The Punishment She Deserves

by Elizabeth George

  Bob gave a look to each of the women before saying to Isabelle, “It’s just this way,” as if she didn’t know where the garden was. But she followed him cooperatively, one of her hands holding Laurence’s, saying to the boy, “Are you getting excited about New Zealand?” She’d seen the packing boxes when they walked through the sitting room towards the garden door. They were still in a flattened shape, but soon enough Sandra would no doubt be gleefully shoving her Spode into them, having finally managed to achieve the triumph of fully co-opting Isabelle’s boys as her own.

  Bob took them across a perfect lawn to a grape arbour under which sat a table and chairs. Isabelle noted that he would be able to watch her from inside the house. Just another indignity she had to ignore. She knew he would push her as far as he could, probing for the point at which she would break. Since she had no intention of breaking, she said, “This is lovely. Thank you, Bob,” and was surprised to hear him murmur, “I’ll see what I can do with James,” before he went back to the house.

  Laurence was happily going on about New Zealand, the school he would be attending along with James, and the fact that the worst bit was that “we won’t have summer hols, though, Mum. I mean, this year we won’t have ’em. See, it’s upside down in New Zealand. They have summer hols in the winter. I mean it’s their winter. I mean our summer is their winter so they’ve already had their holiday and we’ll miss ours. I don’t like that bit at all.”

  “But the school sounds nice, does it? You’ll enjoy the school?”

  “Dad says I will.” He looked over his shoulder at the house and confided, “I don’t know about James, though, Mum. He’s being such a baby. More than usual cos he’s pretty much always a baby.”

  “Sometimes things that are easy for one person aren’t easy for another,” she said.

  “I just think he’s being stupid.” Laurence kicked a leg of the table.

  The house’s garden door opened again and Sandra came out. She was carrying a tray, and James was reluctantly trudging along in her wake, his head so far down that his hair fell forward in a veil and his chin rested upon his chest. Sandra called out to Isabelle cheerfully, “I thought ice cream might be nice in this fine weather.”

  When she put the tray on the table, Isabelle saw that she’d dished up three bowls of strawberry ice cream with chocolate sauce and nuts poured over it and a cherry sitting at the top of the mound. She’d even inserted a wafer biscuit that erupted jauntily from one side. Clearly, she was tempting James to remain with his mother and his brother. She said to Isabelle in a low voice, “I thought this might help,” and then to James himself, “Come along, James. You certainly don’t want to miss ice cream.”

  Laurence’s whoop of joy helped. James eased onto one of the chairs—the farthest from Isabelle, she noted—and he went at the ice cream with his spoon clutched into his fist. Isabelle stopped herself from telling him to use the spoon properly as he was quite old enough to know how to hold a spoon, and anyway, she’d seen him hold a spoon before and she knew very well that what he was doing was all for show. Instead, she tucked in, pronounced the ice cream delicious, and waited for Sandra to leave them.

  “Are you excited as well?” she asked James, when Sandra took herself off to regions unknown but very probably near a window. “New Zealand’s going to be quite an adventure for you. Laurence says school has already been arranged. You’ll miss regular summer hols, but think of it, darling: Christmas in the summer instead of the winter. Won’t that be fun? You can go to the beach. You can have a barbecue. How different it will be!”

  James still had not looked directly at her. Compared to his brother, his behavior had always been more retired, but this seemed extreme and Isabelle felt punished by him, which did not seem the least bit fair.

  She said, “James, is it me you’re unhappy with? Or is it something else? Is the idea of going off to New Zealand—”

  A rambunctious dog suddenly appeared out of absolute nowhere. It charged wildly to the table as if it had materialised from another world. It was large, it was pure black, and it was thoroughly excited, becoming all wagging tail and flopping ears and leaping attempts to join them, if not on the table then at least in their chairs. It barked joyously. It ran round in circles. It hurled itself at their bowls of ice cream. It particularly hurled itself at James.

  The boy screamed. King Kong might have leapt into their midst. James flew out of his seat and began running madly towards the river. This, of course, to the dog meant that James wished to have a game of chase. So the dog yelped happily as it tore after the boy. James shouted, “No! No! Dad! Mummy! Mummy!” as Bob burst from the house.

  “Oliver won’t hurt you,” Bob called. “James! Stop running! He thinks you’re playing.”

  But James kept on. He shot from the riverbank to the orchard and circled the trees, and Isabelle could see he’d begun to cry. His terror of the animal was absolutely real. She got to her feet and set off in his direction.

  Sandra raced outside, calling to him. She held out her arms. She shouted, “Bob, catch that wretched beast,” and she said to Isabelle, “We’ll handle this. Stay right there. James, James, it will be fine. Your dad’s getting him. See? Look at your dad. And here’s Mr. Horton come to fetch him home.”

  The dog, at this point, had James backed into one of the apple trees. He was in the play position that anyone who knew dogs would recognise but apparently James did not, for he kept shrieking, “Get him away! Mummy, get him away!” When Bob finally reached him, the child was a sodden heap of emotion. He’d curled himself into a hedgehog roll. Isabelle could hear him sobbing from across the garden.

  “I am so blasted sorry,” Mr. Horton said. “Sandra, Bob, I only opened the front door and there he went. We’re working day and night on his training but . . . Oliver! Enough! Come!”

  Bob had reached the dog at this point, and Oliver was thrilled with another potential playfellow. It was no real trouble to grab on to his collar, and it was equally easy to draw him away from James and hand him over to his master.

  Sandra, in the meantime, had reached James and scooped him up off the ground like a toddler. She was murmuring to him and smoothing his hair and, to Isabelle’s way of seeing things, generally treating him like a two-year-old.

  During all of this, Laurence hadn’t moved. He’d continued with his ice cream and had watched all of the activity like someone enjoying a television programme. When Isabelle returned to the table, he said frankly, “It happens all the time, Mum. Oliver likes the river and he gets out and comes over here and then he sees us and wants to play. James doesn’t get that. Really, he’s such a wanker.”

  “Laurence, that’s not very nice,” Isabelle said.

  “James, you are such a wanker!” Laurence called out to his brother. Bob had joined Sandra. He’d taken James from her and, cradling his head with his hand, he was carrying him back to the garden table. He said to Laurence, “Enough of that.”

  “But he is, he is,” Laurence declared. “Mum, he even looks under his bed every night to make sure there’s no monsters before he’ll get into it and I’m even right there in the same room! I don’t look under my bed, do I? No. But he does cos he’s a wanker. Wanker wanker wanker who’s even afraid of a stupid dog!”

  “Enough!” Bob pointed sternly at the boy. “What part of that do you not understand?”

  “Bob, should I . . .” It was Sandra now, having trotted along behind Bob like an obedient sheepdog.

  “No,” he said to her. And then, “James, the dog’s gone. I’m going to set you down with your mother and brother. You can finish your ice cream. Mr. Horton’s taken care of Oliver.”

  “An’ if you don’t eat it, I will, James,” Laurence announced. “’N fact . . .” He reached over, grabbed his brother’s ice cream, and began to dig in.

  “Laurence, that is absolutely enough!” Isabelle spoke without even thinking what w
as and was not appropriate. “You are not your brother, so you can’t possibly know what he’s thinking or going through or fearing or anything else, for that matter. I don’t want to hear you ever calling him a wanker again. And stop eating that ice cream this instant.”

  There was something of a shocked silence at this. Isabelle’s heart was thudding. Laurence had the ice cream spoon halfway to his mouth, James had raised his head from his father’s shoulder, Bob was staring at her transfixed, and Sandra’s jaw had dropped. She snapped it closed.

  Isabelle saw how far she’d just gone. She regretted it instantly, for everything that it revealed about her inability to cope. But then, Bob’s mouth moved in what might actually have been a small smile and Laurence dropped the spoon back into his brother’s treat and pushed the bowl back to where James had been sitting. Bob set James down, kissed the top of his head, and turned from the table. He took Sandra’s arm and they went towards the house, leaving Isabelle alone with the boys.

  She said quietly, “I spoke a bit sharply to you, Laurence. I do apologise. But I can’t have you teasing your brother like that. It’s not fair. And to be honest, it’s not very handsome of you when it comes down to it.”

  He looked from her to James back to her again. He said, “Sorry, Mum.”

  She said, “It’s not me you ought to be saying sorry to, is it?”

  To James, then, he said, “Sorry, James. But I do so wish . . . Oh sorry, just sorry.”

  James was looking only at his ice cream, which he had not returned to. He was caught up in whatever a nine-year-old-boy might be caught up in at the end of such an episode, and Isabelle hardly knew what that might be. But she did see how very different the boys were to each other, despite being identical twins. She also saw that if James Ardery was a fearful child, she was very much part of the process that had made him so.

  She said to him, “There’s not the slightest thing wrong with being afraid, James. Of dogs, of monsters under the bed, of creatures in the wardrobe, of snakes in the bushes, of anything at all.”

  He didn’t reply. He didn’t look up. Laurence snorted and she shot him a look. She went on.

  “The difficult part of coping with fears is facing them and walking through them. But the case is this: that’s the only way to dismiss them. And if we are never able to dismiss this fear or that fear—no matter what it is—then they tend to get larger. Do you know why I know this, James? Do you know why I know this better than everything else I might ever know?”

  He shook his head. Laurence, she saw, had stopped eating his ice cream and was watching her warily.

  “Because in my life, darling, I have been absolute crap at facing my own fears. That’s why you live with Dad and Sandra and not with me. That’s why what I did was take the first opportunity I had to run away from Maidstone and go to London. And here’s what I know now after all these years of running. If you run, your fears run with you. And they stay with you till you turn to face them.”

  “But you’re a cop!” Laurence protested. “Cops aren’t ’fraid. Don’t cops have to be not afraid?”

  “If I were afraid of the bad sort of people I come across, that would be true,” she said to Laurence. “But in my case, I’m afraid of who I will be if I ever face my fears in the first place.”

  Laurence frowned. James looked up. He, too, seemed perplexed. But he also looked like a boy who was sorting through various ideas in his head, so Isabelle waited.

  He said, “D’you mean you’re afraid of being afraid, Mum?”

  “That,” she said, reaching for his wrist, closing her hand round it, and feeling its fragility for the first time, “is exactly what I mean. So here is what I did with all those fears: I tried to drink them down.”

  “Like medicine?”

  “No. Like a potion you take when you want to forget. I used vodka and I used it too often and when your dad asked me to stop, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it because I was far too afraid at that point even to try. So I lost him and I lost you and now I’m losing you more. Which hurts very much. So I’m saying that the end of being afraid is losing. One loses everything from happy experiences in life to the people who should be part of those happy experiences. That’s not something I want for you, James. And it’s not something I want for Laurence either.”

  James said, “Laurence isn’t ever afraid.”

  Laurence said, stirring his ice cream into a goo and not looking at his brother, “Thing is . . . I am, James.”

  “Of what?” James clearly did not believe that Laurence could possibly fear anything.

  “Leaving here and never coming back and . . .” His lips trembled and he swiped at his ice cream angrily.

  “And what?” James asked him.

  “And never seeing Mum again, that’s what.” He began to cry.

  Isabelle felt as if her lungs were collapsing. She wanted to speak. She could not do so.

  20 MAY

  WANDSWORTH

  LONDON

  What had she feared the most? Not losing her husband, since it had been her incalculably insane belief that, like so many men, he lacked the nerve to go it on his own after having had a wife at his beck and call, and this despite the fact that being at anyone’s beck and call was the last behaviour in her limited uxorial skill set that she ever engaged in. Nor had she feared the loss of her children. She was their mother, she fed them, she changed their nappies even when those nappies were at their most disgusting, which, frankly, was most days. She bathed them, she put dangerous items out of their reach, she purchased temporary gates to keep them from tumbling down the stairs. Nor had she feared losing her job since, despite being a wife and a mother, she still managed what she’d always been able to manage: maintaining that air of competence and cool professionalism no matter what was going on at home. No. She had feared none of these things. What she had feared most was running out of vodka.

  Driving home from her encounter with James and Laurence, Isabelle had felt what she knew was absolutely essential for her to feel: the great, gaping, guilt-ridden, never-to-be-filled chasm that she had created in her life. She owned her sons’ fears. She owned their pain. She had bought and paid for every anxiety they had about leaving the home they’d always known and being taken off to another country where they would have to face all those things children face in a new environment: from a school where they would be expected to make new friends to an upside down year where summer was winter and winter was summer. And what she knew was that there were very few words she could utter to reassure them.

  When she arrived home from her journey to Kent, the last thing she felt she could face was descending the wrought-iron steps to her basement flat, with its bleak silence an illustration of consequences she had disregarded. So once she’d parked and locked the car, she set off in the direction of Trinity Road. It was her intention to walk until she could walk no more.

  She didn’t mean to go into the off-licence. She hadn’t the first thought of even finding one. But find one she did, and the worst of it was, she came across it not fifteen minutes into her walk.

  She told herself that her need was merely to purchase a bottle of water. She was thirsty and if she was going to walk until she could walk no more, she needed to remain hydrated. So in she went, and she kept her eyes fixed on the lights inside a cooler in the back of the shop. She allowed herself to see one thing only: the plastic bottles of water inside that cooler.

  She felt triumphant as she grabbed one, carried it to the till, placed it on the counter, and looked in her bag for her coin purse. But when the shop assistant said, “Oh, hullo! I live just opposite you. You’re the policewoman, aren’t you? At least that’s what my mum says and she’s such a nosy parker, she knows what’s going on in every house in the street,” Isabelle had to look up. She saw a twentysomething girl with—of all bizarre things—a colourful crab tattooed on her neck and then just over h
er shoulder the lines and shelves of bottles. She smiled automatically as one does and she told the girl that yes, she was a policewoman, but she didn’t think she knew the girl’s mum and the girl laughed and said, “Oh, you wouldn’t. You’d never even see her since all she does is stand behind the curtains and give them a twitch occasionally. Anyway, that’ll be ninety p, unless you’d like something else.”

  Which was how she’d ended up buying two bottles of Grey Goose vodka. And because above all her life was about don’t tell me what to do, don’t lecture me, don’t point anything out because by God I’ll fight you and you will regret it, she ended her evening walk just there. She went back to her flat. She placed one of the two bottles of vodka into the freezer compartment of her fridge, and the other bottle she opened.

  She awakened when a car alarm went off in the street nearby. Her initial thought was that it was still evening because dim daylight was filtering into her flat from the street above. But then she saw that her glass was overturned on the coffee table in front of the sofa on which she lay and so was the bottle of Grey Goose, which, she swore, she had left in the kitchen but which now swam in a pool of extremely expensive vodka that was contained by the raised edge of the coffee table.

  Her mouth felt contaminated. She was aware of profound thirst. She swung her legs off the sofa and saw, then, that she’d removed her trousers and that her bikini underwear clung only to one leg.

  For a blighted moment she wondered if she’d let someone into the flat at some point. But then she hit upon a dim memory of using the loo and thinking it was so much easier just to leave the trousers in a pile on the floor and then to giggle at the absurdity of staggering back to the kitchen for who knows what number of martini it must have been. Only . . . how could she possibly have been that drunk when it was only . . . what? . . . an hour past the time she’d first entered the flat?