Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  I glance behind me to make sure that Rees has not come outside and is safely indoors, out of earshot. ‘Who the fuck are you?’ I say, with a clear note of aggression in my tone. I don’t take kindly to being attacked. David may have come to my rescue, but I want this madwoman to know that without the element of surprise she wouldn’t have got the better of me.

  ‘I’m Chloe’s mother,’ she spits. ‘And don’t you dare use language to me.’ She turns to David, ‘In my daughter’s coat, with my daughter’s baby!’

  David draws himself up to his full height. ‘Edith, I asked Laura to take Harry out in the buggy so he could fall asleep. I wanted some time alone with my other son. I asked her, all right? It was cold and she didn’t have a coat so I gave her Chloe’s. I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known you were going to be coming round. I know it must have given you a shock but that’s no excuse for attacking Laura.’

  The woman’s face is still twisted with bitterness. ‘You’re as bad as she is. Don’t you care? Chloe said you were a hard bastard and look how you’ve shipped her in to take over. Where’s my daughter? Why aren’t you out looking for her? You know what the police are saying, don’t you? They think she’s killed herself!’ And at this, the woman collapses. She puts a hand out, waves it a little and then manages to find the fence. Her other hand is on her stomach as she bends, trying to catch her breath, making a gasping sound, a kind of dry sob, ‘Oh…’ she says, ‘Oh…’

  The anger has drained from me now. In its place, there is something hollow. This woman has lost her daughter. I look at David but he is staring at his mother-in-law. I slip Chloe’s coat from my shoulders. What was I thinking of, wearing her coat? I fold it over my arm. I can’t wait to be rid of the thing. ‘Do you want to come in, have a cup of tea?’ I say feebly, the inadequacy and stupidity of the suggestion painfully apparent even as I am making it; the number of cups of tea I was offered after Betty.

  The woman straightens herself and wipes roughly at her face with her sleeve, then takes off her glasses and folds them. She does not answer me, merely gives me a glare of contempt. Then she turns and walks unsteadily back down the path. Halfway back to her car, she stops, then turns back. She looks at David and says, ‘I’ll come back to see my grandson when he’s awake.’ She looks at me. ‘And when she’s gone.’

  The car is parked at an angle, one wheel up on the grass. She must have skewed to a halt when she saw me walking along, wearing Chloe’s coat, pushing Chloe’s baby.

  *

  Back inside the house, I hang the coat, very gently, back on the hook. As David closes the door quietly behind him, I turn to him and say, ‘I feel awful.’

  ‘Don’t,’ he says shortly.

  ‘She must have thought I was Chloe…’

  Inside the sitting room, I can hear the sound of the television, some loud and violent cartoon.

  David shakes his head. ‘She isn’t just deranged with grief, you know, she’s always been deranged. Chloe ran to her every time we had an argument, particularly when it was about you, and she always made it worse. She’s a bloody nightmare. A lot of Chloe’s problems stemmed from her, believe me, a lot of them. Don’t feel sorry for her. She’s capable of anything. I hated it when she had Harry on her own. I’m serious. I didn’t like that woman near my son. If Chloe hadn’t been so weirdly dependent on her, I wouldn’t even have let her in the house. She was round here the night Chloe disappeared. That’s why I couldn’t let you come round. I didn’t want her to meet you, even know what you looked like.’

  But there was something familiar about her, I thought. ‘Did you and Chloe argue about me much?’

  ‘Of course we did.’ He turns towards the sitting room, speaking over his shoulder as he goes. ‘That’s what we argued about mostly, of course. The ghost at our table, she called you.’

  She’s been gone less than a month and already he is using the past tense.

  *

  It is only later, an hour later, when we are feeding the children, that it comes to me. I have met Chloe’s mother before. She was the small, fierce woman at Willow’s wake, the one who scraped her stiletto heel against my shin. I think of my purple coat, the one inexplicably ruined by bleach, which is still hanging in my wardrobe. I think of Chloe’s expensive waterproof hanging in the hallway, shimmering and warm.

  *

  While Rees watches television, David and I make something to eat. My shoulder aches. Shaken by her mother’s attack, it is hard to be in Chloe’s kitchen. Once I have put a saucepan of water on to boil, I sit down at the table and watch David while he chops broccoli and carrots into tiny pieces, ready to add to the white rice we will cook for Rees. When he has finished, he puts a few tiny trees of broccoli and cubes of carrot in a bowl and silently places the bowl in front of me. To please him, I lift a few into my mouth, and chew… While I do this, he goes over to the kitchen window and stands looking out of it for some time at the neat square of their garden. His hands are resting on the edge of the kitchen counter top and his head is bowed.

  Eventually, he turns, resting himself back against the counter top, and looks at me: David, all long legs and folded arms and serious expression and that deep gaze of his. I look back.

  ‘I’m really sorry you got caught up in that,’ he says, after a while. ‘I always had a feeling something like that might happen, even though I couldn’t imagine it would be like this. I could never have imagined this, everything that’s happened.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault,’ I say. It’s mine, I think. Shall I tell him? How can I ever tell him?

  He looks at me sharply, pours his gaze on me. ‘Isn’t it, Laura?’ he says, plainly and softly, and I realise that I have been so wrapped up in my own guilt and grief that I have never thought of how he might hold himself responsible, how he might have been thinking it was his infidelity that let the demons into our lives. When I don’t answer, he repeats, ‘Isn’t it?’

  *

  After we have finished eating with Rees – David and I pushing a few grains of rice around our plates – we wake Harry, who has been asleep for much longer than he should have been. I mash a banana for him while David takes him to the bedroom to change his nappy: how odd, how natural, our sharing of these tasks. Rees fetches a box of rattles and jangly things from the hallway and lays them out across the kitchen table, in readiness for some sort of show for Harry when he returns.

  ‘Should Harry be distracted while we are trying to get him to eat his banana?’ I ask.

  ‘I always do it,’ Rees replies confidently.

  Then, several things happen at once. The doorbell rings. I rise from where I am sitting at the table, stirring Harry’s mashed banana so it won’t become discoloured, and as I rise I see, in the periphery of my vision, the view out of the kitchen window into the back garden. A dark shape registers; I turn. There is a uniformed police officer standing in the garden, looking at me. This seems so odd that I stare back at him with some aggression. The back garden is not gated or fenced, so anyone can walk into it from the front of the house and a perfectly logical thought occurs to me: he must be lost, maybe he needs help. In the hallway, I can hear David’s voice raised and I think, he answered the door quickly because he feared the return of Edith. Pincered by these two events, both of which require my attention, I stand helplessly in the kitchen.

  Then Toni is in the kitchen doorway. She is in plain clothes and she is with another plainclothes officer, a large, stocky man. David is behind them and his face is a mask of shock. Behind him, but shouldering his way past into the kitchen, is a young male officer in uniform. At the same time, the door from the kitchen to the back garden opens and the other uniformed officer steps in. I have just enough time to look at David and think, he can’t take much more… before the stocky male officer says, ‘Laura Needham, we are here to arrest you on suspicion of conspiracy to murder Chloe Edith Carter,’ and the uniformed officer pushes past David and raises handcuffs in his hand.

  My first thought is, Rees, how
can they do this with Rees in the room? I look round but he isn’t where he was sitting at the table. He is hiding under the table. They don’t even know he is here.

  The young male officer clicks the handcuffs on to my wrists and I stare at them in disbelief. I stare at them, there on my wrists, while the uniformed officer reads me the caution, ‘… but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court.’ The formality of it only adds to the feeling of play-acting, pantomime.

  Toni says, ‘Where is your mobile phone?’ I lift my handcuffed wrists and indicate my handbag, which is on the counter top. Toni picks the handbag up, opens it and glances inside, closes it again.

  ‘Is this your only mobile phone, Laura?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course,’ David replies for me sharply, and Toni looks at him. It is the first thing he has said since they all came into the kitchen. ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘The police station, sir,’ says the stocky officer, politely, as if he is talking to someone rather stupid.

  ‘Can I come?’ pipes up a voice from beneath the table, and the police officers turn. David reaches beneath the table and Rees scrambles out into his arms. When he sees the handcuffs on my wrist, his face freezes.

  ‘No, darling,’ I say, gently, smiling and smiling – this is all a game after all, my smile says. Don’t worry, it’s just a game. ‘You and Daddy and Harry will be able to come and get me later.’

  ‘That’s right,’ says David, holding Rees in his arms. ‘We’ll go and get her later, won’t we?’ and even the police officers, who would have wrestled me to the ground in a headlock if necessary, smile broadly at Rees and nod their agreement, playing the game.

  The stocky officer takes my arm and, with Toni heading the way, leads me out of the kitchen, through the hall, to the van that is parked outside.

  18

  Chloe’s body has never been found.

  We think of our lives as linear, with a clear beginning and middle and end. We desire an order of events, whole and explicable, from the moment we are old enough to understand what order is. We are born, we grow up, if we are lucky we have children. Children reinforce the linearity of our lives with the straight lines of their own. They just get older and taller. They are very good at it. We age; we reach our end. All this gratifies us, whatever small successes or failures we experience along the way. The line is inexorable: time itself. Betty’s death stopped time. The line dissolved and life became a point, fixed on the day that Betty died. Everything else that happened to me before or afterwards swirled around that point. The flamenco class I thought about doing just before David walked into my consulting room that day, was the class I thought about just before I met the man who fathered the child of mine that died. The coffee I am drinking now, in a café called The Sunflower in a shopping centre in Aberystwyth, is the coffee I am drinking at the end of my story of how my child died. Everything that happened before Betty’s death caused it and everything that happened afterwards was a consequence of it.

  Chloe’s body has never been found.

  *

  As Toni and the other officers walk me out of David’s bungalow to where their van is parked on the kerb, I find myself looking around, half expecting to see Edith, Chloe’s mother, hiding behind a hedge. I am calm, though, very calm, while David is ashen. I feel terrible for him. He is clutching Rees, Rees who will save him, who in his turn stares at the whole procedure with round wide eyes, as if nothing would surprise him any more. As I am guided politely into the van, as we drive away, my anxiety focuses entirely on what David will say to Rees after they have watched the van disappear and gone back inside the house. How will all this be explained to my boy? I have gone into a kind of default-anxiety, a maternal one, scarcely considering my own situation.

  The police officers are cold but courteous. Toni behaves exactly the same as the others and there is no acknowledgement of the intimacy of our previous relationship. At the police station, she pulls on a pair of thin purple gloves and empties my bag, stating the contents out loud while the Custody Officer taps everything into a computer. I am asked a series of polite questions. Do I have any allergies? Are there any sharp objects on my person? Everyone is calm. There is no aggression in their actions or their words. It is like registering at a new dental clinic, or applying for a mortgage.

  The uniformed officers take me to a cell to await the arrival of the duty solicitor. Only as the door slams behind me with metallic resonance do I register the reality of incarceration. I sit down on the narrow mattress on the concrete block against the wall. It is navy blue and has a plastic waterproof covering. The cell is cold and stinks of urine. There is a camera in a high corner, the lens covered by a plastic half-globe. They have told me that if I use the toilet in the opposite corner, a black square on the monitor will protect my privacy. I put my head in my hands and think of David and Rees. Then I imagine the Custody Officer outside observing me on the monitor, sitting on the bed with my head in my hands. I sit up and lean back against the wall, sighing, my eyes closed. It is a great relief that there is nothing I can do.

  After about forty minutes, the door to the cell is opened with a series of clunks and two young woman officers in uniform step into the cell. One is holding a transparent plastic bag with something white in it. ‘Would you stand up, please?’ she says.

  I stand and look at them.

  ‘Would you remove your clothes,’ the other woman officer asks.

  ‘All of them?’ I say, surprised.

  She is very young, and gives a half-embarrassed laugh, ‘Yes, all of them, I’m afraid.’ She shrugs. ‘Bra straps, you know.’ This remark is cryptic to me – I assume they want the clothes in order to do some sort of forensic examination, although that doesn’t make sense. It comes to me that they might be searching my house right now, or David’s bungalow.

  ‘Do I get them back?’ I ask, nodding at the items as I hand them over.

  The first officer has extracted the white object, which is a giant paper suit, a ludicrous garment, like a babygro. She places it on the waterproof covering of the mattress, alongside a pair of white trainers that she has been holding in the other hand. ‘You’ll get them back, don’t worry,’ she replies shortly.

  *

  The first thing the duty solicitor says as she steps in my cell door is, ‘Laura, I’ve already kicked up a huge fuss about the fact that they’ve taken your clothes. It’s completely ridiculous, they are being over-officious and we’re going to make a formal complaint.’

  I look at her; plump, glasses, olive skin and very short, tight brown curls close to her head. She is wearing a beige suit with smart flared trousers over a cream-coloured polo-necked top. I have never met her before but within a sentence, she has become my new best friend.

  ‘I’m cold,’ I say. It’s true, I have been shivering for an hour. My paper suit makes a silly rustling sound whenever I move. The ludicrousness of the garment may not be protecting me from the cold but it is certainly protecting me from the seriousness of my situation. David. I think. Where are you? Why don’t you come and get me?

  ‘Of course you are,’ she says. ‘We’ll make sure they let you get dressed before the interview, which I’m hoping will be soon.’

  ‘Why did they take my clothes?’

  ‘Suicide risk,’ she says briskly, sitting down next to me on the mattress and flipping open a notebook. ‘Which I said was completely stupid but they did the whole lost-a-child, arrested- on-serious-charge number and they are only covering themselves of course but it’s completely stupid.’ She looks at me. ‘There’s going to be press, I’m afraid, even if we get you out of here straight away, there’s nothing we can do about that.’ She pushes her glasses back up her nose. ‘Now, let’s get down to it, shall we?’

  *

  The interview takes place in the same small room that David and I took Rees to. The solicitor has been successful and I am back in my own clothes. I sit in the same chair I
sat in before. The same television sits on a stand to one side of the desk. The interviewing officers are the stocky male officer who arrested me, and a woman officer I have not met before, also in plain clothes. My solicitor sits to one side.

  We begin gently. They ask me to tell them how old I was when I first met David. This is sure territory for me and it’s a relief to talk about something so normal, so explicable. I describe, in some detail, my first three encounters with him, in the pub, at the party, and at last in my consulting room. The officers listen quietly and politely, making the occasional comment, although I know this can’t be what they are interested in, what they really want to know. Their interest quickens – the man leans forward slightly – when I describe how David proposed to me on the cliffs. Afterwards, made emotional by the memory, I fall quiet. The stocky male officer sniffs deeply and says, thoughtfully, ‘Bit of a whirlwind romance then, you might say?’

  Tears slide silently down my cheeks. I nod. My solicitor touches my elbow. I turn my head and see she is offering me a tissue. I blow my nose.

  The woman officer says, lightly, ‘So it must have been a bit of a blow, then, when your husband started having an affair?’

  I nod, still blowing my nose. ‘You could say that,’ I say, allowing a hint of sarcasm to creep into my voice. Next to me, my solicitor stiffens.

  ‘You must have felt really angry about the whole thing, and confused,’ the male officer continues, ‘really hard to understand, I’d say, when you’ve got your whole lives and the house and everything and the kiddie to think of. Why do you think he did it?’

  I shake my head and open my mouth to answer but my solicitor jumps in with, ‘You can’t ask my client that. How is she supposed to know how someone else thinks or feels? You can’t ask her that.’