“I gather then, from what Miss Susan said, that there was more mischief to come from Dr Brinsley,” she nudged gently.
“Most definitely, yes,” Gerard confirmed. “A great deal more, but I will say right away that he did settle down eventually.”
The certainty of his reassurance surprised her and simultaneously collapsed most of her thinking.
“Nothing much happened for a couple of weeks after Sue and I had that row except that I began hearing more and more rumours about Mark and his drinking,” he continued. "I barely saw him, but I wasn’t overly bothered by his lack of communication. I felt that if he was really in trouble, he would call or contact me in some way and we could take it from there. I was right as it turned out, though not in the way I expected.
"Very quickly, the rumours became really wild. Mark was arriving late for lectures and, although not drunk, he was usually described by the students as being ‘in his cups’ or some similar phrase. They all thought it hilarious. Some said they had seen him wandering erratically down the main night club strip in the city in the early hours of the morning. Another, who had a part-time job as a barman in one of the night clubs, swore he had served Dr Brinsley several large scotch whiskies one night to the point where the bouncers had to be called to escort him off the premises. Then a second empty scotch bottle was found in his office waste paper bin, and one day he didn’t turn up for lectures at all and nobody knew where he was. At that point, the head of the School of Chemistry was instructed to read him the riot act, which he duly did, and everyone waited for Mark to return to his senses. Unfortunately, he didn’t and the stories just kept multiplying.
"Nobody had any real idea about what was happening to him during this time. He was living alone and he called nobody. I don’t know whether he spoke or wrote to his parents in Canada, or whether Janet’s parents heard from him. If they didn’t, then it was probably just as well. According to the gossip he was beginning to make a serious nuisance of himself. I tried to call him at home but all I ever got was his answering machine. At work his phone was sometimes answered by one of the people in his laboratory or else just left to ring. I gather his staff got fed up with saying that Mark wasn’t there, that they didn’t know where he was or when he would be back, and they could take a message but all the messages from the previous week were still sitting on his desk waiting to be answered.
"I talked to Sue about my increasing concerns one evening and, to my surprise, she remained very calm. She listened to what I had to say, held my hand and seemed understanding. She had become more relaxed as contact between me and Mark became less. She had stopped smoking, at least around the house, and I noticed that we began sharing jokes again about everyday things when we talked. But towards Mark, she remained implacably hostile. He was not to come near our house under any circumstances.
"‘Be there for him if you must, Ger,’ she said, ‘but remember, you cannot help him. If he has hit the bottle, then he is not the same Mark as we used to know. He has changed, and if he is going to come out of it, he will require more support than you can ever give him. He is going to need professional help. He is a different man, and you are going to have to leave him to go to his own hell in his own way and come out of it in his own way too. You will not be able to stop him and if you try, he will only take you with him. He is not your friend any more, Ger. He is a different Mark. Let him go.’
“It was very strong and powerful stuff and utterly damning, and she was quite forceful about it. And it was a message she repeated to me over and over again through the following days. She was prepared to be sympathetic to Mark from a distance but she was not going to have him anywhere near us. That was all there was to it as far as she was concerned.”
“It certainly sounds as though your friend had gone over the edge,” Aunt Gwendoline agreed. “And I suppose it should not have been a surprise. After all that had happened, there was probably very little in his life at that moment to hold him on the right side of rationality. Maybe that is what Susan was trying to tell you, although breaking your Chatterwood vase does seem a melodramatic way of doing so.”
Gerard paused and forced a deep breath into his lungs. He had forgotten about Aunt Alice’s vase. He looked at his elderly aunt sitting quietly with her spaniel peacefully chin on paws at her feet and wondered whether all of his story, apart from the breaking of his vase, had not simply passed straight over her head.
“She didn’t smash it then,” he answered patiently. “That came later. Aunt Alice’s vase did not get smashed until Mark sobered up. He did recover, and it was only then that Sue swiped it off its pedestal and walked out.”
Aunt Gwendoline nodded, but she could not accept the reassurance that her grand-nephew clearly felt. Nothing stirred in the room around her to tell her why the story he was telling her was not harmless and it was that absence of any shiver in her surroundings that bothered her. There should be something, some ripple somewhere to indicate the nature of the danger that was approaching him. But there was nothing. No skyfire shedding its stars blazed in front of her, no engine noise buzzed in her ears, and only a yawn escaped from Rani lying at her feet. She cast a sideways glance at the aspidistra.
“You’re a good girl, our Gwen. Keep the family together for me. Look after them.”
“You’re not helping, Mother,” she muttered silently to it.
She returned to her grand-nephew. “Gerard, dear boy, I do appreciate your indulging an old lady with your story and I hope you will stay until you have finished it. But in the meantime, perhaps we can have another pot of tea to help settle our dinner. Orange Pekoe, I think. Will you help me with the tray?”
She rose cautiously to her feet, stiffened once more by sitting for so long, and Rani and Gerard followed her out to the kitchen.
“Poor Dr Brinsley,” she fussed as she filled the kettle. “It does make one wonder how best to help the poor man. He must have suffered terribly.”
Three incandescent five-pointed stars falling to earth pressed their way into her thoughts, but she brushed them aside.
“Violence is a terrible thing and it does terrible things to people,” she continued. “And drink is no answer, of course.”
Images of her father switched on in her mind, pictures of the much loved figure swaying on the doorstep, finally home from the workman’s club where he had gone to try and drown the demons left behind in his imagination by his time in the trenches of the Great War.
“Poor men,” she sighed. “Poor, poor men, all of them.”
She froze in her setting of the tea tray.
“All three of them,” she repeated, quietly startled. “All three of them are men.”
She had no idea where the thought came from, but the force of it left her with no room for doubt. The look on Gerard’s face told her that she was not making sense.
“Now why did I say that?” she smiled to him. “It must be the lateness of the hour.”
But she was suddenly certain Susan was not among the three flaring stars burning out before their time. They were all men. She indicated the tray.
“If you can carry that in for us, we can continue with your story, because from what you keep telling me Dr Brinsley did eventually recover from his experiences unscathed. Am I right?”
Chapter 25
“Seemingly so,” Gerard answered as they resettled in their chairs. "And the key word is ‘eventually’. In the short term, he was quite definitely scathed. As I said, I had very little idea of what Mark was doing during this time. He didn’t return any of my calls and while I don’t think he was deliberately avoiding me I certainly didn’t see anything of him. That was until very late one night, sometime after midnight, Sue and I were suddenly woken by a disorganised hammering on our front door.
"We were completely startled and both awake in an instant. I switched on several lights and went to see what on earth was going on. Sue grabbed a dressing gown and stayed back in the safety of the bedroom.
"‘Who is it
?’ I shouted through the door.
"There was more hammering and I heard my name called out in a muffled reply, so I opened the door and there was Mark. He was obviously drunk, barely holding himself up against the door frame and with an inebriate’s grin on his face. He was dishevelled and disorderly with mud all over his shoes where he had walked across the garden beds.
"‘Hello, Gerry. Hi there, Sue,’ he shouted out in a cheerfully slurred greeting that must have been heard by all the neighbours. He then took a step forward and collapsed full length on the hall carpet.
"Sue had followed me to the door once she had heard Mark’s voice and she was clearly not amused. She did not say anything. She just looked down at him with an angry stare, and then at me without changing her expression. She gave a shiver although it was not cold, then wrapped her dressing gown more firmly around herself and strode back to our bedroom where she very solidly shut the door.
"I did what I could for Mark. He was stinking of whisky but I managed to haul him fully inside. He was not unconscious but his legs wouldn’t hold him, so he was no help when I tried to stand him up. In his drunken state he seemed to think the whole business very funny. I dragged him into the bathroom where I dunked his head unceremoniously in some cold water and finally dumped him on the bed in the spare room with a plastic bucket and some old towels all around him. At one o’clock in the morning, I could only agree with Sue that he was being more than a nuisance.
"Sue was rigid when I got back into bed. I could hear from her breathing that she was fiercely awake. I tried to say something to her but she turned over without uttering a word. Later on, I heard Mark go to the bathroom where he was strenuously sick, then I heard the running water as he tried to clean up after himself. I dozed off after that, so I don’t know whether Sue got any sleep or not. All I know is that she was very silent over breakfast and was smoking again.
"Mark appeared just as we were finishing. He was very pale and shaking and gave a good impression of being hugely sorry for the trouble he had caused. Sue was distant with him but did manage to smile at him like an aggrieved friend rather than as an avenging angel.
"‘I made a bit of a mess, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘I hope it’s not too bad.’
"‘Gerry cleaned it up,’ she replied. ‘For which you had better be grateful because if it had been me who had to do it one of us would not now be sitting here at this table.’
"Mark grinned sheepishly to her and sipped at his coffee. He made a superb effort of looking for all the world like a contrite schoolboy grovelingly grateful for escaping his just punishment. I took him home on my way to work and had a stiff word with him.
"‘It’s gone far enough, Mark. You have to stop. You’re getting a stinking reputation around the university and you’re becoming a laughing stock. For God’s sake, how do you think Janet would react if she knew what you were like at the moment? She’d be disgusted. You’d never do it to her so why are you doing it to us? She loved you, Mark, and you’re letting her down. I don’t know what she would say if she was here.’
"‘That’s the whole point,’ he answered, suddenly belligerently sober. ‘She’s not here. Those bastards took her away from me and they took our baby away from us too, from both of us. And they got away with it. They had “no case to answer” if you remember. They raped and killed her and the law said it didn’t matter, they had no case to answer. If they had, then I wouldn’t have to be doing this. But they didn’t and she’s not here. And if she was here, she wouldn’t have to say anything to me. But she’s not, and if she is looking down at me at this moment, then she knows and understands. So don’t tell me what she’d say, Gerry, because you wouldn’t know.’
"With that he seemed to run out of steam, and he sagged where he stood.
"‘I’m sorry, Gerry,’ he finished. ‘You’re a good friend, the best, and probably the only one I’ve got at the moment that I can rely on. I’m sorry, and I didn’t mean to do that to you, to get angry with you I mean. I’ll try for it not to happen again, but don’t tell me that Janet and our baby were nothing. I’m sorry.’
"‘Pull yourself together, Mark,’ I urged him gently. ‘This isn’t the way to get over things and you know it. If you need help at any time, you know you can call me. You know that. But only you can sort out whatever it is that is burning you up for yourself. I can’t do it for you. All I can do is help. I can’t tell you how to live.’
"He nodded an acknowledgement and I left him to go and sleep off his hangover. I didn’t see him again for a good few days after that and I resisted the temptation to call him. The whole incident had disturbed me deeply and I tried to come to terms with what was happening to him. It was obvious that he had tried hard to get through his grief and anger at Janet’s death. He had doggedly faced the world and the press tribe immediately after her murder and he had hung on as long as he could to the hope that a just verdict would be delivered against her murderers. And when that did not eventuate he tried to exhaust himself in his work. But in the end, none of it was enough. I began to realise how deep were the scars that had been inflicted on him.
"‘If she was here, she wouldn’t have to say anything to me. But she’s not, and if she is looking down at me at this moment, then she knows and understands.’
“It was those particular words of his that kept coming back to me. I don’t know why they worried me so much and in the end they didn’t matter, because he did eventually sober up and go back to being the respectable university senior lecturer in chemistry that he was employed to be. But I can still remember him saying them to me as if they had some deep significance for him, which they probably did at the time. I only wish they had seen the end to the whole business, but they didn’t.”
Chapter 26
“Aunt Gwendoline, are you all right?”
“Yes, dear,” she answered. “Quite all right. I have just been sitting for too long. It happens when one gets older.”
She was tired and was beginning to think it was time for her bed, but she had suddenly felt cold down one side of her body and the weight of the hand was once again pressing down on her left shoulder. She shivered and tried to brush it off with her right hand and her fingers felt the familiar, swollen knuckles that had spent a lifetime scrubbing and cooking to keep the family free from all manner of want and harm even through the most desperate of times. It demanded that she sit still and pay attention and she acknowledged in its grip the same determination that had shaped its life, the refusal to be bowed by circumstance and be denied a few brief moments of begrudgingly offered joy during the three score and seven years it knew. She looked down at Rani. There was a knowingness in the dog’s eyes that looked unblinkingly up at her, so much so that she had to avoid their gaze. She tightened her shawl around her and accepted the hand, and sat more straight in her chair.
“So, that first night on which you experienced your friend’s drunkenness was not the only occasion it happened,” she summarised. She felt the grip relax and the warmth return to her body.
“No, it was not,” confirmed Gerard. "And it got a lot worse before it got better. Sue went back to smoking in the house and all the easing of tensions that had come from the previous weeks when Mark had been physically distant from us evaporated the instant he fell in through our front door. I suggested to Sue that we start planning our next holiday and I collected some brochures from the travel agent. But although we looked through them together, she remained indifferent to them and strangely sad as if it was all irrelevant and not going to happen. I might be confusing memories here because that is what did happen in the end. She smashed Aunt Alice’s vase and walked out and we never did go on our holiday.
"Mark disappeared from our lives for a few days but he was soon back. The telephone rang at seven thirty one morning, just as we were finishing breakfast.
"‘I’m sorry to bother you so early but we have a friend of yours, a Dr Mark Brinsley, down here at the police station. He has given us your telephone number as
someone who could come and collect him.’
"‘It’s for you,’ said Sue.
"The police sergeant at the desk was very polite but formal as they brought Mark up from the detention cells where, apparently, he had spent the past few hours. He had been delivered there after causing a disturbance outside a night club in the city and he was still breathing thick whisky fumes over everyone.
"‘Your friend is a very lucky individual,’ the sergeant advised me while focussing on Mark that stare that policemen and head masters learn as part of their trade. ‘The proprietors of the establishment where he caused a ruckus last night have decided to be forgiving on this occasion and not press charges. So on this occasion, and I stress it will only be on this occasion, we too will let the matter rest with a word of caution. But next time it may well be very different. Sign here if you will, sir.’
"Mark signed for his belongings and followed me unsteadily out into the world again. I was furious with him.
"‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, Mark?’ I began.
"‘Thanks for coming, Gerry,’ he replied. ‘I couldn’t think of anyone else.’
"‘But what the hell were you doing, getting so drunk you get into a fight outside a night club? For God’s sake, Mark, that’s not you. What’s happened to you that I get a call at breakfast time to come and collect you from the police station?’
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