‘It’ll be easier this time. We weren’t expecting it last time, it was crazy, horrible, it just came at us out of the blue. This time we can plan it. We’ve got time to get everything right.’
‘And when we- you know- when we have to get rid of them, you won’t have to do all that again. You needn’t go off with them, in a hurry, like last time. We’ll think of something else. There must be easier ways, more gradual. Burning, maybe.’
‘We’ve got to manage it somehow,’ Michael said, looking straight ahead. ‘Otherwise we won’t ever be safe.’
‘We will. Because we’ve got to,’ Jean said. ‘And when we do, we’ll be safe forever.’
It was twilight when they walked back down the path to the house. Steph had come back downstairs with Charlie and had switched on lights as she went. Their yellow glow shone from every window into the surrounding dark.
Michael got down to some serious planning the next day. What, he said, if they decided to do a tour of the house and garden the moment they arrived? Jean shook her head.
‘I suppose they might. But I’ll be at the door when they arrive, I’ll tell them tea’s already poured in the kitchen. Even if they do look round quickly, it won’t look so different, will it? Even if they notice one or two things, suppose they see there are no photographs on the tables for instance, I’ll say I put them away for safe keeping.’
‘What if they go upstairs?’
‘They won’t. And just in case they do, I’ll move my things back into the tiny little room they gave me. Move your things up to the attic. And I’ll lock the nursery and not be able to find the key.’
Over the next few days, together they made lists of what had to be done. Michael bought Jean a cotton skirt and top from the supermarket to wear on the day, since Mrs Standish-Cave might well recognise even the blandest of her own clothes on Jean. They planned that on the day they were due back, Michael’s van, and Michael and Steph and Charlie, would be nowhere in sight. But Michael, having left Steph and Charlie somewhere with the van, would walk back and stay out of the way but close at hand, ready to come the moment Jean called out for him.
Jean found the pieces of broken porcelain at the back of the cupboard where she had put them in January, and made a passable attempt at reassembling the teapot. Back in one piece, though crazed now with a frenzy of fine golden glue lines, it sat once again in its place on the sideboard in the dining room. Nearer the time Jean would replace the keys in it, in case the Standish-Caves wanted to get their hands on them even before tea. Jean also decided that if she set a large bowl of flowers on the dining table, it would prevent their noticing the black rings that had appeared on it since they had seen it last. Michael said that the day before they came back he would clean the pool, replace the winter cover and close up the pavilion. But all these were precautions. Jean could not imagine that the Standish-Caves would do anything other than come to the kitchen and sink their grateful teeth into her cake. She would have slices of it cut and ready for them on plates, waiting.
Shocking, isn’t it? It shocks me. And I do truly hate violence. I do not say this with any pride, but if I am a killer, I am a gentle one. After all, I saw to Mother with a tea towel, and this time I’m doing it with cake. Hardly offensive weapons. But I hope the necessity for it is understood, and I shall make it a very strong dose that works quickly. I intend to do all I can to avoid unnecessary suffering.
There has been, however, a change of plan.
It was Mr Standish-Cave’s telephone call. He sounded nice. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but not such a concerned and pleasant person. He said he was ringing just to ask me to be very, very sure that there was nothing in the house that would remind his wife of babies. He was certain, really, that he had put all the baby things into the nursery and locked it, but just in case, would I go round and check before they arrived. I must have sounded surprised because he went on to explain. They had not been able to bring their baby home. He had died in hospital when he was five months old, after a number of operations. His wife had had a breakdown over it; that was why they had been abroad for so long. She was much better now, but frail, and he wanted her to be eased gradually back into things, not be reminded too suddenly of the previous terrible year. And, he was delighted to say, she was pregnant again. So I said oh, how lovely, now you have everything to look forward to. And he said yes, we feel so lucky. His voice grew slightly hoarse when he said that.
You see? It changes everything. It’s one perfect chance. One perfect chance to get the important things right. A curled, waiting, perfect chance, and it’s theirs. When I think of all the messes and inadequacies we have been caught up in and have, no doubt, contributed to- there’s me and Mother and my real mother, Steph and her hopeless parents and her first baby, and Miranda, and then there’s Michael’s poor child-mother and kind, puzzled Beth and Barry and then there’s Sally treating Charlie like an encumbrance, and that husband who’s waltzed off to put other people’s lives right- I think, we got it spectacularly wrong, didn’t we? Somehow we got it all spectacularly wrong, and for the most part it wasn’t even our fault. And here in this house, we’ve been able to put so much right. It fills me with happiness that we have been able to do that. It redresses a balance.
And that, surely, should be enough. I’m still tempted to think that we really could arrange matters so that everything goes on just as it is, and forever, but in the end, we are not greedy. We are not monsters. We made our own and our only perfect chance here in this house, and we took it, with whole hearts and together, and we lived it out, every moment. And with our hearts still full, and still together, we should leave others now to their perfect chance. The Standish-Caves might make wonderful parents, and they might not, but I think they should be allowed their perfect chance, too. The truth of it is that even before we came here, time was pretty much up for us all. There can be nothing good waiting for any of us beyond this. We seized our perfect chance at the last possible moment.
Besides, how long would we have? How long before our lovely lives unravelled again? It would not take much; do the Standish-Caves not have parents, or other family, or friends? For how long would they be content to communicate by e-mail, even supposing we made no disastrous mistakes? How long before someone discovered that the Standish-Caves were not ‘abroad’, and came knocking on our door to find out where they really were? I’ve come to the conclusion that the world just will not go away. That’s all we want it to do, just go away and leave us in peace. But it won’t. It never does. It keeps at you, prodding and pricking till you’re demented, slicing at all your defences till you’d do anything just for a place to lie and gasp, and even if you’re lucky enough to find one, it’s just when you’re beginning to breathe normally that it comes after you again. The whole idea that we could keep the world away indefinitely was, of course, desperate. You can go ahead and call it mad if you like, I wouldn’t.
So the change of plan came into my mind, and my mind, I assure you, is as clear as could be. And when I changed the plan, I began to come up here to the study to write my report in the afternoons, feeling that I should like everything to be understood, even though I am not sure who I am writing to, exactly. I have been coming up for a few hours each day for about twelve days now. The Standish-Caves are due back on the 3rd of September. It is the 31st of August. Tomorrow morning I shall put all these pages I have written into an envelope and send Michael to post it, first class, to Shelley. That’s the obvious destination, I can rely on Shelley to get things moving. But I do not know who will be here first (the post is so unreliable these days), whether it will be Shelley herself, or the police, whom Shelley is sure to contact at once, or the Standish-Caves. I do apologise to whoever it is for what is sure to be an unpleasant discovery. I should like to leave things somewhat tidier, but I don’t believe that’s possible.