Chapter Thirteen

“Are you there, darling?” It is Peter, tapping too discreetly on the glass panel of the flat door, as he always does before he enters. When I was still living on my own I had found it a charming gesture of good manners, but now I sense that there is something insolent about it: almost as if he were saying, “I know I’m here on sufferance; I know that the place is still yours, and I will observe all due decorum in order to spare your feelings (even though I am your superior), to prevent your taking offence.” I have loved Peter from the start for his poshness, but sometimes my infatuation with it helps me to understand very clearly that what I feel for Peter is a masochistic kind of love. As far as Peter is concerned, I will always be his slightly grubby little working class friend.

“Of course I’m here,” I say tersely. And of course Peter knows I am here. It is six-thirty in the evening, for one thing, and I am always home from work by five. The door has been left unlocked, for another – and we are both fastidious about security. Neither of us would have gone out without remembering to lock up.

“Good, good,” says Peter brightly, entering the room. “I’ve brought you some flowers.” With a flourish, he presents me with a bunch of hothouse blooms. They are quite exotic, the sort of flowers you see in contract displays in banks and offices. They include lilies and some of those peculiar half-thistle, half-flower things with green heads.

“Thank you,” I say. I put them down on the coffee table.

“You aren’t cross with me, darling, are you?” Peter darts me one of his lightning sideways looks. “Because if you are it would be very disappointing.” He sits down opposite me, and looks at me in a rather strange, too-intense way. I think I have picked up a hint of menace in his tone. I could be mistaken, because the next moment he is his usual mercurial self, and launches into, first, an expression of empathy and, second, one of his anecdotes.

“I can see that you have had a disagreeable day. Poor you! It must be so hard to have to keep on grinding away in that drab little office day after day.” He holds up his hand as I open my mouth to retaliate: it will not be the first argument we have had about the relative merits of my ‘grubbing’ for a living, as Peter is pleased to call it, while he lives on Daddy’s legacy and Mummy’s handouts, as befit his talents and refined personality.

“No, No! Please stop there. I assure you that I have no wish to provoke. I apologise if what I have just said has irritated you. It was meant merely as a prelude to my offering to prepare supper this evening. But first there is something that I simply have to tell you.” He smiles conspiratorially. “Guess who I met when I was out today?”

I sigh. “I couldn’t begin to guess,” I say. “For a start, I have no idea where you go on your daytime forays. For another thing, I know virtually none of your friends and acquaintances.”

“Jillian!” says Peter, ignoring all of this. “I bumped into my sister Jillian. Now, what do you think of that?”

“I had no idea that you had a sister, Peter,” I say. “Now that you tell me that you do, I don’t understand why your having met her by accident was such a big deal. It’s a small town, after all.”

“Oh, yes, but you see, she doesn’t live here. No, no. She lives in Birkenhead, close to Mummy. I don’t think that she has ever been to Spalding before. So you see, she must have had a reason.”

“Well, I assume that the reason must have been to see you. But if she came all the way from Birkenhead, I don’t understand why she didn’t tell you that she was coming. You might have been out, after all. In fact, you were out when you saw her.”

“Oh, but you don’t know Jillian. She understands me very well. She knows that I am a creature of habit; and also that I would avoid meeting her if I could. Not that I detest her or anything coarse like that, you understand. It’s just that she takes a very superior moral stance where I am concerned; and she certainly frightens Mummy off whenever I ask the old girl for some money. So Jillian will have known that the chances of actually meeting me if we had prearranged it would have been very slender, because I would either have put her off, or more probably allowed her to come and then done a bunk for the day. I take my hat off to her for the tactic that she employed instead, which I guess was to follow me from the flat and then appear as if by accident when I was a safe distance away from it.”

“This all sounds very paranoid to me. Did you ask her how she happened to be there?”

“Of course not. I simply took her to buy some tea. You don’t understand sisters: you are in the fortunate position of not having had one. Jillian taught me all that I need to know about girls, especially that boys are infinitely to be preferred.” I only recall much later that Peter gives me one of his sidelong looks as he says this. The superciliousness of his comment annoys me so much that I make a bad mistake. To this day I regret it. It sets in train a catastrophic sequence of events that might otherwise have been avoided.

“I know more about sisters than you think. I grew up with one.”

Peter scrutinises me with his black button eyes.

“Really? You are a dark horse. What is her name?”

“Bryony.” I swallow hard. One of the many beauties of my relationship with Peter is that he knows nothing of my family history – or so I believe. Now I know that it will take all of my strength and ingenuity to prevent him from poking and probing until he has wormed it all out of me.

“Bryony? What a ghastly name! What could your mother have been thinking of?”

“For Christ’s sake, Peter, give it a rest, will you? For that matter, I don’t think that Jillian’s such a wonderful name, either.”

“Well,” says Peter, steepling his fingers, “I am in complete agreement with you there. But my view is coloured by association, no doubt. Where is Bryony, anyway? I presume that she lives away somewhere. Otherwise she would have called or telephoned on some occasion when I’ve been here, I’m sure. Does she live abroad?”

Something inside me snaps. I scream at Peter for the next five minutes. I don’t know exactly what I am saying. It is as if I have lost consciousness and fallen into a bloody sea of anger. Gradually I find myself surfacing again and Peter’s face emerges out of the red blur. I see that he is shocked, but also that something very important has happened. I realise immediately that I have probably told him other things that I will come to regret, apart from the fact of Bryony’s having existed. Of course, I know with a sinking heart what they are likely to be about: myself and Tirzah.

Peter has been holding his hand up against the side of his face, as if to shield it. Now, as the vituperative torrent of words that I have dredged up from my subconscious slowly falters, he allows it to drop and pats my knee.

“Goodness me,” he says, and I can detect no sarcasm now. “I have often congratulated myself upon my perspicacity at spotting from the start that you are a very interesting person. However, I could never have fathomed exactly how interesting. What a pedigree! It knocks Daddy’s business dealings, which I have always suspected were a little shady, into a cocked hat. I really should love to meet your mother.”

I do not ask Peter exactly what I have revealed to him, and in fact I am never to find out. Looking back later, I am convinced that even though this must have been be the occasion on which I revealed details about my mother’s crime, Peter has known about Tirzah all along, though I doubt if he could have done his research diligently enough to have discovered Bryony as well. Actually, I have come to believe that Peter made his first overtures of friendship to me because of Tirzah.

“Anyway,” he says airily, “to return to Jillian – a safer topic for us, even if I do regard her as a dangerously loose cannon per se. I should tell you that my sister is quite a little bitch. She seems to have spent her entire life scheming to make sure that I get as little from the parental pot of gold as possible. Mummy would be a darling without her. Mummy always appreciated me when I was small.”

I am exhausted by my outburst. I am also feeling a little bit sick. It takes all of my strength to maintain the interest in Peter’s own affairs that – especially after such a lapse – courtesy demands. I close my eyes and grip the arms of my chair.

“What did she want?”

“She wanted to talk about Mummy’s money. I’m afraid that I skirted the subject and insisted that we talk about other things. Not that I’m not interested in it, as you know. In fact, one could say that it is my passion – next to you, of course, darling. But I will not have Jillian creeping up on me and trying to bounce me into new situations before I have had time to think about them. So I only allowed her to get so far. It would appear that she has a plan for putting Mummy permanently into the nursing home where she goes when Jillian wants a rest and selling the house. I have no objection to either of those things; but when Jillian started talking about what should happen to the money after the nursing home fees have been deducted, I shut her up.”

“But why?”

“Because another of my sister’s annoying traits is that once something has been discussed, she thinks – or professes to think – that it has been agreed. And it was very obvious to me by the way that she was leading up to it that a straightforward split between us, or even allowing each of us some of the money on account until the inevitable happens, is not what she has in mind. No, she will be thinking of tying it up in some way. No doubt she is indoctrinating Mummy to think along the same lines, as well. I therefore need to be one step ahead of her, ready both to say the right thing and to act pretty smartly, too.”

“I don’t see what kind of action you can take, short of having your mother certified.”

Peter looks at me with intense distaste.

“Well, that isn’t going to happen: I won’t have my family name tarnished with that,” he says pointedly. “Besides, you haven’t met Mummy. When she tries, she is sanity and good sense personified.”

“Peter, you are baffling me. And I’m very tired. Just tell me what you intend to do.”

Peter cackles – a surprising sound, coming from his quarter.

“It is rather a question of what we are going to do, darling. And now I have had time to think – and in fact I was formulating my thoughts throughout your strange shouting episode, as well as on my way home – I have decided that we need to visit Liverpool with the utmost urgency. On Saturday, in fact, since I presume you are unable to take tomorrow away from your wretched place of work at short notice.”

“I suppose that a visit would be useful for you, so that you can continue the conversation with Jillian. But I fail to see why you want me to go with you.”

“Oh, but you are my very dear partner, darling, and I am devoted to you. It is high time that you met Mummy. Besides, you might be useful for keeping the old boot at bay while I talk to Jillian; and I am quite certain that you will be able to help if more drastic measures are needed.”

I feel a sick pang of fear. “What do you mean?”

Peter thrusts his face much closer to mine than good manners dictate.

“I don’t mean anything yet,” he says, almost viciously. “We don’t know what kind of turn events will take; and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to pre-empt a superfluous action. But it is possible that needs must. No doubt your mother would understand perfectly.”

The sick feeling grows worse. I am panicky.

“Just understand that I have no intention of doing anything illegal. That isn’t the way in which I operate.”

“Ah. I think it is, darling, when you care about the outcome sufficiently. You just need to give my affairs as much weight in your mind as you give to your own.”

“I’ve got no idea what you are talking about.” I am fighting hysteria now. Peter draws back a little, and the extra physical space helps to calm me, even though he says, very quietly so that I can only just hear him:

“So you say, Hedley. But I think you know exactly.”