His voice trailed away as if even he realized the nonsense of what he was saying.
I shook my head in exasperation.
‘You’re a fantasist, Robert,’ I said. ‘A romantic fantasist. Maybe that’s partly what I fell in love with in you. But now, now, with Robbie dead and all this deception, this terrible deception coming to light, it’s just...’ I searched for the right word.
‘It’s obscene.’
Robert recoiled almost as if I had hit him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I will put things right.’
‘You can never put things right, Robert. You can certainly never bring Robbie back.’
He slumped in his chair.
‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I can’t do that.’
His eyes were focused on his empty plate. He obviously couldn’t meet mine.
‘M-Marion,’ he stumbled. ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
‘Y-you, you don’t really think I had something to do with our son’s death, do you? I would never have harmed a hair on his head. Never.’
‘I know that,’ I replied a tad grudgingly. ‘I don’t think you actually harmed him, of course I don’t. In any case you weren’t even here. But, like I said yesterday, perhaps he’d found out about you, and was traumatized by what he learned. That has to be possible.’
Robert turned ever paler. He looked up at me.
‘Does it? Traumatized enough to hang himself? You suggested that yesterday. It can’t be what happened, surely.’
He paused, and shook his head quite ferociously before continuing.
‘Oh, Marion, I have no idea if or how Robbie might have found out that I was not quite what I seemed. But I was still the father who loved the bones of him, for God’s sake. Surely he wouldn’t want to take his own life because my name was really Rob Anderton and I’m a derrickman who got lucky on the lottery instead of a highly paid big-shot engineer. Would he care that much?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘I just have to believe he didn’t,’ Robert continued, desperation in his voice. ‘I just have to believe that even if he had discovered the truth about me it would not have driven him to take his own life. And I hope you will believe that too.’
I fixed my gaze on him.
‘But perhaps there’s more,’ I continued. ‘Perhaps there is more about you that I still do not know. Are you sure you’ve told me everything, Robert?’
‘Of course I have,’ he said. ‘What else could there be?’
‘I really don’t know, Robert,’ I said. ‘But then, I don’t know about anything any longer.’
He was silent for a moment or two.
‘In any case I thought you didn’t believe Robbie had killed himself,’ he went on eventually. ‘I thought you believed there was someone else involved, that he may have even been murdered.’
‘I did think that. But that was when I could not imagine that there was anything in Robbie’s life that would make him want to end it. Now that I’ve learned about you, about your deception, I’m not so sure. Robbie was at a vulnerable age. Teenagers are easily tipped over the edge, we all know that—’
‘Not by me,’ Robert interrupted almost fiercely. ‘I just cannot believe that. It’s too dreadful for me to accept. Look, you said you were going to look into his death because the police are obviously not going to take it any further. Let me help. Let us try to find out the truth together.’
I laughed humourlessly. ‘Truth? You? Not really your specialist area, it seems, is it? In any case you just want to prove to yourself that you’re not to blame.’
‘I’ll admit that,’ he said. He looked so gaunt. Every so often I couldn’t help remembering how much I’d always loved him. And, even now, the one thing I didn’t doubt about him was that he loved me.
‘Well, I suppose I can identify with that,’ I said. ‘I want to prove to myself that I’m not to blame too.’
He reached out a hand to touch mine.
‘Of course you’re not to blame,’ he said. ‘How could you be?’
I pulled my hand away. I had softened a little, in spite of myself, but I wasn’t ready for that sort of contact yet. Far from it.
‘The same way any parent of a child that kills himself is,’ I said. ‘How can you not blame yourself?’
He looked down at his shunned hand. Then up at me.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know what you are feeling.’
And he did, of course.
‘Marion,’ he went on. ‘You will stay with me, won’t you? We need each other now more than ever, surely. There’s nobody else in the world who could understand what we’re going through, what we’ve lost. Only us.’
I nodded. That was the truth, of course. How could anyone else understand?
‘So you will stay?’ he asked again.
I wasn’t ready to make any promises. Not to this man who had thrust a dagger into the very core of my soul at a time when I hadn’t thought it possible to be more deeply hurt than I already was.
‘We have a funeral to arrange,’ I said. ‘Our son deserves that it is done properly, without his parents waging war on each other. I will stay until after the funeral. Then we’ll see...’
There was hope in his eyes then. At least I thought that’s what it was. But this was a man I no longer knew, had perhaps never really known. So I suppose it could have been anything really...
Seven
What a difference a day makes, I thought again. Yesterday I had so wanted my husband to stay with me. Today I did not even know whether or not he was my husband. I did know that I couldn’t remain in his company.
Apart from anything else I was still sorting my head out. I realized I remained in deep shock. And I was afraid I might do or say something I would later regret.
I went upstairs to our bedroom, sat on the bed and tried to think straight. When someone died there were always so many things to be done. I knew that from the death of my grandmother, and could even remember further back to the busy comings and goings in our North Devon home after my mother died when I was child. Followed, of course, by the emptiness.
But Robbie’s death had been so utterly unexpected, and the revelations that followed it so shocking. I had so far done none of the things that should be done. We couldn’t make funeral arrangements until the post-mortem was completed and Robbie’s body released. However, there were people who needed to be told what had happened, and I hadn’t been in touch with anyone. Notably his school and, of course, my father. Robbie’s grandfather. I knew it was unforgivable for me not to have already contacted him.
The school was the easy one, so I did that first. I assumed the office would be closed on a Saturday, which gave me an excuse to avoid actually speaking to anyone. I would send an email. My iPad was on the bedside table where it had remained since before Robbie’s death. I’d almost always taken it to bed with me when Robert was away working. Robert had refused to have a TV in the bedroom, saying it would detract from the pretty tranquillity of the room and the stark beauty of the Dartmoor views through its big picture windows. I’d agreed with him, actually, but when he was away had been inclined to cheat with my iPad, using its catch-up TV and access to movies.
I wrote to Robbie’s headmaster, briefly, and almost emotionlessly, telling him what had happened. As I pushed the send button I reflected fleetingly that the email looked rather tardy. It couldn’t be helped. It was the best I could do.
I had to speak to my father. I could no longer put off making the call. How dreadful it would be if he found out about his beloved grandson’s death from some other source, I thought suddenly. I couldn’t imagine what the source might be, but one did see stories of teenage suicides in the newspapers. I had no idea who would or could be responsible for that sort of coverage, not before some sort of court proceedings anyway, but I could no longer take the risk.