In a Good Light (41 page)

Dad gave one of his eyebrows a desperate tug. ‘If you feel there's a chance she might harm herself, and there's no one closer to her who might be able to help, then I think your instinct to go is probably right. As to the rest . . .' he shook his head to express his utter perplexity at the not-so-sacred mysteries of their relationship.

Penny's eyes bulged with the effort of not shedding tears. Her face was so red I could feel the heat coming off her cheeks. She sat down on the settle, fingers laced across her ribcage, gazing into space and making no further intervention. She knew the decision was made. The only question now was how to comport herself.

‘You could come with me,' was Christian's last, desperate bid. ‘We could have it all sorted out in an hour and go on somewhere from there.'

Penny replied to this with a slow lowering of her eyelids. She would never look on him again.

‘Well, if I'm going I'd better go,' he said, to no one in particular, patting his pocket to check his wallet. Of course – it was full of cash to pay for the meal.

‘Do you want to take the car?' Dad suggested.

Christian shook his head. ‘She lives in Clapham. It'll be quicker by train. I wouldn't mind a lift to the station, though.'

‘Is it a good idea to wear that shirt on public transport?' said Mum, without any comic intent. ‘I should have thought it's asking for trouble.'

Christian laughed dismissively, but he obviously thought the better of it, as he went upstairs and came down a moment later in jeans and a T-shirt. He was still wearing the Raskolnikov hat, which he seemed to have claimed as his own.

‘Righto then,' he said, looking expectantly at Dad, who plucked his car keys from the hall table and flung open the front door. Christian threw a last, supplicating glance at Penny, whose gaze remained averted, before following Dad out and slamming the door behind him.

There was a moment or two as we adjusted to their absence, then Penny opened her eyes.

‘May I use your phone?' she said, with perfect composure.

‘Of course, dear,' said Mum. ‘You're very welcome to stay if you like. Or Gordon will run you home when he gets back. Whichever you prefer. I'm sorry your birthday's been spoilt, but there will be other opportunities . . .'

Penny gave a thin-lipped smile.

Mum and I withdrew as she picked up the phone, but eavesdropping was second nature to me now, and I felt somehow entitled to know the outcome of the drama.

‘Hello Wart. Thank God you're there,' I heard her say, in a voice that took no pains over privacy. ‘I thought you might be in France already. Can you come and get me? . . . Yes, right this minute . . . I'm at the Fairchilds' . . . I'll tell you
about it later. Tomorrow? . . . I suppose I could pack tonight . . . Okay, see you soon.'

She returned to the sitting room, much comforted to find that in some quarters at least she still had the power to command.

‘Are you going to France?' I asked, making no attempt to conceal what I'd heard.

Penny nodded. ‘First thing in the morning.'

‘Are you going to tell Christian?'

‘You can tell him,' she said, indifferently. ‘If he asks.'

‘I thought you didn't like Wart that much,' I said, but even as I spoke I couldn't actually remember any specific instance where she'd expressed dislike. Perhaps I had just projected my own aversion onto her, when there was none.

‘I never said that,' Penny replied. ‘And anyway, he's crazy about me. Which can be quite persuasive.' She had positioned herself on the arm of the sofa, looking out of the front window. The backgammon set lay abandoned on the coffee table, mid-game. It would still be there days, weeks later, marking the moment like a stopped clock.

Wart arrived within the hour. He must have driven with his foot to the floor in case Penny changed her mind. Unable to judge the mood indoors, he stayed in the car, a proprietorial arm along the back of the passenger seat, while Penny called a goodbye to Mum and gave me a hug that had an air of finality about it. She ran out to the car and was back a moment later to retrieve the agate egg, which in her haste she had forgotten. She didn't bother to take the boot-scraper or the yoghurt machine, I noticed.

‘I'm not offended,' Mum said firmly. ‘The poor girl was overwrought.' She put the boot-scraper out on the doorstep in case Penny changed her mind and came back for it, and
there it would stay, unclaimed, until autumn, when it began to acquire smears of mud and dead leaves from passing boots, and was thereafter in daily use.

When I took myself up to bed my mind was spinning like the plate trick in the unvisited Greek restaurant, except that I couldn't keep my thoughts under control. Donovan:
crash
, Pam:
crash
, the hanging man:
crash
, Martina, Christian, Penny:
crash, crash, crash
. Even when I lay back on the bed it seemed to tilt.

To cheer myself up I decided to re-read Donovan's note, the only thing of his I had left. I knew it by heart anyway, but somehow seeing his handwriting intensified the effect. When I took it from its place of safe-keeping, tucked into the frame of my dressing-table mirror, another horrible jolt awaited me.

Esther

I have taken back my first letter because I retract what I wrote. I said you were special to me. You are not.

Donovan

It wasn't so much the contents of the note that floored me as the method of delivery, which relied on the accurate, mortifying assumption that I intended to re-read the original, and also allowed no opportunity for retaliation. Short of dancing round the room, shaking my fist and slamming a foot through the floorboards like Rumpelstiltskin, I had no outlet for my rage. Nothing chases sleep away like this sort of unspent indignation, so I pulled up a chair to the window and watched the tatters of cloud racing across the moon, and the trees jerking and diving in the copse. I could
hear the low growl of an aeroplane somewhere far above, the church bell tolling, and in the far distance, the mournful wail of an ambulance.

I suppose I must eventually have fallen asleep where I was sitting, because the next thing I knew Mum was standing over me, a ghost of herself, with her white nightdress and floating hair, shaking my shoulder and saying, ‘Esther, Esther, wake up. Something terrible's happened.' And with those words the picturebook of my childhood fluttered before me, page by page, in all its strange and wonderful detail, and slammed shut for ever.

THE TWELVE MONTHS
that followed the accident were the worst of our lives. I use the word ‘accident' grudgingly: only a pedant or a lawyer would deny that Christian was the victim of a crime.

Although he was the one paralysed, it's no exaggeration to say that what happened to him shattered us all. Only Grandpa Percy, adrift and unreachable in his dementia, remained untouched.

Dad underwent a spiritual crisis that took him years to resolve, and ultimately cost him his job: in the crucible of suffering, he found his faith melted away, leaving him prone to fits of crushing guilt and nihilistic despair. He saw the fault as his alone. If only he hadn't sent that letter to the papers supporting Janine Fellowes' release, and giving our home address in black and white. He was prepared for hostile criticism, and even some personal danger, but he had never dreamed that anyone would hunt down his son. I couldn't
help remembering that they'd nearly got Christian the first time, with that brick through the window. I'm sure Dad remembered it too.

‘You feel abandoned,' said his spiritual adviser, Canon Fogle. ‘You think: how can a loving God have visited this tragedy upon my innocent son? Why, in my hour of need, is He so remote?'

‘No,' said Dad. ‘I think: there is no God. I've been wrong all along. My whole life has been based on a mistake.'

He lost interest in his work at the prison: he had no sympathy any more for criminals, those casual, remorseless wreckers of lives, and no message of divine salvation to redeem them. He tried to resign but they wouldn't let him. They gave him compassionate leave, and then sick leave, and then extended sick leave, until in the end he obliged and became sick. I remember coming home from school each day to find him sitting in the same chair in the dining room, absorbed, to the point of autism, in sorting the pieces of some vast jigsaw onto trays, by shape and colour, while the picture made a slow, ragged advance across the table. When it was finished he took a photograph of it, which struck me as highly peculiar. This was hardly an episode he'd want any reminder of, I thought. Not that there was much chance of a print ever surfacing: in our house films sat around in drawers undeveloped for years.

Mum's sympathies and energies were focused on Christian: there wasn't much left over for Dad. ‘I've got two genuine invalids to care for here,' I once heard her snap. ‘Don't waste my time with your bogus afflictions.' She coped better than him, publicly at least, but how much of it was a performance for Christian's benefit I never knew. Hers had always been a more wrathful God, and her opinion of
mankind more pessimistic: it could be said that the disaster confirmed rather than undermined her view of the world as a vale of injustice and tears. Perhaps women are just stronger. I know she aged about ten years in as many months, and her hair fell out in handfuls. I used to find slimy skeins of it choking up the plughole in the bath. Where once it had been so lush, twisted and coiled and pinned, it now sat like cobwebs, revealing the pink of her scalp underneath. She didn't make any attempt to disguise it (if, indeed, she'd even noticed: she'd never had any personal vanity), until Christian asked if she was having chemotherapy without telling us. After that she combed the whole lot forward and chopped it into a fringe, and wore a headscarf to cover the back.

Just as I can't remember when I first learned that we all have to die, I don't think there was a specific moment when I was told that Christian would never walk again. The bad news seemed to come piece by piece, anticipated, delivered, withdrawn, rephrased and hedged about with uncertainties. Christian knew he'd broken his back from the moment he hit the ground, but some stubborn streak of optimism convinced him that the combination of modern medicine and his own invincible willpower would prevail. It was a long time before he was prepared to make any accommodation with his condition that was anything other than short term. ‘Just until I'm back on my feet,' he'd say, as though he'd sprained his ankle.

Perhaps we were to blame for colluding in his self-deception. But we could see how close to despair he was, and none of us had the courage to extinguish that faint glimmer of false hope with a cold draught of truth. Sometimes honest comfort isn't well received. There was
one occasion early on, while Christian was still in hospital, before he was moved to the specialist unit at Hither Green. I was sitting with him, watching him eat his lunch – some sort of fish and potato gloop with peas: real invalid's food. His legs, on top of the covers, were still tanned from the summer; his catheter tube emerged from the hem of his pyjama shorts and vanished over the far side of the bed. He was propped up on a bank of pillows against the adjustable backrest, but not quite upright enough, so he couldn't always manage to convey the fork to his mouth without dropping lumps of food. I didn't know whether to pretend I hadn't noticed, or offer to try and shift him, but after the third or fourth spill he started swearing, so not noticing was no longer an option.

‘You need to be sitting up more,' I said. And I had to push him forwards off the backrest, so I could crank it up a notch, and then haul him back against it. Even with Christian using his arms for support, his lower body was such a dead weight it was a real struggle. It struck me that if it hadn't been so awful, it was just the sort of situation that would have had us falling about with laughter. But we weren't laughing; we were just sweating and cursing. When I'd finally sorted him out, he let out a sigh and said, ‘I can't stand this much longer. How am I ever going to get my life back to normal if I need help all the time?'

‘Oh, Christian!' I said, slipping into that tone of mournful sympathy he hated. ‘Don't worry. Whatever happens I'll always be there to look after you.'

It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me with something like hatred and then turned his face to the wall. Before I could think how to salvage the situation, he snatched up the fork he had just been using and jammed it
into his thigh. He laughed in surprise as four, deep, painless puncture marks in his inert limb welled up with blood.

The nurse who came to clean it up and give him a tetanus jab was not impressed. ‘Please don't do that again,' she said, mildly. They all loved Christian. ‘You might have severed an artery. And as for using a dirty fork . . .'

‘I might have had to have the whole leg off, and then where would I be?' Christian retorted, and I could smile at last. Black humour was always preferable to black despair.

One of the many specialists who saw Christian in those early days made an unguarded (and, as it turned out, completely fanciful) remark along the lines that in his view they were only ten years away from a cure. I could see Christian latching onto this as though it was a cast-iron guarantee, accurate to the day. ‘I'm going to be walking by the time I'm thirty,' he'd say, in the way that equally deluded souls proclaim they're going to be millionaires.

‘I don't know what to do,' Mum said to the clinical psychologist. ‘He sits there listening and nodding while the consultant explains that the damage to the spinal cord is irreversible, and then half an hour later he's off again, talking about having physio to strengthen his leg muscles.'

‘Well,' said the psychologist, clasping her hands in her lap. ‘It's probably not a good idea to endorse anything that's plainly not true. But optimism should be encouraged: it just needs to be channelled towards achievable goals, if you see what I mean.'