No fear of Daphne making a scene. She maintains an admirable poise at all times. Today, for instance, when she told me about the child, she spoke quietly, looking away from me with her usual air of faint abstraction. I confess I was annoyed at her, I couldn't hide it. She should have told me she was having him tested, instead of just presenting me with the diagnosis out of the blue like this. She gave me a quizzical look, tilting her head to one side and almost smiling. Are you surprised? she said. I turned my face away crossly and did not answer. Of course I was not surprised. I knew there was something wrong with him, I always knew – I told her so, long before she was ready to admit it. From the start there was the way he moved, warily, quaking, on his scrawny little legs, as if trying not to drop some large, unmanageable thing that had been dumped into his arms, looking up at us in bewilderment and supplication, like a creature looking up out of a hole in the ground. Where did you take him, I said, what hospital, what did they say exactly? She shrugged. They were very nice, she said, very sympathetic. The doctor talked to her for a long time. It is a very rare condition, somebody's syndrome, I have forgotten the name already, some damn Swiss or Swede – what does it matter. He will never speak properly. He'll never do anything properly, it seems. There is something wrong with his brain, something is missing, some vital bit. She explained it all to me, repeating what the doctor told her, but I was only half-listening. A sort of weariness had come over me, a sort of lethargy. Van is his name, have I mentioned that? Van. He's seven. When I get out he will probably be, what, thirty-something? Jesus, almost as old as I am now. A big child, that's what the country people will call him, not without fondness, at Coolgrange. A big child.
I will not, I will not weep. If I start now I'll never stop.
In the afternoon I broke into Charlie's desk again, and took some cash and ventured out to the newsagent's on the harbour. What a strange, hot thrill of excitement I felt, stepping into the shop, my stomach wobbled, and I seemed to be treading slowly through some thick, resistant medium. I think a part of me hoped – no, expected – that somehow I would be saved, that as in a fairy-tale everything would be magically reversed, that the wicked witch would disappear, that the spell would be lifted, that the maid would wake from her enchanted sleep. And when I picked up the papers it seemed for a moment as if some magic had indeed been worked, for at first I could see nothing in them except more stuff about the bombing and its aftermath. I bought three mornings, and an early-evening edition, noting (is this only hindsight?) the hard look that the pimpled girl behind the counter gave me. Then I hurried back to the house, my heart going at a gallop, as if it were some choice erotica I was clutching under my arm. Indoors again, I left the papers on the kitchen-table and ran to the bathroom, where in my agitation I managed to pee on my foot. After a lengthy, feverish search I found a quarter-full bottle of gin and took a good slug from the neck. I tried to find something else to do, but it was no good, and with leaden steps I returned to the kitchen and sat down slowly at the table and spread out the papers in front of me. There it was, a few paragraphs in one of the mornings, squeezed under a photograph of a bandaged survivor of the bombing sitting up in a hospital bed. In the evening edition there was a bigger story, with a photograph of the boys I had seen playing in the hotel grounds. It was they who had found her. There was a photograph of her, too, gazing out solemn-eyed from a blurred background, it must have been lifted from a group shot of a wedding, or a dance, she was wearing a long, ugly dress with an elaborate collar, and was clutching something, flowers, perhaps, in her hands. Her name was Josephine Bell. There was more inside, a file picture of Behrens and a view of Whitewater House, and an article on the Behrens collection, littered with mis-spellings and garbled dates. A reporter had been sent down the country to talk to Mrs Brigid Bell, the mother. She was a widow. There was a photograph of her standing awkwardly in front of her cottage, a big, raw-faced woman in an apron and an old cardigan, peering at the camera in a kind of stolid dismay. Her Josie, she said, was a good girl, a decent girl, why would anyone want to kill her. And suddenly I was back there, I saw her sitting in the mess of her own blood, looking at me, a bleb of pink spittle bursting on her lips. Mammy was what she said, that was the word, not Tommy, I've just this moment realised it. Mammy, and then: Love.
I think the time I spent in Charlie French's house was the strangest period of my life, stranger even and more disorienting than my first days here. I felt, in the brownish gloom of those rooms, with all that glistening marine light outside, as if I were suspended somehow in mid-air, in a sealed flask, cut off from everything. Time was split in two: there was clock time, which moved with giant slowness, and then there was that fevered rush inside my head, as if the mainspring had broken and all the works were spinning madly out of control. I did sentry-go up and down the kitchen for what seemed hours on end, shoulders hunched and hands stuck in my pockets, furiously plotting, unaware how the distance between turns was steadily decreasing, until in the end I would find myself at a shuddering stop, glaring about me in bafflement, like an animal that had blundered into a net. I would stand in the big bedroom upstairs, beside the window, with my back pressed to the wall, watching the road, for so long, sometimes, that I forgot what it was I was supposed to be watching for. There was little traffic in this backwater, and I soon got to recognise the regular passers-by, the girl with the orange hair from the flat in the house next door, the smooth, shady-looking fellow with the salesman's sample-case, the few old bodies who walked their pugs or shuffled to the shops at the same hour every day. Anyway, there would be no mistaking the others, the grim ones, when they came for me. Probably I would not even see them coming. They would surround the house, and kick in the door, and that would be the first I would know of it. But still I stood there, watching and watching, more like a pining lover than a man on the run.
Everything was changed, everything. I was estranged from myself and all that I had once supposed I was. My life up to now had only the weightless density of a dream. When I thought about my past it was like thinking of what someone else had been, someone I had never met but whose history I knew by heart. It all seemed no more than a vivid fiction. Nor was the present any more solid. I felt light-headed, volatile, poised at an angle to everything. The ground under me was stretched tight as a trampoline, I must keep still for fear of unexpected surges, dangerous leaps and bounces. And all around me was this blue and empty air.
I could not think directly about what I had done. It would have been like trying to stare steadily into a blinding light. It was too big, too bright, to contemplate. It was incomprehensible. Even still, when I say Idid it, I am not sure I know what I mean. Oh, do not mistake me. I have no wish to vacillate, to hum and haw and kick dead leaves over the evidence. I killed her, I admit it freely. And I know that if I were back there today I would do it again, not because I would want to, but because I would have no choice. It would be just as it was then, this spider, and this moonlight between the trees, and all, all the rest of it. Nor can I say I did not mean to kill her – only, I am not clear as to when I began to mean it. I was flustered, impatient, angry, she attacked me, I swiped at her, the swipe became a blow, which became the prelude to a second blow – its apogee, so to speak, or perhaps I mean perigee – and so on. There is no moment in this process of which I can confidently say, there, that is when I decided she should die. Decided? – I do not think it was a matter of deciding. I do not think it was a matter of thinking, even. That fat monster inside me just saw his chance and leaped out, frothing and flailing. He had scores to settle with the world, and she, at that moment, was world enough for him. I could not stop him. Or could I? He is me, after all, and I am he. But no, things were too far gone for stopping. Perhaps that is the essence of my crime, of my culpability, that I let things get to that stage, that I had not been vigilant enough, had not been enough of a dissembler, that I left Bunter to his own devices, and thus allowed him, fatally, to understand that he was free, that the cage door was open, that nothing was forbidden, that everything was possible.