Masters of the House (19 page)

“Was it her own car?”

“It was that. Rob bought it for her. She always called it ‘The second-hand Renault Rob bought me.' As if she should have had a new Rolls-Royce.”

“Did she take it with her when she went away?” he asked cunningly, knowing the answer.

“She did not! I should think she was whisked off by someone in a new Rolls-Royce—or Mercedes, anyway!”

“You didn't see her go?”

“Sure, I've told you I did not. If I'd seen her go I'd have had a better idea where she might have gone. If I'd been there I might have tried to stop her, though I don't know. . . .” She shook her head, doubtingly. “It's difficult, isn't it, when your religious faith tells you one thing, and everything in you is crying out another thing entirely. I know it's the religious faith that's right, but—well, I suppose I'm as weak as the next person. Maybe I'd have let Carmen go and said ‘Good riddance.' Because I knew she'd never be anything but trouble and heartache to poor Rob.”

“Was Rob away on the rigs when she took off?”

Auntie Connie shook her head.

“Oh no, he'd been back almost a week. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been there, I can tell you. When I came over on a visit, Carmen was always nice as pie the first day, but even by the second day it was beginning to wear thin. So I made Rob
tell me when he'd be back, and I came a day or two before to make sure he got a proper welcome. I came every year, but just the once. Carmen wouldn't have had me in the house more often than that.”

“So Rob must have been out that night as well.”

“He was. A darts final at the Dog and Pheasant, which he'd been looking forward to all week. So Carmen must have planned it for that night.”

“Knowing you and Rob would be out?”

“I was
got
out,” said Auntie Connie firmly. “I don't much like pubs and darts matches and things like that. They're for men, poor weak creatures! So I'd have been in, maybe knitting and watching television and keeping myself to myself, because by then the little courtesies were getting very forced between Carmen and me. But in the morning Carmen came back from shopping—how she could shop, that woman!—and said she'd met Mary O'Hara wherever she'd been, and she'd said could I go round that evening because she was redecorating her living room and she was in a tizzy, unable to decide on a paper.”

“Is Mrs O'Hara a friend of yours?”

Auntie Connie nodded vigorously. You always knew who she approved of.

“She is that, though she's a younger woman. Comes from County Clare like myself. And she knows I like doing a bit of decorating—I'm a dab hand with the paint pot, and with the papering, too. We'll get down to this place before long. But of course Carmen knew that, too, cunning little minx that she is! I should have suspected.”

“Why should you have?”

“Because she was on tenterhooks all day. Just fizzling away inside, or that's what it seemed like. Couldn't settle to anything, kept making odd little remarks, snide comments and muttering,
little gems of nastiness that I couldn't quite hear and thought were probably directed at me. We'd got to that stage, you see. Rob was out most of the time, playing a round of golf with some friends—he needs his exercise when he's back off the rig. But looking back on it I realise that Carmen had got her escape all planned out. She could hardly hide her excitement.”

“But if it was all planned out, why didn't she take her clothes and things?” Matthew asked.

“Because it was a new life—and a new life with a much richer man than my Rob, someone who she believed would fit her out in the sort of clothes he'd expect his woman to have,” said Auntie Connie confidently. “And that would have suited Carmen fine.”

“So you went off to visit Mrs O'Hara?”

“That I did. About seven-thirty or so, and it's a walk of maybe half an hour. It was a nice summer evening, so I didn't take the bus. And when I got there the house was dark and there was no answer to my knocking. Well, of course I waited around for a bit, thinking Mary'd been detained somewhere, but before long the sun went down and I walked home. And by that time the house was empty and Carmen was gone.”

“Did you think anything of it at the time?”

“Good heavens, no! I thought Carmen had gone out—probably with some man or other. I watched the ten o'clock news and then I went to bed. To tell you the truth, I didn't want to be there when she got back and have to listen to her lies. I heard Rob come in and then I went to sleep.”

“Weren't you worried in the morning?”

She pursed up her lips. Women who stayed out all night had a very definite place in her personal circles of hell.

“Well, we wondered—of course we wondered! Rob couldn't
think where she'd gone. But I questioned him a bit about whether she'd ever been out for the night before when he'd been home. And he had to admit that she had—not often, but she had. I didn't like to go too closely into it—whether she'd told lies, or whether she'd admitted she'd been with a man. I felt embarrassed—embarrassed with my own son! I suppose I felt sorry for him, too, that he'd had to put up with his wife behaving like that, so I didn't ask too many questions. Anyway, we agreed that, Carmen being what she is, we couldn't dash straight along to the police. She might just breeze in that evening and make us look fools. It was difficult even to ring around to people to ask if they'd seen her. So we just sort of sat around, waiting for her to turn up.” Auntie Connie screwed up her face with distaste. “It was difficult, I can tell you. Shaming.”

“How long was it before you went to the police?”

“Oh, I forget. Three days, was it? Maybe four. It was Rob who went. They took all the particulars, of course, but when they asked him about other men in her life, and when he told them what kind of woman she was, they rather lost interest. They said she must have gone off with someone, and she'd probably make contact before very long. So if we ever hear any more of Carmen, it won't be because of the police. Either we make enquiries ourselves, and I can't see the point of that, or she decides to make contact again with us.”

Matthew opened his mouth to mention the insurance money and then closed it again. To raise the possibility of Carmen's death and to give such solid grounds for believing in it would be to make it clear that he himself didn't believe the accepted version of her disappearance. And that might threaten the whole basis on which the family life of the Heenans had been reestablished.
No, much better to keep quiet. He had already gone as far as he ought with his questions, though it was natural enough that he should be interested in Carmen and her disappearance.

“Time for your bed, young man,” said Auntie Connie. “No reason for you to be tired out tomorrow just because your sister goes gallivanting off to the ballet!”

Over the next few days Matthew began rearranging the new information in his head. On the last day of her life Carmen had been on tenterhooks about something. Auntie Connie assumed that it was on account of some new man in her life who was coming that evening to sweep her away to a life of glamour and excitement. She was wrong, of course. But that left Matthew with a mystery. Presumably, whatever it was that was causing Carmen to get so worked up all day was the same thing that had brought her round to Calverley Row that evening. She had been out shopping during the day. Had she heard something then, perhaps? If so, from whom? And what could it have been?

Matthew, thinking these thoughts on the way to school, frowned in concentration. Something was wrong here. Auntie Connie had said she had been shopping. But what day had it been when she was killed? He was sure that there was school next day because he had missed the morning through exhaustion. But earlier on the day of her death he had been working in the garden—which was how he had come to leave the carving knife on the kitchen windowsill. Surely Carmen had been killed on a
Sunday.
If so, she had probably not been shopping but doing something else. Had that something else, whatever it was, led to her making one more attempt to find out what was going on in Calverley Row?

And then there was the question of Rob. Rob had been at a darts match. Matthew didn't know a great deal about pubs, but it
seemed to him likely that if he had been
playing
in a darts match it would have been very difficult for him to disappear for a while, whereas if he had merely been
watching
it . . .

The next weekend, on a sunny Saturday, Matthew dived into the cupboard under the stairs, rummaged around and emerged with an old dartboard and a set of darts. He had sometimes played with his father in the past, though Annie had never liked the game and kept the younger children well away. So now he played on his own in a rather desultory fashion until he heard Rob and Grace at the back door, paying a regular visit. Then he began playing Round the Clock with more enthusiasm.

“That's a lovely game,” said Rob, coming out before long. “Keep at it and you'll be a champion.”

“Beat you at Round the Clock,” said Matthew, handing him the darts.

“Oh, I'm a dreadful player. I haven't got the eyesight. But it's a fine game to watch.”

When Rob was still on seven while Matthew had gone all round the clock, there was little doubt in the boy's mind that Rob had merely been watching a darts game on the night that Carmen died.

“D
AD'S A LOT WORSE,”
said Jamie, pushing back a stray lock from his nearly grown-up face, “a whole lot worse.”

“So you said in your letter,” said Annie, her face concerned over the big pot of tea they had brewed. “I would have come to help if I could. What sort of worse?”

“It started—oh—a couple of months ago, just when Auntie Connie got sick. Maybe the two are connected. I suppose in a way she jollied him along, kept him up to the mark. First of all, he gave up his rug-making.”

“There will be rejoicing in Wilton, and Allah will be praised throughout the realms of Persia,” said Matthew.

They all laughed. Laughing when the subject of their father came up had been a familiar form of release for them for many years now. They sometimes felt guilty about it, but how could they feel love or loyalty for someone who had never meant a great deal in their lives and was now nothing but a millstone?

“We were throwing them away at the end,” said Jamie. “It was funny: It was as if he couldn't physically manage it any more and didn't care, either. It didn't distress him; he just seemed to slip further and further back—regress, that's the word, isn't it? Then he couldn't seem to take care of himself, even to the extent he used to.”

“By the time I left home he could be relied on at least to bathe himself,” said Matthew, “except that he'd stay in forever if we'd let him.”

“That went, then I had to wash him, then—well, I won't go into the other things, they're too nasty. You'll have to go in and see him. But the fact is he seems to have lost all control of himself and all will to live.”

“He never had much of that,” said Annie. “Not after Mum died. Sad that you have no memories of how he was before.”

“I'm sadder I have no memories of Mum,” said Jamie. “But Auntie Connie's been my mother. I couldn't have had a better. Dad has just, well, always been there. A fact.” He smiled. “You know, I think when I was young I thought it was a normal fact of life, as if everyone had one.”

“What about the social services?” asked Matthew. “Have you been along and told them the situation?”

Jamie spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“You know how it is these days. Stretched to the limits and beyond. Local government cutbacks all round. Even Mrs O'Connor couldn't get any help for us.”

“For you,” said Annie. “You've had it all to do.”

“Oh, it's only in the last few days that Auntie Connie has got really helpless. . . . Mrs O'Hara has been very good, and several others from church.” He looked at his watch. “Greg should be here soon. He said his train got in about four.”

“How is he?”

“Overworked and underpaid, if you believe him. He says selling properties in the Northeast is like trying to sell ice-makers in Siberia. He had to grovel to get permission to come down. They said the deathbed of an
aunt
didn't warrant time off.”

“She really was a mother to you two,” said Matthew. “Do you think we should go up and see her before Greg comes? I mean, just in case?”

“I know she wants to see us all together,” said Jamie. “I'll just nip up and see how she is—just in case, like you say.”

There was an expression of great tenderness on his face as he left the kitchen and mounted the stairs with a hurdler's litheness. When he came down he said she was sleeping.

 • • • 

What had impressed Matthew and Annie back in 1979 was, in fact, Auntie Connie's energy. She was not a young woman then and seemed to them positively an old one, but she apparently needed very little rest or sleep. If she was watching television with them or listening to the radio in the kitchen, she was always doing something else as well—knitting, sewing, darning, peeling potatoes or slicing beans. From the moment she took over the house in Calverley Row, the routine of the household, including the tending of their father, went like clockwork.

That didn't mean that the children didn't have their own tasks and duties. That was what they were used to as older children, and that was what they would have wanted, given the choice. Auntie Connie relied on them particularly for shopping, for she never relented over the car; and it was some years before Matthew could pass his driving test—which he did when he was eighteen, triumphantly at the first attempt. About a year after she came, pressed for time, Matthew and Annie went across the field to the supermarket. Any disturbance to
the turf had long since grown over, so they had difficulty identifying where they had buried Carmen. “Sheep aren't really so terrifying after all,” Annie said, when they got home. After that they always took the field route and sometimes took Greg and Jamie with them—the innocent, unconscious bystanders at Carmen's death.