Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Disappeared the morning after the party. Didn’t take anything at all that we could see, just a raincoat because it was raining.’

  ‘You’ve tried his workplace, the BBC and so on?’

  ‘Yes, and not only was he not there, but they hadn’t seen him for months, even this independent production company he used to do stuff for. Apparently they’d had some quarrel and he’d said he’d never touch them again and all that. I can see him saying it.’

  ‘So what was he working on?’

  ‘That’s the awful thing, I don’t think he was working on anything. We looked at his bank statements and there’d been no money coming in, not for months. So we don’t know where he went during the day. And so Mum’s twice as desperate because of him keeping all his troubles from her, unless of course they weren’t troubles and he’d got a glamorous second family somewhere like that man in the papers, but it doesn’t sound like him. I mean he could barely cope with one family – and a midget family at that. So we don’t know what to do next and I don’t expect you do either, but it would be great to have a bit of company because the police aren’t exactly sympathetic. You can tell they just think he’s done a runner and perhaps he has, but they ought to pretend, don’t you think?’

  The rain was coming down hard and I took some boots with me on the train and felt as if everyone could guess where I was going, although the boots were in an M&S carrier bag. Somewhere not quite hidden in the gloom and concern was a twitch of excitement, the sensation of the cold ledge of reality beneath the trembling fingers.

  ‘Going hunting, are you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In those boots. Off to watch the fox get torn to pieces?’

  It was hard to tell how young the man was. There was a tawny fuzz edging his pale chin. The carrier bag had sagged like an old woman’s stockings round the ankles of the boots, so that their glabrous green tops sprouted naked and unashamed.

  ‘No, why should I be?’

  ‘Or fishing then. You look more like a hunting type, though. Either way, we’re after you, don’t you worry.’ He blinked at me with his mild eyes. He might have been asking what the next stop was.

  ‘Are you a saboteur?’

  ‘Who said I was? Got to get off here. Just watch it, that’s my advice.’ He did not give me the time to say that this was one piece of advice I had taken to heart long ago.

  When the grubby green train rattled into the little station, for some reason I took the wrong turning just as I had on my first visit and found myself on the other side of the river looking across at Minnow Island through the rain. There was no sign of life inside the house. Under the dark skies, it seemed a miserable shack shivering in the wind under the leafless willow branches. Why had I made the same mistake? There was something wilful about the error.

  She was waiting on the far side of the footbridge, as before. In a sou’wester rainhat this time and boots, Christopher Robin effect but somehow not childish.

  ‘They’ve searched the island already. It’s not very big really. But you might see something they missed. A fresh eye.’

  She led the way down the path past the locked chalets and the dripping chain-link fences with the withered tendrils of bindweed clinging to them. The air was grey and steamy, the rain coming down harder. I looked at the blank shed-doors, jaunty lime-green and blush-pink, desolate now.

  ‘They’ve been through the sheds, have they?’

  ‘But they’re all locked.’

  ‘One could have been unlocked and he gone in it, to shelter from the rain perhaps and then it got locked by mistake.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ she said.

  ‘No. But they ought to look.’

  ‘They still think he’s gone off with a woman. Anyway it’s difficult because half the people here disappear in the winter. I think some of them are on the run.’

  There was still that calmness about her, which might have made the police think she was not much bothered. She said, ‘Excuse me’ and held out a photograph to a woman coming towards us, and no one would have guessed she had been crying.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not, I mean, I know the face but I haven’t seen him recently. Your father, is he? I heard something about it, what do the police say? Never there when you need them, are they? Mind if I take another look?’

  This time she gave the photograph a lingering, almost sensuous gaze, not like her first hasty embarrassed glance.

  ‘Nice-looking isn’t he, yes, I’ve seen him quite often now I come to think about it but not for quite a few weeks now.’

  She had a shopping bag in one hand and some stuff for the cleaners under the other arm, but she seemed reluctant to move on. My impatience turned into a lurching, sickening apprehension that he was certainly dead, and almost certainly very close to us, perhaps within touching distance. The rain’s chill fingers tapped on my shoulder as though they were his. I turned aside to hop over a low fence and try the door of a wooden shed. Locked of course, but there was enough slack on the chain to open the door an inch or two and peer in: an old mower, a folded-up garden seat.

  The woman stood startled, no doubt about to say something about trespassing, but then Helen snapped open the garden gate of the nearest chalet and began banging on the door and, when there was no answer, pressing her face to the little porthole window. I hopped over into the next garden on my side, not bothering to go back to the path. The shed here was bigger, more like a garage, made of creosoted planks with an asphalt roof. The catch on this one was loose and I yanked it off with one tug. Inside there was a rickety workbench and tools and bits of wood piled up any old how – a painful reminder of the sweet order of Martin Hardress’s workshop, but that was all there was. As I closed the twanging aluminium door behind me and tried to make the catch look as if it had come off of its own accord, I heard Helen behind me cracking on to the next chalet. We were driven on by a shared frenzy, she by a kind of terror that was almost exuberant, and, well, I didn’t know quite what I was doing, except that it seemed necessary to be ruthlessly active, though why this would help it was impossible to say, still less why I had this feeling that Hardress was so close to us at that moment.

  The woman stood still on the path, her mouth open but never quite able to form the words ‘You can’t do that’.

  On we went down the path banging doors, trying windows, lifting up tarpaulins. Eventually we came to the river bank. The path was churned up into deep mud and I remembered about the boots in the carrier bag which had been flapping and niggling at my calves as we ran along.

  ‘Oh no, you’re not going to try the river,’ she said, as I stopped and put on the boots.

  ‘It’s just the mud.’ I waved a vague helpless hand at the morass which led along the bank to the bungalow hidden in the dripping trees.

  ‘The mud,’ she repeated with listless contempt, then fell into my arms and had a proper cry. We said nothing but gave up the silly search there and then and slithered along the path. The police had promised to start a full-scale operation by the weekend, Min said. The superintendent would be there, and possibly divers although they were on another job at present. February was always a busy time.

  But the police search came up with nothing either, and that seemed like a score to Martin who, wherever he was, would obviously prefer not to be found.

  It was four weeks, more perhaps, before a boy and his dog scrabbling in the undergrowth on Leith Hill found him. The dog was a half-dachshund, they told her, an enterprising mongrel combining wriggle and tenacity, which was why he was the only dog to penetrate the thicket of box and holly and bramble half a mile from the nearest path. Not that even the paths were much frequented now, it being a raw March and a thin wind coming up the gully which was narrow though it had a great view. I could see most of Surrey, a cold grey-blue shimmer stretching to the curve of the earth.

  ‘That’s not the Thames, is it? I was wondering if we could see Minnow Island from here.’

  ‘No, we’re facing
the other way. Anyway, you couldn’t because of the South London hills. For a scientist you don’t seem to know much geography.’

  She had insisted on taking me. She wanted someone to come with her, as a witness. He wasn’t there any more. As soon as they had found him, they had cut him down and manhandled – the right sort of verb in the circumstances – him down the hill to the car-park by the Wishing Well café which was as close as the police van could come. The coroner was a little testy about this and complained that the usual scene-of-incident drill had been skipped. There were no photographs taken, no reliable sketch maps made. Helen thought that even the police had been too horrified to leave him there above them with his scuffed sneakers tangled in the tops of the sodden bushes. But it was not hard to imagine his blackened face and lolling tongue and the thin wind keening around his rotting skinny body, the unseeing eyes staring out over the Home Counties.

  ‘That branch up there it must be, you can see where the wire has rubbed.’

  ‘How did he get up there?’

  ‘Oh he showed me the trick of it once, he showed me a lot of funny things. How to hang yourself without having to stand on a chair and kick it away. Helpful hints for dutiful daughters. You make a kind of rudimentary pulley and then a running noose on the other rope. You need two ropes.’

  ‘You didn’t have to come,’ I said.

  ‘Yes I did. You’ve got to see everything.’

  She wriggled through a place where the brambles had not yet choked the box bushes, perhaps the place where the dog had got through, there wasn’t that much difference in size between them. Her fair hair, short as it was, snagged on the brambles and she had to disentangle it with her free hand. The other hand held the posy she had picked from the garden, not much to be had at that time: a few wet narcissi and the scant white blossoms of some shrub that smelled of disinfectant. Not snowdrops, snowdrops were bad luck in a bunch, though it was difficult to visualise much more bad luck.

  She came back without the posy.

  ‘I left it at the foot of the tree. Thanks for coming.’

  Going to Leith Hill wasn’t only like a Sunday visit to the cemetery to lay flowers, though it was that obviously. There was also some kind of dedication in it, a commitment to carry on her father’s – what? Not work exactly, he seemed to work only to earn money or to fill in time. To carry on his impatience is the best way I can describe it, his serious impatience. It was the word he had used too. Impatience is a virtue, he had said.

  She had rented a ground floor in Fulham, a little red-brick house which was all bay window and at the back a patch of garden with a few cabbage stalks, running down to the District Line. Upstairs there was an old lady, a controlled tenant whose rent was still reckoned in shillings, but I don’t think I ever saw her properly. A faint scurrying overhead, a glimpse of carpet slippers already almost out of sight on the tiny half-landing, that was all. Perhaps she thought if she was too visible they would put her rent up. But then it was a quiet place generally. Even the trains scarcely rattled the window although they were so close, perhaps because the track was on a high grassy embankment.

  ‘Does sound rise, like hot air?’ I asked.

  ‘What a silly question,’ Helen said.

  ‘You don’t know the answer, do you?’ I persisted.

  She laughed.

  She was sitting cross-legged on a little rag rug in violent reds and greens, which her mother had made, having given up the tapestries because they reminded her of Martin. With a bent wire fork in her left hand, Helen was idly toasting a slice of bread. There was a toaster but the element had broken. On the rickety table was a pile of science books – mostly about nutrition, food hygiene and other subjects connected with her thesis – and butter in a blue-and-white striped dish with plates to match, and Tiptree’s jams, and a sponge cake which her mother must have brought up from Minnow Island on her weekly visit to see Helen and take in an exhibition to cheer herself up. I too had taken to dropping in on the way from work. At the time it didn’t occur to me that Helen’s place was then the nearest thing I knew to a home (my father was still alive, but visits to him had their tensions).

  ‘You will come again, won’t you?’

  ‘Come where? Here?’

  ‘No, idiot, to Leith Hill.’

  ‘Do you really want to, isn’t it too painful?’

  ‘Well, I don’t want him to be forgotten. And I can’t exactly go to the crem.’

  ‘Surely when you go home, you must be reminded of him all the time?’

  ‘That’s different. I want to pay my tribute, is that the right word? And you’ve got the Morris Minor, and otherwise it’s two changes and then a bus.’

  So we set off again in the little black car with the maroon folding hood.

  It was a cold day but we both preferred to have the hood down, so we must have looked a cheerful couple, both pink-cheeked, her golden hair swept in the wind as we drove along the South Circular, and I thought how odd our mission would have seemed to other people if they had known, but then no doubt plenty of them would be on odd errands too.

  I parked the car at the Wishing Well café, and we walked up the path that led diagonally across the hill with the great grey-blue view of the downs unfolding as the slope turned away to the north. Then we stopped to catch our breath before the last steep climb, off the path proper up a muddy sheep-scratching to the little thicket of box and bramble and the tree half-hidden in the middle. It was a sycamore. I was aware of our feet scrunching on the withered leaves, smaller here than the leaves on the sycamores in the valley because the wind had stopped the tree growing. Now that I looked at the upper branches, they seemed hardly high enough to hang yourself from, but then he had been no height at all, only an inch or two taller than his daughter. This time she did not wriggle through the brambles, but simply placed the little bunch of flowers as near as she could get to the tree from the edge of the thicket, in a place where they would be out of the wind.

  ‘Somebody’s bound to pinch them,’ she said, as we were going back down to the Wishing Well for tea.

  ‘You don’t mind that?’

  ‘Not really. Perhaps it’s better than them withering up there. You don’t have to come again, you know.’

  ‘I’ll miss the tea.’

  The Wishing Well was a dismal green prefab chalet on the edge of the beech wood. You wouldn’t have expected them to serve fresh lightly browned scones with proper clotted cream and strawberry jam. The cream tea was a relief after the sound of the wind rattling the naked brambles. All the same, I don’t think I could have borne to do it again. Later on, she would still go by herself but at much longer intervals, she told me, once or twice a year perhaps.

  Anyway, in no time at all, the same day in fact, I had something else to think about, something which left me shuddering with humiliation, still does really, for the memory of one’s own humiliations is bred to last.

  The telephone was jangling as I was unlocking the door, the noise vibrating against the low ceiling as though trying to escape to some place it would be attended to.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Out, down to – well, with Helen in fact, to a place called Leith Hill to –’

  ‘I’ve been calling for hours, I’m in London.’

  ‘You do sound quite close.’

  ‘Close, is that all you have to say?’

  ‘No, no, I mean, that’s great, I’ve only just got in.’

  ‘Can you meet me tonight?’

  ‘Yes, oh yes.’

  ‘At the Sheridan, at eight? Just you.’

  ‘Yes of course, who else do . . .’ But she had already left me with the dead whirr.

  Jane was standing just inside the door of the hotel room and opened it as soon as I touched the bell so that I staggered straight into her arms and the terrible twenty minutes began. Well, to be exact, the first five were glorious, everything I had dreamed of, the clothes falling off us, her fingers daring, clutching, stroking and the wonder
ful smell of lavender. All this had happened before in France but this time I knew there would be no holding back at the last. She was so direct this time, even harsh, in her words too, murmured, almost grunted, chivvying herself on. And when I abruptly failed, quite without warning, as though some connection had been switched off, she too growled to a halt like a car braking.

  Even in my haze of wretchedness, I had room to be startled by how angry she was.

  ‘Did you come here to humiliate me, deliberately, do you hate me that much?’

  ‘No, no, please I’m sorry.’

  ‘Or am I so disgusting that you can’t bring yourself to do it?’

  ‘No, I’m really sorry. I’ve just had –’

  ‘You thought, I’ll make that stupid old bitch pay for holding out on me.’

  ‘No of course I didn’t.’

  ‘Well you can get the fuck out of here, and take your little prick to show that Miss Goldilocks of yours, it’s more her size.’

  She began crying as I put my clothes back on. When I was dressed, she embraced me in a blind, wild enfolding and muttered how sorry she was and I muttered how sorry I was and she told me to get out all the same because she was no good to anyone. Despite this clumsy patching up, the things she had said before did not go away. I shut the door behind me very gently as if I had committed a murder and did not want to attract attention.

  If she had not lost her temper, possibly I would have written to her, told her what I had been doing that day, and how there was nothing between Helen and me, but the hurt was too raw and Jane too much to cope with.

  So it was Helen I heard from next.

  ‘Sorry to lean on you again. But this odd thing’s been happening and I don’t like to talk to Mum because she’s still so upset about Dad. And the women at college would make the wrong sort of fuss.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Two or three nights a week something horrible gets delivered, a dead rabbit on the doorstep, or a nasty picture through the letterbox – a photo of Auschwitz or a horse being shot. You never know when exactly or which night it’s going to be, so I lie awake almost all night, then while I’m asleep it comes. I’m going fairly crazy, as you can imagine.’