Janice Wilson, said Kate, had a face that you’d have difficulty bringing to mind a week after you’d spent a whole evening in its presence. It was the median face of middle-aged British womanhood, with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever. Pressed for details, she described a thick-waisted woman, fifty-ish, five foot five or six, with mousy hair and a roundish face, and eyes that she assumed were a nondescript brown because no colour was suggesting itself to her. ‘It’s incomprehensible,’ said Kate.
‘It is,’ her mother agreed, frowning hugely to maintain control.
Perplexity compounded the grief, and there was only one course of action that might in any way reduce her mother’s bewilderment. ‘I’ll have to meet her,’ she announced, within a week. Kate was of the opinion that the risks of this course of action outweighed all possible benefits; but days later, her mother wrote a letter to the inexplicable Janice. A reply came back on scalloped and scented paper. Janice Wilson declared herself surprised to have received the letter and even more surprised that it should have been so gracious. A date was proposed.
Janice Wilson welcomed the widow solemnly, as if greeting an estranged, older and more successful cousin at a funeral. Then she started crying, and half-raised her arms, in case an embrace might be acceptable. Well before the end of their conversation, Kate’s mother had decided that this was an irredeemably stupid woman. Richard had been a very happily married man, Janice Wilson informed her, as if this might be consoling news. Her relationship with him had not been an affair, she stated; it was not about sex. (This much was easy enough to accept. The woman was as plain as a sock, and had the shape of a matryoshka doll.) But, Janice confessed, having steeled herself with a long intake of breath, it was true that she had loved him. He had not loved her; there was no question of that. But she had loved him. She had to be honest. His capacity for empathy, his authority, his intelligence – she recited his love-worthy qualities. Janice Wilson appeared to be complimenting the betrayed wife on the calibre of husband that she had achieved. It had begun to appear that Janice had conceived the idea that she and the widow might become friends, united in their loss.
For Leonor Staunton, nothing was clarified by this hour in Martell Road. Quite the reverse: why her husband had chosen to spend any time at all with this garrulous and dumpy dullard, never mind have sex with her, was now a mystery that would remain insoluble. Janice Wilson was so drab that hating her was too much of an effort. Every passing minute in the woman’s house had simply made her feel more tired; her presence was like a stupefying gas. On the doorstep, she shook Janice Wilson’s hand and told her that she had been born in Portugal, a circumstance for which Janice should perhaps feel grateful, because if she’d been born a few miles further east she would have been Spanish and then everything would have been different. ‘I might have ripped your throat out,’ she said, sweetly, with the first and last smile of the afternoon.
It is not known what else Kate’s mother learned from Janice Wilson about her clandestine friendship, or whatever one should term it, with Kate’s father. She shared no other details with her elder daughter. ‘I cannot begin to fathom it,’ she told Kate on coming home. ‘She’s just so thoroughly uninteresting. Had she been a glamorous floozie, I might have understood.’ It was distressing that this nothingness of a woman should, in any way, have known her husband better than she had known him herself: Janice Wilson had known that he was a man with a wife and daughters, whereas the wife had never known that he was a man with a mistress. And a frumpy one at that. ‘But let’s not talk about her again,’ she said, and after that day, for Kate’s mother, the name of Janice Wilson was like the filthiest swearword, never to be uttered.
It was decided that no good could come of telling Naomi what had been discovered, but she had to be told something, as it would be obvious that the investigation had been productive. Kate devised a tale involving a former employee, living in Clive Road, who had fallen on hard times; their father had lent this man some money, but had said nothing about the loan, because their mother had never liked the man (he was a drinker) and would have disapproved of giving him a hand-out. The story was credible, and it cast their father in a favourable light; Naomi would not think any less of him for having heard it. So Kate told her sister what had been learned about the former employee, and Naomi listened without interrupting. She bowed her head when the story was over, and dabbed an eye, and whispered: ‘Don’t lie to me.’ The following year, in May, a police car brought Naomi home; she had been standing by the roadside in Clive Road for hours, talking to herself, the policewoman said.
9.
Martin arrives as the table is being laid. He comes into the kitchen and sees Naomi; he greets her amiably, and as if it’s been only a few days since they last saw each other. In any situation, Martin can dissemble perfectly. His effectiveness in court owes much to the fact that, no matter what the provocation, or temptation, he can maintain a demeanour of immaculate opacity; his customary style is refined, courteous, undemonstrative – the fatal question, when it comes, is like being suddenly stabbed by the well-mannered gentleman in a three-piece suit who’s been chatting to you on the station platform for the past half-hour.
Naomi freights the moment with significance. She puts down the cutlery and advances towards her brother-in-law, arms held wide to receive him. The embrace is over-extended, so that he might understand it as an apology. As she detaches herself, she puts a light kiss on his cheek. Stepping back, she scrutinises him from a range of two paces. ‘You could do with a drink,’ she says, as if seeing someone who is badly out of sorts, instead of smiling Martin. She has been into town to buy a nice bottle; she lifts it from the table, inviting his verdict; he knows little more about wine than Naomi does, but nods his approval.
‘I’ll be with you in ten minutes,’ says Martin. He gives Kate a kiss and goes upstairs.
At the sounds of his footfalls in the bedroom overhead, Naomi looks up at the ceiling and smiles, and turns the smile unchanged to her sister, as if to say that she can understand her sister’s happiness in this life, with her husband, in this house. She puts out the glasses. ‘Is Lulu allowed?’ she asks.
‘A small one,’ says Kate.
Naomi positions each glass exactly in the centre of its coaster. Then she says: ‘Something happened today.’
‘Oh?’ says Kate, thinking Naomi means that something happened to her when she went out to buy the bottle.
‘I can tell,’ says Naomi.
‘Tell what?’
‘That something happened.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘With Martin. I could tell from his eyes. Something really annoyed him today.’
‘Something usually does. It goes with the job.’
‘Or is it me?’
‘You mean did you imagine it?’
‘No, I mean is it me who’s annoyed him?’
‘How could it be?’
‘Well, I’m here. That’s enough,’ says Naomi, and she looks at Kate, frowning, almost tearful at the thought that this might be so.
‘He’s not annoyed,’ her sister assures her.
‘Irked, then,’ says Naomi, as Lulu comes in; she strokes her niece’s hair as she passes.
It turns out that there was indeed an irksome incident this afternoon, involving a member of the jury. On the first day of the trial it had become evident that this woman was more interested in her fingernails than in what was happening in front of her; she was one of those, says Martin, who makes her mind up as soon as the defendant appears, and nothing that anyone says is going to make a blind bit of difference.
‘There’s a non-listening type?’ asks Naomi.
‘Not a type, but a category,’ Martin answers. ‘Some people aren’t prepared to pay attention. Or it’s too much for them.’
‘The proles,’ Lulu explains gravely, to her aunt.
‘Not always,’ says her father.
‘But you can look at your fingernails and still be listenin
g,’ says Naomi. ‘They aren’t incompatible activities.’
‘Believe me,’ says Martin, ‘this woman’s mind was elsewhere.’
Naomi nods. ‘OK,’ she says, with a small smile, the smile that signifies that she has caught the scent of an argument.
A year ago, on the night of the last great falling-out, Naomi had smiled exactly in this way; Kate can hear her sister telling Martin that he was one of the latter-day priests, the wise ones without whose ministrations the world would be wrecked by the idiocy and wickedness of the ordinaries. She replenishes Naomi’s glass of water, and draws a finger along the back of Naomi’s hand as she does so, as if the touch might be a preventative.
‘Proceed,’ Lulu instructs her father.
‘So, today the woman with the fascinating fingernails turns up with hair extensions: long, straight, jet-black. The Morticia Addams look. She can’t keep her hands off her new head; every other minute a hand goes up for a stroke. Some fiddling occurs, as if she’s checking that things are securely anchored. The nails are given some more admiration.’
‘Should be shot,’ Lulu comments, with a complicit smirk for her aunt. But Naomi does not respond; looking only at Martin, Naomi receptively awaits the conclusion.
After lunch, one of the jurors had reported that Ms Extensions had been exchanging text messages while the jury was waiting to be recalled, and she had a strong suspicion that the texts were about the defendant. Ms Extensions was summoned; her phone was confiscated and examined. Five minutes earlier she’d received a text from her boyfriend: Gilty??? Martin spells it out: ‘G-I-L-T-Y. And she’d replied: As fuck!!!!!!! Seven exclamation marks.’
‘And then?’ asks Naomi.
‘Juror reprimanded; juror dismissed.’
‘Christ, the public,’ sighs Lulu. ‘Can’t spell. Can’t think. They really are the weakest link.’
Again, Naomi misses the cue; she gathers some pasta carefully on her fork, thinking; but she does not seem to be plotting an attack.
‘It’s not a perfect system,’ Martin says to Lulu, ‘but it’s better than the alternatives.’
‘And he is guilty, right?’ says Lulu.
‘That’s what I’m endeavouring to prove.’
‘Sure. But he is anyway, yes?’
‘I believe so,’ says Martin.
Naomi eats the forkload of pasta, overchewing it, as though she thinks there might be small bones inside it, then she remarks, to Martin: ‘I bet you made up your mind about Katie straight away.’ The tone is accusatory, and she is not smiling. ‘You liked her, and that was that,’ she says, as if talking about someone who is not in the room, someone who should not be liked.
‘Of course I liked her,’ Martin answers. ‘Who wouldn’t?’
‘More than liked, I’d say,’ Naomi goes on. ‘You knew right away that this was the one,’ she says, and she looks at her sister with a gaze that is objective and almost stern, like a collector giving her verdict on an artefact of high value.
‘I had a hunch,’ Martin concedes. ‘But I needed evidence,’ he says, with a grin for his wife.
‘The evidence comes after the verdict,’ Naomi states, unyielding. ‘You knew. The evidence just confirmed that you were right. That’s what happens, nine times out of ten: within a few seconds we know, and all the rest, all the evidence, just falls into place,’ she says. ‘So maybe this woman knew. You saw right away that Katie was a good one, and Morticia saw right away that your defendant was a bad one.’
‘The courtroom is not the place for intuition,’ Martin tells her. ‘Proof is all that matters. People have to be tested. You cannot go by impressions. People lie to you in court, and some of them are extremely good at it.’
‘There’s an incentive, after all,’ Kate contributes. ‘There’s a lot riding on it.’
‘And I’ve come across people who might have fooled almost anyone, at first,’ Martin goes on. ‘Very plausible; the picture of wounded innocence. I can think of one woman: a cuddly little grandmother, distraught that her own grandchildren should be telling such lies about her. If you’d asked for a vote on first sight, the jury would have acquitted.’
‘But she didn’t fool you,’ says Naomi.
‘She didn’t fool the court.’
‘And you’re sure the court was right?’
‘Absolutely,’ says Martin. ‘Of course. I was there to secure a conviction; they convicted.’
For three or four seconds Naomi holds Martin’s gaze; one eyebrow tightens, in the slightest of frowns; it is as though Martin has made a statement of such subtlety that she is not at all sure how to take it. She looks down at her empty plate. Then, with a quick smile and a widening of the eyes, she seems to give the problem up. ‘So how’s school?’ she asks Lulu, and for half an hour she is the perfect aunt: she remembers the names of Lulu’s friends and teachers, she remembers the minor crises of the previous year, the music that Lulu used to like, everything. She is sympathetic, amusing – ebullient, even.
Lulu has attracted the attention of a boy named Otis, who is the school’s best cross-country runner, and good-looking, but so boring that when he spoke to her last week, having cornered her in the library, Lulu started to panic and found herself struggling for breath; she has a feeling, though, that Otis misinterpreted the symptoms of panic as the symptoms of something entirely different. That’s how stupid Otis is.
This predicament reminds her aunt of an episode from her schooldays, when she’d ended up going to the cinema with a boy called Billy, who had a nice enough face and could swim very well but was clearly destined for middle management and the chairmanship of his local golf club. She’d gone out with Billy, she thinks, as some sort of revenge against a skinny and short-sighted lad called Matthew, who wrote poetry but talked to Naomi only in order to talk about her sister, who was of course far too mature for him, and too refined. Kate has no recollection of this character; Naomi reminds her – he had very dark eyes, and a stare ‘like a murderer’.
The boy with murderous eyes fails to take shape in Kate’s mind, but clarification has to be postponed, because suddenly Naomi is overcome with tiredness, it seems. She closes her eyes as if steadying herself in a wave of dizziness; her head sways. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, blinking quickly. She looks at her sister with deadened eyes. ‘I need to go to bed,’ she says. Getting up from the table, she gives Kate’s hand a squeeze, strongly. ‘Thank you all. It’s been a lovely evening,’ she says, like the guest of friends, not family.
When Kate goes up to bed, an hour later, she looks up the stairs to the guest room and sees a line of light under the door. She knocks. ‘Hello,’ Naomi calls out brightly, as if a visit at this hour were a delightful surprise. To Kate, it is almost the voice of twenty years ago. Lying in bed, with her knees drawn up, Naomi is reading a book. It seems that her exhaustion has been overcome. ‘Was I all right?’ she asks.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Earlier,’ says Naomi. ‘I felt I was boring.’
‘You weren’t boring.’
‘I went on a bit,’ she says. ‘I think Lulu’s frightened of me.’
‘Why would she be frightened?’
‘She thinks I’m ill. I mean, like cancer ill.’
‘No she doesn’t.’
‘I’m perfectly healthy,’ says Naomi, for the third or fourth time since yesterday. ‘You’ll make sure she knows I’m fine?’
‘She knows you’re fine.’
‘No, I scare her,’ she insists.
‘I’ve told her everything’s OK,’ Kate assures her.
‘She’s tremendous,’ says Naomi.
‘Thank you.’
‘And smart. As goes without saying. You and Martin – not going to produce a slow kid, are you?’
‘She works hard.’
‘I’m sure she does,’ says Naomi, seriously.
‘Are you going to come with me tomorrow?’ Kate asks. A reminder appears to be necessary: ‘To see Mum.’
Naomi is scanning the
open pages of the book. ‘Probably,’ she answers, after a pause.
‘You should,’ says Kate. Receiving no answer, she asks: ‘What are you reading?’
‘Merton,’ she replies, displaying the cover.
Kate moves closer to read it. The book is held in Naomi’s left hand; in her right she holds the postcard that she is using as a bookmark. For a moment the message side of the postcard is facing Kate, and that moment is enough for her to see that the handwriting is unusually formal – nobody would write in this way nowadays except as some sort of exhibition or exercise.
Observing the direction of her sister’s glance, Naomi asks: ‘You want to see?’
‘Can I?’
‘Of course,’ says Naomi, proffering the card. ‘It’s not what you think it is.’
But all that Kate is thinking is that the writing must be Bernát’s, which is indeed what it is. The script is extraordinarily graceful and compact; the vowels are of exactly the same size, and the spacing is as regular as typesetting; the ascenders are exquisitely curled. No letters have been amended; the writing is immaculate; it is also incomprehensible. ‘Can you read this?’ asks Kate, and Naomi recites, without looking at the card:
Nincsen apám, se anyám,
se istenem, se hazám,
se bölcsóm, se szemfedóm,
se csókom, se szeretóm.
The voice in which Naomi recites is perhaps half an octave lower than her normal voice, and huskier. It is impressive that Naomi can do this, but Kate feels some embarrassment too, the sort of embarrassment that amateur dramatics can create. ‘Meaning?’ she asks.
‘“I have neither father, nor mother, nor God, nor country, nor cradle, nor coffin, nor mistress, nor kisses,”’ Naomi answers, solemnly quiet, as if repeating the words of a vow. ‘A poem. A favourite of Bernát’s.’
‘You can read Hungarian now?’
‘I’m getting there.’
Kate returns the card. ‘Lovely handwriting,’ she says.
The river is the river Page 5
