“Lorna . . .” I stepped inside, lost for words. “Lorna . . .” Lorna what? Lorna likes to play with fire. That was what I wanted to say. Lorna wants to sleep with a priest. Lorna wants to deliver a slap in the face to the very mother who nursed her through her illness. Lorna liked to wind up her sister at school and still likes to wind up her sister now. Lorna, the brilliant and confused child of a misbehaving father. Lorna, who looks like an angel.
Lorna, who wanted me and Tanya and my mother to love our father the way we loved her, and who would not accept that we could not.
“You cannot stay here,” I told him. Anger was rising inside me again, and I was not sure how much of it was Gilbert and how much my own state of mind. Did this man have a Redeeming Feature? Was I simply not looking hard enough? Unless you counted charm as redemption, which I did not. And even then it was charm that came and went pragmatically, charm that was employed to effect. Lorna had been gung ho about putting Gilbert here, but she was not stupid or unfeeling. She was susceptible to Gilbert’s charm in a way that I had schooled myself not to be, and she was susceptible because she had learned her family history from Gilbert as well as from my mother. In his version of history, he was more sinned against than sinning, the victim of the system, and not what I believed him to be, which was a crook.
“Look at you, look at this place. It’s all wrong,” I said.
He stood in a corridor that was lined with my mother. She had been living on her own since we left home decades ago, so there had been no limiting hand to lie heavy on her style, no conflicting aesthetic. There had been little in the way of money, either. This was muddle as interior decoration, a photo of Hannah and William blown up almost to poster size in a clip frame opposite a similar-size photo of Tanya’s three girls, a pile of legal papers that imitated the Tower of Pisa and that had never moved as long as I could remember, a coat stand that had long ago vanished under a vast collection of dark-colored outer garments almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was Gilbert sleeping? Did I want to know?
“Your mother was always a generous woman,” Gilbert said. “I can’t believe she’d throw me onto the mercy of the capitalist police.”
I looked at him blankly. “The capitalist police?” I echoed.
“Your mother is a socialist, as am I, whatever our differences. I’ve done nothing except reallocate capital to the workers. Surely it is in the cause of justice that I should be given shelter.”
This time I told myself not to rise to it. Gilbert was not mad. One could even make the mistake of thinking him quaintly eccentric. But the things he’d done hadn’t been quaintly eccentric. He had stolen from individuals, from small businesses, not from vast institutions that budgeted for bad luck like him. I’d heard this “all crime is committed by the state” defense before. According to this, theft was natural justice, simply the readjustment of wealth. I knew—because Gilbert was my father, and I knew him—that he believed it no more than I did. He believed nothing. If he believed in something, would that count as a Redeeming Feature?
“Would you like a glass of wine, my dear? You look a little peaky. I have an excellent Pinot Grigio somewhere.”
Glumly I followed him into the kitchen and watched, speechless, as he approached my mother’s wine rack with a considerable level of familiarity. He plucked out a bottle of white wine, lifted the corkscrew from the appropriate drawer, and opened the bottle with a flourish. I noticed that there were abundant vegetables in the rack. I opened the fridge door and found it full of dinners for one in silver packaging, steak and Guinness pie, venison with claret, salmon with a lobster sauce. It was scarcely surprising that my father was beginning to show a belly.
“You’ve been shopping.”
“Not quite,” Gilbert replied, and mentally I winced, because that probably meant he’d been out shoplifting. “Tesco’s has a wonderful delivery service, you know. I ordered online.”
It was just as bad. Had he paid with a stolen credit card? The only thing I could be sure of was that the wealth of food in the house did not represent an honest transaction. I sat at the table and rested my head in my hands. If Tanya found out what was happening, she would kill Gilbert and Lorna and me. Probably in that order. As I formulated the thought, the telephone rang. Before I could stop him, Gilbert answered. I noticed that he did not give his name, simply said hello. Even in the midst of charm, you see, he was careful, he watched his back. He listened for a moment, then put down the receiver without comment.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Perhaps Tanya,” he said, pouring wine into two glasses although I had said I wanted none. “Whoever it was hung up.”
I could not think why Tanya would have rung Ma’s number, since she knew Ma was away. Unless she had got wind of what was happening and was ringing to check it out. In which case she now knew for sure. I felt sick, and angry at Gilbert, and at Lorna, and even at Tanya.
Gilbert put a glass of wine in front of me and sat down happily opposite me, as though expecting a truly enjoyable chat.
I took a sip and then another. Gilbert was right; it really was a very fine wine.
“What happened in France?”
“Oh . . .” Gilbert placed his glass carefully on the table and assumed a tone of glib outrage. “It was quite ridiculous. As you know, I’ve been teaching English in a school in Paris. The principal became ill last year, and I volunteered to take over some of the running of the school. Which I did to the complete satisfaction of the students. You should hear their English, it is delightful.”
“And what is the ridiculous part?” I would not encourage his playacting.
“Well, there was some bad feeling. I left. At my age, I have no need or desire to stay where I’m not wanted.”
“Bad feeling . . .” I repeated the word. “You mean the police were involved.”
“Isn’t that what it usually means?” Gilbert assumed a wounded air.
“But you didn’t hang around to find out.”
“I refuse to be treated in that way. The finances of the school were in a terrible mess when I arrived. All I did was to put them in order. If they are incapable of seeing that, well, I see no need to explain it to them.”
“Where’s the cash?”
Gilbert’s jaw dropped, and his eyes were wide with hurt.
“Robin,” he scolded. He took a sip of wine and thought for a moment, composing the sentence that followed, his eyes hard. “I have enriched others, not myself.”
We looked at each other coolly. It was like looking in a distorting mirror. I thought how much I disliked him and realized with a blinding flash, like lightning, for the very first and most distressing time, that I disliked him precisely because I was afraid that I might be like him. Was it possible that I could be as faithless as him? Could I betray those who tried to love me? Could I be seduced by some other fantastical life and ignore all that was good and solid? It was Finney who came to me in that moment of enlightenment. Why did I fight him off? Why could I not simply embrace him, simply accept his care, negotiate a level of independence that would not alarm him?
I stood up.
“You have to be out of here by the end of the week, or I’ll telephone the police with this address,” I told him, “and if they don’t extradite you, I will.”
His face dropped, and he made to get to his feet, too, but stumbled, hitting his thigh hard against the table, and sat back down again with a surprised look on his face.
“Are you all right?” I could not believe I had asked it.
He nodded mutely.
I made for the front door and shut it firmly behind me. Whenever I meet my father, I walk away feeling devastated, as though each encounter takes me through a doorway to a ruined place. Today, my mother’s e-mail and my father’s final, pathetic stumble made it worse.
I needed very badly to hear Finney’s voice, and when I got home I dialed his number.
It was a woman’s voice that said, “Hello?”
&nbs
p; “Hello,” I answered, my heart stopping. “I think I have a wrong number. I’m looking for Tom Finney.”
“You have the right number, but you haven’t caught him at the best of times. Can you ring . . . um . . . tomorrow?”
The voice was not particularly friendly, not particularly cheerful. Nor was it unpleasant. It was a voice that I imagined belonging to a pretty face.
“I’d like to speak to him now.” I found my jaw was set. If he had lied to me, if Emma was moving back in, he had to tell me himself.
For a moment she was gone. If she was consulting someone, she had covered the receiver.
“I’m sorry.” She came back on the line. “Like I said, now’s not a good time.”
I ate my dinner in front of the television, trying to resist the temptation to ring Finney again. He had not called me back, and I was beginning to regret saying some of the things I’d said at his disastrous birthday dinner. I tried to console myself with comfort food, bubbling, dribbling cheese on toast and tomato soup.
I was drawn to the news like a fly to a burning bulb. Everyone who works around news becomes a junkie. The focus of a news junkie is narrowed until the detail provides the momentum, every new angle on the story a fascination, a fresh reaction, a new quote, all a cause for analysis, debate, even celebration. And in the detail, of course, is the real history, the minuscule change of angle that mutates into the U-turn, the euphemism that glosses over the lie, the vacillations, the missed possibilities that will all be lost when history macros out. I know people who think it is facile, this obsession with news on the hour. For me, at least, it feels as necessary as eating and drinking.
The top story was about a baby seized from his home. I sat up with a start, spilling crumbs all over myself. There was a picture of the child’s distraught mother, her long dark hair spilling over her shoulders, huge eyes welling with tears. It was Anita Darling, pictured leaving her Sydenham home in the company of police officers, her head bowed, arms folded across her chest.
“Christopher Darling,” the presenter said, “is the son of a former soldier. The police say they are following all avenues of investigation.”
Immediately I picked up the telephone. I dialed Justin’s home number, which I assumed rang somewhere on the gallery floor of the strange, tall house. Jacqui answered, but she was in no mood for a conversation.
“I don’t know what happened,” she told me, desperation clawing at the edge of her voice. “If we knew, we could find him. Look, talk to the police.” She held the receiver away from her ear, and I could hear her talking to someone. “It’s Robin Ballantyne, I don’t know what to tell her. She doesn’t understand we don’t know anything.”
“Robin”—I heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line—“Sergeant Veronica Mann here.” Her voice was coolly professional.
“What’s going on? I just saw the news.”
“Good for you.” She lowered her voice. “Look, we cannot say anything at the moment. The baby was gone from his cot this morning. That is all we know. We are looking at all the possibilities.”
“Well, of course you are, but what are the possibilities?” I asked, not because I was about to broadcast anything, but because I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what they would be.
“Robin, a baby has disappeared, and I have to waste my time fighting you off? I am appalled. You do not get any special treatment, no special access. Do you understand? There is a press conference at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”
In the background I could hear a high-pitched keening sound that was as constant as the whine of a mosquito.
“Is that Anita?” I asked uncertainly, not even sure that it was human. If Christopher’s mother was on the edge before, surely this would push her into a full-fledged breakdown.
“I will see you at the press conference,” Veronica snapped, and hung up.
I paced around, then checked on the children again. Hannah was sleeping soundly on the floor. I picked her up and put her back in bed and pulled the sheet up over her, but she kicked it off immediately. In this hot, sticky weather, they wanted nothing covering them. I left the bedroom and returned to the kitchen. I heard the front door close. There were footsteps above, and then Carol’s feet appeared on the open staircase, coming down to the kitchen. She was back from a date with Antonio, and her face was shining.
“Look”—she brandished a plastic bag—“I’ve got all sorts of goodies.”
I peered inside at the waxed-paper packages jostling inside.
“Parma ham, pepper salami, look at these olives, they’re so fat, lovely soft bread made with sun-dried tomatoes . . . oh, and the meringues, have they survived? There’s cream.”
“I think he loves you,” I told her, but I was distracted.
“He does, doesn’t he?” She chortled gleefully, her eyes sparkling. “Maybe I should have my own shelf, what do you think?” Carol mulled.
“Carol, I’m sorry. I mean yes, do clear a shelf, of course. But I don’t know how you’d feel . . . I’d really like to go out for a couple of hours.”
I spoke tentatively. I was so afraid of scaring her away with excessive demands. Every time I walked out the door to work, I felt guilty. I knew it happened to every working mother, I knew it was something I had to live with. But I also knew that the moment Carol began to feel I was not keeping to my side of the bargain, that I was being less than a mother to Hannah and William, she would leave. Without her, my life would fall apart—I had no spouse to cover for me, no margin of error; it was me or nothing.
“They’re asleep,” I concluded apologetically, “but if you could just keep an ear out.”
“All right.” She looked up at me, the surprise on her face illuminated by the light from the fridge. “I’ll leave my door open. I’ll hear them if they call out.” Her face was round and getting rounder by the day as Antonio fed her up. I would soon lose her, I thought as I pulled on my coat.
Even without daytime traffic it took me an hour to drive down to Sydenham Hill Wood. With all the lights on and the cars parked outside, the Tree House looked a darned sight more welcoming than it had when I had first visited. You could have been forgiven for thinking they were having a party. I parked opposite the house. There was no point in even trying to gain access. Nobody would want me there—not Mike, not Kes, and certainly not Veronica Mann. And even I—shameless as I am—would have felt a little shifty about barging into a house from which a child had been taken.
Why had I come? I drummed my fingers on the dashboard. Journalists want to be where the action is. It sounds like a cheesy recruitment ad, but it’s true; it becomes second nature, instinct. Perhaps it is because once you’re in the business, you know how easy it is to distort news. So if you want to know what really happened, you know you have to be there yourself. Especially when it’s your story. And somehow, deep in my gut, I knew this was my story. What the disappearance of Christopher had to do with the disappearance of Melanie, I could not have told you, but I knew the two were not unconnected. Some people go through life expecting disaster at every turn, but of course life is not, for the most part, like that. Real disaster is rare, and the chances of serious crime touching any one life are small. I thought the disappearances of Melanie and of Christopher were related, but I was basing that on nothing more than a rough calculation of probabilities.
I don’t know how long I intended to sit there, but as I watched, a woman emerged from the house. A cool breeze had picked up, and she pulled on a jacket over her top. Sheryl, I realized. Even at a distance she gave off angry vibrations, marching down the road, then into the driveway of a neighbor’s house. I wondered who lived there, then got my answer as the front door was answered by Ronald Evans, his white hair flying untidily, pajamas covered by a dressing gown tied at the waist. He listened to whatever it was that she had to say, then stood back and indicated that she should come inside.
A few moments later, a second woman came out from the Darling house, and for a mom
ent I saw her illuminated in the light from the hallway. She was tall, her hourglass figure defined in a tailored trouser suit, its pastel blue color light against her mahogany skin, her jacket flapping in the wind. She carried authority with her now as she had not when I first knew her, her hair cut tight against her handsome head, her neck long and straight. She did not stoop. As she came nearer, I rolled down the window and leaned out.
“Veronica,” I called softly.
The woman halted, looked around, and spotted me. I waved.
She crossed the road and went straight to the passenger door, first bending down to look in and reassure herself that it was indeed me, then opening the door and getting in.
“What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. It was stupid. I just have this feeling . . . Is this an inside job?”
Veronica sighed and stared out through the windshield.
“The mother and daughter are both beside themselves. I am already practicing in my head having to tell her he’s been found dead.” She shook her head. “The daughter, Jacqui, she’s so protective of her mother, she won’t let me near her. And she blew up at her mother’s friend, who was really just trying to be helpful. Jacqui called her a manipulative cow. All living there like that, they are bound to get on each other’s nerves. What on earth possessed them to come up with this arrangement?”
“How’s Mike taking it?”
“He’s in shock. He’s barely able to speak.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange? One day Mike Darling’s being questioned about Melanie’s disappearance. The next day his baby’s vanished. If nothing else, it distracts attention from him.”
“What?” Veronica turned to me, her face less shocked than she might have intended. “You think he took his own child? Or that the mother did?”
“I can’t believe she’s involved. She seems to be completely out of it.”
“I’m not even sure she’d have noticed he’d gone by now if it wasn’t for the daughter.”
Out of Mind Page 16
