Blind Date (39 page)

There was another room on another floor for him, for now.

“C
an I stay with my son, please? Just another minute?”

“No, madam. No.”

J
oe's father was a nice man,
too, surprisingly petit in comparison to his son. It was the mother, a terrifying specimen of spectacular proportions, who carried the genetic clues to the height and breadth of her son. The voice which emerged from her magnificent chest was sweet and light; she looked as if she could sing, even when she cast the full blast of nuclear disapproval on Elisabeth Kennedy.

“No,” Joe said. “No, No, no. I was mending a clock.”

It was impossible for them to approve of what they saw, apart from the haircut: tolerance was the best they could offer. With all the robustness of a medical family which discourages the offspring from taking any form of ill-health or accident seriously, they still wanted to bear him home to rest on clean, cotton sheets until scar tissue formed and well-meant lectures began.
He went, but would not stay for long. He told them he needed to look after his friend Elisabeth, who would take longer to cure. Which gave rise to brisk remarks about what a good job he had done so far, and who, pray, would be looking after whom? Self-pity was regarded in a worse light than sin.

Muscles mended: bones knit and wounds healed. Elisabeth was told, in a series of platitudes, how everything would cure itself in time, and for once, she began to believe it. She watched the waning of the year.

And, on an afternoon when the autumn began to slide into winter, after she came home from the coast, they met in the tower, and with one accord, climbed to the top. He noticed that she was scarcely fatter.

There were vast stanchions like pillars in the clock room, supporting the ceiling above. No-one had actually declared the place uninhabitable, because no-one had imagined that anyone would wish to persist. Even squatters quailed at the sight of blood, just as Flynn was appalled by the presence of suitcases, until he thought of rent and purchase and budget and how much better it was when a place is heated and dry, and loved, and how much effort he had made to lure them back. He was still guilty about letting someone steal the third key, from his own pocket. In the spring, when a committee had decided how best and cheaply to achieve it, the bells would be removed. All except the bell, so closely related to the face of the clock, which told the world, day and night, that it was only ten to four. By five, it was beginning to become dark. On this evening, a mild twilight.

“Joseph Maxell, how the hell did you move the hands on this clock? They weigh plenty.”

“I haven't got the faintest idea how.”

The floor had been scrubbed, leaving the faintest of marks. He looked at them and tried to cover
it all with the heel of a training shoe.

“Never knew I had it in me.”

“Have you been drinking?”

“Not yet. I hope to start, as soon as possible.”

She had longed to see him; and that was the politician's understatement. He had been the lifeline. Thrown, after his careless fashion: she was pretending now that she had never clutched such a rope. She was brittle, still. Tainted. With his cropped hair and ironed clothes, he looked as conventional as a banker. She missed his mass of hair more than she missed her own.

“Everything at home all right then?” he asked, infected with her awkwardness. As if he did not know. “I'll go and dig her up,”: that boy Matthew must have said it dozens of times. He knew that when she came to the phone, she had hurried and arrived out of breath, which was enough for a man to imagine she was pleased to hear him. He had sat by his own, imagining the curl of her cigarette sneaking towards the ceiling, as it did now.

“I've got this chandelier,” she said. “Arriving tomorrow. Enormous. We'll have to bring it in pieces. I thought you might like to put it together. Your kind of task.”

“Matthew told me,” he said. “He talks a lot, doesn't he?”

“Oh yes.”

Still that awkwardness. Too much to say. The bell chamber was sheltered, but becoming cold. Someone had swept it clean and clear. She hesitated, feeling as she had with Jenkins yesterday, the same old urge to weep.

“Will you forgive me, Joe? Will you forgive
us?”

“For what?”

She waved a hand, as if the “we” included the bells and the bricks.

“Encouraging you into this morass. Introducing
you to… evil. For want of a better word.”

He shook his head. “I don't know what evil is. Only that it has a certain scarcity value. And you didn't encourage me in. I walked, I trespassed, I barged. I insisted. And even if this were an ending and not a beginning, I wouldn't have any regrets.”

“You can't mean that.”

He grinned, thought about it. “My hair,” he said plaintively. “Took years to grow.”

“Ah, poor Samson. You shouldn't have risked it.”

Mocking him, while she touched his short crop, reaching up to do so. He touched the curls which nestled into her neck. The beating of her heart sounded louder than any bell.

“You were brave,” she said. “Did I ever tell you that? Brave to give a fool a warning.”

“Me? Brave? Don't get that idea. I'm only stubborn. And …” he choked on a vital word and amended it into something else, “…
I like
you. Ever since—”

“You saw a picture of my sister,” she said flatly.

“Oh, no. Sooner than that.”

She lit another cigarette. His liking of the smell, was, he supposed, simply another perversity, easily as odd as love.

“You don't know me, Joe.” There was something bubbling below the surface of her voice. Joy, relief and an urge to shout, even if it throttled itself in doubt. He did not yet know how it was she threw things at walls when she was happy as well as enraged. There was a yearning to keep on touching, without ever again thinking of a witness to what she said, or did. “I am utterly corrupt. Secretive, jealous, a liar…”

“Oh, I know all that. I know it could have been me under that bell. I know you had this place booby-trapped. You could have killed me. You would have crushed me.
If
I had been a thief.”

She stared at him, the joy
fading. “You know.”

He kissed her, lightly, on the hair. Her hands fluttered. Her fingernails had grown long. She did not know what to do with her hands. Pray with them. Pray that he meant what he said and this awful, breathless sensation would leave her throat.

“Elisabeth Kennedy, I know you that well.”

He snapped his fingers. “Like
that.
You'd never set a trap without baiting it with something real. Such a thing would be a cheat. You might have done it once, but never twice. First time went against nature. You're such a capable liar, but you don't know how to be dishonest.”

The bell lay on one side, abandoned, the inside of it dark as a cave; the metal cold to the touch. Joe knelt beside it, holding the rim, extended his long arm into the depths, felt with sensitive fingers. There was a small packet, waxed around the fitting for the poor, mutilated, clapper: the packet so small, it was almost undetectable against the size and roughness of the rest. She watched him retrieve it and pick at the wax, finding the little plastic pouch.

“Hold out your hand.”

She did so and he saw how it trembled.

He shook into her palm half of the contents. Chips of nondescript stone, each the size of a baby's thumbnail, the colour of dull brass. A small shower of playthings, unbeautiful, uninteresting, undecorative, with no apparent purpose. Except perhaps, to fill the base of a fish tank, or act as ballast for the roots around an indoor plant. Pieces of nothing.

“What are they?”

She sighed. He flicked on the light from the high switch by the low door. He knew this place; everything in it.

“Industrial diamonds. I don't know the value, never did. My father said, ‘Enough to buy a house.' He didn't say what kind of house. These are what he collected in his working life. Other bits and pieces, too, but
these, the most reliable. A fitting gift for the plainer daughter, but of course, they aren't mine. They never were. He knew what I would do with them.” She said this without rancour.

“He knew I'd keep them safe. Until it was the right time to use them to preserve my mother's house for the next generation. And that's what I'll do, what I was always going to do, when I can find some way of explaining to her. I may have to pretend to win the lottery. He wanted to torment her, poor soul. Now that's an aberration. I'm not his daughter, and yet I inherit all his deviousness. I might belong to Caroline Smythe.”

He was shaking; his top teeth biting his lower lip. Her hand, back in his hair, wanting to touch, but uncertain.

“Put them down, Lizzie. Get shot of them as soon as ever. They worry me. I hate them.”

“I suppose a few of these would mend the clock.”

“No,” he said, frowning at her. “That bloody clock is
mine.”

She flicked the little, light fragments back into the packet with the ease of an expert, and let the packet drop.

“I don't suppose you want a small blonde lightweight thrown in? Only if you're going to live here, I've got nowhere else to go.”

“Oh, you are a fool.”

The shadows of two bodies fused. The light faded into dark, as if there had never been daylight. He was murmuring into her ear, tugging at the curls with a kind of urgency. Muttering that there was something important he had to say.

“What? Oh God, Joe… it's been so long. We're getting dusty… can we go downstairs?”

“You do know I don't have a pension plan?”

I
t was a nicely silent house, creaking to
sleep. The unseen sea, murmuring.

“… Oh, a little patching hither and thither, and we shall see out another winter …” Mrs. Diana Kennedy wrote to her daughter. She had never been comfortable with the telephone. She was of a generation which would always find it easier to write a letter, once she regained practice. The idea of a fax machine was abhorrent. There was something pleasant about the thought that a letter took time to arrive, as if the thoughts inside the words might take it upon themselves to mature en route, and any silly sentiment would become wise.

“I suppose it gives one a purpose. Our American is returning to Chicago, but he might be back for Christmas. Isn't that nice? Tomorrow, I'm going to change my hairstyle. What do you think?” Diana looked away from the page and frowned at the stain on the ceiling. “Well that's the best news. I worry about you, darling. Wish you'd stayed longer. And, on a more serious note, I can't, of course, stop thinking about things. I'd be a liar if I said I could. I
wish
there had been a better resolution. I
wish
I knew which of them killed her; the mother, or the son, but neither of them is ever going to tell us and neither will be tried for it. Perhaps, some day. I
wish
you could bring yourself to tell me what you had to do with finding the first suspect, poor man. I don't suppose you'll ever be able to tell me. Don't worry, darling. It may be better I never know. You're quite right. It isn't always wise to be open about everything. No-one deserves to know
everything
about anyone else. I
wish
, above everything else, that I had not unlocked that rage in Caroline Smythe: what did I have to envy? I
wish
that I'd never given her house room, or failing that, never rejected her. What demons we foster, including our own. I feel it's all my fault. You told me not to think like that, but I do. I do, and that's my burden. I have to live with it, but
I since I must, I shall. I get so
angry
with the garden at this time of year. It's so dull and ragged. Do you know, I do believe Matthew is taking an interest? Not for long. The computer rules: I do wish it didn't. He can type, with two fingers. Unbelievable. Says it's easier than writing. He wrote something strange, yesterday. It was a story for school … he has this crush on the English teacher. It made my blood chill a bit, but it didn't seem to worry him. He was writing something about two people coming to a house where a little boy lived with his mummy and daddy. ‘Oh, bother, it's her,' Mummy says, and sends him to bed. He doesn't see who comes in, but he hears them all saying hallo. ‘Hallo, Caroline,' says Mummy, and then ‘Hallo, Jack, how are you?' She's acting surprised to see them together. Puts her fist in her mouth, but she may be yawning. I don't know where ‘Jack' came from. Do you? Have you ever heard him mention a Jack? All these strange companions of his, Sylvester, Joe, Sammy, Motar, Oza, but never a Jack. I don't know where this wretched Jack came from. He doesn't either.

“The saddest thing about the story, though, is what the mummy says next. She says, ‘I'm sorry, but I'm busy, you can't come in.' So they give her a bunch of flowers. Then they leave. If only it had been like that. For darling Emma, and that other girl. I've written to her mother.

“Mustn't brood. Whatever is the point?

“Take care, darling. And don't be afraid of the dark. Or of him. That's all for the moment.”

She paused. Thought of what else to say.

“There's a lovely high tide this evening. Do you know what I thought when you were born? I thought, if this is love, you can never get enough. Don't forget, will you?”

FRANCES FYFIELD
has spent much of her professional life practicing as a criminal lawyer, work which has informed her highly acclaimed novels. She has been the recipient of both the Gold and Silver Crime Writers' Association Daggers. She is also a regular broadcaster on Radio 4, most recently as the presenter of the series
Tales from the Stave
. She lives in London and in Deal, overlooking the sea, which is her passion.