More Than Love Letters (26 page)

I keep going over and over in my head all the things she said on my answerphone that day. I’ve taken out the tape (her tirade had filled it up, and somehow I couldn’t bring myself to press rewind and wipe it all away), and it lurks accusingly in the bottom of my briefcase. I don’t need to listen to it again, even if I could bear to. I can remember every word – and, worse, every wounded inflection of her voice.

She said I’ve never really cared about people as individuals, not
really
cared, that I’ve only ever been interested in using their problems to make larger policy points. It should be the other way round, she said, with policies only mattering because of how they can help individuals. Well, it may have been true of my cosmetically engineered surgeries – hell, Mike, it definitely
was
true – and I’ll admit that making an issue out of Helen’s death in the way that I did was a huge mistake. I knew how high Margaret’s feelings were running about poor Helen, and about our respected colleagues in the Great British press. So yes, that was crassness of the highest order. But what about Nasreen? I never even met the girl, any more than I met Helen, but I was genuinely concerned about her. Didn’t I tread half the pavements north of the river fly-posting her photo on every prominent object? That hare-brained wild goose chase (if you’ll forgive the zoologically mixed metaphor) nearly cost me the promotion for which I’ve worked and waited (not to mention swallowed my principles and crawled on my belly) for eight long years. And what is getting into government, getting into a position of power and influence, all about, after all? It’s so I can help more of those all-important individuals about whom Margaret is so concerned!

She said I only took up the issues she raised (the sanitary towels, the wheelie bins, and the inevitable blasted dog poo) to impress her, and not because I ever believed that any of it mattered. Well, too damned right, actually! None of it would have merited a second glance if it hadn’t been for her – if I hadn’t seen how much she cared about those things. But she’s so indiscriminate in her passions. She’s got no sense of perspective – no comprehension that yes, actually, some causes simply
are
bigger and more worth spending time on than others. Wasn’t securing a change in national asylum policy bigger than finding Nasreen? Though I’m not sure Margaret would agree. She always takes up with equal gusto the cause of every waif and stray that crosses her path, however undeserving, however unhinged. She’d call it being ‘non-judgemental’. But one woman’s non-judgemental is the next man’s blindly undiscerning. Sometimes you
have
to make a judgement. In politics, judgements matter, judgements are everything. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done.

But I can’t argue with her about it, can’t tell her how she’s so right but also so wrong, because she won’t talk to me. I can’t see any way out of it, but nor can I seem to accept that it’s all over. God, I want her back – but I don’t think it’s fixable.

I’d ask your advice, mate, but I would probably end up sacked, arrested, evicted, deselected and/or bankrupt.

Richard.

 

 

From:
Michael Carragan [[email protected]]
Sent:
22/7/05 09:16
To:
Richard Slater [[email protected]]

 

Good grief, Richard! All this introspective soul-searching is most unnatural in a red-blooded male – bad for the liver, you know. Speaking of which . . . want to try that new Bavarian Bierkeller off Birdcage Walk, over near the park?

Michael.

 

 

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
22/7/05 17:43
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Hi Margaret,

Still feeling delicate around the Richard issue? Have you spoken to him at all? Or is it beyond that? Even if the whole thing is over, it sometimes helps to clear the air, I always think. And I don’t mean just on to a tape going round and round in a machine.

Broken heart apart, how was your end of term, chuck? The usual orgy of stock-taking and recorder concerts and dismantling of displays and mini Mars bar distribution and deciding who takes home the hamster? I think I would probably have been better giving Hammy his freedom and letting him take his chances on the estate than entrusting him to any of mine, but in the end I took a risk on Chitra Prabhu because at least her family are veggies so he won’t end up on toast.

It’s funny saying goodbye to your very first ever proper class, isn’t it? And I discovered there were some things I was finding it even harder to let go of than others. Specifically, the thought of Declan outside my classroom door at three o’clock. But we ursulines must fight fleshly temptation, through immersion in prayer and the study of improving texts. Or in this case, weather permitting, five weeks on a rug on the patch of grass behind our flats (the latter being the exact size of the former), with the Ambre Solaire and some Louise Bagshawe. Interspersed with one week of much the same in Gran Canaria with Paula. Plus the usual amount of time spent jollying Mum and Dad along.

And you? You know, you really ought to do something to take your mind off men. Other than your witchy support group stuff, I mean. You could come and see me – you know you’re welcome any time.

Great big hugs,

Becs xxx

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton
[[email protected]]
Sent:
22/7/05 18:55
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

Well, until Monday, my closely nursed plan had been to spend a large part of the summer holidays in Richard’s flat. In fact, to be brutally frank, in Richard’s bedroom, in the approximate vicinity of the bed. So now, nothing particular in prospect. Might go to Mum and Dad’s for a bit. I’ve definitely promised Gran a visit – I had intended to take Richard down there, too. She’ll be disappointed, because they got along really well.

We’ve finally decided, after another month gone by with no word, to report Nasreen to the police as a missing person. Mind you, I don’t exactly expect the Met to pull out all the stops looking for just another young runaway – a foreigner at that, and not even underage. Alison says that once last year Marianne went on a bender and didn’t turn up for three days, so on the third evening they reported her missing at Ipswich police station. The desk sergeant solemnly took note of all the details and circulated her description, but it later transpired that they’d actually had her belowstairs all day, floating slowly back down to reality in their own cells. I feel I ought to go back to London and continue the search for Nasreen myself, but I’m pretty sure it would be fruitless, and somehow, on my own, I don’t have the heart for it.

I was watching the six o’clock news just now, downstairs with Cora, when Snuffy came in from the garden with half a rosemary bush forming an extension to her imperviously wagging tail. She flopped down against the settee to watch the rest of the bulletin with us, apparently blithely unaware of the mass of spiky vegetation adhering to her nether end. By chance, the next item concerned the ever-mounting stakes in the War on Terror. Heightened airport security, Aunty Beeb reassured us, is the latest plank in the nation’s defence against terrorist atrocity – this bracing news accompanied by footage of two officious-looking spaniels, one black and white and one liver and white, applying enthusiastic noses to the contents of a litter bin. So, on the one hand, ranged against us we have the uncompromising and unknowable might of Al-Qaeda. On the other, lined up in defiant opposition, we have, er . . . a few extra springer spaniels. I must say, it is not a thought to make me sleep any easier in my bed at nights.

Anyway, I’m very grateful for the invitation to come and experience for myself the glories of Moss Side – I might well take you up on it.

Much love,

Margaret x

 

 

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
1/8/05 18:33
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Well, Margaret, I have abandoned my uncharacteristic cloistered ways. There was a medieval fair this weekend, out of town on the Cheshire side, and I went along on a reconnaissance mission for school. Useful, too. I think the kids would enjoy a visit from this shoe-maker I came across. He not only shrinks his end product to the size and shape of his feet by soaking them in his own urine and wearing them in that state overnight, but also prepares his shoe leather himself, straight from the abattoir it appears, and swears by dog faeces as being an unrivalled caustic agent for use in the tanning process. Believe me, that man brings a whole new dimension to the concept of smelly feet!

But where was I? Oh yes, my abduction from the convent, which was effected by a gentil knight in shining armour, resplendent upon a white charger. Fate willed that his name is Hugh, which seemed suitably seignorial. Or that’s what I thought it was at first, but it turns out to be Huw (he’s from the Rhondda valley), which if not positively Arthurian is at least redolent of the Celtic fringe. Of which he possesses rather an attractive specimen, shading mystic jade-green eyes. And actually the horse was brown (so, also the wrong hue). Anyway, he is a telephone engineer during the week and a historical reconstructionist at the weekends, with a nifty line in jousting. (We’ll take as read the jokes about how he handles his lance, shall we?)

It all happened when I was watching the grand tourney. At the entrance to the lists, Huw’s refractory steed decided to take a dislike to all the fluttering flags, and began cavorting and tittuping in a theatrical style, rolling its eyes melodramatically, and moving in any direction but forward, like a temperamental supermarket trolley. Huw applied his homemade spurs with a little too much vigour, the horse kicked up its heels in protest, and one horseshoe flew off and caught me a far from lucky blow across the right instep. (It had been shod, I afterwards learned, by an anthropology student named Henry, a callow and implausibly unsinewy youth, who had only lately turned his hand to costume blacksmithery. The horse itself, fortuitously also called Henry, was moonlighting from its day job at the local riding school.) Huw dismounted at once, and my flow of muttered expletives was arrested in midstream by the blaze of concerned green eyes, rendered strangely disembodied by the interjacent visor of his helmet. Paying no heed to my protests, he picked me up bodily and carried me over to Henry (the equine one), who was standing nearby on three and a half legs, nonchalantly browsing the clover and trying to look uninvolved. Huw lifted me into the saddle, managing to redouble the pain in my foot as he did so, with an unscheduled bash against the pommel (or it might equally have been a pastern, a poll or a pelham, for all I know the difference).

Once inside his tent, the deftness with which Huw removed my Timberland and slid his finger down into my sock captured my attention immediately, and my outrage began to be tempered with warmer feelings. These increased when he doffed his helmet, and unbuckled his breastplate to reveal a buttonless shirt and an expanse of well-muscled knightly torso. (Though, given his ancestry, probably in reality more collier than warrier.) I offered to help him off with the rest of his armour, and found myself coming over like Sir Thomas Tom of Appledore (‘at times like these the bravest knight may find his armour much too tight’). It turned out that Huw had also been brought up on
Now We Are Six
, and we were soon both giggling like schoolgirls on a sugar high. But later, when he was reclining armourless and openshirted on a pile of sheepskins by the flickering firelight, I can tell you, kid, Huw looked all man. In fact he was every damsel’s dream come true. I was lost – and all for want of a horseshoe nail.

You see how I live only to divert and entertain you with my amorous exploits, and take your mind off Richard? How is the trying-to-forget-him-and-move-on coming along, by the way?

Love and hugs,

Becs xx

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton
[[email protected]]
Sent:
7/8/05 23:51
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

Dear oh dear. Following your exploits with the pornographic plumber, I fear you have now strayed into the pages of a trashy historical bodice-ripper. I’m not sure that the carrying off and ravishment of nuns is exactly consistent with the ideals of the age of chivalry – though I expect a lot of it did go on. If you twist my arm I could give you 4.5 for ‘seignorial’, I suppose, and a 3 for ‘refractory’, which I always mistake for a kind of dining room. And OK, no lance jokes, but what about his sword? I bet he can hew away pretty smartly with that, too!

You have cheered me up no end, thanks, Becs – and boy, did I need it! It’s not proving so easy to put Richard, and Helen, and the whole awful business out of my mind. Her father has been banging on in the paper again about an inquiry, though I must say Richard seems to have backed off a bit now. He hasn’t been quoted talking about it again, so maybe he has rediscovered some remnants of conscience. But there’s something else. Helen left a diary. Pat T. and Emily at the hostel found it when they packed up her things. They wanted to give it back to Helen’s mother with the rest of her possessions, but I said that then it would never be read, would probably just end up thrown away, and I couldn’t bear that to happen. So I kept it myself. It has taken me until now to bring myself to open it at all, but once I’d started I haven’t been able to stop. It’s incredibly painful, but I feel this horrible compulsion to read every word (so far I’m up to midway through 2003). In a funny kind of way, I feel that I owe it to Helen.

I remember Richard saying that they used to call one of the Labour Party’s 1980s election manifestos the ‘longest suicide note in history’. But it wasn’t – this is. It’s agony, reading about her life in that family – what that man did to her, and how it made her feel. And then I get even more knotted up inside, remembering that Richard was prepared to meet him, to fight his corner, to lend his support to the public pretence that Helen’s depression and suicide were just bad luck, just one of those things that can happen, even in the nicest families. However much I miss him, and whatever else he’s done, that’s the one thing for which I can never forgive him.