With a cry of pain, rage and release, Max raised the barrel, aimed and squeezed the trigger - and shot the sky.
The report ripped apart the silence and travelled through the village. Prue imagined she felt the air part above her fingertips and the passage of hot metal. Her hands dropped to her sides.
Edward began to cry inside the house and the curtains at Jane’s bedroom window were ripped apart. The back door was wrenched open and Violet peered out.
‘What on earth . . .?’
Then the telephone rang.
Behind Prue, Jamie tensed, leapt forward, and took the gun from Max. The muscles in both men’s jawlines were rigid - the still-young versus the ageing. Sweat sprang out on Jamie’s forehead.
‘Don’t worry, Violet,’ he called out. ‘The gun went off by mistake as Max was bringing it in from the car. Tell Jane not to worry.’
‘How stupid of you, Dad.’ Violet disappeared to answer the phone.
‘I’m sorry, Max,’ Jamie said. ‘For all the reasons in the world.’
With a little cry, Prue snatched the gun from Jamie and cradled it awkwardly to her chest. ‘Sorry, I’m so sorry,’ she whispered to it.
A minute dragged by as the three remained, frozen and unmoving. Then, together, they entered the house.
‘That was Molly,’ Violet said as they entered the kitchen. ‘For some reason, she wanted to know if you were all right. Since you could have blown us all to pieces, I said it was lucky that she was keeping an eye on us. Then the vicar rang to enquire what the shot was.’
‘Hot chocolate, anyone?’ asked Prue. ‘I’m going to make some for Jane.’
‘Yes, please,’ said Jamie, and caught Prue’s eye. Hot milk, passion and a threat of death, was the message it conveyed. How does that strike you?
It struck her as absurd, comic and profoundly truthful. ‘I’ll take Jane’s up,’ she said.
She shrugged off her coat and went into the study to put away the gun. The patina on the barrel gleamed at her, expensive and cared-for. She touched it with her fingertip and then locked it away.
When she returned, Violet and the two men were sitting at the table discussing the stock-market. She joined them, cradling her mug loosely between her hands.
For God’s sake, she thought a little hysterically. Whatever happened, it seemed that stock-markets and clean socks could not be denied their place. But love, sex and passion had to be given theirs too. Yes, they did and she would never ever forget them.
Then she thought of the irony at the heart of scene around the table. It was Violet - who had done so much to cause trouble in the past - who was the reason that the three remained sitting round the table and kept silent, and would continue to do so.
Jamie drained his mug, a freebie from a petrol station that Jane had insisted on collecting, and got to his feet. He gestured towards the empty mug. ‘Thank you . . .’ he said, and for one farcical moment, Prue thought he was going to thank Max for not killing him. Violet stretched and pushed her mug towards Prue, which the latter took to mean she should wash it up.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ she said.
How unprivate Prue’s love affair had been. How impossible it had been to have dived deep into passion tucked away on a remote island. Falling in love with a man other than your husband was a public exercise, and she hadn’t known, hadn’t guessed, that it would be like that.
‘I won’t be staying.’ Jamie tapped the mug, which gave off an echo. ‘I’ll square it with Violet. Fabricate a work crisis.’
Max did not look at Jamie. ‘I want you gone,’ he said, and now he did not sound at all civilized.
Jamie appeared to approve Max’s attitude. ‘I’ll go back by train in the morning. Violet can drive herself up later in the evening.’
‘Right,’ said Max.
And that was that.
Violet insisted that, even if her stupid husband was insisting on working through their well-earned, statutory weekend, she was not. She wished to be with her family.
In fact, Violet did not relish the idea of a Sunday on her own with Edward in London.
‘Look, Daddy,’ she said, bending over Max who was sitting by the drawing-room fire after breakfast. ‘This is our pre-Christmas get-together. If Jamie wants to abandon his family, so be it. I’m staying put.’
Prue, who was writing yet more lists at the desk, fingered the silver paper knife and stared into the omnipresent photograph of Helen. Helen who had run away from her daughter. You launched more than a thousand ships, you witch, she informed the image, with a shiver of knowledge that left her cold, but at least you were honest. Yet if Helen had introduced the dogs of war into the family, it was Prue who had let them loose.
For the ten-thousandth time, Helen’s glistening beauty accosted Prue but, for the first time, Prue acknowledged complicity.
The patter of pine needles falling from the Christmas tree interrupted the silence. The movement caused one of the silver balls to rotate, catching the light.
Max reached up and grasped Violet’s hand. ‘Whatever you wish, my darling.’
‘Right,’ said Violet. ‘We’ll dispatch Jamie to his London vast-ness and we’ll make ourselves comfortable. In some ways, it’s easier without him.’ She thought for a moment. ‘You know what, Dad, I just might stay until Monday morning.’
She slipped her arm around Max’s neck and rested her cheek on the top of his head.
So, it was Prue who found herself delivering Jamie to Winchester station because Violet wanted to watch the cookery programme Gourmet Dieting.
‘You can drop Jamie off anywhere, actually, providing there’s a station.’ Violet made him sound like dry-cleaning. Max said nothing, but Prue suspected he was allowing her to say goodbye in private. Max had always been generous.
It was a cold, raw morning and the wind whistled up the line, bringing the sting of salt, smut and sewage from the coast. The tiny waiting room on the platform was stuffy and smelt of gas fire. A couple of women in sensible shoes were discussing their planned assault on Christmas shopping. They glanced at the intruders and their conversation broke off. By mutual consent, Prue and Jamie retreated outside. Here, the damp and rawness stung their exposed skin.
‘A bad year,’ Jamie addressed the foot passenger bridge. ‘Is that what it’s been, Prue?’
He was willing her to say no. No. Despite her best efforts, she turned to him. ‘Oh Jamie, I can never tell you what it’s been to me.’
‘Nor I,’ he said.
They were silent. She dug her hands into her pocket. ‘Where next, Jamie?’
‘I thought it was goodbye. In one sense, anyway.’
‘For you, I mean.’
‘Abroad,’ he said with a little shrug of his shoulders. ‘I think I can arrange the old job back in New York.’
‘Violet?’
‘She’ll be pleased.’
The future stretched out, for the moment flat and dispiriting, a jigsaw puzzle into which the pieces still had to be fitted. Jamie paced away up the platform, then he stopped and returned to where she stood and put both hands on her shoulders.
‘Prue. I’ll ask once more. Come with me.’
She stared into the face she loved so painfully, alarmed and unnerved by her desire to say yes. ‘No.’
His hands fell away. ‘Has it been worth it?’
‘My God Jamie,’ she said. ‘That you should ask.’ she bit her lip. ‘If I’ve done what I’ve done and driven a stake through the heart of my family, it had to be for something.’ She searched his face and thought she might die of love for him. ‘It had to be worth it. It must be worth it.’
The train came into sight, a steadily enlarging dot on its front plate registering like a borehole on Prue’s vision. With a hiss of wheels on the rails, it drew into the station. Doors clicked open and shut with a hollow sound. A couple of voices rose above the noise, shouting instructions to one another. Passengers went in an untidy stream towards the ticket barrier.
Prue rubbed her fingers together, feeling the roughened texture from too much washing-up without rubber gloves.
‘Prue?’ Jamie questioned. For the last time.
She raised her face to his. ‘It’s impossible.’
‘It’s perfectly possible.’
In the end, I would not have wanted not to have gone through this, she thought. Even though the end of this is going to half kill me.
But why? Faith? Prue possessed only the form, not the substance. Belief in marriage? Yes . . . and no. A sceptic’s view of passion? Never.
‘The real reason,’ Jamie prompted.
‘Jane is the reason.’ She smiled into the face of her lover. ‘And Edward.’
‘Are they the only reason?’
‘They are quite good enough,’ she replied, ‘but no.’
She had been searching through sleepless nights and the fret of sexual frustration, and longing for the formulation which had, so far, eluded her.
She spoke slowly, fighting to find the correct words. ‘If I give up the marriage, it will have been for no good reason,’ she said. ‘There is no reason not to see it through. It’s the same for you, Jamie. There is no reason to abandon Edward and Violet, and every reason to stay.’
To his credit, and this was one of the many things for which she loved him so passionately, Jamie saw the point.
‘My darling Prue.’ He bent to pick up his bag and stood upright. ‘I did try.’
‘Yes, you did,’ she agreed.
When the train had become a dot on the horizon, Prue finally quitted the platform. She walked over the passenger bridge, through the ticket barrier and out into the station car park. She sat there, surrounded by cars belonging to day-trippers. A man also sat on one of the benches, holding his poodle as carefully and tenderly as if it was a child. Every so often, he bent and whispered into the dog’s ear and the dog raised his face and butted his master’s cheek. Prue tried squeezing her eyes to see if it hurt less. Then she dug her nails into her palms so hard that they left red crescents. The corresponding pain made absolutely no impression on what she felt inside.
In the car, she sat motionless and gazed unseeing out through the windscreen.
Weeping copiously, Joan had gone out to her death wearing a black shirt, and a kerchief on her head. Nailed to the stake was a board which said:
Joan, who had herself called the Maid, a liar, pernicious deceiver of the people, sorceress, superstitious, blasphemer of God, defamer of the faith of Jesus Christ, boastful, idolatrous, cruel, dissolute, invoker of demons, apostate, schismatic and heretic.
Such a small sign to carry so much invective - and wasted on nine out of ten of the waiting crowd who could not read. And as if this panoply was not enough, the sermon directed at a frightened, weeping girl waiting for the fire to strip the flesh from her bones took as its text a quotation from the First Epistle to the Corinthians: ‘Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.’
Joan was then formally cast out by the Church and handed over to the secular authorities to finish off. Then she was crowned with a mitre. ‘Heretic, relapsed, apostate, idolater.’
Prue’s nails again dug into the soft flesh of her hands.
They must have been very frightened of Joan, all those men, and of her power to change things.
Perhaps the key lay among the puzzle of Joan’s death. Because the scaffold had been built so high, she had taken a long time to die, longer than necessary, because the executioner had been unable to climb up and strangle her, as was the custom. She would not have been aware of that little detail when she threw back her recantation in Cauchon’s face and, thus, gave her enemies everything they needed to structure the careful wall of faggots and wood.
Nevertheless, Joan had made her death her own decision.
As Prue’s lesser decision was also her own. She started up the engine of the car and drove home.
It came as something of a shock to Jamie staring at the newspaper in the train that he was probably suffering more than Prue.
The landscape was transmogrifying into suburbia, and the variety and colours of heaped and abandoned plastic toys in the back gardens stretching down to the line struck Jamie, and he wondered if his mind was similar - cluttered with soiled, greyish detritus that had once given the illusion of being inviting.
Had he really meant to leave Violet and his son? What if this happens again? also flashed across his mind.
Is this the pattern?
The train drew into Clapham Junction. Jamie looked without interest at the station sign, picked up his bag and stepped down on to the platform. The station had recently been tarted up with British Rail paraphernalia. Even so, it exuded a lost feeling and the litter rattled in the December wind.
He ducked down into the underpass.
As he made his way home, Jamie planned tactics and the strategy for the job in New York that he had already discussed with his boss. His bag grew heavy and he shifted it from one hand to the other and lengthened his stride.
The morning wore out over London.
In Hallet’s Gate, Violet fastened Edward into his travelling high chair and surveyed the lunch laid out on the table.
‘I’m glad Jamie’s out of the way,’ she said, ‘because I want to talk to you about this London business.’
Max helped himself to ham, salad and a baked potato and sent a wintry smile in the direction of his daughter. Prue sat down beside him. Not now Violet, she thought wearily. It was one thing to make life-turning decisions and to choose what was right, or at least best; it was quite another to be lectured.
Violet returned to a favoured theme. ‘Daddy, there is such a thing as the male menopause.’
Red stained Max’s face and his fork stopped half-way to his mouth.
‘It happens all the time. Middle-aged men get restless and do all sorts of funny things. But it’s hormones, nothing more. They’ll soon settle down.’ Violet turned in her chair to pinion Prue. ‘Aren’t I right? When you get older you mourn your lost youth.’
In all the battles and uneasy peaces that had attended their relationship, Prue had never once imagined that Violet would end up defending Prue’s position.
‘So they say,’ she managed to get out.
Violet pressed on. ‘It’s worse for women because they lose their looks, isn’t it, Prue?’
Prue felt unable to comment.
‘There,’ said Violet with some satisfaction. ‘She does understand.’
‘Darling,’ said Max. ‘I do think you have to be careful with your advice. You can’t always be sure what you’re talking about.’
Violet dropped back against her chair. ‘But I am, darling Pa. I’ve read about it in a lot of places. You really mustn’t go shacking up with young girls, however innocently. It gives one a bad name. You can’t have Emmy living with you.’ Having grasped a line of attack, Violet was, as ever, reluctant to relinquish it. She added as the coup de grâce, ‘Think of Jane.’
Max and Prue found themselves looking at each other.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Emmy had been brooding all weekend over the letter she had been sent the previous week.
You might think it odd that I am writing to you, but I ask you to read this letter before making up your mind whether to ignore it or not.
A lawyer to the last, Max’s formality was accentuated in his correspondence.
As I mentioned last time I saw you, I have been thinking about your position. I am writing this on the assumption that you will be bringing the baby up on your own. (Please forgive me if I have got this wrong.)
I will be living in London during the next few months, possibly longer. I know that Violet feels that it is difficult for you to continue with your job with them, especially when you have the baby. This, I imagine, leaves you with a problem and I would like to suggest a solution. I am offering you the post of housekeeper. Duties would be minimal — to cook and clean and shop. Nothing else is required. I am suggesting this bec
ause I think it might be of use to you, and I would like to think that you and your baby would have a roof over your heads.
Emmy reread the letter — written on Max’s white writing paper - and looked out of the kitchen window of Number 5 Hallet’s Lane. It was very much the same view that could be seen out of the kitchen of Hallet’s Gate, but the eyes and mind processing the visual information thus received assessed things differently. However, after a year of living with the Becketts, Emmy had seen enough to know that the general messiness of life applies at all levels.
Her father was in the pub, well on the way, no doubt, to oblivion, and her mother had caught the Ride’n’Shop Christmas Saturday Special bus into Salisbury. A faint smell of disinfectant overlaid by the sicklier one of ceramic hob cleaner assaulted her queasy stomach. Powered by a crystal battery, the clock stared down at her from a wall that glistened with endless applications of cream cleanser. It did nothing so old-fashioned as to tick.
Tick, tock, Emmy.
Whatever she did, whatever happened, Emmy decided that the first thing she would do was to buy a clock with a proper tick.
In the midst of the muddle in which she found herself, someone had bothered to stretch out a hand to help. To help her, witless, ugly Emmy, who had fallen into the oldest trap of them all. Max’s gesture touched a healing finger to the abraded areas of her spirit.
The view outside failed to provide any definitive answers, and she dropped her head into her hands, pressing them against her eyelids. Angus threaded his way through the dancing circles and blobs of light. He did not look happy and Emmy, no saint, felt better.
Mrs Horton shrugged her shoulders. It was not a gesture designed to give reassurance and Emmy took none. ‘Your dad’s livid,’ she said. ‘And doesn’t want you here.’
Emmy was not surprised. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t bother you.’ Inside, her guts heaved with dread and panic.
‘Why on earth did you have to go and fall?’ Mrs Horton attacked the microwave with a specially impregnated cloth and rubbed vigorously. Emmy pictured the war between loyalty to her daughter and loyalty to her husband being waged behind the frosted perm, and was rendered speechless when her mother announced that Emmy was a chip off the old block because she had married her dad for the same reason.
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