‘Roddy, don’t worry about it. Listen, you’re seriously ill.’
‘Ill? Sick in the head. Unable to hack it. The Aged P wouldn’t regard that as a proper illness.’
‘In this case, his opinion doesn’t matter. I’ve had some medical training …’ (She didn’t mention the fact that some people, like Carole, would not regard the courses she had undergone as proper medical training.) ‘… and I’m telling you you’re ill.’
‘Finished,’ he said despairingly. ‘Come to the end of the road.’
‘No, Roddy. You’ve got a lot more road to travel.’
‘I don’t think I can face it. I want it all to end. I can’t take any more.’
‘What did you do,’ asked Jude softly, ‘after you left Alice at the Craigmullen last Saturday night?’
‘I drove up into the Downs. There’s an abandoned barn there, somewhere I used to play as a kid, somewhere I used to take girlfriends to … when … I was older, you know, teenager … I hid my car in there and I … went out into the Downs, for … I don’t know how long … I just wandered around … I didn’t look where I was going, I … couldn’t think what to do. And I saw it, I saw the solution to all my problems. I saw how to stop hurting the Aged P … how to stop hurting Alice … how to stop hurting everyone who ever came into contact with me. And I knew what I had to do.
‘I went back to the car. There was a hunting knife in the glove compartment, I don’t know how long it had been there, left over from some expedition I’d been on. Anyway, I took it. There was a place I knew, used to go blackberrying there as a kid. Knot of trees, surrounded by brambles, nearly impossible to get into. But I did make my way in – that’s when I got these.’ He rubbed a hand over his thorn-raked face.
‘And I knew it was the right place. A body could stay there undiscovered for years, or at least until the next blackberry season. And I knew that was where I would solve my problems.’
There was a silence. Then, with searing self-contempt, he said, ‘But when it came to the crunch, I couldn’t do it. I put the knife to my throat, I was geared up to do it, but when the moment came, I … couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring about that simple solution to all the things that are wrong with my life. I was a failure at that, just as I’d always been a failure at everything else.
‘So, I threw the knife into the brambles and went back to the car. I drove back here … I don’t know why … maybe to admit to the Aged P how totally I had let him down.’
There was a silence. Then Jude said, ‘And presumably, when you came back here, that was the first you knew about Heather’s death?’
‘Yes. Another disaster, to add to all of the existing disasters.’
Silence again. Then, from Jude, ‘I have spoken to Alice, you know.’
‘Have you?’ He sounded as interested as if she’d mentioned someone he’d never met, in another country.
‘She will be so relieved to know that you’re all right.’
‘All right!’ he bellowed suddenly. ‘All right? Is this what you call bloody “all right”?’
‘Has someone told her?’
‘What?’
‘That you’re still alive?’
‘I don’t know. The Aged P said she had kept ringing. Maybe he told her.’ Again, it was not a matter of consequence to him.
‘Roddy … Alice did tell me … what happened between you at the Craigmullen.’
‘Or rather what didn’t happen between us at the Craigmullen.’
‘And I know you blame yourself, but—’
‘Of course I bloody blame myself! Who else is there to blame?’
Jude didn’t reply at that moment. She knew there was only one answer to his question. Leonard Mallett. But that was a story that would require careful, gradual telling.
‘Alice still loves you, and I am sure, with appropriate help, you can get back together and—’
‘Get back together to be a laughing stock to the entire bloody world!’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You wouldn’t know, because you’ve never spent time in an all-male environment like the army. You don’t know what men talk about, you don’t know the jokes they throw back and forth. Jokes about potency, jokes about being able to keep it up, jokes about wedding night disasters. And they’ll find out … They certainly will, if Alice is going to go around telling what happened to all and sundry!’
‘I am not “all and sundry”,’ said Jude, uncharacteristically riled. ‘Alice told me in confidence, and I can assure you I will never breathe a word about it to another living soul!’
‘No?’
‘No.’ The silence stretched between them. ‘Alice does want to see you, you know.’
‘Oh, so she’s mad too, is she?’
For the first time, Jude thought there might have been a hint of gallows humour in his words. But the idea was abruptly crushed as Roddy roared out, ‘Well, I never want to see her again!’
And Jude felt unreasoning fury at the destruction that Leonard Mallett had unleashed.
TWENTY-TWO
Jude called her friendly cab driver and got him to take her straight to the Shorelands Estate. The Alice who opened the door of Sorrento looked even worse than she had last time they met. Her plump face had hollowed out, there were purple rings beneath her eyes, and her hair had lost touch with a brush for some days. The increased untidiness of the house matched her state.
She drew back listlessly from the doorway to let Jude in.
‘I’ve been to see Roddy.’
‘Ah.’ The girl didn’t seem interested as she drooped her way into the sitting room.
‘You did know he’d come back?’
‘Yes, his dad called me.’ Alice flopped down on to a sofa.
‘Well, aren’t you pleased?’ asked Jude, lowering herself into an armchair.
‘Why?’
‘He disappeared. Now he’s reappeared. Nothing ghastly had happened to him. He’s alive. He’s safe.’
‘Mm.’
‘We are talking about your husband, Alice.’
‘Oh yes. We’re married.’ She sounded surprised by the fact. ‘We’ll have to get that undone, won’t we? I wonder if there’s an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for the shortest ever marriage. We might be in with a chance for that.’
‘Alice,’ said Jude with a rare edge of asperity, ‘you can’t be so negative.’
‘Can’t I?’
‘Look, you’ve loved Roddy for a long time. And he loves you. All that emotion can’t just evaporate in a moment.’
‘No?’
‘No. All right, at the moment you’re both traumatized. Neither of you is in any state to make rational decisions. But that will pass. You’ll get better. When you’re less stressed, your true feelings will return.’
‘“True feelings”? I don’t think I’ve got any true feelings. For the last few months I’ve been kidding myself that I have, that I was capable of genuine emotion, that I could even be in love. Now I know I was just kidding myself. My true feelings were killed a long time ago. Dad killed them. And he killed my capacity for love.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘How do you know? Oh, of course, you understand human emotions, don’t you?’ the girl sneered. ‘From the lofty heights of your healing?’
‘No, that’s not how I see it. But from the humble perspective of my healing, I know that people can get better, I know that psychological damage can be undone. I’m not saying it’s easy. But it’s possible.’
‘Huh,’ Alice grunted with weary cynicism. ‘When Roddy’s dad rang, for a moment I might have believed that. I got excited. Roddy was OK. Maybe we could pick up again, maybe we could sort ourselves out.’