Next morning Annie cooked for our dad his usual fried breakfast. “I’ll have to help with the cooking,” he said, “while your mum’s away.” He never did cook more than about once a month, but he did pull his weight by doing all the heavy shopping, the bill paying, and his usual gardening, avoiding almost all the costs of vegetables. The rest of the running of the house went like clockwork. It always had, but we did what we’d always done with much less frequency, and with a much lighter heart. The younger children were a bit of a problem at first. We enjoined on Martin that he was to say nothing to any of them about what he’d seen. The young ones told everyone that Mummie was away, nursing Auntie, and then they forgot about her in the blessedly free and contented atmosphere that was evolving in the house.
The first problem that emerged was what to say about our mother’s absence. Dad didn’t mention her for days after she “left,” but as the days stretched to weeks I decided we had to make the first moves. “I thought we’d have heard from Mum by now,” I said one night when the little ones were in bed. “Never a great one with her pen or pencil,” said Father.
“She could telephone Mrs. Cowper down the road,” I said, mentioning the only household nearby that was on the phone. “They were never great friends,” said Dad. And that was true. Our mother had no female friends, and certainly no male ones either. It was Dad who made the next move.
“I begin to doubt your mother’s coming home at all,” he said one day. “ ’Appen she likes being free of us.”
That was a turning point. Henceforth Mother’s return was an “if” rather than a “when.” We heard from friends at school that down at the British Legion our father had speculated about whether she’d “found a new bloke.” We sniggered at the unlikelihood of it, but not while Dad was around. Soon we became a different family unit, one with a dad, an acting mum in Annie, and a cooperating family coping with all the duties of the household. We were a happy home. One of Dad’s “sayings,” things he came out with regularly, was “I don’t think your mum knew how to be happy.” Now we did. Her death had released us.
And we all did well. In our way we were a successful family. Martin went to university at Leeds, and later became a lecturer at Durham University. He specialised in Law. Clare, the second girl, became a nurse and went out to Australia, where she married and had a family. Vince, the second boy, became a motor mechanic and was famous in the neighbourhood as one who could fathom and nurse back to health any make of motor engine. Paul, the third boy, became manager of a large bookshop. Annie — dear, “without whom” Annie — became a primary-school teacher, and had a large and wonderfully happy family.
We had reunions for many years, which sometimes even Clare managed to attend. They always made me think back to the early years of our “liberation,” when in the evenings we sat round the wireless, and eventually (a thrilling day in the family’s life) the television set. We could bring friends home from school then, and Dad emerged as someone who loved having children around him. In the summer we had little treats — usually excursions: to Skegness, Cambridge, and, most excitingly, to London.
I sometimes read crime novels and they never have a happy ending. Not a really happy one. Ours did. I shudder to think what would have become of us if we had spent all our childhood in the shadow of our mother. As it was, the liberation was quick and almost totaclass="underline" Within a week or two laughter was heard in the house. Quite soon after that we children had spells when we were positively boisterous. That murder freed us, allowed us to be natural, allowed us to be happy.
Dad said that once, towards the end of his life. “By ’eck, it’s been a happy home, has this one,” he said. I thought he wanted to say more, get close to the reason why it had become happy, but all he followed it up with was: “It’s been happy for you, hasn’t it, lad?”
“Yes, Dad,” I said. “I’ve had a very happy life.”
I haven’t said much about me because I was the one who stayed at home. I became an accountant, and Dad and I shared the work of the house that we couldn’t get done by a cleaning lady. I knew I couldn’t leave the house, not with that thing buried down the end of the back garden. And I couldn’t bring a wife there, have children there. Anything could have happened while I was out at work, what with Dad’s passion for gardening and kiddies’ love for buckets and spades. It was better as it was. And there was no guarantee I could have got a wife if I’d wanted to. I was presentable enough, when I was younger, but accountancy as a job did not stir many women’s blood.
Dad had a long and happy retirement. When he died of prostate cancer at the age of seventy-seven I was just fifty. He lay in the hospital bed, trying to conceal his pain, often thanking me for all I’d done for him, as he put it. One day he said:
“It turned out all right, lad, didn’t it?”
“Our lives? ‘Course they did, Dad.”
“No, I mean... the business with your mother.” The nearest occupied bed in the hospital was some way away. I swallowed.
“Mother? What did you know about that?”
“ ’Appen more than you knew. I checked on the night she disappeared that there was still the case she packed should anyone be rushed off to hospital. It was where it always was, in that old wardrobe on the landing. And I checked next day as well and it were gone. And I knew that the spade you put away in the shed had earth on it, though I hadn’t used it at all the day before. And I was bound to see where the earth had been turned over.” He took my hand, shook it, and then kissed it. “You did a good job, David. The best thing you ever did. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
I nodded. When I thought about it, I decided the final tally concerning what I had done was not too bad: five children growing up to be fine adults, a man rescued from a hideous marriage. If I was the exception, it was because I was the one who did it. I was and am a special case. All the time I was nursing Dad I was having funny visions of bars growing inside the windows of our house, felt that the open prison I had lived in up to then was turning into a high-security one. Dad’s death, when it came, would not release me, nor did it. I had no friends, though the family who were still around in the neighbourhood were friends, and those are the best kind.
Now I am retired, and I work in the garden, though not there, and listen to the radio, watch a bit of television. I like to know about other people’s lives. But I like to know about them from afar: I have grown so used to my house, and sometimes it seems to me that I have always been old in it. And now I know I have come to love it. Here is enshrined everything I have achieved. I am a prisoner who has come to love his cell. Nothing is left of the David who might have been. I am watching from outside, as if I was dead. I killed our mother, and she in her turn has killed me.
© 2008 by Robert Barnard
The Problem of the Secret Patient
by Edward D. Hoch
It seems that EQMM’s editors are not alone in their admiration for Edward D. Hoch’s Dr. Sam Hawthorne series. The latest Hawthorne collection has placed fifth on the list of the year’s best translated mysteries in Japan. The notice appeared in Kodansha In-Pocket magazine. Other authors who placed high on the list: Michael Connelly, Carl Hiaasen, Ann Cleeves, and Patricia Cornwell.