That was the first occasion, incidentally, that I had heard about their marriage postdating her pregnancy. It didn’t seem to matter much then. So I asked what happened to the paintings.
‘They are here,’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘In the attic.’
I took my lantern (it all sounds very primitive, doesn’t it?) and climbed up into the roof space. There, stacked under the eaves, were these tubes. Piles and piles of them. Some had brown stains on the outside, which made me think someone must have bled all over them. My father, perhaps. Or some of the wounded men in her care. Then I decided I was being fanciful. The marks could equally have been some form of mould.
When I got down to the cellar again, I asked her why she had never unpacked them. She told me she had never felt she had the right to touch them. They were his and it was her duty to keep them for him. But she also admitted that night that she had lost her faith that she would see him again.
In her distress, she poured out her hatred of the paintings, telling me that they were worth nothing to her without him, that she would willingly set fire to them if that could bring him back. She also confessed that she had been praying the house would receive a direct hit that night so that she would not have to go on without him any longer.
Later in the night, when she was calmer, she apologized and asked if she had hurt me by talking of the destruction of my unknown father’s life’s work. I told her that I was too busy and too tired at that point to care one way or the other about any damned paintings that belonged to a man I had never known.
I wish I hadn’t done that. She turned away, very hurt herself. But when the asthma sewed my lungs together again later that night, she tended me as gently as she always had during my childhood. She was truly a great lady, and she did not have the life she deserved.
Yours etc.
Ivan Gregory
There’s a whole network of us, Trish thought, who grew up without fathers. Was it that shared experience that made me like Ivan Gregory as soon as I read his first email? Has he had the same kind of thoughts about his father as I’ve had about Paddy? And how much has he understood about the significance of his mother’s fruitless search for his father’s family?
Henry had arrived, once again, before her at the wine bar. This time he had a bottle of Alsatian pinot gris in a cooler in front of him, with a plate of smoked-salmon wrapped fish and two forks. She approved of his determined provision of food to go with the wine he chose, but she wasn’t hungry.
‘I’ve just had another email from Ivan Gregory. Why didn’t you tell me his mother was pregnant before she married Jean-Pierre?’ she said as she sat down.
‘Because there is no way that could possibly be relevant to Toby’s problems,’ Henry said, looking surprised. ‘And because one of my preoccupations in all this has been to guard Ivan’s privacy. I didn’t want any gossip in the papers. He might not have read it, but his carers could have, and they might have said something to upset him.’
‘You care far more about him than your godson, don’t you?’
Henry hesitated. ‘My affection for each of them is quite different,’ he said stiffly. ‘But, of course, I care for Toby, as well as for Margaret and the boys. By the way, you can let yourself off all that anxiety about Mer’s arm.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I’ve been in touch with his mother, who tells me that Mer makes up stories like this one about the giant to get himself out of trouble. She says the accident happened while he was playing alone in the garden of the house in Chelsea where they’re staying. Apparently there’s an old Victorian cast-iron roller behind a tree, which the boys have been forbidden to touch. It seems likely that Mer was messing about on it and the handle sprang back and caught his arm. Apparently the pattern of bruising is consistent with that.’
‘Thank God.’ Trish brushed her hand across her forehead and was surprised to find it damp. ‘I was worried.’
‘I know, but I was sure it was unnecessary. I knew Toby couldn’t have done anything like that to his own son.’
‘No. Good. Tell me, how did you come to be his godfather?’
‘His father was one of my oldest friends.’ Henry’s voice was still stiff, and it carried no warmth at all. That was so unlike him, that Trish was certain he was hiding something.
She knew enough about the containment of unbearable emotion to watch his hands. His right thumb was stuck deep into his left fist, as it might once have been stuck in the mouth of the child who needed comfort.
‘Was?’ She made her voice gentle.
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, watching pain drag down the corners of his eyes and remembering how much she had once liked him. ‘What about Toby’s mother? Is she still alive?’
‘Yes.’ This time the single word made a sound like a drop of water hitting red-hot metal. His hands separated. He picked up his wineglass.
‘Then why did you ever need me? Couldn’t you have gone to her for information about Toby and his past and what he could be doing now?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’ This was like trying to make a stone talk. ‘You know, if you’d told me more about them all in the first place, I might have come up with something more useful, and more quickly, too.’
Henry took a moment to speak, playing with his glass. At last he looked up at Trish. Her eyes widened at the sight of the held-in loathing in his expression. How like him to be able to show hatred so much more easily than distress!
‘Toby’s father used to talk about his wife’s distorted view of their son’s capabilities and potential. I’m sure that has something to do with his emotional fragility now. I wouldn’t trust a single thing she said about him.’
Trish remembered Martin Chanting’s contempt for his son and wondered if that had provided the link that had made the two undergraduates friends at Cambridge. ‘Poor Toby.’
‘Yes. His father did his best to help, but he told me once that intervening on the boy’s behalf only made his wife more aggressive towards the pair of them. It wasn’t – it wasn’t a tolerable existence. He stuck it for as long as Toby depended on him, then killed himself just after Toby left university. I have felt as though I was in loco parentis ever since.’
Trish wondered whether her own anxieties had been affecting her judgement. All her more extravagant ideas about what Toby could be doing or suffering returned to her mind. Margaret had said she had always had to bolster Toby’s confidence and make him believe he was worth something in spite of all his hated mother’s bitter criticism, which fitted in with Henry’s belated honesty.
Perhaps there never had been anything odd about the sale of the Pieter de Hooch. Perhaps all Toby’s fear had come from nothing more than his own lifelong sense of inadequacy.
‘Why didn’t you warn me that there was a history of suicide in Toby’s family,’ she asked, ‘when you set me on to terrify him?’
‘Because it’s not relevant. Suicide isn’t catching,’ Buxford said. His face gave her no clues to what he was thinking. ‘Or genetic.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ Trish realized that she wanted Toby’s fear to be about something real and criminal, not a hangover from old parental cruelties. She didn’t want to be told again that adults never got over what happened to them before they were ten. And she definitely didn’t want to discover that she was still so tightly imprisoned in her own past that she could not trust her judgement of other people – or evidence.
‘What’s upsetting you so much?’ Buxford asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said, fighting to get back some sensation of control over her life and mind. ‘You know I’ve become very suspicious of your Jean-Pierre Gregoire.’
Henry put down the glass he had been nursing between his hands and pushed back the silver wings of hair at his temples.
‘Don’t go there, Trish.’ His voice was unusually rough. ‘All you need to know is that he was a collector so affected by a truly horrific war that he wanted hi
s most cherished possessions out of the way of the fighting. Any suggestion to the contrary could do irreparable damage.’ Buxford hesitated for a second, then added, pushing an envelope towards her across the table: ‘Damage to Ivan’s last years, I mean. I am really grateful for the effort you’ve put into this. Now, drink up, and have some of the fish. It goes well with this particular pinot gris.’
Trish ate and drank only enough to be polite.
As Henry made friendly conversation about his early years in the law before he went to the city, she battled with ironic curiosity about the investigation she’d been so keen to drop. There was no reason, of course, why she shouldn’t continue her email correspondence with Ivan Gregory. And even though David would not tell her anything about Mer, their head teacher would probably pass on any important news of him. Trish might even hear it from Margaret.
‘Trish?’ Henry’s voice broke through her preoccupations. She had no idea what he’d been talking about or what he wanted.
‘I’m so sorry. My mind had slid off on a frolic of its own. What did you say?’
‘Nothing of any importance. I was obviously talking too much.’
‘Not a word too much. I was just thinking how much I’m going to miss them all. You will tell me what happens in the end, won’t you?’
He smiled, and looked friendlier than at almost any time since they’d first met here, before she’d heard anything about Jean-Pierre Gregoire, or met Toby.
‘Antony’s right about you.’
Trish thought of Antony’s complete withdrawal of approval, affection and even ordinary courtesy. He had brushed right past her this morning, refusing even to answer a casual question about the progress of his money-laundering case.
‘In what way?’
‘Along with the fact that you have this rare ability to mix imaginative perception with solid analytical reasoning,’ Henry said, ‘he believes you can make yourself care about the most hopeless people. As a misanthrope, he admires that.’
What member of Antony’s chambers could want more? Trish asked herself. It would have been reassuring, though, if he’d been able to tell her himself.
‘And he can’t think why he didn’t notice you for so long while you were being wasted in family law.’ Henry pushed himself up from his chair with both hands flat on the table. He leaned over the bottle and glasses to kiss her cheek. ‘Good luck, Trish. I know we’ll meet again. I hope it’s soon.’
When he’d gone, she poured a little more wine into her glass and opened the envelope he’d left her. The size of the cheque made her eyes widen all over again. She didn’t see how she could take any money, let alone this much, for what she’d helped to do to Toby Fullwell.
But she couldn’t leave the cheque here on the wine-bar table, so she folded it and slid it into her wallet. She ought to get home and do something to make up for neglecting her family. She remembered promising David a trip to the Imperial War Museum. If she didn’t take him soon, he’d have finished his war project before they ever saw the exhibits.
After the last Garrick dinner, Toby had known better than to accept another invitation to eat there. But that meant he’d had to let Henry into the flat. Now, here they were sipping some thin sour white wine he’d found at the back of the fridge and picking at the mouldy end of the cheddar truckle he’d been hacking at every night, while Henry asked him questions.
Thank God, he wasn’t still going on about Peter. This time he wanted to know about Margaret and the state of their marriage, and why she’d moved out. Which was outrageous. It was none of his business.
Still, Toby answered as freely as he could and thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t. As soon as he’d persuaded Henry that marriage to Margaret was the most important thing in his life, the bloody man started banging on about drugs again.
At least those questions were easy to answer. Drugs had never held out any lure for Toby. At Cambridge, when every room he’d entered had been sweet and foggy with the smoke of a dozen spliffs, the idea of losing himself in dope had seemed horrible. Even now, when he longed for oblivion, he couldn’t have risked it. Ben might phone when he was stoned and trick him into saying or doing something fatal.
‘Good. Let’s have another bottle,’ Henry said. ‘I saw you had one in the fridge.’
Toby couldn’t understand why anyone would want to drink more of the filthy stuff, but he obediently drove in the corkscrew, thinking of Ben’s face while he did it. His hands tightened as he imagined the crack of Ben’s cheekbones and a moment later, when he heard the slosh of the wine, he thought of blood pouring out from a vast wound. He sneaked a glance at Henry and saw frightening suspicion in his expression.
‘I keep hearing about the shadier side of the art world,’ Henry said, holding out his glass, which still looked nearly full. ‘Is there really as much forgery and price-rigging as people suggest?’
With the sour fluid prickling against his tongue and his skin pouring sweat, Toby thought of all the spy novels he’d ever read. He tried to remember what they’d said about the best way to resist interrogation.
Ten minutes later, he was giggling at his own jokes about the Russian icon scam of the early 1980s, while Henry sat like a judge in front of him, pouring more and more wine into his glass and waiting for him to break.
Chapter 19
Sam Makins was sitting, staring at the floor, in Trish’s room when she got into chambers after lunch next day. He didn’t move, even when she greeted him, so she laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘Hey, what’s up?’
‘Tamara O’Connor got the maximum sentence,’ he said, still staring at the floor. ‘I tried to make them believe she was a victim rather than a villain, but I screwed up. It would probably have been better if I had just made the usual contrition speech.’
Trish squeezed his shoulder, then let him go. ‘It’s not your fault. Come on, Sam, she was found with twenty-two condoms of cocaine in her gut. There’s no getting away from the fact that she was guilty.’
‘I know. But she was crying when I went down to see her in the cells afterwards.’ At last he looked up at Trish. ‘Her face was grey. Her eyes were all over the place and she had no nails left.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘And she gave me a message for you.’
‘Oh?’ Trish did not want to hear this, but Sam looked anguished enough to make her do whatever she could for him.
‘She said: “Tell Trish Maguire that if I don’t get my kids back, I’ll kill myself. I don’t want to live if I can’t have them. Tell her that.”’
Trish rubbed both hands through her hair. There wasn’t anything to say. Even if Tamara had had a hope of getting them back before she became a mule, she’d blown it now.
‘How do you bear it?’ Sam asked.
‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You shut yourself off. It’s the only way. And then, when you stop being able to do that, you switch to commercial law. Once you’ve done that, you put all your energies into forgetting all the women like Tamara and all the brutalized and miserable children you’ve ever represented. Instead you involve yourself in dreary little arguments about exactly what a contract did or didn’t mean and which company owes which other company damages.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Better than cracking up.’
Toby had just about got his hangover under control by three o’clock in the afternoon. He’d drunk litres and litres of water and eaten several cheese sandwiches. Even so, the ringing phone spiked into his residual headache and he rushed to silence it. Then he saw the number of Margaret’s mobile on the screen.
‘Darling! Thank God! How’s Mer?’
‘Silent. The doctor says his arm is healing as it should, but he still won’t tell us how it happened. All we know is that he had a row with Tim over whose turn it was to choose the TV programme, let himself out into the garden, and came back half an hour later with his arm broken in two places, a lot of bruises and a silly story about a
giant grabbing him in the garden. You know what a fantasist he’s always been.’
‘A giant? Oh, God!’ How was he ever going to forgive himself for this? And how was he ever going to forgive himself for hating what he’d once seen as his own father’s cowardice? Now that he knew how much courage it took to kill yourself, all his ideas about his father had changed. He sniffed and swallowed.
‘Oh, Toby,’ said his wife, sounding kinder than usual. ‘Don’t be silly. You know Mer always makes up stories like that when he’s done something he knows is wrong. He’ll be fine. It doesn’t hurt any more, and the doctor says it’ll heal cleanly. You really don’t have to worry so much.’
Of course, I do, he thought. Then he coughed and found his voice again: ‘Margaret, why haven’t you rung before? I’ve left dozens of messages.’
‘I know. It’s driving me mad. But it wasn’t until today that you sounded like you. I wasn’t prepared to talk to you while you were still behaving like a lunatic. I had enough to deal with over Mer and his arm and Tim’s nightmares.’
‘When am I going to see you?’
‘If you can promise me that you really have sorted yourself out,’ Margaret said, ‘we can talk about a day to come home soon. Will you be at Mer’s school play next Thursday? I thought we might discuss it then.’
‘Thursday,’ he said, feeling shivery with dread and hope, as though someone had run an ice cube across his burning skin. Thursday was D-day.
Ben had promised that if he bought the next fake successfully, whatever it cost, that would be the end of it. Afterwards, so long as Toby kept his mouth shut, Ben had said, the boys would be safe, and no one would come back to him for more favours. By the time the play began on Thursday afternoon, he would know if he had a future.
‘Of course, I’m coming to the play,’ he said, as his mental picture of Cézanne’s hellish landscape melted into his favourite sunny Monet. ‘There’s nothing in the diary. Nothing else, I mean. I’ll be there.’
A Place of Safety Page 20
