I get back to the CPS offices and continue with my statement to Mr. Wright, giving bald facts stripped of their emotional resonance.
“Hattie told me her baby died of a heart condition. Xavier had died of some type of kidney failure. I was sure that the deaths of the two babies were linked and that they must be related to the trial at St. Anne’s.”
“Did you have any idea what the link might be?”
“No. I didn’t understand what was going on. Previously, I’d had a neat theory that well babies were being put in a fake trial, that it was a huge fraud for profit. But now two of the babies had died, so it didn’t make any sense.”
Mr. Wright’s secretary interrupts with antihistamine tablets for Mr. Wright. She asks me if I’d like one too, misinterpreting the reason for my red-rimmed eyes. I realize that I’ve misjudged her, not so much for her attempted thoughtfulness toward me but for her initiative at trying to reprieve her daffodils. She leaves the room and we continue.
“I phoned Professor Rosen, who was still on his lecture tour in the States. I left a message on his mobile asking him what the hell was going on.”
I wondered if his pride in being invited to all those Ivy League universities was to distract from his real purpose. Was he running away, worried that something would be unearthed?
“You didn’t talk to the police again?” asks Mr. Wright. The log he has of my calls with the police clearly shows a gap at this point.
“No. DI Haines already thought me irrational and ridiculous, which had been pretty much my own fault. I needed to get some ‘heavier counterbalancing facts’ before I went back to the police.”
Poor Christina, I don’t suppose that when she ended her condolence letter with the statutory “if there’s anything I can do, please don’t hesitate to ask” that I would take her up on it, twice. I phoned her on her mobile and told her about Hattie’s baby. She was at work and sounded briskly efficient.
“Was there a postmortem?” she asked.
“No. Hattie told me that she didn’t want one.”
I heard the sound of a pager in the background and Christina talking to someone. Sounding harassed, she said she’d have to call me back that evening, when she wasn’t on duty.
In the meantime, I decided to go and see Mum. It was the twelfth of March and I knew it would be hard for her.
20
I’d always sent flowers to Mum on Leo’s birthday and phoned her, thoughtfulness at a distance. And I’d always made sure there would be an end to the phone call—a meeting I had to get to, a conference call that had to be taken—creating a barrier against any potential emotional outpouring. But there had never been any outpouring, just a little awkwardness as emotions were bitten back and passed off as the judder of a transatlantic phone call.
I’d already bought Leo a card, but at Liverpool Street Station I bought a bunch of cornflowers for you, wild and vividly blue. As the florist wrapped them, I remembered Kasia telling me that I should lay flowers at the toilets building for you, which she’d done weeks before. She was uncharacteristically insistent and thought that Mum would find it “healing” too. But I knew Mum found this modern expression of grief—all those floral shrines by pedestrian crossings and up lampposts and on roadsides—unsettling and bizarre. Flowers should be laid where you were buried, not where you died. Besides, I would do my damnedest to make sure Mum never saw the toilets building. Me too, for that matter. I never wanted to go near that building again. So I’d told Kasia that I’d rather plant something beautiful in your garden, look after it, watch it as it grew and flourished. And, like Mum, lay flowers on your grave.
I walked the half mile from Little Hadston station to the church, and saw Mum in the graveyard. I told you about my lunch with her just a few days ago, jumping ahead in the chronology of the story so I could reassure you and be fair to her. So you already know how she changed after you died, how she became again the mum of babyhood in the rustling dressing gown, smelling of face cream and reassurance in the dark. Warm and loving, she’s also become worryingly vulnerable. It was at your funeral that she changed. It wasn’t a gradual process but horrifyingly fast, her silent scream as you were lowered into the wet mud shattering all of her character artifices, leaving the core of her exposed. And in that shattering moment, her fiction around your death disintegrated. She knew, as I did, that you would never have killed yourself. And that violent knowledge leached the strength from her spine and stripped the color from her hair.
But every time I saw her, so old and gray now, it was newly shocking.
“Mum?”
She turned and I saw tears on her face. She hugged me tightly and pressed her face against my shoulder. I felt her tears through my shirt. She pulled away, trying to laugh. “Shouldn’t use you as a hanky, should I?”
“That’s fine, anytime.”
She stroked my hair. “All that hair. It needs a cut.”
“I know.”
I put my arm around her.
Dad had gone back to France, with no promises of phone calls or visits, honest enough now not to make promises he couldn’t keep. I know that I am loved by him but that he won’t be present in my everyday life. So, practically, Mum and I have only each other now. It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people’s too—yours, Leo’s, Dad’s. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.
I put my cornflowers on your grave, which I hadn’t seen since the day of your burial. And as I looked at the earth heaped above you and Xavier, I thought that this is what it all meant—the visits to the police, the hospital, the Internet searches, the questioning and querying and suspicions and accusations—this is what it came down to: you covered with suffocating mud away from light, air, life, love.
I turned to Leo’s grave, and put down my card, an Action Man one, that I think an eight-year-old would like. I’ve never added years to him. Mum had already put on a wrapped-up present, which she’d told me was a remote-control helicopter.
“How did you know he had cystic fibrosis?” I asked.
She told me once that she knew he had it before he showed any signs of illness, but neither she nor Dad knew they were carriers, so how did she know to get him tested? My mind had become accustomed to asking questions, even at Leo’s graveside, even on what should have been his birthday.
“He was still a baby and he was crying,” said Mum. “I kissed his face and his tears tasted salty. I told the GP, just a by-the-by comment, not thinking anything of it. Salty tears are a symptom of cystic fibrosis.”
Remember how even when we were children, she hardly ever kissed us when we cried? But I remember a time when she did, before she tasted the salt in Leo’s tears.
We were silent for a few moments and my eyes went from Leo’s established grave back to your raw one, and I saw how the contrast visualized my state of mourning for each of you.
“I’ve decided on a headstone,” Mum said. “I want an angel, one of those big stone ones with the enveloping wings.”
“I think she’d like an angel.”