In a Good Light (37 page)

You are special to me too. You always will be. So what now?

E.

I didn't push this under his door, like Tess of the D'Urbevilles. Not for fear of the malign influence of carpet – there was no carpet – but because I couldn't risk its being
read by anyone else. I waited for Donovan to go outdoors for his night-time smoke, and when I could safely see the tip of his cigarette glowing in the front garden, I let myself into his room.

I wasn't intending to snoop: the place was in any case monastically bare. He had brought only one small bag from home, and it sat open on the floor, deputising for a wardrobe and disgorging crumpled garments. His suit – hardly worn – drooped, round-shouldered, on a sagging wire hanger on the back of the door, a symbol of his failed attempt at office life. The rest of his belongings were laid out on the table beside the unmade bed: an alarm clock, sunglasses, notebook and pen, loose change, a splayed paperback copy of
Rabbit, Run
. There was his Walkman and half a dozen tapes – Thomas Dolby, Heaven 17, Jean-Michel Jarre, and some compilations called ‘synth' – and a miniature TV set with a four-inch screen. So that was what he did in his room all evening!

I cast around for a safe place to leave my note: somewhere it would be immediately found, but only by Donovan. I thought if I slipped it inside
Rabbit, Run
, marking the page, and slightly protruding, and then left the book on his pillow, he would know instantly that it had been moved, and be prompted to investigate.

As I picked up the book an envelope slid out onto the bed. It was open – in fact it must have been opened and shut many times, because the flap had started to come adrift at the crease – and a triangle of photograph was just visible. I shouldn't have looked. I wish I hadn't. But I'd seen enough by sheer accident for my curiosity to be provoked beyond the point of no return, and before my conscience could intercept I'd pulled the picture out of the envelope.

It was a colour photo of a woman lying on a bed. She wasn't naked, exactly, but the only clothes she had on – a black skirt, rucked up to the waist, and a school tie – somehow made her look more exposed than mere nudity ever could. She seemed to be laughing, but at the same time had one arm shielding her eyes from the camera. The fact that she troubled to cover her face but left her body uncovered, was another disturbing aspect of the picture. What made it more bizarre was the homeliness of the surroundings – a flowery bedspread, a reading light with a scalloped shade, a bedside table crowded with knick-knacks and clutter. There was even a pair of slippers on the floor!

I thought of Mr Clubb's magazines in the toilet –
One Hundred Genuine Married Tits and Clits –
and felt the same churning in my stomach: a curdled mixture of loathing for men, disgust at those women who gave up their secrets so easily, and shame at being made in their form.

I knew that Donovan had taken the photograph – it was so amateurish – and I guessed the woman must be his teacher. The skirt and tie was their little joke. I went to put it back in the envelope and saw someone had written a message on the back:

It's been an education!

E.

The coincidence of that shared initial was another slap in the face, and it reminded me of my original errand, the delivery of my letter, which now struck me as ludicrously romantic and naïve. My hand closed around it and crushed it into a tight ball: I would never send it now. All the feelings of optimism stirred up by Donovan's message had
evaporated. He didn't love me: he was just an incipient pervert, in the same mould as Mr Clubb, who would one day spend his leisure reading porn in the toilet and touching up his daughter's friends in the kitchen.

The slam of the front door made me jump. Using his own notepad and pen I quickly scribbled:
Donovan, Forget it. It was nothing. E.
and put it on the pillow. I replaced the photo and book as I'd found them, and dashed back to my room, closing the door just as he reached the top of the stairs. Then I tore my unsent letter into pieces and burnt them to ash using the Biarritz matchbook, which he had given me all those years ago as a token of eternal friendship.

WHENEVER I LOOK
back on the events that followed that strange day, I'm always appalled by the thought of how little it would have taken for catastrophe to have been averted. With only minute adjustments to the behaviour of any one of us, the future might have unrolled quite differently. This line of thinking can lead to madness, of course, so I don't indulge in it too often. What bothers me most, I suppose, is that we didn't realise then how happy we were. It's as if happiness is something we can only experience in retrospect, as a contrast to present misery.

The telephone calls started a few days later. No threats, or abuse, just silence, several times a day and during the night. Somehow those night calls felt much more intimidating, so we got into the habit of taking the phone off the hook after dark, in spite of Mum's misgivings that someone from overseas – Aunty Barbara, for example – might be
trying to make contact. I nursed a secret ambition to intercept one of these calls and hear that sinister silence for myself. But the one time I managed to beat Mum to the phone it was just Martina, wanting to reach Christian.

‘Is that you, Esther?' she asked in her uninflected drawl.

‘Yes.'

‘It's Martina. I'm trying to get hold of Christian. No one returns my calls nowadays.'

‘He's at work.'

‘Can you give me his work number?'

‘He hasn't got one. It's a sort of building site.'

‘Oh. Well, when you see him can you tell him to call me as soon as possible?'

‘Have you tried Penny? She's not at work.'

‘I've left her loads of messages and she never rings back. Anyway, it's Christian I'm after.'

The conversation ended there, and it slipped from my mind so thoroughly that I omitted to mention it to Christian when I next saw him. People say there's no such thing as forgetting; that it's all a matter of acting out subconscious desires. With that in mind, I've tried to examine my conscience since for any signs that I deliberately failed to pass on Martina's message. All I can say with certainty is that it wasn't planned.

One night, soon after this, Dad came back from visiting Mrs Tapley and said he'd seen a car parked, without lights, at the end of the lane leading to our driveway. It had sped off as he approached, before he had a chance to distinguish its make or registration. As a precaution it was decided that I should be picked up from any late babysitting appointments, and Donovan was advised to curtail his moonlight rambles, and stay close to the house when he had his last
smoke of the evening. In fact he was invited, repeatedly, to smoke in the house, but couldn't be persuaded.

Christian was in favour of rounding up some of his fellow labourers from the Holiday Inn and staking out the area after dark. This was, he assured us, just the sort of job they would enjoy and excel at, some of them having already done long stretches inside for taking an overly physical approach to resolving grievances. Dad vetoed this suggestion in the strongest possible terms. ‘I'm sure if we're sensible it will all blow over. A confrontation is the last thing we want.'

All this excitement provided a welcome diversion from my uneasy relationship with Donovan, which was characterised by electric awkwardness dressed up as perfect civility. I suppose he might have been taken aback by the dismissive tone of my reply. I hoped so. He certainly hadn't felt inspired to continue the correspondence. In any case, there was now a distance between us, which I felt, stubbornly, it was not up to me to bridge, though of course he was ignorant of its cause. I don't know how long I planned to sustain this impasse. There were times when I thought I'd behaved stupidly, and wasted a precious opportunity to advance our relationship. But then I thought of the photograph, and that woman, with her genuine-married-tits-and-clit, and my calcified heart hardened all over again.

Then the money from the charity jar disappeared, and that gave me something new to think about. Mum had taken the earthenware pot down from the top of the dresser, with the intention of bagging up her year's collection of coins and taking them to the bank along with the Top of
the Pew proceeds and converting the lot into a cheque for Christian Aid, and found the roll of notes – over £400 – missing.

Once the plausible explanation – that Dad, newly security-conscious in the wake of those phone calls, had taken the cash to the bank himself – had been discounted, Mum had turned the kitchen over, pulling everything out of cupboards and upending drawers. She seemed to be clinging to the hope that she might have sleepwalked one night, and removed the money to a safer place herself, without retaining any memory of the event. She said she'd once read something similar by Wilkie Collins, but Dad said nonsense, there was laudanum involved. I think she was clutching at straws, frankly. She didn't seem in the least surprised when her searches produced nothing.

The uncomfortable conclusion, reached privately but never articulated, was that one of the household must have stolen the £400. Mum and Dad, who would never accuse, or even suspect anyone of theft without proof, remained publicly wedded to the view that there must be some innocent explanation, as yet obscure to our limited human wisdom, which would eventually, with prayer and patience, be divinely revealed. What they thought and discussed behind their bedroom door I never knew. In the meantime, Dad would have to make good the loss from his Death Fund – earnings he had put by from taking local funeral services when the rector was unavailable, with the aim of accumulating enough to cover the cost of his own burial, whenever required.

It was Penny who whispered the unthinkable. We were in the very same department store café where Aunty Barbara had treated me to prawn cocktail during our assault on the
sales, taking a break from the arduous job of choosing Penny something to wear on her birthday. She had brought me along as a sounding board – God only knew why, given her views on my fashion sense. Only recently she had said, ‘It's incredible that you're brilliant at art, Esther. Anyone looking at what you're wearing would naturally assume you were colour blind.' I suppose my role was just to second her opinions, admire the things she liked, and disparage the things she didn't, and this I was happy to do. Then, over chocolate fudge cake, the conversation came around to the missing money.

‘I hardly dare say this,' Penny said, combing ripples in the fudge with her fork, ‘especially to you. But I keep having this horrible, nagging thought at the back of my mind that it was Christian.'

‘Why?'

‘Because he's the one who needs it most.'

‘He'd never steal from Mum and Dad,' I protested. ‘Or anyone, I mean.'

‘Maybe he was only borrowing it, unofficially, until he got paid, not thinking it'd be missed.'

‘So why didn't he just own up?'

‘Because he doesn't want your parents to know he's in debt.'

‘Or put it back secretly, then? Instead of sitting back and watching Dad pay up.'

‘I don't know. Maybe he's got a perverted sense that he's entitled to it because your mum and dad have kept him short over the years.'

‘That doesn't sound a bit like Christian,' I said. ‘He's not devious like that. He's really kind – he'd do anything for anyone.'

‘Yes, you're right,' said Penny, shaking her head as if to dislodge these ungenerous thoughts. Maybe she felt a little chastened by my robust defence. Then she said quietly, ‘He has been known to do a little too much for some people.'

‘What do you mean?' I had just taken a mouthful of cake, which I swallowed hastily. It seemed to land heavily and whole in my stomach, like a stone down a well.

‘I know you think he's perfect. It's only natural. But he isn't: no one is, and you do people a disservice to imagine that they are. It means they're bound to disappoint you.'

‘What has he done that's “too much”?'

‘Well, he's so sympathetic and friendly, everyone comes to him with their problems. Women, I mean. And sometimes he does a rather thorough job of consoling them, if you know what I mean.'

‘Oh.' I did know, and all of a sudden Penny's reluctance to return Martina's calls or go to America without him made perfect sense. Poor Penny. At last I had discovered the advantage of being Christian's sister: he could never be unfaithful to me. In fact, the more unfaithful he was to other women, the more enviable my position became. Even if Penny's revelation could not shatter my image of Christian as perfect, it did nothing for my sense of the reliability of his sex, already fatally undermined.

‘Men are so horrible,' I burst out, throwing down my fork so that it bounced off the plate and cartwheeled across the table, leaving a trail of chocolate crumbs on the white table-top. ‘Why are they so horrible?'

‘What's brought this on?'

I could have confided in her then about Donovan. She might have given me some good advice and saved me from my own ignorance. But it was only secrecy that made it
possible for me to behave normally in front of Donovan, something that would be impossible in the presence of a knowing witness. So instead I just said, ‘They don't have real feelings, do they? Not like us.'

‘Well,' said Penny, ‘it's certainly true that they're different. But they're not all horrible all the time. I shouldn't have said any of that about Christian. I'm sorry if I've upset you. Forget I ever said it.' She had cleared her plate and was gathering herself up for another onslaught on the dress department.

‘You don't really think he could have stolen the money?' I said.

‘No, no. I never did. Not really. It was just my overheated imagination.'