by Nicci French
‘Yes’, I answered Sarah, picking up a sandwich that disgorged tomato as I lifted it to my mouth, ‘yes, I miss him.’ I chewed a bit, then added, ‘I don’t know how to restore him to his proper size in my memory. If you see what I mean.’
‘What about her?’
‘Finn, you mean? God, that’s complicated. First of all I almost got to love her; she was part of the family, you see. Then, I hated her; I felt almost sick with hatred and humiliation. And then she died and it’s as if that’s stopped all my emotions in their tracks. I don’t know what I feel about her. At sea.’ I shivered at the figure of speech, remembering again the dark waters. I saw Michael Daley standing on the breaking boat and, in slow motion, I saw again the metal pole hitting him, the boom striking him, his long body buckling.
‘The police keep saying how pleased they are that it’s all cleared up, and never mind the loose ends, they can deal with those bit by bit, but I feel bothered. That’s too little a word. I can’t get it right in my head. There are things, I mean, I don’t see how it was possible that…’ I stopped abruptly. ‘Let’s have a game of chess. I haven’t played for ages.’
I put the chess-board on the table and slid open the lid of the dark wooden box, picking out two smooth-headed pawns. I held out my fists and Sarah tapped my left hand.
‘White,’ I said, and we arranged the pieces on their squares. They stood there stalwartly in their ranks, the wood gleaming in the shafts of sunlight; a bird chirped outside, not the lonely cry of a seabird that sent shivers down my spine, but the homely mundane chirrup of an English garden bird sitting in a small tree whose leaves were just about to unfurl.
∗
Later, after Sarah had left for London and I’d collected Elsie and settled her with Linda, I made a trip to the supermarket. I had been only a few days previously and the shelves and fridge at home were groaning with convenience food. But it calmed me to wheel my trolley up and down familiar alleys, picking out the solid comforting objects which were always in their proper place. I liked to compare the prices of reduced-sugar baked beans, washing powder, peanut butter.
I was hovering over a freezer full of puddings – should it be another pecan pie, or a lemon meringue? – when I heard a voice behind me.
‘Sam?’
I took both puddings and turned.
‘Why, hello, er…’ I’d forgotten her name again, just as I had done the last time we’d met. The memory of Finn’s shopping expedition surfaced briefly and painfully. That was the day I’d believed she’d started opening up to me. Now I knew it had been just part of the charade.
‘Lucy,’ she prompted me. ‘Lucy Myers.’
‘Of course. Sorry, I was miles away.’ I balanced the puddings on the overflowing trolley. ‘How are you?’
‘No, how are you? she responded eagerly. ‘You’ve been having such an awful time. I’ve been reading all about it, well, we all have. We admire what you did so much. So brave. It’s all anyone’s talking about at the hospital.’
‘Great,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She pulled her trolley in from the centre of the aisle, so that it blocked my path. I was trapped beside the freezer by our trolleys’ brimming cages, with Lucy as my beaming keeper. In her trolley I saw dog food, mineral water, leeks, deodorant, kitchen roll and bin-bags. I suddenly felt a bit sick and furtively discarded my lemon meringue pie. ‘I mean, I can’t believe you’re so famous now. People must recognize you on the streets and things.’
‘Sometimes.’ I returned the pecan pie too.
‘You nearly drowned. How awful.’
‘It was,’ I agreed. I must remember cat food for Anatoly.
‘And do you know the really amazing thing?’
‘No.’
She opened up the trolleys and stepped inside, putting her face close to mine. I could see the circles of her contact lenses.
‘I knew her.’
‘Who?’
She nodded emphatically at me, triumphant to have her own special slice of this delicious drama.
‘I knew Fiona Mackenzie. Now isn’t that weird, to know you and to know her too?’
‘But…’
‘It’s true. My mother and her mother were friends. I even babysat for her when she was little.’ Lucy giggled as if it were the most thrilling news in the world, that she had babysat for someone who’d later slaughtered her parents and then been burned up in a car. ‘I hadn’t seen her for a few years, maybe three years. She came to my sister’s wedding with her parents. She…’
‘Hang on, Lucy.’ I spoke slowly as if she didn’t understand English very well. ‘You met her.’
‘That’s what I’ve just been saying, Sam.’
‘No, I mean you met her with me. The last time you saw me, in Goldswan Green, I had a young woman with me, remember?’
‘Well, of course.’
‘Finn. Fiona Mackenzie.’
‘That was Fiona? She was so slim, but I heard something about her problem.’
I nodded. ‘Anorexia,’ I said.
She looked at me, her round face creasing, and then a fat man, with his paunch hanging over his belt and sweat spreading under his armpits, heaved his trolley into our parked group.
‘Mind where you’re standing,’ he barked.
‘Mind where you’re walking,’ I snapped back, then looked at Lucy again. I wasn’t about to let this woman get away; here at last was somebody who had actually known Finn Mackenzie. ‘Tell me about her.’
‘Describe her? Oh dear, well, she was,’ she held her hands apart as if she were grasping a beach ball, ‘rather round, you could say, but nice. Yes’ – Lucy looked at me as if she’d given me some kind of key – ‘very nice.’
I raised my eyebrows. ‘Nice?’
‘Yes. Quite quiet, I think, she didn’t push herself forward. Perhaps she was a bit shy.’
‘So she was nice and quiet?’
‘Yes.’ Lucy looked as if she were about to burst into tears. How did this woman ever get through the ward rounds? ‘It’s so long ago.’
‘What did she look like then? How did she dress?’
‘Well, I couldn’t say really. Nothing outrageous, you know. She always looked quite pretty, I think, although she was very plump, of course. She wore her hair long and loose. Look, Sam, it’s been lovely seeing you but…’
‘Sorry, Lucy, your shopping awaits you. See you soon.’
‘That’d be lovely.’ The eager note of friendship came back into her voice now that we were parting. ‘Hey, wait, Sam, what about your trolley?’
‘I changed my mind,’ I called as I strode empty-handed down the aisle towards the exit. ‘I didn’t need anything after all.’
The house was absolutely quiet. Upstairs Elsie lay asleep, clean in her ironed pyjamas. I sat on the sofa, Anatoly on my lap, with only a single lamp to illuminate the room. I remembered one evening here with Danny, a few days after I’d moved and was still surrounded by packing cases and bare boards. He’d rented a video and bought us an Indian take-away which he’d spread out on newspaper in front of us. We sat cross-legged on the floor and watched the film, and I’d laughed so much that I started to weep. Danny had hugged me to him, pushing away the silver-foil containers with their slop of dark-red meats and sinister vegetables, and told me he loved me, and I’d gone on laughing, weeping. And never said it back. Never said I loved him. Not then, not later. So now I sat in his gown, with the cat and the darkness, and I said it to him. Over and over again I said it to him, as though somewhere there in the darkness and quiet he was listening, as though if I said it enough I could bring him back. And then I picked up a cushion and pressed my face into it and cried, heaving my heart out into a plump square of flowered corduroy.
And after that, I thought about Finn. She’d stayed in this house for nearly two months and she had hardly left a trace. She’d burned all her old clothes and taken her few new ones. She’d left no bits and pieces of her life. I looked around the dim room where I sat: its surfaces were
cluttered with stuff I’d accumulated even in the last couple of months. The wobbly clay pot Elsie had made for me at school, the papier-maché peach Sarah had presented me with today, a glass bowl I’d picked up in Goldswan Green because I loved its pure cobalt-blue, the ebony cat, yesterday’s list of tasks, a wooden candlestick, a dying bunch of anemones, a box of Lil-lets, a pile of magazines, another pile of books, a pewter mug holding pens. But her room had always looked like a hotel room, and she’d entered it and left it without disturbing its anonymity at all.
What did I know about this girl who’d lived under the same roof as me for two months, shared my meals and charmed my daughter? Not much at all, although I realized as I thought that she had extracted a good deal of information from me. I’d even told her about Elsie’s father. What had Lucy called her? And those schoolfriends of hers that I’d met at her parents’ funeral? ‘Sweet’, was it; ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’. And those family friends – they called her ‘lovely’ in that patronizing way that means ‘no trouble’. She seemed memorable to me, with her youthful, soft-skinned radiance. Death usually fixes people, pinning them on to their finished life. But death seemed to be dissolving Finn, dispersing her like a cloud.
Thirty-Two
The days and the nights started to become normal, lacking in obvious incident so that one slid into the other. It would be an overstatement to describe the result as blissful, but it was just about bearable, and that would do for the moment. Things happened, of course. After a month more of grim concentration, the book was finished. My printer coughed out a satisfyingly large pile of paper, which I sent off to Sarah for a quick read and some encouragement. There were developments with Elsie. I started to suspect that if a word in one of her reading books was very short indeed, like ‘cat’ or ‘son’, then, given time, and when she was in a good mood, she might be able to work it out without the help of the picture above the text. And she made a third friend: Vanda, whose real name was Miranda. I invited her – or rather Elsie invited her and I confirmed the invitation – to stay the night.
And my unit was about to start, it really was. Two doctors and an SHO were appointed and on their way. I spent many hours in offices talking about details of pay and national insurance, I attended meetings about internal market practice at Stamford, and I went with Geoff Marsh on a round trip of insurance companies discussing the protection we offered against liability over rubber chicken and mineral water. Just one week of Dr Laschen’s famous snakebite medicine and you are guaranteed free from all lawsuits. I sounded so marketable, I only wished I could own a piece of myself.
I thought of Danny, but not every bit of the time. He wasn’t in every room of my house any longer. Occasionally I would open a door, a cupboard, and there he would be in some silly detail or object or memory but that was all. Sometimes I would wake in the night and cry, which was fine, but the obsessive, pointless speculating about the rest of our lives together, the bitterness at having him snatched away from me by a wicked lunatic, I didn’t dwell on that so much any more.
The press attention was slackening off. The articles about the fallibility of the trauma industry had metamorphosed into columnists’ analysis of the nature of female courage. My heroism had replaced my failure but I was no more interested in the second than in the first. There were invitations to be photographed in my garden, to discuss my childhood, my influences, to respond to questionnaires, to go on the radio and play my favourite records. I was offered the opportunity of talking to a radio psychiatrist about what it was like to have my lover murdered and then almost to be murdered myself. As, for the time being at least, the most famous expert in Britain on recovery from mental trauma, I decided that such exposure would not be helpful so, to the lightly suppressed exasperation of Geoff Marsh, I turned everything down.
There was one day, though, that didn’t merge into all the others. It was the day when Miranda was coming to spend the night with Elsie and I had promised them a midnight feast. Over breakfast, Elsie had ordered biscuits, lollies, miniature salami sausages in silver paper, fromage frais, chocolate fingers, and as I wiped her mouth, brushed her hair and teeth, I calculated how I could go to the supermarket between meetings. We were in a desperate rush out of the door and I noticed it had started to pour with rain in iron-coloured streaks. I threw off my jacket and pulled on a raincoat and put a cap on my head.
‘Put your raincoat on, Elsie,’ I said.
She looked at me and started giggling.
‘I haven’t got time to play,’ I said. ‘Get your coat on.’
‘You look funny, Mummy,’ she said, in between gurgles.
With a sigh of exasperation I turned to the mirror. I started to laugh as well. I couldn’t help it. I did look funny.
‘You’re like Hardy Hardy,’ Elsie said.
She meant Laurel and Hardy. She had remembered a scene in one of her videos where they had got their hats mixed up. The cap was too small for me and perched precariously on the top of my head. What the bloody hell was it? I pulled the thing off my head and examined it. It was one of Finn’s. I tossed it aside and grabbed my old trilby and we ran for the car.
‘That was a funny hat, Mummy.’
‘Yes, it was… er…’ Well, why not? ‘It was Finn’s.’
‘That was Fing’s too,’ she said, pointing at the trilby which nestled neatly on my head.
I stopped short and looked at it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. It was. It…’
‘Mumme-e-e-e. It’s wet.’
‘Sorry.’
I ran around the car and let her into the passenger seat and fastened her in, then ran back to the other side and sat beside her. I was very wet.
‘You smell like a dog, Mummy.’
We had played musical statues, musical bumps and a complicated game whose rules I never quite understood but which made Elsie and Miranda echo with laughter. They had their secret midnight feast at a quarter past eight and then I came in in the form of a ghost with a toothbrush to tell them a story. I looked for a book but Elsie said, ‘No, out of your head, Mummy,’ knowing that I only knew one story, so they sat back while I tried to remember the principal events of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Did the grandmother die? Well, she wouldn’t in my version. I tiptoed through all the details until I reached the climax.
‘Come in, Little Red Riding Hood,’ I said in a croaky voice.
‘Hello, Granny,’ I said in a little-girl voice. ‘But what big ears you’ve got, Granny.’
‘All the better to hear you with, my dear,’ I said in my croaky voice. There were giggles from the bed.
‘And what big eyes you’ve got, Granny,’ I said in my little-girl voice.
‘All the better to see you with,’ I said in a croak that made me cough. More giggles.
‘And what a big mouth you’ve got, Granny,’ I piped. I left a long pause this time and looked at their expectant wide eyes.
‘All the better to-o-o-o eat you up.’ And I leaped on to the bed and enfolded the little girls in my arms and snapped at them with my lips. They shrieked and laughed and wriggled under me. After we composed ourselves, I spoke again in what was left of my normal voice.
‘So who was it in the bed, Miranda?’
‘Granny,’ said Miranda, laughing.
‘No, Miranda, it wasn’t Granny. Who was in the bed. Elsie?’
‘Granny,’ said Elsie and they both howled with laughter, rolling and jumping on the bed.
‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then what is it?’
‘A gra-a-anny,’ shouted Elsie and they both howled once more.
‘You two are like naughty little wolf-cubs,’ I said, ‘and it’s time you were asleep.’ I hugged and kissed them and went downstairs where the lamp was swinging on its flex from their continued bouncing on Elsie’s bed. There was a bottle of some old white wine in the fridge and I poured myself half a glass. I needed to think for a moment. There was somet
hing buzzing around in the recesses of my skull and I wanted to grab it. If it knew I was chasing it, it would escape. I would have to sneak up on it. I began muttering to myself.
‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then it’s a wolf.’ I sipped at my wine. ‘But if it doesn’t have eyes like a wolf, and it doesn’t have ears like a wolf, and it doesn’t have a mouth like a wolf, and it doesn’t howl at the moon, then what?’
I found a piece of paper and a pen and began to write things down. I compiled a list and then began to underscore and circle and join things with lines. I let the pen fall. I thought of Geoff Marsh and his medium-term strategy, I thought of Elsie and my new peaceful life, I thought of the absence of press attention and finally and inevitably I thought of Danny.
In a pocket of my purse with some ticket stubs and credit-card slips and my identity card for the hospital and bits of fluff and stupid things I should have thrown away was a slip of paper with Chris Angeloglou’s home number on it. The last time we had met he had given it to me, saying if at any time I wanted to talk about things, I should feel free to give him a call. I suspect the plan was for him to apply his own brand of intrusive remedial therapy and I had responded with the driest of smiles. Oh God. The police were totally sick of me. Everybody – the family, the hospital, everybody – just wanted these terrible events to go away. If I let it go, there would be no problem. It would interfere with my work, unbalance me emotionally and stir up old memories for Elsie which could only harm her. And if I actually phoned Chris Angeloglou now, on top of everything else, he would probably imagine that I was asking him out on a date. But when I was sixteen I had sworn a very stupid oath to myself. At the end of your life, it is the things you didn’t do, not the things you did do, that you regret. So, faced with a choice of action or inaction, I promised myself that I would always act. The results had been frequently disastrous and I didn’t feel optimistic. I picked up the phone and dialled.
