The Godsend

by Bernard Taylor

  That’s what we had to do.

  I had hoped—assumed—that when the inquest was over we’d be allowed to pick up the bits and pieces and try, again, to start building a new life. I knew it would be difficult—of course it would—but, in time, I thought, we could manage it. There would have to come, eventually, a time when the hurt wasn’t quite so saturating; a time when Kate came back from that other world—distant, secluded—to which she had withdrawn. As it was I couldn’t bear to watch her. I could almost see the lines of suffering in her face grow deeper. There was a great weariness about her, a lassitude, and at the same time an alarming tightness. She seemed to exist as if living on the edge of a precipice. I couldn’t reach her at all.

  With the children, though, it was different. She insisted on letting Mrs. Gordon go and then lavished displays of affection on Lucy and Bonnie that were almost uncontrolled in their intensity. But outside of that—her role of mother—she didn’t seem to exist. It was almost as if she’d erected a shield to protect herself from further hurt.

  At the inquest, held in the main hall of the village school, she was like an automaton. I had feared tears and hysteria, but there was nothing. She just sat there—even when it was over and we were free to go—staring ahead, unseeing, at the children’s paintings that lined the walls.

  That, of course, followed the endless questions from the police. For days on end they were in and out of the house. I dreaded their visits and I dreaded their effect on Kate. And the questions seemed to be always the same ones, always beginning with the same words: Do you remember . . . ?

  Did we remember? Could we ever forget? I shall never forget the picture I have of Sam as he lay in my arms, his head lolling back, the scrap of blue clutched in his tight fist, his eyes wide open . . . Did we remember . . . ?

  It is amazing how the fragments that make up those moments remain so clear with me. Everything—the sights, the sounds, the smells—as if all my senses contrived to preserve, just for my torment, the memory of it.

  And when I have wondered at the change that took place in Kate I ask myself how she could not change. My own life felt shattered, so how could I expect Kate—particularly Kate—to be able to survive another such catastrophe? How could anything remain the same? It is a wonder—with all that followed—that she kept her sanity.

  I can still see her as she ran from the house that afternoon, wearing her apron, her hair flying, coming at me like a wild woman, crazed, clutching at Sam’s body as I held him, struggling for possession of him, snatching him to her. I can still see her as she sits there, rocking back and forth, supporting his head on his broken neck, her mouth opening and closing, emitting sounds like that of some mortally wounded animal, eyes staring in disbelief. I can still see Bonnie standing there, twisting her hair-­ribbon in her hands and crying out. I can still smell the nettles, the flowers, the fruit, the wild thyme in my button-hole; see Lucy appearing from somewhere—her hiding place—and adding her own screams of horror. The whole afternoon was stunned, freezing itself before me for the space of moments, imprinting itself indelibly on my brain’s screen.

  Did we remember? What is miraculous is that a person can keep such memories and keep on living.

  Kate couldn’t shut herself off for long, though. Reality had to get through to her at sometime. And in the end the reality was brought home to her in ways that couldn’t be ignored.

  I don’t just mean the press—though they certainly did their best to make our lives more miserable. I should have been prepared for them—Kate’s past career made her news, of course—but I wasn’t, and when they descended on us I was taken completely by surprise. They harassed us for days. One eager, bristly young man I threw out bodily after he had followed Kate from the village one afternoon, refusing to take no for an answer. My right thumb took a beating in the process, but so did his camera on the gate, so I reckoned it was worth it.

  But at least they were doing a job—not like those other ghouls who made the telephone calls and sent us the letters, who were cruel simply for the pleasure it gave them.

  I came down the stairs one morning to find Kate sitting on the bottom step holding the first anonymous letter in her hands. She couldn’t stop shaking. When I looked at the letter I could see why.

  The police know a thing or two. Don’t think they don’t. People are smarter than you think. Three of your children dead in three years. There is a lot of talk and not without reason. Why don’t you own up? There’s a lot of talk.

  They varied very little. They all contained the same vile, sadistic accusations. I can see the words now, written in block capitals on cheap, lined notepaper. I wanted to go to the police about them, but Kate wouldn’t let me.

  From then on I made sure I went through the mail before she did—she wanted it that way, too—so she never saw the others, but she could tell when they arrived all right.

  And the same with the telephone calls. She was in the room when I took the first one and she could tell by my behaviour that something was wrong. Then, when I told her not to answer the phone “for a couple of weeks,” she knew. Sometimes the strange voice sounded like a man’s, sometimes like a woman’s, but it was hard to be sure: pains were obviously being taken to disguise it. The accusations were the same as in the letters, and, in addition, accompanied by streams of abuse—as if the other vicious attacks hadn’t been enough. After three days of it I got the GPO to give us an unlisted number. We heard no more then.

  The letters, too, stopped after a time. Whoever it was must have got bored with the whole thing and turned their knives in other directions, but at least we were free of them. I was encouraged. “You see?” I told Kate, “people are coming to their senses.” I knew they would. Things would go on improving. Like everything else, it was only a matter of time.

  I was too optimistic. I realised that one September morning when the four of us were sitting round the breakfast table. Kate had just asked me to go easy on the milk for my second cup of coffee and Lucy asked for more milk with her cereal. Kate shared what was left in the jug between the two girls then said, “That’s all, I’m afraid, until I can get to the shop.” She was drinking her own coffee black, I noticed, and where she, too, would usually have eaten cereal, she was eating toast.

  “Are we economising?” I asked.

  “No. Pearce didn’t call this morning . . .” Pearce was the loutish young man who had taken over the milk deliveries when old Mr. Daniels had retired earlier in the year. I was silent. Kate added, without looking at me:

  “He didn’t call last Friday, either. He told me he forgot.” She picked up the empty milk jug. “It appears his memory’s getting worse.” She looked at me, letting the words sink in.

  “And Jarman doesn’t want our apples this year.”

  “But he always takes our crop. He always has done. And his father did—from my father.”

  “Not any more. He sent a note round first thing this morning.”

  “. . . Did he give a reason?”

  She shrugged. “He said he’s ‘easing off’, whatever that means . . .” The look in her eyes needed no explanation.

  “This is a fine time to tell us,” I said. “He was due to come and pick them over a week ago. Why couldn’t he let us know sooner?”

  “I suppose he forgot, too.”

  “But . . . we had . . . an understanding . . . always . . .”

  “Then you’d better talk to him.”

  “Well,” I said futilely, “if he doesn’t want them, then he shan’t have them . . .”

  “Quite.”

  The real crunch came later. A week later.

  I was painting in the loft. I had made an early start and was still hard at it some hours later. With everything that had happened—including the spraining of my thumb in the scuffle with the news reporter—I had got behind with my work. Now I was hurrying, trying to make up for lost time.

  Suddenly the door flew open and Kate ran in, holding Bonnie by one hand and clutching her
shopping bag in the other. I put down my paint brush, switched off the radio and went to her.

  “Kate—darling, what’s the matter . . . ?”

  She put down her shopping and leaned against the table, tears streaming down her cheeks, her arms hanging limp. At her side the full bag of groceries tilted and smashed to the floor. She didn’t move. She stood there while the milk and the ketchup poured out in a pool to saturate the bread, the biscuits and the paper bags.

  “I can’t—can’t stay here any more,” she said at last, choking on the words. “We’ve got to get away.”

  I tried to put my arms around her but she pushed me away.

  “I mean it. I can’t stand it any longer!”

  “Tell me what’s happened . . .”

  “Oh, Alan, we’ve got to go. The people . . . the women . . . the way they look at me. The way they stare. All the whispering . . . the whispering—it’s going on all the time.”

  She turned from me and stood facing out of the window. Her eyes were dull. She wasn’t seeing the hills—only the past weeks of torture. And I knew that today’s happening wasn’t an isolated incident but just one in a series. And I’d known it was going on. Of course; I, too, had eyes and ears.

  “All those people who were so nice to us once,” she said. “They’ve changed. You can tell. Everywhere. Every time you go into a shop—how the conversation just—dies, and you stand there in silence and suddenly everybody’s so busy you’d think that work was the only thing on their minds. And when you go past them in the street you feel them watching you, feel their eyes on your back as you go by, and you know that in another couple of seconds they’ll be all heads-together again . . .”

  I looked at her defeated back, and I was filled with anger at the stupidity of all those people who, so callously, were now adding to her suffering.

  “Something’s got to be done,” I said. But I felt helpless.

  “Yes.” She turned and faced me. “We’ve got to leave. That’s what’s got to be done.”

  “Well . . . we’ll see how things go . . .” It was wrong to run away, to let ourselves be driven away. How could we? The village was our home.

  “We’ll talk it over,” I said.

  “No! I don’t want to talk it over! I want to go where there are crowds, where people don’t look at me and whisper.” She sobbed and looked down at Bonnie who sat on the floor eating a biscuit salvaged from a damp packet.

  “I want to go back to London . . .”

  I lived in hope as the days went by, waiting, looking desperately for some indication that the situation might change. But there was nothing. And now the maliciousness of the gossip, the rumours, and the evil from them, seemed to permeate the very house so that, even behind closed doors, we didn’t feel safe. There was just no peace any more. In our bedroom Kate—as she had done for weeks past—undressed quickly and kept to her own side of the bed. When I reached out for her she bore my touch with no pleasure, her body tense, waiting.

  “Kate . . .” I could tell she was awake. “Don’t keep away from me.”

  “I’m sorry . . .” Her voice was flat; there wasn’t a chance she would respond to me. “I just can’t relax.” She paused. “I know I won’t ever be happy here again.”

  The anger I had felt welled up in me, full of hate. Everything I ever wanted was being destroyed. I could have run through the village streets breaking windows and shouting obscenities like a bitter, impotent child. I sat up, drowning in my helplessness, the fury and resentment coming over me like a wave, pouring into my words, and I swore and growled my hatred at the top of my lungs. “You bastards! You bastards! Fuck you all! You bastards!” Then reaching out to the bedside table I snatched up the porcelain madonna—Our Love and Good Wishes for Your Happiness—and smashed it against the wall.

  And here we are. In London. Now, instead of the garden, the orchard, the village below the hill, woodland and streams and rolling green hills we have the planned acres of Battersea Park surrounded by untold square miles of bricks and mortar. And instead of the robins, the finches, the magpies and the thrushes that fed every morning on our bird-table we have a disillusioned pigeon with one leg.

  I didn’t sell our house. I couldn’t. I just locked it up. One day, I told myself, we’d all be able to return. But I did sell the cottage with my studio on the top floor. The tenants of the flat bought it, and we made the deal quickly and they got a bargain. I couldn’t wait, not with Kate in the state she was. We had to move and we had to move without delay.

  We didn’t waste much time searching around, either. This was only the third place we looked at. I say looked at: Kate didn’t do much looking. She just came with me and wandered silently through the empty rooms, her dull eyes devoid of any interest. The desperation was there all right, though, and when I said to her yes, I thought it would do, she agreed at once. I reckoned that given the chance, she’d probably have said the same about the first place we had seen, an enormous, impossible flat in Shepherd’s Bush where the adjoining pub would have spilled its drunks onto our doorstep, and where the walls throbbed with the lunch-time-noise from the juke-box that seemed to have only bass and no treble.

  There was far less room here, but for the time being—until we had an opportunity to look around for something more suitable—it would have to do.

  The flat—I find it difficult to think of it as our flat—is actually on two floors. On the third floor there is a small entrance hall, a large kitchen and a very large living-room. Upstairs there are two bedrooms, a smaller room—“Pity it’s not big enough for a studio,” I had said—and a good-sized bathroom. We would manage okay. One thing, at least, there was plenty of cupboard-space. Everything taken into account, I considered we were pretty lucky.

  When it came to finding myself a place to work, though, it was not as easy. But after searching among the small ads in the evening papers for a couple of weeks I eventually found a large single attic-room in a house in Hammersmith. The light was not as good as that afforded in the loft, it lacked the peace and quiet I had valued so much, and I paid for it through the nose, but, I told myself, I’d get used to it. I would have to. We all had to make sacrifices. And I had one consolation: from the window where I sat at my drawing-board I could look out and see the corner of a small park, Ravenscourt Park. It was grey and bleak when I saw it through the rain that day in November, but even so, the sight cheered me. And the scene would improve. In the spring the grass and the leaves would grow. There might even be flowers.

  The actual process of moving was good for Kate, I’m sure. It was no simple job packing up our belongings after so many years in one place—for days we were frantically busy, sorting, turning out cupboards, packing crates and boxes—and she was kept occu­pied so completely that she literally had no time to think much of other things. Also, we were going—and sad as it made me, for her it was a spur. She was glad. You couldn’t help but see the relief in her face. When we drove down the lane away from the house for the last time she looked firmly ahead. There was never a backward glance at the village, either. Only a little, almost imperceptible sigh, as if she was finally released from the weight of some unbearable burden.

  Even so, in spite of the hope that came to me, it was by no means over yet. On our first night here she came to me as I was undressing ready for bed. I was dog-tired, and all I wanted was to lie down and sleep, and to feel the comfort of her warmth, her closeness in the alien room. She stood awkwardly just inside the bedroom doorway, a long moment in silence, wanting to speak but not quite able to.

  “What is it? Aren’t you coming to bed?” When I looked at her she avoided my eyes. “You must be tired.”

  “Bonnie’s a little restless—nervous,” she said at last, too quickly. “It’s probably the new surroundings . . .”

  I guessed what was coming. “Yes . . . ?”

  “Well . . . I think perhaps I’ll stay in their room. I’ll sleep in her bed. I’ve put her in with Lucy.”

  “. . . A
ll right, Kate.” I managed to hide the little flash of angry impatience that sparked in me and she smiled suddenly, relieved.

  “Just for tonight,” she said.

  Just for tonight . . . I consoled myself with her parting words as I tried to settle, tried to sleep in the familiar, suddenly-much-too-big bed. Just for tonight . . .

  But I slept alone again the next night, the night after that and the night after that—and as the nights went by I began to wonder whether we hadn’t set a pattern that was irreversible. But no, I assured myself. No. It would pass. As I had told myself over and over in the months gone by: it would pass . . . everything passes.

  Where the girls were concerned there appeared to be no problems. They had no difficulty at all in settling in. Lucy took to her new school at once and soon made friends there. Bonnie seemed happy too—but she was so young, anyway, and so eminently adaptable. All that remained was to wait for Kate . . .

  And gradually she did come to terms with it all: her loss, the newness of our surroundings, her memories. The process was slow, but it happened.

  It was evident first in the way she began to show an interest in the flat—painting, decorating, turning it into a home. But more important how, day by day, she loosened her obsessive grip on the girls. For weeks she had been unnaturally protective of them, continuously worrying over their safety when there was no need for it. When this began to go I knew that the rest would right itself as well. I didn’t have to wait too long, either.

  A week before Christmas we hung holly and paper-trimmings around the living-room and then started on the tree I had put near the window. On the rug before the fire Bonnie sat in her pyjamas, ready for bed, Lucy near her on the sofa. Together they were joining in with an old record of carols, singing I Saw Three Ships—Lucy’s long-time favourite. The room was full of Christmas. Kate’s eyes were calm. I watched her as she stretched up to put a coloured bauble on one of the highest branches, and although she frowned in the vain effort of securing it I could see that the tightness about her face was gone; there was a peace there now and I welcomed it so thankfully after its long, long absence.