Masters of the House (18 page)

“What, write the letter?” asked Matthew.

“Yes. I'm no great shakes at writing. And you're educated, or on the way to being. . . .”

Rather unhappily Matthew fetched a pen and sat down at table. It seemed like a sort of lying, writing this letter, but he wanted it done and the subject of Carmen out of the way. He shut out the talk in the room and began to write.

“Dear Sir,” he began, “I enclose with this letter the cheque you recently sent to my wife, Carmen O'Keefe. She left me”—after a moment's thought he crossed out “me” and resumed—“home in June, and since then I have heard nothing about her whereabouts.” Matthew felt that last was a rather good word and was proud of it. “If I should hear where she is I will inform you immediately. Yours faithfully, Robert O'Keefe.”

He got up from table and took it over to Rob.

“Now that's what I call a businesslike letter!” he said when he had read it. “Nice to have someone in the family that can do these things.”

“But what about if she's dead?” Matthew heard himself asking. “Wouldn't the money be yours then?”

“Nay, lad, Carmen's not dead!” said Rob with conviction, as if she'd come with a God-given certificate of immortality. “Carmen's with a man somewhere or other. And if she was dead I wouldn't want that money. I never liked her mother, and I had as little to do with her as I possibly could. Now, I'll copy this out in my horrible handwriting, and we can put Carmen behind us.”

So for the rest of the visit they talked about something else. True, the topic of Dermot Heenan and his mental state came
up, which put most of them in mind of Carmen. But soon the younger children came in from the garden and demanded that Rob go out there and play with them. Grace went, too, and they all four began a series of races and rough games that had them all laughing and shouting. Auntie Connie, piling up crockery on the drainboard, looked out at the scene wistfully.

“They play beautifully, that they do,” she said.

“He's good with children, your Rob, isn't he?” said Annie.

“He is—always has been.”

“Maybe he and Grace will have some of their own.”

“But they'd be b—” She pulled herself up. “But I'll not judge. That's not for me. It wouldn't be their fault, would it, the poor babies?”

“Why don't you go out with them?” Annie said. “We can do the washing up.”

“Look at him with Jamie, and isn't Jamie loving it? Well, maybe I will, Annie love. I've got to remember that you're my family now, haven't I? You're all the grandchildren I need.”

As she took off her apron and went out into the sunshine and laughter, Annie began running hot water into the basin. They began the task without talking, but Matthew's preoccupation eventually found words.

“They really ought to know that Carmen is dead,” he said.

“Why? You heard what Rob said. He wouldn't take the money even if she was.”

“That's what he
said,
” said Matthew sceptically. “But do you think in a year's time, if it was established that she was dead, he'd still be refusing it?”

Annie sluiced a few more saucers and then said, “It was a big amount. Did you see Auntie Connie's face?”

“Yes. It's Rob's money by right. He feels he doesn't want it
now because Carmen's gone and he's just woken up to what she was, but if it's
really
a huge amount he probably won't think like that forever.”

“He might. I don't think he's a money sort of person.” She turned to look at him. “But what if the
real
reason why he doesn't want it is because he killed her, and taking the money would make him feel even more guilty?”

That was a real facer. It was a full minute before Matthew could reply.

“Anyway, there's no point in discussing it. We
can't
tell them. If Rob did it he wouldn't want the body found. And if they brought in the police and told them where we buried the body, the police would be bound to think we killed her in the first place.”

“You're right,” said Annie thoughtfully. “We can't tell them. And I really don't think Rob wants that money.”

“Maybe not. Anyway, it may be that after a certain time the insurance company presumes she's dead and gives the money to—what's he called?—the next of kin or something.”

That took them into realms of legal speculation which they could not cope with. They spent the rest of the day happily playing and talking and eating, and by the end they really felt like a happy family group. When Rob had referred to Matthew as “family” earlier it had felt funny, but by the end of the day it had begun to seem to Matthew and Annie as if Rob and Grace were part of their family and that they were part of theirs.

It was only later, thinking in bed as he often did, that something odd occurred to Matthew. It had not occurred to him before because he knew Carmen O'Keefe was dead. But now, putting himself in the place of people who assumed she was still alive, it seemed to him that they ought to have wondered
whether Carmen O'Keefe wasn't the last person on earth to disappear without trace just when she was expecting a big cheque from an insurance company. She might have been tempted away by a rich admirer, but she certainly would have made sure people knew where she was.

And yet that thought hadn't occurred to Rob or Grace or Auntie Connie. Was that because they weren't all that bright or weren't thinking straight in the aftermath of Carmen's disappearance? Matthew thought that if he were a policeman he might assume that they did not entertain that doubt either because they suspected or because they knew that Carmen was dead.

R
OB AND
G
RACE
came round a couple of times before Dermot Heenan returned home from the mental hospital. Then their visits became more occasional for a time, with Rob patently more uneasy—unwilling to come beyond the kitchen, shuffling his feet, throwing uneasy glances ceiling-wards if he thought he heard a noise upstairs. But Grace chaffed him about this, and soon he was behaving quite normally, at least in the downstairs of the house. Dermot was easy to forget.

He was brought back to Calverley Row by an attendant at the institution, a capable-looking man who was empowered by the psychiatrist to “explain the situation.” He said that there had been a “real improvement,” but in practice this seemed to mean no more than that Dermot now had an occupation: He made rugs and would sit happily for hours with his hook and uniform lengths of wool, filling row after row on the square of rug canvas. It obviously soothed his mind, making the outbursts
of self-accusation less frequent and bitter. That was the full extent of the improvement so far as his family could see. The psychiatrist never paid the promised visit, but he had written a short note with his telephone number on it. He apparently did not envisage Dermot returning to anything like normality, but he said that his progress (or his condition) would be monitored. He would return to the institution on a nonresidential basis every three months or so for a day of checks and tests. Effectively, this meant he was a fixture at the house in Calverley Row for the foreseeable future.

When he had been driven back, he had got out of the car uncertainly, but once through the front door he had limped upstairs if not like a homing pigeon then at least like a rat scurrying back to its lair. Auntie Connie stood in the doorway, shaking her head with pity. When Matthew and Annie, a minute or two later, took up a half-finished rug the attendant had handed to them, they found him looking round with childlike pleasure at the walls and furniture of his little prison. “Good to be home, Annie love,” he muttered, with a little whimper of pleasure. When Auntie Connie took him up a cooked meal later on, he blinked at her as if uncertain whether he had seen her before or not; but in a day or two he accepted her, perhaps under the impression she was some kind of housekeeper.

The rug-making certainly seemed to help. Dermot would sit at it for hours, though he never mastered patterns, and the single-coloured rugs soon seemed to cover every room in the house. When a rug was finished, and Auntie Connie had put the finishing touches to it by sewing the edges underneath and replacing any of the knotted strands that had been clumsily done, they would take the card with wool samples up to him; and with something like pleasure he would pick the colour for
his next rug. Soon friends and fellow worshippers had rugs made by Dermot, and then bazaars at St Joseph's had them as a regular feature. They became eventually a drug on the market and were offered to charity shops and to the bazaars run by other churches. Luckily, Auntie Connie had become good friends with Mrs O'Connor at the Social Security office and managed to get a grant towards the cost of the wool on the grounds that it was occupational therapy.

“Which indeed it is,” said Auntie Connie.

With school started again, the friendship between Matthew and Peter Leary began to blossom. It was an odd school friendship, as both boys recognised. They even fabricated a reason for it to account for it to their peers. Peter was a fanatical stamp collector with the ambition of becoming a stamp dealer. Matthew had collected stamps for some time but had lost interest a year or two before. Now he revived that interest and sat at Peter's feet to learn the finer points of philately. In a short time his interest and enthusiasm became quite genuine, but this did not alter the fact that they had been quite consciously created to form a bond between them. It enabled them to talk together in the school playground, and it accounted for Matthew's frequent visits to Peter's home. Eventually Peter came round to Calverley Row, rather nervously at first, but eventually, like Rob, accepting the situation there as something almost normal. On one of these visits, when he slipped upstairs to the lavatory, he encountered Dermot Heenan. After that the friendship was strengthened by sympathy.

The bond lasted into their adult life. Whenever he came back to Leeds, Matthew went round to see Peter, became godfather to one of his children, helped him get another job when his stamp dealership went bust in the slump of the
early nineties. When he and the other members of the family came back in 1993, he rang him from the house in Calverley Row. “I think the last act is beginning,” he said. “It's an odd feeling.”

Quite soon into the new term at school, Matthew discovered that the Holmes boy who was now in the fifth form was no relation to Kevin Holmes, the garage proprietor who had been named at the Irish Club as one of Carmen's lovers. So that was a possible avenue of investigation closed up. The thought of the man being a garage proprietor, though, put Matthew in mind of their own garage and the car rusting away in it. It was frustrating being just fourteen and having to wait so long before he could apply for a licence. One evening when Annie was having a rare night out with a friend at the ballet in Bradford, he opened up the subject with Auntie Connie.

“It's a pity about the car, just sitting there in the garage,” he said.

“It is that. But I'd feel awkward trying to sell it.”

She was knitting peaceably, and they were both sipping their late night Horlicks and paying very little attention to the television.

“You mean that you'd be admitting that he'll never get well again?” Matthew asked.

Auntie Connie nodded. “Something like that. And it's simply not mine to sell.”

“You haven't got a licence yourself?”

“I have
not.”

“Didn't you ever try to learn?”

She stopped knitting, a reminiscent smile on her face.

“Well now, I did once. That was when my Pat was beginning to fail, and we both thought it might come in useful. At that
time you could get a driving licence in Ireland just by paying your money—none of this nonsense about tests!”

“It's a pity you didn't buy one, then.”

“That it's not! Not for the other people on the road it's not! Because when we went out on the road I didn't like it at all—and that was just country roads in Ireland, with hardly a thing on them except the occasional horse and cart.”

“Horses can be frightening on the road. You always think they might bolt. Maybe it was that you didn't like.”

“I didn't like the feeling of being in charge of the powerful thing. Oh, I could do it all right—change gears, even stop and start on a hill. I'm not a complete fool. But I got in such a state every time I sat behind the wheel that my Pat said we'd best call it a day.”

“It would be good to have the use of the car—fetching heavy things from the supermarket and that.”

“It would that,” said Auntie Connie, nodding placid agreement. “I'll have to find someone who'll deliver us a great big sack of potatoes, then it won't be so bad. And there's a man who calls with pop at some of the houses round here. Potatoes and pop, they're the heaviest things we buy, and we buy lots of both.”

Matthew refused to be diverted.

“I can get the car out of the garage and . . . onto the road.”

She looked at him. He returned the look, wide-eyed.

“We could go up and down Calverley Row.”

“We'll do nothing of the kind!” said Auntie Connie determinedly. “It would be totally illegal. If you're hinting I should get a driving licence, you can forget it. Just listening to the traffic on the Ring Road makes me dizzy.”

“There's another way round to the supermarket via Calverley, though it is a lot longer.”

“You'll never get me behind that wheel, my lad, so you might as well stop trying. I suppose what it comes down to is I'm old-fashioned, and I don't think it's ladylike.”

“Carmen drove a car.”

“There you are, then!”

Once the switch of topic was made, Matthew pursued it fairly ruthlessly.