The Insect Farm (11 page)

“So you are saying that he does know right from wrong?” said Wallace.

“Of course he does,” I said, becoming even more angry. “He’s not a bloody half-wit.” And I knew as soon as I said it that in fact Roger was indeed a half-wit.

The two detectives looked at each other, as if trying to decide whether to proceed with something. The DC continued writing and the DS continued talking.

“Were you aware that your parents had told Roger that they were going to dismantle his insect farm?”

“What?”

“Were you aware of that?

“No, I wasn’t. And what’s more, I don’t think it’s true.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Pascoe.

“Because I think they would have told me.” And the thought occurred to me that perhaps these officers had spoken to Roger separately – maybe at his day centre – and no one had informed me. “Anyway, how do you know?”

“We were given the information by one of the members of staff at the day centre.”

“Has he told you this himself? Has he said anything about this to anyone else?”

“No, we haven’t interviewed him yet; but I wondered if you would mind if we did?”

“Yes, I do mind.” My response was instant. “Roger would be utterly confused and would be just as likely to give you wrong and self-incriminating answers if he thought that’s what you wanted to hear. Roger didn’t do anything relating to the fire – I would stake my life on it – and, if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s a bit of a cheap and easy answer to suggest that he did, just because he cannot properly account for himself and no one has a better idea.”

* * *

Days followed days, and gradually Roger and I emerged into some kind of routine. The two detectives came back after about three weeks to tell me that they were “keeping the file open”, but that their investigations had produced nothing tangible. I knew that they still harboured their doubts about Roger, but I was relieved that they did not articulate them.

Eventually the insurance money came through, and I did the mental arithmetic. By the time I’d found and bought a suitable place for Roger and me to live in, bought some decent furniture, clothes and everything we needed to start a new household, we’d still have more than half of the original £10,000 left over. I would need to put that away somewhere safe just in case – in case anything happened to me before it happened to Roger.

The flat we had found gradually became our home, and I set in motion the process of buying it from the landlord. The place had been fitted out with a fairly decent range of furniture – none of it of any particular note except perhaps for a rather grand but worn and battered maroon leather chesterfield sofa. The owner was happy to include it all, along with the other fixtures and fittings, in the purchase price.

We were even adopted by a cat. The woman in the flat downstairs had lived there for twenty years, and her pet Siamese called Olly had obviously decided that our flat was as much his home as the one below. Mrs Chambers explained to us that when she had first moved into the building, her husband was still alive and she had two children. At that time they had occupied the top two floors, but when her husband died and the children left home, she had given up the upper floor. However, her cat Olly probably still believed that he owned the place.

For the time being I was allowed to take Roger over to the old house a couple of times a week to check on his precious insects. Roger showed absolutely no concern about having to pick his way through the debris of our former
lives to access the back garden and the garden shed. To him it was as though none of it had ever existed, and once or twice I found myself envying his dislocation. I knew we would have to find an alternative arrangement for the insect farm once the builders started clearing the site, but it looked as though it would be a while before that happened.

It was several weeks before our lives got back into anything like a routine, but eventually Harriet and I found an opportunity to sit down together to discuss the future.

“I could decide not to go back. I could get a job – I’m sure I could get a job as a session musician or in a BBC orchestra with my education so far.”

“You could,” I said, “but you’re not going to. Bad enough that all this has screwed up my education, without it doing the same for yours.”

“Don’t you want me to stay with you? I thought you’d want us to be together.”

“That’s a cheap shot,” I said. “You know I do” – and I did – “and we will be together. I’m letting you go back to Newcastle to finish what you started, but you’re going to come down to see me every three or four weeks, and by next May you’ll be finished.”

“And what then?”

“What do you mean?

“I’ll be finished at university. So what then?”

“Then you’ll come back to me.”

“As what?”

“As what? As my girlfriend? My lover? My partner? What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking as your wife.”

Which is how Harriet and I came to be married, with about twenty of our friends in attendance, and with Roger as my best man, on 7th September 1972.

I recall feeling that Harriet’s parents seemed to be mildly irritated to have to return to London so quickly after the funeral, almost as though we should have made up our minds to get married sooner in order to spare them the inconvenience. Maybe we had even done it precisely to cause them maximum trouble. Our marriage took place in Lewisham Register Office, which is an entirely unprepossessing public building right next door to the library where I was about to begin work as a clerical assistant. Mr and Mrs Chalfont left us to make all the arrangements for the marriage of their only daughter, merely undertaking to contribute the sum of £400 to the costs of the occasion. Actually, in those days that was more than enough to fund the modest luncheon party for forty that we hosted in an upstairs room at the unlikely named Waggoner’s Arms in Catford. I think we even had some change left over with which to buy a set of saucepans.

Harriet’s father’s speech might as well have been taken verbatim from a reference book under the section “the father of the bride”, perhaps only omitting the part where he was supposed to welcome his new son-in-law into the family.

None of this offended me, however, and it became a constant source of amusement between Harriet and me to recall how they had struggled to remember their manners when they walked into the Waggoner’s and been shown to the upstairs room. What I found far less amusing was the supercilious attitude they always took towards Roger. Perhaps it’s easy to understand why any parents might have reservations about their daughter marrying someone whose family included any kind of handicap, but I inferred that it was more a question of what people would think. They came from a background in which the family idiot had traditionally been locked away in a wing of the country home and conveniently forgotten, so no doubt Roger was a bit too much in evidence for their comfort.

“Jonathan,” I heard Roger say. It was the morning after the wedding and Harriet was sleeping late while I made breakfast for Roger. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Of course not, Roger. You can always ask me anything.”

“What does ‘for ever’ mean?”

“For ever?” I repeated. “That’s a funny question to ask. What’s put that in your mind?”

“It was what you said yesterday: you and Harriet. You both said that you promised to love each other for ever.” Roger had his own particular way of turning things over in his mind, and it was often fun to see how they would emerge.

“That’s right, Roger,” I said. “Harriet and I are in love, and we know that we are going to love each other for ever.”

“But what does ‘for ever’ mean?”

“It means for the rest of time. Never stopping. It means always.”

“But how long is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean Roger,” I said. “It means what I said. It means never stopping. ‘For ever’ means never stopping. Not ever.”

Roger stopped speaking and I could almost hear the cogs inside his brain turning and grinding. It was a full minute before he spoke again.

“But you aren’t going to live for ever,” he said.

“No, of course not. When two people in love talk about ‘for ever’ they’re talking about all of their lives.”

“So it’s a lie, then.”

“It’s not a lie exactly,” I said, “but it’s not one hundred per cent accurate. The other person knows that when their lover says ‘for ever’, it means all of their lives. Harriet knows that I will love her until the day I die, just as I know that she will love me.” I felt a bit foolish saying it like that to my brother, but this was just how it was coming out.

“Until one of you dies,” he corrected me.

“Yes, I guess so,” I said, and suddenly felt sad. It was not a thought I had spent any time on.

“Or until one of you meets someone else you fall more in love with.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I was relieved to be back on territory I felt confident about. “We are both certain that we
will love each other for all of our lives.” I had been about to say “for ever”, but had been duly put right.

“But it does happen though, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does, all too often, I’m afraid. But it’s not going to happen to us.”

Once again Roger was silent for a while before he spoke again.

“So when two people in love say they will love each other for ever, they don’t actually have a clue what they are talking about, do they?”

I thought more about what Roger had said, and how odd is the lover’s “for ever”. It’s like the greengrocer’s apostrophe – in there because we feel it should be, but most of those who use it are not quite sure what it means or where to put it. We say “for ever” at a time of our lives when we have not the smallest idea of what that means in reality. Yet when we say it, we mean it, and would vehemently defend the sincerity of our intentions. As far as Harriet and I were concerned just then, any idea that our union was less than permanent was inconceivable, because now we felt ourselves to be inseparable.

On the Monday following the wedding, however, Harriet returned to Newcastle to finish her degree course, and I started work in Lewisham Public Library – the main attraction of which was that I could work what later came to be known as flexi-time, thereby enabling me to drop off and collect Roger at the bus stop every day. It was a pattern which was to serve us all well in the months to come.

Chapter Eleven

Sometimes in the early mornings I would sit and watch Roger for a few minutes before waking him. It was at those times that he seemed at his most vulnerable and, perhaps, at his most pathetic. Here he was, a man in his mid-twenties, with firm dark overnight stubble on his chin, but occupying the world of an eight-year-old. Anyone coming upon him while asleep, with no prior knowledge, would expect him to wake as a fully grown man, perhaps with sour breath, having overindulged in alcohol or reminiscing about some sexual conquest from the previous night.

Instead of this, Roger woke up like a small child, blinking his way back into cognizance of a world which required constant explanation and held unknown mysteries. Often when I would go to wake him in the mornings, I would find Roger looking like a victim of a long-term coma, his face squashed into the pillow and with little traces of saliva caked on his cheek and dampening the sheets. His sleep was apparently entirely untroubled by the cares that come with being an adult.

I envied Roger his ability to sleep the sleep of the innocent, and apparently to remain peacefully in another world until roused into this one. All evidence suggested that his
sleep remained undisturbed by dreams or concerns, and any enquiry on the matter was always met with an entirely non-committal reply, much as if he didn’t know what he was being asked, as most probably he did not.

“Do you ever think about our parents, Roger?” I asked him. It was a Sunday afternoon and Harriet had been visiting for the weekend. We had just returned from King’s Cross, where we had seen her off on the train back to Newcastle. I had opened a bottle of beer, as I frequently did on these occasions, but had made a mental note to stop after just one. These were the times when I was most vulnerable to my circumstances, and on more than one occasion after Harriet had gone for the train a single beer had turned into a few more than I had planned to have.

“No,” he said, as though he had been expecting the question, “do you?”

I thought for a moment. “No, not much,” I said. “But I do sometimes find myself wondering how the fire started.”

Roger seemed to consider. His mouth drooped down at the corners and his brow furrowed, as if someone had asked an eight-year-old who had left a scratch on the piano. I thought he might be about to say something which would make me wish I hadn’t asked the question, but after a few seconds he said: “I don’t know.” Then a moment later: “Good job it didn’t affect the insect farm.”

If Roger had not mentioned the insect farm at that moment, the question would probably have fizzled out into something
else. But he had planted a seed in my mind, and so I asked him: “Is it true that Dad had suggested that you would have to get rid of the insect farm?”

Sometimes, when something happened to Roger that he didn’t expect or understand, he would react by involuntarily hitting himself on the head with the inside of his wrist. It was an alarming gesture which he had made occasionally from quite early in childhood. Maybe it arose out of the frustration he felt at not being able to get an idea into his head, or perhaps he was punishing his head for not being up to what he required of it. Whatever and whenever, it always took me by surprise when it occurred, and that’s what happened now.

“What?” he said. I had no doubt that his alarm was real. “Get rid of the insect farm? You don’t mean it?”

“I don’t mean now, Roger. No one is suggesting that now. I just wondered if Dad had ever suggested it before they…” I let the sentence peter out.

“Why would he do that? It’s not hurting anything!” Once again he used his wrist to bang on his forehead, as though physically trying to force information into his brain that he could not otherwise compute.