Dying Flames

by Robert Barnard

  “But you went to Milton Terrace?”

  “Is that what it’s called? Yes, to pick up ‘some things’ for a few nights. She told me to wait in the car, and I couldn’t work out why.”

  “Probably she didn’t want to be interrupted by her children and have to deal with them with you there.”

  “She sure was quick! She said she’d left a note for them, that they’d be all right, because their grandad lived in the town. Then we took off for Essex, the real Essex I remembered, her directing first, then me getting my bearings and my memory back. We seemed to be there in no time.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “My loneliness. Her loneliness. I think hers was just a consequence of mine. She wanted to match it, then come up with a solution for both of us. Quite soon it moved from being a question of ‘if only we’d’ to being one of ‘we still could.’ Nothing crude, you understand, or pushy on her part. It was all done delicately, as if she had a dream, and it was still possible that…”

  “Peggy lived in a dreamworld,” said Graham. “I think she always did, but it had grown on her over the years, particularly when it became clear that life wasn’t going to live up to her expectations.”

  “Whose life does?”

  “Did she ask you about your children, your financial position?”

  “Just a question now and again, but she got the information. And it was true: moderately well-off, moderately promising children, me jogging along fairly happily with my sister.”

  “But you could have been so much happier with her.”

  “That idea was in the air. Anyway, we got to the Colchester area, and almost simultaneously we said, ‘Brightlingsea.’ Because it was getting to be ‘going-back time.’ Anyway we drove there and went to a few places that said ‘Bed and Breakfast’ in the window, but most of them had signs that said they were full. It was late, getting towards midnight, and I think they really meant they didn’t take people who arrived at that time of night. Peggy said, ‘Down by the river, where there used to be all those little boats.’ We’d used those derelict little boats before. It was a crazy idea, but it was a clear night and there was moonlight. We left the car on Hurst Green and walked down to the path and the mudflats.”

  “What was the atmosphere? Romantic?”

  “Yes. I was in the silliest of seventh heavens. Peggy had apparently put practical thoughts about my financial situation and her two children out of her mind. Even she saw there was an atmosphere that shouldn’t be spoilt. We went over the mud to a hulk, and as soon as we got there, she was at it—we were…we both were, eager, hungry, but she was, like, greedy. Not greedy for sex, but like it was food and she couldn’t get enough. Before long it stopped being wonderful and it almost became…disgusting.”

  “Like it had never been with Peggy back in the old days.”

  “No, no. Never like that. And when we lay back, she began.”

  “Began what?”

  “Talking on and on. Wasn’t that the best sex I’d had in years? Wasn’t it? Forcing me to say yes. When we were together, it would be like that all the time. We could take up again where we left off. Nobody she’d ever known had satisfied her as I did. I could move over here. That wouldn’t be a problem. I could move in with her. Was the exchange rate good these days? She hadn’t followed it since…She pulled herself up there. She’d nearly said ‘since the maintenance payments stopped.’ I said the exchange rate was very poor. ‘Well, doesn’t that mean it would be very good going the other way? I could come to the States and see how I liked it. There are drama groups there, I imagine. I have to have my drama—it’s my lifeblood. I should think they’d like an English accent for when they put on classic English plays. Are there any good houses we could rent in Cheyenne? I’m not used to luxury but I am used to comforts, and those I do expect. Or do you think I’d be happier somewhere closer to where the action is? San Francisco maybe, or Los Angeles?’ ”

  “I and me and mine were very common words in her conversation,” said Graham.

  “I saw she was taking me for a fool. Again. For the second time she would screw me for everything she could get. She’d done it for eighteen years, now she’d start all over. I hate being taken for a fool, yet here she was setting me up as a fall guy again. I saw red, but I still had enough control to want her to know what was happening to her. She still had the yellow scarf she’d been wearing with the green coat, and it was on the planks we’d been making love on. I took it, put it around her shoulders as if to keep her warm. Then I began tightening it. ‘These are your last moments, Peggy,’ I said, and she giggled, thinking it was a joke. ‘You bled me dry because you thought I was a fool, but I’m not dumb enough to let it happen for a second time. To me you’re a waste of space on this earth—’ The face was going scarlet, the eyes bulging, she was trying to pull the scarf away with her hands, but I kept tightening and tightening until…There she was, dead. And I meant what I said. I couldn’t see the point of such a self-obsessed, lying, scheming, cheating soul as hers. I was her executioner.”

  “Self-appointed.”

  He turned wearily toward the window, and the long lawns outside.

  “Of course. I’m not justifying myself, or what I did. It was unforgivable. Maybe I’m about to find that out. I’m just trying to tell you what my thoughts were at the time. And if you want to be merciful, perhaps you could wonder whether killing as many as I did in Vietnam doesn’t put a person into a different relationship to murder, compared to a civilian who has led a careful, respectable, humdrum life.”

  Graham was quiet. Who was he to make moral pronouncements? He who had led a conspicuously careful, respectable, humdrum life until now?

  “What did you do next?”

  Ken lay there, finding it difficult to refocus his mind on the time after the murder. Strength was visibly something that had to be struggled for, attained with relief.

  “Got back to the car,” he said at last. “The darkness was just beginning to lift. I drove back to Romford and had a late breakfast with Anya. She asked about Peggy and I just said, ‘You don’t want to know.’ It was open to her to believe we’d had a meeting that was unsatisfactory or acrimonious. I don’t think she did, but she knew better than to ask. We had another day or two in London, then took the train to Edinburgh for another few days. Then we got the plane home. I think I behaved normally during that time—cool, taking in all the sights, enjoying myself. I bought English newspapers, but saw nothing about Peggy. Anya may have wondered why I bought British papers, but she didn’t ask questions. Like my wife—my second wife—she knows there were things in my past life that make me unlike other people. She had a whale of a time in Britain. After she got back here she was just hoping to return for a longer stay that would include Poland. I guess she’ll have to go alone.”

  He pointed vaguely to his body. It was as if the cancer was not in any one place but in the whole body.

  “I think that’s really all I came for,” said Graham, getting up. “Can I give your love to Terry?”

  “You sure can. He telephones now and then, and I talk to him if I’m up to it. He must have guessed by now that there’s no hope.”

  Graham nodded, trying to keep the subject unemotional.

  “How long have you got?”

  “Oh, the docs don’t want to be too specific. Afraid they might be proved wrong. But from the way they’re talking it seems like a matter of weeks rather than months.”

  “I hope it’s as easy as it can be.”

  “It won’t be. But that way I’ll be glad when it’s over. You can tell the police over there that extradition would take a whole lot longer than my judge is going to take to get hold of me.”

  “I’ll tell them. If what you’ve told me tallies with what they’ve found out so far, I can’t see them going to the trouble and expense of applying for extradition.”

  “You don’t have the death sentence any longer in Britain, do you?”

  “No. Not for a long t
ime.”

  “Just a long, long prison sentence? Seems to me our way is the more merciful way.”

  “Seems to us that you have managed to have both.”

  Ken smiled a wry smile. “Point taken. Keep in touch with Terry, won’t you? And you’ll be in touch with the other children as well. Peggy may not have been much of a mother, but I feel kinda…”

  His voice faded.

  “Oh, I’m very much in touch with them,” said Graham.

  “Don’t try to explain it to them. It will sound like I’m trying to excuse myself. Just say it goes back a long way.”

  “Everything does. Right back to conception. I’ll say good-bye. You must be very tired.”

  Graham took the hand that could hardly tighten itself round his, then left the sun-soaked room, thanked the woman at reception, and ordered a taxi.

  Going out into the sunlight, Graham walked down the rolling hill toward the gate, where he had asked the taxi to wait for him. The lawns sloping downward to the road seemed to image life in its later stages. He got into the taxi, directed it to go to the hotel and then the airport, and began his journey home.

  Two weeks later he heard from Ken Poldowski’s sister that he had died. Two weeks after that he received from her a photograph, with a note to say that Ken wanted it given to his son, but thought that Graham should see it first. It showed Ken in American air-force uniform, posing with Peggy, perhaps for her friend Katy. Peggy was wearing a pretty, frilly frock and looked adorable. The picture was taken just outside the lych-gate of the Upper Melrose church. The stumpy tower of the church could be seen to the left of the picture, and in the distance, well into the churchyard, Graham was pretty sure he could make out the tomb of Jonas Braithwaite. He decided not to mention the tomb and its significance to Terry.

  Chapter 17

  Family

  Once he had arrived back home, Graham’s instinct was to bunker down. The record had been set right, the picture had become clear, unclouded at last by Peggy’s congenital and virtuosic lying, and the episode could be put behind him as an uncharacteristic blip in a well-ordered and frankly rather dull life.

  Except that the “episode”—too trivial a word, really—was not over and could not be put behind him. Adam’s presence in his cottage was sufficient witness to that, as well as the presence of Christa and Terry farther into the background, and still farther back the figures of Ted Somers and Harry Webster, who as Adam’s grandfather and father, seemed likely to play a part, whether they wanted to or not, in his life.

  So his life, whatever happened, had been rearranged. It seemed perverse or ungrateful to think of his new responsibilities as duty. He was, like it or not, something close to being a paterfamilias. And as soon as he thought of himself in those terms, an ache came into his heart. That was not the relationship he had wanted to have with Christa. Now, after the draining experiences of the last couple of months, she represented a new life, vitality, warmth—even fun, a concept he had rarely considered to be a desirable or possible component of existence. And not just fun—love too. Love most of all. He had no doubt that he was in love. Had he ever been in that state before? Even at eighteen, with Peggy? (He did not bother to bring his wife into his calculations.) No, his feelings for Peggy had been merely an adolescent crush, without the same warmth and light that Christa carried with her into his nearly middle-aged lifestyle.

  Graham had a fiction writer’s ability to see character and predicaments from all possible angles. When he got to this point in his analysis, he said to himself, no, you have not been in love before. But you have thought yourself to be in love. Believed you were. Quite often. Is this the same thing? Is this one more piece of self-deception?

  He rang Sergeant Relf when he had been home two days.

  “I think you know the line I was working on,” he said, “or guessed at it. I went and talked to Terry Telford’s father in Wyoming. His name is Kenyon or Ken Poldowski, and he was the American in Luigi’s on the night of Peggy’s death. He’d been paying for Terry’s upkeep for eighteen years, but of course she’d given him up for adoption—”

  “Or simply given him to the Telfords,” said Relf.

  “Yes. Everyone’s very insistent it was all done legally, but Peggy was an actress, and I suspect she fooled her parents. But either way Ken had been fooled. I accept Ken’s assertion that this was just a part of what made him kill her, because I found him to be an honest person—one of the straightest I’ve ever met. He went looking for her that night, and then he found that some of the old magic was immediately kindled. But before long Peggy threw off the veil of romance and started getting blatant. He realized he was being fooled again. He had a sense too that she was simulating a sexual appetite which was really nothing but an old, straightforward greed for money, security—things she’d always gone after, though mainly as secondary goals to the ones represented by her self-deceptions and her acting. A whole mess of emotions coagulated into a strong revulsion against her and all she stood for in his life, and he strangled her in that old boat at Brightlingsea.”

  “He told you this himself?”

  “Yes. No point in concealing it. He has cancer, a recurrent cancer, and he has only weeks to live. You could contact the Everglades Nursing Home in Cheyenne. His doctors will tell you. He’s a fighter, but he’s going to lose this one. Going by his looks, ‘weeks to live’ seems about right.”

  When he put the phone down, Graham was struck by a thought that had probably been lurking in the back of his head since Cheyenne: a square jaw was pretty poor proof of paternity. His meeting with Peggy in the Upper Melrose churchyard had been after A-levels, when everyone who was about to leave school simply drifted away because there was nothing left in school for them to do. July—sometime in July. And Terry was born mid-April, he had said on the Web site. Possible, certainly possible. It might be worth going into blood groups…

  He put the thought from him as soon as it had occurred. He’d made the point to Christa and Relf, and it remained true: if Peggy had had his child, he had known nothing about it at the time, nor for a quarter of a century afterward. A mother who has borne a child might well feel something for it for the rest of her life, even if she had had it adopted. But a father, one who has been unaware of the birth? How can he suddenly feel something for that child?

  And the truth was that he felt nothing special for Terry Telford, beyond a vague hope that he sorted things out with his parents without too much pain for them or him, and got a job that satisfied him. He felt more for Adam and Christa, though he was quite aware that his feelings for Christa were not of a fatherly kind. He had often, in recent weeks, found her in his mind as he drowsed out of sleep. She had become, for him, one of those distant, longed-for, impossible dreams, like a love goddess to an adolescent.

  Added to which, he knew that Terry had felt immediate affection and affinity for Ken Poldowski, and though he suspected the soon-to-be-dead officer had not felt emotion of quite the same intensity in return, still he did not want to disturb the boy’s orientation of his affections one more time. Let be, let be.

  One Saturday, when he had delivered Adam to his grandmother in Stanway, he drove into Colchester and took refuge from the crowds of early Christmas shoppers in Castle Park. It was when he had been round the castle—the first time for twenty-five years—that, standing at the top of the hill, he saw Garry McCartney toiling up it with what looked like three grandchildren running riot around him. Graham resisted the impulse to hurry away and awaited him by the path.

  “Hello, Garry.”

  The big man blinked.

  “Why it’s…novelist chappie, isn’t it.”

  “Graham Broadbent. I suppose you read about Peggy.”

  The face collapsed a little.

  “God, yes. That took me back. She was such a…star. And they’ve never nailed the devil who—”

  “It was an American. He’s died of cancer. He was having it off with her all the time she was playing Saint Joan. Sh
e had his child, then stung him for maintenance even though she’d given the baby to another family for adoption.”

  The man gaped.

  “You can’t be—”

  “Oh, but I am serious. Some of our old memories get just too much of a rosy tinge to them. See you around.”

  And he walked off. When he looked back, Garry was enforcing what passed for his authority with some heavy cuffs around the ears. The children screamed blue murder, but it didn’t sound entirely serious.

  The next weekend Christa came down, brightening Graham’s life, and even causing Adam to come back earlier from his mate’s home on the two nights that she stayed. Graham and Christa discovered a mutual fondness for chess, largely fallow for lack of partners, and they played at the dining table while Adam watched a blood-and-technology video from the sofa. While Graham was meditating a move of Christa’s whose short-term significance he could see but whose long-term aim was mysterious to him, Christa said, perhaps to distract him:

  “I think Grandad and Kath’s marriage is several steps closer.”

  The deafening sound of steel and bass drums from the TV set was extinguished.

  “So does that mean I have to go and live with them?” Adam asked.

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Graham. “You stay here as long as you want it to be your home…. But he is your grandfather, remember. He’s all you’ve got left of your mother’s family. You could perhaps go and stay with them for some weekends.”

  “I s’pose,” said Adam, starting up the video again. “If there’s no match on.”