Without Consent (15 page)

Free of the immediacy of her own environment, she had time to relax and confess to herself that she had looked forward to this unsolicited invitation. Despite the circumstances of the second meeting with Helen, the bullying involved in the introduction at a time in her life when she doubted her judgement about anything and everything, she had already told herself that it was rare to like a person so spontaneously if it was not mutual. Therefore, if she liked Helen, Helen liked her. That kind of conclusion was not sound in a situation where lust was involved, Anna
thought ruefully, but otherwise, yes, it was fair enough. She had usually known, although not always immediately, whom to trust. It was important to her to believe that Helen West was extending some form of friendship, as opposed to pity, or unfulfilled duty; even curiosity would have been better than condescension.

On the high pavement of the Angel, she began to walk again. The traffic was no less frenetic but less commercial, and here, the restaurant smells prevailed. There was one every twenty yards, not always with the same identity as its counterpart of the same time last year, wafting forth scents of spices, hot oil, curried chicken, tortillas, tomato sauce, bread, humanity, full bellies and good times. Anna thought of old friends and evenings out, wondered why it was that old friends could not help in her current condition, not that she had asked. Perhaps she wanted to keep her reputation with her old friends, not let them see her diminished; it was as if she owed the old friends a consistency she did not owe to the new. She paused to look at a menu in a window, cheered by the lights and the thought of food, horrified by the prices and slightly contemptuous of those who only came out because they could not cook.

It was then that she saw, up ahead among the straggling pedestrians, a shiny bald skull. It made her stop so abruptly that a girl running along behind cannoned into her with cross apologies. It was not him; nothing like him at all. It was simply a man, turning to smile at the girl he was ushering into a car; another younger man, dressed in garish clothes and possessed of a pricey motor, perhaps to compensate for the fact that his handsome head was as bald as an upturned bowl. He looked ten years the junior
of her man. The car pulled out from the pavement with an arrogant burst of speed. Anna began to walk again.

How many lies had she told to Helen West? None of any significance; omissions rather than positive untruths, and she was not sure she wanted to remedy any of them. An irrelevant omission in failing to admit, out of a kind of shame which she resented herself, that while she had been a midwife for much of her life, and proud of it, she had succumbed to the lure of a better-paid job. It was a downright distracting lie to state that her bald-headed lover no longer worked in the same place, or had any command over her. How strange it was, the virtual impossibility of recounting the truth and nothing but the truth the way she could relive in her mind what that man had done to her, telling herself a slightly different version every time, each remembrance adding or subtracting sufficient details to distort the narrative. That was what trauma did to the mind, she supposed: made her doubt her sanity and threw integrity into turmoil. She doubted she could ever take an oath to tell the truth.

She passed a wine shop and a cinema queue, dawdling, and backtracked to look at the pictures advertising the film. Scenes of love, tension and violence made her shudder and she hurried on again. I want my old self back, she told herself, that is all I want. I want to walk around again with a perfectly normal set of reactions and a sense of humour. I want to be clean, decent and truthful. And what do I want from an evening with my new friend? I want her, someone, to know what it is like to have one's footsteps dogged by this all-pervading shame and anger. But I still can't tell the whole truth, which is that what he did to me
might well have been a brutal form of therapy to cure me of my silly passion. Nor can I say that, yes, I have seen him passing many times, even when I least expect it, although not nearly as often as I think I have, and that every time I have that real or imagined fleeting glimpse, like now I feel a panic-stricken sickness. A lump of gristle arrives in my throat and I think I am choking.

She had reached the crossroads where the restaurants gave way to trees. She stood for a moment, trying to remember the route she had memorized from the map she'd consulted before setting out. That was another symptom: lack of concentration. Dammit, she did not want to be suffering from a syndrome, or to be nothing but a mass of symptoms. She amended any expectation of what she might have wanted this evening to achieve. A shy foray into friendship, and if not that, a few hours' distraction would do.

‘I
can't cook, you know,' Helen said.

She lied, as well; that was all Anna needed.

The flat was a slightly untidy haven of multicoloured peace. Anna was aware of the moral superiority which came from the knowledge that she was a far better housekeeper than her hostess, and on far less money. She touched things, she admired, explored and settled like a wary animal. Most of all, she liked the garden: unplanned, overfull, big enough for a cat to get lost. She would have loved to get her hands on that garden.

Much, much later, after several glasses of wine and food in the form of an endless parade of snacks, Anna told Helen, lightly, speaking briefly, nothing heavy, that what
she really wanted was revenge, and Helen repeated, equally lightly, Redwood's cynical formula. Lure him back, make him do it again, collect evidence. She was only speaking in the context of the options available for redress rather than revenge; namely, none. They laughed about it; neither of them aware at the time of how the idea might take hold, like one of Anna's plants in parched ground.

When Bailey arrived, Anna left. He had made her feel welcome; her discomfort lay in the fact that she had never meant to stay so long and was not much at ease around men at the moment, even though it was nice to refuse his offer of a lift home and then be ushered into a cab. As if she was as normal as she seemed. A capable woman able to unlock her own door with that once-familiar pleasure in being home. Ashamed to feel so diminished by some incident which had not even threatened her health. And all the rest of her, still burdened with love and lies.

B
ailey stood awkwardly in the kitchen, the way he sometimes did, as if he had never been inside the flat before, instead of a million times at the last count. There were moments when Helen wanted him to be in no doubt that this was her territory, others when she wanted him to meld in with the furniture, as comfortable as if he owned what was hers. His lack of resentment often amazed her; so did his humility and his complete acceptance of her ambiguous rules. She did not deserve him.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘Didn't know you had company. Only I didn't want to be on my own.'

This was an admission, coming from him. There was far less of his almost obsessive reserve than there had been,
but he was never going to be a man who admitted easily to need.

‘Good. There's wine in the bottle and the night's young. Is it Ryan?

He nodded. Helen put her arms around him. His body felt like knotted wood, slightly softened by age, yet hardened by the tension which seemed to sigh through his voice.

‘Never mind a drink,' Helen said, ‘you need a massage. Hot bath, maybe. Tender loving care, all that.' She kept her voice free from anxiety but his pallor was alarming. Bailey was ever thus: resisting the river of emotion until the dam was ready to burst. She never remembered the ulcer.

‘I need inspiration,' he said. ‘And a different job. And,' he added, accepting a glass and something resembling a sausage roll, both swallowed with indifference. ‘And … what was I saying?'

‘Exactly that.'

He sat at the kitchen table, marginally relaxed. She was almost up to speed on the Ryan débâcle, she thought, but plenty could have happened in forty-eight hours. Such as some little snippet from the laboratory, some detail which made the whole thing worse.

‘I've got to pass it over to that sanctimonious star, Todd,' Bailey said. ‘I've got to. No choice about it. The girl's finalized statement is entirely convincing, needless to say. I've never bunked off a case before, and yes, I'm so angry with Ryan, I could spit.'

‘Why did he do it?' Helen wondered out loud, feeling awkward about the fact that she had never felt at ease with Ryan, although confident she had hidden it. It was, in part,
she suspected, a kind of jealousy. Ryan might know more about Bailey than she ever would; might even have a greater command over his affections.

Bailey rounded on her with red eyes.

‘What do you mean, why did he do it? He might not have done it. Don't make assumptions.'

‘Why not? You're sure, too, or you wouldn't be half as infuriated as you are now, or isn't it the thought of him being guilty which gets you down? You assume; you've got the evidence. Why can't I assume?'

He took a deep breath and attempted a smile. His stomach rumbled; the sausage-roll affair was a mere titillation, but the rumbling was his own fault for neglecting the simple business of eating. He had long since given up expecting, or even hoping, that Helen's fridge would automatically hold the makings of a man-sized meal. Sometimes yes, usually no; he was used to it.

‘I'm sorry. I can't quite explain. I mean, I have to deal with my own assumptions and the evidence, which looks bad enough, but I find myself enraged if anyone else points the finger at him. Even when the stupid clot makes it worse, and even then I don't want anyone else suggesting that Ryan's guilty; I don't want to believe it, even though I do, actually, believe it. Am I making sense? No, I expect not. I loathe Todd.'

Helen stood behind his chair, kneading his shoulders. He reached for her hand and held it against the side of his face, resting his cheek against it. Bailey revelled in any sign of affection; he had been born and raised with a shortage which had turned him into a quietly demonstrative man.

‘By an odd turn of coincidence,' Helen said, ‘Anna, that
girl you just met, my new friend; she might have been interviewed by Ryan. About a month ago. If she'd made a complaint, that is. She lives on his patch. But she didn't and she won't. She thinks her complaint is too bizarre for anyone to take seriously.'

‘Why?'

She would have liked to have told him, but she doubted it would have made him feel better.

‘You've heard enough about sexual aberrations for one day,' she said. ‘It'll keep.'

A
t about half-past eight in the evening, Aemon Connor delivered his wife into the hands of the police, more by accident than by design. It was not a measure he had ever considered appropriate for any member of his family, although when his daughters were small, he had found the prospect of having them imprisoned singularly tempting. Now, he could have wished them at home, rather than summering with the relatives he believed would have a more beneficial influence on making them hardy than Brigid ever would. To allow any stranger into his apartment, unless it was to admire the handiwork and commission a building on the same lines perhaps, was anathema, but there was little else a man could do when his wife would not get out of the bath.

Would not, could not; he was unsure of the difference, only that by the time he actually saw her in there, having put his foot to the flimsy lock which provided privacy rather than security, she was cold. Attempts to communicate through the door had resulted in her humming, softly at first, breaking out halfway through the first line of a
hymn tune he thought he recognized, into a bubbly laugh which was devoid of any quality of joy. Well, as he told the doctor, he'd known since the beginning that Brigid, despite a sweet and gentle nature and a fine singing voice, too, lacked a certain something in the brain department, but this was another matter altogether. What he would never mention to the doctor was the fact that he considered his gentle wife such a conversational dead end that he fucked her out of despair. It was all a man could do in order to stay sane and as loyal as his faith demanded. Nor did he mention to the doctor that his wife had not left her cooling bath – cold, in truth, but on a day like this not chilly enough for any signs of hypothermia yet – by voluntary means. When she refused to respond to an order, he had seized her by the arms first, then the waist, and bumped and dragged her out of there, swearing mightily and calling on God for a witness. He had put that damn bathrobe on her, the one she hid inside so often to make herself look like a nun, shoved slippers on her feet by grabbing her ankles and forcing her tootsies inside. Aemon also failed to mention that her passivity during all these manoeuvres, which was not to be mistaken for co-operation, had given him an embarrassing stirring of desire; the one thing she could always do when no one else could, making her more infuriating than ever. Her skin was whiter than the morning milk, spongey to the touch. When he dumped her on the sofa, she had screamed, scrambled up to one end of it, curled her slippered feet beneath her and put her thumb in her mouth. Since this was the greatest sign of animation yet, he took it as a favourable sign.

He helped himself to a large drink to steady his nerves,
then another. She seemed happy enough, until she fixed her huge eyes on him and giggled. She took the thumb out of her mouth, formed a fist out of her hand with the index finger pointing at him like the barrel of gun, whispering, bang, bang, bang. Soon after that, he called the doctor.

The medic was a dark little man, half Aemon's size, pretending he had better things to do than interrupt his dinner. Aemon did not like Asians, for being so much better employees than his fellow countrymen. He liked this example even less when he turned into an interfering idiot with ideas of his own. He was beginning to mutter about his wife needing sedatives or whatever treatment was recommended for hysterical women, when she interrupted, opened her mouth and said, very clearly, ‘Please take me away, I've been raped.'