In a Good Light (32 page)

For the next five minutes or so I carried on pruning, singing uninhibitedly and snapping the shears in time to the music. I was wondering whether it might look better to leave a few tendrils hanging over the top of the window rather than a blunt fringe, when I felt someone shaking the ladder. I looked down and saw Donovan, squinting up at me.

‘Excuse me,' he began, breathlessly. ‘Do you know if there's anyone at home? Oh my God, it's you,' he exclaimed, as I snatched off my shower cap, sending the earphones spinning. How long had he been standing there? How loudly had I been singing?

There is no such thing as graceful descent where ladders are concerned. I clumped down towards him, stepping on the trailing legs of my dungarees. ‘We weren't expecting you till tomorrow,' I said – not the politest welcome, it later occurred to me.

‘Ah, well, that'll be Mum getting the dates wrong,' he said in the untroubled tone of one used to this phenomenon. He took in my costume with an amused expression.

‘Where is she?' I said, looking round for Aunty Barbara. The fact that he was alone, on foot and out of breath, was only just beginning to ring alarm bells.

‘She's in the car in a ditch about half a mile down the lane. We were cut up on a bend by a yellow Mini and went into a skid.' Our eyes slid in the direction of Penny's car, standing on the driveway not ten yards away. Donovan refrained from commenting.

‘Oh dear. How awful. Is she okay?' It must have been embarrassment or nerves or something, but for a second I had the most overpowering urge to laugh. It took all my concentration to subdue it.

‘Yes, she's fine. She just decided to sit and listen to the radio while I sorted it out. Have you got a tow-rope?'

‘I expect so. Let me see.' The only rope I could think of was the one suspended from the oak tree with the tyre on the end. I supposed in the circumstances it would have to be sacrificed. ‘Come, in,' I said, pushing open the front door and kicking aside some bags of clobber. ‘Christian and Penny are here. They'll give you a tow.'

‘CHRISTIAN!' I yelled up the stairs. ‘DONOVAN'S HERE AND HE'S IN A BIT OF A FIX.'

There was a pause and then Christian appeared, taking the stairs in four strides. ‘Hello, Donovan, how are you,
mate?' he said, in that hearty, blokeish way that serves men for best friends and strangers alike.

‘All right, mate. Good to see you,' Donovan replied. They pumped hands enthusiastically, seven years of estrangement dusted off in a second.

‘Donovan's car's just been run off the road by a yellow Mini,' I explained brightly.

Christian looked aghast, then turned to Penny, who had reached the top of the stairs just in time to hear my last remark. ‘I told you you'd taken that corner too fast, you stupid tart,' he said.

Penny covered her mouth with one hand. ‘Oh God, I'm so sorry. I knew I was over your side a bit, but I'd no idea I'd forced you off the road. I'll pay for any damage.'

I left her babbling apologies and went off to fetch the rope, wondering how best to retrieve it from the oak tree. It was some years since I had clambered up to sit in the branches, but I was pretty sure I could still manage it. Unpicking the knots would be another matter. Stepping through the French windows onto the brick paving I was brought up short: the swing had gone. Only a chafed groove in the bark of the ancient branch and a patch of bald earth directly below marked its passing. I felt a rising sense of indignation wholly at odds with my own intentions of a moment before. It was my swing. I had spent many happy hours riding the tyre, cheating death as the recipient of Christian's notorious ‘up and rounds'. No one had asked me if I would mind.

‘Someone's taken down the swing,' I said, as I rejoined the group in the hallway.

All three looked at me in bewilderment. I suppose without any accompanying explanation my remark might not
have seemed entirely germane. Then Christian laughed. ‘That's been gone nearly two years. Where have you been, Esther?'

‘Oh.' For a moment I thought he must be winding me up. How could I not have noticed a thing like that?

Then Penny said, ‘I've got a rope in the boot. Come on, let's go and rescue your car, Donovan.'

The three of them went off in the Mini, Penny's part in the accident apparently forgiven. I took the opportunity provided by their absence to change out of my dungarees into something more presentable, and organise some tea and biscuits with which to revive Aunty Barbara after her ordeal.

I had been looking forward to this visit ever since it had been confirmed. I felt somehow connected to Donovan after that meeting on the train, and my pledge of silence. I had been carrying the secret clasped to me like a precious vase all this time. On several occasions it had nearly slipped out of my grasp. When Mum said, casually, ‘I wonder how Donovan's turned out. He's probably a punk rocker,' I almost lost it, CRASH, but fortunately Mum put my snorts of laughter down to her regal pronunciation. For another thing, I always associated the Frys with drama, and I was now at an age where it was starting to seem much more important to be interesting than to be nice.

Even in the manner of their arrival they didn't disappoint. From the front doorstep I watched the cavalcade approach at a crawl: first, the yellow Mini, with Penny and Christian in the front; second, the recovered Fiat, with its scraped wing, Donovan steering, Aunty Barbara in the passenger seat; finally, Mum on her bicycle, French loaves balanced in the basket like pencils in a pot.

‘That was a piece of luck your being around, Penny,' said Mum, as everyone emerged from the cars. She had cycled up just in time to see the Fiat being dragged from the ditch, and hadn't heard the history of the accident.

‘You could say that,' said Christian. ‘On the other hand . . .' There was general laughter. Mum looked puzzled.

‘I've made tea,' I said. ‘In a teapot.'

Aunty Barbara was standing on the driveway, staring up at the house, one hand shading her eyes. Perhaps she was remembering her last view of it, from the back of an ambulance. She was dressed in a long red skirt and a ruffle-fronted blouse, deeply unbuttoned. Her black hair was divided into two short, stiff plaits, either side of a chalk-white parting. Her face was a mask of make-up, most of which came off on my cheek as she moved in for a kiss. Christian and Penny must have been similarly done over at the roadside: their faces bore matching scarlet smears.

‘Hello, darling girl. You're looking wonderful. So slim.' I yelped as she tried to enclose my waist with her hands. I'd forgotten that intimidating way she had of talking straight in your face. The heavy, spicy smell of her scent made my eyeballs smart. ‘You're lucky, you know. Most skinny girls have no bosoms,' she added behind her hand, in what she imagined to be a whisper.

‘Hello Barbara,' said Mum, coming to my rescue. ‘You look very well. You've put on weight.'

‘I've actually lost half a stone,' Aunty Barbara corrected her.

‘Oh. Perhaps you're just a bit fatter in the face,' said Mum, undaunted. She led the way indoors. ‘I expect you'd like a cup of tea after your little adventure.'

‘I'd rather have something stronger,' said Aunty Barbara,
who had always refused to acknowledge my parents' status as teetotallers. ‘There's a bottle of fizzy in one of the bags. I wrapped it in newspaper to keep it cold. If Donovan had been any longer fetching help I'd have drunk it.'

‘I ran all the way here and we drove straight back,' Donovan protested. ‘It can't have been ten minutes.'

‘You mustn't mind Donovan if he gets moody,' Aunty Barbara advised Mum in another of her loud whispers. ‘He's nursing a broken heart.' Donovan gave her a murderous look.

‘This place hasn't changed at all,' said Donovan in a kind of wonderment, as he carried the bags up to the bedrooms. It was certainly true that the house had seen no improvement in its general condition over the years. The bogus antique dealers had made off with one or two pieces of furniture, but other than that, everything remained much the same, allowing for the slight deterioration wrought by our occupancy.

He went into every room, shaking his head at the weird familiarity of it all. ‘It's like the museum of my childhood,' he said at last, looking at the pattern of dart-holes in Christian's bedroom door. On an impulse he went across to the wardrobes and gave one of the brass handles an experimental twist. In immemorial fashion it came away in his hand. ‘Fantastic,' he murmured, slotting it back. ‘Unbelievable.'

Over the next few weeks I would often come upon Donovan in the act of surreptitiously fixing things: loose switches, wobbly handles, dripping taps. It was only when I saw how easily such problems were remedied that it occurred to me to wonder why no one had thought to tackle
them before. I couldn't help inferring some criticism of our habits and standards from his behaviour, and my gratitude was often extinguished by gusts of self-consciousness and shame. There was no need for any polite subterfuge where Mum and Dad were concerned: they were delighted with his initiative and skill, and took no offence whatsoever. When he changed a fuse in the Hillman, a job that would have had Dad scratching his head and dithering for weeks, his conquest of them was complete.

After testing and rejecting the others, Aunty Barbara installed herself in the least uncomfortable of our chairs and picked up a copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, which was lying open across the arm. ‘Who's reading this?' she wanted to know. Penny raised her hand. Aunty Barbara pulled a face. ‘It completely spoilt it for me when she went off to her tryst in rubber tennis shoes,' she sniffed. Having dismissed D.H. Lawrence for ever, she rummaged in her carrier bag and produced a velvet pouch, which she passed across to me. It contained a teardrop crystal pendant the size of a plum. For a piece of jewellery it was monstrous, but I dutifully thanked her and hung it round my neck, so that it sat like a great pebble on the shelf of my chest.

‘No, you clown, it's not a necklace,' she said. ‘You hang it in the window and it catches the light.' She took it off me and spun it in a shaft of furry sunshine, spraying the walls with rainbows.

The next item was a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. ‘Champagne to my real friends: real pain to my sham friends, as Francis Bacon would say,' she announced, handing it over to Christian. ‘Open it will you, there's a dear.'

Christian rather heavy-handedly thumbed the cork free
and a creamy plume rose from the neck of the bottle and trickled over his hands onto the carpet. He hadn't thought to have a glass ready.

‘Hmm. I can see you haven't had much practice in the art of opening champagne,' Aunty Barbara observed. ‘I'd better send you a crate for your twenty-first.'

Christian refused to look grateful in advance. His last ten birthdays had passed her by unacknowledged, and she had been known to forget her own son's Christmas present, so there were no real grounds for optimism. However, even he had to admit that this time around Aunty Barbara was an altogether more solid presence than the wraith who had tottered in through the door and out through the window all those years ago. Now she had a job, a salary, and most significant of all, a mission.

It was Dad who brought up the subject of the impending execution while we were all sitting round the dining table eating Penny's special cheese fondue. Aunty Barbara, it emerged, had joined a charitable organisation called Letters for Lifers, which had put her in touch with Roy Kapper, a prisoner who had been on death row in Georgia for over a decade. The last of his many crimes was a bungled robbery at a gas station in which the Vietnamese proprietor was shot. Kapper and his accomplice had both denied pulling the trigger, each pointing the finger at the other. The accomplice's lawyer was marginally more persuasive: his client was only given life.

‘Do you have any grounds for an appeal?' Mum asked. She had seen too much suffering at the mission hospital to hold sacred the lives of individual criminals. Dad, on the other hand, thought Satan himself could be rehabilitated with a proper programme of education and counselling.

‘If it fails I shall appeal to President Reagan as a fellow actor,' she replied.

‘Does your man show any remorse?' Dad wanted to know.

‘He certainly regrets getting involved with Gyle – that's his partner in crime,' said Aunty Barbara, spearing a chunk of bread and stirring it through the hot cheese. ‘He says he wouldn't mind dying so much if he knew Gyle was going too.'

‘Does that sound like the view of an innocent man?' Dad wondered aloud.

‘What do you find to write about?' Penny asked. ‘I wouldn't have a clue.'

Aunty Barbara withdrew her bread cube, trailing strings of molten cheese. ‘At first I wasn't sure what to say. I started off with these heartfelt expressions of sympathy, but I thought that would probably make rather dull reading, so then I just told him all about me, who I am, a typical day – that sort of thing.'

‘What are his letters to you like?' Mum asked, wincing as a strand of cheese stuck to her chin.

‘For someone who's had almost no education they're reasonably coherent. I've got one here.' She produced a piece of folded, lined paper and handed it across to Mum. I could see the handwriting, a random mixture of upper and lower case letters. Donovan, at the other end of the table from me, was looking bored. He's heard all this a thousand times before, I thought. Everyone who comes to the house wants to hear about Barbara's murderer friend.

‘He calls you “dear lady”,' said Mum, skimming the page before handing it back. ‘That's nice.'

‘He writes very movingly about his childhood, which was miserable, and prison routine, and facing death. I was
thinking of trying to get our correspondence published,' Aunty Barbara went on.