Eager to Please

by Julie Parsons

‘Shh.’ Rachel knelt down beside her again.

  ‘The thing is, I’m worried about what it’ll be like for him. Afterwards. How will he feel? I want this, I don’t want to go on like this, but I don’t want him to suffer. I’m scared he’ll feel guilty. That’s why I wanted to ask you.’ She paused, her breathing laboured.

  ‘You wanted to ask me what?’ Rachel looked down into her face.

  ‘Oh, nothing, it’s nothing.’

  ‘No, go on, tell me.’

  Clare closed her eyes, then opened them looking directly in Rachel’s.

  ‘I want to know how you felt, after you killed your husband. Did you feel any guilt? What was it like for you all those years in prison? Could you bring yourself to remember him, the way it had been before?’

  Rachel stood up and moved away.

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ she said. Her voice was measured, controlled. ‘How many time do I have to say it. I did not kill my husband. Yes, I admit I shot him, but I didn’t kill him. It was an accident. It was my brother-in-law who did it. No one would believe me. In some ways I don’t blame them. I should have told the truth right from the start. But I didn’t. I lied. And my lies were found out.’

  She sat down on the side of the bed.

  ‘And yes,’ she said, ‘I did feel guilt. I felt dreadful guilt. I still feel dreadful guilt. But I feel other things too.’ She handed Clare the glass of juice and the pills. She waited until she had swallowed them, then she sat back and listened to her breathing. Until it was slow and shallow.

  ‘If he is human he will feel guilt.’ Her words were soft, her voice gentle. ‘But he will get over it, like I did.’

  She stood up and turned off the television. She turned back towards the bed. She bent down and stared into Clare’s face, watching her closed eyelids flicker. Then she smoothed her thin hair back from her forehead and stepped through the door into the garden.

  Outside it was still warm. It had been hot earlier in the day. The kind of heat that brings a garden to life, she thought. And she thought of how she had spent that afternoon.

  ‘It’s as if you can see all the plants actually growing, the energy flowing through them,’ she had said to Ursula Beckett as they walked together through the garden centre. They stopped beside a bed filled with irises. Their flowers were tightly furled, like small neat umbrellas, but as they stood beside them, she noticed that one of the petals, white, tinged with pale blue, had begun to edge its way free.

  Today they were on their own.

  ‘Would you like to come with me?’ Ursula had asked her as they said goodbye at the beach that day. ‘If you’re interested, that is. There’s a garden I’m designing, out past Bray. I need to organize my stock for it. There’s this wonderful nursery I go to. The same family have owned it for years. You’d enjoy it.’

  They had driven off the dual carriageway and taken a turn that led them up a winding wooded road to an old stone farmhouse. Ursula had told her how kind these people had been to her when she started her business. They had helped and encouraged her, shared their knowledge with her, and they had introduced her to her husband.

  ‘My lovely Daniel,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to meet him. He’s such a sweetheart. I know you’d like him. He seems a bit gruff when you meet him first, but that’s because of his job. He runs a security company. He’s under a lot of pressure, there’s always a lot of money involved. But when you get to know him, underneath all that macho stuff, he’s a dote.’

  She was beautiful, this woman whom Daniel had married. He had chosen well. Rachel watched her as she walked ahead of her through the rows of plants. She was graceful and confident, sure of her place in the world. Rachel compared them, one to the other, and felt awkward and clumsy.

  ‘So, tell me,’ she said as they stopped to sit on an oak bench, beside an arbour covered with climbing roses, ‘tell me how you met.’

  Ursula explained. A number of years ago, there had been a terrible spate of robberies out here. It was far enough from the city so the roads were clogged with snow in the winters, but close enough so the glow from the lights just over the horizon seeped into the night sky. Men had come in a van in the early hours of the morning. They carried shotguns and iron bars. Black balaclavas covered their faces. They knew what they wanted. Money, jewellery, silver, paintings, furniture. It happened more than once. After the third time, when the family had been tied up in the cellar and threatened, they got sense. They called in a security company.

  ‘As luck would have it, I was here the day Daniel came to see them. We kind of started chatting, and then you know the way it is, one thing led to another, he took my phone number, and then he called me and we went out together. And somehow we ended up getting married. It was very unexpected. I was planning on going back to the States where my family live.’

  ‘What brought you to Ireland in the first place?’ Rachel kept her face turned from Ursula’s gaze.

  ‘Oh, the usual Irish-American thing. I was mad about the music and the culture, and I came over to trace the ancestors. I had relations who were living out here. They had a big farm down the road. Sold now, houses built all over it. But back then my aunt was a keen gardener. She got me going, got me interested. I never thought of staying here permanently. I was always about to go home. I even had a boyfriend waiting for me. But there you go. That’s life. Here I am. Married with children.’

  ‘And how long ago was that?’

  ‘Oh, let me see. Laura is four. Jonathan is seven. So I guess it must be eight years or so. Yeah, that’s right. It’s our anniversary the week after next. We’ll be having a party. You must come.’

  Eight years ago, when she had been in prison for four years. The worst four years of her life. She thought of it now as she sat on the wooden bench, stroking the smooth grain with her fingertips, feeling the sun on her face, listening to the sound of a woodpigeon in the branches of an ash tree nearby. Further away a cow bellowed, one long drawn-out note. A warning sound. And the noise of prison sounded in her ears. The shouts, the threats, the screams. The clanging of metal on metal. And the solitary loneliness within it all.

  ‘So, you must miss your family. Whereabouts in America are they?’

  ‘They’re in Boston. They come over quite often to visit. And I go back to see them every year. I take the kids with me. Daniel won’t come. He doesn’t like to fly. He says if he could sail across the Atlantic he’d have no problem. He likes boats. God knows why.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  She smiled and grimaced. ‘Can’t stand them. I get seasick real easily. Daniel has a yacht. He’s in love with it, I’m convinced. “She”, as he insists on calling it, “she’s” moored, or whatever you call it, in the harbour in Dun Laoghaire. It’s the only thing we disagree about. He wants to go sailing on the weekends, and I want to stay in my garden.’

  ‘And what about Daniel’s family? Oh, sorry,’ she paused, ‘now I’m the one being nosy.’

  ‘No, not at all, it’s fine.’ Ursula patted her on the knee, her touch warm and generous. Inclusive. Confiding. ‘Daniel has a kind of a tragic story in his background. He had a brother, a younger brother. He was murdered, years ago. His wife killed him. It was terrible. And what was worse, if anything could be worse, she tried to implicate Daniel in the whole thing. She said that they’d been having an affair and her husband had found out, and there’d been a dreadful row and that Daniel had shot him. Of course, it was nonsense and no one believed her. But it was terrible for the family at the time. Daniel’s mother never got over it. She died not long afterwards, from alcohol. And his father, too, suffers that way.’

  His wife killed him. How strange to hear it said like that, so bluntly, so matter-of-fact. His wife killed him. She wanted to say the words out loud, try them out for size.

  ‘You’re very quiet.’ Ursula leaned towards her, looking into her face. ‘Have I shocked you?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘Of course not. I was just wondering, what happened to the wife? Did
she go to prison?’

  ‘She most certainly did. She got a life sentence. Daniel says they’ll never let her out. She’s bad through and through. You know, I’m an American, and we have a different approach to questions of justice. I think that someone like that, who commits murder, then tries to blame another person, deserves the death penalty.’ She paused and looked again at Rachel. ‘Now you’re shocked, aren’t you? That’s not a popular sentiment here, I know. My friends always tell me to shut up when I get going on the subject, but I’m afraid that’s the way I feel.’

  Rachel said nothing in reply. She had thought about death often. She had wanted to die more than once. She turned her wrist over so the scar shone whitely in the sunshine. She fingered it gently. The skin still felt different even after all this time. She had tried to open her radial artery one day, using a sharp piece of plastic she had broken from a biro. Blood had flowed all over her clothes, all over her bedding. She had felt sick and light-headed. She had held her arm away from her body and watched the blood drip on to the floor until the screws found her. And that was the end of that.

  ‘Come on.’ Ursula stood up. ‘I’ve got work to do. And you’re going to help me. You know something about plants, don’t you? I can tell. I have a feeling that you’re quite a gardener, that your garden at home is something special, am I right?’

  What could she say? How could she answer? That it was something special, that it had been something special. That it had been beautiful and precious. She smiled up at her and stood.

  ‘Once,’ she said, ‘once I had a lovely garden. But then we moved away, and I’ve never been able to get it right since. But now, perhaps, I will.’

  She stood in the doorway and listened for the sound of Clare Bowen’s breathing, then heard the phone in the corridor outside, ringing. It was Andrew. He was drunk.

  ‘You can go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll be home in ten minutes.’

  ‘I’ll wait, I don’t mind.’

  ‘No.’ His voice was loud and insistent. ‘No, I don’t want you to stay. I want you to go. Do you understand me? Do I make myself clear?’

  She listened again for the gentle sound of Clare’s breath. Then she left the room, and left the house. It wasn’t far from the quiet road where the Bowens lived to the sea road. She walked quickly, then broke into a run. Her stride was smooth and fluid. She had been running regularly along the west pier every day. Her breath flowed evenly in and out of her nostrils. She ran faster, the thick soles of her trainers cushioning her ankles and knees on the hard concrete of the footpath. All around her was dark and still. There was hardly any traffic. She ran on, smelling the sea before she saw it. The tide was out. She could taste the salt on her lips and feel the thick black mud that lay just beneath the sandy surface, the way it would ooze through her toes. Soon she saw the shape of the trees beside the DART station. She ran down the hill to the car park and pushed her way through the bushes. It was very quiet here. Ahead she could see something white, fluttering, the tattered remnants of the crime scene tape. She bent down and ducked beneath it. She saw the dark shape where the guards had cleared the undergrowth away from the place where Judith had lain. She sat down on the ground, then lay back, flat, staring up at the sky. There was no moon tonight, but the stars were bright and clear. She rolled over and rubbed her face in the earth.

  She thought of the offer that Ursula Beckett had made her. To come and stay for a couple of days, while her husband was away.

  ‘He’s going sailing with some of his friends from the yacht club. I don’t like being on my own with the kids. The au pair is useless. She’s just another kid too. I’ll give her the weekend off. Come and stay, it’ll be fun. I’d like it.’

  ‘What should I do, Judith?’ she whispered. ‘Should I do it? Will it be worth it? Will it help?’

  She turned on her right side and pressed her ear to the ground. She listened. Then she lay back and looked up again at the stars. She smiled and spoke again. ‘Goodbye, Judith, and thank you. For your love and kindness. For your generosity. For helping me choose how I would live my life in the future. Rest now, rest in peace.’

  The tears ran from her eyes. She pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Deep sobs shuddered from her body as she rocked herself from side to side, listening to the murmur of the sea as slowly the tide crept in across the ridges of sand. She had planned what she would do when she left prison. Worked it all out. Every step, every move. And now it was working. She was on her way. Soon she would have what she wanted. Soon it would come. She rocked herself some more. She closed her eyes. And saw her future so clearly now in the darkness.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  IT WAS ONLY an hour and a half by train from the centre of London, but it was a landscape unlike anything that Jack had ever seen before. Huge square fields, ten acres at least, densely covered by a grid of wire which was supported at each corner by tall wooden poles and draped with row after dense green row of long vine-like plants. Small brick cottages with tiled roofs the colour of dried blood stood neatly by the railway line, their gardens packed with summer flowers. And every now and then the sea of green was interrupted by what he realized must be oast houses, their conical snouts pointing skywards. So these were hop fields, these strange unnatural structures like giant vineyards. Or was it hop gardens, wasn’t that what they were called, he vaguely remembered, thinking of stories of happy cockneys picking hops in their summer holidays or some such thing. He sat back into his seat and clutched a cardboard cup of lukewarm coffee, staring out as field after field whipped past.

  It had been a very early start this morning. The six o’clock flight from Dublin to Heathrow, the train to Paddington, the tube to London Bridge, and then another train out through all those commuter towns with quaint English names like Chislehurst, Petts Wood, Orpington and finally to Tunbridge Wells in Kent. He wasn’t convinced that it would be worth the effort. But he was intrigued by the phone call he had received yesterday morning. It was from Elizabeth Hill.

  ‘I am phoning you,’ she said, ‘because I have just read in today’s Irish Times of the arrest and questioning of a man who, from the description in the paper, I recognize as my ex-husband. And I am absolutely stunned that you would think that he would have had anything to do with my daughter’s death. It is inconceivable that he would have harmed her. I cannot understand what you think you are doing.’

  He had explained that they had sufficient evidence to arrest him. And they anticipated that they would have a sufficiently strong case with which to charge him. He’s definitely, Jack told her, in the frame.

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘You’re wrong about this, Mr Donnelly. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, what kind of logic you’re using. I don’t even care what evidence you think you have against him. You are absolutely and utterly wrong.’

  A sudden pang of anxiety had made his stomach twist, his mouth go dry. She was wrong, of course she was wrong, but why would she rush to defend the man who so obviously hated her? This was the question he pondered as a taxi drove him from the station at Tunbridge Wells, through the narrow lanes, the hop fields towering above them as they passed by, and into the forest where Elizabeth Hill now lived. It was, he thought, like something from one of his daughters’ story books. All darkness and mystery, with the sun pushed out of sight by the trees that crowded in on either side of the road. Jack imagined what it must be like at night-time. Pitch black and silent, except for the occasional hoot of an owl. And he smiled at the thought. The kids would love the idea of it.

  The taxi slowed and stopped at a five-barred gate.

  ‘I might as well leave you here. It’s not much further, just around that bend in the road.’ The driver jerked his head in the direction. Jack fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a handful of pound coins. He counted them out and dropped them into the man’s upturned palm.

  ‘You a friend of hers from Ireland?’ The driver twisted his thick neck around
to get a better look at him.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Do you know her?’

  He shrugged, then pulled out his receipt book and began to fill it in. ‘Not really, but everyone hereabouts knows who she is. She’s the official artist for the nature reserve. She does all kinds of stuff. Calendars, cards, posters. Birds and animals, all very pretty. Not my taste though. I prefer the other kind of birds, if you know what I mean.’

  God, Jack thought, bloody taxi drivers.

  ‘So, she lives by herself here, does she? Must be pretty lonely.’

  ‘By herself. You obviously don’t know her very well. She’s always got a lodger or some such staying.’ And the man sniggered, his jowls shaking. ‘She’s a bit of a one really. But then you know what artists are like.’

  Jack waited until the car had driven off before he began to walk along the lane. His feet made no sound as they scuffed through the fallen pine needles. The air smelt fresh and sharp with the scent of resin. He suddenly felt a long, long way from home. He thought of the drive from the station. How neat and tidy all the hedgerows had been. No tattered plastic bags hanging from the branches of the hazel and wild roses. All the signs on the road were freshly painted, perfectly legible. And there was no litter, no abandoned cars or dumped black plastic sacks oozing with someone else’s rubbish. The villages they had passed through had village greens and he had even seen a pond with ducks, and a cricket pitch, with a quaint little wooden pavilion. It was very English, very afternoon tea and cucumber sandwiches. Very different.

  Elizabeth Hill’s cottage was different too. It was built of old brick, a variety of colours, muted reds, pinks, creamy yellows, and it was half-timbered. The roof was steeply pitched, with tall ornate chimney pots. The windows were small, the panes diamond-shaped, shining in the sunlight, and the top half of the front door was open, fastened back against the wall. He stood and looked inside. It gave directly into what he supposed was her sitting room. It was dark, shadowy, except for the bright spotlight mounted on the ceiling, which shone down on to a drawing board, a sheet of paper, and a woman’s fair head bent over her work. He stood outside and watched. She didn’t look up. He waited, his hand on the latch.