‘Truly, I thought there was something amiss,’ he said, blustering the night with his hands. ‘I thought I was being a good neighbour and a good citizen.’
Thacker looked so pitiful and frightened that Clare asked the police not to charge him and finally everyone left except Thacker himself.
‘I am sorry,’ he said, ‘but your lights are almost never on at night, and I thought you were alone.’
‘Thank you for your concern,’ Clare said, shaking his hand as cordially as she could. ‘We must go to bed now. My son has an early morning.’
Clare clicked Thacker in and out of her gate and went back inside to find Mark almost in the same position as before the interruption.
‘Will you forgive me?’ he asked.
‘For Laura? Oh, Mark, no. I cannot do that. It is not for me to forgive or to judge. You did what you felt you had to do. If you wish forgiveness, you must ask Laura for forgiveness. I am not Laura,’ she said, realizing that she was angrier with her son than she had ever been before. Not only was Clare the wrong person from whom to ask forgiveness, she also lacked the capacity to forgive what Mark had done.
‘But Laura is dead.’
‘Even still,’ she cried, trying to make her face immobile where it convulsed into spasm. ‘That shouldn’t prevent us from asking Laura to forgive our failures against her.’
‘And if she had asked you for money?’
‘She did not ask me. But yes, if she had asked me, I would have given it. I wouldn’t have thought twice, just as I would give it if you asked. But my relationship with each of you is — was — different from your relationship with each other. I cannot say that you did the wrong thing. You believed you were doing what you had to do at the time. You regret it now. You wish my forgiveness, but from my perspective there is nothing to forgive. I don’t hold you accountable for Laura’s actions, for what she did, and what became of her, whatever that might have been. She was only accountable to herself. I could have been a different kind of mother to her, and that might have changed everything. We cannot say that one moment or series of moments determined what Laura became. She was an adult. She made her own decisions. I think we dishonour her by assuming we could have changed her mind so easily.’
It was not yet light the next morning and there was already breaking news of another commuter bus being fired on by masked gunmen. Six passengers were reported dead, dozens injured. Nurses striking over a pay deal were barricading hospital entrances so that patients and ambulances and even the doctors themselves could not enter. Hospital workers were toyi-toying in operating theatres, dancing in protest around anaesthetized patients. Injured people were dying on the pavements outside. A woman gave birth in a car park. Abandoned by ward nurses, mental patients rioted for food. The military had been called in to restore order and provide emergency medical assistance, but they were also threatening to strike. Meanwhile, the Health Minister had been indicted for siphoning millions into an offshore account. Clare turned off the television, went to shower and dress, and had the coffee made by the time Mark emerged from his bedroom.
‘I’ve been called back home, Mother. I’m afraid I have to leave this morning.’
‘I would say it has been nice to see you but I fear it hasn’t been nice for you. It hasn’t been entirely nice for me, but that’s not what I mean. I am glad you came and I hope you will come to stay again soon. I shall promise not to burden you with further confessions. It is clear that the only answer to my problem is one I must find myself. Short of the dead granting me forgiveness, I have little hope of absolution, and thus of being freed from these memories.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t think I understand,’ Mark said, sweeping his tie over his shoulder as he sat down to his coffee. ‘The wig. Do you truly believe that Uncle Stephan’s relatives are the ones who broke into the old house?’
‘If not his relatives then his friends or associates, or even people hired by them.’
‘But what does it mean, if that’s what actually happened?’
‘I took it as a warning — that they knew the role I had played, and they knew that justice had not been done, so far as my involvement was concerned. Perhaps it was not their plan. After all, Marie and her little handgun interrupted them. Perhaps they had other spoils in mind than symbolic ones.’
‘Or they were nothing more than ordinary thieves who were interrupted and took the first thing to hand as they fled the house.’
‘But then why return the wig to the monument? Your version does not make sense if you think about its return — it requires that they would have been knowledgeable thieves, thieves with a sense of remorse about what they had taken, who returned it to a place where I might find it, but not to the house itself.’
‘You’d moved out. And it’s possible that they did know who you were and were only targeting someone they thought might have money. Not all thieves are idiots. I’ve met my share of knowledgeable ones … and remorseful ones, too.’
Clare shook her head and moved around the kitchen, putting bread in the toaster, refilling her son’s coffee cup.
‘It’s not completely impossible, what you say, but I prefer my version. It was a symbolic act — perhaps not the act the robbers intended. Possibly they intended nothing symbolic at all, but something brutaclass="underline" a reckoning of the flesh. We will not know. I think I no longer fear them. There is little to fear from the living but pain, and pain is, in the end, transitory. I could survive pain, or if not survive it then transcend it.’
Together they ate breakfast in silence. When they were finished, Mark pulled his belongings together, put his suitcase at the door, and the two of them moved through the house without speaking. There was no one else to mediate them, no employee to give them occasion to speak about something other than themselves. Clare finally stopped herself from searching out new reasons to be absent or preoccupied and stood waiting at the door while Mark moved between the guest room and the bathroom and the kitchen and the back porch. It was as though he were delaying departure but could not tell her he wished to stay longer.
When it was almost nine and he had only half an hour to get to the airport he put his arms on Clare’s shoulders and leaned close to kiss her once on each cheek. She inhaled him and caught the scent that he would never realize was the smell of his mother and father in equal parts, a hybrid of the two: a fecund spiciness on one hand, a formal, feathery mustiness on the other. Clare put her arms around his back and brought him close and said, though she hoped it was unnecessary, ‘You know everything there is to know about me. I have no more secrets. Everything will be archived. It will not be yours, but it will be yours to read. I trust you not to contest my wishes or my final actions.’
‘You speak as though you were about to die.’
‘Most nights now I feel I am already with the dead.’
He looked at her and put his forehead against hers. It was a thing he had not done since he was a small boy, staring her down at closest range. They held each other’s gaze for a moment and then he broke away.
‘Before I go I have a request,’ he said, taking her hands in his.
‘Anything I’m able to do, you know that I shall.’
‘I beg of you, please, not to put any of this in one of your books. What we’ve said to each other is just for you and me. It’s not for other people to read. I don’t want anyone reading it, in whatever way you might try to disguise it. Don’t make up a character that did something similar to what I did to Laura, not even remotely like it. Don’t record my confession to you in your diaries or journals for people to read once you’re dead. Don’t take my story or my words. These are my words.’