The Son-In-Law (25 page)

‘Mum!’ I screamed. ‘What? I can’t hear you.’

I knew I was losing her. This was my last chance.

‘I love you,’ I yelled. Tears were running down my face. ‘Can you hear me? I love you.’

‘. . . can’t forgive.’

Then a terrible noise came down the receiver; a roaring, blaring blast of sound. The line went dead.

My alarm clock was going off. Hannah was in my room, drawing the curtains. She used to have smile lines around her eyes, but lately they’d been more like worry lines. There was a new crease on her forehead. It was vertical.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, when she looked into my face. ‘You’re not crying? You
are
crying!’

‘I had a bad dream.’

The vertical line got deeper. ‘What was it about?’

‘Can’t remember.’

She sat down on the bed and tousled my hair. ‘What sort of thing? Tell me all about it. Then you’ll feel better.’

‘Violin lessons,’ I said.

•

Mr Hardy took me out to a café after school on the Wednesday. He’d phoned and arranged it with Gramps. We reached Micklegate just as a last ray of sunshine was touching the upstairs windows, golden flashes on wobbly old glass. Rush-hour traffic had already begun to build up, and all those exhaust pipes made clouds in the cold air. I hate to think what York’s rush hour does to the environment.

‘Another lovely winter’s day,’ said Mr Hardy, holding open the café door.

I was pretty sure he hadn’t brought me here to talk about the weather. Still, I was happy enough to be bought hot chocolate with marshmallows and sit in the window. There was a big group of mothers in the café, with their toddlers in highchairs and babies in buggies. Most of them wore puffer jackets and looked as though they went skiing a lot.

‘My mum used to bring us into a place like this,’ I said. ‘She was forever having coffee with her friends. She used to say caffeine was her fix.’

Mr Hardy smiled as he stirred sugar into his mochaccino. ‘I can relate to that.’

I looked out of the window. Shadows were creeping along the cobbled street outside. Since Dad had reappeared, I couldn’t seem to talk about Mum without tears coming into my eyes and my face going puffy. I was always teetering on the edge of crying or shouting.

‘So,’ began Mr Hardy. ‘How do you feel about seeing your dad?’

Two slim women in smart suits and little trench coats came striding past. They looked stylish and professional. One of them had short hair, bright green earrings and a long neck. For a second—just a crazy flash of a second—I thought she might be Mum. Then she turned her head to look in through our window, and I saw she was nothing like Mum. She wasn’t even pretty, when you saw her face full on.

‘Scarlet?’ said Mr Hardy.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Um, any chance of a bit more detail?’

‘It’s hurting too many people,’ I said. ‘And it has to stop.’

‘Tell me who it’s hurting.’

‘Hannah. Gramps.’

‘Mm-hm.’ He sat back in his chair, stirring his coffee again. That had to be the best-stirred mochaccino in Yorkshire. ‘And who else?’

‘Mum,’ I blurted miserably. ‘It’s hurting Mum.’

He didn’t look at all surprised. In fact, I could have sworn I saw him nod to himself. ‘Tell me about how it’s hurting your mum.’

‘She’s so sad! I can feel her . . . she’s lonely. She’s homesick. How can we like him again after what he did to her? How
can
we?’

The mothers at the next table were glancing at us. I dropped my voice. ‘I can’t make a friend of my dad. None of us can.’

‘It isn’t your choice, Scarlet.’

I shook my head. ‘Yes it is. I know it is, Mr Hardy, and so do you. I understood what you said about the judge making the decision, but in the end it’s my choice. I can choose whether to talk to Dad, whether to be his friend, whether to make it work. The boys will do what I tell them. So in the end it’s all down to me.’

Mr Hardy took a sip of his drink. When he put the cup back onto the saucer, some of the foam had stuck on his upper lip.

‘You have a moustache on your moustache,’ I told him.

He grinned, a bit embarrassed, and wiped it away with a serviette. ‘Thank you. What makes you so sure that this is hurting your mother?’

And it all came out. I told him how I sat in a circle of memories in my room and called her up with the power of my imagination. I described how I felt something stroke my cheek, and how I felt darkness. Mum’s darkness. I told him about how she’d phoned me in a dream.

‘She was trying to communicate,’ I explained. ‘She had something extremely important to say, but I couldn’t hear her. I said . . .’

I couldn’t get the words out. I really wanted to tell the story but by now I was crying so much that my voice wouldn’t work. I held my hand over my face because I knew it looked red and ugly. Mr Hardy passed me a tissue. He seemed to have a never-ending supply. I suppose he needed them in his job.

‘Sorry,’ I gulped.

‘Don’t be.’

‘Well, anyway . . . I couldn’t hear Mum, but I hoped she could hear me. So I said . . . um, this sounds really mushy.’

‘I can do mushy.’

‘Okay, well . . . I said, “I love you. I love you.” I told her again and again but the line went dead and I don’t think she heard. I never got to tell her that I love her, you see, when she died. She died not knowing.’

For the first time since I’d met him, Mr Hardy looked upset.

‘She knows you love her, Scarlet. She will always have known that.’

‘What if she doesn’t, though? What if she thinks I could have saved her? Maybe if I’d said something, their argument wouldn’t have got out of hand. I didn’t manage to stop Dad from hitting her, did I? I didn’t have the strength. I didn’t shout loud enough. I was so frigging useless.’

‘You were ten years old. You called the ambulance, and you relayed CPR instructions to your father. That was what you did. That was the best thing you could have done.’

‘Too late.’

He thought for a long moment, crumpling a serviette in his big hand. ‘Scarlet, do you know what actually killed your mum?’

‘Yes. Dad hit her and it made her brain bleed.’

‘Hm.’ He hesitated for another moment and then seemed to come to a decision. ‘Actually as she fell, she knocked her head on the fire surround. It was tragic, because if she’d fallen the other way she might not have been very badly hurt. It was the marble fire surround that caused the bleed.’

I stared at him in suspicion. ‘How d’you know all this stuff?’

‘I’ve read the medical evidence from the trial.’

‘She wouldn’t have been badly . . .?’ I mouthed the words, letting them sink in. ‘Are you saying . . . Oh my God. I think you’re trying to tell me it was an accident.’ And then it came back to me: something Vienna’s bitch of an aunt had said. ‘Was she drunk?’ I asked. I saw Mr Hardy blink, and he pulled back his head as though I’d tried to bite him. I had to know. ‘Was she totally rat-arsed, like I’ve heard?’

‘Who’s said this, Scarlet?’

‘I hear things. People tell me things. I’m not deaf, and I’m not stupid. I also know that she’d been in a loony bin before.’

‘You mean a mental health unit.’

‘Whatever. So is it true, about her being drunk?’

‘I think it’s more appropriate if you ask your grandparents those sorts of questions.’

I was going to get to the bottom of this once and for all. I’d had enough of being kept in the dark. ‘Yeah, right, like that’s going to happen! If you won’t tell me, I’ll have no choice but to listen to the gossip.’

Poor Mr Hardy drummed his fingers on the table. ‘All right. I don’t believe she was very drunk, though it seems she wasn’t quite sober either. But whether she had or hadn’t been drinking isn’t really the point.’

‘I think it’s pretty important.’

‘No, no. The point is that she was your mother. She was a gorgeous mum, a gorgeous person. You loved her. Gramps and Hannah loved her. Your dad loved her too, and he didn’t mean to kill her. That’s why they didn’t try him for murder.’

It was all quite a lot to take in. Until that afternoon, I hadn’t talked to anyone about what actually happened the day Mum died. Gramps and Hannah avoided the subject—it was absolutely taboo. Nanette gave me as much paper as I wanted and got me to paint pictures. I’m rubbish at art but I covered sheets of her paper: angry figures and a mouth with dark pink lipstick and blood coming out of it. I drew an ambulance. I drew a gravestone even though Mum didn’t have a grave. I drew myself, in the dark, with tears shaped like balls on my cheeks and an enormous open mouth. Nanette never gave me any details about what happened, though.

‘Your mum chose your father,’ said Mr Hardy. ‘I believe they loved one another very much indeed. Together, they had you three children. There were good times as well as sad ones.’

My drink was waiting with its sprinkling of cocoa powder on the top. They’d put it in a tall glass. Evening had floated into the world outside, and all the carbon-spewing cars had their headlights on. People scurried home from work with their hands in their pockets and scarves around their faces. I could tell it was freezing cold by the dull glint on the pavement.

I wondered whether Mum ever felt cold anymore. Perhaps she felt cold all the time. Perhaps being dead meant being cold.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

‘Where do you think she is?’

‘I’m asking you, Mr Hardy.’

He smiled, shaking his head. ‘You know her best.’

‘She can’t have just stopped being. It’s not possible. Her soul is somewhere—in heaven, I suppose. But I don’t know what a soul is, really. I don’t know what heaven is, either.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Nobody does,’ I said. I had a theory about this. ‘Bishops don’t. Muslims and Buddhists and Jews and atheists don’t. Even the Pope doesn’t actually know. They all just hope for the best. That’s all any of us can do.’

‘How about Hannah? She believes in God, doesn’t she? And she’s very clever.’

‘Hannah is the first to admit she doesn’t know. She’s much too smart to pretend she has the answers.’ I dipped my head and drank half the hot chocolate at once. ‘In a way,’ I said, ‘I want it to be Mum who I felt in my room. I want it to be her I heard in my dream . . . because that would mean she still exists—you know? But in another way I want it not to be, because she was miserable and angry. I want her to be happy. I want her to rest in peace. RIP, Mum.’

‘Maybe it was you that was feeling miserable and angry, not her.’

I thought about this idea, and knew he was probably right. The mothers at the next table were standing up, unhooking their puffer jackets from the backs of their seats and fussing around the babies. One of them bumped into me and said sorry.

‘That’s all right,’ I replied automatically. She smiled at Mr Hardy.

‘Nice manners,’ she said. ‘Credit to you.’

I waited for him to tell her that he wasn’t my dad. He didn’t. He just thanked her and looked proud.

‘Fraud,’ I mouthed at him, and he giggled in a Mr Hardyish sort of way.

We both watched as the mothers pushed their buggies out into the street, letting in the chilly night.

‘Have you got a mother?’ I asked Mr Hardy.

‘She died a little while ago.’

‘Me and my big mouth.’

‘You are a very kind, thoughtful person,’ he said. ‘Please don’t worry. She was almost ninety, and she had been ill for a long time.’

‘She was still your mum.’

‘She was.’

We left soon after that, dodging between the revving cars before hurrying down Faith Lane. The sky was velvety orange, not black, because of the city lights. I looked up at the dark walls as they loomed above us.

‘They’re so old,’ I said. ‘They have been here for hundreds and hundreds of years.’

‘True.’

‘The people who built them are all dead now.’

‘Yes, I think we can confidently make that assumption.’

‘Funny to think of, isn’t it? All dead. They must be wondering why the hell they bothered. And where are they now, I wonder? Is my mum sitting in a café in heaven, gossiping over a latte with a hunky Roman soldier in a metal skirt, Elvis Presley and a couple of dazzling angels? Is she having a giggle with Dick Turpin?’

‘Dick Turpin got to heaven?’

We’d arrived back at our house. I unzipped my shoulder bag to fish out the front door key. ‘Thank you for the hot chocolate, and thank you for listening to me.’

‘Nice manners,’ he said. His beard twitched. ‘Credit to me.’

Twenty-three

Joseph

Just as the first snowdrops began to hint that spring was on its way, February sank sharp teeth into North Yorkshire. Each night Joseph crouched with Jessy by the heater as sleet and ice whipped against the caravan’s windows. He read into the early hours, staving off the moment when Zoe would lie bleeding on the rug.

Each morning his alarm clock clattered through the nightmare. In each indigo pre-dawn, he felt despair. He would never escape from Zoe’s death. He would never be whole. Sometimes, as he forced his steps towards the farmyard, he had an impulse to turn the other way; to cross the stream and trudge onto the open moors. If he lay down up there, exposure would kill him long before anyone noticed he was gone.

Jessy refused to get up for these earliest sorties. She woke long enough to watch sleepily as he pulled on layers of clothes—most of them borrowed from Abigail—then gave a smug grunt before resting her nose back onto her paws.

‘All right for some, you dozy tart,’ sniped Joseph, one morning. He stepped out, teeth gritted against the blasts. As he climbed the slope, he felt oddly cheered by the flicker of a candle in Rosie’s kombi. She was an early bird, that woman.

Struggling to start the tractor, his mind was on the children. Theo and Ben seemed to like him. He didn’t imagine that they had forgiven him, but he felt more of a father with each outing. Scarlet worried him, though; she seemed terribly troubled. Sometimes she’d forget herself and smile at something he had said, but each thaw was followed by a freeze. Lester insisted that she was ‘conflicted’. Good old touchy-feely speak, that. Conflicted.

As he handled the final bale, crimson light unfurled like a glowing flag on the horizon. He cut the engine, fascinated by this dawn spectacle.