Charlie just looked at him and smiled.
32
This time she didn’t startle him. He sensed that he could rouse her simply by letting his thoughts drift in a particular direction. When he turned to face her, he saw that she was wearing the lilac suit again. Her eyebrows were plucked, and brown lines had been drawn on in their place. On the table in front of her were two packets of cigarettes. She must be thinking of staying for longer than usual. She’d come prepared.
No, he wasn’t startled, nor did he feel nervous. He had never appeared on TV, or on the front page of a national newspaper. The media were not in the habit of discussing his fate. He was an ordinary person, and yet her fame — her notoriety — had no impact on him.
“I’m ordinary too,” she said, little puffs of cigarette smoke emerging with the words. “If I hadn’t met him, I would have gone on being ordinary.”
That was debatable, of course. But it was the first time she had referred directly to the man who had been her lover, her mentor, the man who was now serving a life sentence in Ashworth, a high-security prison for the criminally insane. He had outlived her, even though he had been on a hunger strike for the past three years, and was being force-fed through a tube. He had outlived her, even though he was the one who wanted to die. He wouldn’t have been too happy when he heard the news.
“I’ve got a question for you,” Billy said. “Another question.”
Half an inch of ash teetered on the end of her cigarette. “Still no ashtray?” she said, looking round the room. “Oh well.” She held her cigarette over the drain and flicked the filter with her thumb. The ash tumbled softly through the air and disappeared. She turned back to him again, her pencilled eyebrows raised, which gave her a raffish, faintly sarcastic air.
“Who did you love most?” he said.
“My mother.” She hadn’t given herself time to think. She hadn’t needed to, perhaps. Either she had seen the question coming, or she had simply told the truth. She was still watching him, waiting to see how he would react to her answer, daring him to make something of it.
“What about your father?” Billy said.
“I don’t want to talk about him.”
Her father had been away fighting in the war until she was three. When he returned, she was sent to live with her grandmother. Later, crippled by an accident at work, he became a drinker, moody and violent.
“Your mother…” Billy nodded slowly. “I thought you might say that.”
“You don’t believe me?”
He looked away. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. It was just that the answer seemed predictable. He had somehow known that she wouldn’t be able to admit to loving the man with whom she’d committed those atrocities, the man whose name was now linked eternally, inextricably, with hers. From a distance of thirty years, she would have found that love hard to credit, let alone acknowledge. She would have had to call it something else — something less idealistic or more extreme. An obsession. A madness. She might even have blotted it out altogether. The knee-high boots and miniskirts. The nickname he had given her. The sado-masochistic sex. What’s more, she’d probably been in love with people since. That fellow inmate, for instance, the one who was a singer — and there were rumours of affairs with prison guards as well. The love she remembered, though, was the one that came first. A daughter’s love. He tried to imagine the woman as a little girl, but it made him feel uncomfortable. It was as if he were placing her on the same footing as her victims; it seemed insensitive at best, at worst a kind of violation. Yet there must have been a time, mustn’t there, when she was innocent? People didn’t want to think about that, of course. There was one image of her in the popular mind — the dyed-blonde hair, the brooding gaze — and that was it. There was no before, no after. No childhood, and no old age. Those photos taken in various prisons over the years — who were they supposed to fool? All those different hairstyles. That wasn’t her…And as he sat there at the table it suddenly occurred to him that he had never seen a picture of her as a child, not even one. Didn’t her mother have any? If not, what had happened to them? Had they been suppressed? Destroyed? It was a strange absence, unsettling, almost unjust, though he thought he understood the need for it.
“What about you?” the woman said.
He brought his eyes back to her again. She was always turning the tables on him — or trying to. The result, perhaps, of half a lifetime of being questioned by parole boards, psychologists, criminologists and priests…If she temporarily deflected attention away from herself, she would have time to marshal her thoughts, to dissemble, to conceal. Or perhaps she was simply brighter than he was. After all, she did have a degree from the Open University, which was more than he would ever have.
“Who did you love most?” she said, her face seeming to tighten around her cigarette as she inhaled.
“I’m not dead,” he said.
“So far, in your life”—and she drew the words out, mocking him for being so pedantic—“who did you love most?”
He could have said his mother too, but that didn’t seem to be the point of the question. At the same time, he felt he ought to be quick, like her. The answer wouldn’t come, though, and the longer he hesitated, the more difficult it became. He ought to know, surely. He shouldn’t have to think.
“Oh dear,” the woman said. She had a triumphant smile on her face, a smile that was almost lascivious, as if it excited her to identify weakness and uncertainty in others. “Maybe I should help you,” she said, “by mentioning a few names.”
“Like who?”
“Venetia.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, you’re wrong.”
“You were mad about her. Anyone could see that.”
“It wasn’t love. It was—”
“You worshipped her. You would have done anything—”
“Shut up a minute, will you?”
Her look of triumph returned. He had shouted. Lost control.
“You’re not giving me a chance to think,” he said. “All this talking, all these questions.”
“Oh?” she said. “And whose idea was this?” She leaned over and dropped her cigarette into the drain. “I don’t know why I’m asking, really,” she said, straightening up again, her face a little flushed. “I already know the answer.”
“What is it, then?” If Billy sounded defiant, it was only because he was without resources; it was pure bluster.
“Raymond,” she said, looking off to one side, as though it was so obvious, so plain for all to see, that she didn’t even have to meet his gaze. “Raymond Percival.”
Billy let out a brief, explosive laugh, but even as he was ridiculing the idea, he saw Raymond walking ahead of him towards the reservoir, his bare back in shadow, his skin as cool and pale as peeled fruit.
“You followed Raymond everywhere,” the woman went on. “You did everything he said.” She lit another cigarette. She took her time. “You were so obedient. Even dogs aren’t that obedient.”
He shook his head, but knew that it was true.
“The way you looked at him sometimes. The thoughts you had. You never actually put them into words, but they were there, weren’t they?” She broke off to inhale. “You behaved just like a bloody girl,” she said, then laughed bitterly. “I should know.”
He stood up quickly, the legs of his chair screeching on the tiled floor. His face was burning. He could feel her watching him to see what he would do next. She was feasting on his embarrassment, his shame.
“The way you looked at him,” she said.
Turning to face the mortuary doors, he noticed a wedge-shaped gash at about waist-height. The door-frame was varnished wood, but the dent was sufficiently deep to reveal the wood’s true colour, palest yellow, not unlike unsalted butter. He touched it with his fingertips, feeling the sharp edge, the cleft. A porter had misjudged the width of the trolley he was wheeling, or a funeral director had been too cavalier with a coffin. You’d think someone could have repaired the damage, though; it wouldn’t have taken much.