A Poisoned Mind

by Natasha Cooper

  ‘No one can help, except the medical staff. And time.’

  ‘And you. You were talking as though only your voice could hold him here.’

  ‘That’s what they said I had to do.’ But it may not be enough.

  She couldn’t articulate the last bit; it mattered too much.

  Antony held out his hand, but she didn’t want anyone to touch her now, so she stayed where she was.

  ‘Trish, I’m—’ He wiped his hand over his forehead, as though he was sweating with tension. Or fear. ‘I never realised you loved him that much.’

  She looked at him, determined not to let out any more tears. Making a huge effort, she said:

  ‘I did.’

  Chapter 22

  Adam hadn’t wanted her to come to his lab, so Angie was waiting for him outside the Pavilion. She’d never been to Brighton before and had assumed its chief landmark would be an enormous, glittering palace, but it wasn’t. Set in grass on a kind of traffic island, it was surprisingly low built and painted a pale mud colour like a particularly dreary kind of mushroom. It didn’t help that the thick grey sky was dripping the nastiest sort of drizzle over everything or that she’d had another terrible night.

  Greg had been arrested, along with Ken Shankley and the young woman in Trish Maguire’s photograph. Angie’d phoned Fran to try to explain why she was never coming back to the flat. And Fran had wanted to know all sorts of things Angie couldn’t tell her. She just didn’t know enough. Then she’d found the cheapest possible hotel in the grottiest bit of Earls Court and phoned Adam to set up this meeting.

  Shivering in the rain now, she hoped he wasn’t going to be much later. She hadn’t brought an umbrella, and the drizzle might feel soft but it was still wet. As she shrugged her shoulders to try to shift the ache, she rubbed both hands up under her hair and felt the wetness run all over them.

  ‘Angie!’

  She whirled round and saw her son, dressed in jeans and a full-length mac with a beautiful blue scarf draped around his neck. He was carrying an enormous golfing umbrella.

  ‘Come on under here. You’re soaked. You’re mad, you know! Why didn’t you go in?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, looking round at the open door to the Pavilion. ‘I thought … Oh, I don’t know: penance maybe. Can we have some breakfast?’

  ‘Haven’t you had any? What is this?’

  And so she told him, standing there in front of him, with the rain pouring down over her face, who had killed his father and why.

  He frowned at her, puzzled, trying to understand, then shook his head. ‘Why did you have to come to tell me all this? Why not write?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t be sure you’d open the letter,’ she said. ‘And you needed to know. And because … because—’

  At last he saw it. ‘Because you thought it might have been me?’

  Her head drooped. She couldn’t go on looking at him. She shook all over, freezing cold, not sure whether to admit it or excuse herself or leave him to think whatever he needed. ‘I’m so so sorry. I should’ve known better. I—’

  She felt his hand cupping her elbow.

  ‘Come on, Mum. We need to get you out of this wet and eating something hot.’

  Half an hour later, with a huge mugful of strong tea inside her and half a plateful of bacon, eggs and sausages, she watched him take off his spectacles and polish them. She’d talked herself right out and felt limp but purged.

  ‘I still don’t understand why you never told him how much you hated life on the farm,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve kind of grasped why you thought it would be disloyal to tell me, but why not share it with him?’

  ‘Because there wasn’t anything he could do about it. We’d poured everything into the bloody place; we had no money, except what was tied up in it. We’d been trying to sell for years, but never had any offers that came anywhere near what we needed – or had spent. I had to make the best of it. Do everything I could to avoid heaping my … my misery on to him.’

  ‘But why? He was a grown-up. He could’ve taken it. You were only there because of him. He should have been told.’

  She picked up a piece of cold sausage in her fingers, then dropped it again and wiped her hand on her napkin.

  ‘This is what I could never get you to understand,’ she said, meeting his angry gaze with difficulty. ‘We were only there because of me. Because I’d lost my temper with the bank.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He didn’t look as though he cared either, turning to call over his shoulder to the waiter for more tea.

  Angie clasped her right shoulder and rotated the joint. It didn’t help, leaving her to think she might hurt like this for ever.

  ‘You were fourteen months old,’ she said, looking past his adult features to the squidgy pink baby she’d had to hand over every morning before crushing herself into the tube to get to the bank. ‘I’d been back at work since six weeks after you were born, leaving you with the nanny. Every day, I had to pretend I wasn’t a mother. It was the only way you could make it in the City then. Perhaps it still is; I don’t know. I hated doing it, but it seemed important.’

  ‘More than me?’ he asked in a detached voice, as though it didn’t really matter.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said with a snap. ‘Which is why you had the best nanny we could find; she was so good in fact that you much preferred her ministrations to mine.’

  ‘I don’t remember that.’

  ‘Good. Anyway, we came to bonus time at the bank. Even though I’d done just as well as the men on the team, put in the same hours, stayed just as late when all I wanted to do was be at home with you, made as much money, they gave me only 10 per cent of what the nearest equivalent man got.’ She paused, bringing the memories into focus. ‘Donald Mackenzie-Bates-Stuart. Arrogant, pompous as his triple-barrelled surname, and not nearly as hardworking as he pretended. But he said the right things, and went to the football games, and went drinking with anyone useful higher up the ladder so they knew he was one of them. Whereas all I wanted was to get back to you. They thought I had babysick on my mind if not my suits and that made me an alien.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘When I heard about his bonus, I lost it and screamed and yelled about their stinking chauvinist monstrous behaviour. I can see their terrified faces now, as they backed away from me.’

  ‘You mean you were really screaming?’ A smile she hadn’t seen for years was lighting up Adam’s face. ‘Literally?’

  ‘Yes. And picking up files and flinging them around the office.’ She smiled back, well into the present again. The past definitely seemed like a foreign country. ‘They sent for John, poor John, who was already leading a team and doing brilliantly. He was as embarrassed as you can imagine, but he didn’t let it stop him. He ignored the lot of them, put his arms round me, kissed my head and said: “Hello, Angie-darling. Let’s get you out of here.”’

  The waiter brought two more mugs of tea, which made a helpful distraction.

  ‘He got doctors and lawyers involved, and negotiated a big payoff for me. We talked about what we should do and decided to look for a farm to buy. At first it was wonderful: we were happy; the place was gorgeous; you thrived in a way you never had in London.’

  She paused, thinking of it and how she’d felt and how John had looked as though the lifting of the burden of her distress had liberated him to be the man he should always have been, the man she’d had glimpses of on some of those long happy drives.

  ‘I thought we were in heaven.’

  Adam looked as though he was going to protest, so she hurried on with the rest of it.

  ‘Then it began to go wrong. We discovered how little we knew. You grew up to understand and hate the isolation. We began to lose money. The work got harder. We got older. It was like a battle, every day. We fought the weather and the sheep diseases and the mad constricting laws, and failed. And in the end John died because we were there, because he’d left his own successful career for
me.’

  ‘Or because your hysteria gave him a safe exit,’ Adam said with a dryness she’d never heard from him. ‘Come on, Mum. Don’t look so blank. Did it never occur to you? You’re not stupid. You must have thought of it.’

  ‘Thought of what?’

  ‘No man who likes his job is ever going to do anything as final as resign just because his wife can’t hack it.’

  Angie stared at him.

  ‘Think.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Adam. You never understood his generosity or his grit or—’

  ‘Or his need to be top dog all the time.’

  Wanting to protest, she couldn’t make the words come, as though something in her knew what he meant and wouldn’t let her pretend any longer.

  ‘I know what life in those City jobs is like,’ he went on, leaning forwards in his determination to make her accept what he was saying. ‘You’re at the mercy of everyone: the man above you, your uppity subordinates, your angry needy clients, the regulators, the press. He must have absolutely hated every moment of it, but, being the man he was, he couldn’t admit it. Your crack-up gave him the way out he needed.’

  With a tremendous mental effort, the equivalent of heaving four immense hay bales on to the tractor in one go, Angie forced herself to see the story from Adam’s perspective.

  ‘And you,’ he added, ‘being the martyr I always said you were, blamed yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know … How can you—?’

  ‘You never discussed it, did you? You never asked him why he did what he did after you lost your temper in the bonus row?’

  She shook her head, beyond speech now.

  ‘Think what a difference it could’ve made if you had. To all of us.’

  The waiter was behind the little bar, making espresso for someone amid a cloud of steam as Angie struggled with herself, and her past, and her son. Her nails were digging into the palms of her hands and her teeth were clamped on a chunk of the inside of her cheek.

  ‘What?’ he said, with an aggression that made it all harder to say what needed to be said at last.

  ‘Adam, say you’re right … although it doesn’t make any difference to the past now … but say you’re right: is it too late?’

  ‘For us?’ The beginnings of another smile softened the muscles around his eyes. ‘Who knows? We can only try. And see.’

  Trish came back from the lavatory to find a man who looked like George’s ghost standing at the foot of his bed, staring at his unresponsive face. At the sound of her step he looked round.

  ‘Trish? You must be Trish.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I got your email.’

  ‘Henry.’ It wasn’t a question. She knew he couldn’t be anyone else. She’d found his tables-selling website and clicked on the contact button to send a message telling him what had happened.

  ‘Yes. I’m not sure why I came, what you think I can do. Why did you send for me?’

  ‘I didn’t. I thought you should know what had happened to George in case you wanted to come. I thought seeing him might help you to for—’ At the look in his eyes, she stopped.

  ‘Forgive him?’ he said.

  She noticed his broad stubby scarred hands were gripping the rail at the end of the bed as tightly as Jay’s had when he’d been staring at his mother.

  Trish looked from Henry’s face to George’s. This wasn’t a time for tact. There might not be any time.

  ‘No. I thought it might help you to forgive yourself. That’s always harder.’

  He turned his face away, as though the sight of her was unbearable.

  ‘Isn’t that why hiding inside one’s rage and hate is so much easier?’ she said, needing him to see what he’d been doing.

  ‘I don’t know. Does it matter now? Look at him: it’s too late for either of us. I’d better go.’ He found a smile from somewhere and looked even more like a thinner, rubbed-out version of George. ‘Thank you for trying.’

  Trish knew what she wanted to say but she wasn’t sure she’d get the words out before she started crying again. Gripping her own hands together, she tried and failed. He looked at her with something that might have been kindness and walked away.

  Epilogue

  ‘And Ken Shankley has now been charged,’ Trish said to George’s unresponsive face nearly a week after Henry had gone home. She’d given up expecting to see him again. ‘Which is more than any of us expected. I don’t know whether they’ll ever get a conviction, but there will be a trial.’

  She paused to look at George’s face. But there were still no signs of awareness.

  ‘They’re still trying to find Barry Stuart, but he seems to have disappeared. New Zealand may have been a decoy destination. But he probably doesn’t matter all that much because Greg Waverly is apparently singing like a canary now. Angie Fortwell will see justice of a kind. And so will Don Bates of CWWM.’

  David was sitting on the opposite side of the bed. He was looking a bit better, but the terror and guilt of the last week had marked him, perhaps for ever. Trish caught his eye and smiled. His lips twitched slightly in response, which was progress.

  There was some progress with George too. He had been promoted from the Intensive Care Unit to the High Dependency Ward once he’d started to breathe on his own again. According to one of the nurses, this meant the doctors no longer thought he would die.

  Henry hadn’t come back, but Selina was often here. She couldn’t make herself talk into the vacuum of George’s unconsciousness, but she did come every other day.

  ‘Other things are going right for Angie too. Don Bates has persuaded his board to rent large chunks of her land,’ Trish went on, trying to sound cheerfully conversational and not as though she was having to force herself to talk. Her throat felt as though she had swallowed a tube of sandpaper. ‘She’s written me a kind letter, asking about you, and filling me in on all the news. Apparently CWWM are developing a new organic way of decontaminating polluted ground, but it needs extensive testing before it can be marketed. Low Topps Farm turns out to be the ideal place. Which is a kind of irony when you think about it.’

  She paused and looked at George’s face, then up at David’s.

  ‘Did something move?’ she asked. David shook his head, his eyes still like black pools of despair. ‘I’m sorry to be boring on about the case, but they say it’ll help him come back if we talk; and it’s hard to think of things to say, except what we’ve been doing and I’ve run out of home stuff.’

  ‘I know.’ David’s eyes closed briefly. ‘I’ve told him all about school and rowing club, which is just the same as your work; and what I’m going to cook for him when he comes home; and … all that kind of thing.’

  Trish waited. David seemed to be hovering on the brink of something else.

  ‘And how sorry I am,’ he whispered, as though the words burned his mouth as they came out and if he said them quietly it might mitigate the pain. ‘If I hadn’t made friends with Jay and made you let me bring him home all the time, it wouldn’t have happened; if I hadn’t introduced Jay to Scrabble, it wouldn’t have happened; if I hadn’t taken so long—’

  ‘Hush, David. None of that’s true. You did not cause this. It is not your fault.’

  His lips set in stubborn parallel lines she recognised from the mirror.

  ‘George isn’t going to die. Not now.’ She tried to smile, although her eyes were betraying her again and leaking yet more sticky, demeaning tears. ‘And if we go on talking we’ll bring him back properly. We will, David.’

  He got up abruptly and moved to the far end of the ward, then out through the heavy swing doors. Trish turned back to the bed, fighting the irrational fear that her switch of attention might have caused a relapse.

  ‘And you know, I have a feeling Don Bates might know more about her than he let on. They’re the same sort of age and in some ways the same type. But I don’t suppose I’ll ever be in a position to ask.’

  She looked across at the far wall of the
ward, where charts and warnings about hygiene were pinned up in orderly rows. It was odd to be talking like this without getting any reaction. In court, she’d often had to make speeches as long as any of these sessions with George, but that was different. When opposing counsel didn’t interrupt with objections or points of law, she’d have the judge nodding every so often and making notes. She always knew in court that she was being heard, even when she was sure she wouldn’t get the result she wanted. Here, only the passing nurses, who didn’t care, knew what she was saying. And she had no idea whether she’d get the right result.

  ‘I’ve been wondering, you know, George,’ she added before she noticed the change of subject, ‘whether it’s wrong to try to make your life as near perfect as it can be just for you and your family and forget the webs connecting you to the rest of the world. I can’t work out whether you ought to share, even if you know newcomers may be so damaged and dangerous they’ll ruin it for themselves as well as you. What do you think?’

  There was no reply, of course. She looked around the ward and saw no one else listening to her either, so there was no reason not to articulate her current obsessions about the way she’d let Jay into their lives and failed to listen to the selfish fears that had turned out to be so reasonable.

  In her peripheral vision Trish saw another visitor appear and pull a chair up beside the equally silent inhabitant of a bed on the opposite side of the ward. She looked more carefully and saw it was a woman, heavily veiled and wearing flowing robes.

  Time to change the subject again. But to what? All the most urgent words in her mind were unsayable. She couldn’t mention Jay by name in George’s hearing, or say how Caro was keeping them up to date with news of the police’s handling of his case. He was in secure accommodation again so at least he couldn’t attack anyone else, but it would be many months before he came to trial. The precise charges he’d face would depend on what happened to George now.

  Trish gripped the edges of her seat, holding in everything she mustn’t even let herself think in case it all sounded in her voice. She tried to think of Jay as he’d been when he’d run from the police in case they were going to use him to accuse George of unspeakable crimes, and again the day he’d come to the flat after Darren had beaten him up, and again how he’d looked as he’d waited to visit his mother, sitting beside the pathetic bouquet he’d collected for her. Trish thought if she could fasten on the vulnerability and not the violence, the generosity and not the fatal resentment, she might find a way to stop hating him.