A Line of Blood (32 page)

‘Bottle of wine, wasn’t it?’ she said. There was no cruelty in the words, but the laughter froze on my lips.

My hand moved involuntarily towards my face. I stopped it before it could reach the subtle tracery of dried blood, all that now remained of the blow Millicent had dealt me in the kitchen.

‘No,’ I wanted to say. ‘No, that’s not the same thing.’

‘Have you spoken to a DV team?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘At the hospital.’

‘And have you considered whether to press charges?’ The sympathetic look was back.

‘I shouldn’t have laughed,’ I said. ‘It’s the stress of all this. I know you have a job to do.’

She nodded. ‘You’re dealing with an intolerable burden,’ she said. ‘You need to know that we already have a twelve-hour extension on your wife’s custody. Approved by an inspector. But after that she’s out.’

‘What are you saying? That you want more time?’

‘I’m telling you how things are.’

‘I can’t press charges against Millicent.’

Mr Sharpe wanted the meeting over as quickly as I did. Neither of us mentioned that he had seen me in the pub with Rose; nor did he ask where Millicent was, nor how things were at home. He knew we were having difficulties, he said. It was perhaps to be expected that Max was
acting out
. Had we spoken to Max about what he had done, about why he had punched Ravion Stamp?

Yes.

Ravion Stamp did not have a spectrum disorder, as Max appeared to believe. He was a normal little boy. He and Max did not like each other, but they would be going on to different secondary schools after the summer break.

All right.

Perhaps we should leave it at that, then?

Perhaps we should.

We shook hands and left it at that.

Caroline. I had completely forgotten about Caroline. Something – Norway? Arla? the arrest? – had erased her from my mind.

She rang me as I left the school, asked if I would meet her for lunch at a members’ club near Manchester Square. And I went, although in truth I did not know why. It was Millicent who needed my help now, not I who needed Caroline’s.

But I had asked to see Caroline; it had taken strength for her to ring me. She was waiting for me in the Welles dining room. It was just after half past twelve; the room was almost empty. She looked comfortable here in the club, in her elegantly expensive clothes, at this elegantly expensive table, with its lead crystal and its starched linen. She didn’t stand up, and for a moment I wondered whether I should bend and kiss her. Then a waiter appeared, and I sat down and ordered a good whisky.

She smiled, and raised her water glass to me. She had grown her hair longer now and wore it drawn back, wound tight on to the crown of her head, where it was held with long pins. There were tiny lines around her mouth and eyes.

‘I wanted to apologise to you,’ I said. ‘But I’m not sure where to start.’

‘You don’t have to apologise to me, Alex. You were very young.’

‘Twenty-seven isn’t young. Twenty-seven is should know better.’

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

From above the fireplace a muscular man in a military uniform leaned forwards from the back of his horse, his sword extending outwards into the room.

‘Is he one of yours?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s not
one of mine
. Mine are downstairs somewhere.’

A waiter appeared beside me with a large tumbler of whisky on a small tray. I took it and put it on the table in front of me. I dipped my finger into my water glass and let three drops fall into the whisky.

Caroline raised an eyebrow. ‘How can you be so deft, and yet so gauche, Alex?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘But the whisky’s too good not to. I didn’t mean to embarrass you.’

‘It’s not as if anyone’s going to judge me by your behaviour. They may, of course, judge you. But you haven’t been my problem for a very long time, have you, Alex?’

I stared at her, uncertain of what to say. She called over a waiter, ordered a bottle of wine.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hadn’t planned to come here and be angry with you. It isn’t as if I can’t see that you’ve changed. You have a wife, and a son, and I’m sure you love them both very much. But then you needle me about where I come from, as if there’s anything I can do about my family, and it’s as if you haven’t changed in the slightest. It’s an accident of birth, Alex. Nothing more.’

‘And yet we’re here,’ I wanted to say, looking at the portraits on the wall. ‘Amongst
your
equals and
my
betters.’

She was right, though. Something in me still wanted to lash out at her, even now.
I have to stop rushing to judgment.

‘I have a temper,’ I said at last. ‘It attaches itself to the wrong targets. To the people I love. I don’t know why. I can see it now, and now that I know about it, I don’t behave as badly as I did to you. But it’s still there, and sometimes I take it out on Millicent, or on Max.’

‘I see.’ A look of concern crossed her face.

‘Never physically,’ I said. ‘I would never.’

‘All right.’

‘I think I learned it from my father.’

‘From your father?’

‘He came home angry from the Korean War. No one helped him. It got too much for him eventually. Although I always knew he loved me.’

At this she looked troubled.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not placing the blame for what I did to you at his door. I betrayed you, and when you asked me to leave you alone I harassed you.’

She made to speak. But the waiter arrived with the wine. I insisted she taste it. She ordered a goat’s cheese salad, and I ordered the same.

‘You don’t have to accept my apology, Caroline. But I do have a need to apologise to you.’

‘Alex,’ she said, ‘you said your anger attaches itself to the people you love.’

‘Most strongly, yes.’

She took a swig of wine.

‘How deliberate is your choice of words?’

‘Deliberate.’

‘You loved me, Alex.’ Almost like Millicent on that day thirteen years ago. ‘You loved me.’ Almost an accusation. ‘Well, I never knew.’

‘Neither did I. Pathetic as that sounds.’

We picked at our salads. The whisky obliterated the flavour of the goat’s cheese, made it flat and lifeless. We talked a little about our lives. She worked for a charity, and was often out of the country. She did not talk about men, except to say that she was single, by choice. She had never considered having children. Her parents were very understanding about the life she lived. She was their only child. Without a son they already knew, she said, that the line would not continue. ‘Their little failure, not mine.’

‘Strange,’ I said. ‘In my family we only produce boys. One a generation. Max, my son, is the only son of an only son of an only son.’ She smiled at this, and for a moment I saw myself married to her, posed formally in the walled garden of her brick-built country house, boy-child in arms, smiling out at the world. Lord of the Manor; almost but not quite.

When we had finished eating she said to me, ‘Alex, I have long since destroyed any record of what you did. If the police did contact me I should be obliged to say what happened between us, but I should also feel an obligation to say that it is clear you have changed. For what that’s worth. My old solicitor died years ago. I should be surprised if the firm kept a carbon copy – even more so if the police ever found out about the letter.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I took her hand.

‘No,’ she said, drawing away. ‘Alex, I would like you to stay away from me in future.’

She meant it.

‘I’m confused, Caroline.’

‘I forgive you, Alex. But I don’t want you near me.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is humiliating.’ I took a slug of wine. After the whisky it tasted thin, sharp, as nauseating as mould on bread.

Her voice softened. ‘I can see that you’re trying hard to be good; I think you
are
a better man now. A good man. But you still have that strange broken quality to you, and that makes you dangerous to women like me, who like to fix things.’ She gave an embarrassed little gesture. ‘There’s a stupid little piece of me that still wants to fix you, Alex.’

‘I’m sorry for what I did to you,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘perhaps we should bring this to an end.’

‘OK.’

‘I do think you’re right, Alex, by the way. I think you
have
inherited something of your father’s shell shock. That anger doesn’t just disappear. It gets handed down, father to son.’

‘I wasn’t claiming that,’ I said.

‘You wouldn’t be the first man it happened to,’ she said. ‘It’s very widespread. You don’t experience combat. You don’t see your friends killed. You don’t take part in atrocities. But you inherit the psyche of a man who has.’

‘That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Actually, it does. It’s called transgenerational trauma.’

‘And you know about that from one of your little charities, do you?’

‘I work with refugees, if that’s what you mean, Alex.’ She said it quietly, and without anger. ‘Their children, the ones born in the safety of London hospitals, develop the same scars as their parents. Same symptoms – outbursts of anger, panic attacks, a sense of something being permanently broken – but without the flashbacks to the traumatic trigger.’

She left an enquiring pause. I decided to say nothing.

‘Most of them don’t understand why they’re traumatised, Alex, because they have never experienced the trauma that their parents lived through. But they live with their parents, whose disorder is untreated, and they inherit the disorder. Just being around someone with PTSD is enough.’

‘You think I’m like them?’
I know I’m not like them.

‘At least your father knew the cause of his suffering. I don’t think you do. And a part of you feels compelled to strike out at other people. Although I believe you when you say you’re getting better.’

‘I don’t want your pity,’ I said.

‘I don’t pity you, Alex.’

There was a warmth in her eyes. Empathy perhaps. Not pity. ‘But now that you know what it might be, you could seek help.’

‘I’m coping,’ I said, ‘but I’m going to go now.’

I thought for a while about trying to find work, but found myself watching television instead. I watched an early-afternoon programme about a maximum-security prison in Michigan for women. Everybody shouted. Not one of the women in the prison claimed to be innocent. Two of the inmates had smothered their children, one had poisoned her husband, and another had burned down an entire city block in downtown Detroit. ‘Sure,’ said the firebrand, ‘sure I have some regrets.’ It was the narcotics that had made her do it. The programme showed an image of her, skeletal and out of hope. She looked better now; she worked in the prison library. But really it was all over for her: she was never getting out.

Once, in the days before Millicent, when I wasn’t sleeping, a psychiatrist suggested I could have transgenerational trauma; he called it War-Related Intergenerational Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, though.

It seems to be a real thing, passed from returning soldiers to their families, from fathers to their sons. I looked it up.

I don’t have it.

Rose rang. She wanted to know why I had missed Bryce’s funeral. I told her that I had been in hospital over the weekend, that I had wanted to come. I didn’t tell her about Millicent and the bottle.

‘He was a better guy than I realised,’ I said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, he was a good guy. He had it tough.’

‘How do you mean?’ she said again.

‘The lost child. That must have been very hard for him.’

The line went very quiet.

‘What do you mean by the lost child?’ she said at last. ‘What did he say to you, Alex?’

‘He didn’t say anything to me. But he told my wife about his little girl. About Lana.’

Again, Rose said nothing.

‘Rose,’ I said. ‘You still there?’

‘Yeah. I’m here.’

‘He did well to rebuild his life after that.’

‘Did he?’ she said. ‘Did he really?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I think we should meet.’

‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot on.’

I ended the call. I didn’t tell her about the arrest.

When Max got home I tried to talk to him. How did he feel about Millicent being arrested? Fine, he said.

‘Fine?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

How did he feel about what he’d heard, about what he’d seen of the affair? Fine, and again fine.

‘Max,’ I said, ‘are you sure you’re OK?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When are you next seeing Dr Å?’

‘I go three times a week.’

The reproach in his voice, in his eyes:
you should know that
.

I rang my mother and asked her about the arrangements for the funeral. ‘Oh, son,’ she said, ‘it’s all in hand.’

My mother was in no mood to speak about practicalities for once. Instead we spoke for a long time about my father. She had washed the last of his clothes now, although really she could see that there was no need; she had filled the house with pictures and music, had been playing his Serge Gainsbourg records – ‘the
boulevardier
ones, mind, not the sexy ones’ – over and over. She found herself talking to my father though she knew he was not there.

‘Foolish, Alexander, is it not?’

‘No, Mum, there’s nothing foolish about that. I miss him too.’

‘Right enough, son,’ she said. ‘Aye. Thank you,’ as though there were something to thank me for.

When at last she asked after Millicent, as I knew she would, I told her that Millicent was OK. Busy, though. And sent her love.

‘Send her my love back, will you not? Tell her that I miss our little chats.’

Arla came home at eight and we ate pizza and drank wine in the kitchen as if nothing was wrong. Max took himself off to bed early, and Arla and I carried on drinking. Anyone looking in through the back door would have thought we were man and wife.