The Company of Fellows (43 page)

“
I know who
killed your dad.” He leant back against the opposite wall, trying
not to relax his arms too much, trying to fight off sleep a little
longer, aware that his body was fighting back against what came
next for all it was worth, trying to shut itself down. He watched
the midges glinting like Swarovski crystals behind her, felt the
acrid burning of the sun on his eyes, looked anywhere but at
her.

Over the
bridge, into the long, damp, sun-drenched grass. Warmth on his back
and searing his eyes. Warmer still the teasing of summer on his
hand. Looking down and watching the thin snake of red creeping out
of his grasp. Opening his fist, noticing that something was there
but not knowing what. Watching his hand as though it were as alien
to him as the thorns that were cutting into his skin.

Becky blinked
a couple of times but said nothing.

His eyes
closed now. “He killed himself.” Tommy waited.

A minute and
he heard nothing. A minute more and he opened his eyes, half
expecting she would be gone, screwing his eyes into the sun. She
smiled. “So you couldn’t wait?”

In the
absolute evening stillness Tommy thought that he could hear his
head list to one side, his confusion and curiosity
audible.

She was still
smiling but now the most distant corners of her mouth seemed to
quiver with a sadness that was at least something he could
understand. Then they were still again.

“
To try the
wine,” she said. “Couldn’t resist, could you? Dad said you probably
wouldn’t be able to. Drink it with Rosie, did you?”

She could have
been stringing any words together. He couldn’t pick out any sense
in anything she said.

“
He said it
would come to this. To a choice, Tommy. We’re defined by our
choices. That’s what he believed. Not the easy ones like what to
have for breakfast or which trashy novel to read next, or where to
go on holiday.” For a moment Tommy caught a pause and saw her
blink, maybe blinking back a tear. “Not the choices we make all the
time, or even the ones we make once a year or so. We’re defined by
the fuck-off big choices we make once a lifetime. Maybe twice. If
we get lucky. Choices we can never go back on, not ever, because
once we’ve made them we’ve changed everything. Not like the
butterfly by causing a ripple that grows and grows but by cutting a
fracture between two futures right then and there, the moment we
even think it.”

Now it was
Becky who cocked her head in the silence, looking at him with such
intense interest it was as though she had never seen him before and
wondered what he was doing there, who he was. Her voice lowered as
though she didn’t want to scare off this new discovery, whatever it
might be. “What would you choose to do if you could never go back
on your word? Well, you can never go back on this, Tommy, but I’m
afraid it’s not a thought experiment.”

“
I don’t
understand.” was all that Tommy could say. “What
choice?”

“
Maybe you’re
not so clever.” She smiled. He thought he saw real affection in it,
but probably he was just exhausted and seeing mirages in the sun.
“That’s not fair. I know you are.”

“
What are you
saying?”

“
I’m saying
that Dad planned everything for this, Tommy. Beginning before I was
born. Just like it says in the Bible.
Before the twins were born, Jacob I loved, but Esau I
hated
.” She paused, as though to allow him
space to take in what she was saying. To digest it, piece by piece.
He couldn’t.

“
You came up
to college just after mum got pregnant, didn’t you?”

“
I guess,” he
said. Somewhere unconsciously the maths made sense in a way that
the words didn’t.

“
Why do you
think you got such a nice room in college? The only one in the
whole place with its own kitchen at the time, wasn’t
it?”

That rang a
bell. He had heard the question before. Barnard Ellison had asked
him.

“
He was
grooming you for me, Tommy.”

“
What?”

“
Dad wanted
the best of everything for me, and that included you.”

Tommy tried to
get his head around what she meant. OK, he thought, keep your
questions basic. “If he wanted the best for you why turn his back
on you for 18 years?”

“
You really
are tired, Tommy. You still don’t get it, do you? He didn’t turn
his back on me.
Jacob I loved, but Esau I
hated
. Think about it. It’s the key to
everything. He turned his back on Becky. He raised me the most
loving way any father could, every day for eighteen
years.”

Tommy could
feel himself going cold, and he smashed his hands into the wall to
make his blood pump. What she was saying could mean only one thing,
but it was something that made no sense at all. “Carol?” he said,
finally.

“
Well done,
Tommy.”

“
And
Becky?”

“
Becky’s where
I left her. In a deep grave in woods little way off the M40, on the
way to the airport, from where she was going to fly to Budapest. I
can take you to her grave. If that’s what you choose.”

Tommy focused
enough to see something in her eyes. The same look he had seen
there less than a week ago as they had talked at his house. She had
been talking about her summer in Eastern Europe then as well. She
had had a look of the deepest sadness, and suddenly he understood
why. She had fallen in love with travel, but it was the only trip
she had ever taken. The only one that she was old enough to
remember at any rate. She had spent the first eighteen years of her
life cloistered away from the outside world, and it was only when
she emerged that she had realised what she had missed out
on.

He looked at
her. She was smiling at him. It seemed to be genuine affection that
he saw.

“
That’s your
choice, Tommy. Mum or me. You’ve got the mould. I checked in the
drawer and it was gone. Rosie will tell you it’s her fingerprints
on there. Then again, I killed my sister. You could tell her that,
and I’ll take you to Becky’s grave. If you don’t choose me of your
own volition then what’s the point of pretending, eh?”

He could feel
a battering ram in his head. He knew that his mind would be beaten
into submission in a few minutes at most. There was no time to
think. He looked at her eyes staring out from under her red fringe
and saw hollow dead eyes staring up at him. He couldn’t begin to
imagine what it must have been like to be locked away for 18 years.
Could Shaw really have done everything out of love for her? That
was why Shaw waited, waited till she was ready for him. Waited
until she was old enough to inherit everything from her mother and
father; then he laid down his life and framed Haydn so she could
have it all.
Things he could only do once.
Raise a child.

“
But your
sister?” was the only thing he could think of to ask. It was one of
the things that he had never understood, the bond between siblings,
because it had never been something he’d known; but he had always
imagined that there was something inexplicable that linked them,
especially twins. He knew that siblings could do the most horrific
things to one another, but that was like lovers, surely, an anger
borne out of a jealousy that was some kind of perversion of that
closeness. It didn’t just happen. “Are you saying you just killed
her, because it was part of the plan? How could you do
that?”

“
The choice
was made a long time ago. Before I was born, just like the verse
from the Bible says. Dad chose me. Not for any reason except that
he had to choose one of us and it happened to be me. He pulled the
trigger years before I did. From that day on Becky was fucked. It
was just a matter of waiting.”

As he tried to
think, as he tried to begin to frame questions in his head, Tommy
knew at last what Shaw had meant in his book. There was no
vocabulary, linguistic, moral, sociological, or religious to
describe whether this young woman, Carol, or whoever she was, was a
victim or a criminal; innocent or guilty. She was the twin that
Charles loved. Those were the only words there were to describe
it.

He could feel
darkness flooding into him. He was desperate to keep it away for
long enough to make a decision; desperate for strength, but there
was nowhere left to draw it from. He smiled and crossed the bridge.
He held his arms out to Carol and embraced her. Closing his eyes,
he saw Emily. He felt her strength. Just enough.

He unpalmed
his mobile and pressed the hotkey. From the way he felt Carol tense
once, flail, then relax, like an animal stunned by the electrodes
at the abattoir, and bury herself closer into his shoulder, he
guessed that Rosie had pulled up behind him. Tommy took Carol’s
arms and held them out to Rosie who cuffed them. He had no
vocabulary to frame the question of Carol’s innocence or guilt. But
every word he thought of told him that Haydn was innocent. It felt
like he had fallen back on the simple absolutes of a society too
tired to fill in the grey. But without them he would have done
nothing. He made a note to himself to thank Emily when he was well
enough again.

As cars
arrived to take her away, Carol looked back over her shoulder.
“I’ll wait,” she called to the figure standing on the bridge,
quivering in Rosie’s arms. But Tommy was already gone, somewhere a
long, long way away.

____

66

It was the
last thing Tommy remembered for two weeks. He was ill, but he
wasn’t sectioned. Emily gave Rosie compassionate leave to look
after him, and some days she visited him herself. After three weeks
Tommy was well enough to explain how much the strength of her
friendship, and her own, deeper, strength had helped him. A week
later he and Rosie went for dinner with Emily and David.

Carol kept to
her word; Becky’s body was taken from its shallow grave just off
the M40 and interred in St Lawrence’s churchyard in North Hinksey.
Haydn had lost one daughter already, and now she faced her loss all
over again. When he was well enough, Tommy cooked for her
regularly, and Rosie told her stories about her childhood in Hong
Kong.

*

Rosie took the
remaining plates into the kitchen. Her antennae were tuned well
enough to know that Haydn was ready to talk, but only to
Tommy.

As Rosie cast
a glance over her shoulder she thought that the scene looked like
something from Noh theatre, or the ballet, or perhaps from an
Orthodox icon. She saw two figures, both with an arm extended,
hands intertwined, heads leant in and slightly to one side. The
tableau was one of confidants, of survivors both offering and in
need of consolation, and yet it seemed that they were no more than
stylised characters playing out parts engraved on masks. Their
actions, and their words if she could have heard them, were, she
thought, both infinitely appropriate and utterly
meaningless.

Finally Haydn
spoke. “You’ve never asked. Maybe that’s because you still aren’t
ready, but I rather think that it’s out of kindness.”

Tommy realised
from the jarring sensation that this was the first time he had
heard Haydn describe a feeling like kindness, even if it was only
by using the noun in passing.

“
Kindness is a
good thing,” she continued. “But sometimes it gets in the way of
the truth.”

“
Yes, but
often kindness is better than the truth.”

“
How very
true,” she said. “But not between us.”

Tommy smiled.
“That sort of kindness is best left between lovers.”

“
But you and
I, Tommy, we’re just cold academics.”

Tommy felt as
though finally Haydn was peeling away the layers of protection in
which she had clothed herself for so many years. So much so that he
wondered whether he needed to ask the question now, or whether he
would know the answer simply by feeling the way she had locked her
fingers in his. But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to try, as
though suddenly she was naked and he needed to protect her
modesty.

“
The truth
is,” she said, “I knew the moment she walked in the door. Not
because of how she spoke, or how she acted, or how she looked.
Charles was quite right – three months away would have explained
all of those things. I knew in exactly the same way you know
someone, Tommy, the moment you meet them.”

“
I didn’t know
you.”

“
No.”

“
Did you know
that she’d killed Becky?”

“
I
guessed.”

“
And you said
nothing?”

“
She killed my
daughter.” Haydn paused, teasing a thought out from somewhere. “But
she is my daughter. We are defined by the choices we make about our
children. That’s what Charles thought, wasn’t it?”

Before Tommy
could speak, Haydn carefully removed her hand from his and placed
her fingers on his lips, gently silencing him. As soon as she had
replaced her hand Rosie, had, as she had sensed, returned from the
kitchen.

Rosie stood in
the doorway a moment before she came in, but all she saw was two
figures acting out a hollow play.