The Liar
Page 26
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘I’ve left some things at Emma’s house – she gave me a xylophone and a knitted rabbit and a book about animals from the zoo. I was going to pick them up when I went back. I can still run over and get them.’
‘No,’ said Maudy. ‘Clarence will be back soon and my nephew will be coming with the van. We have to leave as soon as he gets here.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘I’ve got time if I run. We can even sell the xylophone when we get to Birmingham. We can’t come back for it once we’re there, can we? I will be quick.’ I was about to stand up but she was on me in a flash, her hands tight round my wrists.
‘Sit down!’ she yelled.
And I did. I stared at her. Everybody stared at her.
Maudy sighed. She knew that she had to tell us everything: ‘Back in January,’ she said, ‘Sadie came round. She’d been helping me in the yard with some dying, but while she was out the back, Clarence decided he wanted a fag and went rummaging in her bag. He didn’t find one. There weren’t nothing in her cigarette case but a photograph, a very old one. He didn’t think of his plan right then, he ain’t that smart, but over the next few days he had got everything planned out in his head.’
‘A photograph of what?’ said Jim.
I stopped listening, I already knew, and I hated Clarence even more.
42
Emma
I walked back in the darkness, feeling my way along the path but not caring if I stumbled or fell. I cradled Smokey under my coat, the gentle swell of his purr the only reminder that I was alive.
My heart leapt when I passed the war memorial and saw that the light was on in the house, the curtains glowing with warmth. When I got to the front door I found it unlocked and my note torn down from the paintwork. I pushed the door and flung open my coat, letting Smokey run into the hallway. I called out, rushing into the lounge but there was no laughter to greet me and no child running towards me. The room was still and quiet.
George was sat in his old armchair with his head in his hands and I suddenly thought that the past weeks had all been a strange dream and that Ruby had never existed. I perched on the window seat and bit my lip. George raised his head slowly as if in a daze, his face weary.
‘The bank telephoned me last week,’ he said, ‘while I was at the surgery.’
‘Oh,’ I said, kicking the floor.
‘Mr Arbuthnot thought it only courteous to call me.’ He paused and rubbed his eyes. ‘Two hundred pounds, Emma!’
I stared at the floor. ‘You didn’t stop him.’
‘Stop him? Well I didn’t believe you would go ahead with it, not until Mr Arbuthnot telephoned again today. You know there has been some concern about you recently. Audrey hasn’t helped matters; your affairs seem to be known all across Missensham.’
‘You didn’t stop him, but you didn’t stop me either,’ I said.
‘Stop you from withdrawing your life savings? What would be the point? I’ve been trying everything to make you happy. If I thought that this one last thing could help—’
‘Oh, George! I—’
‘I know things haven’t been perfect between us but I have tried the best I can: given up my place at the hospital so we could spend more time together; built up my business at the surgery; provided you with a motorcar and a warm, modern house and paid for its redecoration. When I’ve given you all this, why would I stop you from withdrawing your own money?’
‘You did all that for me?’ I said.
‘I thought you wanted to live on the Sunningdale Estate,’ he said quietly. ‘It was you that chose to live here, with the central heating and electric lighting and the Frigidaire. I was never bothered by any of those things but, with your childhood home sold and your parents gone, I thought a nice house and garden would be important to you.’ He looked at me, his face had a kind of childish blankness to it and suddenly I saw past the medical jargon and the political rants. At heart he was a simple man, he had not wanted the detached house, the red Austin car, or the refrigerator. All that he’d ever wanted had been simple things and I had not been able to give them to him.
‘I thought that living here would help things,’ he said. ‘I know I’m not an ideal husband. I know that you didn’t love me when we married, maybe you never did. I could accept that but I thought that I could at least make you… content.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Will you let me know what you want this time? What was the money for? You at least owe me that.’
‘I thought I could buy a child,’ I said. ‘I thought I could buy our baby back, I thought I could buy Violet, but I was wrong.’
He sighed and wiped his eyes. ‘You are talking about Ruby Brown. Well, that child is none of our concern. She is better off with her mother.’
‘Her mother?’ I said.
‘Yes, her real mother. The tuberculin tests came back negative; Maud Brown doesn’t have tuberculosis after all. So it’s all for the best in the end – the child has a home and it is not with us.’
I thought of the unopened chlorodyne bottles that Sadie had smashed at my feet, the piles of perfectly finished gloves, the protests from Ruby and Sadie. Maud did not have TB. Her coughing and wheezing had all been to fool me and make me believe that she was just a caring mother forced to part with her child.
‘It doesn’t matter what I say, anyway,’ I said. ‘The family are gone. I don’t have that choice to make any more.’
George’s face showed no surprise and I realized that, to him, Ruby had always been just an inconvenient visitor and never someone who he could imagine spending the rest of his life with. ‘Why did it mean so much to you?’ he said. ‘We could have adopted any child, yet you never showed any interest in that. You flung yourself into gardening. I thought you were happy with that. But I’m just a doctor of the body. I cannot read your mind.’ He paused, tilting his head so that the lenses of his spectacles shielded his eyes. ‘Was it because the baby wasn’t mine? Was it because it was his? Is that why it meant so much?’
‘George!’
‘Please don’t treat me like a fool. I was happy to turn a blind eye to it at the time, but please have the respect not to treat me like a fool.’
‘You knew?’ I whispered. ‘You knew all along?’
‘No, I didn’t know about the affair to start with, I had my suspicions but I wasn’t sure, not until you became pregnant. Then I knew.’ He sighed. ‘Well I don’t suppose it matters now, we’ve both had our secrets.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ I said.
For a long time he did not say anything, just sat in his old chair. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked steadily and started to whirr as the minute hand clicked onto the hour. He waited for the last chime to finish, then put his head in his hands.
‘I was in Amiens during the war,’ he said quietly, ‘working at the field hospital.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That is where you were—’
‘Where I became hospitalized myself? Yes. I have told you that much before. I have a shrapnel wound in my back, which you know about, but I always let you believe it was that which got me sent home.’ He hesitated, the hiss of his breath rising over the ticking clock. ‘The thing is, I wasn’t in that hospital for my back; I had complications from an infection.’ He stopped suddenly and made his little coughing sound but there was no arrogance to it this time and he smiled weakly. ‘So no great battle deeds for heroic George, no venereal diseases from the wild women, just a simple infection. It was mumps, just like any schoolboy would get. I caught it from a troop of French soldiers brought in from the battlefield. I was only a junior medic but I was the only one on duty that night and I had to tend to a tent full of them, their faces swollen like toads. They were filthy creatures, crawling with disease. Their trench had been disorganized, with no sanitation, and the smell…’ He drew a sharp breath as if the stench was still in the air. ‘The bloody French.’ He sighed. ‘The bloody French.’
‘Oh, George!’
He took off his spectacles. The skin underneath was tender and moist as if never exposed to the air. He rubbed his small, blinky eyes as if seeing daylight for the first time. I wanted to reach out to him, put my arms around him but I could not. He was already a memory to me, something that would fade if I tried to touch it.
‘I wanted to tell you so many times, but you seemed happy with what we had back then. I suspected that you were having an affair but, when you told me that you were pregnant, I knew that under the circumstances you would be forced to stay with me and so I accepted your little secret. I knew about your lies, how could I not? But if I said nothing, then my own lies would not matter so much anymore.’
‘Oh George, I’m sorry!’ I started to cry. The more he had loved me, the more I had hated him. He had concealed his lie, but all the time he’d had to confront mine – every day that my belly grew larger. And when the lie was born it was weak and disfigured but could no longer be ignored. The one special secret I had from him had been shared between us all along.
‘Did you take my baby, George?’ I said. ‘Did you take my baby away from me and tell me that it was dead? Did you do that because you knew that the baby wasn’t yours?’
‘How could you say that?’ he whispered.
‘You were in the hospital that day, George. You were at my baby’s birth but you had been working on the pulmonary ward and there was a woman on that ward, a woman whose baby was very sick, I know this much, you can’t deny it.’ It was what I had wanted to say to him for so long. The only explanation that had made sense, but my voice was faltering with every word. ‘You had plenty of opportunities to take my baby away and give it to Maud Brown – a woman whose baby was about to die, a woman who was so sick that she would not know any different.’
‘Emma!’
He got up and knelt in front of me and his face alone was enough to answer my questions.
‘The rattle then?’ I said quietly. ‘Why didn’t you bury it like you said you had?’
‘I thought there might have been another child,’ he said. ‘When Violet died I didn’t know what you would do. I suppose I thought that you might go off cavorting again. You were still young after all – I didn’t expect you to give up. I never expected that you would spend so much time in mourning, but then the weeks became months and the months became years. You never said anything about it to me but I could see the change in you; the time you spent around the house, the gardening. This…’ he waved his hand round the room. It was the room we sat in every day, but just for that moment I saw it exactly as he did – the emptiness, the silence measured by the tick of the clock. ‘You wanted to stay here with the memories,’ he said. ‘And memories are everywhere in this house.’
‘Oh, George, I—’
‘I put the rattle away for the day that another child would come,’ he said. ‘The day that all this would end. I buried it deep, just not with Violet. I buried it within the house instead of in the soil and buried it in my memory. I never expected it to be found. That girl must have meddled…’ He frowned as if making a conscious effort to correct himself. ‘Or Mr. Tuttle.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘I took our baby and rubbed her flesh, pounded her heart, breathed into her mouth for half an hour. Walter tried to stop me. He could see that Violet was premature, small, and weak. And in the end he could not watch anymore and I was left alone; just me and a tiny body.’
It was true. I had known it all along. Why had I ever doubted this poor wounded man? I felt numb, like I had cried all my tears and had nothing left. ‘Why didn’t you say so, George? Why have we never talked about it? I’ve been blaming you all this time!’
‘Well maybe that’s something,’ he said sharply. ‘It’s easier when there’s someone to blame.’ He cleared his throat and stood up as if the conversation was over and the matter resolved. Then he put on his spectacles and returned to his armchair, crossing his legs as he sat down, the newspaper rustling as his face disappeared behind the pages of print.
I parted the curtains and stared out the window. The road was in darkness but I watched the still night air for minutes on end. It was the way I had always looked out on to the road, day in, day out for the last ten years, always waiting for something to happen for something that would give me a little bit of hope and show me that my life would change. But now when I looked out onto the road I could feel more years racing past and my gaze stretching into my dotage. After all, why should anything be different for me? I did not deserve anything more than the silence.
The lounge door creaked and wavered gently. A hooked tail sailed behind the arm of the sofa, the soft pad of paws on the carpet.
George looked up. ‘What’s that?’
‘Just a cat,’ I said.
‘Oh good,’ he said. ‘I like cats.’
43
Ruby
My name is Ruby and rubies are red. But there are lots of things that are red that aren’t so precious or pretty, and that red is all around me: red are the berries of the poisonous yew that grows in the churchyard; red is the coal that glows inside the stove with the broken door; red drips from the fingers of gloves that point their fat, accusing fingers at me; red is the swell of blood on the consumptive’s handkerchief; red is a warning sign strung on barbed wire; a red face of shame; a cheek gnawed raw; fire; blood; rage and hate.
But then all was dark.
Everything that was Ruby was in that darkness. My whole world, my family and everything we owned from the smallest thimble to the treasured sewing machine and we were all together in one tiny space. You might think that some terrible fate had befallen us, but there was no justice for my family, no lessons to be learnt. It was the darkness that hid us and the walls of the van that kept us safe as we made our escape along the back roads and country lanes.
I saw only what the van saw with its shining eyes, two circles of light skimming over the pits and ruts of the Evesbridge Road. Sometimes moonlight would burst through a gap in the hedges, like the flash from a photographer’s gun and for a second I would see the photograph of us as we were then: the metal sides of the van, wooden apple crates bursting with pots and pans, upended tables and chairs and the stony face of a brother or mother.
Clarence was barking at Fatkins; ordering him to speed up, to mind the potholes, to let out the choke. But Fatkins didn’t say a word, he didn’t even turn to face Clarence, I could see the shape of his face, a dark shadow in the windscreen mirror and I got a cold feeling that he was looking at me.
Then Maudy’s face was right up against mine, her old sick blanket wafting bitter carmine into my nose. ‘Here, Ruby, you awake?’
I grunted, but it wasn’t enough to silence her.
‘I’m sorry about moving,’ she said, ‘and about Smokey and Emma and the xylophone, but things will be so much better for us in Birmingham.’
I grunted again.
‘Remember, you are special.’ She had said it before so many times, but it seemed that I was extra special that day. She had said it over and over as we were sat on those apple crates: ‘You are special, Ruby’. But, so happens, lots was special to Maudy that day and she started to mouth off again, going on about special-big houses and special-fast motorcars in a special-big city until I started to think that maybe s
he was right. I was special, without me there would have been none of those dreams.
Maudy only shut up when the hedges stopped and there were moonlit fields all around. Now I could see them all, looking pale and sickly in the moonbeams as they slept – Jim-John and Henry with ghostly white faces, the moon washing the freckles from Andy’s cheeks. Maudy grinned at me, her mouth wide like a skull.
In the front of the van Clarence was patting the big purple envelope in his breast-pocket: pat-pat-pat. Fatkins glanced over at him but then I saw his eyes flick back in the mirror – he wasn’t looking at the road and I started to think that he was looking at me again. I started thinking that he blamed me for driving his cousins to Birmingham, blamed me for keeping him from his bed in the middle of the night, blamed me for the boys staying with his mother in her little house and for all the money we had scabbed off him for damp aprons and stoves that would never be fixed. I looked away quickly. And then I started to remember what had happened earlier that day in the empty cottage. In my head Clarence and Fatkins and the envelope and everything else in the van just faded away and all I could see was our kitchen again, and it looked empty, with the floor bare and piles of apple crates against the wall. I started to think about what Maudy had said again. Of course I was special; without me, we would have never been in this mess…
*
‘So it all started when Clarence finds the photograph,’ Maudy said as she sat down on an apple crate. ‘We could tell from Sadie’s face what the photograph meant to her and then she broke down and told us all about this granddaughter that never was.’ Maudy smiled gleefully. ‘The thing is, once Sadie has started talking, she couldn’t stop. She told us all about the affair and the pregnancy and the birth, even the posy of violets left on the incubator. You see her son had told her everything, even Emma’s name, and where she lived, and even what she didn’t tell us weren’t hard to figure out.’