Why Don’t You Come for Me (12 page)

‘I was trying to find the knife.’ She could see her own expression reflected in the mirror doors of the wardrobe, shifty and unmistakably embarrassed at being caught out.

‘But you didn’t find a knife, did you?’ Marcus’s voice was a shade louder than it needed to be. He sounded both exasperated and angry. ‘Basically, you hunted through his room and smashed your way into his cupboard, after I had specifically said we shouldn’t search his room.’

There was no real evidence that she had searched the room, but it seemed pointless to deny it. ‘I was sure I saw a knife.’

There was a brief silence while the phrase drifted around the room, pathetic as a half deflated balloon waiting to be kicked aside. This is how it was between my father and my mother, she thought. He not wanting to make a direct challenge, not wanting to say outright that she
was
imagining things. A shudder ran down her spine – a sensation that her mother had been wont to describe as a goose walking over your grave.

‘Sean was very upset.’ Marcus began to speak in an oddly controlled voice. ‘He doesn’t understand why you smashed his cupboard up. I think …’ again the pause was unbearably long ‘… I think he was a bit scared. It’s not a normal thing to do, going into someone’s room and smashing their things. He’s not used to anything – anything so violent.’

‘I’m not violent.’

‘You know what I mean.’

She stood beside the bed, frozen in the act of removing her sweater, suddenly afraid of what Marcus might say next: that there was no knife and never had been, that Brian had not harmed Shelley, that no unseen stalker had dogged her movements for years, mocking her with picture postcards of her vanished baby daughter. She wanted to say that she had changed her mind about the concert, and didn’t want to attend – that she suddenly had the strangest sense of foreboding about it. However, Marcus might interpret that as sulking or deliberate spite – or worse, as madness. There. She had allowed herself to think the word.

Marcus was still standing with his back against the bedroom door, almost as if he was expecting her to make a run for it and was ready to stop her. ‘You need to get ready,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we are going to be late.’

She nodded, dragging the sweater over her head, then fumbling with the hook of her skirt, while he continued to stand there watching her. She felt as if his scrutiny went deeper than her outward appearance, that he was examining things she could not see herself.

Eventually she said, ‘I shouldn’t have broken into his cupboard. It was just that I was so sure … Only now I’m not. I only got a glimpse – maybe he was looking at one of those magazines and the light caught the page when he shoved it out of the way.’

‘I think you should apologize to Sean,’ he said quietly. ‘Even if you can’t explain to him why you did it.’

‘Would you still have asked me to apologize if I’d found a knife in his cupboard?’ she flashed back.

‘But you didn’t.’

There was another silence while she peeled off her tights.

‘I didn’t smash the cupboard up on purpose. I know that it looks pretty violent, but I just levered the door open and it split. It looks worse than it is.’

‘It’s broken,’ he said. ‘How can that be better or worse?’ He walked out of the room before she could reply.

It was an uneasy drive down to Ulverston. She asked about his mother, he asked about the tour, but Jo felt that the issue of the knife travelled with them as surely as if it was lying on the dashboard, its shiny blade caught every so often in the headlights of passing cars. It
was
possible that she had been wrong. Mistaking an innocent object for a firearm had led to people being shot before now.

It had begun to drizzle, so they hurried up the hill from the car park, she clinging to Marcus’s arm as they sheltered beneath his big umbrella, partly as a matter of form, partly in order to keep up. Past the Laurel and Hardy statue and into the Coronation Hall, where the booking office doubled up with Tourist Information, showing their tickets to the dinner-jacketed stewards on duty at the front doors.

They had seats in the balcony because Marcus preferred the acoustics up there. Although Jo had been raised on pop music, she always enjoyed the Camerata, and the music seemed extraordinarily beautiful that night, a programme of Elgar and Vaughan Williams. At the end of the first half, when they joined the crowd shuffling down to the bar for interval drinks, she knew that both their spirits had been lifted: she returned Marcus’s smile, and he squeezed her hand. As they entered the bar she caught sight of Maisie Perry, down at the other end of the room. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘There’s Fred and Maisie. If we had known they were coming, we could have offered them a lift.’

The Perrys had seen them in the same instant, and Maisie began weaving her way towards them, her progress considerably impeded by people moving in all directions, many carrying a glass in each hand, everyone trying to negotiate a path around the clumps of people who had chosen a spot to stand in and were now impervious to all other human traffic.

‘Marcus, Jo – how lucky to see you here. Now I’ll be able to introduce you to our new neighbour, Mrs Iceton – the lady who has bought The Old Forge.’ Maisie waved an explanatory arm to where Fred was in conversation with a woman who had her back towards them.

As they followed her through the crowd, Jo turned to Marcus. ‘Surely someone hasn’t moved in there already.’

‘A removal van came, the day you went away.’

‘Goodness, but it’s crowded tonight,’ Maisie prattled as she shepherded them across the room. ‘Still, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To see the concert so well supported. We’re very lucky to get the Camerata coming to the Coro, I always say.’ She ended her monologue with a flourish: ‘Gilda, meet some more of your new neighbours, Jo and Marcus.’

Only then did the strange woman turn and face them for the first time. It had been twenty-five years, but Jo knew Gilda instantly. She swallowed hard. Marcus was already shaking hands, ever ready with some pleasantry suitable to the occasion.

‘And this is Jo.’ Maisie was enjoying her role as introducer-in-chief.

‘I believe we’ve already met.’ Gilda’s smile was bright, but when Jo automatically extended her hand, the one she received in return was like a dead thing.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Jo, trying to meet the other woman squarely in the eye. ‘Or if we have, then I’m afraid I don’t remember you.’

‘Oh, I don’t think you can have come across Jo, yet,’ Maisie chipped in helpfully. ‘She has been away on one of their tours, until this evening. I think I already mentioned to you that Marcus and Jo run a company which specializes in historical and literary tours – such an interesting way to earn a living. You’ll have to get them to tell you all about it.’

Jo was too flustered to experience her usual level of irritation at the way Maisie was evidently au fait with all her movements. She was aware of Gilda regarding her discomfiture with cool amusement, while Maisie continued to chatter, oblivious to any possible tension. ‘What a coincidence, finding that half of Easter Bridge is here this evening.’

‘That’s not so very difficult,’ suggested Marcus. ‘Given the total population of Easter Bridge.’

‘I see the Wheatons are back at The Hollies,’ Maisie went on. ‘It’s their second home,’ she explained for Gilda’s benefit. ‘They have a boy and a girl, which might be nice for your daughter, when she’s at home. Gilda has a daughter at boarding school.’ She tossed this snippet of information in the direction of Jo and Marcus, barely pausing for breath before adding something about Brian and Shelley often coming to the Ulverston concerts too.

Jo turned swiftly to Maisie. ‘I haven’t seen anything of Shelley lately, have you?’ The words almost ended in a squeak as Marcus surreptitiously grasped her hand and dug his fingernails into her palm, while politely asking Gilda, ‘Your daughter will be home for the holidays at the moment, I suppose?’

‘No, I was hoping she would be, but she’s been invited to stay with a schoolfriend for a few days, and yesterday she rang to say that there’s some sort of party at this friend’s house on Saturday, so can she stay on until after the weekend.’ Gilda punctuated her monologue with the exasperated sigh of a parent who can hardly keep up with their offspring’s social life. ‘Then they are going to drive her up to Helmsley, where she’s due to spend the last week of the holidays with my cousin Carole. She always has Becky over in the holidays – Carole is our closest relative, and they’re very fond of one another, so in the end I’ve arranged to go across and see Becky
there
, before she goes back to school.’

‘I expect it’s fallen in very well, keeping her out of the way while you get straightened up after the move,’ Maisie said. ‘Moving is such a hectic time, although I expect she’s dying to see your new home together.’

Without giving Gilda the opportunity to confirm or deny this, Maisie turned to ask Fred something about the second half of the programme. Jo felt Gilda’s eyes on her again. It made her feel as if she were standing under a hot, bright spotlight. Maisie continued chattering to Fred and Marcus about Thomas Tallis. Fred was saying something about a piece which had first been performed in Gloucester Cathedral, but Jo wasn’t listening properly. She had to escape from the heat and dazzle. She edged away from the group, excusing herself with something about going to the ladies’.

As she hurried down to the ground floor, she realized it was becoming a theme, running away to hide in the toilets. She would have to grow up – in fact, that was the solution – she
was
a grown-up, and the uncomfortable memories which Gilda represented belonged to an another time – a time when she had been no more than a child. She had left all that behind now, and Gilda or no Gilda, she wasn’t going to resurrect it.

The crowd in the bar was thinning by the time she returned. A lot of people had already made their way back to their seats, and the little group from Easter Bridge appeared to be on the point of dispersing. Gilda was facing the opposite way, which gave Jo the chance to take a long, hard look at her new neighbour. Her hair was as lank as it had always been, although these days it was streaked with grey, and she still wore it scraped back into a plastic hair clip which might have come from Woolworth’s. Her trousers were ill fitting and not quite long enough, revealing pale blue ankle socks and flat lace-ups, the ensemble topped off with a strange knitted jacket, possibly courtesy of Oxfam. In twenty-first century Ulverston, where any eccentrically dressed bag lady might just turn out to be a moneyed recycling fanatic, it was impossible to make completely objective judgements based on fashion considerations alone, but in Gilda’s case, Jo detected the natural successors to the old-fashioned pleated skirts and hand-knitted cardies which had singled Gilda out as ‘different’ at school, before the girl even opened her mouth.

Jo reminded herself firmly that nothing which had happened in the past could possibly matter now, although if Gilda was going to live just across the road, she would presumably have to come to some accommodation with her. She decided the safest line to take would be amnesia. She would claim to have pretty much forgotten everything about Gilda – after all, a great deal of water had passed under the bridge since then.

The playing in the second half was sublime, but Jo struggled to focus on the remainder of the programme. She kept experiencing the irrational sensation that Gilda was watching her from somewhere in the semi-darkened hall, though when the lights came up and she scanned the applauding crowd in the balcony, and then the departing concert-goers on the stairs and in the street outside, there was no sign of their new neighbour. Not that she was allowed to forget her.

‘What’s the deal with you and the weird woman?’ Marcus asked as they headed back to the car, sheltered again by the big umbrella.

Weird – that was exactly it, she thought. Gilda had always been a bit weird. ‘We were at senior school together, in the same class. Her name was Gilda Stafford then.’

‘Why did you pretend not to recognize her?’

‘It’s awkward – complicated.’

‘Why?’

Jo hesitated. They had reached the big roundabout at the bottom of the hill, and had to pause for a couple of passing cars before they could cross the road. The pavements reflected cold and wet in the street lights. It was quiet enough to hear their footfalls when there wasn’t any passing traffic. ‘It’s something I’d much rather not talk about. Something I’m rather ashamed of, if you want to know the truth.’

Marcus said nothing, leaving a long silence during which he clearly expected her to elucidate further, but she said nothing as they crossed the car park and climbed into the car. After starting the engine, he said, ‘If this woman is going to live just across the road and there’s something – or was something – between the two of you, don’t you think it might be better if you told me?’

‘It’s nothing really. It’s all in the past. You know – just schoolgirl stuff.’

‘No, I don’t know.’ He reached across to increase the heat on the windscreen, which was starting to mist up. ‘I think you’d better tell me about it. If it’s something trivial, then you’re right, it doesn’t matter. If it
is
something important, then I ought to know.’

Jo hesitated. It was obvious that his curiosity was aroused and he wasn’t going to drop it. ‘OK. When I started at St Catherine’s, everyone else had been there for a couple of years and already made their friends. I was a very lonely, very scared new girl. I fell in with the first people who offered to be friends with me and I became part of their … crowd. All I wanted was to fit in and be accepted. You can understand that, can’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Marcus, but his tone was cautious rather than warm.

‘We – they – were quite a tough crowd. You know, the sort of girls who are always a bit cheeky to the teachers, always on the edge of any trouble. We used to dare one another to do stupid things. We even did a bit of shoplifting, not because we wanted or needed the things we took, but just to prove we could get away with it. I knew it was wrong and I was petrified that I’d get caught, but I did it because the others did it, and if you didn’t keep up, you’d be out …’