Till We Meet Again (36 page)

‘And after Annabel was born? You must have been reminded of Liam constantly then?’

Susan had been reminded. She could remember holding Annabel in her arms as she sat up in the hospital bed and seeing Liam’s face so clearly in her daughter’s. She looked like a little gypsy baby with her curly dark hair and olive skin. One of the nurses had asked if her father was Spanish or Greek.

Susan had felt deep pangs of remorse, thinking how if she hadn’t fought with Liam they might have remained friends and she could contact him now. But her real sorrow was that she wouldn’t have him somewhere in the background to share her joy and pride in their child. Just the way Annabel’s fingers gripped hers, her little head butting against her chest for more milk, was so sweet that she felt privileged to have been given her.

‘Yes, she did remind me, but only of the good things.’ She shrugged. ‘She had his curly hair and olive skin, but she made me so happy and complete I just kind of blanked out what I’d done to him. It was like he died from natural causes really. I saw myself as a widow.’

‘Four happy years?’ Roy said.

Susan looked up at him, and the sympathy in his eyes brought a lump to her throat. She had never really been able to explain adequately to anyone just how happy those years had been: the rush of joy when Annabel held up her little arms to be lifted out of the cot, the sound of her laughter, the sheer jubilation she experienced when she took her first faltering steps. How could she make anyone understand the bliss she felt when, all rosy from a bath, Annabel fell asleep in her arms, or when her plump little arms were wound tightly round her mother’s neck? It was a mother’s thing, a state of grace too wonderful for mere words.

‘Yes,’ she said simply, looking down at her hands. ‘But I paid a heavy price for those years, didn’t I? When she died I was convinced it was God’s judgment on me. I wanted to die too.’ For the first time in the interview her eyes filled with tears, and Roy too found he had a lump in his throat.

‘Then you met Reuben?’ Roy prompted her after a few seconds of silence.

She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears. ‘Yes, and he convinced me it was possible to find happiness again.’

Steven had already heard how Susan met Reuben, and about her life in Wales with him. Roy knew some of it from Beth and he’d gleaned more from the witnesses in Wales and things Susan had told him in previous interviews.

Both men had been left with the impression that it hadn’t been a real love affair, more something born out of desperation. Yet as Susan began to talk about it, they both saw they were entirely wrong.

‘I believed in Reuben,’ she said forcefully. ‘I don’t mean just him loving and looking after me, but I believed in his philosophy of life, his truthfulness, his nobility. To me he stood head and shoulders above other men, he was above corruption. He was like the Good Shepherd, he rounded up damaged people who needed his guidance, strength and love and he made them whole again. I suppose I thought he had been sent to save me. I would have done anything for him.’

She paused, trembling with emotion. ‘I gave him everything I had,’ she said simply. ‘Not just my worldly possessions, but my love, trust and all my skills. When I arrived at Hill House it was a grubby, disorganized place. I cleaned it up, made it comfortable and cosy. By planning meals in advance I reduced waste and made economies. Some of the people there couldn’t cook, they had no idea of hygiene. I taught them those things. I mended clothes, I nursed them when they were sick. I cared for the garden too.’ She looked round at Steven. ‘I know I told you that I knew what Reuben was long before he came home with Zoë, but that wasn’t true. Yes, I found out how much money he got for my belongings, and that he was making more from the workshop than everyone supposed, but that didn’t matter to me. He was sharing his home and his life with a bunch of people who would have been living on the streets but for him. That’s how I saw it, and even when the others grumbled to me, I always took his part.’

‘But then he turned up with Zoë?’ Roy said, trying to nudge her along. ‘Now, when was that?’

‘A few days before Christmas of 1992,’ she said haltingly.

Even after all this time, everything was so clear and sharp about that day. It was very cold, with a biting wind, but Susan had been in the kitchen all afternoon, making mince pies and icing the cake for Christmas. The others kept coming in and out, trying to steal the pies sitting cooling on the wire tray on the table.

It had been a happy day, everyone childishly looking forward to Christmas, swapping childhood stories and laughing a great deal. Susan remembered Megan was sitting in the corner of the kitchen folding coloured paper to make Chinese lanterns to hang on some branches she’d sprayed with gold paint. She had a tinsel crown on her head.

It was dark when they heard Reuben’s van arrive back. The table was laid for dinner and everyone was waiting expectantly as Susan had made a rabbit pie and they were all starving.

Then Reuben walked in, rubbing his hands together with the cold, and just behind him was the girl.

She was tall, slender, with long blonde hair and azure-blue eyes. She wore a sheepskin coat, the soft, expensive kind, a red beret, jeans and long riding boots. She could have just stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.

‘This is Zoë,’ Reuben said, drawing her forward and keeping his arm around her. ‘She’s come to join us.’

Everyone looked surprised, but as he introduced Zoë to each of them, they recovered quickly, and someone went and found another chair and began squeezing it in at the already crowded table for her.

‘Oh, don’t put yourself out for me,’ she said, waving her hand. Her long nails were painted black with a little glitter on each one. ‘I can make do with a sandwich and sit anywhere.’

Susan had sensed just by the protective way Reuben was with her, that this young, pretty and confident girl was going to be trouble, but she felt she had to be welcoming. ‘Of course you must join us, we always eat all together,’ she said. ‘It’s an important part of our life here.’

Zoë’s blue eyes fixed for a moment on Susan’s face and slid down her plump body contemptuously, as if comparing her own to it. ‘You must be the Earth Mother I’ve heard so much about,’ she said with a smirk.

All through the meal Zoë charmed everyone but Susan. She tossed her hair with one hand as she spoke of bathing under a waterfall in Thailand, and it was obvious from the glow in all the men’s eyes that they were imagining her firm young body naked. She said she’d got a tattoo, and stood up and unzipped her jeans to show a green gecko on her washing-board stomach.

Her cut-glass accent irritated Susan, especially when Zoë went on to speak scornfully of her stuffy parents in Bath. Daddy was a dentist. He wanted her to have a career. Mummy was a lady who lunched and raised money for charities. She said they knew nothing of the real world.

She held forth for some time on her philosophy of complete freedom, that youth shouldn’t be spoiled by work, that pleasure was all. She said she had lived for a while with some ‘freaks’ in a squat in Bristol, but when Reuben told her about the set-up here, she’d thought she’d ‘give it a stab’, as she put it.

‘I’m very artistic,’ she said airily. ‘I’m sure I could design something crafty we could sell for a fortune.’

Her arrogance astounded Susan. She remembered how on her first night she had hardly dared say a word to anyone. This girl looked set on taking control.

But even worse was watching Reuben’s reaction to her. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, he nodded in agreement at almost everything she said, however infantile. It was obvious he had fallen for her completely, and Susan suspected they were already lovers.

Yet however hurtful that was, Susan expected that Reuben would do the right thing and tell her himself when they were alone in their bedroom later that night. As she began the washing up, with everyone else still sitting around the table, she tried to squash her anger and jealousy and prepare herself for it. She hoped she could handle it with dignity, maybe ask that he take Zoë somewhere else until she could make plans to leave.

‘Leave that, Sue,’ Reuben said suddenly. ‘Get on upstairs and change the sheets on my bed.’

She remembered letting a plate slip from her fingers back into the sink and break. ‘Why?’ she asked stupidly.

‘Well, Zoë won’t want to sleep in your sheets,’ he said with a malicious grin. ‘So hurry along, we’re tired.’

It was impossible to believe that anyone could be so cruel, and in front of so many witnesses. Susan turned towards the others at the table, tears starting up in her eyes, expecting at least some of them to speak up for her. But Simon and Roger were grinning furtively, a kind of ‘well-you-can’t-blame-him’ expression. Heather smirked, and everyone else looked away. Only young Megan looked as if she felt for her.

Later, Susan was to wonder why she didn’t shout at Reuben, or at least tell him to do it himself, anything but obey meekly. But in that humiliating moment she thought it prudent to remove her own things from that room, rather than have Zoë going through them.

As she took her jumpers out of the chest of drawers, her hand made contact with her father’s revolver, wrapped in a piece of soft cloth. She hadn’t touched it since the day she’d moved into Hill House, but as she felt its heaviness, for a brief second she thought of turning it on Reuben right then.

There had been times since moving into Hill House when it had crossed her mind that Reuben might tire of her one day. She had spoken of it once, and Reuben had said that if the day ever came he promised he’d tell her to her face, long before he embarked on a relationship with a new woman. She had believed him too, for he was always talking about honesty in relationships being all-important.

Now it seemed promises and loyalty meant nothing to him. The pain she felt was so terrible she wanted to scream it out, and if she had had anywhere to go, she would have gone then, walking right through the night, rather than stay under the same roof as them. But it was below freezing outside, she had no money, and there was no place to run to.

In many ways it was like Annabel’s death all over again, the pain and the disbelief were all so similar. She could remember asking herself why she had to be punished again. And why it was when she had so much love in her heart, no one had any for her.

Relegated to the smallest, dampest room, with a sagging, lumpy bed, night after night she grew more angry. She could hear them making love across the landing, and it seemed to go on for hours. Then they’d wake her with it again in the mornings, and she would lie there rigid with hate, completely impotent even to flee from her tormentors.

They did torment her too, all over that Christmas. They cuddled and kissed in front of her, sniggering at her embarrassment and humiliating her further by getting her to wait on them.

On New Year’s Eve they disappeared together for a few days, giving her a little respite, but they came back all too soon. All through the bitter weather of January and February, while the rest of them braved the cold to work in the craft room, they were either lolling in the kitchen, smoking dope, or up in the bedroom making love.

‘Susan!’ Roy said sharply, bringing her back to the present with a jolt. ‘I asked you if Zoë and Reuben had already formed a relationship before he brought her to Hill House? Or did it start afterwards?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was thinking about the day he brought her there. I think they were already lovers.’

She explained what had happened, then went on to say that over Christmas and New Year they humiliated her in every possible way.

‘They stuffed themselves with the food I’d prepared, drank the wine I made, and acted like I was just a halfwitted housekeeper,’ she said angrily. ‘It was just like the way Father and Martin treated me all over again, only much worse because in the days when I was at home in Luddington I didn’t know any different.’

‘Why didn’t you just leave?’ Roy asked.

‘How could I? I had no money, nowhere to go to.’ She made a gesture of hopelessness with her hands. ‘I begged Reuben to give me some money so I could leave, but he just laughed at me. He was so cruel, he said I didn’t know how well off I was, and who else would give a home to a broken-down old crone like me?’

‘So you saw what he really was then?’ Roy said with some sympathy.

She nodded. ‘All my belief in him turned to hatred. He’d clear off for a few days with Zoë, and each time he came back he was nastier because by then he really wanted me out. I saw how stupid he really was then. He thought Zoë could take my place in every way.’ She gave a hollow laugh. ‘As if! She had no interest in keeping house for him, that wasn’t her scene. Reuben and his house were just a stop-gap till she got a better offer somewhere else.’

‘So when did you start planning to kill them?’ Roy asked.

‘In March,’ she said, crossing her arms defiantly. ‘I knew Reuben would throw me out before long, but he still wouldn’t give me any money. He said he didn’t care if I starved on the streets, I could do with it because I was too fat.’

She paused for a moment and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Then I overheard him telling Zoë that he had this secret place, and he’d take her there when the weather was better. I knew where he meant of course, and I decided then and there, that would be their graveyard. So each time I went out for a walk, I went there, taking a piece of camping equipment or tins of food with me. Then in early April they went off to North Wales – Reuben always had a stall at some craft market there. As soon as they’d gone I told the others I was leaving, and went, only I didn’t leave Wales. I went on up to the glade in the woods to wait.’

She began to say something else, but her voice faded away and when Roy looked at her he saw she had gone chalky-white. He leapt up and went round the table, just in time to catch her as she fainted.

‘Terminate the interview,’ he rapped out to Bloom. ‘And get her a drink of water.’ As Bloom hastily did as he was ordered, Roy and Steven pulled out Susan’s chair and put her head down between her knees.