(1998) Denial (17 page)

‘I’m coming.’

He wound the tape back over the segment and played it again. As he listened to her speak the words, he closed his eyes, went back two days, to Thursday, to Cora Burstridge’s flat with its art-deco furniture and the note on the dressing table.

I can no longer look at myself in the mirror
.

He concentrated, fired up the synapses, tried to haul back a complete picture of Cora Burstridge’s bedroom on the third floor of Adelaide Crescent on the Hove esplanade, overlooking the English Channel.

Slow Time.

That was the name the CID gave it when they sealed off a crime scene. They put the house, or the hotel room, or the flat, or the patch in the woods, or the stretch of pavement, or the area surrounding the car into
slow time
. Like freeze-frame. One frame at a time. The minutiae; hair follicles; flakes of skin; clothing fibres.

Slow Time.

This was suicide. It was not a crime scene. She’d chained the safety lock from the inside, written her note, downed her pills, and then –

The thought of what Cora Burstridge had done next gave him the shallows.

Before his grandfather had retired and come to live with Glenn’s parents in England, he had been first mate on a tramp steamer that plied for trade around the Windward Isles, delivering boxes of engine spares to one, collecting sugar beet from the next and taking coffins to another. Glenn loved to listen to the adventures he’d had, but especially he liked to listen to the old man talk about
the shallows
.

Boats almost never sank in deep water, he told Glenn. It was the shallows that got them. You got the biggest waves where the water was the most shallow; the most dangerous rocks were not the ones you could see, but the ones you could not see, the reefs a few feet below the surface. The shallows.

The shallows spooked Glenn, yet he was drawn, each time, to ask his granddad to talk about them. They gave him a thrill, they gave him his own private demon to fight – and it was a demon that he never, ever, quite slayed.

Dark, raging turbulence. Froth, foam, razor-edged coral that could rip open the belly of a boat like a sardine can. The shallows instilled in Glenn a fear that used to wake him some nights in his childhood, thrashing in his bed and screaming warnings to the skipper. When the fear subsided it left him high and dry, washed up from his sleep into a dark, only partly defined pool of dread.

Suicide. The word rolled around inside his head like the slop of dark water.

Suicide
.

He tried to picture those last few minutes of her life. Writing the note. Taking off her slippers. Getting into bed. Pulling the bag over her head, tying the bow with her dressing-gown sash. The horribly claustrophobic sweatiness of the bag in front of her eyes.

What kind of thoughts did Cora Burstridge have during those last minutes of consciousness? What had driven her to it?

He’d spoken to her daughter, who lived in Los Angeles, and a couple of her friends had given statements – and spoken to the press. Cora Burstridge had been depressed since her most recent face-lift. She’d been finding it hard to cope with ageing, and the BAFTA award on Monday night had only exacerbated her sense of isolation.

She had not been made a dame, or given any other honour because, as she herself admitted, Buckingham Palace had frowned on her series of public affairs with three prominent politicians, then frowned harder on her anti-monarchist views.

‘Better give the old bat some kind of recognition before she croaks,’ was how she’d privately described Monday night to one friend.

Alone, money running low, her looks gone, dumped a decade back by her third and last husband, suffering from depression, she was a classic case for a suicide.

So why
, Glenn Branson asked himself as he hauled himself up from his armchair to confront his cold steak and now frosty wife,
why do I have a problem with this?

‘This is Dr Tennent speaking. Gloria, would you please give me a call as soon as you get this message? I’m rather afraid I upset you this morning. It might be helpful if we had a quick chat on the phone.’

Click.

Thomas pressed
REWIND
on the car’s tape deck. Then he pressed
PLAY
and listened again to the recording of Dr Michael Tennent’s voice that he had copied onto a cassette from the answering-machine.

Click.

He swallowed. Gripped the steering wheel with his fists. He wanted to rip it out of the dashboard and stab Dr Michael Tennent to death with the column.

He played the tape again.

Saturday night. Ten o’clock. Big moon. Stars sparkling, a lot of prisms up there tonight. He was sitting in Dr Goel’s midnight blue Ford Mondeo. Dr Goel was cool about him using it. The car was clean, immaculate, there had not been a speck of dirt on the paintwork when he’d begun his journey here. It had a Phillips tape player and CD deck, beige leather seats, electric windows, plenty of gadgets. There were buttons and switches everywhere you looked, with strange symbols on them. Tiny hieroglyphics drawn for midgets with magnifying glasses. What the fuck did they mean?

The only thing written in plain English was on the boss of the steering wheel in front of him.
AIRBAG.

It was getting hard to see the dog turd on the pavement in the pool of shadows between two street-lamps. Thomas had been eyeing it for an hour. A fly was crawling up the
inside of the windscreen. Flies ate dog turds. Flies ate dead birds. If it wasn’t for flies there’d be dead birds everywhere. He didn’t mind flies, they were OK, he had reason to be grateful to them. He hated dead birds. Dead birds were unlucky.

There had been a dead bird in the garden the day his mother died. There had been a dead bird beside Versace when he’d died. They could be messages from the Higher Authority – how could you know they weren’t?

It was too dark for anyone to see his face inside the car now. He’d brought
The Times
, ready to shield his face if anyone walked past. He did not think anyone in this neighbourhood would bother to look twice at a man, sitting in a respectable car, reading
The Times
. So far, no one had walked past except the old man with the Labrador that had crapped on the pavement.

There was a piece about the missing editor, Tina Mackay, appeals from the police and her mother, another quote from her distraught boyfriend. No leads, no clues, no sightings of her E-registered navy Volkswagen Golf with a dented rear bumper. There weren’t going to be. He had dismantled it in his garage at home, taken it, one bit at a time in his white van, to different junk yards. All in all, he cleared almost two hundred pounds for it. He spent the money on flowers for his mother’s grave.

There was a far, far, bigger piece on Cora Burstridge. A eulogy of 2,324 words. It was written by the former film critic turned theatre critic, Peregrine Vernon.

Peregrine Vernon had once savaged his mother’s performance in a play. It was in 1986, her attempt at a comeback; in Somerset Maugham’s
Our Betters
, in which she played a dictatorial aristocratic lady of leisure. Peregrine Vernon suggested the director should have cast a wild pig instead of her. ‘It would have looked more attractive and made less of a hash of the lines,’ he had written.

Thomas could clearly recall the critic’s face in the photograph above his by-line. The bow-tie, the silver hair, the bloated, broken-veined, lunched-out face. And his mother’s tears when she had read those words.

At the play’s first-night party, his mother had looked so beautiful, he had been so proud of her, the performance she had given in the play had been sensational – and the performance afterwards at the party, the grand lady making her comeback, welcomed by everyone, that had been fantastic! A triumph! They were all there. The Lloyd Webbers. Harold Pinter. Paul Scofield. Peter Hall. Cameron Mackintosh. Eddie Kulukundis and Susan Hampshire. Robert Fox. Vanessa Redgrave. Maggie Smith. Joan Plowright. Sir Michael Hordern. Albert Finney. Judi Dench. Bill Kenright.
Everyone!

There were tears of happiness in his mother’s eyes that night. Then the terrible silence in the back of the car as they were driven home, the first reviews already read and the papers discarded. And in the morning, with the arrival of the
Mail
and those terrible words, she was broken.

Jack Tinker, the regular critic, had been on holiday. Peregrine Vernon had taken his place. Through her tears she kept repeating over and over that Jack Tinker would have liked it, Jack Tinker would never have said such terrible things.

And now Peregrine Vernon had written 2,324 words on Cora Burstridge.

A scandal that Cora Burstridge was never formally honoured by the country for the incalculable range of her services to it. From selfless volunteer to giant of the screen and the theatre . . . we have lost one of the greatest actresses our country has ever produced and she will never be replaced . . .

Thomas’s anger increased. Peregrine Vernon was wrong. There was a scandal, but it was quite different from the one he wrote about here. He needed to be told. The record should be set straight.

You stupid ass of a man, why did you have to write this article? I’d forgotten about you, really, I had!

Amanda Capstick’s Alfa Romeo was still outside Dr Michael Tennent’s house. The roof was still down. Two
hours ago the national lottery draw had taken place live on television. His mother had despised the lottery, had sneered at the people who bought tickets. He wondered if Dr Michael Tennent bought lottery tickets. He played the tape-recording from the answering-machine again.

‘. . . I’m rather afraid I upset you this morning. It might be helpful if we had a quick chat on the phone.’

Click.

Rewind.

Click.

He played it again.

He hated the lottery. Hated the little coloured balls that jigged around in the glass bowl. The lottery gave people hope, when in reality there was no hope. If you lost, you were miserable. If you won, your life became hell. It was never going to get you out of your loop of misery. It was like Dr Tennent’s voice on the tape. Promising something it could never deliver.

There was another cassette lying on the passenger seat beside him. He would play that soon.

The flies had quit for the night. Even the one crawling up inside the windscreen seemed to have given up trying to escape, for the time being. He took a coin from his pocket, tossed it, palmed it, but did not yet look down at it.

Dr Michael Tennent, will you still be there in the morning?

The flames of the two candles burned upright in the breezeless night, on the wooden table in the wrought-iron gazebo, beneath a canopy of vine leaves. Amanda ate the last mouthful of her lamb. It was seared on the outside, pink in the middle, seductively sweet from the redcurrant sauce. Michael had judged it to perfection. ‘You are an amazing cook,’ she said, wanting to see him smile. He was a completely different person when he smiled: he turned from a serious, remote character, wrapped up in his own thoughts, into an animated and gregarious personality.

She was having a good time with him, the earlier incident, if not forgotten, set aside, and she was enjoying the sense of being let into secrets as he told her about some of his more bizarre case histories. And he looked strikingly handsome tonight, with his strong, lean face, his dark hair, his small tortoiseshell glasses, his powerful frame clearly visible through his red Ralph Lauren shirt. She liked the smell of his cologne. The way he spoke.

She watched him cutting a piece of lamb on his plate. His shirtsleeves were rolled back midway to his elbows; his arms and hands were hairy. Strong, masculine hands with long fingers,
surgeon’s hands
, her mother would have called them.

He was the kind of man she would have liked to have had as her father, she thought. Maxine Bentham had repeatedly told her that her attraction to Brian was her need of a father figure. Maybe that was true, and maybe that was the reason she was sitting here in this garden with Michael Tennent, feeling the same kind of snowstorm excitement in her
stomach that she’d had on her very first date when she was seventeen.

Michael glanced away awkwardly: compliments always made him shy. Then he looked back at her, intently, and raised his glass of red wine. ‘I think you’re lovely,’ he said quietly.

The angst he had been feeling about entertaining another woman in Katy’s home was forgotten now – maybe the wine was helping, maybe the passage of time, but mostly it was Amanda. There was some kind of magic going on out here between them. Something so good that it scared him: it was too good to last. Nothing this wonderful could last.

The song that had kept coming into his head over the past few days, was back again now, ‘Georgia On My Mind’, and suddenly he realised why: a neighbour – or maybe a car out on the street – was playing it on a stereo.

Their eyes met. A midge hovered into view then fell back into the night. There was an intensity in her eyes that drew his own to them: they were shimmering with life, spangles of light like a burst of fireflies glittered in the dark of the pupils. They continued to stare at each other, locked in a slow, easy moment that stretched effortlessly longer and longer, dancing with their eyes to their own private, silent rhythm.

Tiny muscles quivered in Amanda’s face. Her expression narrowed a fraction, then widened again, bearing the hint of a smile that was warmth, not mockery. Such incredible eyes. Michael longed to reach across the table and take her hand. He wanted to touch her, but this wasn’t the moment, not yet.

The night was warm on his face. It carried her perfume to him. Here, in his garden, surrounded by exotic plants, they were alone in a dark, secret world, and he felt a growing tightness of excitement inside him, a sense of adventure, the start of some extraordinary, magical journey.

She blinked, and still she was staring at him. A slight frown now, as if there was something she was seeing that
was denied to him, then she swung away her eyes and picked up her glass.