There had been nothing, really, that could be done. All of them had known it. All of them had pretended otherwise. The Coast Guard went out into the fog, taking the route from Walney Island into Lancaster Sound. But it was miles from there into Morecambe Bay and miles farther into the channel of the River Kent. She could have been anywhere, and this was something that everyone had known as well. If it had been the tidal bore alone, there might have been a chance — slight though it was — that she could be found. But with the tidal bore conjoining the fog, the situation had been without hope from the very first. They did not find her.
The RNLI had attempted to help as well, once there was enough water for them to set out. But they hadn’t got far before they knew that it was a body they would be looking for. With this the case, for them to remain out in the fog ran the risk of there being more bodies to find at the end of the day, and to compound the tragedy was foolish. Only the Guide to the Sands could assist, they reported to Lynley upon their return to land, for the Guide’s job in a situation such as this was to speculate on the probable places that a body would wash up. His job was to help them find the body as quickly as possible because if they did not find it when the fog lifted, there was a very good chance they would not find it at all. The water would wash it away, and the sand would bury it. Some things out in Morecambe Bay were never found and some things lay buried for one hundred years. It was the nature of the place, the Guide to the Sands told them.
Lynley and Deborah had gone into Arnside House at last, after hours upon hours of stoking the bonfire, even after the point when the tidal bore had surged into and then filled the channel and all of them knew there was not a single hope left. But Nicholas wouldn’t leave the fire, so they continued to feed it with him, even as they cast worried looks upon his devastated face. He wasn’t ready to stop until evening, when exhaustion had combined with knowledge and the dawning of grief to rob him of the desire to continue. Then he’d stumbled towards the house, and Lynley and Deborah had followed him as the people of Arnside village parted to let them pass and their words of sympathy had matched the looks of sorrow on their faces.
Inside the house, Lynley had phoned Bernard Fairclough. He reported only the barest of facts: that his son’s wife was missing and probably drowned out in Morecambe Bay. Apparently out for a walk, Lynley told them, and caught up in the tidal bore.
“We’ll be there at once,” Bernard Fairclough had said. “Tell Nicholas we’re on our way.”
“They’ll want to know if I’m going to use now,” Nicholas said numbly when Lynley relayed his father’s message. “Well, who wouldn’t worry that I might, with my history, eh?” He went on to say that he would not see them. Or anyone else, if it came to that.
So Lynley had waited and when Nicholas’s parents arrived, he gave them the information. And he himself decided that his part in all this was not to betray Alatea. He would hold her secrets in his heart. He would take her secrets to his grave. He knew that Deborah would do the same.
It was too late by then to begin the journey back to London, so he and Deborah had returned to the Crow and Eagle, booked two rooms, had a largely silent dinner, and had gone to bed. In the morning, when he could bear to talk, he phoned New Scotland Yard. There were, he saw, seven messages on his mobile phone. He didn’t listen to any of them. He rang Barbara Havers instead.
He told her briefly what had happened. She was silent except for the occasional, “Oh damn” and “Oh hell, sir.” He told her that they would need to get word to Alatea’s family in Argentina. Could Barbara find the graduate student once again and make the necessary phone call? Yes, she could, she told him. She was that bloody sorry about the way things had worked out, as well.
Havers said, “How are you, sir? You don’t sound good. Anything else I c’n do at this end?”
“Tell the superintendent that I was detained in Cumbria,” he said. “I’ll be on my way in an hour or two.”
“Anything else I should tell her?” Havers asked. “Want me to let her know what’s happened?”
Lynley considered this only briefly before he made his decision. “Best to let things lie as they are,” he said.
She said, “Right,” and rang off.
Lynley knew he could trust her to do as he’d asked, and it occurred to him, then, that he’d not thought at all about ringing Isabelle. Either on the previous night or this morning upon waking from a very bad sleep, he’d not considered her.
Deborah was waiting for him when he descended the stairs into reception at the Crow and Eagle. She was very ill looking. Her eyes grew bright with tears when she saw him, and she cleared her throat roughly to keep them from falling.
She was sitting on a wooden bench opposite the reception desk. He sat next to her and put his arm round her shoulders. She sagged into him, and he kissed the side of her head. She reached for his other hand and held it, and he felt the change in both of their bodies as they began to breathe as one.
He said, “Don’t think what you’re thinking.”
“How can I not?”
“I’m not sure. But I know that you mustn’t.”
“Tommy, she would never have gone out into the bay if I hadn’t been pursuing this whole mad surrogate mother business. And that had nothing to do with Ian Cresswell’s death, which you and Simon knew all along. I’m at fault.”
“Deb darling, secrets and silence caused all of this. Lies caused this. Not you.”
“You’re being very kind.”
“I’m being truthful. It was what Alatea couldn’t bear to tell him about herself that took her onto the sands. It was that information that took her to Lancaster in the first place. You can’t make her secrets and her death your fault because they’re not, and that’s how it is.”
Deborah said nothing for a moment. Her head was bent and she seemed to be studying the toes of her black leather boots. She finally murmured, “But there’re things one must be silent about, aren’t there?”
He thought about this, about everything that remained and would remain forever unspoken between them. He replied with, “And who knows that better than we two?” and when he loosened his arm from her shoulders, she looked at him. He smiled at her fondly. “London?” he said.
“London,” she replied.
No matter Nicholas’s desire for solitude, Valerie had insisted to her husband that they would remain in Arnside House the rest of that night. She’d phoned Manette to give her the news, telling her to stay away. She’d phoned Mignon as well but with little worry that Mignon would bring herself all the way to Arnside since she’d been holed up in her tower from the moment she’d understood that her parents had no intention of continuing to be at her monetary, emotional, and physical beck and call. Mignon hardly mattered to Valerie at this point, anyway. Her concern was Nicholas. Her worry was what he might do in the wake of this disaster.
His message to them via the detective from New Scotland Yard had been terse but forthright. He wanted to see no one. That had been all.
Valerie had said to Lynley, “She’ll have people in Argentina. We’ll need to let them know. There will be arrangements…”
Lynley had told her that the Met would handle informing Alatea’s people since he had an officer who had tracked them down. As for arrangements, perhaps they all ought to wait to see if a body could be found.
She hadn’t thought of that: that there might not be a body. There had been a death so there would be a body, she wanted to insist. After all, a body was a form of finality. Without one, how would grief ever be navigated?
When Lynley had left with the woman he’d introduced as Deborah St. James — unknown to Valerie and, frankly, unimportant at this point save the knowledge that she’d been present during the time of Alatea’s disappearance — Valerie climbed the stairs and made her way to Nicholas’s room. She’d said to the panels of his door, “We’re here, darling. Your father and I. We’ll be downstairs,” and she’d left him alone.
Throughout the long night, she and Bernard had sat in the drawing room, a fire burning in the grate. Near three in the morning, she’d thought she heard movement above them on the first floor of the house, but it turned out to be only the wind. The wind blew away the fog and brought with it the rain. The rain beat against the windows in steady waves and Valerie thought aimlessly about heaviness enduring for a night but joy coming in the morning. Something that came from the Book of Common Prayer, she recalled. But the words did not apply in this terrible case.
She and Bernard did not speak. He attempted to draw her into conversation four times, but she shook her head and held up her hand to make him stop. When he finally said, “For the love of God, Valerie, you must talk to me sometime,” she understood that in spite of everything that had passed in the last twelve or more hours, Bernard actually wanted to talk about them. What was wrong with the man? she asked herself wearily. But then, hadn’t she always known the answer to that?
It was just after dawn when Nicholas came into the drawing room. He’d moved so quietly, she hadn’t heard him and he was standing in front of her before she realised it was not Bernard who’d entered the room. For Bernard had never left the room, although that too was something she hadn’t taken note of.
She started to get to her feet. Nicholas said, “Don’t.”
She said, “Darling,” but she stopped when he shook his head. He had one eye closed as if the lights in the room were painful to him, and he cocked his head as if this would help bring her into focus.
He said, “Just this. It’s not my intention.”
Bernard said, “What? Nick, I say…”
“It’s not my intention to use again,” he said.
“That’s not why we’re here,” Valerie said.
“So you stayed because …?” His lips were so dry they seemed to stick together. There were hollows beneath his eyes. His cherub hair was flat and matted. His spectacles were smudged.
“We stayed because we’re your parents,” Bernard said. “For the love of God, Nick — ”
“It’s my fault,” Valerie said. “If I hadn’t brought the Scotland Yard people up here to investigate, upsetting you, upsetting her — ”
“If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s mine,” Bernard said. “Your mother is blameless. If I hadn’t given her cause to want an investigation, no matter the bloody reason — ”
“Stop.” Nicholas raised his hand and dropped it in an exhausted movement. He said, “Yes. It’s your fault. Both of you. But that doesn’t really make a difference now.”
He turned and left them in the drawing room. They heard him shuffle along the corridor. In a moment they heard him trudging up the stairs.
They went home in silence. As if knowing they were coming down the long drive from the road — perhaps she’d been watching for them from the roof of the tower, where, Valerie now knew, she’d doubtless been skipping up the stairs to spy upon everyone for years — Mignon stood waiting for them. She’d wisely discarded the zimmer frame, no doubt understanding that her jig was decidedly up, and she was wrapped up in a wool coat against the cold. The morning was fine as it sometimes is after a good rain, and the sun was as bright as an undashed hope, casting gold autumn light on the lawns and the deer grazing upon them in the distance.
Mignon advanced on the car as Valerie got out. She said, “Mother, what happened? Why did you not come home last night? I was sick with worry. I couldn’t sleep. I nearly phoned the police.”
Valerie said, “Alatea…”
“Well of course Alatea,” Mignon declared. “But why on earth did you and Dad not come home?”
Valerie gazed at her daughter, but she couldn’t quite seem to make her out. Yet hadn’t that always been the case? Mignon was a stranger and the workings of her mind were the foreign country in which she dwelt.
“I’m far too tired to speak to you now,” Valerie told her, and headed for the door.
“Mother!”
“Mignon, that’s enough,” her father said.
Valerie heard Bernard following. She heard Mignon’s wail of protest. She paused for a moment then turned back to her. “You heard your father,” she said. “Enough.”
She went into the house. She was monumentally exhausted. Bernard said her name as she made for the stairs. He sounded tentative, unsure in ways that Bernard Fairclough had never been unsure.
She said, “I’m going to bed, Bernard,” and she climbed the stairs to do so.
She was acutely aware of the need for a decision of some sort. Life as she’d known it was something of a shambles now, and she was going to have to work out how to repair it: which pieces to keep, which pieces to replace, which pieces to send to the rubbish tip. She was also aware of how much the burden of responsibility fell upon her shoulders. For she had known all along about Bernard and his life in London, and that knowledge and what she’d done with that knowledge were the sins that would weigh on her conscience till the end of her days.
Ian had told her, of course. Although it was his own uncle whose use of the firm’s money he was reporting upon, Ian had always recognised where the true power in Fairclough Industries lay. Oh, Bernard ran the day-to-day business and, indeed, made many of the decisions. Bernard, Manette, Freddie, and Ian had together kept the concern moving forward, modernising it in a way that Valerie would never have considered. But when the board met two times a year, it was Valerie who took the position at the head of the table, and not one of them ever questioned this because that was how it had always been. You could climb the ranks, but there was a ceiling and breaking through it was a matter of blood, not strength.
“Something curious and rather unsettling,” was how Ian had reported it to her. “Frankly, Aunt Val, I’d thought not to tell you at all because… Well, you’ve been good to me and so has Uncle Bernie, of course, and for a while I thought I might be able to move funds around and cover the expenditures, but it’s got to the point where I can’t quite see how to do it.”
A nice boy Ian Cresswell had been when he’d come to live with them to attend school after his mother’s death in Kenya. A nice man Ian Cresswell had become. It was unfortunate that he’d hurt his wife and children so badly when he’d decided to live the life he’d been intended to live from birth, but sometimes these things happened to people and when they did, you had to muddle on. So Valerie had seen his concern, she’d respected the battle of loyalities he was fighting, and she was grateful that he’d come to her with the printouts that showed where the money was going.
She’d felt ghastly when he’d died. Accident though it was, she couldn’t help thinking that she hadn’t stressed enough the perilous condition of that dock in the boathouse. But his death had given her the opening she’d been looking for. The only suitable manner in which Bernard could be dealt with, she’d decided, was humiliation in front of his entire family. His children needed to know exactly what sort of man their father was. They’d abandon him, then, to his London mistress and his bastard child, and they’d circle the wagons of their devotion around their mother, and that would be how Bernard would pay for his sins. For the children were Faircloughs by blood, the three of them, and they would not brook the obscenity of their father’s double life for an instant. Then, after a suitable amount of time had passed, she would forgive him. Indeed, after nearly forty-three years, what else was Valerie Fairclough to do?
She went to her bedroom window. It looked out upon Lake Windermere. Thankfully, she thought, it did not look out on the children’s garden that now probably would not be. Instead, what she gazed upon was the great wide platter of the lake itself, still as a mirror flung onto the earth, reflecting — as a mirror would do — the fir trees along the shore, the fell rising opposite the land of Ireleth Hall, and the great cumulous clouds, which were the usual aftermath of a stormy night. It was a perfect autumn day, appearing clean and polished. Valerie looked upon it and knew she didn’t belong in it. She was old and used up. Her spirit was dirty.
She heard Bernard come into the room. She didn’t turn. She heard his approach and she saw from the corner of her eye that he’d brought a tray with him and was placing it on the demi-lune table between the room’s two lakeside windows. Above this table, a large mirror hung, and reflected in it Valerie saw the tray held an offering of tea, toast, and boiled eggs. She also saw reflected her husband’s face.
He was the one to speak first. “I did it because I could. My life’s been like that. I’ve done what I’ve done because I could do it. I suppose it was a challenge to myself, much like winning you. Much like making more of the firm than your father and grandfather had been able to do. I don’t even know what it means that I’ve done what I’ve done, and that’s the worst of it because that tells me I might well do it all again.”
“Isn’t that a comforting thought,” she said dryly.
“I’m trying to be honest with you.”
“Another highly comforting thought.”
“Listen to me. The devil of it is that I can’t say it meant nothing to me because it did mean something. I just don’t quite know what.”
“Sex,” she said. “Virility, Bernard. Not being such a little man, after all.”
“That hurts,” he said.
“As it’s intended.” She looked back at the view. There were things to know before she decided and she might as well know them, she told herself. “Have you always?”
He did her the courtesy of not misunderstanding. “Yes,” he said. “Not all the time. Only occasionally. All right, frequently. Usually when business took me elsewhere. Manchester, perhaps. Birmingham. Edinburgh. London. But never with an employee until Vivienne. And even with her, it was like the rest, at first. It was because I could. But then things went further between us and I thought I saw a way to have two lives.”
“Clever you,” she said.
“Clever me,” he replied.
She glanced at him then. Such a little man, actually. He was shorter than she by nearly five inches. Small, a little delicate, mischievous looking, cocky, grinning… My God, she thought, all he needed was a hunchback, a doublet, and tights. She’d been as easily seduced as the Lady Anne. She said to him, “Why, Bernard?” and when his eyes narrowed, she added, “Why two lives? One is usually more than enough.”
“I know that,” he said. “It’s the curse I live with. One life was never enough for me. One life didn’t… I don’t know.”
But she knew and perhaps she’d known all along. “One life couldn’t prove to you that you were more than Bernie Dexter from Blake Street in Barrow-in-Furness. One life could never do that.”
He was silent. Outside the honking of ducks drew Valerie’s attention back to the window, and she saw a V of them flying in the direction of Fell Foot Park, and she thought of how ducks taking flight or landing made such a silly, awkward spectacle but ducks in flight were as graceful as any bird and the equal of any bird doing what birds do. It was only the getting there that was strange and different.
Bernard said, “Yes. I suppose that’s it. Blake Street was the pit I climbed out of but its sides were slippery. Any wrong move, and I’d slide back down. I knew that.”
She moved away from the window then. She went to the tray and saw he’d brought only enough for her. One cup and saucer, two boiled eggs but only one egg cup, cutlery for one, a single white napkin. He wasn’t so certain of himself after all. There was a small mercy in this.
“Who are you now?” she asked him. “Who do you want to be?”
He sighed. “Valerie, I want to be your husband. I can’t promise that this — the two of us, you and I and what we’ve built — won’t all end up going down the Fairloo in another six months. But that’s what I want. To be your husband.”
“And that’s all you have to offer me? After nearly forty-three years?”
“That’s all I have to offer,” he said.
“Why on earth would I accept that? You as my husband with no promise of anything else, such as fidelity, such as honesty, such as…” She shrugged. “I don’t even know any longer, Bernard.”
“What?”
“What I want from you. I no longer know.” She poured herself a cup of tea. He’d brought lemon and sugar, no milk, which was how she’d always taken it. He’d brought toast without butter, which was how she’d always eaten it. He’d brought pepper but no salt, which was how she’d always seasoned her boiled egg.
He said, “Valerie, we have history together. I’ve done you — and our children — a terrible wrong and I know why I’ve done it and so do you. Because I’m Bernie Dexter from Blake Street and that’s all I’ve had to offer you from the first.”
“The things I’ve done for you,” she said quietly. “To you, for you. In order to please you… to satisfy you.”
“And you have,” he said.
“What it took from me… You can’t know that, Bernard. You’ll never know that. There’s an accounting that needs to be made. Do you understand that? Can you understand that?”
“I do,” he said. “Valerie, I can.”
She was holding her cup of tea to her lips, but he took the cup from her. He placed it carefully back onto its saucer.
“Please let me begin to make it,” he said.
The police had taken Tim directly to hospital in Keswick. Indeed, they’d radioed for an ambulance to do so. Manette had insisted that she ride inside the vehicle with the boy because if she knew nothing else about Tim’s condition and the prospects for his healing, she knew that he needed to be close to what was standing in place of his immediate birth family from this time forward. That was Manette.
The alarm had still been howling like a warning of the apocalypse’s imminent arrival when the police burst onto the scene. Manette had been sitting on the makeshift bed with Tim’s head in her lap and his body shrouded by the nightshirt, and Freddie had been crashing about looking for the guilty parties — long since flown — as well as for evidence of what had been going on in this place. The camera was gone, as was any sign of a computer, but in their haste the other members of the cast and crew of the spectacle being filmed had overlooked such items as a jacket containing a man’s wallet and credit cards, a woman’s bag containing a passport, and a rather heavy safe. Who knew what would be inside? Manette thought. The police would find out soon enough.
Tim had said nothing other than two numbly spoken sentences. The first was “He promised” and the second “Please don’t tell.” He wouldn’t clarify who promised what to whom. As to what he meant with “Please don’t tell,” that was fairly clear. Manette rested her hand on his head — his hair too long, too greasy, too unnoticed by anyone for far too long — and she repeated, “No worries, Tim. No worries.”
The police had comprised uniformed constables on the beat, but when they saw what they had walked into, they’d used their shoulder radios and made a request for detectives and officers from Vice. Thus Manette and Freddie had found themselves face-to-face with Superintendent Connie Calva once again. When she stepped into the room and swept her gaze over the Victorian bedroom, the open window, Big Ben in the distance, the dog at the foot of the bed, the discarded costumes, and Tim lying with his head in Manette’s lap, she had said, “Did you ring for an ambulance?” to the constables, who nodded. Then to Manette, she said, “I’m sorry. My hands were tied. It’s the law,” and Manette had turned away. Freddie had said, “Don’t tell us about the goddamn law,” and he’d spoken so fiercely that Manette felt such a wave of tenderness sweep over her that she wanted to weep for how stupid she’d been not to see Freddie McGhie clearly before this moment.
Superintendent Calva took no offence. She fixed her eyes on Manette and said, “You stumbled upon this, I take it? Heard the burglar alarm, saw the mess outside, and reckoned what was going on? That’s what happened?”
Manette looked down at Tim — he’d begun to shiver — and she made her decision. She cleared her throat and said no, they hadn’t just stumbled upon the scene, although thank you, superintendent, for assuming they might have done. She and her husband — she forgot to refer to Freddie as former or erstwhile or anything other than what he’d once been to her when she’d had common sense — had broken into the place. They had taken the law into their own hands and would have to embrace the consequences. They hadn’t arrived soon enough to stop some piece of filth from raping a fourteen-year-old boy and filming it for the delectation of perverts around the globe, but she and Freddie would leave that part of it in the hands of the police, as well as what the police wished to do about the fact that they — she and her husband, as she referred to him again — had broken and entered, or whatever the police wished to call it.
“An accident, I think,” Superintendent Calva had said. “Perhaps malicious mischief by persons unknown? In either case, these wheelie bins need to have better braking devices on them, ones that lock, I daresay, so they can’t get out of hand and roll into the front doors of shops.” She’d looked round the place and directed her officers to begin the process of collecting evidence. She’d concluded with, “We’ll need a statement from the boy.”
“But not now,” Manette told her.
They’d taken him then. Tim had been handled tenderly by the emergency staff at the hospital in Keswick and ultimately released to his cousin Manette. She and Freddie had taken him home, provided him with a warm bath, heated soup for him, buttered soldiers to go along with it, sat with him as he ate it, and put him to bed. Then they had retired to their separate bedrooms. In hers Manette had spent a sleepless night.
In the early morning, with darkness still pressing against the windows, she made coffee. She sat at the kitchen table and gazed unseeing at her reflection in the glass, backed by night outside and the pond somewhere in that night and somewhere on the pond the swans tucked into the reeds together.
She considered what they had to do next, which was to phone Niamh. She’d already phoned Kaveh to tell him only that Tim was safe and inside her own home at this point and would he please let Gracie know so that she wouldn’t worry about her brother?
Now she had to do something about Niamh. As Tim’s mother, Niamh had a right to know what had occurred, but Manette wondered about Niamh’s need to know. If she were informed and Tim learned she had been informed and she did nothing after being informed, the boy would be further devastated, wouldn’t he? And wasn’t that one pill of pain he didn’t need to swallow? On the other hand, Niamh had to be told something at some point since she knew her son had gone missing.
Manette sat there at the kitchen table going back and forth and in and out, trying to make a decision. Betraying Tim seemed unthinkable to her. On the other hand, he was going to need help. Margaret Fox School could give it to him if he cooperated with them. But when had Tim been known to cooperate? And did what happened to him mean he might cooperate now? Why should he, for God’s sake? Whom could he trust?
God, it was such a mess, Manette thought. She didn’t know where to begin to help the boy.
She was still sitting at the table in the kitchen when Freddie came into the room. She realised she must have dozed in her chair, because it was fully light outside by then and Freddie was dressed and pouring himself a cup of coffee when she snapped to.
“Ah, she lives.” Freddie came to the table with his mug of coffee, took hers, and dumped its cold contents into the sink. He gave her a fresh cup and rested his hand on her shoulder briefly. “Buck up, old girl,” he said to her affably. “You’ll feel better after having a good run on that blasted treadmill of yours, I daresay.”
When he sat opposite her, Manette noted that he was dressed in his best suit, which was not something he ever put on when he went to work. He had on what he called his weddings-baptisms-and-funerals togs, which he wore with a crisp white shirt with French cuffs and a linen handkerchief folded into the breast pocket of his jacket. He was 100 percent Freddie McGhie, at ease with himself and sparkling from his head to the tips of his polished shoes, quite as if the previous day had not been a nightmare beginning to end.
He nodded at the handset of the phone, which Manette had left sitting in front of her on the table while she dozed. He said, “Hmm?” in reference to this, and Manette told him she’d phoned Kaveh. He said, “What about Niamh?” to which her reply was, “That’s the question, isn’t it?” She told him that Tim had begged her not to tell his mother. He’d amplified on “Please don’t tell” when she’d gone into the bedroom to make sure he had everything he needed for the night.
“I suppose I should ring her, though,” Manette concluded, “just to let her know he’s with us, but I’m reluctant even to do that much.”
“Why?”
“The obvious,” she said. “The same reason Tim doesn’t want me to tell her anything from yesterday: Sometimes it’s just easier to speculate what might happen rather than to know the truth about people. Tim can think — or I can think, let’s admit it — that she won’t care or she won’t do anything or she’ll just feel bothered by the news and that’s it. But he — and I — won’t know for sure, will we? So he — and I — can also think, Perhaps if she knew, though, she’d jump into action, she’d shed this skin of indifference that she’s been wearing, she’d … I don’t know, Freddie. But if I phone her, I can’t avoid finding out the complete truth of Niamh Cresswell. I’m not sure I want to know it just now, and Tim certainly doesn’t.”
Freddie listened to all this in his usual fashion. He finally said, “Ah. I see. Well, that can’t be helped, can it,” and he reached for the phone. He gave a glance to his watch, punched in a number, and said, “Bit early, but with good news early is always welcome.” And then after a moment, “Sorry, Niamh. It’s Fred. Have I awakened you? … Ah. Bit of a restless night here… Really? So glad of it… I say, Niamh, we’ve got Tim over here… Oh, bit cold from exposure. He was sleeping rough, the imp… Ran into him in Windermere, quite by chance. Manette’s looking after him… Yes, yes, that’s just it. Could you phone the school and let them know… Oh. Well, of course. Certainly… You’ve put Manette on his card as well, eh? Very good of you, Niamh. And I say, Manette and I would very much like to have Tim and Gracie stay here with us for a while. How d’you feel about that?… Hmm, yes. Oh grand, Niamh… Manette will be thrilled. She’d quite fond of both of them.”
That was it. Freddie ended the call, put the handset back on the table, and took up his coffee once again.
Manette gaped at him. “What on earth are you doing?”
“Making the necessary arrangements.”
“I see that. But have you gone mad? We can’t have the children here.”
“Whyever not?”
“Freddie, our lives are a terrible muddle. What Tim and Gracie don’t need is another uncertain situation in which to live.”
“Oh yes. A muddle. I do know that.”
“Tim thought that man was going to kill him, Freddie. He needs help.”
“Well, that’s understandable, isn’t it? The killing part. He must have been terrified. He was in the midst of something he didn’t understand and — ”
“No. You don’t understand. He thought that man meant to kill him because that was the deal they’d struck. He told me last night. He said he’d agree to the film if this Toy4You person would kill him afterwards. Because, he said, he lacked the bottle to kill himself. He wanted to, but he couldn’t. And above everything he didn’t want Gracie to think he’d been a suicide.”
Freddie listened to this gravely, chin on his thumb and index finger pressed agaist his lips. He said, “I see.”
“Good. Because that boy’s in such a state of confusion and emotion and passion and hurt and… God, I don’t know what else. So to bring him here, into this situation, perhaps permanently… How could we do that to him?”
“First of all,” Freddie replied after a moment of thought, “he’s in a very good school where he can sort himself out if he’s a mind to it. Our part is to give him that mind. He’s wanting a mum and a dad to stand behind him and believe in him and in the possibility that one can actually pick up the pieces of one’s life and go on.”
“Oh, very well and good, but how long can we give him that if we take him now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come along, Freddie,” Manette said patiently, “don’t be obtuse. You’re quite a wonderful catch and one of these women you’re dating is going to reel you in. Then Tim and Gracie will face another broken situation and how can we ask either one of those children to go through that?”
Freddie looked at her steadily and said, “Ah. Well. Have I been wrong, then?”
“Wrong about what?”
“About us. Because if I have, I’ll dash back upstairs and get myself out of my wedding togs.”
She looked at him till she could no longer see him for her blurring of vision. She said, “Freddie… Oh, Freddie… No. You’re not wrong.”
“Excellent. I was feeling … well, a bit more certain than perhaps I should have done, so I spoke to the registrar, who’s perfectly willing to make an exception in our case and allow us a wedding. Today. I’ll need a best man and you’ll want a bridesmaid. Shall I rouse Tim for the job?”
“Do,” Manette said. “I’ll phone Gracie.”
Zed Benjamin sat in the car park outside his mother’s flat, and he stared at the route he needed to walk to get inside. He knew what awaited him there, and he wasn’t anxious to confront it. It wasn’t going to take long for his mother to work out the fact that he’d lost his job, and that was going to be a real teeth grinder to deal with. In addition to that, there was Yaffa to be faced, and what he really didn’t want to see was her expression when she listened to the tale of how he’d failed in every possible way pursuing his story of the century in Cumbria.
Worse, he felt like hell. He’d awakened that morning in a budget hotel along the motorway. He’d left Cumbria at once on the previous day, directly after speaking to Rodney Aronson and collecting his things in Windermere. He’d driven as far as he could towards London before he’d had to stop for the rest of the night. That night had been spent in a grubby room reminiscent of those Japanese sleeping boxes he’d once read about. He felt as if he’d attempted slumber inside a coffin. Make that a coffin with a loo, he thought.
He’d risen that morning as rested as a man could be after having a fight break out in his hotel corridor at three A.M., necessitating an appearance by the local police. He’d got back to sleep at half past four, but at five the various workers for the day shift in the various shops and takeaway food stalls of the services area had begun to arrive, and they did their arriving with the accompaniment of the slamming of car doors and the shouts of greeting to each other, so round half past the hour, Zed had given up on sleep altogether and crammed himself into the upright packing crate that went for a shower in the bathroom.
He’d gone through the rest of his morning rituals by rote: shaving, cleaning his teeth, dressing. He hadn’t felt like eating, but he wanted a cup of coffee and he was in the cafeteria of the services building when the daily newspapers arrived.
Zed couldn’t help himself. It was force of habit. He’d picked up a copy of The Source and had taken it back to his table to see that the tabloid was running a follow-up to the earth-shattering Corsico piece about the mixed-race child of the minor royal. The paper was giving it Major Breaking Story treatment, this time with the banner headline He Declares His Love accompanied by suitable photographs. It seemed that the minor royal in question — who appeared to be getting more minor by the moment — intended to marry the mother of his bastard child since the revelation of his relationship to the woman had just obliterated her career as a third-rate Bollywood star. Turn to page 3 to see who the mother of the bastard child might be…? Zed did so. He found himself looking at a sensuous woman with more than her share of mammaries, posing with her royal suitor cum fiance with their child abounce on the royal’s knee. He was grinning toothily, on his face a self-satisfied expression declaring to the men of his country, “Look what I managed to get for myself, you wankers.” And it was true. The idiot had a title to recommend himself. Whether he had brains to go with the title was another matter entirely.
Zed had tossed the paper to one side. What a load of tosh it all was, he thought. He knew what would be going on at The Source as a result of this piece and the one that had preceded it, though. It would be celebration of Mitchell Corsico’s unerring ability to sniff out a story, shape the public debate, and manipulate a member of the Royal Family — no matter how obscure — to take an action predetermined by the tabloid. He — Zedekiah Benjamin, struggling poet — was better off shot of the place.
He shoved his way out of his car. He could no longer avoid the inevitable, he thought, but he could damn well paint it as a positive alteration in his life if the proper words would come to him.
He had nearly reached the door when Yaffa came out of the building. She was wrestling with her rucksack, so he reckoned she was on her way to the university. She didn’t see him, and he considered ducking into the shrubbery in an attempt to hide from her, but she looked up and clocked him. She halted.
She stammered, “Zed. What a… well, what a… a lovely surprise. You didn’t say you were returning to London today.”
“It won’t be so lovely when I give you the news why I’m here.”
“What’s wrong?” She sounded so concerned. She took a step towards him and put her hand on his arm. “What’s happened, Zed?”
“The sack.”
Her lips parted. How soft they looked, he thought. She said, “Zed, you’ve lost your job? But you were doing so well! What about your story? The people in Cumbria? All of the mystery surrounding them and what they were hiding? What were they hiding?”
“The how and why and who-knows-what-and-when about having babies,” he told her. “There’s nothing else.”
She frowned. “And Scotland Yard? Zed, they cannot have been investigating having babies.”
“Well, that’s just the worst of it, Yaff,” he admitted. “If there was anyone from Scotland Yard up there, I never saw him.”
“But who was the woman, then? The Scotland Yard woman?”
“She wasn’t Scotland Yard. Haven’t the foggiest who she was and it doesn’t much matter now I’m through, eh?” He was carrying his laptop, and he shifted it from one hand to the other before going on. “Fact is,” he said, “I was rather enjoying our little charade, Yaff. The phone calls and all that.”
She smiled. “Me, too.”
He shifted the laptop again. He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands and his feet all of a sudden. He said, “Right. Well. So when d’you want to schedule our breakup? Better be sooner rather than later, you ask me. If we don’t engineer it in the next couple of days, Mum’ll be talking to the rabbi and baking the challah.”
Yaffa laughed. She said in a way that sounded like teasing, “And is that such a very bad thing, Zedekiah Benjamin?”
“Which part?” he asked. “The rabbi or the challah?”
“Either. Both. Is that so bad?”
The front door opened. An elderly woman toddled out, a miniature poodle in the lead. Zed stepped aside to let her pass. She looked from him to Yaffa to him. She leered. He shook his head. Jewish mums. They didn’t even have to be one’s mum to be one’s mum, he thought with resignation. He said to Yaffa, “I don’t think Micah would much like it, do you?”
“Ah, Micah.” Yaffa watched the old lady and her poodle. The poodle lifted its tufted leg and did some business against a shrub. “Zed. I fear there is no Micah.”
He peered at her earnestly. “What? Damn. You broke up with the bloke?”
“He never was the bloke,” she said. “He was… Actually, Zed, he never was at all.”
It took Zed a moment. Then the moment felt like the dawn although it was morning and broad daylight in front of his mother’s flat in St. John’s Wood. He said, “Are you telling me — ”
She broke in with, “Yes. I’m telling you.”
He began to smile. “What a very clever girl you are, Yaffa Shaw,” he said.
“I am,” she agreed. “But then I always have been. And yes, by the way.”
“Yes to what?”
“To wanting to be your wife. If you will have me despite the fact that I set out to ensnare you with your own mother’s help.”
“But why would you want me now?” he asked. “I have no job. I have no money. I live with my mum and — ”
“Such are the mysteries of love,” she declared.
Gracie came dashing outside the moment the car stopped at the front gate. She flung herself at Tim and clung to his waist and Tim could barely take in her words, so rapidly did they come at him. He was having a bit of trouble taking in the rest of things as well. Cousin Manette had phoned Margaret Fox School to bring them up to date on his whereabouts; she’d requested permission for Tim to miss just one more day; she’d promised she’d have him back there tomorrow; she’d dressed herself in a peacock silk skirt and a milky-coloured cashmere pullover and a grey tweed jacket with a scarf that made all the colours good together; and she’d said they all had a wedding to attend at which Tim was going to have to be best man. That is, if Tim was willing to do so.
Tim saw from her face that the wedding was her own. He saw from Freddie’s face that he was going to be the bridegroom. He said, “I guess,” but he looked away quickly from the happiness that was blazing between his cousin and her soon-to-be-once-again husband and he thought how he didn’t belong in that blaze, how to enter it even for a moment promised the bleak reality of leaving it as well. And he was tired of the constant leaving that had been colouring his life. He added, “What’m I s’posed to wear?” because clearly he had nothing suitable in Great Urswick.
“We shall find something perfect,” Manette had replied, her arm through Freddie’s. “But first, Gracie. Kaveh’s kept her home from school because, of course, I shall need a bridesmaid.”
Which was the topmost subject on Gracie’s mind as she hung on Tim’s waist. “A wedding, a wedding, a wedding!” she sang. “We’re going to a wedding, Timmy! C’n I get a new dress, Cousin Manette? Should I wear white tights? Will there be flowers? Oh there must be flowers!”
Gracie needed no answer to any of this, for she went on to other matters, all of them having to do with Tim and Bella. “You must never run off again,” she told him. “I was that worried and scared, Tim. I know I was cross with you but it was ’cause you hurt Bella, but Bella’s only a doll and I do know that. It’s just that, see, Dad gave her to me and he let me pick her out himself and she was special ’cause of that, but I’m so glad you’re back, and what’re you going to wear?” And then to Manette and Freddie, “Will there be guests? Will there be cake? Cousin Manette, where will you get flowers? Are your mum and dad coming as well? What about your sister? Oh, I expect the walk would be too much for her.”
Tim had to smile, and it was odd because he hadn’t felt like smiling in more than a year. Gracie was like a newly bloomed flower, and he wanted to keep her that way.
All of them went into the house so that Tim could find something to wear to a wedding. He climbed the stairs to his room while Gracie remained chatting to Manette and Freddie below but once inside, the place looked different to him. He saw things and knew them for his belongings, but somehow they weren’t really his. He resided there, but he didn’t reside there. He wasn’t sure what this meant or how to feel about it.
He had nothing nice to wear to a wedding. All he had was his school uniform and he certainly didn’t intend to wear that.
He thought for a moment about what it would mean if he took the next necessary step. It seemed an enormous one, something that might engulf and drag him under in ways he could neither anticipate nor recover from. But there was a wedding, and it was Manette and Freddie’s wedding, and there seemed nothing else to do but to go into his father’s bedroom and to search round and ultimately pull from beneath the bed the black garbage bags of his father’s clothing that Kaveh had shoved there, preparatory to carting them all off to Oxfam in advance of bringing his bride to the farm.
Ian’s trousers were large on Tim, but a belt did the trick and in another year they would probably fit him anyway. He sifted through the rest of the clothing: more trousers and shirts, ties and waistcoats, tee-shirts and sweaters, and he thought of how well his dad had dressed and of what this meant about who his dad had been. Just a bloke, Tim thought, just an ordinary bloke …
Hurriedly, he grabbed up a shirt, a tie, and a jacket. He went back to the others, who were waiting for him in the old kitchen of the manor house, where Gracie was taping a note to Kaveh onto the cupboard in which he kept his tea. Gracie and Timmy have gone to a wedding! was written on the note. What fun!
After this, the lot of them set off to Windermere. On the way out to the car, though, they saw George Cowley removing the last of his belongings from the tenant’s cottage. Daniel was there, hanging back a bit, and Tim wondered that Dan wasn’t in school. Their eyes met, then slid away from each other. Gracie called out, “Bye, Dan. Bye, Dan. We’re off to a wedding and we don’t know if we’ll ever be back!”
It wasn’t until they’d wended their way from Bryanbarrow village to the main road through the Lyth Valley that Manette turned in her seat and spoke to them. She said, “What if you never came back at all, Gracie? What if you and Tim came to Great Urswick and lived with Freddie and me?”
Gracie looked at Tim. She looked back at Manette. Her eyes were round with expectation, but she turned her gaze to the window and the passing scenery it offered her. She said, “Could I bring my trampoline?”
Manette said, “Oh, I think we have room for that.”
Gracie sighed. She moved on the seat to be closer to Tim. She rested her cheek on his arm. “Lovely,” she said.
So the drive to Windermere was spent in a tangle of plans being laid. Tim closed his eyes and let the sounds of their conversation wash round him. Freddie slowed the car as they came to the town and Manette said something about the register office, which was when Tim opened his eyes again.
He said, “C’n I do something first? I mean, before the wedding?”
Manette turned to him and said of course he could, so he directed Freddie to the appliance repair shop where he’d left Bella. The doll had been seen to. Her arms and legs were reconnected. She’d been cleaned up. She wasn’t what she’d been before Tim had pounced upon her, but she was still unmistakably Bella.
“Thought you wanted it posted,” the woman behind the counter said to him.
“Things changed,” Tim said as he accepted the doll.
“Don’t they always,” the woman said.
In the car, he handed Bella to his sister. She clutched the doll to her budding little bosom and said, “You mended her, you mended her,” and cooed to the thing as if it were a live baby and not a realistic depiction of one.
He said, “I’m sorry. She’s not as good as new.”
“Ah,” Freddie said as he moved the car away from the kerb, “but which one of us is?”