The Sunlight on the Garden (11 page)

‘If he went to live in Morocco, as has been suggested, how would that affect you?'

‘Oh, I'd be absolutely devastated. Devastated. I don't know how I'd manage without all the support I get from him. And from Mahmoud too. They're wonderful to me, both of them, as I said.'

She broke off, looked fearfully up at Maddy, then pulled a handkerchief out of the pocket of her jacket and put it to one eye and then the other.

Suddenly, astonished, Maddy realised that all this rigmarole – as she had first thought of it – had moved her. No, it wasn't a rigmarole, it wasn't playacting. It was as though she had listened to a thrush pouring out its valiant, artless song at the fall of a winter's night. It was
real
, just as the tears had been real. Her fingers suddenly stopped clicking at the laptop. Then she forced them to go on with their task of transcribing this banal and yet patently sincere witness to the reality of the love between an ancient, well-to-do, highly educated man and a young, impoverished, half-educated one.

‘How do your family feel about the partnership?' the barrister prompted.

‘Oh, we all accept Mahmoud as one of us. He comes to all our family gatherings – the Christmas dinners with my son and his wife and all the grandchildren – the weddings, the christenings. He even comes to the funerals!' She gave a little laugh. ‘We all – all treasure him, you know. Even my little dog, my pug, treasures him: If I'm off colour Mahmoud travels all the way to Kennington to take Suzie for walks. And Arabs are not supposed to like dogs, are they?'

When the old woman had finished her testimony, Maddy astonished the barrister by saying ‘ Thank you', giving her first smile of the day, and not herself putting a single question or challenge.

‘That brings our session to a close.' Maddy closed the laptop and put it under her arm. ‘You will have my decision in the next four to six weeks.' She got to her feet.

‘Was I all right?'

As Maddy left the room, she heard the old woman ask the barrister the question. She did not hear the answer.

In the office, Maddy refused the offer of a cup of coffee from the adjudicator whose place she had taken the day before. Inexplicably she had all at once begun to feel depleted and depressed. ‘I must pick up the twins,' she told him. ‘I'm already late for them.'

Thank God, the Volvo was there in the forecourt. But where on earth could Jake have taken it? One side was splashed with mud. On a closer inspection, she also saw that the roof was spattered with greyish-green bird shit. The interior reeked of cigarette smoke. He knew that she hated it when he smoked in the confined space of the car or of either of the two lavatories. Oh, it really was too bad!

As she drove off, she began to formulate what she would say in her report. As always the words leapt one after another into her nimble mind
I do not accept that this Appellant holds a genuine belief that he will be persecuted or ill-treated were he returned to Morocco. His evidence was often confused and he repeatedly contradicted himself even when being questioned by his own counsel … It is perfectly credible that Mr L'Estrange is genuinely attached to the Appellant. But of the Appellant's attachment to Mr L'Estrange one might be forgiven for being more than a little cynical. After all
…

At that moment the words, previously jostling each other as they rushed out, tripped over each other, floundered, collapsed. That was what she ought to say, what
they
wanted her to say. But was it really what she felt? Was it the truth? Halted at the next traffic lights, she picked at the skin round the nail of her forefinger, then raised the forefinger to her mouth and tore at the tag of skin with her teeth. She felt the blood oozing out.

Soon after that, she saw the three figures walking through the rain sheeting down, inexorably malevolent. The L'Estrange man was a little ahead of the others. He was now using his sister's stick as he hobbled along. The Moroccan was carrying the old woman's handbag in one hand while with the other he held over her head a small, green, folding umbrella, presumably hers. Her good hand rested on his raised arm, even though that must have been uncomfortable for her, since he was so much taller than she was. Bowed, from time to time stumbling, she looked pitifully tiny and vulnerable. Clearly they had given up on the bus and were walking to the underground station. Maddy slowed, all but stopped.
Would you care for a lift
…? Those were the words that now leapt into her mind. Then she swept them out of it. It was no good to be sentimental about the spectacle of two old people and a young man battling against the rain as they trudge to an underground station. After all, the brother could have certainly afforded a taxi or a minicab. In any case,
they
had been right. One of them had said ‘There are a lot of bad eggs and we have to smash them before they hatch out. If from time to time a good egg gets smashed in the process, well, in the interest of the safety of this country that's how it has to be.' He had gone on to talk of sleepers. ‘All too often the more respectable these people seem to be, the more likely it is that they are up to something sinister.'

Could that handsome, fleshy Moroccan be up to something sinister? Why not? How would that pathetic, credulous couple know if he were?

She pressed the accelerator. Other words began to leap into her mind.
The Appellant has failed to discharge the burden upon him to the standard or at all
…

The school door was closed. The place, usually so noisy with its host of young children, was eerie in its silence. Maddy pressed the bell and then, her impatience getting the better of her, pressed it again only a few seconds later.

Miss Middleton's flat, cheery face appeared round the door. ‘Oh, it's you. That wretched court must have kept you again!'

‘Yes, I'm done in. I don't know how long I can go on with that job.'

‘It must be your public spirit that holds you to it. The little ones are ready. Waiting.' She turned: ‘Lucy! Laurel!'

Suddenly the seven-year-old twins materialised on the upper landing of the grandiose staircase of the Edwardian house. They were wearing identical shiny black strap shoes, identical tartan skirts, and identical braces over their teeth.

Maddy held out both arms to them, as she cried out: ‘The Campbells are coming!' It was something that she often cried out. Although born and bred in London, she was proud of her Campbell ancestry. ‘But the Campbells are sorry they've come so late.'

‘Oh, mummy, mummy!' They screamed in unison as they raced down the stairs and into her arms. Simultaneously Lucy said ‘What happened to you?' and Laurel ‘We've been waiting an age.'

‘Sorry, darlings, sorry, sorry! Mummy had a horrible day. It began with Daddy forgetting to fill the petrol tank and then got worse and worse from then on. Never mind! The Campbells have come – at last, at long last. Oh, I'm so happy to be with my darlings!'

A
few days before his death, Lois's 82-year-old father had remarked with wry melancholy: ‘The old become invisible'. Now she herself had become invisible at the age of only thirty-seven. ‘I'm here, here!' she wanted to shout across a road or down the aisle of a supermarket. ‘Look at me!' But no one would look spontaneously, only when forced by her to do so. As someone whom she knew approached from a distance, she would become aware of the head wavering and the eyes swivelling away from her, to be followed by an abrupt scuttle across the road, even in the face of heavy traffic, or of a dart into a shop or down a side-turning.

It was not hostility, she constantly told herself. At first those with whom she and Brian came into even the most fleeting contact had been so sympathetic and helpful – their manner all too often suggesting that they themselves were drooping under the burden of the same intolerable grief as they were. Strangers had left flowers not merely at the house but, so it was reported, on the bank of that wide, calm, implacable river. By that river someone had even propped against a tree a Barbie doll, oppressively still in its box, its ever-open, thick-lashed eyes staring out through shiny cellophane. One ungainly mare of a woman, known only from the school run, had galloped towards Lois as they had simultaneously approached a letter-box, had thrown her arms round her and cried out ‘Oh, oh, oh! I can't bear it.' It might have been she to whom the terrible thing had happened. But those times were over. Now there was only an embarrassment so acute that people could no longer cope with it. Clearly they had decided, however unconsciously, that it would be better, if also brutal, to pretend that Lois had travelled out of their lives into a remote tundra of grief where it would be futile to try to reach her.

‘It's not only that we might not exist,' Lois said to Brian. ‘Poor little Suzie might never have existed.'

He stared at her with a desperate intensity. At work, he too had sensed that people once so matey now avoided his company, if they possibly could do so. ‘Hello, Brian. How are things? Everything okay?' Then they hurried on, without waiting for the answer. How could everything be okay? His whole large, firm body would throb with rage against them for the idiocy of it.

‘But she did exist,' he now said. ‘We must never forget that.'

‘Of course I never forget it! And never will! Sometimes – it's so odd – I feel that she
still
exists. Something rouses me in the middle of the night – just as she would sometimes rouse me when she'd had a nightmare. Of course I can't
see
her – never. But I think – I really think for a moment – yes, she's with us.'

‘Why don't you wake me?'

She did not answer. Then at last she mumbled: ‘ Well, you need your sleep.'

He went across to the chair where she was seated, knelt before her, and took both her hands in his. He looked up imploringly at her with his wide-spaced, pale-blue eyes.

She jerked her head aside. ‘Why does that bloody enquiry take so long? Why don't they
do
something?'

‘These things always take time.' But he too constantly simmered with an inner fury at the delays. ‘Those two wretches have both been suspended. They have to wait, we have to wait.'

Later that night, when he was snoring beside her, she awoke and peered, half in hope and half in apprehension, around the room. But no, on this occasion – unlike those many occasions before it – she received no sense of Suzie's presence. She did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.

Slowly, as quietly as possible so as not to rouse him, she clambered out of the high bed and crossed over to the door. Its handle felt cold on her palm. The boards creaked under her bare feet as, one hand to the wall, she made her way down the corridor. She often came into this room when Brian was at work and she was alone. If he knew that she had done so or was about to do so, he would chide her with a mixture of shared sorrow, love and exasperation – ‘It's no good, love. Useless. It only makes things worse.'

‘I suppose you think we ought to forget her? Oh, I so much want her back! It's all I want!'

He made no answer. No answer was possible.

She went into the narrow room, lit by the huge disk of an autumn moon far out above the fields belonging to neighbours whom they would once often meet at the pub or in each other's homes but whom they now rarely saw. She sat down on the bed. She pressed her hands together between her knees and bit on her lower lip. ‘Come! Come! Oh, come back to us, Suzie!' Her whole being said it, a silent entreaty. Briefly a shadow seemed to flicker between her body, tense with supplication, and the extravagant moonlight. She almost thought that she heard a laugh, high, bell-like. Frantically, she turned her head from side to side. Then the moment had passed. She was alone, with the motionless, mute dolls and animals still ranged on the shelf that ran along the length of the bed. She felt suffocated by the silence and her solitariness. She gasped for breath. It was as if she herself were drowning in that river, her saturated clothes pulling her down, down, down, however frantically she struggled.

‘I think they've forgotten us. They not only don't notice us, they've forgotten us.'

‘These things all take time,' he said wearily. That's how the system works.'

‘Fuck the system! At first the police were all soft voices and concern. Now we never hear a word from them. Was it – was it all pretending? And it's the same with Mr Bodley. For a few days – until the funeral was over … D'you remember how he said on television that this was a tragedy that no one connected with the school would ever forget? Well, he's forgotten bloody quick, and so have the rest of them.'

‘People have to get on with their lives. He has a school to run. The police have crimes to solve.' He sighed. ‘It's understandable.' But secretly, against all reason, he shared her indignation and rage. He too wanted to shout out: ‘Pay attention to us! Don't forget us! Notice us! For God's sake notice us!'

Without telling him, Lois decided to return to the river. She could not drive there because, now that she no longer had the school run to make, Brian took the car to get to the office instead of travelling there by the bus. As she walked the two miles or so to the station, a car passed her and she saw that it was Dotty Lawson's cumbrous, ancient, dusty Volvo. There were three children in it, two of them Dotty's own tall, serene daughters and one a diminutive, fidgety boy belonging to some newcomers to the village. Once Suzie would also have been in the car, since Dotty and Lois had taken it in turns to do the school run. Now that boy had supplanted her. From time to time, unbidden and at once repudiated in horror, the thought would insinuate itself into her consciousness: Why couldn't that pathetic shrimp of a creature have drowned on that school excursion, instead of little Suzie? Everyone was always saying that it was a scandal how, grubby and dishevelled, he was all too clearly neglected by parents with high-powered jobs in television.