There was very little blood; clearly most of it had been spilled somewhere else and the rest had drained into the sand. The rough edges of flesh where the head and legs had been severed gaped like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop.
Arvo became aware of Maria’s perfume and felt her warm breath on his neck as she came around and leaned over him. “My God,” he heard her mutter. “This is what your actress found?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The poor woman.”
But Arvo wasn’t looking at the images of violent death any longer. Something in one of the early black-and-whites had caught his eye.
The photograph had been taken from the landward side of the body, and judging by the angle, the photographer had probably knelt to take it. The time must have been soon after sunrise, because the sun was shining over the hills in the east and casting fairly long shadows.
Just beyond the body, where the sand was getting wet from the tide, Arvo thought he could make out a faint indentation, as if something had been drawn there, then mostly washed away. He could only see it because of the sun’s angle, and even then it was no more than an indistinct outline. It could have been merely a trick of the light and water, he thought, but it looked exactly like a heart shape.
14
As soon as Sarah got to the bottom of the stairs and bent to give her father a kiss on his rough cheek, Cathy and Jason dashed through from the front room and surrounded her, jumping up and down. She had hardly registered the sour smell of his breath before the kids had dragged her away to tell them all about the television series and what it was like living with all the stars in Hollywood. What were Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme really like?
After she had whetted their appetites with a few harmless exaggerations, magically transforming the humble beach house into something approaching the Hearst castle, she went to look for Paula and found her in the kitchen, warm in the heat of the gas oven.
“It’s nowt special,” Paula said, by way of a warning. “Just a chicken-and-leek casserole, boiled potatoes and a tin of peas. Not what you’re used to over there, I expect.”
“It’s fine, really,” said Sarah, smiling to herself. In a way it was a relief not to have to make her way politely through yet another shredded romaine and sweet onion salad with chèvre and roasted chestnuts, or duck and spinach ravioli with thymed tomatoes. “Can I help?”
Paula gestured with a wooden spoon. “You can peel those spuds, if you like.”
Put firmly in her place, Sarah began to peel the potatoes. “Dad looks worse than I expected,” she said.
Paula gave a harsh laugh. “Well, he’s not getting any better, that’s for certain. But there’s good days and bad. Today’s fair to middling.” She put down her wooden spoon and turned to face Sarah, tiredness and resignation showing in the lines around her eyes and the dark bags beneath them. “It’s the nights that are the worst,” she said. “He has trouble breathing when he lies down sometimes. The doctor says it’s normal, given his condition, but that doesn’t help a lot, does it? The thing is, Sal, he gets so frightened when it happens. He thinks his time’s come. His heart beats so fast and loud I’ll swear they can almost hear it in the next street. And he gets confused, he doesn’t know where he is or who I am. It passes, like, but it gets me worried. I hate to see him like that. And him such a vigorous man in his prime.”
She looked away, eyes burning, then shot Sarah a sly, sideways glance before casting her eyes down. “He calls me by your name sometimes, too, you know. ‘Sal,’ he says. ‘Sal, I’ve got to go now.’” She sniffed and went back to stirring the sauce. “Hurry up with those spuds, will you, or this bloody casserole will be well past its sell-by date.”
“It smells good,” said Sarah, flushed and tingling with what Paula had just told her. Her father had called her name — Sal — in his confusion. Perhaps he didn’t hate her, after all. She ran cold water into the pan of peeled potatoes and put it on the burner.
“Thanks,” said Paula. “You can set the table now, if you like.”
Sarah did so, and before long they all sat down to dinner. Cathy and Jason wanted to go in the front room and watch television while they ate from their laps, but Paula said no, they watched too much of the idiot-box as it was. She looked at Sarah when she said “idiot-box” and Sarah didn’t miss the dig. But that was Paula all over; she had given too much away in an unguarded moment, and now she had to go on the offensive.
The children sulked for about thirty seconds, then they started humming the theme music of Good Cop, Bad Cop. Paula told them to shut up. Sarah laughed. Her father continued to pick at his food in silence, leaving most of it. Paula shot Sarah a long-suffering glance, as if to say, “See, he’s even off his food now. What am I to do? How can I cope with all this?”
It was hot in the dining room and Sarah felt a bead or two of sweat trickle down the groove of her spine. Had Paula turned up the heat for her benefit? It would be just like her to do that, and then complain about the bill. What little conversation they had over the meal was halting and banal, yet fraught with the tension of the unsaid, the unexpressed. She was beginning to feel like a character in a Pinter play.
As she ate, she began to think that there might be some kind of home or special clinic where her father could go and be well cared for. God knew, she could afford it. But she knew without asking that any such suggestion would be met with extreme resistance. Where she came from, you looked after your own.
After a Marks and Spencer’s apple pie with custard, which Sarah declined, and some general chat about what a lousy summer it had been, Paula sent the children off to bed and announced that she had to go to work. Sarah did the washing-up alone, with only the sound of the wind whistling around the kitchen window for company.
When she had finished, she returned to the dining room and saw that her father was still in the same position at the table. He had one of his stamp albums open in front of him and was turning the stiff pages slowly.
Sarah could only stand in the doorway and gaze, held frozen by the emotion of a memory that leapt unbidden into her mind. She must have been five or six, at the cramped old pit house in Barnsley, and for the first time her father beckoned her over after tea to come look at his stamps. Even then he had spent hours at the table just looking at them, chain-smoking Woodbines and sometimes drinking a bottle of beer.
Sarah could remember the smells as if they were yesterday: the acrid cigarette smoke, the malt and hops of the beer, the lingering odor of dripping, bacon or kippers. And she had stood beside him — he with his arm loosely around her shoulders — and looked into what she could only describe as windows into bright new worlds. Small windows with serrated edges, or tiny screens onto which colorful images were projected. None of the stamps were very valuable, she thought, but the bright colors, the proud heads of monarchs, exotic birds, other animals and majestic ships and planes that decorated them enthralled her.
And now here he was, in a different, much larger house with any number of rooms to choose from, in the same position at the dinner table, poring over his collection. From where she stood, Sarah could see the flashes of color.
In her mind, she could hear the memory of his voice as he told her the stories of the stamps, of how “Suomi” meant Finland and “Deutschland” meant Germany, who they had fought in the war, of how far away and how hot were the places like Gold Coast, British Guyana and Mauritius, and how the brightly colored birds with the long feather tails, the macaws and birds of paradise, depicted on the stamps, really did live in those places. One day, she had vowed then, she would see them. Her eyes burned with tears as she watched him laboring to breathe over the images.