Angus rested his arms on the fence. ‘Do you think confession’s the only route to redemption?’
‘I’m tempted to say no, though I don’t know what other route there could be.’
Angus shrugged. If you believe in redemption.’
‘But you believe in the power to change, presumably?’
‘Presumably.’
‘And anyway,’ Tom said, ‘I thought you were rather in favour of raking up the past?’
‘Oh, I am. For its own sake. I don’t flatter myself it’s got any therapeutic value. In fact the whole idea of writing as therapy makes me puke. It amuses me sometimes to think about the talking cure, and how it’s become a whole bloody industry, and how little evidence there is that it does a scrap of good.’
‘If you mean counselling, there’s quite a bit of evidence that it’s harmful, or can be. People who get counselling immediately after a traumatic event seem to do rather less well on average than those who don’t’
Angus looked surprised. Tom wasn’t saying any of the expected things. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Tom shrugged. ‘My guess would be that people are meant to go numb, and anything that interferes with that is…. potentially dangerous. Equally, of course, the numbness eventually wears off.’
‘And then talking helps?’
‘It’s one way of getting at the truth.’
‘And that makes you feel better?’
‘Not necessarily, no,’ Tom said. ‘It’s valuable for its own sake.’
‘Well, yes, I think we can agree on that.’
As far as the theory goes, Tom thought, remembering one sister’s raw eyelids, the other’s hectic cheeks.
‘Of course we’re not talking about “the truth”, are we?’ Angus said. ‘We’re talking about different, and quite often incompatible, versions of it.’
‘I thought we were talking about Danny.’
A pause. The sound of sheep munching grass drifted up to them from the valley, while behind them bursts of laughter came from the lighted room.
‘How is he?’
‘Reasonably well. Finding it a bit hard to adjust.’
‘How long’s he been out?’
‘About a year. He’s a student. Reading English.’
A sound somewhere between a snort and a laugh. ‘Well, he had a lot of talent.’
For some reason this remark filled Tom with antagonism. ‘I expect he still does.’
‘They’ll all be spilling out in a moment,’ Angus said. ‘Shall we go further down?’
They scrambled over the wall, and began to walk down the hill, their shoes squeaking on the moist grass. Sheep raised their heads to watch them pass, but didn’t bother to move away. The sound of voices and laughter came faintly here. They turned and looked back, and the white farmhouse, with its lighted windows, emphasized the shared isolation of the hillside.
‘Does he know you’re here?’ Angus asked abruptly. ‘No. I’ll tell him the next time I see him. There’s a general agreement that I can see whoever I want to see.’
‘Will you give him my address?’
‘Only if you want me to. Do you?’
‘Oooh. Now there’s a question.’
Angus’s voice had changed. It was less consciously well modulated; his accent had thickened; there was a catch in his breath Tom hadn’t noticed indoors. Perhaps he was asthmatic, and the night air was tightening his chest, or perhaps the silence, the watching sheep, the gulf of white light, had created another self.
‘Yes, why not? He might be curious enough to find out what he did to me.’
‘What he did to you?’
‘Yes, I suppose it does sound odd. I was in my twenties, he was fifteen. Obviously it was my fault.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? Water under the bridge.’.
‘I’d like to know what happened.’
‘Why?’
Tom started on the obvious reply: because I think it’ll help me to understand Danny, and found himself saying instead, ‘Because I’m standing in your shoes, and I’m starting to think it’s a dangerous place.’
‘Don’t be alone with him, then.’
‘I’ve got to be. Anyway, I’m not worried about that.’
Angus nodded. ‘Lucky you.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘I
fell
in love with him.’ A pause, while Angus contemplated, with a moue of distaste, the banality of the statement: its lack of any protective coating of cynicism or self-mockery. ‘Almost as soon as I met him. I wasn’t the only one, though, it took various forms. I’m not saying it was always sexual. In fact it wasn’t. But he was directly responsible for four people –. that I know of – leaving that unit. And generally it was because they were over-involved, or jealous. I just accepted it. Not simply the fact that everybody was intensely involved with Danny, but the pretence that it wasn’t happening. That all the kids were treated exactly alike. Like bloody hell they were.’ He pulled himself up, dismayed by his own bitterness. ‘Have you seen Greene?’
‘Yes. And Mrs Greene.’
‘Oh yes. Elspeth.’
‘Did Greene know what you were doing with Danny?’
‘Sexually?’
‘I meant the writing.’
‘No, he didn’t, and he wouldn’t have approved if he had. We were always told we didn’t need to know anything about them, the past was irrelevant, their backgrounds were of no importance whatsoever. And these were kids with completely fragmented lives. I mean, Danny was brought up by his parents, but he was the exception. There were kids there who’d had five or six foster placements in one year. Just at the… real bog-level standard of who they were and where they came from, they had no idea. And I thought it was important, and I still think it’s important, to help kids like that construct the narrative of their own lives. And to help them put names to emotions. You got the impression with a lot of them that they had a kind of tension level, and they didn’t know whether it was pain, boredom, loneliness, un-happiness, anger, bewilderment, because they didn’t know the names. They only knew it felt bloody awful, and they relieved it by bopping somebody else over the head. So I don’t apologize for what I was doing. It needed doing. And it wasn’t therapy. It was supplying a basic piece of equipment that the rest of us take for granted.’
‘Did you like Danny?’
‘You mean, apart from loving him?’ He thought for a moment. ‘There was nothing to like. He was incredibly charming, shallow, manipulative. I mean, beyond belief. Control was an end in itself. And he was shut down. You were dealing with about 10 per cent of him. And not only that. He was only dealing with 10 per cent of himself. And he had this very bright, cold intelligence, and he was talented – which was gold dust in there, believe me! And it seemed such a tragedy, that he was… frozen like that.’
‘So you decided you’d thaw him out?’
‘No, that’s not true. He decided. The sort of topics I was giving him were standard English essay stuff. It was Danny who started pushing it. I did say things like, “Look, I can’t see the people.” But he took that and ran with it. He got closer and closer, until you could hear them breathing, and okay, it was dangerous, but let’s not forget, it was also something that needed to happen.’
‘Did you ever think you ought to stop?’
‘Yes. He didn’t want to stop.’
‘Did you ever say, “Slow down”?’
‘I didn’t know how close we were. You’ve got to remember I didn’t know anything about the background. He’d be describing a particular incident and I didn’t know whether it was the day before the murder, or the year before.’
‘You could have asked.’
‘Not without pushing. I never mentioned the murder.’
‘Did he write about the time his mother tried to beat him with his father’s belt?’
‘And he grabbed it and swung her round? Yes.’
‘Did he write about Lizzie Parks?’
‘Yes, I think that’s what did it. The next day I was due to see him, and he didn’t show up. And that Sunday evening after tea he went to Greene and said I’d molested him. Greene sent for me. He established that I’d spent
x
number of hours alone with Danny, and that was it. I was out. I left the next morning.’
‘Why do you think he went to Greene?’
‘Because he was frightened. He couldn’t stop, he knew he was going to tell me about the murder, and that was a terrible thought. Because he’d never actually admitted it.’
‘Isn’t it possible he found the sex disturbing? He was only fifteen.’
‘No.’
‘How do you know?’
Angus turned to face him, a glimmer of amusement in his pale eyes. ‘I’m going to tell you something about the sex that’ll really shock you.’
‘I doubt it, but go on.’
‘There wasn’t any. It never happened.’
Tom took a deep breath. ‘You’ve shocked me.’
‘He cut my head off.’
‘Why didn’t you insist on an inquiry?’
‘I’d been alone with him. It was my word against his.’
‘And you thought Greene would believe him?’
‘Greene didn’t want a scandal. Bad for Danny, bad for the school. Bad for Greene.’ A moment’s pause. ‘How close are you to the murder?’
‘Pretty close.’
Angus grinned, and began walking back up the hill, calling over his shoulder, ‘Watch yourself.’
They parted at the door. Angus walked away along the corridor, wine glass in one hand, bottle in the other, not looking back. Tom had no desire to rejointhe party, and instead went upstairs where he was to sleep, for the first time since childhood, in a bunk bed. The lay preacher was already there, on his knees beside the bed, praying. Tom hadn’t encountered this before either. He undressed quietly, and tiptoed off to the bathroom. A woman muffled in a tartan dressing gown – one of the group who unaccountably wanted to write – was already waiting in the corridor.
Tom asked whether she was enjoying the course.
‘Do you know, I think I am. It’s not what I expected, but Angus is a brilliant teacher.’
Tom lay awake for a long time in the narrow bunk bed, listening to the snores of the recovering alcoholic. One of the beautiful young men came in – the sausage-squeezer, whose name was Malcolm – and got undressed in a shaft of moonlight. The lay preacher got out of bed and started to pray again. They had five days of this, Tom thought, turning on his side. He was worn out after one evening.
He must have drifted off to sleep, because the screams confused him. Somewhere out there was a woman or child in pain, and he struggled to sit up. The others were already awake.
Is it a woman?’ the lay preacher asked.
‘No, it’s an animal,’ said the recovering alcoholic.
‘Can’t be,’ said Malcolm.
He got out of bed and reached for his dressing gown. Tom and the recovering alcoholic followed him downstairs – bare feet slapping on the cold tiles – and through into the living room. Empty bottles, full ashtrays, an air of desolation. Somebody asleep on a sofa.
‘Do you suppose the doors are alarmed?’ Malcolm asked, pushing them open anyway. He strode off down the lawn, Tom following. Another scream cut the air. The ham on the nape of Tom’s neck rose. The lights went on in the tutors’ cottage. Rowena, wearing a white neglige, came out on to the grass. Then Angus, draped in a sheet. They all stood and listened. Just as they were beginning to hope it was over, another scream tore the darkness.
Rowena, her drawling voice suddenly clear and cold, said, ‘It’s a rabbit. They do sound incredibly human.’
‘Should we kill it?’ the ex-alcoholic asked.
‘No, it’s coming from the other side of the valley,’ Angus said. ‘It’d be dead before we got there.’
‘Christ.’
‘Look,’ Malcolm said, ‘it’s going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m going back to bed.’
He strode away up the lawn. Very sane and sensible, Tom thought, and yet, not. An hour ago there had been talk, laughter, companionship, lights, warmth, wine, food, and the screams had blown it all away. Each one of them stood there, shivering, condemned to the isolation of his own skin. How fragile it all is, he thought.
He felt Angus’s hand heavy on his shoulder. ‘Back to bed,’ he said, pushing Tom gently towards the house. ‘There’ll be a fox along soon.’
‘Will we see you at breakfast?’ Rowena asked.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Tom said, over another scream. ‘I have to get back.’
SEVENTEEN
He’d forgotten that he was dependent on other people for transport. It was ten o’clock before anybody was free to drive him to the station, and then the train was late and he missed his connection in York. He’d intended to be in the house when Lauren arrived, though she had a key. She wouldn’t be waiting in the street.
They were between Durham and Newcastle when his mobile rang. ‘Tom, is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look, I’m in the house. You remember I was coming back to collect some of my stuff? You said today would be all right.’
He could tell from her voice she was worried. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You know the boy you pulled out of the river? He’s here. He said he had an appointment. I thought you must just have gone round to the shops, so I let him in.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think so.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Walking up and down.’
Her voice dropped to a whisper, difficult to hear. The reception wasn’t good anyway. The next thing he heard was: ‘I’ve tried talking to him, but it’s no use.’
All along the carriage people were standing up and reaching for their bags. In another minute they’d be queuing in the aisle. The train terminated here.
‘Look, leave him alone. We’re coming into Newcastle now. I can be there in twenty minutes.’
If he got off now before everybody else. If there was no queue at the taxi rank. He grabbed his bag and pushed his way to the door, where he waited, jittery with impatience, for the light to turn green. Then he ran, weaving between hurrying people, and burst out of the station to reach the taxi rank before anyone else.
Once inside the cab, he drummed his fingers on his bag, ignoring the driver’s attempts at conversation. The traffic was reasonable, and the journey took fifteen minutes.
Outside the house, he stuffed a handful of coins into the driver’s hand and waved away the change.
He let himself in as quietly as he could, and stood in the hall, listening. A murmur of voices from the kitchen. At the foot of the stairs were two suitcases,one of them open, half full of small objects wrapped in newspaper. Stacks of paintings wrapped in brown paper rested against the wall. Through the open door of the living room he saw grey ghost squares on the walls where the pictures had hung. Some pieces of furniture had been pulled out and placed in the centre of the room. He felt a pang of grief, for the end of his life with Lauren, for the joint person they’d been. And into this intensely private trauma had come Danny, whose voice he could hear downstairs. He hadn’t known till now how little he trusted Danny, though there was an irrational element in his anxiety. The screams of the snared rabbit lingered in his mind, and he hadn’t managed to get back to sleep.
He walked slowly downstairs. Through the banisters, he could see Danny’s feet in black-and-white trainers. Nothing else. A floorboard creaked, and he heard Lauren say, with a rush of relief in her voice: ‘That’ll be Tom now.’
She stood up as he came into the room. He would never know how they would have greeted each other if they’d been alone. She came across the kitchen and offered him her cheek to kiss. He saw the moistness on her upper lip where pinpricks of sweat had broken through the make-up, and there was a peppery smell that came from her body, not from deodorant or scent.
‘Hello, darling. Sorry I’m late.’ He turned to Danny. ‘And Ian, this is a surprise.’
‘I think I may have got the wrong day.’
Even as he offered Tom the easy way out, Danny looked pleadingly at him. Lauren was standing with her back to the kitchen table, her thin arms crossed over her chest. Her lower teeth nibbled at her upper lip. Tom felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. It was extraordinarily distracting: this feeling of a pivotal moment in his own life being played out in front of an uninvited audience. Danny’s hands were twisted in his lap, a knot of white knuckles, like worms.
‘Well, never mind, you’re here now, though I’m afraid I can’t manage the full hour. But I’ve got a few minutes.’
He took Danny into his consulting room. All the way there he was aware of Danny noticing dust squares where paintings had been, a table pulled away from the wall, gaps in the book shelves, the remaining books collapsed on to each other in slack heaps. Danny’s face showed nothing but embarrassment, and yet Tom was aware of a line being crossed. Danny was inside, now.
Perhaps the anxiety got into Tom’s voice. He said sharply, as soon as they sat down: ‘Now, then, Danny, what’s this about?’
‘You’ve seen the news?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ This was obviously not the moment to mention his meeting with Angus. ‘What’s the matter?’
Briefly, Danny explained. Two little boys, eleven and twelve years old, had been charged with themurder of an old woman. Two newspapers, and the late-night news on the BBC, had run ‘think pieces’ on the story. What is happening to our children? etc. Since the Kelsey murder was sub judice, and therefore not available for public debate, they’d illustrated their points with references to Danny’s crime. Even more seriously they’d used his school photograph.
‘It’s going to open up again,’ Danny said, his voice strangled with misery and fear. Already he’d seen on television all the things that had happened to him: fists beating on the sides of a police van, shouted threats, the blaze of publicity, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
‘What exactly did they do?’
Danny denied any knowledge of this. He’d switched off the television as soon as he saw his photograph and gone straight to bed, half expecting his landlady to bang on the door and throw him out.
‘I really don’t think anybody would recognize you from that photograph,’ Tom said. ‘I know I didn’t.’
‘Some people would,’ Danny insisted. ‘I’m like you, Tom. I remember voices, I remember the way people move, but you’ve got to remember there really are people who never forget a face.’
A frisson of unease. That was an entirely accurate description of the way Tom’s memory worked, and yet he couldn’t recall any conversation in which he and Danny had talked about the different ways people recall the past.
It was also the first time Danny had called him Tom. This was the wrong moment to object, and anyway Tom had one or two adult patients who used his first name. It probably didn’t matter too much either way. And yet it jarred.
‘Have you phoned Martha?’ he asked.
‘I can’t get hold of her. I keep trying.’
I’ll have a go too. And I’ll try my secretary.’
He put through a call. Martha had been in to the Family Welfare Centre, but had just left, saying she was going away. She hadn’t said for how long. Tom tried her mobile, but it wasn’t switched on. Turning back to Danny, he said: ‘Look, we will get her. Don’t worry.’
‘I always knew it wouldn’t work. There’re too many people out there wanting to get me.’
Tom settled down to listen to him, aware of Lauren in the background pulling a piece of furniture across the floor. Danny was most afraid, not of violence, nor even of having his false identity blown – though these were real fears – but of the raking up of memories. Every newspaper, every news bulletin. On the Metro, coming to see Tom, he’d heard people talking about the crime, and he thought he’d heard the name: Danny Miller. It had disturbed him so much that he got off the train at the next station and found a seat in another carriage. ‘I don’t want to know what they did. I’m thinking about Lizzie all the time anyway. I don’t need this.’
‘Do you want to stop our sessions for a few weeks till this is over?’
No, he didn’t. In fact the exact opposite: he wanted to press on faster. ‘I’ve got to get it out now,’ he said. ‘Before all this muddies the water.’
Tom could see the sense in this. He didn’t believe Danny would walk past the news-stands and not buy a paper. He didn’t believe he’d switch off the television whenever the case was mentioned, and such was the urgency of his desire to make sense of what he’d done, and so insurmountable the barriers preventing him from doing it, that there might well be seepage from the reported facts of the crime into his memory of Lizzie’s murder.
The doorbell rang, and he heard Lauren go to answer it. Two male voices. He wanted to be able to see what was happening.
‘All right,’ he said, standing up. ‘Look, you can see things are pretty impossible here at the moment. Can you come back this evening? Say about seven?’
Danny moistened his lips. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘There really is no danger, Danny.’
Danny shook his head. ‘You didn’t see them banging on the van. They can’t get those two, but they can get me.’
Tom showed Danny out, then stood with his back to the door, bracing himself. Lauren was in the living room, sitting on the arm of the remaining sofa. This perching, this waiting to take off, irritated him. Why on earth couldn’t she sit down?
He started to say: ‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ but stopped halfway through, startled by the booming of his voice. Of course, the removal of furniture and paintings had altered the acoustics. It was like speaking into a phone, when somebody on another floor has forgotten to put the extension down.
She answered the incomplete question. ‘Not long. About half an hour.’
Her voice sounded different too. He realized he was going to remember this echo-chamber conversation as the sound of his divorce. Two people who used to love each other mouthing banalities in an empty box.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked, meaning, I’d like a drink.
She hesitated. ‘Yes, why not?’
He uncorked a bottle and came upstairs with two glasses. All these simple actions were so heavily invested with memories that he felt like a priest celebrating Mass. He searched for some way of making the handing over of a glass of red wine seem less sacramental, and failed to find it. ‘Well,’ he said, struggling to keep the irony out of his voice, and failing again. ‘Cheers.’
‘Who is that boy?’ she asked, turning away from him and walking over to the window.
‘Ian Wilkinson.’
She looked puzzled. ‘I know the face.’
‘Of course you do. You met him on the Quayside.’
‘No, before that.’
Tom shrugged, but his heartbeat quickened. Danny was right. Lauren was strongly visual, far more so than most people, and something about Danny’s face tugged at her memory. She’d recognize him from the school photograph.
And if she did, others would.
To distract her, he said, ‘You know the most horrifying thing about all this? Only a few weeks ago we were trying for a baby.’
‘Yes, I’ve thought a lot about that. Thank God it didn’t work.’
That for him, and perhaps for her too, was the moment when it ended. They were strangers now, not close enough to be antagonistic, trying to sort out the best way of disentangling their financial arrangements.
‘Will you want to sell?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think so. I might let out the top floor. It wouldn’t need much doing to make it self-contained. And I suppose the lawyers’11 sort out what to do about your share of the equity.’
‘I don’t want a long wrangle.’
‘Nor me. It’s more a question of what they want.’
They chatted for half an hour, finding it increasingly difficult to keep a conversation going. The topic he most wanted to raise – had she got somebody else? –was taboo. It wasn’t his business any more, though that didn’t stop him speculating. He scoured her face and body for signs of sexual fulfilment, but she looked as she always did, elegantly turned out, cool.
He wondered how it felt to be leaving the house for the last time. She’d loved it when they first moved in. All those months spent painting the river in every possible light, and then she’d exhausted whatever it was she’d found here. After that, he thought, she hadn’t liked the house much. On one wet day recently, peering through mizzled windows at the swollen river, she’d said they might as well live on a bloody boat.
It was a relief when the removal men came in and said they’d finished.
She stood up at once and looked at him. ‘Well, Tom, do you think we can wish each other luck?’
For a moment the anger almost choked him. You’re going, he thought, and you want me to wish you luck? But then he folded her stiffly in his arms, and patted her shoulders. He was surprised by his reaction. She felt wrong against him. The skin of his chest and arms was saying, Wrong body, so that, in the end, seeing her off for the last time, closing the door afterwards, he was able to feel that this parting was, to some extent, his decision.
A few minutes later, pouring himself another glass of wine, he realized that only a slight change of perspective was needed to make it all his decision. He could have gone to London with her and e-mailedchapters of the book to Martha and Roddy; they didn’t need to meet. And he could have made love to her, got her pregnant. Only his body’s apparently inexplicable refusal to perform had prevented it, and yet what a disaster it would have been. He would never use the word ‘dickhead’ again. It was grossly unfair. His dick was the only part of him that had shown the slightest spark of intelligence.
All this was comforting, in a way. It raised his morale not to have to see himself as Lauren’s victim. Determined to start work on the book again, he went into his study, only to stop short in the doorway. For there, propped up on his chair, obviously not forgotten, left deliberately, was Lauren’s last painting of the river.
The sun hung over the water, a dull red without rays and without heat, as it might look in the last days of the planet. Beneath was an almost abstract swirl of greys and browns, and in the bottom right-hand corner, barely in the picture, a dark figure, himself, looking out over the water.