Twice Shy

'Thank you very much.'

'Any time.'

I put the receiver down with a steadily lightening heart and shook Sarah awake in the next bed.

'Sorry,' I said, 'but I've got to be in school by nine o'clock.'

CHAPTER 11

There was a period when Sarah went back to work and Donna drooped around our house trying to come to terms with the devastation of her life. Sarah's manner to her grew gradually less over-protective and more normal, and when Donna found she was no longer indulged and pampered every waking minute she developed a pout in place of the invalid smile, and went home. Home to sell her house, to collect Peter's insurance money, and to persuade her Probation Officer to take Sarah's psychological place.

On the surface, things between myself and Sarah continued much as before: the politeness, the lack of emotional contact, the daily meetings of strangers. She seldom met my eye and seemed only to speak when it was essential, but I slowly realised that the deeply embittered set of her mouth, which had been so noticeable before the day we set off to Norwich, had more or less gone. She looked softer and more as she had once been and although it didn't seem to have altered her manner towards me it was less depressing to look at.

In my inner self a lot had changed. I seemed to have stepped out of a cage. I did everything with more confidence and more satisfaction. I shot better. I taught with zest. I even found the wretched exercise books less of a drag. I felt that one day soon I would stretch the spreading wings, and fly.

One night as we lay in the dark, each in our frostily separate cocoon, I said to Sarah, 'Are you awake?'

'Yes.'

'You know that at the end of term I'm going to Canada with the rifle team?'

'Yes.'

'I'm not coming back with them.'

'Why not?'

'I'm going to the United States. Probably for the rest of the school holidays.'

'Whatever for?'

'To see it. Perhaps to live there, eventually.'

She was silent for a while: and what she said in the end seemed only obliquely to have anything to do with my plans.

'Donna talked to me a lot, you know. She told me all about the day she stole that baby.'

'Did she?' I said noncommittally.

'Yes. She said that when she saw it lying there in its pram, she had an overpowering urge to pick it up and cuddle it. So she did. She just did. Then when she had it in her arms she felt as if it belonged to her, as if it was hers. So she carried it to her car, which was just there, a few steps away. She put the baby on the front seat beside her and drove off. She didn't know where she was going. She said it was a sort of dream, in which she had at last had the baby she'd pined for for so long.'

She stopped. I thought of Ted Pitts's little girls and the protective curve of his body as he held his smallest one close. I would have wept for Sarah, for Donna, for every unwillingly barren parent.

'She drove for a long way,' Sarah said. 'She got to the sea and stopped there. She took the baby into the back of the car and it was perfect. She was in utter bliss. It was still like a dream. And then the baby woke up.' She paused. 'I suppose it was hungry. Time for its next feed. Anyway it began to cry, and it wouldn't stop. It cried and cried and cried. She said that it cried for an hour. The noise started driving her mad. She put her hand over its mouth, and it cried harder. She tried to hug its face into her shoulder so that it would stop, but it didn't. And then she found that its nappies were dirty, and the brown stuff had oozed down the baby's leg and was on her dress.'

Another long pause, then Sarah's voice, 'She said she didn't know babies were like that. Screaming and smelly. She'd thought of them as sweet and smiling at her all the time. She began to hate that baby, not love it. She said she sort of threw it down onto the back seat in a rage, and then she got out of the car and just left it. Walked away. She said she could hear the baby crying all the way down the beach.'

This time the silence was much longer.

'Are you still awake?' Sarah said.

'Yes.'

'I'm reconciled now to not having a child. I grieve… but it can't be helped.' She paused and then said, 'I've learned a lot about myself these past weeks, because of Donna.'

And I, I thought, because of Angelo.

After another long while she said, 'Are you still awake?'

'Yes.'

'I don't really understand, you know, all that happened. I mean, I know that that hateful Angelo has been arrested for murder, of course I do, and that you have been seeing the police, but you've never told me exactly what it was all about.'

'You seriously want to know?'

'Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn't ask.' The familiar note of impatience rang out clearly. She must have heard it herself, because she immediately said more moderately, 'I'd like you to tell me. I really would.'

'All right,' I said, and I told her pretty well everything, starting from the day that Chris Norwood set it all going by stealing Liam O'Rorke's notes. I told her events in their chronological order, not in the jumbled way I learned of them, so that a clear pattern emerged of Angelo's journeyings in search of the tapes.

When I'd finished, she said slowly, 'You knew all through that day when he had us tied up that he was a murderer.'

'Mm.'

'My God.' She paused. 'Didn't you think he might kill us? Donna and me?'

'I thought he might. I thought he might do it any time after he knew his father had the tapes. I thought he might kill all three of us, if he felt like it. I couldn't tell… but couldn't risk it.'

A long silence. Then she said, 'I think, looking back, that he did mean to. Things he said…' She paused. 'I was glad to see you.'

'And angry.'

'Yes, angry. You'd been so long… and Angelo was so bloody frightening.'

'I know.'

'I heard the rifle shots. I was in the kitchen cooking.'

'I was afraid you might tell Angelo you heard them.'

'I only spoke to him when I absolutely had to. I loathed him. He was so arrogant.'

'You shook him,' I said,'telling him I'd shot in the Games. It was the clincher.'

'I just wanted to… to kick him in the ego.'

I smiled in the darkness. Angelo's ego had taken quite a pummelling at the hands of the Derrys.

'Do you realise,' I said, 'that we haven't talked like this for months?'

'Such a lot has happened. And I feel… different.'

Nothing like a murderer, I thought, for changing one's view of the world. He'd done a good job for both of us.

'Do you want to come, then,' I said, 'to America?'

To America. To go on together. To try a bit longer. I didn't really know which I wanted: to clear out, cut loose, divorce, start again, remarry, have children, or to make what one might of the old dead love, to pour commitment into the shaky foundations, to rebuild them solid.

It was Sarah, I thought, who would have to decide.

'Do you want us to stay together?' I asked.

'You've thought of divorce?'

'Haven't you?'

'Yes.' I heard her sigh. 'Often, lately.'

'It's pretty final, being divorced,' I said.

'What then?'

'Wait a bit,' I said slowly. 'See how we go. See what we both really want. Keep on talking.'

'All right,' she said. 'That'll do.'

*****

Letter from Vince Akkerton to Jonathan Derry.

Angel Kitchens,

Newmarket.

July 12th

Dear Mr Derry,

You remember you were asking about Chris Norwood, that day back in May? I don't know if you're still interested in those computer tapes you were talking about, but they've turned up here at the Kitchens. We were clearing out the room we change from outdoor clothes in, prior to it being repainted, you see, and there was this bag there that everyone said didn't belong to them. So I looked in it, and there were a lot of old papers of writing and three cassettes. I thought I'd give them a run on my cassette player, because they didn't have any labels on saying what was on them, but all that came out was a screeching noise. Well, a mate of mine who heard it said don't throw them away, because I was going to, that's computer noise, he said. So I took the tapes in to Janet to see what she could make of them, but she said the firm has got rid of their old computer, it wasn't big enough for all it was having to do, and they've now got a company computer or something with disc drives, she says, and it doesn't use cassettes.