He got halfway down the stairs, staring at us, amazed to find us standing in the hall as witnesses to his rage and humiliation. Then he stopped, sagged down on one of the bare oak treads and sat, still trembling with rage, holding his head between his hands.
“My darling,” Grace gasped. “My poor, poor darling.”
“Leave me alone,” he snapped, fending her off with a flap of his arm. “Just leave me alone, will you?”
“You mustn’t take any notice of him,” Grace said. “Your father’s been terribly depressed lately. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“He knows exactly what he’s saying,” Adam snapped back at her. “He knows exactly how to undermine what little confidence I have. The man’s a monster. I don’t know how you can bear to live with him. You should have left him years ago.” When his mother failed to answer, he stared down at me, his face filled with hostility. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Grace asked me to come and see you. Both of you. You and Hal, I mean.”
“Oh yes? I suppose you’re going to tell me you agree with him – that I was a fool to marry Efwa in the first place? That I’ve thrown my life away? Unlike you, of course, who’s turned out to be just the sort of son that bastard always wanted? Well, as far as I’m concerned, you’re welcome to one another. He’s never been a father to me. I’d sooner die than be the kind of son he wants.”
“Adam” – Grace reached out to him – “you mustn’t think that way. It can only hurt you. What’s been happening? What’s happening between you and Efwa? You have to talk to me.” But Adam merely sat on the stairs with his head in his hands, staring down at his feet.
Grace glanced helplessly at me. I had no idea what to say or what to do. My strongest desire was to be out of that wretched house and running through the clean, wild air of the tops, running till my breath gave out or the blood burst in my ears. “Could you get us something to drink, Grace?” I said instead. Then I looked back at my friend. “Come away from there, Adam. Let’s go through into the sitting room. Let’s try and talk.”
He glowered at me before rising and following me. I sat down in the buttoned leather chair by the window that faced south onto the garden, while he sank onto the couch across from me without saying a word. His lean features were dark with stubble. Not since that night in Cambridge years before had I seen him looking as desolate as this.
“Do you want to talk?” I asked.
“What’s the point?” he scowled. “If I’ve learnt anything over this last week it’s that words don’t make a blind bit of difference. I tried talking to Efwa till I was blue in the face, and it got me nowhere. You’ve seen what happened when I tried to talk to Hal. What good do you think talking to you will do?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps none. But silence can be worse, can’t it?”
“I wanted to speak to Marina,” he said. “I thought she might be able to help, but she’s disappeared. I’ve no idea where she is. That’s why I came up here. I couldn’t stand another minute cooped up in that flat with Efwa not talking to me.”
“She hasn’t said anything to you then?”
“Not a word. But it’s obvious she’s having an affair. I’ve suspected it for weeks. She’d been unhappy for ages, and suddenly she brightened up and started taking trouble over her appearance again. Then it finally dawned on me. But when I tried to talk to her about it, she just got ratty and offended, so I was left with these rotten thoughts going round in my head. Then something happened, about a week ago. She must have been dumped by her lover. She’s been shut up in the bedroom most of the time since then, and won’t talk to me. God knows who she’s fallen for – probably one of the Equatorians from the exiles’ group. One thing’s for sure: she’s not pining for me.”
I looked away from his bitter scowl and saw Grace through the half-open door, standing in the hall with a tray of drinks, listening. Unaware of her presence, Adam said, “I had to get away last night. I couldn’t bear it any more.”
“But if you’re right and the affair’s over,” I said, “can’t you just give it some time? These things happen, Adam. Give her a chance to come round and start over again.”
“You haven’t seen her. You haven’t seen the state she’s in. I don’t think there can be any going back.” Adam’s voice was breaking as he spoke. I thought he was about to weep. I looked away, hot with the knowledge that I only had to say, “It’s Hal, Adam. It’s your father who’s seduced your wife,” and the shock alone would have been enough to convert him from this abject wreck into a man ready to wreak murderous vengeance. That would have been it. No more deceit, no more equivocation, just the cruel fact of the case out there to be lived with, one way or another, once and for all, by each one of us – Adam, Efwa, Hal, Grace, Marina eventually, and me. But with a visible effort Adam pulled himself together. So I sat there in silence and watched Grace come in through the door with the tray of drinks trembling in her hands.
“I think we could all do with one of these,” she said.
“That’s always your answer, isn’t it?” Adam snapped back at her.
“You have to stop this, Adam,” Grace said with astounding severity. “I know you’re hurting, but lashing out at those who love you won’t do any good.”
“And just who would that be?’ The sarcasm was as caustic as his stare. “The only one of you who really cares about me is Marina. And you and Hal drove her into hiding years ago. God knows where she is now that I need her.”
Rising to my feet, I said, “You’re not being fair, Adam.”
“Fair! You think there’s anything fair about this world? And as for you – do you imagine I’m blind? Do you think I haven’t watched you taking over my life?”
I was at a loss how best to answer the accusation when Hal’s voice growled from the open door. “Face up to it, Adam,” he said in a voice of calculated derision. “You’ve been given every chance in this life. No one’s responsible for your failures but you.”
“Leave us alone, Hal,” Grace urged, “You’ll only make things worse.”
Hal stood motionless, glaring at his son. “Be quiet, woman. This is between me and him. He’s not angry with you or Martin. It’s me he hates, and he always has done. He hates me because he knows he’ll never be half the man I am. Isn’t that right, Adam?”
I heard Adam wince. When I turned to look at him his eyes were wide, his mouth open as if gasping for breath.
“You know something, you unspeakable fucking bastard?” he said at last. “I wouldn’t be twice the man you are if it meant being in any way like you at all.”
“Get out of my house,” Hal said with cold, suppressed violence. “Get out and don’t come back.”
“Why would I ever want to come back here?” Ignoring Grace’s pleas, Adam brushed past Hal and left the room. I heard the sound of his footsteps crossing the stone flags of the hall, and then that of the heavy studded door banging shut behind him.
From where she stood, staring at her husband in a fierce trance of disbelief, Grace hurried out after him.
Hal reached out a hand for the back of a chair and sat down, staring into the empty, soot-charred recess of the open hearth. Neither of us said a word. Through the window onto the yard I saw Grace leaning to speak to Adam, who sat with his hands gripping the steering wheel of his car. He shook his head several times. Holding on to the open door, Grace stared about her in dismay. There was a last brief exchange before Adam pulled the door shut and drove away. Grace stood with a hand at her mouth, watching him go,
“It’s done,” Hal muttered into the silence of the room. “Once and for all it’s done.”
“Oh God, Hal,” I said, “I think you’ve just lost them all.”
“I know,” he said, “I know.”
“I don’t understand why you had to be so cruel.”
His eyes studied me briefly, and then looked away. “Don’t you?”
“No, I don’t.”
Almost wearily he said, �
��Then consider the possibility that it might have been for his sake.” For a time Hal sat withdrawn in silence before shaking his head. “At least I didn’t lie to him,” he added at last. But he might have been speaking to himself.
I said, “You couldn’t have hurt him much worse if you’d told him the truth.”
“The truth?” Grace demanded from where neither of us had seen her standing at the half-open door to the hall. “What truth?” She advanced into the room, pushing back her wind-dishevelled hair. “What are you talking about?”
When neither Hal nor I answered, she arrived at her own conclusion. “You’re talking about Efwa, aren’t you? You know who she’s been having the affair with.” In the same moment her face blanched with another sickening realization. She turned her fierce, unforgiving eyes on me.
“You,” she said. “It’s you, isn’t it?”
“No, Grace,” I answered at once. “No.”
She seemed instantly to accept the honesty of my unflinching gaze. Either that or some terrible intuition was already breaking across her mind.
“Then who?” she said in a voice charged with all the implacable power of a woman’s desire for truth. “Who?”
*
In the years that followed I often wondered whether disaster might have been averted if I’d stayed on longer at High Sugden than I did that evening. But nothing I might have said could have proved stronger than the fate that had begun to gather about Hal’s head from the moment he first succumbed to his infatuation for Efwa.
In any case, having once realized where the true guilt lay, Grace wanted me out of the house and gone. She assumed that I must have been complicit with Hal all along, and after that she had nothing more to say to me.
Nor do I know what she found to say to Hal. When I left High Sugden to drive back to London, they were sitting in a time-fused silence, waiting for whatever words emerged to shatter it for ever.
I drove back down England through heavy rain. The A1 unspooled through the darkness ahead of me. Every now and then I’d see a sign flash by and would be surprised to discover how far I’d travelled.
The traffic thickened as I entered London. It was well after midnight when I got home and found the envelope that had been pushed through my letterbox. The neat handwriting was unfamiliar to me, but when I unfolded the single page of the letter and began to read, I recognized the sender clearly enough.
Dear Martin,
I am writing this letter because yesterday I have come to your house and you are not there and soon I will be gone from UK. I don’t know what to write because already I think you will think me as a woman who is not good at all. Maybe is so. I have done certain wrong things and I am feeling too too bad for Adam but God will decide. Now I have to go from my house here. Adam has raised his hand to me one time and even I think he would have beat me but he is a good man who thinks it better that he hurts in himself. Maybe I am feeling better if he has beat me. But now he has gone for his father’s house in High Sugden and I don’t know what he will say.
I think now I have to go from UK before the truth can kill us. I have friend who will help me and I know that my family in Adouada has need of me now. After that I don’t know. But I beg you please to tell Adam that I have fear for him. My heart is all hurt and I too sorry for the pain I have give. Now I have my trust in you even as Hal has trust in you. You are our good friend for all of us and we are all in God’s hands.
From your friend Efwa
Throughout the next two days I tried to ring Adam, but got no answer. Then, on the evening of the second day, my own phone rang. It was Hal on the other end. He was so distraught that it took some time for me to piece together what he was trying to tell me.
Earlier that day, a group of children out playing on the moors had found a tidily folded pile of clothes on the edge of the dam beside the ruined mill near the head of Sugden Clough. On top of the pile, held down by a stone, lay a piece of paper with a brief hand-written note, of which they could make no sense.
While the girls were examining the clothes, one of the boys dived into the water. Several feet below the surface he found a white body suspended head down in the murk. The left wrist was tied to the iron axle bar of a cog wheel half-buried in mud.
Some two hours later the first policemen arrived on the scene. Knowing nothing of the laconic, despairing spirit which had once animated the poor drowned body, they too were perplexed by the note. It read quite simply, Coup de Grace.
23
Revenant
Thirty years after those events, the account I gave of them that night inside the water theatre at Fontanalba was not so coherent. I often hesitated. At some points I found it hard to speak at all. Briefly I considered omitting any mention of what had happened between me and Grace, but then I saw how my public loyalty to Hal would be inexplicable without the admission that it was the corollary of private guilt. Even so, I was doing my best to navigate my way past that difficult confession when I recalled the manner in which Grace had once remarked that sooner or later Marina would get the truth out of me. In that moment, Grace’s reproachful figure pressed on my conscience. Nothing, it seemed, could be concealed for ever. And hadn’t I promised there would be no equivocation this time? In any case, what point in telling the truth at this late stage unless that truth was complete?
The long silence after I had finished speaking felt intensified by the sound of falling water. Adam and Marina had come to the cave expecting to hear me confess my guilt, but what they heard was not what they anticipated, and I could feel them striving to adjust. Marina remained withdrawn and inscrutable, cloistered inside her darkness. Adam sat beside her with his hands tightly clasped in his lap, absolutely still. He had been weeping silently as I spoke, and for the first time I was struck by how much his haggard face had come to resemble his father’s with the passing of the years.
“Did Hal ask you to tell us this?” he said at last.
“No – not in so many words.”
“But he knew that you might?”
“I imagine so. I think he must have wanted me to tell you.”
Adam voice was hoarse with grief. “I can’t bear to think what my mother must have gone through.”
Marina remained frozen inside her silence, her face averted as Adam made a visible effort to pull himself together. “There’s been a tragic waste at the heart of all of this,” he declared. “A waste of life. A waste of friendship. A waste of love. It looks as though one way or another we’ve made a mess of everything between us.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “I’m afraid we have.”
“But maybe some of it is still redeemable.”
“I’m hoping so,” I said, perhaps too quickly. “I know that Hal hopes so too’
Adam shook his head. “I don’t know about Hal. I can’t even think about seeing him yet. Right now every nerve in my body is shrieking To hell with him.” He turned incredulous eyes on me. “I mean, how do you forgive a father for stealing your wife, for God’s sake? Or for driving your mother to kill herself?” Again he shook his head, as if to clear it of impossible thoughts. “What kind of saintliness would that take? Part of me is ready to murder him with my own hands for what he did.” His expression had become a white scowl as he spoke. I could sense the old anger and bitterness rekindled inside him as if each word was a breath blown on still-smouldering coals. “Even at the time,” he said, “when I didn’t know the half of it, I hated the two of you more than I’ve ever hated anyone in my whole life.”
“I know,” I said. “I can still feel it.” And I think that we must both have been remembering the moment in the Coroner’s Court thirty years earlier, when having heard me endorse Hal’s plausibly edited account of the events preceding Grace’s death, Adam and Marina had stared across the crowded courtroom at me, both of their faces radiating hatred, and white with the cold, incredulous fury of those who know themselves betrayed.
Quietly Adam said, “But it turns out that you weren’t just pro
tecting Hal, were you?”
The question needed no answer, but it prompted me to say the difficult thing that I thought he needed to hear. “I don’t believe that Hal was just protecting himself either.”
“You mean me?’ he frowned. “And you think that exculpates him?”
“I didn’t say that. But he’s my friend. He was my friend before all this began and he’s been lacerating himself with grief and guilt ever since.
Worriedly aware that Marina had not yet uttered a word, I felt sure that she must be preparing some vehement condemnation of her father. Her face was turned away from me still. She sat motionless in her white cape, a marble statue of contemplation, revealing nothing of her feelings and leaving it to her brother to respond.
“You can’t expect me to feel much in the way of sympathy for Hal right now,” he said. “It’s Efwa I’m thinking about.”
“But wasn’t she as much a victim of all this as the rest of us?” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking to blame her. Not after all this time. What would be the point of that? I’m just wondering what happened to her – after she returned to Equatoria, I mean.” His eyes winced shut. “Chances are she’s dead by now, like so many others, I suppose.”
“Actually she’s alive,” I said quietly.
Adam’s eyes widened again. “You saw her?”
“In Fontonfarom, yes. Somehow she survived the massacre there. She’s been helping to run a makeshift orphanage in the old Middle School building. Of all the people I was looking for on my last trip, she was the only one I found.” I hesitated for a moment before deciding to add, “I’ve got her on video, if you can bear to watch.”
“You filmed her?” Adam exclaimed in disbelief. “What about helping her to get away? Wasn’t there something you could have done for her? Didn’t you think about that?”
“Of course I did. But she wouldn’t come. And she wanted me to film her. She demanded it. She wanted the world to know what was happening in Equatoria. And there was no way she was about to abandon the children in her care. In any case,” I looked up at Adam, “what would there be for her here?”
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