Usually these daytime outbursts seemed to me to be his fault. In the evenings, however, after Bryony and I had gone to bed, a different kind of row would take place. Although I could not hear every word, I often listened to these arguments as they welled up and ran their course and I could never understand why she precipitated them in the way that she did. They always followed the same pattern. First of all would come her voice, plaintive, nagging, reproaching him for something. He would either reply abruptly, evidently trying to change the subject, or – presumably either because he was in a good mood, or thought she had a point – adopt a wheedling tone and try to pacify her. Neither of these tactics would work. She would carry on, perhaps raising her original grievance again, but always dragging in more and more items to support her argument. She would draw on his past misdemeanours, his general character and his failure to provide the kind of house she would like to live in. Finally she would start on his relatives, especially the three whom we saw most frequently, who lived in the house in Westlode Street (my great-grandmother was still alive at the time of which I speak). This was always the point at which he snapped, and then they would both shout and scream, savaging each other with words until the early hours so that it was impossible for Bryony and me to sleep.
I was desperate to stop these arguments, not because I could not sleep, but because I did not know what was happening downstairs. With the daytime rows, terrible as they were, at least I was there, and I always believed that I had only to stick them out to make sure that nothing irrevocable occurred. In the evenings, I could no longer protect the status quo with my presence. They could have resorted to blows, or one of them might have walked out and made my world collapse, and I would not know and therefore would not be able to stop it. It was out of the question that I should venture downstairs to keep watch after I had been sent to bed, so I had to find another way of coping. Sister Hilda and her funnel of prayer seemed, quite literally, a Godsend.
For several nights I knelt on the floor beside my bed for hours, sending up my prayer funnel to God. I thought of all sorts of ways of asking for His help. I did not ask for it head-on: Sister Hilda had told us that you need to be careful what you ask for, and how you put it to God. So I did not say, ‘Please, God, make them stop because it is making me unhappy.’ I said things like, ‘Please, God, bring peace to this house; let us live in harmony with you and with each other; let us respect your ways.’
It did no good whatsoever. On the sixth night it was particularly cold – we had no heating in the bedrooms. I knelt on the lino in my pyjamas for three hours, for the first hour thinking that perhaps the praying was beginning to work at last, because all was quiet downstairs. Then the shouting started, and it went on and on and on. At first I tried to shut it out. I carried on praying, even saying my prayers out loud, my hands over my ears to drown out the other noise. I got colder and colder: my feet were so cold that I could not feel them, and the goosebumps stood out on my arms where the thin, too-small sleeves of my ancient pyjamas ended just below the elbow. It must have been midnight when I finally gave in and stumbled into bed, clasping my feet in my hands to try to warm them, despair in my heart. The shouting had not stopped. I do not know how long it took me to fall asleep. It seemed like aeons; but I know that when it finally happened, still the shouting had not stopped.
The next morning everyone came down for breakfast, at which I felt somewhat relieved. My mother was sallow and tight-lipped, my father red-eyed as if he had been weeping. I felt tired and sick. My anxiety was so great that I could do nothing; I could barely swallow my tea, certainly not think of eating cereal or the toast doorsteps that my mother had propped against the yellow and brown tea-cosy. Only Bryony seemed to have slept well. She sat at the table now, cheerful and rosy-cheeked, eating Sugar Puffs with the top of the milk. Although I was usually fond of Bryony, at this moment I hated her for her insensitivity.
My mother fixed me with a baleful look.
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked dourly.
“Nothing,” I said. I looked away from her. “I think I’ll go to school early today – there’s some homework I need to finish.”
“You won’t go anywhere until you’ve had something to eat – will he?” she appealed to my father. He shook his head in half-hearted support of her, but he could not speak. Unlike her, he seemed still to be traumatised by last night’s row. The delivery boy passed the window with his newspaper and we listened as it fell to the floor in the hall, the letterbox lid clattering. My father slid away to retrieve it. Grimly, my mother poured out Cornflakes for me. My father returned to the room but not to the table. He stood with his back to the stove, holding the paper up in front of his face.
“What is the matter with you?” my mother repeated.
“There isn’t a God,” I said slowly, the tears welling.
I felt my father tense up behind his newspaper. I don’t think that he was a man of any strong beliefs or passions, but he had been brought up a Methodist by his grandmother, and he probably didn’t think to question the teachings that she had peddled.
My mother gave a short sarcastic bark – it was hardly a laugh.
“It’s taken you long enough to find that out,” she said. “I could have saved you the trouble. Now eat your breakfast. It’s too cold today for you to go out without any food inside you. I don’t want the welfare lady after me.”
Bryony appraised me in a superior way from behind her virtuous table manners. She was fond of me, too, but that did not stop her excelling at being the good girl when I was in trouble.
As I think about that day now, I am left with two problems, one rooted in the past, the other in the present. The past problem actually has nothing to do with God: it relates to my father. For not quite the first time, but certainly the first time I have articulated it with any clarity to myself, I wonder what my relationship with Ronald Atkins might have been like if it had not been influenced, first, by my mother, and then by what Uncle Colin had told me. Would I have liked him better? Would we have been companions, as other men seemed to be with the boys in their care, and gone to cricket matches together or built things?
The second decidedly has to do with God. It also concerns Peter. How can I live under the same roof with him – he is an ardent Catholic – without his finding out that I do not believe? And what will be the effect on him when he does?
Chapter Twelve
Policewoman Juliet Armstrong trudged up the short gravel drive of the shabby 1960s semi. She particularly hated the nature of her mission, though she had volunteered for it; it was her job, not Tim’s, though he had offered to do it, and she would not shirk it.
Pausing, she quickly took stock of her surroundings. The house was at the further end of a cul-de-sac called Acacia Close. All of the houses in this street were identical, all obviously built by the same property developer at a time when complementing cheap brick with clapboard-style wooden panels was in vogue. Some of them were dilapidated, others cheerfully painted and recently embellished with additional amenities such as glass porches; some of the gardens even sported water features. Juliet guessed that this was because some were still occupied by people who had bought them when they were first built, and that others had more lately been purchased by young couples still full of optimism and energy, bringing new blood and lots of DIY as the original sixties occupants had grown too frail to live on their own and been forced to move out – or had, indeed, died.
Number 17 Acacia Close was in a particularly depressing state of disrepair. There were weeds growing up through the over-abundant gravel, and the borders on either side of it were choked with nettles and thistles. The privet hedge looked as if it had not been cut for many years, but instead of becoming a forest, some of its bushes had shot towards the sun like gangly youths, while others had died. The clapboard-style wood was almost bleached white with the sun and rain of many years, with no lick of varnish to stem th
e depredations of time. The doors and windows had last been painted long ago in a depressing shade of turquoise and this paintwork was now pealing.
Not everything was broken or run-down: the white plastic disk of the doorbell still glowed a faint orange. Juliet pressed it and waited for a minute or so, then pressed it again. She could hear the two-tone electronic chimes sounding within the house, but there was no responding bustle of movement. Juliet took a few paces backwards and looked at the upstairs windows. The transoms of what was probably the master bedroom were both open. She wondered whether Mrs. Sheppard was the sort of woman who would leave upstairs windows open when she was out shopping. Somehow, she doubted it.
She was startled by the sound of a bolt being shot, and realised that it was coming from a gate at the side of the house. A very small woman emerged. She was carrying a saucer in her hand which she was holding at arm’s length. She was dressed entirely in brown: dark brown cardigan, pale brown blouse, brown polyester trousers and brown lace-up shoes. Apart from her hair, which was thick and bushy, a nascent white streaked with grey, and which was escaping from the rather inexpert bun into which it had been fashioned on the top of her head, she was extremely neat. She stopped in her tracks when she saw Juliet, her face stricken with alarm. It was a strange face: puffy and wrinkled at the same time, with surprisingly sharp pale brown eyes. Juliet guessed that Mrs. Sheppard must be in her mid to late seventies, but she looked older.
“Mrs. Sheppard? Juliet Armstrong, of the South Lincolnshire Police.” Juliet held out her identity card. “I’m very sorry if I startled you.”
“What do you want?” The tone was peremptory, even abrupt. As she spoke, the woman turned away to place the saucer – which evidently contained milk – on the gravel on one side of the front door. “Whenever the police come to see me, it means trouble.”
Juliet quailed inwardly. This occasion would be no exception. She looked up and down the street. The whole area seemed to be deserted. Even so, standing outside in full view of anyone who might happen to be watching from one of these banal houses was not an appropriate place to deliver the news that she had brought with her.
“Would you mind if we went inside? There is something that I need to tell you.”
Mrs. Sheppard’s worried expression turned into a scowl. “Aye, I suppose so. I hope you haven’t frightened the cat: he’s shy, and he might not come for his milk if you’ve scared him. He isn’t my cat – he lives next door, but they don’t look after him properly. You wait here while I open the front door.”
“I can just as easily walk with you to the back door.”
“I said, wait here,” said Mrs. Sheppard very emphatically, her voice cracking with the effort. She disappeared through the side gate, and fastened the bolt again immediately.
Juliet waited for some minutes with growing unease. Eventually she heard the sound of another bolt and a chain being drawn back and saw Mrs. Sheppard’s shape outlined against the frosted glass of the front door. The door opened.
“You can come in now.”
Juliet stepped into a tiny hall, in which there was room only for the doormat and a potted plant in a black iron stand. The staircase led straight up from the doorway. Both the hall and the stairway were painted a very pale duck-egg blue. Mrs. Sheppard sidled past her and opened one of the two doors on either side of the stairs.
She gestured to Juliet to precede her. Juliet entered a long oblong room made light by the huge picture windows that dominated either end. This room was also painted pale blue – a truer blue than the stairs, whose hue had a greenish tinge. The carpet and most of the furniture were mostly pale blue. There were two armchairs and a sofa covered in light blue cotton, with a darker blue throw on the sofa, a table with a pale blue linen runner and a dresser and cupboard coated in thick light blue paint. The lampshades were blue-white. There was a print of one of Picasso’s cat paintings from his blue period over the fireplace and two photographs standing on the mantelpiece framed in silver-blue chrome. The only things that were not blue were a very small coffee table, which was probably made of pine, and the television. It was the most monochrome room that Juliet had ever seen. The effect should have been restful, but it wasn’t: being there felt more like being held inside a fridge and unable to escape. It was a room that tried to be controlled, but in which the angst was almost banging round the walls, like a trapped bird trying to get out.
Mrs. Sheppard gestured to Juliet to take a seat. Juliet took one of the armchairs while she perched on the arm of the sofa, in what looked like a very temporary position, as if she soon expected to be escorting Juliet back to the door. Being inside her inner sanctum seemed to mellow her slightly, however. She attempted a smile, though her hands were convulsively twisting the edge of her brown cardigan.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” she ventured, before Juliet had had time to open the conversation.
“Thank you, that would be nice,” said Juliet, thinking that she would try to achieve as much rapport as possible, and that Mrs. Sheppard herself would probably be in need of tea shortly.
She sat and waited while Mrs. Sheppard vanished into the kitchen. It was unnerving how soundlessly the woman moved. She had closed the door behind her as she went, and no sounds of kettles filling or other tea-making preparations could be heard. Juliet sat very still. There was nothing to do in this room: no books, no magazines, no music system, no evidence of any hobbies such as knitting. There was the television, of course. Surely Mrs. Sheppard didn’t devote most of her time to watching it? Her eyes wandered around the room until her gaze fell on the two photographs. One was of a girl barely into her teens, wearing school uniform. Someone had managed to get the girl’s whole figure and her bicycle into the frame, so the facial features were too small to be distinguished clearly. Juliet guessed that it was a picture of Kathryn. The other was a head and shoulders shot of a man in his mid-forties, grinning, his hair windswept, his casual shirt open at the neck. This photograph was in colour; the one of the schoolgirl was black-and-white.
Mrs. Sheppard returned, bearing a tin tray which held two china mugs, a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk. She placed it on the coffee table and proceeded to offload its cargo. Juliet noticed that the tray was decorated with a blue and white scene from Swan Lake.
“I didn’t put the milk or sugar in, not knowing how you take it,” said Mrs. Sheppard. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks. I’d just like a bit of milk.”
Mrs. Sheppard had settled herself more permanently on the sofa this time. She leaned back against the cushions, clutching her mug of tea. The atmosphere had thawed considerably. She was attempting another of her curious pudgy-faced smiles.
“Now,” she said encouragingly, “that’s better. What can I do for you?”
“Mrs. Sheppard, I’m afraid that your instinct was right: I haven’t brought you good news. However, I hope that what I do have to tell you will bring you some comfort in time, even though it will be very painful at present.”
The smile collapsed in ruins.
“It’s Kathryn, isn’t it? That skeleton that they’ve found?”
“Yes.” Juliet paused. “I’m afraid it is – there can’t be any doubt about it. We’re lucky that you insisted on having those DNA samples analysed when you did.”
The rubbery lips trembled, but only for a minute.
“I’ve always known that she was dead,” she said. “I’ve known it from the first call we made to the police after she went missing. She just wouldn’t have disappeared like that. She didn’t live here any more, but she was always in touch. Even if she’d been running away from something and decided to emigrate, say, she would have told us. She wouldn’t have put us through the agony of not knowing.”
She paused for some moments. Juliet didn’t interrupt.
“It was my idea to have the DNA tests done. I didn’t need them for myself, but he needed them.” She
pointed to the second photograph. “Frank. It was eating him away, not knowing what had happened to her. He had a feeling that she was still alive and he would comb missing persons organisations for hours and go off on wild goose chases trying to find her. It was wearing him out. I suggested the DNA tests, thinking that when we got the results he would be calmer, because every time the police found a body they would try a match and then we would know that it wasn’t her. But after the first few weeks, it didn’t make any difference. Not really. What he wanted was an answer. He died five years ago, so I suppose he’ll never have one now.”
This time she did cry, soundlessly, her head bowed, her shoulders raised. After a while, she stopped as suddenly as she had begun, and said in a listless but matter-of-fact voice:
“There hasn’t been much point to my life since then, except for the cat.”
In the Family Page 8