‘Oh God!’ she shouts. ‘We had the most awful row this morning.’ She hunches forward. I feel her put her hands to her face and start to shiver.
‘I should tell you this,’ the same policeman continues. He pauses delicately, mindful of the double respect owed to the heavily pregnant bereaved. ‘We tried to contact you this afternoon. A friend of his identified the body. I’m afraid our first impression is suicide.’
When my mother straightens her spine and lets out a cry, I’m overcome by love for her, for all that’s lost – Dubrovnik, poetry, daily life. She loved him once, as he her. Summoning this fact, erasing others, lifts her performance.
‘I should have … I should have kept him here. Oh my God, it’s all my fault.’
How clever, hiding in plain sight, behind the truth.
The sergeant says, ‘People often say that. But you mustn’t, you shouldn’t. It’s wrong to go blaming yourself.’
A deep inhalation and sigh. She seems about to speak, stops, sighs again, gathers herself. ‘I ought to explain. Things weren’t going well between us. He was seeing someone, he moved out. And I started a … His brother moved in with me. John took it badly. That’s why I’m saying …’
She’s got in first with Claude, told them what they were bound to discover. If, in flagrant mood, she were to say now, ‘I killed him,’ she’d be safe.
I hear the rasp of Velcro, the flip of notebook page, the scratch of pencil. She tells them in dulled voice all that she’d rehearsed, returning at the end to her own culpability. She should never have let him drive away in such a state.
The younger man says reverentially, ‘Mrs Cairncross. You weren’t to know.’
Then she changes tack, almost sounds cross. ‘I don’t think I’m taking this in. I’m not even sure I believe you.’
‘That’s understandable.’ This is the paternal sergeant. With polite coughs, he and his colleague stand, ready to leave. ‘Is there someone you can call? Someone who can be with you?’
My mother considers her reply. She’s bent over again, face in hands. She speaks through her fingers in a flat voice. ‘My brother-in-law’s here now. He’s upstairs asleep.’
The guardians of the rule of law might be exchanging a lewd glance. Any token of their scepticism would help me.
‘When the time’s right we’d like a word with him as well,’ the younger one says.
‘This news is going to kill him.’
‘I expect you’d like to be alone together now.’
There it is again, the slender lifeline of insinuation to support my cowardly hope that the Force – Leviathan, not I – will take revenge.
I need a moment alone, beyond the reach of voices. I’ve been too absorbed, too impressed by Trudy’s art to peer into the pit of my own grief. And beyond it, the mystery of how love for my mother swells in proportion to my hatred. She’s made herself my only parent. I won’t survive without her, without the enveloping green gaze to smile into, the loving voice pouring sweets in my ear, the cool hands tending my private parts.
The constabulary leave. My mother mounts the stairs with a plodding tread. Hand firmly on the banister. One-two and pause, one-two and pause. She’s making a repeated humming sound on a fading note, a moan of pity or sadness exhaled through her nostrils. Nnng … nnng. I know her. Something’s building, a prelude to a reckoning. She devised a plot, pure artifice, a malign fairy tale. Now her fanciful story is deserting her, crossing the border as I did this afternoon, but in reverse, past the watchless guard huts, to rise against her, and side with the socially real, the dull quotidian of the working-day world, of human contacts, appointments, obligations, video cameras, computers with inhuman memories. In short, consequences. The tale has turned tail.
Hammered by drink and lost sleep, bearing me upwards, she continues towards the bedroom. It was never meant to work, she’s telling herself. It was just my foolish spite. I’m only guilty of a mistake.
The next step is close, but she won’t take it yet.
TWELVE
WE ARE ADVANCING on slumbering Claude, a hump, a bell-curve of sound baffled by bedclothes. On the exhalation, a long, constipated groan, its approaching terminus frilled with electric sibilants. Then an extended pause which, if you loved him, might alarm you. Has he breathed his last? If you don’t, there’s hope he has. But finally, a shorter, greedy intake, scarred with the rattle of wind-dried mucus and, at the breezy summit, the soft palate’s triumphant purr. The rising volume announces we are very close. Trudy says his name. I feel her hand extend towards him while he’s on a downward plunge through the sibilants. She’s impatient, she needs to share their success and her touch on his shoulder isn’t gentle. He coughs into half-life, like his brother’s car, and takes some seconds to find the words to pose his question.
‘What the fuck?’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Who?’
‘Jesus! Wake up.’
Drawn from the deepest phase of sleep, he has to sit on the edge of the bed, so the complaining mattress says, and wait for his neural circuitry to restore him to the story of his life. I’m young enough not to take such wiring for granted. So, where was he? Ah, yes, attempting to murder his brother. Truly dead? Finally, he’s Claude again.
‘Well blow me down!’
Now he feels like getting up. It’s 6 p.m., he notes. Enlivened, he stands, stretches his arms athletically with a creak of bone and gristle, then moves between bedroom and bathroom cheerily whistling, with full vibrato. From the light music I’ve heard I know this to be the theme tune from Exodus. Grandiose, in a corrupted romantic style, to my newly formed ear, redemptive orchestral poetry to Claude’s. He’s happy. Meanwhile, Trudy sits in silence on the bed. It’s brewing. At last, in dulled monotone she tells him of the visit, the kindness of the police, the discovery of the body, the early presumption as to cause of death. To each of these, delivered as bad news, Claude chimes, ‘Marvellous.’ He leans forward with a moan to tie his laces.
She says, ‘What did you do with the hat?’
She means my father’s fedora with the broad brim.
‘Didn’t you see? I gave it to him.’
‘What did he do with it?’
‘He had it in his hand when he left. Don’t worry. You’re worried.’
She sighs, thinks for a while. ‘The police were so nice.’
‘Bereaved wife and all.’
‘I don’t trust them.’
‘Just sit tight.’
‘They’ll be back.’
‘Sit … tight.’
He delivers these two words with emphasis and a sinister break between them. Sinister, or fractious.
Now he’s in the bathroom again, brushing his hair, no longer whistling. The air is changing.
Trudy says, ‘They want to talk to you.’
‘Of course. His brother.’
‘I told them about us.’
There’s a silence before he says, ‘Bit dumb.’
Trudy clears her throat. Her tongue is dry. ‘No it isn’t.’
‘Let them find out. Or they’ll think you’re hiding something, trying to stay one step ahead.’
‘I told them John was depressed about us. One more reason for him to—’
‘OK, OK. Not bad. Might even be true. But.’ He trails away, uncertain of what it is he thinks she should know.
That John Cairncross might have killed himself for love of her, if she hadn’t killed him first – there’s both pathos and guilt in this recursive notion. I think she doesn’t like Claude’s casual, even dismissive tone. Just my guess. However close you get to others, you can never get inside them, even when you’re inside them. I think she’s feeling wounded. But she says nothing yet. We both know it will come soon.