Adam had been as gobsmacked as Jeff when Leo had filled them both in, back in his office at Fallowfields at their evening rendezvous, about what had gone down at Patricia’s. Though he wasn’t surprised that his beady mother had managed to rumble Jadwiga and catch her out, even as she posed as yet another helpless old lady for the carer and her husband to prey on.
He was amazed that she had managed to rumble Walter and Serena’s involvement too, though she’d never been a fan of Adam’s first wife, for reasons that he hadn’t ever quite fully understood. Even now, when he was forced to accept that Serena had been prepared to do away with him, he was struggling to understand why. Yes, obviously, there was the money, which would have set her and Walter up comfortably for the rest of their lives. But then again, you’d have thought Serena would have had some respect for the unnecessarily generous settlement that Adam had voluntarily given her. Yes, he had left her, for no good reason other than his own wanderlust and waywardness; but there had never been any ‘hell hath no fury’ about their ongoing relationship, especially when it became clear that running off with Julie had been a huge mistake.
Adam’s pride had meant that he had never admitted as much to her, though he had come close to it a couple of years ago, before Walter had appeared on the scene, and when Eva was still just a colleague. There had been a couple of sneaky dinners with Serena, and they had laughed together about the fact he hadn’t told his second wife he was out on the lam with his first. He had never suggested they get back together, though he had, for a few months, been tempted. He had been under the erroneous belief that he and his first wife were friends, that that was all good for the children, that sins had been forgiven and resentments buried. Clearly not.
He could only blame Walter for taking it as far as they had done. Walter, that twisted failure, whose string of repeated cock-ups had made him bitter and resentful rather than sensibly accepting of his own dire limitations. Adam’s success had not been handed to him on a plate. He had worked for it, job by job, client by client, using all kinds of ingenuity to win projects and get them over the line, against the relentless forces of negativity that had included jobsworthy and grudge-bearing planning officers, devious rivals, unimaginative and unreliable clients, you name it. He had sacrificed plenty of good times and days in the sun to stay late in the office and get things finished. Serena had always seemed to support him, when he prioritised deadlines over time with his children, but perhaps she hadn’t, perhaps the hidden hatred had started there.
Walter had always had a problem with Adam, not that Adam had cared tuppence about that. He had assumed, blithely, that was because Walter knew, deep down, Serena still loved him. He had always been polite to the wazzock, even as he’d struggled to hide his contempt. Of course he wished his ex-wife well, he wanted her to be happy, his guilt dictated that, but to be happy with that dickhead! It was her choice, he supposed. Perhaps, retrospectively, it had been a mistake slagging him off repeatedly, and he had always thought amusingly, to his children. He had known that his meaner comments might get back. But he hadn’t cared. What power did tragic and useless Walter have over him? None.
That had been his error. It turned out he’d had all too much power – if only he was prepared to cross the line into the resort of the failed, the weak, the desperate, the disillusioned, the cynical, the useless and the mad: criminality. Adam would never have countenanced Walter as a murderer, even if he had properly understood how terminal his circumstances were. The idea that Serena would have happily helped him was inconceivable. But there you are. What had happened had happened. And it only went to show, as Jeff had observed, that it was always the quiet ones you had to watch out for. The quiet ones and the nice ones. Fizzing away furiously under their warm and apparently forgiving smiles.
As for Leo’s accident, Adam could only explain that in terms of panic. Leo had made it obvious from the start that he didn’t like Walter, that he thought his mother was selling herself short. Leo was dead set against her continuing with the relationship, certainly against her marrying him. So Walter’s plan to save himself and be financially secure was in jeopardy. And then, it seemed, Leo had realised about his involvement in the so-called suicide. There was no way Walter was going to discuss what to do about that little problem with Serena. She would hardly support murdering her own son. But it had to be done. And what better, for a young man who was known for his love of fast cars, than a tweak of the brakes, and an accident.
Now it was over. The human perpetrators were all facing human justice. Adam and Jeff had been at Harrogate Road to witness the efficient police swoop and round-up, the shock on the faces of Serena and her partner in crime as they realised they had been found out; then the sheer and unforgiving horror on his first wife’s face when Walter’s second charge was read out.
But Adam was relieved to find that now he knew exactly what had happened to him, his hatred and anger towards them had entirely gone. As it had towards his unfaithful spouse Julie and the human condom, Rod. Good luck to them! And to his sister and her husband also. She had made her choice. She could have made another, easily enough, but there you go, if what she really wanted as a life companion was a CGI cartoon with personality deficiencies, so be it. It wasn’t for him to be entangled in their destinies; any more than it was now with darling Eva. He had floated one last time past her studio, seen her tucked up in the big white ‘Songesand’ double bed with a happy-looking Reuben, and had wished her well. She had her life ahead of her and he hoped it would be a good one, filled with all the tangible rewards the real world has to offer those who strive hard enough to find them.
After their excited mutual debriefing, and the satisfaction of knowing who was responsible for putting them where they were now, the three ghosts had been left with nothing to say, stunned into silence. What now? was on each of their minds. Would they stay in this spectral state for eternity; for a year; for a day? They didn’t know or understand, any more than they knew or understood exactly how and why they could visit their human counterparts sometimes and not others.
Jeff had been surprisingly focused in helping solve the mystery of Adam’s death, but now that was resolved, Adam could see, from the lurking fury on his face, that he still had unfinished business with the man who had frightened him to death. The last thing he wanted or needed was his ex-partner muscling in with undeserved recriminations, even though for the moment Leo’s presence was enough to keep them apart. If time was going to be short, he wondered, how could he get away and spend a little quality time alone with his son, have a chance to tell him how proud he’d been of him, how much he loved him, and how sorry he was that their destinies had got mixed up in the tragic way they had.
But even as they sat, or rather floated there together in that empty Fallowfields office, none of these logically human developments came to pass. Instead, it seemed to Adam as if, even as the watching faces of his companions faded into the background, he was suddenly drowned in brilliant light.
Far away he could hear music, slow and ineffably soothing, like a twangle of harps accompanying the hugest choir. There were violins in there too, Eva’s beloved violins. Was it ‘Quizás, Quizás, Quizás’ they were playing? Oh my God, yes it was. Segueing mysteriously into another of his favourite pieces of music, Chopin’s Etude Op 10, no 3, sometimes known as Tristesse. Tears filled his virtual eyes, but they were, God help him, tears of happiness. He felt as he always used to feel, walking up a sandy path with his children at the end of a day on the beach, nothing more to worry about, his task over. He could have done with another twenty or thirty years, he could have done with another life, but if that was not to be, so be it. It was time to let go of this beautiful world.
Images flashed through his mind, if mind it still was. Himself as a child, with the set of coloured pens his parents had given him for his tenth birthday… reading out his poem at the school poetry competition, ‘The Air, A Dream’, the thundering applause and the furious look on Roland’s crimson tomato of a face… at Bristol with Serena, drinking cider with their good friends Belinda and Eric on a summer’s evening in the cobbled yard outside the Llandoger Trow… up in London in that crazy first term at the AA, Stan over ‘a Four Seasons with extra tuna’, his default pizza, in Kettner’s in Soho… Serena on honeymoon in Lipari, that dazzling terrace at the Roche d’Azur, negronis at lunchtime, her lovely nakedness back in the shuttered siesta bedroom… Matty as a toddler, with that winning smile, that jet-black curly hair… Leo’s magician phase, how old had he been, thirteen? the shiny grey suit they had bought him, the spinning red bow tie… Julie at that lunch at the L’Arbre Bleu in Chelsea, cute in her cream suit, her bobbed blonde head back, laughing, slipping him her card… a boat ride with her up the Camel Estuary, a tall heron guarding the grey stone beach, the sun going in, that sinking feeling that he’d made a huge mistake… Eva with her logbook, her attentive face out on some site meeting when she was still a student…
They flooded in, these memories, faster and faster, like some PowerPoint presentation gone mad. Then, abruptly, in a moment, they were gone, whirling away forever like autumn leaves in the wind. His past was vanishing, as if it had never been. As if, in truth, he had never been. The music had ended on a perfect cadence, but Adam found he no longer cared. He tilted up his hologrammatic jaw and melted effortlessly into the brilliant nothingness beyond.
Now this is the ultimate living space, he thought, as he faded away.
THE END