It was also, although I did not see it like that at the time, an image that could work in two ways.
So was this image that started it all, the piece of grit round which my theory grew and grew: an insistent conviction, at first quite unsubstantiated, that Marigold’s killer was known to me and that the death might not have been an accident at all? So it seems, so it seems.
Evan Brown had adopted the name Daffyd Huws in the early 1960s. Perhaps permanently, but of that I could not be sure.
In 1977 my Marigold had been killed in the region of the Creuse, thrown from a Paris-registered car driven by an Englishman whose identity papers styled him David Hughes.
At the same period a David Hughes, painter, had been living in Paris, a man of about my age who had gone again without leaving a proper forwarding address.
Much more recently a bogus painter whose name might – but it was not certain – be written Daffyd Huws, was reported to be operating from Maryk’s old workshop, also in the Creuse.
The facts, in connection, were highly suggestive. But they were no more than that. Even in my obsessed state, I could see that I had no conclusive proof. But when I reminded myself of this I was not admonishing myself to keep what is called ‘an open mind’, I was driving myself on to further efforts of proof.
One thing has always puzzled me. If I say too that it had saddened me, that may sound foolishly redundant in context, but it had added a precise extra sadness on top of all the rest. How had Marigold – Marigold who had been so sensible to the point of wariness, a little shy also – how had she ever, ever come to accept a casual lift from a stranger?
She might have accepted one from the Post van. Or from the local Mayor or the baker or from some other known person. But not, not, I had cried out inside myself, from some Paris-numbered car driven by a man she had never seen before.
The eventual conclusion from this was that perhaps the man had not been a stranger to her after all?
After a good deal of thought along these lines, I wrote a careful letter to Sophie.
Sophie was the girl who had stayed on with Marigold at the mill-house when I took my leave, that bright morning when Marigold had eleven more days to live. Now aged twenty-seven (I knew that, as she and Marigold were the same age), Sophie was married to a man in the British Council and was on the other side of the world, in Malaysia. In the past few years, she and I had kept in rueful, symbolic contact, mainly through Christmas cards, so I had her address. I took my time about writing to her but, having done so, became restlessly impatient for her answer.
It was a long while coming, and meanwhile I fantasized about it with morbid precision. ‘Funny you should ask,’ she would write, ‘because, yes, there was this man who used to come to the mill-house. A dark man, middle-aged, with a little beard. Welsh, I think. He used to call quite often that summer, always when you were out, and he told us not to tell you because, he said, he was a very old friend of yours and was preparing something that would be a surprise for you …’ (‘It was a sort of secret. He wanted it that way, said it was better …’ Simone’s voice, so long ago, thin and wretched, tainted by the degraded act of another.)
‘He seemed very keen on being friends with us, a bit treacly, I didn’t really like him. I didn’t like to say at the time, but it’s been worrying me ever since …’
However, when Sophie’s reply at last came, it was full of enthusiastic news of the birth of her first child. I felt that my awkward enquiry must have arrived at exactly the wrong moment. She wanted to rejoice, and here I was driving her back into the past, asking her to re-live something she had once, with bitten lips and tears, been inclined to believe had been partly her fault (– ‘If only I hadn’t left Marigold on her own because I was going to Paris.’ Unspoken – if only I hadn’t agreed to meet that boyfriend there, I knew that was a bad idea at the time … ‘Then everything might have been different.’)
But Sophie was a good little soul, and having got the excitement of the first and second stages of labour and the personality of her baby off her chest, she finally got down to answering my question.
‘… I really can’t tell you much about that last week because, although of course I remember masses about Marigold and will never forget her, what we did wasn’t all that different from what we’d always done at the mill-house. I know we went swimming and for bike rides and played our guitars together. She taught me The Four Maries (which now always reminds me of her; it seems so dreadfully appropriate) – and she was learning a new setting to Thomas the Rhymer which was quite difficult because it had chords in antithesis to the main melody – I expect you remember it? What else – well, we ate up the rest of the food left in the fridge and Marigold made some sorrel soup and I made a cake. She went for walks sometimes on her own, but she’d always liked to do that. I don’t remember anyone else calling, though of course they might have.
‘There is just one thing I can think of. On the last day I was there, Marigold got a letter (in English) from an old friend of her mother’s. This friend said she was passing through the area and heard Marigold was there and might call and see her. I remember Marigold saying it was a bit difficult because she didn’t know at all who this woman was – Daphne Something, I think. We couldn’t read the signature properly.
‘After the awful accident, I never thought to mention this because it just didn’t seem relevant. I only really remembered it now, years later, when your letter came. You ask if anyone called at the mill-house while I was there, but apart from the postman and the baker this is really the only possible person I can think of. I hope it is some help.
‘Well, I must close now. John and I are due to move into our new flat on the 24th. I am so pleased, as it will make life with Baby much easier and there will be room for Amah to live in …’
Sophie, as I have said, was a good little girl: her daring Parisian excursion had been untypical. That was one reason among several why I had felt fairly tranquil leaving her and Marigold alone to keep each other company. No doubt, now, she was busy being a good wife to her John, intrepidly facing a lifetime of arbitrary moves round foreign lands, a succession of new flats, amahs, ayahs, mammies and local languages. It was evident that it simply had not occurred to her now, any more than it had at the time, that Marigold’s mother’s old friend might not have been a woman.
It is intoxicating to have your obsessional fantasies reinforced, even partially and uncertainly. It becomes addictive. Six years before, if Sophie had suddenly seen fit to tell me that she thought a person who might have had a name like Daphne had been due to call on Marigold at the mill-house, I too would have thought little of it, brushing the detail aside in impatient misery. But now, in connection with other things, the information seemed like startling corroborative evidence. Up till then I had recognized the logical fallacy in taking such evidence for proof when the first premise has been a wild one. Now, evidently, I had passed some psychological frontier.
I had left behind the life in which I believed Marigold’s death to have been a brutal but meaningless happening. Because the indications that the driver of the car had been Evan Brown now seemed to me so strong, it literally did not occur to me that this in itself might have been a bizarre coincidence, even as almost all accidental deaths and many murderous ones depend upon a chain of coincidence.
It did not occur to me to think that Evan, after all, might have had no dark plan of his own: that he might simply have picked up by the roadside a girl appearing to need a lift – a missed bus? A non-appearing taxi? – without having the least idea who she was. Instead, I could see now only a dreadful symmetry. All those years before, I had ordered Evan and Joyce out of my car and told them to find their own way back to Paris. Then, after Simone’s revelation, I had threatened Evan with the police and had told him that, if he ever showed his face at the mill-house again, it would be the worse for him.
‘You bastard,’ he had said. ‘I’ll get even with you. You wait.’
And I ha
d waited, but not for long, since the showiness of the remark seemed to me patently shallow. After he had stolen my Simca and landed it in a ditch the police had come … In my youthful innocence, my attempted reasonableness, I had believed that that would be the end of the matter. Or wanted to.
If I had looked harder into my own heart, even then, at my own sense of wordless, physical, male vengefulness, I might have come to a different conclusion. Not necessarily the right one. But one more in keeping with the present time.
Now I could see with telescopic clarity Evan, hitchhiking his way back to Paris: the young, dark man at a distance, once again alone, whom I had already seen wandering over a graveyard on a Welsh hillside. On the roads to Paris, he must have believed I had set the police on his trail. He had alienated another group of useful friends, ditched another compliant girl: the murderous justification of resentment must have been fermenting within him.
Or so I, from the depths of my own concentrated emotion, surmised.
Opportunists like Evan do not let anything go to waste, including, I reasoned, hatred. The determination to turn defeat into victory would be Evan’s own form of morality. It looked now to me as if, in spite of his initial defeat in the Creuse at my hands, he had returned there years later under a different identity, cultivated old Maryk – he whose carved bird he had once stolen and then broken … If I was right in this supposition, all my suppositions, then how wonderfully neat and satisfying it must have seemed to him, covertly observing the mill-house from afar, when the long-deferred opportunity at last came, planning the casual geniality with which he would introduce himself, an old family friend. (‘It was a sort of secret. He wanted it that way. Said it was better.’) Perhaps, I fantasized, he had crouched inconspicuous in some heathery eyrie above the river, had watched for my departure, had seen me, had heard the echo of my voice as I kissed the girls goodbye and drove off, a man alone …
This time round, he was the one there, with a car, readily offering a lift – to the bus, to Argenton, to Châteauroux even. And the person needing a lift was Marigold, my daughter, my bird, the one he would break in two.
First my Simone. Then, a lifetime later, my Marigold. Bastard. Foul-hearted, filthy, desecrating bastard.
So, I attributed to Evan my own inexorably growing sense of purpose. So, somewhere along the line of investigation, perhaps quite recently, I had ceased to regard Marigold’s death as chance. Like Jacquou long ago, I had to make an on-balance assumption either of guilt or innocence. I made the huge assumption of guilt, and the rest followed. Rough justice, but the best that, in the circumstances, I could offer.
A car door can be opened on a crucial bend. A passenger can be hit and pushed out. If no assiduous pathologist thinks to look for the evidences of assault, they may not be noted. The incredulity and then the terror as the attack takes place, the horrified struggle of the last few moments of life, may leave no identifiable traces.
You bastard. I’ll get even with you. You wait.
Thirty years had passed, the heart of a lifetime. During it, certain things had taken root in me. And grown. And therefore in Evan too, I assumed, in Evan too.
I had to establish and verify the link with Maryk, since, without it, Evan-David’s presence in the Creuse in recent years became purely conjectural. But I too waited. I could afford to. Whatever it was, exactly, that was evolving inside me, with a life of its own, seemed to be doing so now without my conscious volition. I had a strong feeling that I must not force this process, must not be impatient. So, I bided my time, waiting simply for another natural opportunity for me to revisit France. At the end of the summer, Marigold would have been dead seven years.
Meanwhile, in that late winter and spring of 1984, I contemplated one or two other moves which, even if I did not regard them as essential, might be useful. One day I nerved myself to ask Lewis if he still had a copy of the postmortem report on Marigold.
From his immediate expression, I expected him to say that he did not. I thought in that instant, ‘I shall tell him I don’t believe him – that I know well he keeps documents for ever. I shall tell him he’s been cowardly all along in this business – that he never pushed the French authorities as he should have done, asked the questions he should have asked –’
But I was saved from making this manic onslaught by Lewis’s honesty. He said heavily: ‘Yes, I’ve still got it – somewhere. But I wish you wouldn’t, Tom. I do wish, for your sake, you wouldn’t.’
‘I know you do,’ I said, my ready anger against him suddenly evaporating into reciprocated tenderness. ‘But I must, Lewis, I must.’
‘Mmm … Well must you this afternoon? Because I’d have to turn the attic upside down to get at the old files.’
‘No. Not this afternoon. But you must promise me you’ll look it out for me when I ask again.’
On one level I flinched as much as ever at the thought of flat, irrefutable words the report would contain. Contusions and fractures and cranial haemorrhages … The language of a broken body. No, I was in no hurry that afternoon. But it calmed me to have extracted from Lewis a promise that I could look at it when I wanted to. I told him so.
‘Well I haven’t much choice, have I?’ he said grumpily. ‘Since, if I refuse, you could no doubt write off yourself to the French police records for a copy. You’re hardly one of my more helpless clients, Tom.’
This idea had also occurred to me. I had turned it over in my mind, but had, after some further meditation, rejected it. In the same way, though less consciously, I had rejected in Paris the idea of calling at the police station in the Marais to see what they could tell me of Monsieur Euze. Evidently I had developed, along with my preoccupation, some sense of circumspection, even cunning.
As the winter ebbed, two things began to happen, both of which, by coincidence, reinforced my opinion of my own insight and prescience. One event was to do with my Aunt Madge and the other with Melvyn Baines.
I say ‘my’ insight and prescience, but the idea that Auntie might take very badly to death when it came to the point had originated with Hermione rather than with me. However I had adopted it, and it had settled like a jigsaw piece into my current view of things. So that when I received a distracted letter from Edinburgh in February, speaking of going into the Royal Infirmary for ‘tests’, it felt to me like something always known which had long cast its distortion backwards on her life. Why, after all, should anyone go to such lengths to convince themselves the dead are alive unless death inspires in them a particular terror?
In April, during Ann’s school holidays, we flew up together on the shuttle to see Aunt Madge. It meant that we could go there and back in one day. I have enough nights in hotels travelling in the way of work; in any case Aunt Madge might have been hurt had she known we were staying in one, but Ann did not think that we ought to burden our elderly invalid by staying with her. I was not going to suggest that we stay with Humphrey and Carmen.
In the event, however, I don’t believe it occurred to Aunt Madge to wonder if or where we were staying. She had lost a great deal of weight: both her clothes and her skin sagged on her, and the plump rouged and powdered mask I had known for years seemed to have slipped, revealing underneath the cranium of a shrivelled old woman. But it wasn’t the weight-loss that shocked me but the horror in the eye-sockets. By a cruel but logical irony, she who had wanted so much to believe that beyond death lay a cosy pleasure park now apparently found herself already, in this life, in hell at the prospect.
‘It’s It, you know,’ she said, staring at me. Her appalled, squeamish tone suggested cholera or syphilis. Another analysis might have indicated that the core of the affliction was fear itself.
‘You mean, it’s cancer? Well yes, we supposed so.’ In fact I had already spoken on the ’ phone to her consultant, a brisk Scot who, no doubt rightly, regarded the case as an everyday one and extensive treatments as inappropriate.
She flinched from the taboo word.
‘Don’t say it, Tom.
I can’t bear it. You don’t understand.’
I knew I was not really being kind, not as many people, including Ann, would have been: Auntie should have chosen to speak to her, not me. However I was her nephew and she had picked, presumably deliberately, a moment when Ann was out in the kitchen washing up the lunch. I felt mutinously that too much was being expected of me. Simone had been not quite forty when she had died of cancer. Aunt Madge was in her late seventies. Not from me would she milk any response of shocked horror.
Trying to find some meeting-ground, some acceptable basis for commiseration – the supportive, efficient male – I said: ‘Are you worried about having a lot of pain? Because I don’t think you should be. They’re much better these days at controlling it, and there’s no reason why, when the time comes, you shouldn’t have all the dope you want. Would you like me to speak to your doctor about that?’
But it wasn’t pain that was worrying her. To my surprise (I have always been rather afraid of pain and bodily weakness myself, mainly because I have so little real experience of it) she hardly seemed to have envisaged the later stages of her illness, and was unresponsive to further queries I tried regarding nursing homes or hospices. Her face crumpled, tears spilling like a child’s from the puckered lids.
‘I don’t want to die, Tommy. I just don’t want to die.’
‘We all die,’ I said crossly, after a pause.
I should have moved across and put my arm round her. I could not bear to touch her. It was no longer just a lack of sympathy I felt for her but a disgust, almost a kind of squeamish horror on my own side. No doubt there were complicated reasons for this. As Ann knows, I am not good when faced with emotional demands. But what I thought consciously was that Aunt Madge’s present mental state, near the end of her life, was, after all, a sickening indictment of that life. It was disillusioning.
Ann had come back into the room and may have heard my unhelpful remark. She looked from one to another of us. I got up and retreated to the kitchen in turn, leaving them to it.
Give Them All My Love Page 23
