A Banquet of Consequences (49 page)

Then on the top of the third page Barbara saw:

 . . .
actually drove the car into a tree and even today I couldn’t tell you why. But by then I knew I was dealing with something troubling. She said Yes of course she’d driven the car into a tree because she’d been angry with me for ringing to tell her I’d be missing dinner. Not for forgetting to ring her, mind you, but for ringing in the first place. She’d already started to prepare it, it was something special, and she was beside herself when I wouldn’t be there to eat it. So she went outside, got into the car, drove it at speed straight into a tree on the lawn, and left it there for me to find. After that, to tell the truth, I didn’t cope well in dealing with her. Withdrawing seemed best. Being silent and watchful, as I wasn’t at all sure what she might be capable of.

Barbara closed the folder and tapped her fingers thoughtfully on it. She had to admit that, despite the fact that the tale was being told by Francis Goldacre about his former wife, which alone might have been intriguing to Clare, the story itself was also the antithesis of romantic love. So she was forced to consider something less sinister than Clare Abbott wearing her brothel creepers as she slithered round Caroline Goldacre’s past for something juicy. She could have been merely engaged in gathering information for a future sequel to
Looking for Mr. Darcy
, providing herself with more facts for her thesis.

Barbara opened the Mercedes Garza folder and gave its contents a glance. Its documents began with:

Caroline’s mum is sixty-eight years old. My request for an interview with her was met with surprise but no reluctance once we got through the reason for my subterfuge in arranging the meeting, which she said didn’t surprise her at all. She came to me in Spitalfields.

There followed a history of the mother-child relationship between Mercedes and Caroline, and the fact of it being a mother-and-child exploration made Barbara consider that the previous folder had no real connection to
Looking for Mr. Darcy
at all. For as far as she knew, the Darcy book didn’t deal with mothers and their children. So was this a stab at yet another topic for a book? she wondered. Or was it something else?

The first of Barbara’s food arrived: the chip butty and the cheese toastie nesting together on a plastic plate decorated along its edges with munching bunnies enjoying their veggies and perhaps attempting to encourage diners to do the same. Barbara ignored them and made a request for brown sauce, ketchup, and malt vinegar on the theory that one never knew which was going to take the chip butty directly over the top into gourmet dining. She tucked in and went next to the thick folder containing the emails.

It would, she knew, take hours to read through them all, so she decided to begin with a selection. She doused her chip butty with brown sauce, took a hefty bite, evaluated the level of gastronomical delectation it provided her, added some ketchup, and dipped into the emails, making an arbitrary selection of several from the beginning, several from the middle, and several from the end. Thus she was able to see the alteration in both tone and contents although further delving also demonstrated that the alteration in tone illustrated not a consistent change but rather one that, like a roller coaster, rose and fell in what appeared to be an indiscriminate fashion.

The emails began in the polite manner of one woman writing to another to whom she has only been recently introduced. These dealt largely with Caroline Goldacre’s admiration for Clare Abbott as a writer, lecturer, and feminist. Clare had apparently handed over her email address following a talk she’d given in Shaftesbury—mention was made of the Women’s League and the date on the email was just over two years earlier—and Caroline declared herself surprised that Clare would respond to her. This was along the lines of “when I think about all you’ve achieved and compare it to what I’ve done with my own life, which isn’t much,” accompanied by a fair amount of social groveling that made Barbara squirm. However, it soon appeared from the ensuing emails that—chatty and friendly though she was in them—Caroline was angling for employment and while what Barbara herself had learned about Clare, as well as what she’d witnessed when she’d met her, didn’t indicate that the feminist would actually fall for Caroline’s obvious manouevring, she reckoned that it had seemed to Clare Abbott at first that an affable and much-needed housecleaner had fallen into her lap.

So Caroline Goldacre hadn’t been lying when she’d claimed that she’d begun as an ’umble charwoman, Barbara thought. This was a mark in her favour, although it went no distance to explain why Clare had printed her emails and kept them locked away in the boot of her car.

Skipping ahead, Barbara found the first alteration in tone, some ten months later. Something was amiss in the housecleaning: A question about damage to the hob was met with a tart offer to “turn in my keys if my work is so lacking in what you’re looking for, Clare.” Clare had apparently responded in some unacceptable way not present in the collection Barbara was looking through, for what followed was a missive of the are-you-accusing-me-of-LYING variety, which was then followed by an excruciatingly long three thirty
A
.
M
. document in which Caroline—had she been drunk? drugged? hysterical? channeling Henry James?—banged on for three pages about her former husband, the suicide of her troubled son, the marriage of her older son and his “disgusting wife India,” and then back to her former husband for a revelation of his “failures as a man.” She wound herself up and launched from there into a comparison of herself to Clare Abbott with all her “bloody privileges and Oxford education and have you any idea how you intimidate people or do you just like to play with them as you’ve been playing with me” and on and on till Barbara’s head was swimming. This particular email had been highlighted here and there with yellow marking pen, and on its edge were written “Timms 164” and “Ferguson 610.”

If Clare had made any answer at all to this, there was no record. Indeed, thumbing through the emails, Barbara saw that answers—if there had been any—were not included. In the case of this particular email, what followed was something written less than twenty-four hours later by Caroline, apologising for having unceremoniously dumped her anxieties upon Clare. She’d been out of order in her previous email, she wrote, and her outburst had been stimulated not one whit by Clare’s reasonable question about the hob but rather by a phone call from “the perverse India” regarding Charlie, Caroline’s surviving son. India had declared her concerns about Charlie’s low spirits and his refusal to seek help for a depression that India believed
might lead him to take his life as his brother had done. “It broke me. I’d only just spoken to her when I wrote to you,” Caroline explained to Clare. “Forgive me, please. Working for you has given me a way of not thinking about Will for a few hours each day, and I’m desperate for that.”

Barbara looked back at the earlier email sent at three thirty in the morning. Caroline had just spoken to India by phone? At three thirty in the morning? That hardly seemed credible.

Whether Clare had considered this fact, it was of no account, for within two emails Caroline was back to normal again. Oddly, although they saw each other nearly every day, Caroline wrote as if they were miles apart and playing at pen pals. She wrote to Clare daily, and the next fifty or so emails seemed to be innocuous until something set her off again. Caroline was, at this point, advancing in her employment. She’d gone from charwoman to housekeeper and cook, and a little delving indicated that Clare had transgressed by questioning a meal that Caroline had prepared. “The fish seemed a bit off” had apparently been what launched Caroline into two pages of “Let’s just have a look at how you use me, Clare, and at how you use other people as well because that’s really who you are isn’t it you’re just a user and haven’t I learned THAT and MORE about you.”

She’d been afire with indignation, creating a document in which she listed Clare Abbott’s sins, the mightiest of which appeared to be Clare’s relationship with a brother who’d turned to her for financial help but “oh you won’t help him will you because you can’t forgive him can you because you’re the ONLY one on the planet who was ever made to suffer aren’t you Clare. You act like you’re the FIRST person EVER to have a brother who CLIMBED INTO YOUR BED so let me ask you if you have any idea what it’s like to be RAPED by your own father because you don’t have any idea do you when your brother didn’t rape you but just stuck his FINGERS up into you and there you are like this is the worst thing that could ever happen to someone oh please.” She’d been subjected to repeated attacks by her own father, Caroline declared, and when she had gone to her mother, “do you know what it’s like when your OWN mother doesn’t believe you no I expect you don’t. So I make a mistake with some BLOODY
fish and it’s all about you isn’t it Clare because you are such a narcissist only I didn’t know that and if I did I wouldn’t have ever come to work for you you selfish cow.”

Narcissist
had been circled in black, and another name and number had been scrawled in the margin: “Cowley 242.” If Clare had made a reply to this rambling discourse, it, once again, was not in the folder. As before, however, a day later had come the apology. This one was along the lines of “I misunderstood what you meant when you said the fish was off. I’d bought it fresh and I thought you were saying to me that I didn’t know what fresh fish should be like while you knew better. I can’t explain why this got to me but I think it had to do with Francis and all of his refusals to help Will when it would only have taken a simple surgery. God, I can’t go there and write about Will. I think I’m going mad.”

At the conclusion of this one, Barbara blew out a breath slowly, considering not only the emails but also the notations in the margins. She could only imagine what her own future might have been like with the Met had she—in addition to her numerous transgressions—fired off a volley of provocative missives to her superior officers. She found it curious that Clare Abbott had not sacked the woman at some point but had instead not only kept her on but also increased her responsibilities and her access to the feminist’s life. The only inference Barbara could draw at the moment was that Caroline had the Just4Fun goods on Clare, which she threatened to reveal if she was ever sacked.

She flipped to the final few emails. She’d finished her chip butty and cheese toastie, and her ham salad had long since arrived. She requested tea and when it appeared with surprising alacrity, she doctored it with milk and sugar, asked if she could have the ham salad wrapped up for takeaway, downed a couple of gulps of tea, tucked into her pineapple upside-down cake, and read on. Alastair MacKerron, Caroline reported to Clare, was having an affair with “that slag Halsey who probably sucks his dick for a fiver because believe me he wouldn’t pay more for it,” and despite Caroline’s having caught them at it after hours on the bakery floor “with her on her knees and he’s leaning back just smiling and smiling because he’s USING her just like he used me in the days before I caught him with our CHILDMINDER
for God’s sake nineteen years old she was and there was Will all alone in the kitchen and them in the larder and you do not even want to KNOW what my little boy told me he’d seen them up to in the past and him barely eight years old! I do not know why I don’t walk out on him because believe me NO ONE would ever want him, not permanently like I have the yob,” her husband had declared that he would “no more give up the BLOODY COW than would he have a limb removed. He said his arm but we know he meant his best friend which is his DICK.”

This section was once again heavily highlighted and annotated with names and numbers. Added now were penciled notes in, presumably, Clare Abbott’s hand. They were heavily dependent on some sort of shorthand abbreviations—
del., abandon
,
grand s.o.s.
—and because of these and the annotated names and numbers, for the first time, Barbara wondered if Clare had been actually encouraging Caroline to write to her, perhaps telling her to unburden herself. If nothing else from Caroline’s continuing emails, it did not seem that Clare had asked her to cease and desist.

“He’s drinking now, every night this is Clare,” began the final email that Barbara looked at, “and how he’s also managing to get up and do the baking without ruining everything he puts into the oven is a mystery to me because I assure you that I am NOT lending him a hand and I won’t till he gets RID of the cunt. Which of course he has no intention of ever doing. She’s expecting him to leave me for her but he knows I’ll have him for EVERYTHING if he even tries it. I’ve given him my LIFE and this is how he says thank you which is how he’s always been by the way not two years into our marriage and there he was having girls to his SHOP in Whitecross Street and I discover this don’t I when I stop by with a lunch I’ve picked up for him specially and he’s locked the door and I know he’s there so I break it I smash the glass with my fist and you can bet he felt rotten after that with his trousers round his ankles and this little tart doing the business on him and his own WIFE spurting blood all over his precious floor. Told a real tale to the paramedics, he did. Made it She’s upset and she cut herself and could be she needs watching for a few days. During which time, naturally, he had the CHILDMINDER
constantly. I can’t even remember her damn name but anyway she was in and out or hahaha it would be better to say that he was in and out wouldn’t it and when I got home and found the two of them doing it like dogs and with Will and Charlie actually WATCHING like this is something on the telly—”

Barbara stopped reading. She felt as if her eyeballs were on the verge of bleeding. The why of it all was ricocheting round her mind like the remaining ball in a pinball game. What prompted someone to blather on for pages like this, vomiting forth either personal details or a doctored version of them? And perhaps more important, considering what had ultimately happened, what prompted another person to receive these details in an endless stream without putting a halt to it all?