The Loving Husband (19 page)

A door slammed somewhere in the road and she turned towards the sound with such a rush of relief she thought they’d all see it in her face, the sound of Emme’s voice, high-pitched, chattering. Then Ben, howling.

In her purple fur collar Karen pushed through the door with him in her arms, his face red with the exertion, eyes squeezed shut, cheeks wet, and suddenly all three of the police officers were on their feet and at the door behind her. Emme edged out of their way, standing at the side.

‘It’ll be around eight thirty,’ Gerard told her. Carswell was already outside, Fran could see his shoulders hunched against the cold.

‘Fine,’ she said and Gerard was out too, their heads together. Carswell was stamping his feet.

Fran took Ben from Karen and sat down with him at the table, pulling up her sweater. Hiccupping with sobs and grappling for the breast, abruptly he settled and was silent. Emme came up beside Fran, standing very quiet at her shoulder. A hand crept out and settled on the fine hair on Ben’s head.

‘Look, said Ali, lingering in the doorway, ‘are you sure – it’s part of the job, you know. If you’re not happy being on your own.’

Karen looked from one of them to the other, taking in the situation, and pulled out a chair. ‘She’s not on her own, is she,’ she said, plonking herself down, and reluctantly Ali Compton gave in. She reached into her breast pocket for a card and set it on the table in front of Fran.

‘Call if you need me,’ she said. And just like that, they were gone.

‘Had he been crying long?’ said Fran to Karen, in the sudden silence. She could feel Emme’s small hand tight on her upper arm, and turned her head slightly towards her. ‘You all right, lovely? Nice tea?’ she said and Emme whispered yes, but held on tighter.

‘Just started up when we got here, I swear,’ said Karen. ‘It was Emme wanted to come home. I’ll just get Harry out the car and—’

‘No,’ said Fran, sharper than she’d meant to sound. ‘I mean … thanks, Karen. This was a lifesaver.’ She leaned her cheek towards Emme’s. ‘Run upstairs a minute, Emme,’ she said quietly. ‘And turn the light on in Ben’s room for me? I don’t want to trip over.’

Fran waited till Emme was out of the room. ‘You know what they’re saying,’ she said. ‘Nathan told me he was going to the pub, once, twice a week, but the landlady never saw him. You hear that? Has she been talking about me?’

Karen was on her feet, the starry-lashed eyes fierce in her set, pale face. ‘Do you think I’m that kind of bitch? Pretend to be your friend so I can talk about you behind your back?’

Fran just shook her head, too weary for a fight, and Karen’s anger deflated abruptly. ‘I haven’t heard anything,’ she said. ‘And for the record, I am a cow, but I’m not that kind of cow. But they haven’t got him, have they? Useless sods.’ Nodding towards the door. ‘But you said it yourself, there’s someone still out there. It’s not safe for you to be on your own.’

‘You’re on your own too, aren’t you? At least I’ve got a panic button.’ Karen just stared, taken aback, and Fran said, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done without you, Karen, honest. But I can’t live like this.’

And she flipped a hand up from where she held Ben, gesturing to the neat pile of papers on the dresser, the mugs, the footprints tracking in from the door. ‘People in and out of my house. I can’t think straight.’

Karen eyed her narrowly, then she nodded, just once, and stood up. ‘You know where I am. If you need me.’

And then they were on their own.

Fran knelt beside the bath, Emme sitting solemnly among the bubbles meticulously working at the rigging of a little wooden boat, and Fran soaped her small bowed shoulders. Ben had fed himself into such a stupor that he didn’t stir when she laid him down. Once he was asleep she had walked from room to room, Emme following her, quiet. She mopped the bootprints from the floor, and wiped the phone, quickly, although Emme didn’t seem to have seen the blood. She checked the window fastenings, the bolts on the kitchen door, the lights on the boiler. ‘It’s going to snow,’ she said to Emme. ‘Maybe at the weekend,’ and Emme nodded, unblinking.

In the bath Emme had got the rigging untangled: bent over it in concentration, her firm little chin not Fran’s. ‘Mummy,’ she said, not looking up, ‘Harry said sometimes daddies don’t come back.’

Fran thought about the long night ahead of them. ‘Your daddy and Harry’s aren’t the same,’ she said, eventually. Emme looked up then, holding the boat out. ‘He wouldn’t leave you on purpose,’ Fran told her, taking it from her and reaching for a towel. ‘Bedtime.’

She sat a long time beside Emme, waiting for her to sleep. She hadn’t even got up to go, only shifted herself in preparation, when Emme sat straight up in the bed, and babbled, her voice steady but rising. ‘The bad man came, bad man. In the roof. In the cupboard. Don’t.’ A nightmare, Fran told herself, her own heart racing though, for what would come out of Emme’s mouth next, scrabbling for where she’d heard that before,
the bad man
– and then as quickly as she had sat up Emme fell back on the pillow.

He wouldn’t leave you.

They’d been in the delivery room hours, it seemed, with nothing happening but the pain, when suddenly alarms started sounding, and lights went off, voices raised in the corridor and they poured in. Two midwives, a student nurse, a tanned consultant with a foreign accent, South Africa or maybe Zimbabwe, and then Fran couldn’t see Nathan from where she lay pinned on the bed, her knees raised and spread, at the centre of all the commotion. Then she did: he was at the wall, pale and blank, staring at the door.

At ten pounds and facing the wrong way, back to back, the baby had got stuck and something was happening to her heartbeat. Fran tried to understand but it was too technical, the consultant leaning down to her talking about recovery time didn’t make sense and she was distracted by his aftershave, the heavy gold link bracelet on his wrist. She tried to see over his shoulder to Nathan but he wasn’t there any more.

They cut her: she heard the sound and hoped Nathan was in the corridor. Emme was born in a hot gush of blood and the last Fran heard was someone talking about transfusions before she lost consciousness, or they sedated her, she didn’t ever know which. When she woke up she was on her own in a white room magically, blissfully quiet, a private room, and wondering who’d arranged it, or paid for it. Not exactly on her own, because there was Emme, bound in white by some expert hand, her crimped and folded red face visible through the Perspex cradle they’d put her in. Nathan didn’t appear until the evening. After they’d given her some lunch she had reached for her mobile to call him but didn’t, instead she let it fall back on the hospital cabinet out of lassitude, blood loss or hormones. He would come when he came. She remembered his white expressionless face turned away from her behind a student nurse’s shoulder in the delivery room, and then abruptly she was in no hurry.

He came through the door with flowers and magazines and chocolates that lay undisturbed on the end of the bed until the nurse moved them. He stayed less than an hour, nervous the whole time. ‘They said you’d need to sleep,’ was how he excused himself, and he hadn’t looked at Emme in her cot until right at the end and only then despite himself, stealing a glance, as if he was afraid of her.

Patient in the dark, at the far end of that long tunnel that had led them from that brightly lit hospital bed to here and now, Fran sat on Emme’s bed until her daughter’s breaths lengthened and grew even at last and only then, stiff with waiting, did she stand and leave the quiet room.

Some time long before dawn Fran woke, and she struggled up out of heavy sleep on some command she couldn’t remember, only really knowing she was awake when she knocked into something as she moved across the room. Then she was at the window, the cold coming through the glass.

The sky had cleared and although she couldn’t see the moon the landscape was illuminated by it. A man was standing on the edge of the field, legs apart, hands folded in front of him. As if mesmerised she watched him, numb to danger. Then she saw the police car, parked under the row of bare poplars, the stripe down its side showing black in the moonlight. She went on watching, but the man didn’t move, and slowly she went back to bed, and slept.

She dreamed of DC Carswell, his narrow little face close to hers in a confined space. The policewoman was there too, Ali Compton, standing in the shadows by a door, but she had her back to them. Carswell put his hand on her breast, he cupped it, he tilted his head to examine her reaction and Fran felt her mouth open, but not to protest. She closed her eyes and saw the other face, a different face, familiar, and she waited for him to kiss her. The policewoman in the corner hummed something, so as not to hear.

Fran woke as the pale sun was coming over the horizon and immediately she was out of bed, still groggy with sleep but on full alert. A number of things were wrong: she staggered a little and reached for the wall, trying to work out what they were.

Her breasts were hard as rocks, her nightdress was damp where they’d leaked. Ben hadn’t woken her in the night. That never happened. She steadied herself and leaned down to switch on the bedside light and saw something on the floor, dislodged from under the bed by her bare foot, but she didn’t have time for it. Hoover. Later. A scrap of something blue.

Ben
.

He was sleeping, soundly, noiselessly, his face was calm and rosy and the blanket was so neat it looked like he hadn’t even stirred all night. Fran straightened from the cot.

She had to tell Emme. She walked into Emme’s room and sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. Emme was curled around herself tight, her duvet was askew. The soft golden hair was matted at the back of her head from her restlessness on the pillow. The knowledge of what she had to do, to say, sat in Fran’s chest like a stone. Should she have Ali Compton give her advice?

She remembered the dream. Ah, shit, she thought. Shit, shit, shit. For a second her skin crept all over, for shame. Just a dream. It wasn’t a policeman she’d wanted to kiss, though. It wasn’t Nathan, father of her children, either.

Leaning down to Emme’s cheek, pressed sideways into the pillow, Fran set hers against it. Emme’s breath had that sleep smell, baby-sour. She stirred, turned, her eyes opened and ranged, away and back, across the ceiling above Fran’s head, blank. The bad man,
in the roof, in the cupboard
,
thought Fran. ‘I’ve got to tell you something, Emme.’

My baby, she thought.

‘It’s about Daddy.’

Emme sat up, wriggling into place, then her shoulders dropped, attentive. She watched Fran’s mouth as she spoke. ‘Daddy hit his head,’ Fran said, keeping her voice. ‘They tried to make him better but it didn’t work.’ She stroked Emme’s hand. ‘He died, Emme. Daddy died. He didn’t want to, but sometimes we can’t stop it.’

She stopped talking and slowly Emme’s eyes travelled up, and met hers. ‘Where is he?’ she asked. Her gaze was steady.

‘They have to keep him in the hospital.’ She swallowed. ‘Emme, we won’t see him again. You can think about him as much as you like, he’ll still be your daddy. But he won’t be here.’

‘Harry said he wouldn’t come back,’ said Emme and she stared down, frowning, her arms squeezed against her body.

‘Harry doesn’t really know what happened.’ Fran leaned down to look into her face. ‘You can stay at home with me, today, if you like. With me and Ben.’

Quiet, blank, Emme looked past her, to the door, back to her face. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, obedient but firm. ‘I don’t want to, thank you.’ And she was wriggling past Fran, she made for the door. Fran heard her feet on the stairs, careful.

They left early for school. There was no sign of the police as they came out of the kitchen door, Ben buttoned under Fran’s coat in the sling, Emme muffled and silent in scarf and gloves. The puddles in the yard were frozen hard.

The fields stretched out flat and white with frost to either side of the road. The long straight line of a drainage ditch stretched away from them at an angle, unwavering and black in the frost, and the sky was pale and hard and bright overhead. A high-pitched whine took them by surprise, coming from behind them as they came out of a corner and then a scooter almost skidded on the ice as it swerved to avoid them. A kid, a skinny teenager helmeted but not dressed for the cold and hunched against it, he righted himself just in time and kept going.