Undercurrent (17 page)

She banked half the maintenance and shared the rest. I thought she could just go on banking it for the next seven years, and then there'd be a teeny nest egg when she comes out and needs a deposit for something. Only our sweet Jonathan - what did she ever see in the slimy shit? - now writes a sanctimonious letter from Bahrain or somewhere saying he doesn't see why he should pay money for the wife who murdered his son and how do we think we're going to make him anyway?'

The long speech exhausted Edward. He was the nearest he came to fury. 'And what that fucking maintenance could also do is pay us for continuing to look after her interests. Supposing she changes her mind about anything.'

Maggie was silent for a minute.

'Have you always wished she would change her mind, Edward, or are you newly converted?'

'It's grown on me,' Edward said simply. 'But you can't appeal a conviction on a guilty plea unless the client asks you to do it. Especially if she's pleaded guilty and given a graphic description to the police.

You can't. We can't. Especially me. Place runs like a fucking charity as it is. Fat cat lawyers, ha ha ha. Still,' he added, visibly brightening as if the last drag of the cigarette was markedly better than the rest, 'there's always Uncle Joe.'

'My distant Uncle Joe, too,' Maggie said. ‘Who was supposed to be dangerous to little girls.

Angela visits, not me, I never knew him.'

Edward was back at the paperclip daisy chain, pausing only to wipe his spectacles with the tail of the red scarf.

'Visiting where? Who?'

Henry Evans entered the room without knocking. He sat in a crooked chair, smiled at them both.’ The open door brought in a chill and the distant sound of typewriters. There was a moment's silence.

'Hallo, Henry,' Maggie yelled with a manic cheerfulness which made Edward jump. 'What are you doing here?'

Henry seemed to consider. 'I tore the lining of my jacket,' he said. 'It was flapping down the back I thought it was someone . ..'

His voice ceased on a sigh. His glasses were misted. He took them off and squinted, then gazed fixedly at one point in the room after another, as if he were checking the contents, his eyes resting on the fish longer than on any other feature, his expression registering mild distaste. His hair was windblown, adding to the slightly ridiculous appearance of a man entirely uncertain if he were actually present, but apparently quite at home.

'Do sit down,' Edward said, sarcastically. 'We have absolutely nothing better to do.'

Henry addressed himself to Maggie. She was blushing scarlet. His hands appeared to be locked into some kind of debate with the coins in his pocket. Maybe he was unhinged.

'I went out on the pier again,' he told her. 'I guess I really like that place. Or I did. I suppose a pier is something you build when you don't have any cliffs or high places, so, if you can't look down, you can at least look across.'

Maggie was nodding understandingly. They waited. Henry seemed to be daydreaming, relying on their polite indulgence.

It was hopeless trying to explain things; it always was. Henry squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. Edward was suddenly quite content for the man to find the necessary words while he himself contemplated his appearance thinking that at last, in the realms of clownish eccentricity, he had found someone with whom to compete. The man had stopped looking so fucking well dressed.

The thought was comforting. In the lost, intervening two minutes. Henry was back on the pier, looking at the beach and the fishing men with their black umbrellas as he realized that the ghost stroking the back of his leg was the lining from his jacket and no ghost was about to strike him down. Thinking of how all his life he had been wisely running away from events and objects as well as people. The headlong dash from the confined spaces, the slipping away from his love affairs and relationships by mutual consent.

Thinking of all the times he avoided confrontations, how his nickname had once been Tortoise, how someone had once said he actually resembled a terrapin when he swam, and how his mildness was not really the same thing as tolerance, nor his calmness anything more than the fear of chaos and a cousin to cowardice. He was always the one who left, to preserve his dignity.

Henry Evans would be the wise man who walked away to sleep through another winter.

Even if he did have the sneaking feeling that whatever had become of her, whatever she had done, Francesca Chisholm, who had once led him out of the caves, would not have done the same.

'I'm not going to do it.'

'Do what. Henry?' Maggie prompted, her voice coming at him from a long distance, like his father's gentle voice calling him into eat from the door of the house, across the long back yard.

Garden, she would have said; you mean garden.

'I mean I'm not going home,' Henry explained patiently, as if his meaning had been perfectly obvious. 'I mean, no, I don't buy this shit about Francesca being a murderer. I don't even buy this shit about anyone alive being capable of doing it, either. I sure as hell couldn't, I'd walk away first.'

There was the click, click of Edward's lighter, a clunk as it landed where he threw it, then the scrape of a match.

'... So I just want to know how she was living. You know, who she knew, who she didn't. And if she killed the kid, I want to know why. I want to know what was wrong. I want there to be a reason. Maggie here could help me. I'll pay for your trouble. Looks like you could use it.'

'
She
is absolutely none of your business,' Edward said. Henry shrugged.

'Well I've walked away a few too many times,' he said, 'when I should have been turning back.'

Turn back? If only one could: Run away: I would.

Ah, the anniversary gets closer, casting a shadow, eclipsing everything, making me loquacious.

They tell me that the anniversary of the day you first come inside prison is the worst day of
your life.

We didn't notice anything wrong with Harry at first Perhaps because there was so much
wrong with us. Having a child was my idea, it was my imperative; I was a late starter and full of
hormonal madness. I wanted everyone to have lots of children, so that I could know them and make a
sort of football team one day. The fact that my spouse was so dead against it was something I
dismissed as a simple case of nerves. He would fall in love with the result, especially a girl. I should
have accepted what he was instead of assuming he would change, but this was what I was going to do
and I did it. And of course, when you are pregnant, the baby is more important than the husband.

He didn't like that; he hated the terminal stages when everything went wrong. It wasn't a
joyful birth and Harry was not a pretty child. He'd been in such distress before he was born, I could
hardly expect him to come out smiling.

The unutterably cruel thing about this kind of cerebral palsy is that wonderful halcyon period
before anyone notices anything wrong. Harry was nothing more or less than a lovely, placid baby. It
was when he started to move. He couldn't sit without falling, always towards one side, and I would
notice how he made himself fall in one direction. In retrospect, there is something so pathetic about
that, trying to fall in the direction where he could protect himself. Then there was this odd preference
for one hand over another; I thought he was going to be left handed and wondered where that had
come from. Then when he began to crawl, he would haul himself forward with his left arm, drag the
other, which looked funny and sweet until it didn't stop.

There was that moment when I looked at him and knew something was terribly wrong. It isn't
a moment I can really describe. Even then I was terrified of what might become of him. I wanted to put
him back in the womb and tell him to stay where it was safe.

I had several books on cerebral palsy and I knew all about it. I did clear out all the books,
didn't I? And the diaries I kept of his progress? Yes, I did, I'm sure I did.

We had lovely times, Angela and Tanya and I, playing with Harry. He was tough and
determined, features I love in a boy. Oddly enough, with two damaged and utterly demanding children,
there were too many crises to notice the departure of a husband. It was as if they had never existed.

Mine must have known I would not mourn him. Poor man, he was right to go.

And he didn't abandon us, whatever it looked like. He came back sometimes and he sent
enough money to help us. He did love me in his own way; it was I who rejected him.

It took me a while to realize how much he hated Harry. Angela, too, although hate's the wrong
word for it, indifference tinged with irritation is closer to the mark. It was another of those
heart-stopping revelations, more sad than bitter. I adored her child and, kind though she was, she
simply
could not love mine.

And nor did other people. I was no longer the universal friend, the person with time for
everything and everybody. Harry and I, we were the ones in need.

Who killed Cock Robin?

I said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow

I killed Cock Robin..

Stoppit, stoppit. . . There is no one to blame but you.

FMC

CHAPTER SEVEN.

The rhyme and the tune of it ran through Maggie's head.

Some think to lose him,

By having him confined,

And some do suppose him

(Poor thing!) to be blind.

But if ne'er so close you wall him,

Do the best that you may;

Blind love (if so you call him)

Will find out his way.

'The answer,' Henry said, 'is always in the facts.'

'No, it isn't. Henry. It's in the emotions. Trust me, I'm a lawyer.'

'Maggie, why do I think you're playing games with me?'

'Because you're a North American, Henry. You don't understand flippancy.'

She remembered this conversation from her supine position on Laura Bains' very old sun-bed, which was an integral part of the Bain beauty clinic (I'll be the bane of your life, ha, ha) situated halfway up Thistle Road, on the left. Can't miss it. She was remembering Henry, sitting in his upstairs room surrounded by papers, as he had been for the last four days except when he was out of doors making a tit of himself by his awful habit of direct and literal speech and his equally unfortunate inability to lie. When the lights went out on the sun-bed and the rattle of the machine stopped with a judder, she pushed on the canopy. It creaked like the door of a tomb.

'Are you done? Get yourself over here.'

A short distance, the route between the window bay of a small, dark living room and the back wall, separated down the middle by a ceiling-height curtain of flowered plastic. Pulling on clothes as she went, Maggie slouched from the hard couch of the sun-bed to the slightly softer and higher one of the massage couch.

'You must have bought that sun-bed before we left school, Linda.'

'So you thought you'd got used to better, eh? Something in a fancy gym in London where the top bit went up by itself? I don't know, why do we bother?'

Cleansing lotion was applied to her face with deft hands. Maggie looked up to a ceiling of Artex swimming in whorls. On the radio a crisis was discussed in a phone-in. Cottonwool pads skimmed the surface of her skin. 'Thought I'd bugger off, once,' Linda was saying. 'Like you lot. Got pregnant and here I am. Was him buggered off. All comes out the same, dunnit? No place like home.

You can burn the girl's bra for her and she'll ask for it back. And her corsets. No good playing high and mighty here, petal.'

'I never did.' The hands paused for a moment. There were the sounds of a vigorous washing movement out of sight.

'No. You never. Nor your cousin, to be fair.' A cool astringent was applied to Maggie's chin and swept upwards towards her forehead. 'You were such a romantic, weren't you? Always pretending to be the princess and spouting poetry. I never knew who you were going to be from one day to the next. You were bloody good fun, Maggie Chisholm. You still are, even if you did change your name and marry the wrong one. Didn't we all?'

'He wasn't the wrong one at the time.'

'No, they never are at the time. Never thought it would happen to you though, not after a dozen or more years. And it isn't enough reason to skulk around the way you do, as if you were the only one in that boat. You want to come out with me and the girls. Keep your eyes shut.'

Linda used a new pad of cotton wool to ease off the last of the mascara from Maggie's left eye. "Stead of which, you can't settle, you can't buy a house with your money. Live with the poofters and now you're walking out with this American. At least I know you still look after your face. What does he want, this fella? Is he rich?' A further dollop of exfoliating lotion was applied, a little roughly.

Maggie could feel a small callus on Linda’s middle finger and wondered, inconsequentially, how it had arrived. She had a memory of a massage, somewhere in the past, given with rough hands, concentrated on the callus and kept her voice calm. She did not like people discussing Henry unless they did so with a bit of respect.

'I told you,' she said. 'He wants to find out more about Harry's death. He was in love with Francesca once and he can't believe she did it.'

'Hmmpph. So where was he when he was needed then? Bit late, isn't he? I know what he's doing, I heard. I hear most things in here in the end, more than you do in that office, I can tell you.

And there's plenty would tell him to let sleeping dogs alone, the silly oaf. Not that I didn't hear a lot of theories about it at the time. About how Franny's husband wanted her back, made a flying visit, thought to get the poor little boy out of the way, took the chance when he saw him out by himself.