Englishwoman in France (4 page)

He coughed. ‘Well, the thing is, I'm riding out at the crack of dawn. Big meeting back home with a supplier. Four o'clock start.' He took my hand.

That was when I felt the wedding ring. I thrust his hand away. Why had I not felt it before? On the ledge? There'd been no ring then. Had there?

‘I'll be back up here early next week,' he said.

I was already shaking my head. ‘I don't live here. I live in London.' I waited, then, for him to tell me that he got up to London. Sometimes.

In the dingy porch light I saw his face change. ‘I thought, after this, you would . . .'

I was sorry for him. I picked up his hand again and very deliberately ran a finger over his ring. ‘It was a time out of time,' I said. ‘No past, no future.' I kissed his cheek and ran inside.

I stood there with my back to the door, listening to his motorbike roar away. Then Mae's mother popped her head round the door. ‘You all right, love?' she asked.

‘Yeah. Fine,' I said.

‘Our Mae not with you?'

‘No. I came away early. She's with Spelk.'

‘That's all right then.' Mrs Croft had known Spelk since he was indeed the little spelk that got him the family nickname.

Upstairs I lay on Mae's bed and stared up at the stars she had pasted on her ceiling. I should have felt foolish, but I felt happy. It had been a perfect night. The Deer House. The stars in the heavens. The faces in the water; the Celtish funeral procession. And this Ludovic, who built and painted boats. Ludovic who? I didn't even know his name. Perfect night, though! It was the perfect night to make a baby, because that was when my Siri, my own precious girl, was made.

When Mae got back home an hour later she demanded details. I gave her a much edited report. She shook her head. ‘You must be mad, going down the park with that big galoot. Could have been murdered. Could have been murdered by him. Idiot.'

‘I was safe enough,' I said. ‘He's married.'

May stopped slathering cream on her face. ‘Married?' she said. ‘Worse than a murderer, then,' she said gloomily.

‘Anyway I've to go back to London tomorrow.'

‘Tomorrow? I thought you were staying till Monday.'

I shook my head. ‘Gotta get back,' I said. ‘Just got to get back.'

The next day on the train, watching the landscape fly by, I imagined Ludovic, that big bear of a man, on his motorbike roaring down the roads parallel to the railway. Even now, deep inside, I was humming with delight, going over and over again the events of that perfect night. I knew I'd never see this man again but at the same time I knew this matter was not finished. Perhaps I knew – even then – that Siri was with me. Otherwise why should I be so happy when I had just met and lost – in the space of four hours – this man who could have been the love of my life?

You might ask why I didn't pursue Ludovic about Siri. Perhaps it was my mother's strange but successful example of single parenthood; perhaps it was the gold ring on his finger that had given me such a jolt. But I didn't tell Ludovic about Siri.

Mae told me later that he'd come back to the Swan several times looking for me. But she obeyed my strict instructions not to betray my whereabouts. And even she did not know about Siri until my daughter was born. By then she failed to make the connection with the big boat builder, thinking Siri's father some guy I'd met and dropped in London.

I'm not quite saying it was all in the stars, but that's at least one interpretation of events. After that night I came to think about Ludovic when I looked at the night sky and saw Ursa Major, the constellation known as the Great Bear.

I
t took them just six days to find the boys responsible. The younger one, Kerry, was finally forced – by nightmares and unwarranted vomiting – to confide in his sister, who told their mother. The family, not unused to concealing more petty crime, considered the problem. Then they decided this secret was too large, too terrible, to keep and went to the police.

At the first court hearing, even through my own miasma of grief, I felt sorry for the mother of this younger one who had been Siri's classmate, her friend. The woman was white faced and confined in clothes too small for her. There was a strip of white flesh where her tank top did not meet her jeans.

It seemed that this family blamed Pete, the older one; called him the ringleader. They told how, on the intervening six days after the murder, in between bouts of cider drinking in the park, he'd been riding around the town on a stolen mountain bike. When the police pounced on him he was cocky, defiant. He blamed Kerry, the younger one. ‘Looks like an angel, don't he? But behind those eyes, mister, there's blue murder. I'm tellin' yer.'

I discovered all that from the papers much later. At the time I learned some stuff from the police liaison officer, Lily. (Sagittarius. Earth sign – full of desires and creative energies. Optimistic, freedom-loving, good-humoured, honest. On the other hand blindly optimistic, careless, tactless and restless.) Odd in a policewoman, perhaps. I remember she smelled of lily-of-the-valley perfume. Very earthy. This policewoman said there might be something in what the older boy said, but that both boys were to blame. For me, whoever was to blame,
who
drank cider and
who
spewed up, my beautiful Siri could be no more, nor no less dead.

You will know the details. (I think everybody in England knows the details. This kind of death is no private affair.) Twelve-year-old girl, young for her age but clever – according to her headmaster ‘a credit to her generation' – anyway, this twelve-year-old girl plays football with Kerry, a boy from her class. His older friend joins them. The three of them follow the kick of the ball into nearby woodland. (How I regretted then, moving to Philip's place south of the river. My inner-city block was much safer than this suburban wilderness.)

Anyway, the three of them played, messed about, had a laugh. Then there was some kind of quarrel and Siri strode off towards home. Pete caught her in a neck-lock and hauled her back in among the trees, struggling. They tied her to a tree and the two boys play-acted a scene of crime and punishment. The younger boy, Kerry, could not remember the words that were said. He said he was frightened but still thought it was a game. He said that Siri thought so too. He said she laughed. At first. Then the older boy punched Siri hard and she screamed.

‘It was very loud, her screaming, sir,' the younger boy, Kerry, confided to the policeman who was taking his statement. ‘And it got on Pete's nerves.'

Pete said that it was Kerry who filled her mouth with grass and gagged her with her own long socks. Kerry said it was Pete. What happened next involved stones, and does not bear telling. Even here.

I would keep telling myself over and over again that Siri's life ended when she and Kerry were kicking the ball around in the road outside our house. But of course that's just a lie I told myself to stem the nightmares. Counsellors did give me strategies, doctors did give me pills, but I knew that nothing – nothing in this whole world – would fill the hollow, raking, nightmare vacuum. A filthy black vacuum that lodged itself at the centre of my heart, my soul, my life.

This was bad enough, but even worse was the fact that my casual lifetime gift of seeing the dead let me down in this crucial moment. Knowing Siri to be dead I searched for her everywhere – every street, every park, every shop that I knew was familiar to her. More than once the police brought me home to Philip in an exhausted daze. Other mediums wrote to and emailed me with offers of advice and comfort, even contact. But I ignored them. One informed me quite coolly that there was a cosmic law that a mother may not see the spirit of her murdered daughter. Or even worse – that the sudden violent death of my beautiful child had placed her in limbo from where my puny gift could not rescue her.

It might seem odd, but despite seeing dead people throughout my life, I'd never before considered seriously that religious stuff about
hell
and
purgatory
and
limbo
. I just thought that some of us, like my mother and me, could see through time as though the millennia were mere lifting veils that swirled around us.

In truth, my work in astrology was just me playing around in the area between the familiar symbols of my gifted imagination and managing to hit the right message more times than could be explained logically. I never questioned it and as I have told you, it had rendered me a good living.

After I lost Siri time piled on top of me like iron weights with spikes, distancing me from that terrible morning when I had waved my Siri off and told her to enjoy herself. I kept seeing her lift her head and smile at me, in that way she had. Through those first two, then three years, my early raging grief stiffened into a kind of wooden armour. I was still consumed with anger but was too wooden to show it. I continued to be angry with Siri for saying yes to a game of football. I was angry with those boys, now locked away until they knew better. I was angry at the world that had somehow conspired to stage her destruction.

It took me nearly three years to enter Siri's locked bedroom. And when I did and I found nothing of her in there, I loaded all of her stuff – clothes, toys, schoolbooks, posters – into bin bags. I threw out everything except a small attaché case she had begged from my mother. In this scruffy little case I put random pieces, one from each bin bag: some of her baby shoes; a sun dress she wore on a holiday we spent with my mother and stepfather; a battered copy of Maurice Sendak's
Where The Wild Things Are
; her first school writing book; a diary with a padlock that I'd given her on her last Christmas. There was nothing in it. I looked. And the little red hat Siri wore when we met Philip was in the top of one of the bags. That too went into the attaché case.

The room was stripped and the door was locked again.

I went on being angry at Philip for not being angry enough, for not being as crazy with grief as I was. Even so, one slender part of my wild mind sympathized with him. How could he feel like me? Since we met him he had acted the father to perfection – teaching Siri to ride a bicycle, blowing out her birthday candles. He'd done the things any father does. As time went by, when we were together, his family started to note the resemblance between Siri and him.

His mother once showed me photos of Philip at the same age. ‘Two peas in a pod, see? Siri's the model of our Pip.' I think she'd convinced herself that he and I'd had this affair in London and come together again later. He did nothing to disabuse her.

Perhaps Philip stayed sane just because he
wasn't
Siri's father. Oh, of course he was upset, incredulous, spluttering. He talked about skewering those boys like (he said) the little pigs they were. But in the many months of the investigation he kept a cool head and a hard hand on any explosive feeling. And finally, when the boys were locked away and the press moved on to another spicy case, he said to me that we should look forwards not backwards. We could be practical and help other families in similarly bad plights. He'd already been approached to do this.

He could be very convincing sometimes. And I thought that perhaps I might help in this way. But I knew that I had to
see
her again – any shade, any shadow of her – before I might move on. Finally I allowed some of my acquaintances from the fringes of astrology to try to help me see her, but in the end they threw up their hands as, one by one, they failed in the face of my scepticism and disbelief.

Then yet again I started to go everywhere where she, or she and I, had ever been – every street, every lane, every alleyway, every bus, every train. I took long journeys to every place we'd been on holiday, to look for her there. I started to go and hang around her school at break times. In the end her headmaster, so kind at first, lost his rag. He came, coat flapping in the wind, and dragged me to his car and drove me home. Now that made Philip
very
angry.

Still, no matter what I did, Siri was never there.

You might find it strange that through all this mad time I still continued to do my astrology columns, recycling old stuff, free-basing new stuff, making new money to prove I was alive, adding it to the stash that came from my dear mother's foresight. I worked through the night and slept through the day, only rarely catching sight of a perplexed Philip. I cut down on my antidepressants because there was the possibility that the numbness might make me renege on my deadlines and keeping Siri alive in my mind. Also I realized that the pills were giving me suicidal inspiration and I wanted to stay alive to see Siri again.

On many nights I would cast and recast Siri's chart for the time then and the time now – for the day of the murder and for this same date – one, two, three years later. And again and again I would stare in the mirror and wonder why, why on that day I should have told her, ‘Yes love. You go and get some fresh air!' What I should have done is shackle her to the fridge, the bed, the washing machine. Anything.

I looked at Siri's constellation, Virgo, in the night sky and willed it to bring her through to me from whatever fog she was in, so I could see her. But these days, angry at the man called Ludovic who had started it all, I no longer sought out the Great Bear in the night sky.

Even worse, I was perpetually seething with anger at Philip for just being normal. This anger and my nocturnal habits drove an ever widening wedge between us. Where there had been kindness there was now rancour. Where there had been tolerance there was blame and disbelief. He saw me as crazy and incomprehensible. I saw him as hard and unfeeling.

Then, after another bout of not speaking to each other for days on end, he breezed in saying that – out of the blue – someone in his office had offered him a house in the Languedoc for two months. Seemed she'd rented it but couldn't make the dates now because her daughter in Australia had become pregnant. Philip was very keen on the idea. Perhaps he thought it was the last chance for us. This was why he'd broken his silence. ‘Don't you think it'd be a chance, Stella, to get away, to freshen up a bit?' His tone was anxious. ‘It'll do you good. You can take your laptop and do your pieces.' He offered it as an enticement.