‘She doesn’t need to know, does she?’ says Davy.
‘We’d have to rely on her not coming here to chat to the hotel staff. I know Pamela, and she will. She’ll want to know if he died alone, if anyone helped him – well, you would, wouldn’t you? I want you to go through his data, Davy – texts and emails. Discreetly. Make sure there’s nothing that might … upset anybody – shame him, or us. Know what I mean?’
Davy nods.
Join the force, get divorced. Wasn’t that the saying? Not such a surprise that Stanton’s marriage had been foundering. Common enough, and yet, if you could deceive your nearest and dearest, it spoke of other deceptions. Slipperiness. A lack of empathy.
Harriet is saying, ‘He should already be ashamed.’ But she has said it ever so sadly and Davy understands that Stanton is as big a disappointment to her as he is to Davy.
He looks around the room for Stanton’s phones – work and private – and finds them among the folds of his trousers on the lady chair by the window.
Perhaps Stanton was looking for love, Davy thinks, pummelling down the stairs of the George and out onto the street. He notices how he’s trying to sympathise with Stanton, to understand him, just like he always did with his father after he left his mother. Or is love a euphemism – a place to stop and lay your head? And why couldn’t that place be alone? What’s so bad about being alone?
Sometimes, his father said, being with someone can be the worst feeling in the world. Davy had plucked up the courage to ask him, during a visit to Whitstable where his dad lived with ‘new wife’ Sharon (though in fact they’d been married for fifteen years, ‘new wife’ being the term coined by his mother, said with disgusted mouth).
Davy felt he needed to know why their life, when Davy was a boy, had fallen apart. He felt he needed to know why he’d been left with a mother who didn’t get up from one day to the next, so that Davy had to cook, clean, take out the bins, pull open the curtains with some platitude in a cheery sing-song voice – a tic that never left him. Desperate edge, of course.
Davy didn’t say it like that to his dad, kicking at pebbles on the seafront. His dad knew what he was getting at, though, and was quick to leap to his own defence, as if Davy were not a son asking for help but a high court judge, passing sentence on fatherly failing.
‘There was nothing else I could’ve done,’ his dad said. ‘I was going under.’
And Davy thought, yes there was. You could have stayed. You could have put yourself second, behind me, because I was only 10.
‘Sometimes a marriage is so bad that all you can do is get out,’ his father continued, and he had a skimmer in his hand, aimed at the sea, and he threw that skimmer with what Davy felt was more force than the stone quite demanded.
‘And of course you had Sharon,’ Davy said.
‘Sharon was a comfort to me. Times were dark.’
Not as dark as they were for me, Davy thought. Maybe that’s why he can’t find a girl. He really ought to find a girl, he thinks now with the image of Stanton’s body in his mind. Settle down, create something permanent.
Last wedding Davy went to – and he’s attending quite a few, must be his age – was Conor and Savannah’s. He wasn’t sure they were strictly his friends, but he’d sat with Conor Cartwright during woodwork at school, both boys inept with a lathe though ironically Conor had gone on to work at Huntingdon Timber and Roofing Supplies. Davy didn’t really know Savannah but her expression on her Big Day was a rictus of anxiety. She seemed to be scanning the room every time Davy looked at her, her skin radioactive with fake tan, visibly performing a mental inventory: chair covers with flouncy bows, glass pebbles scattered on the tables (Davy had popped one in his mouth, thinking it was a mint); little boxes of sugared almonds for each guest (which were as much a danger to teeth as the glass pebbles). The whole thing must’ve cost an arm and a leg and Davy had immediately thought of a severed arm and a severed leg, someone they’d discovered in an attic a while back. Anyway, Savannah didn’t look happy on her Big Day. She looked like someone going through an ordeal.
He watched the groom – hair wet with gel so he looked as if he’d just slid out of a drainpipe – laughing with the laddish gang from school. These were boys (shouldn’t they be men by now?) Davy didn’t really fit in with. He found them too … macho? Ungallant.
It was more than that. When he’d joined them on a night out in Cambridge wearing slippery shirts and cheap body spray, they ratcheted up the volume as if to cover the whisperings of all they didn’t have in common. They were shouting over their lack of intimacy, and also the lack of confidence in themselves. There was a gap, visible to Davy, between the football scores and taking the piss out of the fatter one in the group (a lad called Digby Boxer, poor bastard) and beneath it, the absence of meaning: the way they didn’t care about their jobs or their girlfriends, about anything at all. Davy felt beaten about the head by all the swagger, marinated in alco-pops, which seemed to stand in for masculinity. Nothing of his inner life was expressed by this group. There was nowhere, he felt, to put the quietly sad corners of his experience.
Now, walking towards HQ carrying God knows what in Stanton’s phones, he realises he never actually liked Conor and he wonders why he hasn’t been able to admit this to himself and move on. When Conor stood to give his wedding speech – chinking a fork on a glass and standing next to his perma-tanned now-wife – his eyes were on the table of lads near the front as he joked about how Savannah had forced him down the aisle with typical feminine connivance. He lovingly referred to her as ‘the ball and chain’; said she wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer but my goodness she could shop so he’d better sign up for overtime at the timber yard.
Davy balked at the laughter that rang out, particularly from the bride’s Asti Spumante-infused parents. The thought flitted across his mind that Conor Cartwright might be homosexual but unable to express this, fearful of being beaten to a pulp and left bleeding in his slippery shirt in some Cambridge gutter.
How do women stand it? Davy wondered. It was as bad as the past, when the sexes were miles apart and couldn’t communicate, only now there is this pretence. Conor’s disdain, hiding in plain sight, told the congregation what he really thought of his wife, who seemed to have sweated blood organising this shindig. And the whole room was laughing.