Meanwhile, the Fireplace House had become the focus of everything. Emily White’s brief moment of fame would have fizzled out long ago, but for the blast of oxygen delivered to it that autumn by Brendan Winter. Those allegations of fraud and abuse did more to raise Emily’s profile than Catherine White ever did. Not that Catherine cared by then — her family was breaking apart. She hadn’t seen her daughter for weeks, not since the Social Services had decided that the child was at risk. Instead, Emily had been sent to live with Mr White, at a B & B in the Village, with twice-weekly visits from a counsellor, until such time as the business could be properly concluded. Left at home, Catherine was self-medicating with a mixture of alcohol and antidepressants, which Feather — never a stabilizing influence — supplemented with a variety of herbal remedies, both legal and illegal.
Someone should have noticed the signs. Amazingly, nobody did. And when the thing exploded at last, we were all of us caught by the shrapnel.
Although we were next-door neighbours, I didn’t know much about Mr White. I knew he was a quiet man who only played music when Mrs White wasn’t around; who sometimes smoked a pipe (again, when his wife wasn’t there to nag him); who wore little steel-rimmed glasses and a coat that made him look like a spy. I’d heard him play the organ in church and conduct the choir at St Oswald’s. I’d often watched him from over the wall, as he sat in the garden with Emily. She liked him to read aloud to her, and, knowing I liked to listen, Mr White would project his voice so that I could hear the story as well — but for some reason Mrs White disapproved, and always used to call them indoors if ever she noticed me listening, so I never really got the chance to get to know either of them.
After he’d moved, I’d seen him once, in the autumn that followed Benjamin’s death. A season, not of mists, but of winds, that stripped the trees of their leaves and made gritty work of the pavements. I was walking home from school through the park that separates Malbry from the Village; the weather was half a degree away from snow, and even in my warmest coat I was already shivering.
I’d heard he’d given up his job to care full-time for Emily. This decision had met with a mixed response: some praised his devotion; others (for instance, Eleanor Vine) felt it wasn’t appropriate for a man to be left alone with a girl of Emily’s age.
‘He’ll be having to bathe her, and everything,’ she said, with clear disapproval. ‘The thought of it! No wonder there’s talk.’
Well, if there was, you can bet that Mrs Vine was behind it somehow. Even then, she was poisonous: spreading slime wherever she went. My mother had always blamed her for spreading rumours about my dad; and when once or twice I played truant from school, it was Eleanor Vine who informed the school, rather than telling my mother.
Perhaps that was why I felt a link between myself and Mr White; and when I saw him in the park, Mr White in his Russian-spy coat pushing Emily on the swing, I stopped for a moment to watch them both, thinking how very happy they looked, as if there were no one else in the world.
That’s what I remember most. Both of them looking so happy.
I stood on the path for a minute or so. Emily was wearing a red coat, with mittens and a knitted cap. Dead leaves crackled under her feet each time the swing reached its lowest arc. Mr White was laughing, his profile slightly averted so that I had time to look at him; to see him with his defences down.
I’d thought him quite an old man. Older by far than Catherine, with her long, loose hair and girlish ways. Now I saw that I’d been wrong. I’d simply never heard him laugh. It was a young and summery sound, and Emily’s voice against it was like a seagull crossing a cloudless sky. I realized that the scandal, far from driving them apart, had strengthened the bond between these two, all alone against the world and glad to be together.
It’s snowing outside. Wild, yellow-grey flakes caught in the cone of the corner streetlight. Later, if it settles, then maybe there will be peace over Malbry; all sins past and present reprieved for the day beneath that merciful dusting of white.
It was snowing the night that Emily died. Perhaps if it hadn’t been snowing then, Emily wouldn’t have died at all. Who knows? Nothing ends. Everybody’s story starts in the middle of someone else’s tale, with messy skeins of narrative just waiting to be unravelled. And whose story is this anyway? Is it mine, or Emily’s?
13
You are viewing the webjournal of blueeyedboy.
Posted at: 23.14 on Thursday, February 21
Status: restrictedMood: wakeful
Listening to: Phil Collins: ‘In The Air Tonight’
They should have seen it coming, of course. Catherine White was unstable. Ready to lash out at the cause of her pain — rather like me, if you think about it. And when Patrick White brought Emily home after her performance —
Well, there was an argument.
I suppose they should have expected it. Tension had been building for months. Emotions ran high in the household. In her husband’s absence, Mrs White had been joined by Feather, who, with her alternative therapies, her conspiracy theories, her walk-ins and ghosts and Tomorrow Children, had pushed Catherine White from her volatile state into a full-blown neurosis.
Not that I knew that then, of course. It was late September when Emily left home. Now it was mid-January, with the snowdrops just beginning to push their little green heads through the frozen ground. In all those months of observing the house, I’d barely seen Mrs White. Just once or twice, through the window — a window still hung with Christmas lights, although Twelfth Night was long gone, and the Christmas tree with the tinsel on it was turning brown on the back lawn — I’d seen her standing, looking out, a cigarette trembling at her lips, gazing at nothing but snow and a sky that hissed like white noise.
Feather, on the other hand, was always hanging around the place. I saw her almost every day: fetching the groceries; bringing the mail; dealing with the reporters that still turned up from time to time, hoping for an interview, a word, a picture of Emily —
In actual fact, Emily had barely been seen by anyone. Released by the Social Services when the Peacock case collapsed, she had since moved in with her father, who, every alternate weekend, took her to see her mother in the presence of a social worker, who made careful notes and wrote a report, the gist of which was always that Mrs White was, as yet, unfit to be left alone with Emily.
That night, however, was different. Mr White wasn’t thinking clearly. It wasn’t the first time that Catherine had threatened to kill herself, but it was her first realistic attempt; averted by Feather’s intervention, and by the swift action of the paramedics who had hauled her out of the cooling bath and performed first aid on her slashed wrists.
It could have been worse, the doctor said. It takes a lot of aspirin to actually kill someone outright, and the cuts on her wrists, though fairly deep, had not touched the artery. But it had been a serious attempt, grave enough to cause concern — and by the next morning, which happened to be the day of Emily’s final performance — the story had reached such giant proportions that it could no longer be contained.
How small are the building-blocks of our fate! How intricate their workings! Remove just one component, and the whole machine ceases to function. If Catherine had not chosen that particular day to make her suicidal gesture — and who knows what sequence of events led to that final decision — bringing Bodies A, B and C into malign conjunction; if Emily’s performance that day had not been quite so compelling; if Patrick White had been stronger, and had not given in to his daughter’s pleas; if he hadn’t defied the court ruling and taken Emily to see her without a social worker being present; if Mrs White had been in a brighter mood; if Feather had not left them alone; if I had worn a warmer coat; if Bethan had not come outside to look at the newly fallen snow —