Thirty-One

From the window of Ruth’s flat, Kieran watched Harry’s car draw away. He followed its progress down the street, then turned. Ruth had come out from the bathroom and was holding Theo by the hand. The boy stood red-faced, hitching breaths.

‘Come here, Theo,’ Kieran said, walking towards him and picking him up. The child was like a rigid board in his embrace.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ he told Ruth.

‘I want to protect him,’ she said.

‘You’re going the wrong way about it,’ he replied. He turned his back on her, took Theo to the sitting room and, by a mixture of brute force and cajoling, managed to get Theo’s coat on. They came back out into the hall, and Kieran took his car keys from the table.

‘Where are you going?’ Ruth asked.

‘Out,’ he told her.

She followed him. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

He turned to look at her. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it possible,’ he said.

‘Thought what was possible?’

‘For you to hit below the belt like that.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘Caroline Devlin,’ he said.

She reached out in an attempt to put a hand on his arm, but he stepped away. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Just … enough.’

‘Kieran,’ she called, as he went down the stairs. ‘Kieran …’

As he opened the door to the street, he was met with the warm, billowing air of a spring afternoon. It was past three o’clock, and the primary schools were finished for the day; along the road, mothers and children were coming in their twos and threes. At the gate he let one such group go past: a woman with a child on either hand, listening to some long, involved story from the older girl. She gave Kieran an apologetic smile, then picked up a lurid red-and-green drawing the little one had dropped. He let them go past, eyeing the trio not with envy but with despair.

Kieran crossed the road and went into the park. There was a play area there. At the swings, he let Theo down and gave him a little push in the small of the back. ‘Go play,’ he said.

Theo didn’t move. Instead, he began to cry: a series of long, moaning sobs that would tear any parent’s heart. Kieran felt a mixture of rage and impotence wash over him. After a few seconds, he squatted down, took out his handkerchief, and helped wipe his son’s face.

‘I promise that I’ll sort this out,’ he said. ‘Everything will be all right.’

The look that Theo gave him—a straight glare of crude, closed disbelief—was like a slap in the face. Kieran stood up, and put his boy on the swing seat. They stayed for a while in this desultory duet, Kieran pushing the swing, and Theo sitting in it without making a single sound or movement.

The chestnuts spread broad, tacky-edged leaves above his head. Kieran stared across the other side of the park to Maiden Walk. The route was named for the Iron Age castle a few miles away, the stronghold of the Durotriges who had resisted the Romans. They had fallen, of course: fallen under the advance of time, of a greater power, leaving behind ballista bolts in the spines and skulls of the castle’s defenders. Rome had swept in, with its roads and currency and watercourses and stone buildings; with its vetch and flax and vineyards. With ten million sesterces provided by Seneca to make another little Italy.

At the eastern boundary of the park was one of Kieran’s favourite places. A tiny portion of the old town wall there had been built fifteen years after the death of Boudicca. Barely ten feet of it now remained, incorporated into the Victorian Hamstone margin. He had brought Lin here once, before they even lived together, and shown her this wall, and found to his bemusement that she knew at least as much about it as he did. She even knew where the cemeteries of the city had been, and the coin hoards, and the fragments of mosaic. Her capacity for knowledge was encyclopaedic. More importantly, it was effortless. She could soak up great skeins of dates, theories and facts, ordering them in her head into her own eclectic categories.

He wondered what theory occupied her now: what outrageous route she was pursuing. He closed his eyes and wished himself out of it, wished himself back two thousand years, to a place where he would feel at home, to a system of belief he’d understood. To a code, to some military convention.

He had been due to see Arthur Caldwell at three; he ought to make a phone call and rearrange the meeting. It was impossible to avoid a meeting. Caldwell’s message—left on the Priory answerphone the night before—had all the hallmarks of an ultimatum.

Kieran stopped the momentum of the swing. ‘Come on,’ he said to Theo, ‘let’s go and have a cup of tea.’

Theo said nothing.

‘Some Coke and a piece of cake?’ Kieran asked.

There was still no reply.

‘How about a piece of lemon cake with the lemon icing?’

Nothing.

Through the nearest park gate was a public call box. Kieran spoke to Caldwell, who sounded continuingly tetchy, and postponed the meeting till five. Then he and Theo went on to the nearest teashop. Kieran hadn’t eaten lunch; he had been too wound up over this unwelcome publicity. As he sat waiting for his order, he reflected that it was lucky no one appeared to know Ruth’s address, or connect him with her. Not yet, anyway.

His food was brought, together with a milky coffee. He ate hungrily, his mind continually bouncing back to Lin’s stricken, accusing face. Theo played with the icing of his cake, slowly mashing it to a pulp, but not eating it. In despair, Kieran sat back in his chair and watched his son.

Theo was the catalyst that had brought him and Lin together—was that right? He would never know. There had been so many undercurrents then that he had not appreciated. Not appreciated until last year, when the weight of her secret broke Lin’s spirit.

Her secret, he thought.

My distance.

After her mother’s death, he and Lin had travelled back down south immediately after visiting the hospital. Lin had flatly refused to stay in Liverpool, so they had driven through the night, to arrive back at the Priory at one in the morning. Between leaving the city and arriving home, they had barely exchanged half a dozen words.

He hardly knew what to make of Lin’s family. What he could not get over was how different Lin was to them all. It was hard to believe that she was related at all to these sullen men with their broad, flat-planed faces and fair colouring. They were the complete antithesis of her, opposite in every way. Even their voices were not the same. Lin’s bore only a slight trace of accent, and was lighter with a quick, self-deprecatory undertone.

He had to wake her up when they reached home. She had climbed out of the car slowly, as if her body ached, but she didn’t go inside. On the front steps, she turned abruptly, and, without looking back at him, went around the side of the house.

‘Where are you going?’ he had called.

‘Leave me alone,’ she replied. ‘I’m OK.’

He went inside, but, halfway up the stairs with the bags, curiosity and concern overcame him. Going out of the back door, he saw her standing far down the garden, past the fence, which she must have climbed over. She was in the field next to the river.

He was seized with a sudden fear. Running down the lawn, he called her name. It was pitch black, and cold, and the ground was slippery. She had moved to the very edge of the water.

‘Lin!’ he shouted. ‘Lin!’

She turned to look at him as he scaled the fence and stumbled over the tussocky paddock.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

He was out of breath. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing. Just looking.’

He stood there, catching his breath. ‘Jesus, Lin.’

‘What?’

‘I thought …’ He indicated the river.

She looked at him in puzzlement for a moment, then smiled. ‘Oh, Kee.’

He put his arms around her, and kissed her forehead.

‘How could I drown in here?’ she said. ‘It’s only three feet deep.’

He said nothing.

The night was still; the wind of the morning had blown itself out. A fog lay in patches all the way along the route of the river, he could see it drifting, a grey ghost above the water, right through the field further back still, towards the village.

‘What do you think of me?’ she asked.

‘Think of you?’

‘Staying away from my family.’

‘Perhaps you had your reasons,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I had my reasons.’ She paused. ‘I’m so different to you.’

He had laughed softly. ‘Well, perhaps that’s the attraction.’

‘No, I mean I come from a different background.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s effortless with you,’ she said. ‘You see, I have to make this effort … all the time …’

‘Don’t be silly.’

She ran a hand over her forehead, pinching the skin at one temple. ‘No, you don’t understand what I mean,’ she said. ‘You see, I never fitted. I’ve never felt part of anyone.’

She was right. He didn’t understand at all. He thought she was tired, overwrought. ‘Come back to the house,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a hot drink.’

She made a tugging motion at her hair, the habitual gesture of complexity, of confusion. She did the same sometimes when thinking over mathematical problems. ‘I have so many feelings,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know how to … how to …’ She stopped, staring at the ground. ‘To be real to you. To me.’

He was totally perplexed. She might as well have been speaking in Swahili for all he understood her.

‘She didn’t want me. I wasn’t real,’ she said. ‘Just a kind of thing, to be angry with, to blame.’

‘Your mother must have been forty when she had you,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she was too old to be patient.’

‘She was forty-two.’

‘Well, then.’

‘And when I needed her, she …’ Her voice dropped. ‘She turned on me. She beat me with her fists. Her fists.’

‘Unforgivable,’ he said.

She had looked at him. ‘Was it?’

‘Of course.’ But he knew that he had missed something. Something vital had passed by him in the darkness, some revelation she found hard to part with. But it was simply beyond him. His life had always been easy and smooth. He had been brought up by parents who were jolly and uncomplicated. He had never encountered any particular problems, either with women, or money, or school, or work, or with any relationship. He had led, he supposed, a nicely charmed life … until he met her. He was always hoping it would come back again, that calm he so valued. Perhaps that was what she meant by his being effortless.

‘It would have helped if your father had been there,’ he said.

‘Either one,’ she had murmured.

She had begun to shiver. She leaned down to look at the writhing current of the water, turning over and over, a restless sleeper, on the stony chalk bed. In the summer, there was watercress in this stream. It seemed very far away at the moment.

‘She threw me out,’ she said. ‘I had nowhere to go, except to a friend’s. I couldn’t believe her hatred. I went back to the house, but she wouldn’t let me in. I rang, but she put down the phone. I was nearly eighteen …’

‘Mothers and daughters often fight,’ he had said. To tell the truth, he was very cold, and was trying to think of a way to lighten the mood, and get her back inside. He was also incredibly tired, bone tired, worn out with driving.

‘Don’t you want to know why?’ she asked. ‘What caused this … fight?’

He had tried to hug her. ‘I want you to go to sleep and try not to think about today,’ he said.

He felt her stiffen momentarily in his arms.

Then, she had obediently taken his hand, and followed him, over the dark wet grass, into the house.