by Flynn Berry
“Has it been hard keeping it a secret?” she asks.
“Sorry?”
“From your parents,” she says. “You must want to tell them about the party.”
Across the pond, the wind parts the branches of a willow, showing the room inside. For the first time, I let myself imagine that I haven’t lied to Alice, that my parents are happily married, that I am planning a surprise party for their anniversary. “It has been hard, I’ve almost mentioned it by accident a few times.”
“Where were they married?” she asks, and her expression seems concentrated, harder than usual.
“A registry office. How long have your parents been married?”
“Thirty-five years,” she says, then rolls onto her back and closes her eyes. I don’t know what has just happened, if she’s testing me. If she’s about to ask the name of the registry office, if she’s going to look at the records and find none with my surname. I try to remember if I made a mistake earlier, when we were talking about our ancestors, but I only told her vague details, not any of their names.
Alice seems to fall asleep. I look at the row of orange life preservers and try to think of how to answer the different questions she might ask. Eventually, she sits up. “Ready?”
We walk down the heath, which is green and rippling with shadows from the few high clouds, the birds, and us. I still can’t tell if she was baiting me earlier, or if now she seems quieter than usual. Alice takes out a bag of Maltesers and eats them while we walk. We’re crossing a hollow near Pryor’s Field when I hear a sound, like a gurgle, and Alice stops short. She drops the bag of chocolates and holds her hands to her throat as her eyes widen.
I step behind her, put my arms around her torso, and drive my fist into her diaphragm. Her body jolts against mine. I do it again, harder, and she coughs the chocolate onto the grass.
She wheezes, bent over, her hands on her chest. We’re alone, no one saw it happen, or is coming to ask if we’re all right. Alice has started to laugh, hysterically, and I drop onto the grass. Around us, the full green trees move in the wind.
“Oh,” she says, “you’re crying.”
I wipe my eyes with my sleeve. She sits next to me, puts her arm around me, and says, “Thank you, Claire.” When my knees stop knocking together, we continue on, still arm in arm. Alice tells me what it felt like, what she thought was going to happen. She must find my response odd for a doctor, but I can’t explain it to her. When she choked, I hadn’t knocked into her, I didn’t push her, but it still feels like my fault, like I wished for this to happen since now she’s in my debt.
26
MUM WAS IN the garden chopping wood. Sunlight swept down the blade as the ax fell, she must have oiled it recently. The log split and its halves dropped into the snow. When she finished, she left the ax wedged into the trunk, its red handle in the air, which was a stupid thing to do, anyone could come and take it. I went down to the garden and replaced the ax in the shed.
That night, Mum made a fire with the wood she’d chopped. I looked at the logs and thought, I’ll wait until that one catches, then I’ll ask her. She was still kneeling by the fire, and small twists of burnt paper sailed up the chimney.
“Why did he do it?” I asked. After staring into the fire, Mum had to blink to see me.
“I don’t know,” she said. I’d asked her before, and this had been her answer then too. The air above the fire wavered with heat.
“Did he think you were going to take his money?”
“No, most of his money was in trusts, they’re protected in a divorce.”
“What about the house?”
“I didn’t want us to live in that house,” she said. “I was about to put down the deposit on a place in Highbury.” This news upset me, like we’d almost escaped in time.
“Had he met someone else?”
“We were separated,” she said crisply. “That wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“Was he worried about his reputation?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, turning towards me. With her broad mouth and deep-set eyes, she looked so little like the woman in the old pictures. Behind her, one of the logs collapsed in the grate.
“With the divorce. Did he think you’d say things about him?” Mum shrugged. She reached her hand in to shift a log and pulled it out just ahead of a burst of sparks. I said, “You must have thought of something.”
“He was angry with me,” she said. “He seemed to think I was getting in his way.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, Claire.”
“In the way of what?” I asked, and she shook her head. “Why did his friends help him?”
“They’d known him for longer.”
“What about Emma?”
“They didn’t think about Emma.”
* * *
—
I VISITED EMMA’S MUM, Nancy, in Birmingham eight years ago. On one of my days off from St. George’s, I took the train north, and a cab to her house in Balsall Heath.
I’d written to her first, she was expecting me. We sat in her front room and she told me how it had been for her. How it was still. I stayed motionless, pinned in place, while she talked, her eyes on the carpet.
She had separated from her husband, Emma’s father, two years after their daughter died. She still saw Joe sometimes, and said they both hoped that one day it wouldn’t be so painful for them to see each other, and that they would live together again.
They had scattered their daughter’s ashes on a hill in France, near Aubrac, where they’d gone on holiday when Emma was seventeen.
“She was so taken with it,” said Nancy. “She said it was the best place she’d ever seen.”
Nancy showed me a picture of the monastery they’d visited where, during winter storms, the monks toll bells to guide anyone lost in the snow.
We went through albums with pictures of Emma. Nancy looked at me intently, and I wondered if she was trying to see him in my face.
“My mum loved Emma,” I said. “She felt so guilty that it was Emma and not her.”
“I know,” said Nancy. “We wrote to each other.”
I startled. “Did you?”
“I went over to her after the inquest, to tell her it wasn’t her fault.”
I started crying then. Nancy said, “We met a few times. At a tea shop near the train station in Edinburgh. What’s its name?”
“Waverley Station.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s it.”
27
THE STILL LIFE shows oysters and lemons painted four hundred years ago in Holland, and I feel sorry for it having ended up here, in this room of braying people, and that one of them might take it home.
Alice hands me a glass of champagne, then stands at my shoulder to consider the painting. We’ve been spending a lot of time together in the past few weeks, since the afternoon on the heath. I still feel guilty, like I wished for her to almost die, and knew how much saving her would help me. It did change our friendship, almost instantly. We started talking on the phone, and seeing each other more often, and she’s invited me out for hikes, dinners, films, and now this, a private view at Sotheby’s.
We’re in a room of Dutch still lifes that will be auctioned next week. I look at another painting, of frilled red tulips and a silver trout, and can’t believe someone will be allowed to buy it. Alice points at the delicate wet scales on the fish. Behind us, a man is describing his birthday party. “The theme is younger sons,” he says. “Each table will be named after a different famous younger son.”
It’s the end of August. I told Alice a few days ago that my father had broken his hip and I needed to cancel their party. She was disappointed for us, but told me that of course she wouldn’t bill me for the event. She tried to return my deposit too, but I insisted that she keep it.
Alice is still absorbed by the painting. She’s a good person to be with in a gallery, private and thoughtful, and seems unbothered by the people around us. I yawn, and consider leaving and coming back in the morning, when the gallery is open to the public and these people will be gone.
I was up in the night worrying about Robbie. And almost all of my patients today were difficult. One of them complained about the wait, and I couldn’t tell her that I was late because the patient before her had told me he’d started self-harming with a straight razor.
I follow Alice into the next gallery, squeezing past a group in the doorway. At its center, talking loudly, is Sam.
My pulse starts to thump all across my body, thick in my wrists and throat and the backs of my knees. The last time I saw Sam was three years ago, after the newspaper published the story about his house in Chelsea. He saw me too, across the road from his doorstep, he stopped and stared at me, a puzzled look on his face.
He’s wearing yellow trousers with a white shirt tucked into them. His red hair has started to recede, and his brows are fair, so his forehead seems to jut unbroken over his eyes. His face looks old-fashioned, something about the light blue eyes and the long space between his nose and mouth.
Sam holds his fist near his mouth while he swallows, so that no one else will start talking. The group waits until he clears his throat. “I came back from squash yesterday and couldn’t walk, and just sat in front of the painting while I recovered.” He starts to describe the still life he owns, by one of the Dutch masters whose work is for sale in this auction. I notice that his tongue is white, like he doesn’t brush it. A woman says, “I think this era marks—”
Sam shouts, “Alice!” She smiles when she sees him. He puts his arm around her shoulders and turns her to face the group. “This is my goddaughter.”
Alice says, “Have you met my friend Claire?”
Sam kisses me hello. As he moves to kiss the other cheek, I’m close enough to smell the whisky in his mouth. “Nice to meet you,” I say. He looks me over, then returns to Alice. He hasn’t recognized me. “What happened with your accountant?” he asks Alice.
“It’s a disaster,” she says.
“Right, let’s get dinner this week, I want to hear about it,” he says.
“Let’s. Did you see they’re serving your wine?” asks Alice. Sam owns a vineyard in Kent called Dionysius. He stops a server and asks her to fetch a bottle. The back of the label says, helpfully, that Dionysius is the Greek god of wine. He was also a tyrant who ruled Syracuse in ancient Greece and ordered hundreds of executions, which I stop myself mentioning.
“How’re the vines?” asks Alice.
“Fine, fine, fully recovered,” says Sam. To the group, he says, “Four years ago, we had rot and lost the entire harvest.” It’s an effort not to smile, I hadn’t known about that. He says, “You hear about industrial sabotage in France every few years.”
“No one would do that to you,” says Alice.
“Oh, I can think of a few people,” says Sam, smiling. I heard he’d been in trouble at university. A girl made a complaint about him, though she withdrew it, and never went to the police.
I finish my champagne. Not a good idea, three glasses of it without any food. I look at the white lines across Sam’s throat where the skin hasn’t tanned. He’s teasing Alice about one of the groomsmen at a wedding last month, and she rolls her eyes. The rest of the group realize they aren’t going to be involved in the conversation and start to talk among themselves. There’s a plastic stirrer in his drink. I saw them at the bar, they have sharp points. I could get it from his glass and slide it into his carotid artery.
It seems impossible that he hasn’t sensed anything, that he thinks I’m a stranger. Finally, Sam looks at his watch. “I’ve got to run, I have a dinner at Rules.”
Rules was my father’s favorite restaurant. I had dinner there once as part of my research. It’s the oldest restaurant in London. There were booths on thick carpets, oil paintings of game birds, and a waiter cutting slices of beef Wellington from a trolley. They served the same boarding school desserts as Sweetings, and a lot of the guests seemed to know one another.
My father must miss it. Not just the restaurant, but its particular version of England. He must not like the food or the landscape as much wherever he is now. The thought makes me furious, that he might think he still deserves to have whatever he wants.
Alice and I move through the rest of the exhibit while Sam heads down the road to Rules. Then what? 5 Hertford? A strip club? I can’t picture him alone. I doubt he is often.
• • •
Everything would be different if Sam hadn’t qualified for a pilot’s license. He kept a Cessna at a private airfield in Kent, and the night after the murder, he took it out for a flight. He told the police he’d only gone to Whitstable and back, but there was no warden at the airfield to confirm it, and no records of his flight path, since he flew so far below commercial airspace.
The police believe that Rose or James drove my father’s car to Newhaven, while he hid at Ashdown. The next night, one of them drove him to the airfield in Kent and Sam flew him out of the country. To Germany, maybe, or Belgium.
The flight to Germany would have lasted ninety minutes. I want to know what they talked about. I think both of them would have taken pride in having a normal conversation in those circumstances, like it proved they were braver and steadier than other men.
My father once told me a story about an English pilot whose plane was shot down during the Battle of Britain. He bailed out with a parachute and landed in the Surrey countryside on the grounds of a lawn tennis club. The club offered him white flannels and a racquet, and invited him to play while he waited for the RAF van to come for him. The pilot beat everyone who played him. When my father told me the story, I pictured him as the pilot. I wonder if he did too.
After Sam left him, he must have hiked alone into the countryside. The experience might have felt familiar from all the accounts he’d read of men in the war, walking alone past farmhouses. He might have felt a comradeship with them. I wonder what he ate, where he slept. Those stories might have given him practical ideas. They might have prepared him to enjoy it.
28
I WAIT FOR ALICE outside a small train station in Sussex, with my bag at my feet and the bottle of wine I bought at Waterloo. A few days after the gallery event, she invited me to Ashdown for the weekend.
“Sorry I’m late,” she says, coming to help carry my things. The air is cool here in the countryside, and she’s wearing a blue-and-cream Fair Isle cardigan with wooden toggles.
I stow my book and follow her to the car. Stella barks from the backseat and I turn around to pet her. When Alice stops at a crossing, the sound of the indicator clicking fills the car. “Who else is at the house?” I ask.
“My parents, four of their friends, my cousins, and this man from work Mum invited by accident.”
We drive past a herd of sheep painted with red marks. I wonder how long sheep live, if these are the descendants of the ones Mum saw when she came here.
The evening sky grows dark above the hedgerows. When we reach Maresfield, I look at the village sign and remember my father telling me that during the war it was painted over to confuse the Germans in a land invasion.
“Did Ashdown have evacuees during the war?” I ask.
Alice shakes her head. “Too near the coast, it wasn’t safe enough.” During the Blitz, my grandmother had children evacuated from London at her estate in Norfolk. She mentioned it often, as though it made up for all the years when the vast house didn’t help anyone.
Alice turns onto Hindleap Lane. I remember this road, the dense woods around it, and the stone lions at the gate. The gate glides open, letting us through onto a long drive lined with poplars. Wind rushes through the trees, and in our headlights the shadows on the gravel blur and race and lengthen
.
We come around a bend in the drive, and there is the house, a Palladian mansion, the stones stained gray with age. Nighttime clouds race past its towering roof. My father must have been so relieved to arrive here that night, to watch the gates close behind him. Alice locks her car, and her body is lit red as the taillights flash.
When she opens the front door, two Rhodesian ridgebacks run towards us. The dogs have a bristling line of fur down their backs, so they always seem to have their hackles raised. Voices are coming from the drawing room. I want to pull on Alice’s sleeve, ask her to wait a minute, but then we’re inside and the group has encircled us. I meet her cousins Beatrice and Anna, an older man in tweeds, a woman with a German accent, and another cousin, Luke, who’s just back from Vietnam. He has a red string tied around his wrist, from Vietnam, presumably.
James is on the sofa, with one ankle crossed on his knee and a stretch of ribbed yellow sock showing. “Dad, you remember Claire,” says Alice. He rises from the sofa to kiss me as Rose appears at his side. “How nice to see you again,” she says warmly, and I wonder if Alice told them about what happened on the heath.
All of the other guests have versions of the same accent, except for the woman from Berlin. Alice leads me to a corner of the room where a bar cart is crowded with spirits, bitters, bourbon cherries. Rose gave my father brandy when he reached the house, to help with the shock. I lift the bottles, like I’ll find that particular one.
I think Rose and James have been in touch with my father, and if they have, there has to be a trace of it somewhere in this house. A letter, or bill, or photograph, or note in a calendar. They wouldn’t need to destroy those small pieces of evidence anymore, they aren’t under investigation. I’m impatient to start looking, but it will be hours until everyone else goes to bed.
