James appeared at the door with Matthew in his arms. She caught his eye. “Can you give us a few minutes?” she said. He was surprised usually she was only too happy to be rescued from her family but he backed away.
Robert, still engrossed in his own thoughts, seemed not to notice the interruption. He continued, “Then there was the home circumstances report. I went to see Michael Long to discuss it. Jeanie’s mother used to visit her in prison but Michael never did. Since Mrs. Long died, Jeanie had no visits at all. I wanted to find out if there was a possibility of a reconciliation. If Michael had agreed that she could stay with him on release, even for a short period, that might have made a difference to the board.”
“But he wouldn’t?”
“He said he couldn’t face having her in the house.” Robert looked up from the table. “So you can see why he felt so guilty, why he needed to blame me. He had believed his own daughter to be a murderer.”
Chapter Six
Michael slipped out through the church door and paused to catch his breath. He was shaking. The rain was blowing straight into the open porch. It stung his face and hit the grey fabric of his suit, each drop spreading as the Communion wine had spread through the fibres of Robert Winter’s white surplus. Michael struggled into the waterproof jacket he still carried over his arm, and although the storm showed no sign of abating he started off for the road. The service would soon be over. The old crones inside would be coming through on their way to the hall for coffee and he couldn’t bear the thought of them gawping.
The sweet taste of the Communion wine remained in his mouth and on his lips, and suddenly he was desperate for a real drink to wash it away. He hesitated outside the Anchor. He hadn’t been inside for years, but still he was tempted. Then he realized the place would be busy with men waiting for their Sunday dinners to be cooked, and he didn’t want to meet anyone he knew. He didn’t think he’d manage to be polite. The fury which had overcome him when he’d seen Winter, coming towards him with the chalice, still roared around his head. He wasn’t proud of the scene he’d made, but if he hadn’t spat at him, he’d have had to hit him. He still wanted to hit someone.
It had been a crazy idea to come to the service in the first place. He saw that now. Whatever he’d hoped to get out of the ritual, he’d been disappointed. Peg had been the one for the church, not him. He’d always thought it a daft do. Grown men dressing up in frocks. What had he expected anyway? Jeanie’s voice sailing out of the rafters, “It’s all right, dad. I forgive you.”
He lived in a small row of council bungalows, just behind the church, had done since he moved from the Point after Peg had died. The reporters who’d been there when he’d left, still stood on the corner, shouting their stupid questions and waving their microphones. He ignored them and opened the door just enough so he could slide in. He didn’t want them looking inside. He thought, as he always did coming in, how small and cramped it was. How dark. That was one of the reasons he didn’t like going out much. Coming back each time was like being locked up in a prison cell. He hated it.
He hadn’t thought Jeanie had hated prison. Of course no one would enjoy it, but he hadn’t thought being shut in would send her into a panic. She’d never liked the outdoors much. She’d been terrified in a small boat, even when it was flat calm and she had a life jacket on. She preferred being inside with her music, and she’d had that in prison. They’d taken her a.cassette player and a load of tapes. Her music was all she’d really needed. That was how it had seemed to him and Peg when she was a youngster. She’d shut them out, excluded them. They’d brought her up and that didn’t seem fair. Like she’d dumped them when they stopped being useful to her. Then she’d hanged herself and he wondered if he’d got it wrong about her not hating the prison. That and other things.
He tried not to think that he might have been wrong. If Jeanie had hated the prison even as much as he hated this place, it must have been a nightmare for her. He couldn’t contemplate that, whatever she’d done, and grasped around for someone else to blame, knowing it was unreasonable even as he was doing it. He settled on Winter, the do-gooder, the pretend vicar. He was an easy target.
In the cupboard in the kitchen there was a litre bottle of cheap whisky he’d had delivered from the Co-op with the last lot of groceries. He half filled a tumbler and drank it down in burning gulps, then ran his tongue around his lips. He still fancied he could taste the wine and poured himself another glass, carried it with him.
He walked through to the bedroom and began to change out of his suit. He took the trousers off first and folded them over the back of the chair. Some change fell out of the pocket but he left it where it dropped. He thought of the bedroom in the house on the Point, the window so close to the water that its reflection bounced off the ceiling. It had been as near to being on a boat as you could get on dry land. There had been a continuous watery soundtrack the call of seabirds and waders, the drag of the tide on the shingle, the breaking of waves. He had taken it for granted until he’d moved here and had been almost suffocated by the bungalow’s dense and dreadful silence. Here, the rooms were so small that he could stand with his arms outstretched and almost touch the walls on each side.
He should never have retired as coxswain of the pilot launch.
That was what Michael told himself, standing in his underpants, struggling to get the fold in his trousers in the right place. But to tell the truth he hadn’t had much choice when it came down to it. If he hadn’t resigned from the launch they’d have had him out anyway, using the drinking as an excuse. As if all the pilots didn’t like a drink. At least this way there’d been a bit of dignity in his going. Peg would have approved of that. But he missed it with the same ache as he missed Peg. He missed the crack with the pilots and the girls in the data centre. He missed the satisfaction of bringing the launch into the lee of a big ship, holding it steady, while the pilot climbed down the ladder and jumped aboard. It hadn’t been like him to go without a fight and it still rankled. He’d felt the same humiliation as when Winter had turned up on the doorstep of the bungalow wanting to talk about Jeanie.
It had been a while ago now, but Michael still remembered the encounter with great clarity. He had gone over it many times in his mind. It was like one of those fairy tales about giants and monsters that children return to: frightening, but comforting in its familiarity. And it stopped him from thinking of worse things. Jeanie hanging in her cell by a bit of torn sheet. Him being wrong about his only daughter.
; So, Winter had turned up on his doorstep. It would have been January or February almost a year ago. Michael had only gone to answer it because he’d thought it would be the lad from the Co-op with his groceries. Normally he didn’t bother answering the door. He had no time for people selling things or collecting for charities. But there was this man. Winter. Michael hadn’t recognized him. He’d been dressed in a brown duffel coat, the sort naval officers used to wear in the war, but Winter had had the hood up, pulled right down over his forehead, so Michael had been reminded more of a monk.
“Mr. Long,” he’d said. “I wonder if I might come in for a minute.”
Michael had been about to slam the door on him, to mutter something about it not being convenient, but the man had put his face very close, so Michael felt he couldn’t breathe, and he’d said in a quiet, preachy voice, “It’s about Jeanie.”