I thought I would like to talk to him again with more in my mouth than a series of disconnected questions. To do that, I had to know more. Ellie Mabon might be more. I regretted invading her life. But it was still just late afternoon. There should be no husband. I was apologising to her mentally as I stopped the car at her door.
I parked behind a blue Peugeot and stepped out. The house was big, an odd amalgam of wood and stone. It was an original concept. I hadn’t seen another one like it, for which I was grateful. The complicated bell had only begun its symphony of chimes when the door opened. We stood looking at each other while the bell continued pointlessly.
I appreciated Scott’s taste. If you were going to lose your head, she was a good place to lose it. She was tall and red-haired with a beautiful mouth even her present expression couldn’t mar. The eyes were green as an aquarium and drew you to them in the same way. She was dressed to go out, wearing a black fitted suit, the lapels of which met enticingly across her bare chest.
‘Hullo,’ I was able to say.
‘How dare you!’ she said.
‘I’m sorry. But I — ’
She was glancing down the road.
‘Turn right now and get back into your car.’
‘Wait.’
‘Do it!’
She started to smile sweetly. She was nodding as if agreeing with something I was saying.
‘Do it now. Get into your car. Drive in the direction in which it’s facing.’ She pointed helpfully, still smiling. ‘What I’m doing just now is showing the neighbours I’m giving you directions. At the end of the street, you take first right. First left. Then you pull in to the side of the road. You wait till my car comes past. And you follow it. It’s the blue Peugeot out there. Move.’ I started to walk away.
‘That’s where it is,’ she called after me. ‘I’m sure you’ll find it. You can’t miss it.’
She closed the door quite loudly.
I waited for ten minutes before I saw the Peugeot in the rearview mirror. She was a careful woman. I followed her out of the town. She drove for some time. Just when I thought we might be leaving the country, she took a winding road, turned into another and pulled on to the grass beside the gate of a field. There was room for me behind her.
Outside the cars, we stood looking at each other. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t a bad way to spend the time.
‘Hullo,’ I said. ‘I’m Jack Laidlaw.’
She ignored my outstretched hand.
‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘Scott told me about you. But I thought he was exaggerating. He exaggerated about a lot of things. You’re the one area where he seems to have mastered understatement. You’re off your head.’
It was a day for collecting accolades.
‘Do you think we should be telling each other such intimate things about ourselves so soon?’
She stared at me and shook her head, the way people might when watching a disaster on television. She sat against the bonnet of the Peugeot. She had legs from which fantasies are made. I tried not to make any. It wasn’t easy. The urge to live is a kind of holy idiot. It finally understands nothing but itself. It has no sense of context. Attending the funeral in all good faith, it may finish up wanting to screw the widow.
Ellie Mabon was staring through the trees and I, supposedly obsessive pursuer of the truth, saw not a source of information but a marvellous woman. The mad, whispering optimist who had arrived in me with my awareness of my own sexuality was talking again: perhaps she’s the one. Perhaps with her I could have made the place where I want to be.
‘Scott and I used to come here,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you phone first?’
‘I thought I did.’
‘I mean again. Before you arrived just now. There could have been someone with me.’
‘I didn’t want to give you the chance to knock me back again.’
She was still abstracted, presumably remembering the past. It was a good place to have chosen. The roadway was hemmed with trees, high but hidden, a position from which to see without being seen. Below us, some distance away in a small valley, there was a house. It was a modern house with just a little land around it. It wasn’t a farmhouse. It was perhaps a townie’s dream of the country, urban amenities included.
‘We used to pretend that house down there was ours,’ she said. ‘Pretty pathetic, I suppose.’
Her references to Scott and herself demystified the moment for me. This wasn’t just a woman dreaming. This was Ellie Mabon, who had had an affair with my brother and had a husband she was worried about. Seeing the icon animate into someone who breathed the same troubled air as I did, I banalised her further. I noticed the shoes she was wearing. Their high heels were digging into the turf. But she had chosen the location. She must have known where she was coming, with someone she didn’t want to meet. Yet she had dressed like a fashion show and worn shoes that were spectacularly unsuited to the place. The reason might be vanity, the need to look her best before a stranger. Or the reason might be a sense of theatre — wearing the costume of the other woman. Either way, it put her among the rest of us. Speech returned to me.
‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came. I just need to talk to you.’
‘What I can’t forgive,’ she said. ‘What I won’t forgive is that Scott told you about us.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘Then how did you know?’
‘I just found out today. Today was the first time I heard your name.’
‘Then he must have told somebody.’
‘That doesn’t mean that what he said was bad. And it was only your first name he mentioned.’
‘Oh, that’s lovely. I suppose that’s what you call discretion. I didn’t tell anybody.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’
She threw me a look like a spear.
‘If you only had the first name, how did you find me?’
‘I’m a detective.’
‘I’ve heard,’ she said.
She turned towards me and folded her arms. She had made up her mind.
‘Let’s get this over with. What is it you want to ask me? You seem to know enough already.’
‘No, not enough.’
‘Before you start. I’ll tell you anything I can about Scott. But don’t ask me about us. We stopped seeing each other more than a couple of months ago. It was over for us.’
‘Why was that?’
She seemed to be deciding whether my question came within her rules. She made a concession.
‘I stopped it. Scott was too serious about everything. He couldn’t have an affair. It had to be a grand passion. He was so intense about everything. I could see the whole thing blowing up in our faces. I dreaded that some night he would arrive at the door.’ Her eyes returned from contemplating the house that could never be theirs and looked at me. ‘Maybe it runs in the family. I mean, I wasn’t too wrong, was I? In a way, it did happen.’
Her implied accusation didn’t affect me. I was too busy accusing the accuser. She appeared to want a relationship that wouldn’t interrupt her meals with her husband or embarrass her in front of the neighbours. Scott had made the mistake of loving her too much, I thought.
‘You weren’t seeing him at school?’
‘I left. I do relief teaching now. I had to get away. It was too painful being so close. Charlie had been suggesting I take it easier for years. He makes good money. And every day I was living with the dread that Scott might announce our forthcoming engagement to the staffroom. Or decide to kiss me in the corridor. He was unpredictable towards the end, you know.’
People whose heads are imploding often are.
‘So you’ve had no contact with him for months.’
She eased her heels out of the mud, found a new position for them.
‘He phoned,’ she said.
‘When?’
‘A lot of times. But at least it was during the day. Except for the last time.’
‘When was that?’