A Place Of Safety (34 page)

‘I went to see Ann today.’

‘What?’

‘Around lunchtime.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t. It was so awful, Val. Tubes and drips and machinery . . . and poor Ann hardly there at all.’

‘Oh God, Lou.’

‘She’s dying, I know she is.’ Louise burst into a flood of tears. Val climbed out of the armchair, came over and put his arms round her as he had when she was a little girl. For a moment Louise allowed herself the comforting conceit that things were once more as they used to be. But then the longing for veracity, to have everything absolutely straight between them, drove her on.

‘They said . . .’ She was crying so much she could hardly speak. ‘He hadn’t been to see her at all . . .’

‘Who?’

‘Lionel.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Or even rung up.’

‘You talked to the wrong person. Reception changes all the time at these big places.’

‘This was the nurse at intensive care.’

Val withdrew then. First physically, the warm muscly flesh of his arms hardening until Louise felt she was being embraced by two curved planks of wood. Then disengaging his emotions.

‘I thought you’d stopped all this.’ Val’s voice was cold. He got up and moved away.

‘Val - don’t go!’

‘I thought you’d changed. That you’d begun to understand.’

‘I do,’ cried Louise.

‘Now you’re calling him a liar.’ He looked down at her with a detachment that was not entirely without sympathy. ‘I’ve asked Jax to come and live here, Louise. Whether you move out or not. You’ll just have to accept it.’

‘How can I accept something that makes you so unhappy?’

‘It’s not about being happy. It’s about being glad to be alive.’

 

After his sister had gone to bed and cried herself to sleep, Val sat near the window of his own room, gazing out at the great cedar tree in the driveway of the house opposite. Louise had wept so violently and for so long, he had thought she might make herself ill. Yet he did not go to her for he was unable to say what she longed to hear and knew his presence could only torment her further.

It was true what he had said about being glad to be alive. Equally true that, for a great deal of the time, he now experienced pain and fright. But the moment was long gone when he could have walked away. No question now of weighing distress against satisfaction and trying to decide if the game was worth the candle.

Dante had got it right. And von Aschenbach. Look, lust after, love and worship youth and beauty. Just don’t touch. But what about the ‘strife below the hipbones’, as he had somewhere read the sexual urge memorably described. It seemed to Val the more frequently his longing for Jax was satisfied, the more powerful it became. Tonight, sitting awkwardly in the untidy sitting room of the Old Rectory asking after Lawrence’s wife, Val had felt he was on fire.

Jax and Lionel sat facing him on a sofa that was splashed with red stains. Jax was drinking Coke, his tongue darting in and out of the glass like a fish. Each time he reached out for his glass, the dragonfly tattoo passed through a fall of light from a standard lamp and sprang to iridescent life. Lionel sat as in a waking dream: calm, smiling and looking at nothing and no one in particular.

Val did not stay long. He couldn’t bear having Jax within arm’s reach and not be able to touch him. The boy’s blazing blue eyes shone with sexual invitation. The flickering tongue, nothing but a sensual wind-up, was already driving Val mad. He prayed that Jax would offer to see him to the door, perhaps even come outside for a moment and stand close to him in the darkness. But Jax did not move. Just waved an ironical goodbye, lifting his glass.

Val had no illusions about what his life would be like when the boy moved in. Though his love for Jax was immensely powerful it was also powerless. He would give and give until it hurt. Until not only his bank balance but his heart was bled white. Jax would take, physically, emotionally and fiscally, as much as he liked for as long as it suited him. Then he would be off. He would not grow to love Mozart or Palestrina. Nor would he ever be persuaded to read a grown-up newspaper, let alone Austen or Balzac. Such Pygmalion longings Val now recognised as hopelessly foolish. Yet they were not ignoble and he could not laugh at them as he could easily have done had they been held by someone else.

This bleak clairvoyance, showing no ray of light or comfort at all, did not unduly depress Val. He liked the thought that he was prepared for anything and believed he would be able to cope when the end came even though the thought filled him with despair.

There was no one to talk to about all this. Val had several good friends, straight as well as gay, but there was not one who could possibly understand. Bruno, yes, perhaps, but he was now a cloud of dust blowing across the Quantocks where they had loved to walk. And Val, who, scattering the ashes, had thought he would die any minute, torn apart by utter loneliness, now spent every waking moment of his life longing for someone else.

He got up stiffly - Louise was quiet at last - and rubbed the muscles of his calves. He had woken that morning with a blinding headache and had not cycled either on the road or on the runners in the garage, the first time he had missed for months and his legs knew about it.

The halogen light came on in the Rectory garden. The tortoiseshell cat from the Red Lion sauntered across the grass then stopped and crouched, quite motionless. Val was on the point of turning away when he noticed the blue door was only half visible. A tall wedge of dark shadow stood in for the missing section. The door was standing open.

His heart exploding with sudden joy, Val ran out of the house across the moonlit road and up the narrow carpeted stairs. Into the darkest moments of his life.

Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby stirred his chopped banana and muesli. Gave a moody sigh. Put his spoon down.

‘Is there any more coffee?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said Joyce, directing her attention to the empty cafetière. ‘And I’m not making any more. You drink far too much of that stuff as it is. Have you cut down at work?’

‘Yes.’

‘You promised.’

‘
Yes
.’ Barnaby pushed his bowl aside. ‘For heaven’s sake.’

‘What was the matter last night?’

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

He had had fragmentary dreams, vivid little cuttings and snippets all relating to what was overwhelmingly on his mind but juxtaposed in ridiculous combinations that made not the slightest sense. Valentine Fainlight cycling furiously on Ferne Basset village green but never moving from the spot, with Vivienne Calthrop hovering just above the ground behind him like a sequinned barrage balloon. Louise Fainlight in a wetsuit made of crocodile skin, fishing with a billhook in the weeds of a fast-flowing river and catching it on the frame of an old pushchair. Ann Lawrence, young and beautiful, wearing a flowered dress, climbing into an open red car. Straightaway a transparent canopy festooned with tubes and jars fell over her and the car turned into a hospital bed. Lionel Lawrence, in a room like yet unlike Carlotta’s, threw ornaments and books around and tore up posters while Tanya, this time an angel in truth with huge feathered wings, perched on top of a bookshelf and shoved two fingers at him, grinning.

Finally there was Jackson floating up from Barnaby’s subconscious in the shape of a monstrous rocking sailor doll. It was laughing, a clockwork cackle, and the more it was pushed, the more it laughed and bounced back. Beaten and thumped and pushed and beaten, the mechanical laughter became louder and louder, finally distorting into one long scream. This was when Barnaby awoke and knew it was himself that screamed.

Joyce reached out across the table and took his hand. ‘You’ll have to let go of this, Tom.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You always say—’

‘I know what I always say. This one’s different.’

‘You’re like that man with the whale.’

‘That’s right.’ Barnaby managed a bitter smile. ‘Call me Ahab.’

‘It’ll break sooner or later.’

‘Yes.’

‘Try and—’

‘Joycey, I’m sorry. I’m going to be late.’

If anything, he was twenty minutes early. Joyce followed her husband into the hall, helped him on with his overcoat. Took down a scarf.

‘I don’t want that.’

‘Just take it with you. It’s really chilly. There’s mist in the garden.’

She watched him get into the car from the hall window. Heard the aggressive revving and the engine picking up speed, too early and too fast, as he drove off. Then the telephone called her away.

 

Something terrible had happened to Val. Louise was so used to her brother getting up first that, on waking to a silent house, she simply assumed he was away doing his daily twenty-mile run.

She flung on some warm trousers and a jersey, made some tea and took it outside. Barnaby had found the garden at Fainlights too rigidly austere for his taste. But it was precisely this constrained formality that appealed to Louise. Edges were straight, low barriers of yew were precisely angled, shrubs were shaped into unmoving elegance by skilful clipping, the dark water in the pool remained unruffled. Even overlaid as it was now by the rattle and roar of the approaching Causton and District Council’s refuse collection lorry, the scene was very peaceful.

Louise wandered idly around, drinking her tea, stopping to admire a delightful sculpture of a hare and stroking its ears, rubbing a scented leaf between her fingers. Coming to the back wall, she noticed the key was missing from the garden door. It was a large iron key, always turned in the lock against intruders but never removed, Val’s theory being that anyone who could gain access to the thing would be in the garden already and if Louise started keeping it in a safe place it would soon get lost.

Louise turned the handle and stepped out onto a narrow grass verge bordered by a ditch. On the other side of the ditch a long field of stubble bordered by hedges stretched away to the main road. The key was not on this side either. She would look for it after breakfast and buy a bolt and padlock in Causton if it could not be found.

Moving away from the garden, she wandered round to the garage. Though the stack of bikes was there, the Alvis was missing. Then, to her surprise, Louise saw it in the road, parked neatly, close to the kerb. The refuse lorry pulled up. A man took the Fainlights’ wheelie-bin and hooked it onto the lifting apparatus. There was a loud thump as the contents were emptied and the bin was banged back onto the pavement. Louise pushed it into the garage.

Returning to the house, she called her brother’s name and, receiving no response, went to his room. Val was sitting on a low chair very close to a window overlooking the village street and the Old Rectory drive. On his knees were a pair of field glasses from an earlier birdwatching phase. His fingers gripped the leather strap so tightly the white knuckles seemed to be almost cracking the skin. His car keys were on the floor by his feet.

‘Val?’ His utter stillness frightened her. ‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

It was as if he hadn’t heard. He didn’t even turn his head. Just swayed slightly as if slipping into sleep then jerked himself upright. He still wore his clothes from yesterday.

‘Have you been here all night?’

‘Nothing.’

Louise stared, bewildered, then realised he was answering her first question.

‘Are you ill? Val?’ She reached out and touched him then snatched her hand back. His arm was cold and heavy as a stone. ‘You’re frozen. I’ll get you a hot drink.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘How long have you been sitting here?’

‘Go away, Lou. No, wait! I need a pee.’ He handed her the glasses. Then, walking quickly away, ‘Don’t take your eyes off the house.’

Louise waited for him to come back, not watching any house, with or without the glasses. When he did so he turned from her, once again staring out with feverish concentration, squinting and peering through the lenses.

Louise waited a few moments, sensing she had been forgotten. She was unsure what to do next. Making a cup of tea, the universal English panacea for everything from a headache to fire, flood and pestilence, seemed rather a futile gesture. But he was so cold. And it was better than doing nothing. But then, as she began to move away, Val started to speak.

‘I can cope . . . that is, as long as I . . . I
can
cope . . . I’ll be able . . . to handle . . . only I’ve got to . . . then . . . tell me . . . ask him . . .
ask
him . . . torment . . . I can’t bear . . . not . . . not . . .’

All this anguished mumbling was punctuated by sucked-in, painful wheezes. He sounded like someone having an asthma attack. Louise waited, devastated, for this wildness to run its course. There was small comfort in knowing that none of it was meant for her. Just before she left the room he brought the glasses up quickly with a little cry then, just as quickly, dropped them. His shoulders sagged with disappointment.

Louise retreated to the kitchen. Making tea and wondering who on earth she could turn to in her dilemma brought her sharply up against the realisation that, now that Ann was not here, there was no one. She and Val had always been self-sufficient, each to the other, while living in Ferne Basset. Keeping yourself to yourself was all very fine until one of you became helpless. She considered ringing their GP then almost immediately abandoned the idea. What was the point? The man would hardly come out to see someone simply because they were utterly wretched and gabbling senselessly to themselves. And if he did, how might Val react? In this present, thoroughly unbalanced state he seemed quite capable of throwing the doctor down the stairs and himself straight after.

What could have happened since they parted company the night before to have reduced him to this pitiful condition? That it was Jax’s doing she had no doubt. She wondered if she dared ask Val then quickly decided against it. Not because she feared his reaction but because she was afraid he might decide to tell her the truth.