‘Becca,’ said Charlie, reaching out to take Rebecca’s hand.
‘I don’t understand your shame,’ Rebecca said to her in a jagged voice. A tear sped down her cheek. ‘I just can’t understand it. I wish I’d done things I couldn’t account for. I wish I had the guts. I’d tell everyone about it — I’d shout it from the fucking rooftops!’
She put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook so that the little frilled sleeves of her dress trembled.
‘I wish I had the guts to tell them all to go to hell,’ she wept.
‘Mummy,’ said Hamish.
Rebecca sat and cried into her white hands.
‘I wish I could send them all to hell!’
Charlie gave me a look of enquiry which Rebecca raised her tear-streaked face in time to notice.
‘Oh, don’t expect him to care!’ she cried. ‘We’re all sinners in his book, you know! Don’t expect him to lift a finger — he let me go a long time ago!’
‘Mummy mummy,’ said Hamish.
‘He never stood up to them. You ask him, you see if he did! He never judged them on my account!’
‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to,’ I said.
‘I wanted you to fight for me!’ she shrieked.
‘I love you,’ said Hamish.
Rebecca put her face in her hands again and the tears dripped through the grille of her fingers.
‘I’m tired of being good,’ she sobbed. ‘I should have gone crazy — I should have gone completely crazy. I should have told them just to go to hell!’
‘I love you, mummy,’ said Hamish.
‘I want to find out what will happen if I stop being good,’ wept Rebecca wildly. ‘I want to stop being good!’
Hamish got off my lap. Charlie was leaning across the table in the gloom with her hands outstretched, her prominent features casting little blocks of shadow over her face. My wife sat weeping in her chair. The pale silky material of her dress and her light-toned skin and hair gave her a formless, undulating appearance in the unlit room: she glimmered like some unearthly creature and water streamed from her eyes. She folded herself over so that her face rested on her knee and her back shook as the long tremor of each sob passed strenuously through her. Hamish stepped around the table to where she sat and spread himself carefully over her. He laid his chest over her back and wrapped his arms around her quaking sides so that his feet were almost lifted off the ground. He pressed his cheek into the back of her neck. He covered her unresponsive body with as much of himself as he could, as though in preparation for the great indifference of the latitudes towards which he saw himself now embarking; like some creature, a barnacle, an anemone, that knows only how to adhere, to cling on for dear life.
TEN
I phoned Adam at The Meadows. He said:
‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Vivian’s done a bunk,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s gone.’ I heard him take a drink of something. ‘Packed up her things and gone.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘Yesterday. I brought dad back from the hospital and she was nowhere to be found.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘We do now,’ he said. ‘She’s in Spain. She called Jilly from the airport. Said she was going to those friends of hers, the ones with the ranch.’
‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll come back.’
There was a pause. The ice in Adam’s drink made pebbly sounds in the receiver.
‘I don’t think she can,’ he said. ‘Dad says he’ll have her arrested if she sets foot on Egypt again.’
‘That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘She killed the dogs,’ Adam said.
‘She didn’t.’
‘She did. She put rat poison in their feed. We found them locked in the stables. They were lying there in the straw as stiff as a pair of boards.’
I pictured their silent, rough-haired bodies clearly.
‘We never realised she was such a — such a bitch,’ Adam said in a thick voice. ‘Now that she’s gone, well — Caris says it’s like a spell has been lifted, a curse almost. And she’s right, the whole place feels different. It’s like it used to be.’
‘When?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Like it used to be when?’
Adam put his hand over the receiver. I heard him say, ‘It’s Michael,’ in muffled tones to someone else in the room.
‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘the big news is that mum’s moving back up. She’s selling her place in Doniford and moving back up to be with dad. Property in Doniford’s gone through the roof — she got a valuation today and it’s enough to make your eyes water. One thing’s for certain, she and dad won’t have to worry about money again. She’s selling right at the top of the market and she bought right at the bottom. They couldn’t have done it better if they’d planned it.’
I said: ‘Vivian seemed to think they had.’
‘Had what?’
‘Planned it.’
‘Oh, that nonsense,’ Adam said roughly. ‘Actually, when we were searching the house we found a letter. Before we knew about the dogs, this was. We were a bit, you know, concerned at that point because Vivian seemed to have vanished into thin air and her breakfast things were still on the table and her car was in the drive. It all seemed a bit suspicious. It almost looked like someone had offed her, until dad found this letter she’d put on his desk. She’d gone and got a solicitor in Doniford to write it. At least she had the decency to do that.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Oh, it was just a formal thing,’ Adam said. ‘You know, stating that she was transferring the deeds to the farm back to dad and all that. As I say, at least she had the common decency. It’s a big relief actually. For a second there …’ He tailed off. ‘Dad says it was his moment of weakness,’ he continued. ‘His one real moment of weakness in his life. Apparently she had him in an impossible situation. He let his heart rule his head — I suppose you’d say he forgot who he was. You should see him now, though. He’s like a spring lamb. They’re even talking about getting more dogs. Mum’s got some aristocratic German breed she’s after, great big things. All white, of course. Dad says it’ll look like we’ve got polar bears at Egypt. They’re at it already, as you might have guessed. The old routine.’
There was a silence in which some receding object seemed to be contained: a pause like a vista of the sea through which a boat was making its way, dwindling and becoming indistinct while barely seeming to move at all.
‘I really rang to ask about Toby,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Laura’s little boy. Toby.’
‘Oh!’ said Adam. ‘Yes, yes, he’s fine. Good as new. No harm done. Lisa did the right thing taking him in, it turned out.’
‘Thank Lisa for me,’ I said. ‘Tell her I appreciate everything.’
‘I will. Of course I will. I’ll tell her when she gets back.’
‘Has she gone somewhere?’
‘What? Yes, she’s gone back home. Up north, to her parents. She’s taken the girls.’
I was startled to hear this: there was something troubling in the sound of it that caused me to guess at what it meant.
‘She just wanted to, you know, go home for a bit. Get away from everything for a, ah, while. What’s that?’ he said, with his hand over the receiver again. ‘No, I’ll tell him. I said I’ll tell him. Caris says hello,’ he said garrulously, to me.
‘Is she there?’ I was surprised.
‘She says you should think about shaving off your beard. Maybe that makes more sense to you than it does to me.’ He laughed. ‘God, she’s dancing around like a big bloody gorilla! Shave it off, she’s saying. Just shave it off! She’s doing the hand motions and everything. God, you should see her!’