In a Good Light (38 page)

‘I would have said it's more likely that Wart might think he's entitled to the money. He was in the kitchen that day when Mum put some cash in the jar. He might have felt he was just recovering a debt.'

This seemed to strike Penny with some force. Then she shook her head. ‘No. Wart wouldn't stoop to that,' she said, and I wished she could have expressed that sort of confidence in Christian.

I didn't contradict her though, because I knew it wasn't Wart. I knew very well who had taken the money, and I was just waiting to see whether, given the right occasion, he had any intention of confessing.

THE OPPORTUNITY AROSE
quite soon and without any contrivance on my part. The next time I babysat for the Conway twins it was, to my surprise, Donovan who arrived to fetch me home.

‘Where's Dad?' I asked. Not ungratefully, I hoped, but as a point of information. Anything out of the ordinary was now a cause for concern.

‘His car wouldn't start. Battery's flat.'

‘I'm sorry you've had to come out.'

‘I don't mind.' With great formality he opened the passenger door first and held it open for me. The inside of the car smelled of upholstery saturated with ancient smoke, like the saloon bar of the Fox and Pheasant.

‘I used to like walking home by myself at night before all this Janine Fellowes business started up,' I said, making myself comfortable. ‘It's such a pain.'

‘I thought you were scared of the dark,' he said as we set off. ‘You still sleep with the landing light on.'

‘That's different,' I said, nonplussed to think that a habit I'd long ceased to think about had attracted his notice. ‘I've got this thing about waking up in a blackout. It started at the caravan when I was little. You know how dark it is there at night.'

‘The caravan,' Donovan repeated. ‘I haven't thought of it for years. I wonder if it's still there.'

‘I don't see why not. We used to go there every summer, until Grandpa moved in. The key's still on a hook in the cloakroom.'

‘That was the last place I can remember Mum and Dad being happy. Before all the rows started.'

‘Did it affect you badly when your dad left? We were never allowed to mention it at the time. Divorce was one of those words, like cancer, that you could never say out loud.'

Donovan shrugged. ‘It wasn't much fun when Mum was ill. I used to stay out later and later just to avoid going home. I remember once I got locked in the park, so I stayed there all night, playing on the swings by myself. I went to sleep on a bench in the bandstand like a tramp. The funny thing was I didn't feel at all frightened or lonely. When I got home Mum hadn't even noticed I was missing. That's how bad she was. After that I did it again whenever I felt a bit low. I think I'd make a good tramp.'

‘It's amazing you've turned out as normal as you have,' I said, echoing Mum's sentiments, and he acknowledged this faint praise with raised eyebrows.

‘It's amazing I survived at all, considering some of the food I used to eat. I tried to cook for myself, but I hadn't got a clue. I thought everything had to be boiled – sausages,
pork chops, mince, you name it. I couldn't understand why they never went brown.'

We had pulled into the driveway by now, but neither of us made any move to get out. Huge moths wheeled blurrily in the beam of the headlights, so Donovan flicked the switch off and we sat there in darkness. We were being so natural and friendly with each other that I almost forgot the electric fence of embarrassment between us.

‘You laugh about it now, but it must have been horrible at the time,' I said, not wanting to bring the conversation to an end just yet.

‘There were some awkward moments when Mum was really out of it. One time when I was at primary school she'd been in bed for about a week and I couldn't find any clean uniform for school, so I wore jeans and a football shirt with my tie. I was convinced I was going to get sent home or caned, but of course my teacher could see there was something going on at home, and I didn't get into trouble at all. In fact it was the kids who dared to point out that I was wearing the wrong stuff who got told off instead, which was really weird. My teacher called round after school to talk to Mum, and Mum wouldn't come out from under the bedclothes. So this teacher took all my dirty uniforms home with her and washed and ironed it and brought it round at the crack of dawn so I'd have something to wear. I was so grateful, because that was all I wanted – just to come to school and not stand out.'

As someone who had never worn quite the correct uniform, but only its closest jumble sale equivalents, I could readily sympathise.

‘I'm surprised she didn't get a doctor or someone in to help your mum,' I said.

‘She may have done. I can only remember the bits that happened to me.'

Inside the house the front room light went off and a face appeared between the curtains, peering out, and then withdrew again. Not yet, I pleaded silently. Don't come looking for us yet. A moment or two later the bathroom light went on upstairs and I breathed again.

‘Perhaps you'd have been better off living with your dad,' I said. He had always been the one with the big car and the big presents and the big wallet.

‘I did for a while when Mum was taken into hospital. But I never got on that well with Suzie, not surprisingly. I know there's no one culprit in a divorce and all that, but Dad was the one who left, so naturally I blamed him. And I think he felt so guilty at the mess he'd made of everything that he was really uncomfortable in my company. He just got stuck into work and making pots of money, as if he could buy his way out of trouble.'

‘Christian and I always envied you all your flash toys. We'd probably have been a bit kinder if we'd known what a miserable time you were having.'

‘You weren't unkind,' Donovan said. ‘I suppose I was pretty unhappy,' he went on. ‘But a happy childhood's a terrible start in life: you'd never get over it. We all need a little disappointment.' And he gave me a sideways grimace that was almost a smile.

‘I wonder if Mum and Dad knew all the details,' I said. ‘You were always “poor Donovan” to them. Whereas you were always “rich Donovan” to us.'

‘I think they did. They were fantastic to me, better than
my own parents. Your dad is such a good person. He'd give someone the shirt off his back if they asked. Before they asked, in fact.'

‘It's his religion,' I replied. ‘Love your neighbour as yourself, bless those that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and all that. Only he really believes it.'

‘Shh!' Donovan put a finger to his lips. A fox had come slinking around the side of the house. It was a handsome, healthy-looking creature, with a lush, white-tipped tail, not one of those stringy, urban foxes with a mangy bit of rope for a brush. It must have detected movement from the car, as it stood very still and gave us a long, insolent stare. Donovan snapped the lights on and its eyes blazed yellow, then it shot across the lawn and away through a loose plank in the fence.

I'd never had such a serious and heartfelt conversation with Donovan: anything real was usually headed off by sarcasm. It was such a shame to spoil it, but I couldn't afford to waste this confessional mood. I knew what I'd seen. I hadn't imagined it, but I wanted to hear it from him.

It had been the day after the kiss, the note, the photo. I had my period, and I came downstairs to put one of my newspaper parcels in the boiler. This was a ritual that had to be performed in private, naturally, and I was in the habit of lurking in the kitchen doorway to make sure the coast was clear, then dashing in, checking that the boiler was alight, dropping the vile thing onto the burning coals, slamming the lid, and standing guard until it was reduced to ash. On this occasion I could hear someone in the kitchen. I peeped round the door and saw Donovan standing on a chair at the dresser. There was a roll of money in his hand.
As I ducked into the cloakroom, I heard the scrape of the jar being put back on the shelf and the slap of Donovan's feet on the tiled floor as he jumped off the chair, and then the back door opened and shut and there was silence. I gave it a minute or two before venturing back to perform the rite at the boiler. With characteristic self-absorption I didn't give any thought to what Donovan was actually doing there: it was only later, when the money went missing, that the significance of the incident came back to me. At the time I experienced it quite differently, as a narrow escape from a double dose of embarrassment.

I looked out at the night sky, and the proud and lonely face of the moon above the treetops gave me courage. Donovan's hand moved to retrieve the keys that still dangled from the ignition.

‘Why did you take the money?' I said.

Donovan looked at me blankly. ‘What?' He gave a nervous laugh, as if waiting for the joke to develop, and when it didn't, he said, ‘You think
I
stole that money. From your mum and dad?'

Deflecting a question with another question is not quite the same thing as a denial, I thought.

‘Well, did you?'

‘How can you come out and say that? How can you even think it? After what we've been talking about. Don't you know me at all?'

This wasn't going quite the way I'd planned. I hadn't allowed for counter-accusations in any of my mental rehearsals. I thought there might have been some pressing reason for him taking the money and I just wanted to hear it and understand.

‘Apparently not,' I said. ‘I would never have thought you'd steal from us. And I would never have thought you'd deny it to my face.' I risked a glance at him. He stared back at me with those acid green eyes full of hatred, the whole of his body tensed, and I thought of that other night-wanderer, the fox, standing there, not knowing whether to fight or run.

‘Well, I've certainly been wrong about you, Esther,' he said in a hard voice that I'd never heard him use before. ‘I used to think you were about the nicest person I'd ever met. Maybe I was a bit rough with you in the garden, but, Jesus, it was hardly more than a kiss, and you enjoyed it, I know you did. And I wrote and apologised, quite nicely, I thought, and you sent me that cold, tight-arsed note and have been avoiding me ever since like I'm a leper. Fair enough, that's up to you. But how you can sit there and accuse me of nicking four hundred quid from your mum and dad, who've taken me in again and again when they've got nothing and my own dad's practically a millionaire . . . If I had four hundred quid of my own I'd give it to them.' He was in such a spitting rage now I thought he might hit me and I flinched away, but he was just struggling to get his wallet out of his pocket. ‘Here,' he scrabbled through it, pulling out notes. ‘Ten, twenty, thirty, fifty. There you are, have the bloody lot.' And he threw them at me and jumped out of the car, banging the door so hard that the radio burst into life, the manic screech of bluegrass violins erupting like a coven of scrapping foxes. He strode off, not in the direction of the house, but back down the driveway into the lane, where he broke into a run. Off to find some ditch to sleep in, like a tramp, I thought spitefully.

I switched the music off and sat there, stunned, my heart
galloping in my ribs. Donovan's rant had left me completely winded. ‘Men don't have feelings,' I'd complained to Penny. I was inclined to prefer them that way, now that I had been on the receiving end of a tirade of masculine ‘feeling'. My legs shook as I walked towards the house. I closed the front door as quietly as possible, realising, with a fresh upsurge of indignation, that I would have to leave it unbolted in case he returned, and that there was nothing between us and our phantom enemy but a puny Yale lock.

I crept up to bed, dodging the creakier boards, and lay sleepless and agitated for hours, wondering how I would ever face him again. I think in some unexamined corner of my mind I must have known it wouldn't come to that.

MY SUBCONSCIOUS MUST
have no sense of occasion. When I finally fell asleep, I slept soundly until mid-morning and awoke refreshed from a series of pleasant, rosy dreams. The quarrel of the night before seemed a distant event, trivial and easily remedied – an impression that wore off with the narcotic effect of the dreams. By the time I had showered and dressed I was fretting about my mishandling of the whole business again and wondering how it could possibly be resolved. Perhaps my remarks would have made some impression on his conscience and the money would, as if magically, reappear. But he had been so emphatic, so furious in his denials. Perhaps I should have told him bluntly what I'd seen. But I hadn't wanted him to confess because he had no alternative. I'd wanted him to tell me because he wanted to tell me. Perhaps – a dark thought spread like spilt ink – I had made a terrible mistake.

I tapped on his bedroom door but there was no reply,
and when I looked inside it was clear the bed hadn't been slept in. His car was still in the driveway where we had left it. He must have stayed out all night.

I couldn't hang around at home all day waiting for him to come back, so I borrowed Mum's bike – Donovan's restoration job a fresh reproach – and cycled over to Dawn's. There was no one at home, so I rode right across the estate to Pam and Andy's, remembering as I rang the bell that the family had gone to Minehead for the week. Andy's car was not out front: I wondered if he had taken Pam to hospital. I was about to swing the bike round when Pam's face appeared at the upstairs window, and she gestured frantically for me to wait while she scrabbled with the catch.

‘Oh, Esther, thank God someone's come,' she said, just her head and shoulders visible over the sill. My heart lurched. I'm going to have to deliver the twins! I thought.

‘You're not in labour, are you?' I quailed.

‘No,' she said impatiently. ‘I've run out of biscuits.' She disappeared from view and a moment later bobbed up again and said ‘Catch!' and threw a small beaded purse down to me. Inside was a door-key and some change. ‘I can't come down the stairs, or I'll never get up again. Can you nip round the corner and get me a packet of digestives? Better make it two. And a bottle of Tizer.'