The worst moment was not the actual sight of Leo Jackson but the anticipation of seeing him. Then, when his name was read out, when the policeman on the door went to bring him through, then her heart had begun to flutter alarmingly and the perspiration to break out on her face. She wanted to see this youth who had so cruelly attacked her son, but she was afraid of her own reaction to the sight of him. She might faint, she could feel she might faint, could feel the dizziness begin. She might cry out, a howl of rage or anguish, she didn’t know which sound would rise within her and escape her tightly compressed lips. So the waiting was the worst, the short interval between hearing the name and seeing the boy. Then her agitation subsided rapidly. He was not what she had expected and it was a shock. It calmed her, seeing Leo Jackson. She could not understand it and felt ashamed. He walked so quietly to the witness box, without a trace of that defiance, that cockiness she had expected. And though he was tall, much taller than Joe, and powerfully built, a man’s build not a boy’s, he was not threatening. His voice, when he took the oath, was low but quite clear and he repeated the words fluently, without stumbling, as if they meant something. He replied politely to the initial questions. Well, he would have been told to be polite, at all costs. But could he have managed to sustain such a well-mannered pose if there were not an innate courtesy? She didn’t know. For such a young man he seemed remarkably mature.
Seemed. It was impossible to know. She heard him admit to having taken LSD, to having drunk too much, to having got caught up in a gang, to having attacked Joseph Samuel Kennedy . . . He was admitting it without a trace of emotion. But then, when he was cross-examined, he was suddenly silent. He would explain nothing. He agreed with the facts, that he had, undeniably, been one of the attackers. He had been there, yes. He had held a knife in his hand, yes. But beyond that, nothing. He stood silent, staring straight ahead. Silent, but not insolent. Silent, but not cowed or embarrassed. It was unbearable. She didn’t know why but this silence upset her. He shouldn’t be silent, he had no right to be. She was here to listen to his explanation and none was forthcoming. She wanted to go up to him and shake him and order him to tell her what had happened. She was horrified to realise that she needed the details, from him, from his lips, every last one. She wanted to hear him explain and justify and apologise and beg for mercy. And he didn’t. Until he did so, this distance between her imagination and the reality remained to plague her. It couldn’t be real until Leo Jackson had told her it was in spite of what Joe himself had described. When both the Crown prosecution solicitor and the defence solicitor gave up and Leo Jackson was led away she felt such frustration she bit her lip until it hurt. But still she didn’t feel any desire to kill Leo Jackson for what he had done, that desire the police called ‘natural’ and seemed to expect. When it didn’t emerge, Graham acted as though he was disappointed. They, she and Sam too, hadn’t behaved as they should, there was something not quite right about them, surely.
She suspected Joe might share that view. When Louis came rushing home, straight to the hospital, he’d said, ‘I’d like to kill whoever did this,’ as he stood and looked at Joe, still in intensive care and all wired up. He’d whispered it, but Joe had heard and he smiled. ‘Fucking brute,’ Louis had said, tears in his eyes, an unheard-of sign of emotion from him. If it had been Louis set upon, of course, it would never have happened – he was strong and looked it. He wouldn’t even have been selected, however random the selection. He wasn’t a thug himself but he looked powerful. Joe had always wanted to look like Louis, to play rugby like him and fight like him and just be him. Even being Louis’ brother, known as his brother, had been enough for .a while, though things had changed, inevitably, since Louis had gone away to London. Harriet had tried to get Louis to phone Joe regularly, knowing she’d never get him to write, but it was hopeless, he hardly ever did and Joe minded terribly. But after it happened Louis reinstated himself, though only for a while. He sat with Joe, drove him to and from the out-patients’ clinic to get his plaster checked, then off, helped him walk again, entertained him. But he hadn’t actually talked to him, not properly. He didn’t seem to want to know everything and he hadn’t encouraged Joe to talk about it. ‘There’s no point,’ he’d maintained, when she’d asked, but she knew he was afraid. He was like Sam. He couldn’t talk about it. Women talked. To each other. She and Mrs Armstrong. She’d have to write, as Mrs Armstrong had done. She’d suggest they meet. And talk.
*
She had never expected a reply, nor any acknowledgement. She hadn’t written for that. In her mind’s eye Sheila could see Mrs Kennedy tearing up her letter and flinging it in the fire. Or wastepaper-basket. She envisaged the other mother’s fury, perhaps, her anger that such a letter should be written at all. It was actually a relief when forty-eight hours had gone by and there had been no response – she’d been afraid to answer the telephone, even though she hadn’t put her number on the letter, just in case. And when Alan went to answer it, the few times it rang that weekend, she’d tensed and strained her ears and only relaxed when she heard him naming the caller. Because of course she hadn’t told Alan she’d written. It was not that she feared his anger so much as his intense irritation that she wouldn’t, as he put it, ‘leave go’. That was what he wanted her to do – see sense, face facts, let the past go.
But the past was the present and future too. It had to be lived with. Leo was still their grandson, he could not be disowned. He had to be visited, looked at, talked to, and all the time she was remembering. Months now since she had asked ‘How could you?’ and ‘Why?’ Months. She asked him instead about the routine of the prison. It wasn’t, in fact, called a prison, she knew that, Leo was too young for a proper prison, but the Young Offenders’ Institution was undoubtedly a prison, what else? So she asked about the routine and he replied, in monosyllables, enough for her to glean a few names of jobs and activities and people. She clung on to these, memorised the sequence of events, and knew when, on which day, to ask about the sport, the woodwork, the art. He hated her contrived knowingness, she could see that, but she persisted, forced answers out of him. He never asked her anything. He didn’t seem to want to know about Alan, still called Dad, in spite of all the emphasis at the trial on his having no father, or about his great-grandad. Never enquired, so she did not push much information on him. Occasionally she volunteered something Alan or her father had said, but she didn’t make a thing of it. Once, when she’d had flu and hadn’t been able to go, though she’d been sure to send a message, she’d been upset that Leo hadn’t asked her how she was feeling. Not a word. Just stared at her, arms akimbo, as they always were, eyes fixed on her but without contact. She heard herself rambling on about her illness, how she still felt weak, had no energy, and eventually he had broken in. ‘Don’t come then,’ he’d said. Was it out of concern for her? She didn’t think so.
She asked about him, asked Helen, the probation officer, naturally, about how he was getting on. Fine. Fitted in well. No trouble. He was taking five GCSEs and working hard. Just as he had done at school – always, reports were excellent. He was clever, everyone acknowledged that. And, except for that one day, when he and an unnamed other did what they did, civilised. He wasn’t a lout, he didn’t swear and fight. He was a credit to her mothering, except – always except. An isolated incident. Inexplicable was how it had been described. Inexplicable, and likely to remain so. The only time, she was sure, he had ever taken drugs. She’d seen the expressions of disbelief on the faces of the police when she’d said this, but she firmly believed it. Leo had said so. About all he’d said: someone had given him LSD and he hadn’t ever taken it before, had no idea of its effect. He claimed not to remember anything that had happened afterwards, not until he found himself holding a knife and Joe Kennedy bleeding at his feet . . . Only none of them had believed him. Alan hadn’t, her father certainly hadn’t – ‘Cock-and-bull, tell us another.’ She’d been tempted to put in something about her faith in Leo’s story when she wrote to Mrs
Kennedy but commonsense had stopped her. It wasn’t fitting. A letter of apology ought, in these very special circumstances, to contain no excuses or explanations. It was a gesture, that’s all.
Mrs Kennedy’s reply astounded her. If Harriet had known instinctively that her strange envelope must contain a letter to do with Joe, conveying someone’s sympathy, Sheila was even quicker and more sure about Harriet’s when it came. The moment she picked it up. The postmark for a start, such a nice little place, they’d gone there for their holidays once when she was a child. She could still remember her father hiring a boat and rowing her and her sister out into the middle of the huge lake. It had been thrilling. When she heard where the Kennedys lived she had envied them, a lovely place, quiet, leisurely, pretty. So the postmark and the writing and the very quality of the envelope gave it all away. Hate letters had not been written in an italic hand on long white thick envelopes. No. They’d come in buff envelopes, or cheap blue envelopes, the writing hard to read, the address often incomplete. This, she knew, was from his mother and she had asked for it, she had brought it on herself. Whatever his mother had written, however much it was going to hurt her, she could only blame herself.
Sadly, she put it in her apron pocket and finished the Hoovering. The roar of the machine dulled the worry she felt. Backwards and forwards across the worn carpet she pushed the Hoover, automatically moving the chairs, getting well into the corners, negotiating skirting boards with care. Alan was out, he’d taken the car for its MOT. There was no reason not to read Mrs Kennedy’s letter now. But she finished the Hoovering, put the room to rights, dried the breakfast dishes, put the washing machine on, and then made a cup of tea. Only when the tea was in a mug and she was sitting down at the table, the Daily Mail open in front of her, exactly as she would have been doing at this time on any Wednesday morning, only then did she take the envelope out of her pocket and slit it open. She was ready, if she heard Alan return, to slip it back again and appear engrossed. Smoothing the large sheet of paper out – was it typing paper? she didn’t know – she was surprised how much Mrs Kennedy had written. At first she feared the very length of this letter. Surely it would be a rant, to be so long, someone working up a head of steam. But no. It was the kind of letter she had never even allowed herself to hope for:
Dear Mrs Armstrong,
Your letter was a great shock and I admit it distressed me to be hearing from anyone to do with Joe’s attacker, but all the same, after only very short reflection I was glad to get it.
Quite frankly, until very recently I’ve had no room in my head to think of anyone but Joe and what he has suffered and is still suffering. I haven’t wanted to think about your grandson, or about you. But lately I have actually found myself remembering a great deal I was told about you, and believe me I at no time have blamed you. I know it must be a nightmare for you too and I am not so self-obsessed or selfish that I can shut you out of my mind entirely.
What I wondered was whether it might be a good idea to meet? I admit I don’t quite know why. My husband would say it was a bad idea, that there was no point to it, and I fear Joe himself would be angry. But I feel the same need that you perhaps felt when you wrote to me. I can’t put a name to it. The horror of what happened continues to spoil my life, however hard I try. Joe is not really recovering as he should. I don’t know what to say. It might be a mistake to meet. I don’t know what we would talk about. But I felt suddenly so happy you had written and the idea of meeting just came to me. What do you think? I could drive over to you, any weekday.
I will quite understand if you think there is no point. Thank you in any case for writing. It meant a great deal to me.
Yours sincerely,
Harriet Kennedy
The tea was cold. Sheila poured it down the sink, put the kettle back on, made more tea. God knows how long she’d sat there, dazed. In her head she could hear her father crowing, ‘You’ve been and gone and done it now, lass.’ She had. How was she to answer this letter? She’d never had anyone write to her so openly in her life, as though already they had met. It was so strange, so eerie. She shivered, and put both hands round the mug she was holding, glad of the reassuring warmth of the tea. This woman was not like her, that was clear. She was highly educated. Comfortable with words. Why did she want to meet? What motive could there be? Was it a trick? Did she want to worm her way in and then somehow strike, somehow make Sheila suffer? Well, if so, that was bearable. She was prepared to suffer. She wouldn’t have written her own letter if she hadn’t been privately welcoming a measure of deserved retribution. She wasn’t stupid. She’d known her letter advertised her willingness to be abused. But what about Mrs Kennedy? What did her letter advertise? Sheila was afraid to speculate. There was no one she could discuss it with, except maybe that Helen person who still paid the occasional visit. But she didn’t know when the next call would be due or how to contact her directly. She wouldn’t like to do that anyway, it didn’t appeal to her. And she couldn’t keep Mrs Kennedy waiting, not after a letter like that. It would be rude. Worse, it would be cruel, and there’d been enough cruelty already.
If Mrs Kennedy came, where would they sit? Not in the kitchen. It was poky, there was too much jammed into it. The table was too small, too rickety. So it would have to be in the living-room, and where would Alan go? He was out in the mornings usually, but not absolutely always. And in the afternoons he often watched sport on television and she was out, visiting her father or her sister. Mrs Kennedy wouldn’t come in the evening. She’d want to be back for the boy, four o’clock at the latest, so there was no question of the evening. The morning, then, would be best, but what about lunch? It would take her an hour or so to drive here and she wouldn’t be leaving until well after the boy had gone to school and she’d tidied up, so, say she left just before ten maybe and arrived about half-past eleven, then what about lunch? She’d have to offer her lunch and then what about Alan? He never missed his lunch, it was the worst part of his retirement, providing his wretched lunch. The afternoon, then, would be better, about two o’clock. Mrs Kennedy would likely have to leave at three to be back for her son. The afternoon was clearly best if only she could arrange for Alan to be elsewhere. But how could she be sure he would be? She could invent an errand for him – no, better still, he could take her father to buy his bedding plants. He’d been on about it, had his list written out, sweetpeas, asters, marigold, stocks and dahlias. She’d fix it for next week, once she’d cleared it with Mrs Kennedy. She’d offer her Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday next week and then fix it. Once her father had been promised something it could not be unpromised. Alan was resigned to that. He’d go along with it. Even if it poured down, the promised trip would have to take place on the day and at the precise time fixed. . .
She felt exhausted with all the planning, but went and got a sheet of paper there and then and wrote to Mrs Kennedy that she would be glad to meet and could she offer her a cup of tea or coffee any weekday afternoon the following week except Monday and Friday. It was posted within the hour. Relieved, she turned to other soothing, household, tasks, desperate to get into the rhythm of them before Alan returned and spotted something was up. He was not a sensitive man, but forty-odd years of marriage had at least made him an expert on whether she was flustered or not. She didn’t want to be flustered but one glance in the mirror told all. Red. Red in the face, when usually she was so pale. The way to deal with this agitation was consciously to relax – breathe in, count to three, breathe out, count to three – and take her mind off whatever was disturbing her. So she ironed, though it was not when she usually ironed, and if Alan was smart he’d register this. She did not iron before lunch on a Wednesday morning. Never. She ironed only in the afternoon. It used to be when Woman’s Hour was on until they mucked the time up. But today she ironed, slowly and carefully, and it worked.
Alan noticed nothing. He was distracted himself. Came in frowning, the tic in his cheek working away. ‘One hundred and forty pounds,’ he said a
t once. ‘Damned cheek, they charge what they like these days.’
‘Must have been something wrong,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, there was something wrong all right but not one hundred and forty pounds worth. It was the labour, that was the expense, that’s how they get you.’
‘Well, we need a car.’
‘I know we need a car, but I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to go on running one, that’s the truth, not at this rate.’
The expense of the car was a constant worry. It kept him going for hours, working out what was likely to go wrong next with the car and how much it would cost. It was a seven-year-old Ford Escort, beautifully looked after, bought new and treasured by him. Their first new car, almost their first car. The beginning of easier times, they’d thought. Leo had been as excited as Alan. His one ambition then, aged nine, had been to learn how to drive. Alan had promised to teach him as soon as he was seventeen. Together, they washed and polished and cherished the red car and it had opened out their lives immeasurably. It was never too much trouble for Alan to take her anywhere, though when she’d wondered aloud if she could learn to drive he’d been dismissive. She was too old, he said, her reflexes would be too slow. She’d accepted his verdict. Sixty-three probably had been too old. But if only she’d been able to drive, the journey now to visit Leo would be so much less gruelling – it took so long, taking first the train and then buses, changing from one to another. Alan would drive her there, if she asked, but she couldn’t bear him to be sitting outside, with Leo refusing to speak to him, closing his eyes and keeping them closed and not speaking at all if Alan insisted on being there.
Mothers' Boys Page 6
