‘Not remotely.’ She held his gaze. What could she say? There was no sense in mentioning Robert Kennedy, then they really would think she was mad.
‘You had no idea he was going to do this?’
‘Are we assuming he knew he was going to do it?’ she had replied archly.
The interview by the side of the pool was punctuated by a bubbling sound that might have been relaxing had it been a water feature. It was the car shifting in the water. Actually it was a water feature. She had snorted with sudden laughter, startling the police and making Gina squirm, which in turn rocked the swing seat and unsettled the policeman.
‘You think your husband accidentally drove his car into the swimming pool?’ The man would have been openly sarcastic if death and status hadn’t been involved.
‘Of course.’ She thrust out a long jodhpured leg. The policeman flinched. ‘He was on the lilo when I left the garden. He had to hurry, to get to Lewes and be back in time for lunch.’
‘Strange time to choose to go out, with guests due any minute, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘They weren’t guests, they were family. We don’t stand on ceremony.’
‘How long were you in the house, Mrs Ramsay?’
Gina was watching her.
‘How long does it take to make a gin and tonic?’
The policeman had raised his eyebrows in a ‘you tell me’ way, probably relieved his own mother didn’t drink gin in the day.
‘Minutes, I suppose, I don’t know, maybe five, maybe ten? I took my time, I had no…’
She stopped mid-sentence. She could read his mind: ‘Strange woman, not shed a tear, drinks at all hours, lies about it, keeps laughing at odd moments. The minute she’s out the way, husband slams his car into the pool and drowns and she doesn’t bat an eyelid.’ Isabel was crying inside but that didn’t count. She wanted to go back to lying in the sun with Mark doing graceful circles on the lilo. She wasn’t ready for this phase of her life.
Now she trailed across to their bed and, finding Jon’s jumper folded on Mark’s side, hauled it over her head and rolling up the sleeves, prepared to go downstairs. She didn’t want to be on her own any more. There would be enough time for that.
Fifteen
Just as Isabel had guessed, her children and their partners were in a tight group around the kitchen table vainly trying to weigh up the consequences of what Jon had dubbed with transparent enthusiasm ‘a total fuck up’. It was not that Jon lacked feeling, he had always been intent on gaining the admiration of his father-in-law, but he was at his most congruent full tilt in a crisis. This was his chance, now they would see him come into his own. The pity was that the one Ramsay he most wanted to impress was dead. In the hours after Mark was taken to hospital, everyone had vied for supremacy in practical prowess as lists were drawn up and then ripped up, and scenarios of the future were described and dismissed. Everything led back to the big question: what had really happened?
‘I doubt very much it was an accident.’ Jon had forgotten the emotional implications, so carried away was he with vaunting specialist knowledge and infinite capability. ‘There might have been time to get out of the car, if the windows were up. But he had wound them down. Besides what was he doing there? He’d had to drive out of his way to be in the pool.’
‘Of course it was an accident. That’s not up for debate.’ This from Lucian. ‘It’s summer, do you drive with the windows up in this heat?’
‘Well, I’ve got air-con so…’
‘That old car was knackered and Dad was tired, he works harder than you and I put together.’ He glared at Jon who failing to heed the beady scowl cantered on happily.
‘Hey, but you know, the great thing is that those camera tapes will tell us. Funny how we all banged on at the old man about them, and now he’s been proved right. We’ll have the whole thing on film. I’ll tell the police first thing tomorrow.’ Jon persisted in referring to Mark Ramsay as ‘the old man’, thinking it made him sound rakish and one of the family.
‘That film is none of their business. Besides, let me be the judge.’
Then Caroline, Lucian’s girlfriend who had never felt the precarious nature of her relationship with him more than now, and spurred on by Jon’s seeming disregard for Lucian’s authority, chose this moment to mention Mrs Ramsay’s ‘problems’. Alliances solidified. Lucian and Gina closed ranks and closed down the discussion.
The two out-laws made mumbled exits:
‘Check the garden, lock up the house, run baths…’
Soon after this Isabel appeared in the doorway. Her wispy and hesitant demeanour, one hand on her stomach, the other on the door jamb, brought their whispered conspiracy to a stop just as a little girl’s unwanted presence had done in the same room years before. Lucian screeched back his chair as he leapt up to pour his mother the last of the cocoa from the pan on the Rayburn into the mug that Gina snatched up off the dish rack.
After Isabel had returned to her bedroom with her drink, unable after all to bear the company of her children, Lucian and Gina stayed sitting at the table like statues keeping vigil in stony bewilderment, as the sun set on the last day in this world that included their father.
Sixteen
When Chris had opened the bedroom door, Alice snapped shut her eyes, and pretended to be asleep until at last she heard her go away. Chris had not gone to the launderette, but Alice could hardly blame her. Her behaviour earlier that evening would have seemed peculiar, and in the morning she must make up for it. Alice lay on her back and tuned into the sounds of the building. The creaks, hisses, bangs and whines orchestrated the lives of residents as they did her own. The woman upstairs had gone to the lavatory five minutes ago. She had heard the intermittent trickling followed by a rushing of the waste pipes in the wall behind her head. Alice hated having such intimate knowledge of her neighbours, although perversely her distaste provoked a prurient obsession with these secret existences and she would listen out for them. Alice was the possessor of facts that no one else knew.
Then she heard Chris’s radio: a thin chattering interrupted by music emerging into a track she recognised, ‘London Calling’ by The Clash. She had once remarked that she liked it. Perhaps Chris would remember this and might now be thinking fondly of her. Alice wanted the music to do the work of reconciliation for her. It was unlikely. Finally there was nothing but thoughts inside the gothic Victorian tenement as it fell into uneasy night silence.
At one o’clock it was safe to get up.
Alice shrugged on her dressing gown, a size too big: a peril of mail order. Her feet fished around in the dark for slippers. Amber light from the lamppost in the quadrangle gave the living room an uncanny appearance, filtering out vitality, memories; all specificity. Alice crept in with the spatial unfamiliarity of a visitor.
She saw immediately that the casserole stain had vanished, and kneeling down she ruefully touched the damp rug in front of the fire. The gas fire was where she always heard the voices. This was how Alice knew they were real. If they had been inside her head, they would be everywhere.
At first she had assumed it was a television in one of the other flats. But then getting so close to the blue and orange flames that her cheek stung, she had worked out that they came from behind the heater and were too unruly and spasmodic to be scripted. Arguing. Shouting. Soothing tones of making up. There was a child crying, a voice that might be a man interrupting. Sometimes the voices weren’t talking to each other, but speaking in isolation, like a bedtime story or a stern lecture and then the boy or girl laughing or perhaps crying. Alice rarely caught actual words although she was certain they were speaking in English from the inflections. If Alice did hear words, like exceptional, beautiful, special, they were like her own thoughts.