The Pull of the Moon (24 page)

It’s my sister. A rare event. She opens by asking how I am, but this is only a feed for my line, which is ‘Fine. How are you?’

Cue leading lady who embarks on a long speech explaining the various problems currently besetting her life. The divorced estate agent she had such high hopes of turns out to have been a dud. Her
older daughter Martine is living with someone ‘completely unsuitable’ in ‘some terribly squalid part of Bristol’ – meantime her younger daughter, Belinda (Binny to her
mother), is suspected of having an eating disorder. Both her ex-husbands are being aggravating – one has just married a much younger woman – a clear act of provocation, apparently. Is
it my imagination, or does my sister actually say, ‘He has only done it to annoy me’?

She finally gets round to asking: ‘So how’s your life? Have you seen anything of Eddie lately?’ In the dramatic production that is my sister’s life, my offstage
activities are not liable to amount to much more than being the conduit for occasional news of our mutual sibling – hence the coupling of these two unrelated queries.

‘I went out with them for the day, a couple of months ago. They’re all fine.’

She takes this as a signal to issue thinly veiled accusations of neglect, implying that neither he nor I ever go out of our way to spend a day with her. This is partly true and in my case not
least because of an occasion when I did go out of my way to spend time with her, only to be blown off because some bloke with an Aston Martin asked her out to lunch.

While I’m doodling on the message pad, giving half an ear to all this, a picture of Mrs Ivanisovic grows in my mind: not the frail habituée of Broadoaks, who could be toppled like a
pile of leaves in an autumn breeze, but a younger, stronger version, her body taut with focus and determination as she sits at her son’s bedside, posing ever more dangerous questions, to
which he signals his response with a squeeze of her hand. The vision is abruptly blown apart by my sister announcing that she has the use of a friend’s villa in Portugal for a fortnight, and
why don’t I join her? There’s a pool, a lovely restaurant nearby – a market within walking distance if we want to do our own food – and best of all she has enough air miles
to bring the plane fares down to next to nothing. ‘How about it?’ she asks, so heartily that anyone listening in might think a fortnight of each other’s company is something
we’ve been simply longing for these past ten years.

‘When is it?’ I ask. ‘I’ll have to look in my diary.’

I can tell she is miffed. It’s only a couple of weeks away but someone like me ought to be available to accept without demur. I go through the pretence of rustling the pages of my diary
while mustering up a tone of regret. ‘I’m sorry, Amy, I can’t. I’ve got something on virtually every day. Two lots of theatre tickets, I’m down to play badminton in
the club championships—’

‘You could scratch,’ she interrupts.

‘– and I can’t let my partners down,’ I continue smoothly, as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘It would mean missing two weeks of night school – and at this stage
I’d probably never catch up; and it’s the week our book group meets.’

‘Surely none of these are exactly matters of life and death?’

‘Well – no. But it means letting lots of people down – and I don’t like to go back on my word and leave people in the lurch.’ (Not even for a jolly in an Aston
Martin.)

I don’t tell her that I’d actually much rather go to the book group, where wine and conversation will flow and Hilly will come over all earnest, and our Irish friend Brendan will
make us laugh, so I try a conciliatory tack. ‘Why not go on your own?’ I suggest. ‘Look on it as an opportunity to pamper yourself, have some quality time. Chill out.’

‘It’s all very well for you to say that, Kate,’ she snaps. ‘You’re used to being on your own.’ Her vision of a lonely spinster travels down the line, as loud
and clear as her accompanying words. She really hasn’t got a clue.

‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone else. I bet there are lots of people who’d love to go with you.’ Actually I’d lay a substantial wager that she
has already asked everyone else she knows – otherwise she wouldn’t be asking me. ‘It’s a shame I can’t make it. Maybe next time.’

She brings the conversation to an end soon after that. I sign off with a jaunty, ‘Enjoy Portugal.’

Once I have put the phone down the silence in the flat seems to intensify. I prowl around fidgeting with things, then retire to bed over-early to endure a restless night, while my inner demons
play Join the Dots. By a trick of perspective Mrs Ivanisovic is just a helpless old lady to most people – but her power to menace depends on who you are. I eventually fall into a deep sleep
at around five in the morning, which inevitably means I end up oversleeping. I make myself drive all the way to Ferrybridge without a break, as a sort of punishment.

The service station at Ferrybridge is quite crowded. It isn’t school holidays, but there are surprising numbers of children about – presumably taken out of school by parents who
think a day out at a theme park has an educational value equivalent to whatever the National Curriculum has on offer. I try to find a table well away from these screeching kids and their
quarrelsome families. Pam and Marjorie pity me in my childless state – but I don’t think I ever saw motherhood as my destiny: I am not naturally the motherly type.

If I am absolutely honest about it, I don’t think I originally chose teaching because I especially liked children or wanted to work with them. As my schooling came to an end and my lack of
tangible ambition in any particular direction became ever more apparent, the options had narrowed down to Go To University or Go To College. My parents thought university signified too much freedom
for an irresponsible scapegrace like me. College had the advantage of being near enough for me to live at home for another couple of years, where I could be kept an eye on. Commercial college was a
bit infra dig – my mother hadn’t invested in grammar school uniforms and cheese and wine with the PTA only for her daughter to end up a shorthand typist – so teacher training
college it was. This seemed okay to me. I didn’t look very far ahead in those days and being on the teacher’s side of the desk appealed more than being on the pupil’s.

There was a blip of course. In the immediate aftermath of Danny’s death, I was returned to my parents, too traumatized to continue with my studies: a situation they accepted with a kind of
grim resignation. I had always been the awkward middle child, unfavourably compared to my siblings – the one who never quite fitted in and always tended to be a bit of a nuisance. It was so
like Katy to have messed up her academic career (such as it was) by getting involved with an unstable boyfriend who had killed himself. Of course they did not actually say this outright – but
I knew what they were thinking. My brother and sister would never have given them all this trouble. They dated normal, sensible people who kept their names out of the papers and never gave suicide
a second thought. Trust Katy to pick the weirdo.

In the end of course I went back to college and qualified to teach. Teaching is a greedy vocation. It can gobble up your life if you let it, biting off great chunks at a time, demanding your
full commitment. Fortunately I needed its total absorption. When I decided to retire early, everyone was surprised. ‘You love teaching,’ someone said, but I am not really sure if this
was true. By focusing so completely on my work, I managed to exclude a great many other things I did not care to think about. Perhaps teaching was also like a mission into which a penitent throws
themselves, the way sinners used to undertake work in a leper colony. Every child in every class became a special kind of mission for me – but at night they went home, and at the end of
summer term they moved on. I was only a part of their lives, never the whole of it. I suppose this is the difference between me and Mrs Ivanisovic, whose energies were focused on one child
alone.

They
were
very close, Danny and his mother. This makes it easier to believe in the alleged deathbed communication between them. She positively adored Danny. Maybe it was the loss of that
other child which forged the bond so strongly. No wonder she was devastated when Danny died. And now even Stan has deserted her – Betty Ivanisovic is the lone survivor, hanging on to life by
the slenderest of threads. One snip from the cosmic scissors and she will be gone.

I sip my latte (why can’t one just buy a straightforward cup of coffee any more?) and ponder the contents of her first letter – her demand for the truth.
I must know
, she
says. Why must she? Why do people think it will always be better if they know? Might it occasionally be better
not
to know? Trudie’s mother doesn’t know. She has been spared the
truth and surely it is better that way. She may even yet hold on to the hope that Trudie is still alive. She can retain her memory of a laughing, dark-haired nymph – unsullied by the truth of
a mouldering forgotten corpse, lying far from home without the dignity of a proper grave.

TWENTY-FOUR

Since I was clearly surplus to requirements in the garden I returned to the kitchen, where the smell of stale cooking made me want to retch. I flung open the windows to let in
some fresh air, and also to establish some semblance of being in touch with the others – I couldn’t see or hear them, but I knew they were not far away. I began to clear the contents of
the table, scraping plates, tipping out dregs, stacking everything beside the sink, every moment expecting Trudie to come strolling into the room. I knew it was impossible and yet it still seemed
highly likely. Far more likely, in fact, than what had actually occurred.

The kitchen sink stood under the window, which meant that anyone working at it necessarily had their back to the room: a position which made me deeply uneasy. I knew the house behind me was
empty, but this did nothing to alleviate the sensation of hostile eyes on my back. It was even worse when I left the kitchen. The whole house seemed full of decaying memories. Desiccated cacti
gathered dust on the hall table; a forgotten ancestor stared down from an almost blackened painting, watching the door for relatives long since departed. I noticed that Trudie’s jacket had
vanished from the hall – I guessed that Simon must have put it in her bedroom with her other things, banished immediately the ridiculous thought that Trudie herself had picked it up a moment
before, on her way out of the house for a walk. As I mounted the stairs, another thought struck me – how, when things had vanished in the past, the explanation had been provided by Murdered
Agnes. Now Trudie . . . I drew back from the thought, took the rest of the stairs at a run.

Breathing hard, I took my towel and shampoo into the bathroom and removed my shirt, ready to wash my hair. The running water seemed unnaturally loud, filling my ears, masking out any other
sounds. Was that somebody moving on the landing? I turned off the taps to listen, but there was no one there. When I turned the water back on again a host of doubts came flooding into my head.
Wouldn’t it have been better to leave Trudie where she was? Had we panicked and done the wrong thing? Surely we were wrong to fear the involvement of the police – they couldn’t
have pinned anything on any of us without witnesses. And anyway no one knew exactly what had happened. I struggled to focus on the moments leading up to the scream. Danny had been convinced it was
an accident – but suppose there really had been someone else in the wood last night. I realized that the basin was all but overflowing. I had to turn off the taps in double quick time and
reduce the water level by slopping some down the overflow.

When I bent over the basin to wet my hair, I was instantly beset by the idea that there was someone creeping up behind me. I jerked my head up, sending a cascade of water across the tiles and on
to the floor, ran to the bathroom door and shot the bolt, but it didn’t help. I had merely locked my fears inside with me and they jostled around the bathroom, trying to gain the upper
hand.

It took an age to wash long hair in the hand basin. At home we had a rubber fitment which went over the bath taps – a shower spray, we called it, which made the rinsing easy: but here the
operation involved emptying and refilling the sink half a dozen times, trying not to send a shower of water on to the floor every time I lifted my long hair clear of the sink. I had reached the
final rinse when a series of loud bangs reverberated through the house. I leapt back from the sink, soaking everything in range, pressing a wet hand against my mouth to stifle a scream. Three loud
bangs – three in swift succession. Wasn’t three always the number of significance – the harbinger of something dreadful to follow?

For several seconds I stood frozen to the spot. Water trickled unchecked from my hair, damping my bra, a rash of drops standing out across my shoulders like imitation gooseflesh. It had been
easy enough to blame any pseudo-supernatural occurrences on a live Trudie. Alien noises in the house could no longer be thus ascribed.

I picked up my towel and dabbed my arms and shoulders with it, before tentatively towelling my hair, eyes fixed on the bathroom door, listening intently for any clue as to the origin of the
noise. The sounds had been near at hand – somewhere in the house. I mentally calculated the distance between myself and the guys. It was unlikely that they would have heard anything and there
was thus little hope that they would come to investigate. All previous attempts to open the bathroom window had ended in failure. It was assumed to have been painted shut, years before. How loudly
would I need to yell . . .?

The three bangs rang out again – and the penny finally dropped. It was the door knocker. There was someone at the front door. My fleeting sense of relief died instantly. This was no time
to entertain casual callers, with Simon and Danny out in the garden presiding over the concealment of a dead body. Anyway, we never had casual callers – or indeed any callers at all. The only
person who had ever visited us was Mrs Ivanisovic, and she surely wouldn’t have returned a mere forty-eight hours later. It must be someone selling something – or maybe Jehovah’s
Witnesses. If I ignored them they would have to go away.