Tarnished (15 page)

‘Excuse me.’ Clive flew across the library floor, like a missile homing in on her. ‘Could you look up that volume for me please, now, miss.’

Stomach churning, she pushed her trolley into the secret cul-de-sac of the C section of fiction, the one spot where she knew she was unlikely to be found by Marianne. Squatting behind the trolley, she pulled the article out of her back pocket and, hoping she had made some mistake, she reread the whole thing.

But there was no mistake. Raymond’s real name was Franklin, after his father, no doubt. That was why he had been so impossible to find.

He had killed her mother.

Her father had been imprisoned because he had killed her mother.

She wished she couldn’t believe it, but the tragedy was that she wouldn’t put it past that weak control-freak she had met in Spain.

She realised she was breathing too quickly, that she was nearly hyperventilating.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and called Loz.

‘Fucking shite,’ Loz said when Peg told her what she had found out.

‘It says it was a mercy killing,’ Peg said. ‘It says that Mum’s doctor said she would have died anyway, and sooner rather than later. But it was still murder, and that’s what he was arrested for.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I’ll bring the article home tonight,’ Peg said, craning round the bookcase to see Marianne crossing the library, heading in her direction. ‘Gotta go.’

‘Is everything all right, Peg?’ Marianne said as she hove into view.

‘Yes,’ Peg said, hastily pocketing her phone and trying to look busy. It was practically a sacking offence to be caught with a phone – like Loz, Marianne had this very strict rule about staff keeping them in their lockers while working.

‘Hurry up then. We’ve got a backlog to shame the Royal Mail.’

Peg made herself look busy until Marianne returned to her desk. Then, when the coast was clear, she looked back at the article one more time.

When her father disappeared after her mother’s death, Peg had swallowed wholesale the vague and coded story handed to her by Doll about being such the spit of her mother that, in his broken-hearted state, he couldn’t bear to see her. She had accepted this line so fully as a child that she hadn’t felt the need for any further explanation. It had even, in some way, made her feel special.

But here in front of her was the real reason.

Her father had murdered her mother.

Because, in Peg’s eyes, mercy killing didn’t really wash.

In Peg’s eyes, he had robbed her mother of her life. And how could someone do that to someone they were supposed to love?

Peg screwed her face up and pulled on her ear lobes until they hurt. She wanted to run out of the library, all the way to Tankerton, force her way into the bungalow, grab Doll by the neck and demand why she hadn’t told her the truth.

Had she been trying to protect her?

That’s what she would have thought, perhaps even a couple of days earlier.

But for the first time ever, the art of understanding – at once her blessing and her curse – deserted her. To be left to discover this, on her own, was an outrage.

As she sat there, huddled into the bookshelves, the indignation running through her like a hot needle and thread, her phone rang, bursting its rally of birdsong call-tone out into the library.

She hurriedly pulled it out of her pocket and switched it to silent, planning on stuffing it back unanswered. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone else. But then she saw the caller was Julie, Jean’s carer, so she answered. Julie didn’t call unless there was an emergency.

‘Hello?’ she whispered, closing her eyes.

‘Meggy?’ Julie’s voice sounded harried, and Peg could hear a strange keening in the background.

‘Yes, Julie. What is it?’

‘Oh Meggy, you’d better get down here quick. Doll’s had a bit of a turn.’

Fourteen

It took an age for Peg to get to the hospital, which was in Margate. The train crawled unbelievably slowly along the Thames Estuary. A man called Toby in the seats across the aisle from her declared to his Bugaboo-Hunter family that it would be quicker to
walk
to Whitstable. He got on his phone and loudly told someone called Davina that they were going to be late for the restaurant. When the train guard nasally informed them over the tannoy that, due to a points failure, there would be a bus replacement service between Chatham and Sittingbourne, Toby’s reaction verged on the murderous.

Sweating with her own stress, Peg felt like telling him to shut up, that at least he wasn’t trying to get to a collapsed grandmother. At least he hadn’t just found out his father had killed his mother.

To calm herself, she tried to call Loz, but there was no reply – she would be at work now. So she sent a text, explaining what had happened to Doll.

On the replacement bus, she pulled the
Farnham Herald
article out of her pocket, unfolded it, smoothed out the creases and tried to read more meaning into the words in front of her, but there was nothing else to discover. However, there was the picture of her mother to gaze at. In all of this, that at least was something to be grateful for.

The newspaper seemed to be on her father’s side, portraying him as the heartbroken husband of a very sick woman. But this image of him as grief-stricken had been challenged too many times in the past couple of days for her to buy it: she didn’t know that she could talk to him again. Loz’s plan of screwing him for his money had seemed morally difficult to start with, but now it struck her as impossible. She slipped the article into her red notebook for safekeeping, then spent the rest of the journey trying to think it through, how it might work, but every time she came back to the point that she wanted nothing more to do with him. And she felt foolish for having been taken in by all the lies told to her all her life.

Why should she compromise herself by going to him for money and redistributing it between the two women who had kept all this from her?

She hated the fact that she was being made to feel so bitter, so angry.

When she arrived at the hospital, after a journey that had taken over four hours, it was nearly five o’clock. The A&E department rustled with incongruously jaunty Christmas decorations, even though it was only the beginning of December.

‘I found her on the slope outside of your aunty’s when I came by to do her lunch,’ Julie said, struggling with the arm of her coat, which must have turned inside out when she pulled it off in the heat of the hospital. ‘She’d been fetching through a snack for her. She was cold – freezing – and she’d slipped on the ice and barked her knee, but she was also very confused and dithery. I took her in and sat her down with a cup of tea and she was all “Where’s my Jeanie?” this, and “We’ve got to get my Raymond” that, and she kept going on about some Keith? Like she was gathering everyone together for supper or something. I called the ambulance.’

They both looked at Doll, who lay motionless and tiny underneath a green waffle blanket on a wheeled bed. Her arms lay on the covers, a drip jutting from her wrist. The plastic disc of a monitor clung to her chest, held in place by clear tape that smocked her thin skin. A machine by the side of her beeped, registering mysterious numbers on windows on its front.

She looked worryingly peaceful.

‘She got a bit agitated in the ambulance so they gave her a shot of something to calm her down,’ Julie said, reading Peg’s concern.

‘What do they say it is?’ Peg asked Julie, lifting off her rucksack and placing it on the floor by Doll’s bed.

‘They think it was a mini-stroke, they’ve done a scan and there’s no sign of any damage, but they can’t rule it out, they say. The main thing is she’s malnourished, they say, and dehydrated. And she might have some sort of infection down there. They’re waiting to find her a bed.’

‘They’re keeping her in?’

‘They want to keep an eye on her for a day or two. She was pretty confused.’ Julie glanced up at the red digital clock above a notice containing a stern warning against abusing NHS staff. ‘Look love, I’ve got to go. I got a neighbour to mind the kids but they’ll be needing their tea.’

‘Of course,’ Peg said. ‘Thank you so much.’ She leaned forward and gave Julie an awkward hug, not made any easier by the fact that she towered over her by more than a foot.

‘I got cover in for your aunty,’ Julie said, breaking away, clearly not used to such close encounters with clients when cleaning or feeding weren’t involved. ‘So you don’t need to worry about her tonight.’

Peg’s thoughts went out to Jean, lying alone in her big bed, being ministered to by a stranger. It was the first time she would ever have spent a night in the house without Doll.

‘Did you come here in the ambulance?’ Peg asked. It was a ten-mile journey back to Tankerton.

‘I’ll get a cab back. There’s a Freephone in the foyer.’

‘Here.’ Peg pulled her wallet out of her parka pocket. ‘Take this.’ She fished out a twenty-pound note and handed it to Julie.

‘Thanks love, but you keep it. I can probably claim it on expenses if I make enough of a noise.’

‘If you’re sure . . .’

The twenty was the only money Peg had with her, and the unplanned, full-cost train fare out had set her meagre weekly budget completely off-kilter. But she felt she ought to offer, at least. Julie probably only earned a tiny bit more than her, and had two children to support. Peg was also aware that, with an education that was – objectively viewed – privileged, she could have had the world as her oyster. That she earned a subsistence wage shuffling books around shelves in a South London library long-listed for closure was a matter of choice – even though it didn’t feel all that much like it.

‘You keep it, Meggy,’ Julie said, closing Peg’s hand over the note and pushing it away.

The kindness made the tears prickle in Peg’s eyes.

Julie kissed Doll on her cheek. ‘Take care, Doll, love. We’ll have you back home in no time.’

‘Hope so,’ Peg said.

Julie smiled on one side of her face and shook her head slightly. As a parting gesture, it didn’t much fill Peg with confidence.

Peg pulled off her parka and sat next to Doll, who skittered her wizened hand over the bedclothes as if she were gathering lint from a child’s coat, or playing some wayward invisible piano. She took the hand, held it still and examined her face. The old lady’s skin hung loosely on her cheeks and jaw, revealing the shape of her skull.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Dad, Nan?’ she whispered. ‘Who were you trying to protect? Me? Or Raymond?’

Without warning, Doll’s eyes shot open. Her hand darted from the waffle blanket to grip Peg’s wrist, digging her nails into the base of her palm, the metatarsals and tendons rigid like chicken bones.

The beeps of the machine picked up pace.

‘Raymond?’ Doll said in a voice so papery that Peg had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. ‘Where’s my Ray?’

‘He’s not here, Nan.’

‘He’s not here,’ Doll repeated to Peg, sharing a confidence. ‘He’s in Spain.’

Peg blinked. Doll had known all along where her son was. Of course she had known. How much grief and effort would Peg have avoided if she had just asked Doll outright, and Doll had simply answered?

Not that she could imagine either happening.

And of course the grief and effort of finding her father was nothing in comparison to what she was enduring having done so.

‘It’s such a pity,’ Doll went on. ‘I wanted to show him the baby. He was so looking forward to it.’ She let go of Peg’s arm and peered about her. ‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where’s my baby?’

‘There’s no baby, Nan. You’re in here because you had a funny turn.’

‘I had the collywobbles.’

‘You had the collywobbles.’

For a second, Doll seemed to be content with this explanation. But she started casting her eyes around again – slowly at first, then faster as her agitation grew, her hand working double-time on its mystery task on the blanket. Her darting fingers suddenly grabbed a fistful of her bedding and ripped the whole lot free from its tightly packed hospital corners, fully exposing herself where her NHS back-fastening gown had ridden up. Surprisingly pale and smooth skin made her thin, knob-kneed legs look like they belonged to a little girl, rather than an old woman. Peg was glad to see that someone had managed to put a pad of sorts on her and some kind of surgical webbing knickers to save both the sheet she was lying on and her modesty.

‘Where’s my Keithy?’ Doll cried, struggling to get off the bed. She rounded her eyes furiously on Peg. ‘Where’s my baby, nurse? What did you do to him?’ The rapid beeping of her machine had now turned into an alarm call.

‘You haven’t had a baby, Nan. You had a bit of a turn.’

‘Keithy!’ Doll swung her legs off the bed and attempted to stand, wires tangling with her gown, her drip threatening to topple.

‘Nan, no. You’ve got to stay still,’ Peg said, trying uselessly to restrain her. She was scared to use any sort of force on her in case she snapped her delicate bones. Assistance arrived in the wholesome apple-dumpling shape of a young nurse who hurried into the cubicle, bearing a cardboard dish with a plastic syringe full of a sickly looking orange liquid.

‘My baby,’ Doll went on, looking wildly around her.

‘There there, Mrs Thwaites,’ the nurse said. She expertly applied just the right amount of gentle force to swing the old lady round so she was once again lying down. Then she picked the blanket from the floor and tucked it back over her, effectively hemming her in. Swiftly, she stuck the plastic syringe in her mouth and dispensed the orange liquid. Doll swallowed and the nurse put a plump hand on her cheek as she calmed down. In a few short moments she was stilled; her eyes closed again, her breathing and the beeping returning to normal.

‘She’s got a bit of a UTI,’ the nurse said, speaking to Peg over the top of Doll’s head.

‘UTI?’

‘Urinary tract infection. We’ve just got the labs back. Makes them a bit disoriented. It’ll take a while for the antibiotics to kick in.’

Peg nodded. ‘She thinks she’s had a baby. She can’t find him.’