Out of Mind (20 page)

“Forget it,” I told him. Which was easier than answering, “Because you’re my source, and I want you to do some digging for
me.”

Once Justin had gone, moving slowly down the corridor, I stared out the window until I saw him emerge six floors below and
make his way along the street. It was raining again, and the uneven pavement had turned into a delta of pools and puddles.
I rang Beatrice.

“Remind me what happened to the things Melanie had with her at HazPrep,” I said.

“I have them here,” she told me. “The police went through everything, then a woman called Lin from the Corporation packed
it all up and Ivor Collins brought it to us here.”

“Lin Pala packed it up?”

“I think so. We talked on the phone.”

“Was there anything missing?”

“Well . . . it’s difficult to tell, since I don’t know what she had with her. The only thing I asked Lin about was Melanie’s
mobile phone. . . . I know it sounds silly, but she never went anywhere without it.”

“Then she must have had it with her,” I said. I remembered Bentley and Finney discussing the final electronic signal logged
by the transmitter, speculating that either the phone’s battery ran out or the phone itself was switched off. It was too dire
an image to share with Beatrice.

“Yes,” her mother agreed, sounding suddenly tired, “she probably did.”

I knew what she was thinking. If Melanie had her phone with her, there was even more reason not to vanish. It meant nothing,
of course, but one’s mind can concoct the most far-fetched scenarios: What if Melanie had forgotten her mobile, lost her way
in the woods, lost her memory, had no cash for a pay phone? Then she might be lost, and she might return. But she’d had her
mobile with her. Why, then, had she not rung?

I remembered Andrew Bentley at HazPrep suggesting that Melanie had gone outside for a cigarette or to make a phone call because
of the bad reception inside the building. I wondered if the police knew what calls she had made that night or those she’d
received.

“Have you heard any more from Stella?” I asked.

“No,” Beatrice said, “not since you were here. I think she’s gone back to Germany.”

I thought, as I hung up, that would be the last we would hear of Stella’s allegations.

For the rest of the day, I tried to put it all out of my mind. I should be leaving Melanie to the police now. I had done what
I could—perhaps I had done more than I should. Pointing the police in the direction of Mike Darling might do nothing more
than mislead the investigation and harm Darling. The combination of Darling’s phone call and Justin’s warning made me realize
how close to the breaking point Darling was. I would, I decided, divert myself. That night I read through my mother’s e-mail
again and thought of what she had written about my father.

“No,” I murmured to myself, “he has no Redeeming Feature.”

I felt as though I was betraying my mother, letting her live in happy ignorance on the other side of the world while her former
husband with no Redeeming Feature lived in her house. That night, before I fell asleep, I decided I had to put a stop to it.
I had booked the next day off. I would spend the morning with my children, and in the afternoon I would evict my father.

M
Y mother’s doorbell resounded around what should have been her empty house. I had not prepared the way with a phone call.
Gilbert had always called on me unannounced, and I wanted to return the compliment. I waited. I could sense him on the other
side of the door. I glared into the peephole. Eventually the door opened.

“Robin, how lovely to see you.” A tone of delight. He stood there, in tweed and cotton and polished wingtips, welcoming me
into what was most emphatically not his home.

“You didn’t bring the children!” Said in a tone of disappointment, although on the one or two occasions they had met, he had
paid them scant attention.

“Gilbert, this is ridiculous.” My father and I had not spoken for more than thirty years. Since we were reunited—although
I hesitate to put it in terms even vaguely suggestive of a hug—I have not been able to bring myself to call himself by anything
more familiar than his Christian name. “I’m not going to bring the children here, to their grandmother’s house, to find you
. . .” I spluttered out of words.

“You think there might be a problem?” He looked taken aback. “Lorna assured me your mother would come around to the idea.”

“Lorna . . .” I stepped inside, lost for words. “Lorna . . .” Lorna what? Lorna likes to play with fire. That was what I wanted
to say. Lorna wants to sleep with a priest. Lorna wants to deliver a slap in the face to the very mother who nursed her through
her illness. Lorna liked to wind up her sister at school and still likes to wind up her sister now. Lorna, the brilliant and
confused child of a misbehaving father. Lorna, who looks like an angel.

Lorna, who wanted me and Tanya and my mother to love our father the way we loved her, and who would not accept that we could
not.

“You cannot stay here,” I told him. Anger was rising inside me again, and I was not sure how much of it was Gilbert and how
much my own state of mind. Did this man have a Redeeming Feature? Was I simply not looking hard enough? Unless you counted
charm as redemption, which I did not. And even then it was charm that came and went pragmatically, charm that was employed
to effect. Lorna had been gung ho about putting Gilbert here, but she was not stupid or unfeeling. She was susceptible to
Gilbert’s charm in a way that I had schooled myself not to be, and she was susceptible because she had learned her family
history from Gilbert as well as from my mother. In his version of history, he was more sinned against than sinning, the victim
of the system, and not what I believed him to be, which was a crook.

“Look at you, look at this place. It’s all wrong,” I said.

He stood in a corridor that was lined with my mother. She had been living on her own since we left home decades ago, so there
had been no limiting hand to lie heavy on her style, no conflicting aesthetic. There had been little in the way of money,
either. This was muddle as interior decoration, a photo of Hannah and William blown up almost to poster size in a clip frame
opposite a similar-size photo of Tanya’s three girls, a pile of legal papers that imitated the Tower of Pisa and that had
never moved as long as I could remember, a coat stand that had long ago vanished under a vast collection of dark-colored outer
garments almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was Gilbert sleeping? Did I want to know?

“Your mother was always a generous woman,” Gilbert said. “I can’t believe she’d throw me onto the mercy of the capitalist
police.”

I looked at him blankly. “The capitalist police?” I echoed.

“Your mother is a socialist, as am I, whatever our differences. I’ve done nothing except reallocate capital to the workers.
Surely it is in the cause of justice that I should be given shelter.”

This time I told myself not to rise to it. Gilbert was not mad. One could even make the mistake of thinking him quaintly eccentric.
But the things he’d done hadn’t been quaintly eccentric. He had stolen from individuals, from small businesses, not from vast
institutions that budgeted for bad luck like him. I’d heard this “all crime is committed by the state” defense before. According
to this, theft was natural justice, simply the readjustment of wealth. I knew—because Gilbert was my father, and I knew him—that
he believed it no more than I did. He believed nothing. If he believed in something, would that count as a Redeeming Feature?

“Would you like a glass of wine, my dear? You look a little peaky. I have an excellent Pinot Grigio somewhere.”

Glumly I followed him into the kitchen and watched, speechless, as he approached my mother’s wine rack with a considerable
level of familiarity. He plucked out a bottle of white wine, lifted the corkscrew from the appropriate drawer, and opened
the bottle with a flourish. I noticed that there were abundant vegetables in the rack. I opened the fridge door and found
it full of dinners for one in silver packaging, steak and Guinness pie, venison with claret, salmon with a lobster sauce.
It was scarcely surprising that my father was beginning to show a belly.

“You’ve been shopping.”

“Not quite,” Gilbert replied, and mentally I winced, because that probably meant he’d been out shoplifting. “Tesco’s has a
wonderful delivery service, you know. I ordered online.”

It was just as bad. Had he paid with a stolen credit card? The only thing I could be sure of was that the wealth of food in
the house did not represent an honest transaction. I sat at the table and rested my head in my hands. If Tanya found out what
was happening, she would kill Gilbert and Lorna and me. Probably in that order. As I formulated the thought, the telephone
rang. Before I could stop him, Gilbert answered. I noticed that he did not give his name, simply said hello. Even in the midst
of charm, you see, he was careful, he watched his back. He listened for a moment, then put down the receiver without comment.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Perhaps Tanya,” he said, pouring wine into two glasses although I had said I wanted none. “Whoever it was hung up.”

I could not think why Tanya would have rung Ma’s number, since she knew Ma was away. Unless she had got wind of what was happening
and was ringing to check it out. In which case she now knew for sure. I felt sick, and angry at Gilbert, and at Lorna, and
even at Tanya.

Gilbert put a glass of wine in front of me and sat down happily opposite me, as though expecting a truly enjoyable chat.

I took a sip and then another. Gilbert was right; it really was a very fine wine.

“What happened in France?”

“Oh . . .” Gilbert placed his glass carefully on the table and assumed a tone of glib outrage. “It was quite ridiculous. As
you know, I’ve been teaching English in a school in Paris. The principal became ill last year, and I volunteered to take over
some of the running of the school. Which I did to the complete satisfaction of the students. You should hear their English,
it is delightful.”

“And what is the ridiculous part?” I would not encourage his playacting.

“Well, there was some bad feeling. I left. At my age, I have no need or desire to stay where I’m not wanted.”

“Bad feeling . . .” I repeated the word. “You mean the police were involved.”

“Isn’t that what it usually means?” Gilbert assumed a wounded air.

“But you didn’t hang around to find out.”

“I refuse to be treated in that way. The finances of the school were in a terrible mess when I arrived. All I did was to put
them in order. If they are incapable of seeing that, well, I see no need to explain it to them.”

“Where’s the cash?”

Gilbert’s jaw dropped, and his eyes were wide with hurt.

“Robin,” he scolded. He took a sip of wine and thought for a moment, composing the sentence that followed, his eyes hard.
“I have enriched others, not myself.”

We looked at each other coolly. It was like looking in a distorting mirror. I thought how much I disliked him and realized
with a blinding flash, like lightning, for the very first and most distressing time, that I disliked him precisely because
I was afraid that I might be like him. Was it possible that I could be as faithless as him? Could I betray those who tried
to love me? Could I be seduced by some other fantastical life and ignore all that was good and solid? It was Finney who came
to me in that moment of enlightenment. Why did I fight him off? Why could I not simply embrace him, simply accept his care,
negotiate a level of independence that would not alarm him?

I stood up.

“You have to be out of here by the end of the week, or I’ll telephone the police with this address,” I told him, “and if they
don’t extradite you, I will.”

His face dropped, and he made to get to his feet, too, but stumbled, hitting his thigh hard against the table, and sat back
down again with a surprised look on his face.

“Are you all right?” I could not believe I had asked it.

He nodded mutely.

I made for the front door and shut it firmly behind me. Whenever I meet my father, I walk away feeling devastated, as though
each encounter takes me through a doorway to a ruined place. Today, my mother’s e-mail and my father’s final, pathetic stumble
made it worse.

I needed very badly to hear Finney’s voice, and when I got home I dialed his number.

It was a woman’s voice that said, “Hello?”

“Hello,” I answered, my heart stopping. “I think I have a wrong number. I’m looking for Tom Finney.”

“You have the right number, but you haven’t caught him at the best of times. Can you ring . . . um . . . tomorrow?”

The voice was not particularly friendly, not particularly cheerful. Nor was it unpleasant. It was a voice that I imagined
belonging to a pretty face.

“I’d like to speak to him now.” I found my jaw was set. If he had lied to me, if Emma was moving back in, he had to tell me
himself.

For a moment she was gone. If she was consulting someone, she had covered the receiver.

“I’m sorry.” She came back on the line. “Like I said, now’s not a good time.”

I ate my dinner in front of the television, trying to resist the temptation to ring Finney again. He had not called me back,
and I was beginning to regret saying some of the things I’d said at his disastrous birthday dinner. I tried to console myself
with comfort food, bubbling, dribbling cheese on toast and tomato soup.

I was drawn to the news like a fly to a burning bulb. Everyone who works around news becomes a junkie. The focus of a news
junkie is narrowed until the detail provides the momentum, every new angle on the story a fascination, a fresh reaction, a
new quote, all a cause for analysis, debate, even celebration. And in the detail, of course, is the real history, the minuscule
change of angle that mutates into the U-turn, the euphemism that glosses over the lie, the vacillations, the missed possibilities
that will all be lost when history macros out. I know people who think it is facile, this obsession with news on the hour.
For me, at least, it feels as necessary as eating and drinking.