‘Jesus,’ Hanna laughs, ‘we’re going to have to watch our mouths around that one.’ She rescues the jug from the stove and pours. ‘So, will you come? Seeing as you’re aged and infirm and in need of help.’
‘Lonely, too.’ The coffee’s too hot to drink. I blow on it. ‘Bloody lonely, don’t forget.’
She throws a biscuit at me. ‘“It was weeks before the neighbours noticed the smell.”’
‘If you put it like that, I can hardly see how I can refuse.’
‘Michel’s Mum is coming, too.’
‘Poppy? Really?’
‘Just for a day.’
‘I should hope so.’
Hanna doesn’t seem to want to hurry me out of the house particularly, yet what can we say to each other while the matter of Agnes, and Agnes’s paternity, remains unbroached? The older Agnes gets, the more convinced I am that she’s mine. The facial similarity isn’t definitive, but it’s still there. Her long, slightly mournful upper lip, and her nose, a little snubbed. (It lets her down, a little heavy for her face.) More, it’s her manner. Well, her mannerisms. The prim way she tells her stories, her eyes sparkling. Her easy and comical outrage. A dozen tiny gestures. They remind me of my mother. When that happens, something cold and clinging fastens itself around my guts and I know that, sooner or later, for the girl’s sake, I am going to have to say something. I will have to. It would be unfair not to. It would be wrong.
If they hadn’t made me the girl’s godfather, and weren’t as a family so comfortable to be around, I think I would have said something by now, and hang the consequences. Given my mum, and what she did to herself, it is essential that they know. But I am Agnes’s godfather, I play with her almost every other weekend, and she has come to matter to me in ways I could not have predicted. Once I tell Hanna and Mick that I think Agnes is mine, then I will lose her, if not forever, if not entirely, then for a long time, and there will always be this cloud over us. This is a sacrifice I know I must make, but frankly I haven’t the guts.
At the door, as I’m saying goodbye, girding myself for the drive back to the city, Hanna says, ‘I’ve never understood why you and Mick are so hostile towards Poppy.’
Poppy? Poppy. How old must she be now? Well into her seventies, I would have thought. I haven’t thought about Poppy in years, and when I have, it’s always been with affection, or at any rate, with amusement. ‘I think “hostile” is a bit strong.’
‘No,’ Hanna says, ‘it isn’t.’
‘Well. You probably had to be there. Good night.’
‘Good night, Connie.’
I lean in for a kiss but she has already turned away; she is closing the door on me.
ELEVEN
‘Come on, Connie,’ Dad called, swinging my bedroom door open. Since about half-past six he had been trying to rouse me. He was leaving early. He had a conference to attend, a presentation to give. Something very last-minute and, by the sound of it, important. He was stressed. ‘Are you at cricket practice this evening?’
Groaning, I pulled the duvet over my head.
He stepped into my room. ‘There isn’t time for me to give you a lift into school.’
I flung the duvet off and sat up. ‘Shit.’
‘Conrad.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’re just going to have to lug everything in yourself.’
Usually, when there was an evening practice, Dad gave me a lift to school in the car. Getting there on foot was not easy, given the sheer amount of kit I had to carry. I had my own bat, my own pads, my own gloves – last year’s unlooked-for birthday present.
‘No problem,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’
‘S’okay.’
‘I’m sorry.’ For one horrible moment it looked as though he was going to hug me.
‘Dad, it’s okay. Just let me get dressed, yes?’
He remembered himself. He forced a smile. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’
‘Eggs?’
‘Sure.’
Dad clattered around in the kitchen while, piece by piece, I assembled myself. Textbooks, uniform, kit. Bits of sleep-deprived brain.
Dad called up the stairs, ‘Have you got everything?’
‘Everything but the kitchen bloody sink.’ It was embarrassing, striding onto the school cricket pitch in such brand-new gear. It must have cost my parents a small fortune.
‘Jumper?’
‘In this weather?’
‘Jumper.’
‘Okay, Dad.’
I threw the whole lot into a leather-handled green canvas bag that, by disregarding a hundred years of innovation in man-made textiles, was an embarrassment in itself.
I lugged the bag downstairs. The key was hung up as usual by the side door. Dad kept our car parked among all the others out the front of the hotel. I went out with my bag. I was still dozy, running on habit, and it wasn’t until I turned the key to open the boot that I remembered I wasn’t getting a lift. Before I could catch the boot lid it swung up on its spring.
Mum lay curled up inside, barefoot, in denim shorts and one of Dad’s cast-off jumpers. The chalk-white shapelessness of her legs made it clear to me, straight away, that she was dead.
My eyes drank in strange details – hairs on her calves; her rough, blotched knees – as though death were an extreme form of bodily neglect. Her face, blue and swollen and bovine, was only partly visible through the fog that had collected on the inside of the bag. She’d taped it around her throat with brown tape. It was one of our big freezer bags from the kitchen. Near where her eyeball had stuck to the plastic there was a white patch, a writable surface, ‘BEST BEFORE’ in clear cut-away type. Her bottom teeth were visible. They were very small.
‘Conrad!’
I dropped my bag and turned.
Dad stood at the entrance to the hotel. He had an apron tied around his middle, protecting his suit. A spatula in his hand.
Things slowed down around me, or seemed to, driven out of mind by the clatter inside my own head. It felt, for a moment, as if I hung outside myself, watching myself thinking.
Mum in the boot – whose doing was this? Mum’s own. The bag around her head was sign enough of that. The stench of whisky and bleach. For years, and wordlessly, Dad and I had been living in anticipation of this moment. Batting it away. Facing it down. All for nothing. Here it was at last.
But this was not what was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be Dad who had found her like this. Dad, called away at short notice on a last-minute trip!
I had opened the boot instead. I had discovered her. ‘Dad?’
He just stood there in the shade of the portico, shoulders raised in a half-shrug. Nonplussed.
Who had invited Dad to this last-minute conference? Was the conference even real? Mum had planned this. She had expected Dad to find her here as he got ready to go, filling the boot with vests and goggles and all the rest of his visual paraphernalia. It hadn’t been enough that she had decided to destroy herself at last. She had wanted to destroy Dad, too. She still could.
All right.
I turned.
Dad had gone back inside.
It was clear enough what I had to do. I had to go back inside and find him. Warn him. Tell him. At least if I told him what she had done, then he would be prepared. Seeing her there, dumped like a deer in the back of a poacher’s car, would no longer be the killer shock that Mum had meant it to be.
The trouble was, I didn’t know if I could tell him. I didn’t know if I had the strength to go back into the hotel and catch him as he came out through the lobby, asking for his car keys.