‘But she needs to see you Dad. Please. At least think about it. I know it’s a lot to take in. I’ll call you later – or Francine will.’
William thought that unlikely. He wasn’t even sure he wanted her to.
‘I have to go now, Dad,’ Evie was saying. ‘Try not to worry.’
William put the phone down and stood motionless by the back door. Of all his present concerns, worry was not one of them. Anger, yes, new and uncomfortable, and fear too: for Helena, for her life, and what all this would now unleash. But worry was a useless sentiment, he’d wasted too many years on it so far. What was it that cleric had said? Something about worry being interest paid on trouble before it’s due? In that respect, he’d rendered himself bankrupt.
Forty
For all their unfinished business, William had never once considered what he might do or say if he and Helena were ever to meet again. For decades, she was referred to simply, obliquely, if Evie or Joanna ever enquired. But once, not long after Francine moved in, he found Evie in her bedroom with Joanna, an open box of photos scattered around them on the floor. Evie held one in her hand, while Joanna sat patiently in her lap. This is your mummy, Evie was saying, pointing to the photo. Your real mummy. She’s not here now, she can’t be, but she’ll come back one day, I know she will. And William had gone in and gently tidied away. Then he’d picked up Joanna and left Evie in the room still holding the photo in her hand.
William cleaned himself up at the sink and went upstairs to his bedroom. From a cupboard he took out that same box, a brown shoe box, its faded label crisp and peeling on the side. He took off the lid and stared at the contents. Photos, still there, a muddle of muted colours and stark black and white, faces smiling up at him from a lifetime ago. And next to them, neatly tied, a bundle of envelopes addressed to Evie, each one unopened. William lifted them out. Helena’s handwriting stared back at him, neatly eloquent, accusing. For three years after she left they’d arrived with heart-breaking regularity: every birthday, every Christmas and many times in between. Somehow Evie had never caught the postman, never found them, had never known. And then abruptly, after that last, painful meeting, they’d stopped. William had struggled to know what to do with them. Instinct pulled him one way: respect for a memory that Evie might hold dear, the knowledge that she had not been abandoned. But practicality, and more significantly his mother, had cautioned against it. She’s gone, William, we know she’s not coming back, what possible good will it do? Evie will forget, just let her move on.
Though Evie’s life moved on, he knew she did not forget; he saw this in her daily struggle, her battles with Francine. Even now, after all this time, she dealt with the same demons as her mother, and once again he’d stood by and watched it happen. William could not alter the past but he saw now that there was a way to deal with the present. Dammit, he thought, putting the lid back on the box and hunting round for a bag to put it in, I will go down there. Isn’t that the least I can do? For once in my life I can try and do the right thing.
William took a taxi to the station, it was simpler than driving and then having to chase around looking for somewhere to park in the pre-Christmas mayhem. He stood on the platform clutching his small bag, scanning the line in both directions. He wondered again why he was doing what he was doing and in spite of the cold, began to sweat, his hands clammy, all adding to his resolve, his need to be on the train. For it was here, years ago on this very station, that he’d been driven to commit the only impulsive act of his life. In the station buffet, he’d met a young woman waiting for a connection to London. They were seated at the same table in the crowded room, the smell of smoke and chip fat making it hard to breathe. Something about the way she absently stirred her coffee, eyeing the room with a pained expression, prompted him to ask where she was travelling to.
London, she said. That’s the plan anyway.
A new job?
Nothing definite, she said, still stirring her coffee. I just need to go. It’s time.
The next train for London came and went, but still the woman did not leave. She listened as William talked about his work at the school, the town where he lived, his father who’d recently retired. Then he’d surprised himself by suggesting lunch.
There’s a café, not far away, he said. A bit more choice than here. The trains run every hour to London. You can always catch a later one.
The woman never did catch the train. Lunch slid into tea, then a wander through the market place and up the Riverwalk towards the locks. William carried her small bag all the way. She opened up as they walked, hinting at strained family ties, an overbearing father, a sister who’d died. And later, by the dimming river, beneath a leaden East Anglian sky, he’d offered her a job.
I need some help with a new project. The school’s given me funding for an assistant – administrator if you like. It’s for the rare books collection, typing up and cataloguing as the material comes in. What do you think?
Her name, he finally discovered, was Helena. William now found himself wondering whether he had ever really stopped loving her, that when she left, he had simply ceased to function on any internal level, the light she’d fired in him vanishing as rapidly and completely as it had entered. Perhaps it never did return and he’d simply resumed his default persona: paralysed, steady, dull. He’d brought up his children, done his best, but had never again laid himself open to attack. It had worked. In spite of his affection for Francine, and his gratitude for the life she’d given him, for over thirty years, he’d kept the lock gates closed, sealing off the space where his love should have been. And William realised too that Francine had known this all along.
Forty-One
William crept into the room where Helena lay, a small mound beneath the blue hospital covers. A grey control console with four buttons lay by her left hand, a small cylinder attached to a tube by her right. Above her head was a board covered in lights and switches. She was turned away from the door, only her dark head visible, a half-profile – Joanna’s profile – now creased and swollen. He saw again their bedroom at home where she’d retreated in the weeks after Joanna was born, the curtains drawn against the smallest hint of day, trays of food left untouched time after time. William stood rooted, a fusion of past and present. Around the lock gates, stagnant water began to trickle and to seep. He stood in danger of losing his footing, of being awash with it all.
‘William?’
He heard his name from beneath the bedclothes and moved closer to the bed. Helena turned her face towards him and he saw the tubes, the bruising, the healing graze across her cheek. She was there, but hidden beneath all this, beneath the careless brushwork of ageing: the loosened skin, traced lines across her forehead, around her mouth. William’s hand moved to his own chin, an involuntary touch, reminding him, returning him firmly to the present. He wondered how on earth he must appear to her, would they even know each other in the street? So deep ran the rift between memory and truth, the broken crumbs of love.
Helena’s face was calm. She indicated a chair next to the bed and cleared her throat, ‘You can sit William, unless you have somewhere to be?’
He approached the chair and sat down, putting the small bag he was holding on the floor by his feet. ‘I’m so sorry…’ he began. ‘How are you?’
‘They tell me I’ll survive,’ Helena struggled to pull herself up in the bed. ‘Could you?’ she said, indicating the control console, ‘just put the back rest up a bit?’
William picked up the console and looked at the buttons.
‘Don’t press the red one or they all come running. It’s the green one,’ she added, helpfully.
William pressed the button and the top end of the bed rose slowly to a steeper angle. He could see her face clearly now, her shoulders beneath the green and white hospital gown narrow and rounded. He’d forgotten how small she was.
Helena turned towards him, ‘I’d have known y
ou anywhere, William. You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘I’m not so sure about that.’
Helena leant back on the pillows. ‘You’ve spoken to Evie?’
‘Yes. She phoned me this morning.’
‘You must be wondering what the hell’s going on.’
William laced his fingers together and put them in his lap, ‘Yes, somewhat. I’d no idea that Evie’d been seeing you – that you were in touch again.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry for that. It was never meant to be a secret, it just didn’t seem right to bring it all out, not to begin with, you understand. You must have known how fragile Evie was after Edward.’
A rebuke? William looked down at his hands and said quietly, ‘I was aware, yes. And Joanna suspected something. But Evie doesn’t ask for help.’
‘Any more than I did?’ Helena’s eyes met his for a moment, then dropped. ‘You know, when it’s so bad – in the middle of it all – asking for help never occurs to you. You think, what can anyone do anyway? Then there’s the guilt – that never lets up. She’s been through a lot William.’
William listened, Helena’s words punctured by the hiss of her oxygen, the click of the drip. He was silent for a moment then said,
‘I’ve not been much help. It’s been an odd time all round. And this…’ William took in the room, the bed, ‘this simply confirms it. I long ago ceased to be surprised by events. Old age does that, you know. And disappointment.’
Again, Helena attempted to move, groping for the cylinder by her right hand.
‘Does it hurt?’ William asked, regretting at once how inadequate he sounded. ‘Can I do anything?’
Helena shook her head, pumped the button with her thumb, ‘All taken care of. Probably having far too much of this stuff, but still. They keep telling me to keep on top of the pain – it beats alcohol any day.’ Helena’s eyes closed again. ‘You don’t have to stay you know. This can’t be easy for you.’
William shuffled in his seat, the room becoming far too small. He tried to picture the life of this woman in front of him, a hidden life, a life unlived together as they had set out to do. So familiar yet utterly strange, he knew nothing about her. He searched for the right words and failed to find them.
‘Evie said…’ he began, ‘Evie said you’d asked to see me. That you wanted me to come.’
‘I did,’ Helena’s voice croaked and she began to cough. Alarmed, William pushed his chair back and stood up.
‘Water, please,’ she indicated the tray and the cup. The child’s cup.
William picked it up, leaned over and placed the spout close to her lips. Uneasily intimate, he held the back of her head as she sipped the water, then laid it back on the pillow.
‘I didn’t know how long I’d be here,’ she said. ‘Or even if I’d ever come out. There are things I need to say, William, things you never knew.’
William replaced the cup on the tray and sat down again.
‘You probably don’t want to hear this,’ Helena continued, ‘but I need to tell you anyway.’
‘Go on.’
‘I tried to come back, many times. Sometimes I even succeeded, got as far as the house. I’d wait in the back roadway and hear you all in the garden – Evie’s voice, and yours. Then later, Joanna too, her little sounds. Once or twice I went to the park and waited in the trees, watching the children with Francine.’
William hung his head, examined his shoes. He didn’t want this; it was all far too late. ‘I had no idea,’ he said.
‘Of course you didn’t, why would you? You’d moved on. And I had no right to be there. Your mother made that quite clear.’
‘Ah, yes. My mother.’
‘You know she wrote to me a few months after I left. To this day I don’t know how she found out where I was living.’
William’s mind turned to the memory box by his feet, so recently opened and the letters he’d stuffed away in the bottom. He remembered now, his mother had been there one morning when a letter arrived. In his confusion, had he failed to hide it away? Had he told her? Had she simply guessed?
Helena closed her eyes again, ‘She threatened to take legal action if I tried to contact you – or the children. Rhona always made her feelings very clear. She was a hard road to cross.’
Thoughts of his mother reared up in William, her brittle reasoning and the stark, bitter option she’d laid out at the time: If that woman comes back into this house William, I’m calling the police. He left his chair and fetched a drink of water from the basin. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I knew how she felt, but for what it’s worth I didn’t know she’d written. If I did, maybe I would have done something – had the guts to challenge her.’
‘She didn’t take kindly to being challenged, I know. You never did manage it, did you? So when you came to meet me in London that last time, I knew she’d put you up to it. The way I see it now, it was none of her bloody business. But back then – well, my own feelings of guilt were enough to persuade me she was right.’
William sat down again. His heart shrank from all the times he should have stood up to his mother. ‘After Evie told us what had happened,’ he said, ‘there seemed no other option. If the police had been involved, what then? What good would it have done? An arrest? A trial? I did at least wake up to the fact that you’d been ill, that it was a moment of madness. And there was my own guilt too, for not seeing it, for leaving you lost and hopeless, for doing nothing.’
‘It’s all in the past now William, and that’s where it needs to stay. That doctor knew what was going on. What was her name? Roberts?’
A touch of colour rose in William’s face. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Catherine. Oddly enough, I met up with her not long ago.’
Helena turned to him. ‘Really?’
‘Bumped into her quite by chance.’
‘William, you’re blushing!’
‘Nonsense,’ he shifted in his seat, studied the cup in his hands.
Helena’s eyes fell distant again, ‘She got me out of bed, I remember.’
‘But it wasn’t enough, was it?’ he said.
‘Maybe not, and none of it matters now. But William,’ she grabbed his arm and held it, pressing it into his knee, ‘I have to atone for what happened, to pay a price for what I did. I’ve lived with it all this time, I have to know that you understand, that you’ve forgiven me.’
William swallowed and looked away. The lock gates creaked, threatened to overwhelm him. ‘There’s nothing to forgive,’ he said. ‘I should have done more – much more. I see it now with Evie, with what she’s going through. But, dealing with distress – it’s hard. Easier to pretend it’s not happening, that it will all sort itself out. I’m not much good at all this supportive stuff everyone bats on about nowadays.’
‘But I was your wife, William, not just anyone. Evie’s your daughter!’
‘Empathy’s not my strong suit I suppose,’ he said, but he took no comfort from his little justification.
Helena released his arm and covered his hand instead, ‘It’s not too late to help Evie. She’s doing well but there’s a long way to go. She’s still fragile.’
William looked down at their hands clasped together, her touch warm, confiding, even familiar. Panic began to rise, his head swam. ‘I should go,’ he said, gently laying Helena’s hand back on the bedcover. ‘I don’t want to tire you.’
Helena closed her eyes again. ‘Thank you, William. Thank you for coming. Go and see Evie, talk to her. Better still,’ she added, attempting to smile, ‘take her to see your doctor friend.’
Forty-Two
With Edward and the pram, Francine was heading for the lift when she ran into William by the stairs. ‘You decided to come then,’ she said, moving aside to let a woman in a wheelchair pass. ‘Evie said she’d spoken to you.’
William stopped, but made no mov
e towards her. ‘She phoned this morning,’ he said.
‘And you’ve been to see…?’ Francine’s voice trailed.
‘Yes. I’ve just come from there.’
‘How is she?’
William nodded slowly, ‘Better than expected.’
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s good. I didn’t quite know what to expect.’ He hovered, clutching his bag and his overcoat. ‘Evie’s here, is she?’
‘She’s with Mark.’ Francine paused. ‘I think they’ve a lot to talk about.’
‘Let’s hope they do. She sent me a text – I’m meeting her later, about five.’
Their eyes met across the pram, then slid away. They stood a moment, an uncomfortable silence.
‘You know, we could get a drink or something,’ Francine offered. ‘There’s a pub up the road. I’ve no idea what it’s like but the walk would be good.’
The pub had little to recommend it. They found a table in the corner, as far as possible from the loudspeakers. One or two lone drinkers perched on stools by the bar, leaning over their glasses; a gathering of young people clattered among their lunchtime debris. Francine tucked the pram away from the main thoroughfare and ordered a mineral water. William ordered beer. They might have been mere acquaintances, there seemed so little to say. Francine wondered how much William and Helena had found to talk about. Was there silence like this or had he finally poured out his heart? Had she?
‘How have you been William?’ she asked.
William stared at the table, at the ceiling, nursing his beer close to his chest. ‘I’m alright,’ he said.
Clearly, he wasn’t. Everything about him had closed down. ‘You know we should talk, William.’
‘Should we? Should we really? All this…’ he waved his hand vaguely at the room, at the state of his life. ‘I can’t do it. I don’t know why all this has happened now. Is it just coincidence? I just want it all sorted, I’m too old for drama.’
The Place Where Love Should Be Page 19
