Critical Injuries (17 page)

Isla put an arm around each of their shoulders. “We'll go to the living room, shall we?” She had a notion that the kitchen, communal and packed with family history, should not be spoiled for them. They rarely used the living room, so it would be no great loss if they found they couldn't enter it again after this. The living room was where Isla and James read, watched videos and TV, sometimes shared late-night junk food, even sometimes held hands. The living room was already ruined for her. She thought how carefully and warily from now on she would be approaching and choosing parts of the house that might survive some of this. The least contaminated corners, these were what they would have to squeeze themselves into.

Wherever was she going to sleep? Not in that bedroom.

She sat, deliberately, in James's chair, still warm from Constable Donnelly, for whom it had probably been warm from James. If Jamie and Alix, near the edge of the sofa, had any pictures of James in this chair, it was time to start erasing them. She wondered at how clearly she was understanding these small, acute matters, and how she had previously managed to miss much larger ones.

Under this ice, such a bonfire blazing! “Let me tell you,” she began, “basically what's going on.”

Quite soon, Alix began crying. Jamie turned stony. Isla abandoned the chair and moved between them, cradling Alix with one arm, holding the other across Jamie's back, gripping his shoulder. It didn't take long to tell what she knew. She could feel things snapping, giving way, collapsing in on them. “Did he do it?” Jamie asked finally. Alix looked up, blotched and tragic.

“I think maybe,” said Isla. Should she not give them more room for hope? Lies made the air in the house thick tonight, repellent and musty, but he was their father. They had their own attachments to him. “But of course we don't know, and sometimes the police make awful mistakes.” Alix brightened slightly, Jamie did not. Isla took a deep breath and felt the ice expand in her chest.

“What we have to do is stick together and just work things out one thing at a time. So now, you two can decide whether you'd like to take tomorrow off school, while I call your dad's lawyer. How's that?” Small tasks, she thought, little steps, would be bearable. Any leaps and bounds and they'd go crashing right through the starred, flimsy glass under their feet. At least that was how she felt about it. She certainly didn't want her children cut by any more flying glass.

Although they would be. There was no stopping that now.

She wished she knew the right thing to do. She wished the right thing to do had crossed James's mind before he lunged at little girls in storerooms and offices.

“I need to call Bethany first,” Jamie said abruptly. Isla was surprised; she couldn't even call Madeleine yet, or Martin, certainly not James's parents, could barely contemplate reciting all this to James's lawyer who, she realized, would have to hand the case on to one of his partners more adept at criminal law. “I won't be long. I don't want to talk to her, I just want to know if he did anything to her.”

Oh.

“Not Daddy, he wouldn't do that!” Alix cried. “That's gross!” It was like a mutation of Alice in Wonderland: Alix shrinking back into little girlhood, Jamie growing old. Isla wondered what she was becoming. Something not nice. But hanging on with icicle fingers.

“Go ahead, then,” she told Jamie. “The lawyer can wait.” She held Alix, stroked her flamboyant hair, feeling it spring up against her hand. “It'll be all right, sweetie, don't worry, we'll take care of it, it's all right to be upset, but of course it'll work out.” She had no idea what she was talking about, except that she was lying.

Jamie knew, too. “Bullshit,” he said, and left the room to call Bethany.

Well, what was Isla supposed to tell a weeping child, a broken-hearted little girl? Was she supposed to be wise?

At least she was supposed to be something. At least performing acts of motherhood gave her something to do. “How's Bethany?” she asked Jamie when he returned to the living room.

“Fine.” Which she supposed answered the question.

She didn't have the strength to prevent him retreating blackly and silently to his room. She spoke, briefly, to James's lawyer, gave him the skeletal facts, and the phone numbers of the cops. Alix was whimpering on the sofa, that child who once lay sprawled in her dreams, exhausted by joy. Isla covered her with a blanket and sat down to watch, and found herself waking, cramped and stiff in the chair, with the first dartings of light. Amazed they'd all slept; but sleep has its purposes: anaesthetic, forgetful.

Had James slept? Under what circumstances?

Alix and Jamie did not go to school. Alix, looking like a fawn, a puppy, something young and vulnerable to the bullet, the boot, refused breakfast. Jamie had orange juice, Isla dry toast. “Your father,” she said cautiously, opening the wound because it had to be done, “will be in court today, I think. If you want to see him, either of you, we can probably make arrangements.”

“No,” Jamie said. “Not me.”

Alix was watching her brother. “Me neither,” she said sturdily.

When Isla called Martin to tell him she wouldn't be at work and, briefly, why, he said, “Jesus, I don't believe it.” He was a better person than she, then. Except it was just an expression. He could as easily have said, “You're kidding,” although she clearly was not.

She said, so he wouldn't have to, “You should start considering what this is going to mean to us. How public it gets, for one thing. It's not going to be very useful, having a partner who's married to someone accused of serial sexual assault. On kids. If you can imagine. Not exactly a plus in the minds of most of our clients.”

He was good enough to say sharply, “Don't even think like that, Isla. Just deal with what you have to deal with, we're not going anywhere without you. Could you use a drink later, if I came by?”

She thought she might. “You're a pal.” He might be an unfaithful husband, Martin, but he was no molester. That, today, ranked him high on her list of virtuous men.

She called Madeleine, who gasped of course and said, “Oh, my God. Oh, my dear. That's incredible. Tragic. I'll be there as soon as I can manage, can you hold on?”

“Of course. Thanks. I might ask you to stay with the kids for a couple of hours, would that be okay? They're not in school, and I expect I'll have to be out for a while.”

“Anything. Anything I can do. That son of a bitch.”

“Yes.”

He wasn't a son of a bitch, though, he was the son of two fragile parents who had to be told. Was this her job, too? Plunk, plunk, plunk through the day, one dreary horror after another?

James's lawyer phoned. Not the one she'd called last night, who handled his business affairs, but an expert in criminal matters. He introduced himself as Stephen Godwin. He said, “I'd like to see you in my office as soon as we can. I'll be speaking with your husband at some length today, and he'll be making a court appearance this afternoon. I want to raise the matter of bail then, so I'll need to know how far you can go with that, and also a few things about him. That he has a home, solid member of the community, no history, faith of his family, that sort of thing. Later on we'll need to talk more in-depth. More personally. His tendencies, for example, that you may have noticed. I know this must be a difficult time for you, but the earlier we get going the better, I think. Eleven? Eleven-thirty?”

What an invigorating conversationalist, this Stephen Godwin.
Tendencies?

“Actually,” she said, “no. Let me see, how can I put this?” She was pacing the hall with the portable phone, up and down, up and down, click-clicking to the beat of her words and a quite refreshing anger. “Let's see. He no longer has a home, there's not a penny headed his way for bail, and it also turns out I have no idea what his
tendencies
might be.” The kids had stayed in the kitchen, but were probably listening. There was a limit to the number of things she could care about, or prevent.

His voice became soothing, as if she were a dangerously skittish large animal. “Now, I know how you must feel.” Really? “This is a terrible time for you and of course you're upset, anyone would be. Believe me when I tell you, though, because you know I have a lot of experience in these matters, that later you'd regret not swinging into action today. You and your husband have been together a long time. And there are your children to think about. These things are more apt to get out of hand if they're not dealt with promptly. The best defence is a good offence, that's what I'm talking about.”

“I do not,” she said frigidly, “need instructions about giving some thought to my children. I made arrangements to hire you, and that's as far as I go. Oh, and I also need to know if the media's going to be interested. The police mentioned that possibility.”

“I see. Yes. Well, they may be. All I can say is, it depends on what else is going on, but very likely at some point. Respected businessman, young employees, all that. It would be very unwise to speak to the media, though, I should warn you.”

“I believe I'm aware of that. In any case, I'd have nothing to say.”

“Please, let me repeat, don't let your anger, natural as it is, get in the way. If you don't mind me saying, it rather sounds as if you're assuming he's guilty. Is there any particular reason for that?”

“No particular reason, no.” She could hardly say she had found she could picture James being guilty. Or that he had admitted it in his own disgusting way when the doorbell rang. She imagined Stephen Godwin shaking his head when he hung up, thinking no wonder James bent hard over more flexible women.

“Daddy can't come home?” Alix asked back in the kitchen. So they were listening.

“Do you want him to?” Not a fair question. What was the kid supposed to say? She didn't have time to say anything, because Jamie spoke up in a new growling, sort of menacing voice.

“He'd better not.”

Oh dear. Isla pulled out a chair at the table. It happened to be James's usual chair. She was doing it again, she saw: already replacing his image with hers. Sunlight was making the maple tabletop glow golden; how could this terrible day be so painfully sunny? “Look,” she said, “I'm not sure what to tell you. I don't really know how to help. You two are sad and angry and confused, and so am I. But I'll tell you this, we are not going to let each other down here. Inside this house we can cry or yell or swear or whatever, and we will also take care of each other. I won't tell you this isn't bad, because it is, and I can't tell you what's going to happen, because I don't know. But we will get through. And we'll have to think of other people, as well. Your grandparents — your father's their son, and I'm going to have to tell them, and that's hard. The main thing is, we have to stick together and look after each other, and we'll be okay.” It wasn't much of a pep talk, but they wound up sitting taller.

Madeleine arrived then, opened her arms, and Isla, walking into them, finally felt herself at risk of breaking down into individual, collapsing atoms and molecules. She could have disintegrated entirely within her mother's tight arms, but wouldn't, of course. She had children, too. In a moment she straightened, said, just, “Thank you.”

Madeleine nodded, stroked Isla's arm. “I know,” she said, and Isla thought maybe she did.

She left Madeleine with Alix and Jamie, the three of them playing an absent-minded game of Scrabble, with the TV on in the background. “No news, though,” Isla whispered to her mother.

It was awful, standing in James's parents' familiar living room, telling them. “Oh my God,” his father said, turning pale. He went, suddenly, from aging to old. Isla understood that he, too, had pictures. His mother was like Alix, features folding, face bending into her hands.

They weren't bad people. He was the only son, the only child, they had. This was a life's work collapsing in on them.

Except abruptly his mother changed, grew fierce and stern and powerfully determined. Her mind, only momentarily uncertain, was now clear, but in quite a different way from Isla's clarity. “Now then,” she said, “what do we do? This is ridiculous. It's atrocious. We have to take care of it right now. Get rid of it.” Whatever that meant.

His father, roused and rallied, maybe also bullied and blinded, found words, too, and anger. “What foolishness,” he said. “A man's name ruined, and for what?” Of course it was his name, too. He'd be sensitive on the subject of what became of it.

Isla couldn't help, explain, account for, or comfort. She could barely save herself. She left them then to the task of erecting whatever walls they could manage. It was what parents did; unlike wives who leapt to conclusions. She also left them Stephen Godwin's name and telephone number. For all she knew they would try to bail James out. For all she cared they would succeed. “How can we keep the children from finding out?” James's mother asked at the door; a rather belated nod, in Isla's opinion, towards her grandchildren's well-being.

“They already know most of what I just told you. Well, for one thing, they were there when he was arrested.” His mother shuddered at the word, her picture of what “arrested” entailed, and Isla touched her hand. “They'll be all right. They stayed home from school, of course. But oh, I forgot to mention it might wind up in the news, I'm afraid. You'll need to be ready for that.”