Simply Heaven (59 page)

I’m in the bath and I get a phone call from my father. It’s my second bath in six hours. I can still smell my ordeal on my skin, in my hair, and I don’t know if I will ever get it off. The caller display reads ‘UNKNOWN’, but I pick it up anyway, because, despite the fact that our making contact at this point would throw all our plans into disarray, I can’t help but hope that it might be Rufus. If I’d known who it was, I wouldn’t have picked up. I can’t be planning a retribution for one crime and sweeping an identical one under the carpet. Even I’m not that much of a hypocrite. Or that much of a coward.

But Rufus hasn’t made a single call to my phone since I vanished. I know he’s washed his hands of me, given up, no longer intends to humiliate himself for the sake of our relationship. The months of game-playing have ground him down, and he’s given up. I know it’s my own fault.

I don’t discuss this with them. But in an ironic, unintentional way, it seems that, if it wasn’t for my own family, I would probably be breathing my last sometime around now. Because the only calls registered, apart from the half-dozen from Nessa when she was tracking the phone through the house, are ten unidentified-number hang-ups, the sort you get when someone’s called you from abroad. One of these must have been the one that Nessa heard in the Egyptian corridor. And I can’t think of anyone who would be calling me that consistently without leaving a message other than my family.

So I pick it up, say: ‘Hello?’ and my father, who’s calling at 6 a.m. his time, says: ‘Please don’t hang up, Princess.’

I consider doing just that. Say, eventually: ‘What do you want?’

‘What do you mean, what do I want? You’re my daughter.’

I don’t say anything in reply to this. Listen to him breathing. It sounds as though he has a bit of a cold.

‘What’s going on, Melody? I don’t understand.’

I continue the silent treatment.

So he says: ‘Look. Your mum’s got a temper. You’ve inherited it. You both say things you don’t mean, but you’ve never done this before. This is crazy. You’ve always shouted at each other, and you’ve always got over it. We don’t sulk in our family.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘We do other things instead, right?’

‘Oh, right,’ he says, ‘so you’ve got some other gripe?’

I bite my lip. ‘Well, ‘gripe’ is an interesting way of putting it.’

‘So do you mind telling me what it is, then?’

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I say, because I’ll never get used to it and saying it out loud is almost impossible to me.

‘No, I don’t,’ says Dad. ‘You women speak in code.’

‘OK, I’ll spell it out. I don’t want anything to do with you. I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to see you and I don’t want any contact with you.’

My dad’s cold suddenly sounds like it’s got a lot worse. ‘But why, Melody?’ he asks in a tremulous voice. ‘I don’t understand …’

‘Ask Mum if you can’t work it out.’

‘Melody, I’m asking
you
.’

OK. Have it your way.

‘I found out about Andy,’ I tell him.

A silence. ‘I thought you knew about that?’

‘KNEW about it?’ I feel the bile rising. ‘What you
talking
about? Do you think if I’d known about it for one minute, I’d have let you … let you do
that
– if I’d known about it?’

‘But, Melody, we were only doing what you wanted.’

‘Wanted?’ I slosh upright in the soapy water. ‘WANTED?’

‘You said you wanted to get rid of him …’

I practically drop the phone. ‘No I didn’t! No I
didn’t
!’

‘Well, what
did
you say, then?’

‘I said …’ I don’t have an answer to this. ‘I said I wished he was in hell,’ I finish.

‘Well, it was the best we could do,’ says Dad.

And I’m yelling at him. ‘How can you be so flippant about it? How can you behave like it’s a joke? Don’t you understand what you’ve done?’

‘Of course it’s not a joke,’ says Dad. ‘It’s not to you, anyway, and we wouldn’t have done it if we didn’t think it was what needed to be done.’

I am practically choking on my rage. ‘I don’t—’

And then he chortles. Actually chortles. ‘It was pretty funny, though,’ he says. ‘He wasn’t exactly dignified, splashing about begging us to let him back on board. I would have thought you’d have found it pretty—’

‘Get
away
from me! Oh my God! You’re – you’re
profane
! How can you talk about it like that? You’re – oh – God, you disgust me!’

He starts to speak, but I cut him off by hitting the hang-up button. And then I duck under the water to wash myself clean, and I’m shaking all over. Pour half a bottle of Tilly’s Crabtree and Evelyn Aloe Vera shampoo over my head and start to scrub. I feel I will never be clean again.

The phone starts to ring again. I snatch it up, snarl: ‘Leave me alone! Just leave me alone! Forget you had a daughter! I’m not your daughter! I don’t want to be the child of fucking
murderers
!’ And hang it up so hard I nearly break the button. Hit the off switch and throw the handset over on to the pile of clothes I’ve left in the corner. There are tears streaming down my face. Gritting my teeth, I drop under the surface again. Barely hear the tap on the door that announces that Tilly’s outside.

‘Are you decent?’

‘Come in,’ I tell her.

She looks concerned.

‘I thought I heard shouting.’

I swipe a soapy arm across my eyes. Bad mistake. Grope about for something to wipe them off with and find a soft fluffy towel being pressed into my hand.

‘Yes,’ I tell her, ‘no …’ I can’t quite stop a sob. ‘Oh God, how did we get these families? What did we do to deserve them?’

Tilly perches on the linen basket. ‘I don’t know. I wonder if I did something in a past life, sometimes.’

‘Well, I don’t believe in that bullshit,’ I tell her bluntly. ‘All that bloody made-up cack designed to make you say, yeah, you’re right, I drew the short straw and other people drew the long one but it’s all my fault. I deserve this.’

‘Was that your mum?’

‘My dad.’

‘I don’t suppose you want to—’

‘No.’ I massage the tension spots at the base of my skull and screw my eyes up. ‘No, not right now. I’ll tell you sometime, but not now. It’s just – I just – I don’t want to be like them. They do awful things and I don’t want to be like them.’

Tilly shakes her head. A bit sadly. ‘Nobody has to be like anything,’ she says. ‘I hope that’s true. I really hope so. How are you feeling?’

‘Awful. How about you?’

‘I can truthfully say I’ve had better days. Listen, the others are downstairs and they’ve got the phone. Do you feel up to coming down?’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Give me five minutes.’

In the kitchen, Nessa and Roly have the new phone out of its box and are programming its number into the speed-dial on Tilly’s. She’s going to walk Rufus along the Egyptian corridor on some pretext or another and set it ringing as they pass the door. But not until Nessa has accidentally-on-purpose left him in a room with the baby monitor.

‘Rufus is back at the house,’ says Nessa. ‘That’s the good news. At least there’s no more waiting around to be done.’

I sit down. I hardly dare ask. ‘How does he seem?’

‘Awful. He’s lost almost as much weight as you have. He’s spent most of the day shut away in your room. By the looks of him, I’d say he hasn’t slept much lately. Oh, and he’s been crying.’

‘Oh God.’ The thought of Rufus crying makes me want to do the same.

‘Don’t you join in,’ says Nessa.

‘What have I done to him?’

‘Steady on,’ says Roly. ‘Not you, remember? Other people. Where’s your phone?’

‘Here.’

‘Well, sling it over.’

I hand him the phone and everyone does a quick check to make sure they’re identical. I know they all think it would be best if we used the original, but where I’m going I’m not going to be parted from my lifeline, however essential the authenticity. Roly starts ploughing through the menus on the new one.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘don’t want to put flies in ointment and all that, but isn’t Rufus going to smell a rat?’

‘How so?’ asks Nessa.

‘Well – wife gone five days, find her in a lockup and she’s walking and talking?’

‘Naah,’ says Nessa. ‘Stick her back in there overnight and she’ll be wambly enough to pass.’

‘
Overnight
?’ I’m not happy about this. I’d sort of imagined four or five hours.

‘Sorry, love,’ she says. ‘Got to go for a bit of authenticity.’

‘I’m sorry, too,’ says Tilly. ‘But she’s right.’

‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be
total
authenticity,’ says Nessa. ‘As long as you’re looking a bit desperate and your hair’s messed up and you’ve got no makeup on, he’ll be so fired up by his own heroism the chances are he won’t notice the rest of it. Simple creatures, men. Throw ’em a stick and they’ll go chasing after it. Bit of misdirection, they’ll believe the moon’s made of cheese.’

‘Thanks,’ says Roly.

‘Not an insult, darling, just an observation. Paul believes to this day that if they play music it means the ice-cream van’s run out of stock.’

‘Daddy,’ says Tilly, ‘believes that Mary Fulford-Ffawkes came along and rescued him when no-one else would have him.’

This sort of puts the kibosh on the joking.

‘Bugger,’ says Roly, ‘It doesn’t seem to have “Delilah”.’

‘No,’ I say wearily. ‘I downloaded it.’

‘Bit of a stumbling block.’

‘Honestly,’ says Nessa, ‘you Amish. We’ll just infrared it across.’

She switches on my phone and she and Roly start aiming the two sets at each other like schoolkids playing with rayguns. Quietly, but not quietly enough, my voicemail tone bleeps.

‘Oop,’ says Nessa. ‘Here you go.’ Throws it to me.

I lay it down on the table.

‘Aren’t you going to get that?’

‘I’ll do it later.’

‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Might be something important.’

‘I very much doubt it.’

‘Don’t mind us,’ says Roly.

I start to protest, think: oh God, might as well just do it rather than attract attention.

It’s Costa. ‘Shit,’ he says. ‘Well, you’ll be glad to know the old man’s actually crying. Old girl is swearing like a macaw, but Dad’s blubbing away in the garden, going on about how you called him a murderer. Shit, Melody. What is your problem? Everybody does their best for you and you can’t even—’

I hit three to erase the rest of the message.

‘OK?’ asks Tilly.

‘Double glazing,’ I tell her.

No-one believes me.

‘Listen, are you feeling up to this?’ asks Nessa.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I reply. ‘If you think it’ll work.’

And then I burst into tears. I don’t want to go back there. I don’t want to be alone in the dark again. I’m so afraid.

‘I’m so afraid,’ I say. ‘He won’t want me. It won’t work.’

‘Ah, come on, sweetheart,’ says Nessa. ‘Rufus loves the spots off you.’

‘Not any more. Not after everything that’s happened. He hates me.’

‘Bollocks,’ says Roly. ‘You’re knackered and things look iffy. Stiff upper lip. Always darkest before dawn. That sort of thing.’

‘He doesn’t hate you. He just feels awful. He’s had his heart broken, but that’s not the same as hating you.’

‘I’m a ball-busting, foul-mouthed
bitch
. You’ve no idea. You’ve no idea the things I said …’

Roly hums and hahs a bit and says something about having a fair idea, actually. Oh, arse. I thought he said they didn’t talk. ‘Still,’ he says, ‘better a ball-busting bitch to the face than a sneaky assassin creeping about in the dark, what?’

‘He needs,’ says Nessa, ‘to know you need him. They’re simple that way, men.’

‘But I
do
! I
do
need him!’

‘And that,’ she says, ‘is how come you’ve got to go back in there.’

‘I don’t
want
to go back in there.’

‘I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t want to myself.’

‘Chin up,’ says Roly. ‘Faint heart never won fair wossname.’

‘Someone get her a drink,’ says Nessa. Has a feel of my pulse for good measure and says: ‘Look, Melody, we’re all in this together. You’re just going to have to trust us, OK? Believe me. Forty-eight hours and the whole thing will be over.’

And first up, I pay a visit to Beatrice.

Roly, of course, knows where all the secret passages are. He shows me the way into our bedroom, through which the Hilary-Mary-Roberts spectre found its way the night they walled me up: a lath-lined corridor that runs the length of the Georgian corridor, parallel to it and only eighteen inches wide. He shows me how to get all the way from the Victorian wing to the Queen Anne without showing myself in the public parts of the building. And it’s Roly who knows the way into Beatrice’s lair.

I don’t really know what to expect. I was never exactly invited in for a visit before. I wouldn’t be surprised to find her tucked up in a silk-lined coffin. But, of course, it’s a room like any other at Bourton Allhallows: dusty, dark, filled with the sort of furniture they use as props for the bi-annual rerecord of
A Christmas Carol
.

I step silently through the door, which is hidden, like the one in my and Rufus’s room, in the shadows beyond the drape of the four-poster. I can’t see Beatrice yet, propped against her pillows, but Nessa is on the other side of the room, busying herself with tidying the pots of Polyfilla and the jars of heavy-duty chalk on the dressing table. She catches sight of me in the mirror, tips me the wink. Picks up a bottle of something pink and industrial-looking and calls: ‘What’s this, Mrs Wattestone? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.’

This, while Beatrice has her head turned away from me, is my cue to step out and stand beside the bed. Three or four feet back so that the combination of her aged eyesight and the forty-watt miser’s bulb in the bedside lamp will make the hammy makeup job we put together in the Blue Bathroom look more or less authentic.

I have blue-white skin, and magenta lips. Shadows beneath my eyes and a tracery of purple veins running across my cheeks and down my throat to plunge into the
décolletage
of my nightgown. My hair is dried and coarse, hangs in knots down my back. I look, well,
dead
.