Read Breaking the Chain Online
Authors: Maggie Makepeace
Breaking the Chain
Maggie Makepeace
For Tim, with love
Chapter One
When summoned urgently at seven o’clock in the morning to the bedside of a dying friend, Peter Moon, QC paused only long enough to cook and eat a large unfilleted kipper, before rushing to the well-known London hospital. He was too late. Nancy Sedgemoor was already dead.
‘She passed away five minutes ago,’ the nurse said, ‘and you were her only visitor. Wasn’t that a shame?’
‘Oh.’ He found that his predominant emotion was one of relief. Poor Nancy; but it was probably all for the best.
‘Would you like to see her?’
‘What? Oh no … no, thank you.’ It would be too gruesome, and it wouldn’t help her now. He should have gone to see her before. He had always meant to. It must be all of ten – no, more like twenty years … He sighed and ran a hand through his thick white hair.
‘I’m very sorry,’ the nurse said. ‘Is there anything … ?’ Peter looked at her properly for the first time. She had dark eyes and smooth fudge-coloured skin, and she had pursed her full lips together in a sympathetic line as though she felt for him. ‘How about sitting down a minute,’ she suggested, ‘to get over the shock?’
‘No, thank you very much. You’re most kind.’ He smiled appreciatively at her. In his youth, he might have paid her a compliment; chanced his arm? Well, perhaps not, under the circumstances. But it was very pleasant to be sympathized with. He turned to go.
‘Don’t forget your stick!’ She pointed to where he had parked it, propped against a trolley.
‘Indeed no. Goodbye.’ He picked it up and shook it at her in mock salute. Then he walked back along the hollow cream-painted corridors, using it for support, and moving, it seemed to him, even more slowly than usual. He appeared to the casual observer to be weighed down with grief, but in fact it was just
a twinge of arthritis. His spirits were already resuming their normal buoyancy. No serious suggestion of guilt presented itself to him. He was not a man who entertained self-indulgent emotions. He slipped his right hand inside the jacket of his elegant pin-striped suit and held out an antique watch on a gold chain. He could just read it without his glasses. Good, he thought to himself, plenty of time to get to Chambers for my meeting. It will undoubtedly take all morning; what a good thing I had the foresight to make myself a decent breakfast.
That evening, alone as often in his flat in the Temple, Peter Moon lay back comfortably in his best armchair with a glass of whisky in one hand, his stockinged feet up on the coffee table, and the news on Channel 4. Only then did it occur to him that he ought to let his wife know about Nancy. He supposed he’d better phone her. He put the whisky down, stretched out a hand for the remote control and zapped the television off with a flourish. The telephone was also within reach. He was halfway through dialling the number of their house in Somerset, when he remembered that he hadn’t done any of the things on the list that Hope had given to him the weekend before, and it was now already Wednesday. He put the receiver down and took another mouthful of whisky. He didn’t feel like being nagged.
He glanced round the large sitting room, taking in his familiar surroundings in a complacent glance. He had always liked the long shape of it, with the bulge at the far end, the balding Persian carpet, the dark wallpaper which showed off his treasured oil paintings, the shelves full of rare books, and the expensive heavy furniture. The green velvet curtains hung in heavy folds beside the tall mullioned windows with their view out over the immaculate Temple gardens below, to the Embankment and the River Thames beyond. Now the summer evening sun slanted in sideways through them and glinted on the silver frames of photographs grouped together on top of Hope’s harpsichord. They were mostly of the weddings of his sons, and other family occasions, with the odd picture of himself in a group of similar old men at some function or another. He saw that one of them seemed to have got knocked over, perhaps when the daily woman did the dusting. He hauled himself
awkwardly out of his chair and went to stand it up again. It was the one of his eldest son, Duncan, wearing, for the first and only time in his life, a dark suit and with his plump, smiling, thirty-ish bride on his arm.
His eldest son and probably the last of the bunch to get married; strange that, Peter thought idly. Nice that they lived so close to the house in the country. Duncan always had, of course, but he hadn’t been much help to his mother. Peter still rather hoped that Duncan’s wife might become the daughter that Hope had always wanted. At first he had had the notion that Hope would take to her instantly, in spite of the fact that she was no great beauty. She was sensible enough and she had shown every sign that she would sort poor old Duncan out. But somehow it hadn’t happened like that. The two women had lived barely a mile apart for the last four years, and yet scarcely saw each other. It was a great pity. It might have distracted Hope, and indirectly taken the heat off him. An on-the-spot daughter-in-law had the potential to be so useful … Of course! Inspired idea; he’d try to encourage a greater intimacy between them himself. And for a start he would telephone her – whatsername? – and get her to pass on to Hope the message about Nancy.
Phoebe Moon picked up the telephone and the patrician, rather fruity voice of her father-in-law said, ‘Ah, now to whom am I speaking?’
He always said that. The first time he had rung her up, in the early months of her marriage, Phoebe had been nonplussed. If you phoned somebody, you were surely speaking to
them,
weren’t you? She could remember the conversation of that day almost verbatim. It still rankled.
‘To whom am I speaking?’ the voice had said.
‘Who d’you want?’ she had asked cautiously.
‘Why, my daughter-in-law, Duncan’s wife.’
‘Oh Peter! I’m sorry, I’m not used to your voice yet. This is me, Phoebe.’
‘Of course it is. Phoebe …!’ He sounded as though he were trying it out for the first time. We’ve been married for three
whole months and he’s forgotten my bloody name, Phoebe thought, hurt.
‘Bright Phoebus in his strength,’
Peter went on. ‘Where does that quotation come from, do you know?’
‘No. I don’t think …’
‘The Winter’s Tale,’
he said triumphantly.
‘Oh.’ Phoebe felt put down and thought crossly, So why ask me if you already know?
‘I’m surprised you don’t know that; intelligent girl like you,’ he said. ‘Phoebus is, of course, Apollo the Sun God, is he not? So what does that make you, a sun goddess? The sun wife of the son of Moon.’ He chuckled at his own joke.
‘Actually,’ Phoebe said, having looked it up in a book of names when she was ten, and knowing she was on firm ground, ‘it means bright and shining and it also means the moon, not the sun.’ She had felt like adding, So there!
‘How very apt,’ her father-in-law said jovially. ‘I can see we shall have to call you Mrs Moon Moon.’
Perhaps it was his way of giving her an affectionate fatherly nickname, Phoebe wondered. Somehow at the time, it hadn’t felt very paternal or even very friendly. It still didn’t. But in those days she was newly married and generous of spirit; prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. She had thought, He’s not being unkind on purpose. I expect I’ll soon get used to his funny ways. And so she had laughed politely.
Now she recognized his voice at once. It always irritated her that none of the family ever bothered to identify themselves on the telephone. She wondered if they did it on purpose, to give themselves an advantage over the person they were calling.
So she said, ‘Hello, Peter. You know fine who you’re speaking to. How are you?’
‘I’m well, thank you.’
‘Were you wanting to talk to Duncan?’ she asked. ‘Only I’m afraid he’s out every day until dark in this good weather, cutting people’s lawns. I –’
‘No,’ Peter interrupted. ‘It was you I wanted. I wonder if you could do a small favour for me?’
When Phoebe had first met Duncan’s parents, on a wet day in April, she had initially been surprised and then not a little
overawed. They were not a Mum and Dad, they were a Father and Mother. They were not demonstrative and they did not invite confidences. They made Phoebe feel decidedly uneasy. They challenged her only-child’s preconceptions about life in large families. People, especially women, who had lots of children were warm and welcoming, calm and sociable, weren’t they? After all, even in those days, back in the forties, you surely didn’t
have
to have children if you didn’t want them, did you … ? So a woman who had had four and then adopted another, must be really maternal; a comfortable sort of person who would listen to you? Phoebe quite realized that you didn’t have to be fat to be comfortable, but nevertheless she was shocked at how thin Hope was, and how drawn she looked.
‘W-Well, she is n-nearly 70 and she’s suffered from depression for m-m-most of that time,’ Duncan explained. ‘It runs in the f-family.’
‘But you don’t get it, do you?’
‘N-Now and then.’
‘Oh you’ll be all right when you’ve got me looking after you,’ Phoebe said lovingly. ‘Anyone would get depressed, living alone like you’ve done for so long. It’ll be totally different when we’re married, you’ll see.’ She didn’t say then that she expected Duncan in his turn to look after her. That went without saying. He had already proved that he could, when he had rescued her from that dog, on the day they met. To Phoebe, being looked after was what marriage was all about, and large families were things one rested in the bosom of. She had been looking forward to that bit, never having had one. She was sure she’d get the hang of this one in time. She was, after all, not an innocent young bride, and she was entirely confident of her capacity to guide Duncan gently into the role of loving husband. She was sure they would both quickly adjust to living together and, from then on, would support and encourage each other whenever necessary. Instead of ‘I’, they would become ‘we’.
Poor Duncan had had a bad time, living rough in his overgrown stone cottage for years and years with no proper income, and working irregularly as a jobbing gardener for anyone who would employ him. It had occurred to Phoebe to
wonder why his mother hadn’t occasionally driven over from the big house at the other end of the village, bringing with her a Hoover and some Flash. But when she met Hope it was obvious why not. Hope didn’t do housework. Hope apparently didn’t cook either. Perhaps, Phoebe wondered, she didn’t because she couldn’t? Phoebe herself had long ago learnt to say ‘I don’t play tennis’ rather than ‘I can’t play tennis’. It made you sound more in charge of things.