Tarnished (14 page)

‘Yum,’ I say. I am starving hungry. I always am when I come here from school. It’s the sea air, Nan says. Makes me hungry – and sleepy too.

‘Sit down over there, dearie,’ Nan says, pointing to the other stool, opposite Gramps.

I sit on the stool and swing my feet backwards and forwards on the side of the freezer. I open my book at the place where I was reading with the plan of getting stuck back in while Nan gets on with plating up our breakfasts.

‘No swinging and banging, Meggy. And no reading at the table, please,’ she says. Remembering yet again how much these things I do annoy her, I stop. She puts two big plates of food in front of me and Gramps. Two sausages, three bits of bacon, fried potatoes, baked beans, fried bread and yuck, though I pretend it’s yum, a fried egg.

‘Where’s Aunty Jean’s?’ I ask.

Usually Gran makes up another plate for Aunty Jean and takes it next door for her to have in bed. It takes a while for Aunty Jean to get up in the morning. Everything takes her double time because she’s so big and she’s handicapped.

‘She’s not here, darling,’ Nan says. ‘She’s stayed out visiting.’

We say our grace and tuck in. Gramps looks over at me. He looks like he’s about to say something, but Nan coughs and he stops.

‘Cheer up, Gramps!’ I say, because he looks sad. ‘It might never happen!’

It’s what he says to me when I’m down in the dumps. I bite the end of a sausage that I’m holding up on a fork, like a meat lollypop.

‘Manners, Madam Miss,’ Nan says, but not very crossly. ‘I just came back early, because I wanted to see you.’ She leans back against the sink and smiles at me. She never sits down when me and Gramps eat our breakfast. There aren’t enough stools for one thing, and she says she likes to watch us enjoy our food. ‘I do worry about Jeanie though,’ she says to Gramps. ‘She’s not used to being without me to help.’

‘You don’t need to worry, Dolly,’ Gramps says. ‘She’s perfectly able to look after herself for a bit.’

Nan folds her arms and shakes her head, bunching her shoulders up by her ears so that her pointy chin disappears into the bones of her chest.

‘And I’m sure Raymond will help her out if she’s got any difficulties,’ Gramps says, popping a fried tomato into his mouth with his fingers.

‘Frank!’ Nan says. ‘Fingers!’

‘Is Aunty Jean with Mummy and Daddy, then?’ I ask.

‘Yes, dearie. She’s visiting,’ Nan says.

‘Oh,’ I say, and I get this tight feeling in my chest, and out of nowhere I wish that I could go home and see my mummy and daddy and be there with Aunty Jean. It’s great at Nan and Gramps’s but I’d like to go home to my own bedroom. It’s big and comfy there and I’ve got my own special bathroom. And sometimes . . .

. . . Oh God, sometimes, on nights when my father was out – which was very often – my mother would slip into bed beside me and hold me in her arms and stroke my nose and sing to me until I fell fast asleep.

I still can’t see her face, though.

If only I could see her face . . .

I’ve got a pink net thingy over my bed at home, and I’ve got kittens on my wallpaper. With pink and blue ribbons.

I feel sorry for the kittens, because by the summer holidays, they’ll have been all on their own for the whole term.

I’m quiet while I finish up every bit on my plate, even my egg, even though it’s a bit snotty. I wipe it up with my bread and try not to look as I pop it into my mouth. Nan likes me to eat up every last bit; if I don’t she asks lots of questions about what was wrong with it, and am I feeling all right. Nan thinks if you don’t eat your food up then there’s something wrong with you.

Then I ask the question that’s been building up in my mind.

‘Why’s Aunty Jean visiting Mummy and Daddy?’

Nan claps her hands together. ‘Who’d like a nice cup of tea then?’ she asks.

‘Ooh, me please, Dolly.’ Gramps rubs his tummy and puts his hand up in the air.

‘Me too!’ I cry, doing the same.

Nan picks up my and Gramps’s plates then turns to the teapot, which has been brewing for a long time under the chicken-shaped cosy I chose for her Christmas present last year. She pours out three cups of her lovely, thick, orangey tea. She adds our sugars – three for Gramps, four for me, and a Hermesetas for herself. Then, instead of putting them down in front of us, she switches off the radio, cutting off some lady singing ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’, which isn’t half as good as the Fugees one, which is loads better to dance to. In the quiet bit that follows, Nan turns to face us.

‘I think we’ll have it in the lounge today. What do you think, Gramps?’

Gramps purses his lips together tightly, frowns and nods. ‘Definitely,’ he says.

This is a real treat because Nan got a new suite at Easter and I’m not allowed usually to have any food or drink in the lounge.

Nan puts the cups and saucers on a tray and carries them through. Gramps can’t carry tea. He’s too bumpy because of his gippy leg.

‘Get the occasional tables out, Meggy,’ Nan says and I run on ahead and slide the shiny teak tables out of their nest, putting one each in front of Nan’s and Gramps’s chairs, and one in front of the settee for me. Nan puts a cup on each table, on top of a mat, and we all sit down.

‘This is nice,’ I say, feeling quite grown-up. I sit and try not to scratch at the new settee. Its brown nylon looped cover makes me all jangly, but something in me forces me to run my nails over it, which makes the shivers run up my back and my tongue squirm.

Nan and Gramps look at each other.

‘What?’ I go, smiling at them and pushing my tongue through the gap in my front teeth, trying to keep it still. ‘What is it?’

‘Meggy, we’ve got a bit of sad news for you,’ Nan says quickly, and I see Gramps shoot a look at her.

‘Gently, Dolly,’ he says.

I sip my tea. ‘Is it Mrs Cairns?’ I say. Mrs Cairns next door had a nasty fall when I was here in the Easter holidays and the ambulance came. I lifted up the nets so that Aunty Jean and I could see as they carried her out on a stretcher. Mrs Cairns looked like whatever it was was hurting a lot. We really enjoyed watching and wondering what might have happened. Aunty Jean said if she passed away it would serve her right because she was an interfering old bag. But when Nan came through with our cake she told us off for being Nosy Parkers and closed the nets, although not before she had a good look herself and shook her head, saying that the ambulance men were lifting her all wrong and they’d feel it in their backs if they carried on like that.

I know Mrs Cairns was quite poorly with a broken hip, and I haven’t seen her since I arrived, so I think perhaps she
might
have passed away.

‘No, it’s not Mrs Cairns, dear,’ Gramps says.

‘Good,’ I say, and I really mean it. No one really deserves to pass away.

‘It’s your mummy, dear,’ Nan says.

I put my cup back down on its saucer, sloshing a bit of tea over the edge. I think back to
Diseases and Symptoms
and what the
prognosis
was for a patient with
lymphoma.

‘Is it Hodgkin’s or non-Hodgkin’s?’ I ask Gramps. He knows everything because of his job. Reading his newspaper word by word every day to check for printing mistakes taught him, he says, ‘as much as any la-di-da university could’.

‘It was non-Hodgkin’s, Meggy,’ he says, and I catch the word ‘was’. He doesn’t use a lot of words, Gramps, but he is very particular about those he does.

‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Nan says, trying to smile, but closing her eyes.

I’m tucked right into myself, clasping
Alice in Wonderland
close to my tummy. I try to fold myself round it. I wish I could fall down that hole and drink that medicine and shrink right away.

‘Mummy’s dead, isn’t she?’ I say, looking up at them both. I want to cry, but I can’t. I can’t really believe it.

They both nod. Nan still has her eyes shut.

Even though I have only very vague memories of my mother, they are all warm. They are all about being protected, about being safe, about being loved. So I suppose this news must have been very hard indeed to take in at this point. I don’t think I even believed it.

It was like I was dreaming it and I just needed to wake up . . .

I didn’t know what to do or say. I just felt cold and small. It was all so serious.

I’m scared I’m going to start giggling.

‘She’s a clever little girl, Doll,’ Gramps says. He takes Nan’s thin little hand in his big paw and they both sit there and look at me. ‘She picks up more than you’d know.’

I wish.

Thirteen

‘Excuse me,’ The man in the grey overcoat asked, leaning over Peg as she sat at one of the library computers. ‘Could you find this book for me, please?’

He handed her a crumpled piece of notepaper on which he had written in pedantic capitals,
SEXUAL DEVIANCE IN PACIFIC PEOPLES
.

Peg looked up at him and forced a customer-service smile. He was a regular visitor. Almost daily he sent someone off looking for something risqué or borderline obscene. They tolerated him because he was harmless and clearly lonely. The sour smell he carried with him was the hardest thing to bear, really.

‘I’m terribly sorry, Clive,’ she said. ‘I’m on my lunch break. Do you want to ask Marianne?’

He never asked Marianne. She frightened the life out of him.

Annoyed at her genealogy session being interrupted by the chatter of other people, the elderly woman at the next computer made a harrumphing sound and buried her chin further into her buttoned-up cardigan.

‘It’s all right. I can wait,’ Clive said, gently pushing the paper onto the table beside her. ‘I’ll be over by the magazines.’ He shuffled off, leaving his distinctive odorous wake, and Peg returned to her investigations, still feeling slightly tucked-in and small, the memory of receiving the news of her mother’s death newly wedged into her consciousness. Part of her wanted just to curl up, to hold it close and forget about everything else for the day. But her curiosity spurred her on. It was, after all, part of the same process.

She had not managed to find Raymond Thwaites on any of the specialised search engines she had tried – not on court records for London or Guildford, nor on company records, nor in any of the national newspapers. While she could view PDFs of the local papers for Farnham and Guildford, they weren’t indexed for search engines before 1998, so she had resigned herself to a long trawl through screen images of every edition.

She decided to search the
Farnham Herald
, on the basis that, to the best of her knowledge, her father had certainly been around up until then and it was the paper nearest to where they had lived. She thought she recognised the masthead: had she seen it at her parents’ house when she was young? She worked through, starting at the date of her mother’s death, the day before she sat in her grandparents’ lounge and had the news dealt out to her: the second of June 1997.

When she reached the seventh of June edition, she gasped. The picture on the cover struck into her like a chord at the beginning of a familiar song. A slender, beautiful, coffee-skinned woman in a pale linen shirt waister stood laughing at the camera, her long, slim, brown arms raised, her hand defending a wide-brimmed hat from the wind that was blowing her skirt around her knees.

Something inside Peg said ‘wedding’, and she was hit with a memory of feeling lumpy and tired in a white broderie anglaise dress, with people bending over her and muttering disapprovingly that she was ‘white with the bride’, and her mother – her mother, for here she was, in front of her at last – saying that she wasn’t to take the slightest bit of notice of what other people said, that she looked beautiful.

It was the first fully focused photograph of her she had ever seen. She zoomed in and for a few minutes she just gazed, taking in the lines and planes of that face. She brought her finger up to the screen and touched the tip of the nose – a reflex gesture, one she barely knew she was making – and, once again, the almond-orange smell of her mother was with her.

She allowed herself a couple of moments. There were lines in that face she recognised – partly from seeing them reflected back at her by the mirror, but partly from knowing she had once seen them on that woman every day. She waited for more memories, but nothing happened. Perhaps she couldn’t get there without the breathing exercises.

But she didn’t have time for that.

Remembering her purpose, she zoomed back out and that was when she saw the headline:

FARNHAM MAN ARRESTED IN TRAGIC WIFE MERCY KILLING
.

Peg gasped again – so loudly this time that the woman next to her hissed another sharp ‘Shh!’

Her heart pounding, Peg craned forward to read the article.

Farnham man Franklin Thwaites, 47, was arrested at his £1m luxury home yesterday afternoon after admitting causing the death of his wife, Suzanne Donoghue, 37. Miss Donoghue had been suffering from cancer, and her doctors had given her six months to live.

‘You were due back ten minutes ago.’ Marianne’s face appeared above Peg’s computer monitor, her eyes angled at the big white clock on the wall.

His sister, Jeanette Thwaites, 51, who was visiting at the time, said: ‘I overheard Suzanne begging him to end it all for her, and he was crying, saying he couldn’t do it.’

‘What?’ Peg said, tearing her eyes from the screen, feeling as if her skin had been stripped from her body.

‘Lunch break’s over,’ Marianne said, shaking her head so that the many strings of glass and stone beads round her neck clattered dangerously. ‘I need to release Paula.’

Peg drew her fingers up her face and over her scalp. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Just get on now, please, Peg. The returns trolley is overflowing.’ Marianne bustled over to the desk, her Indian print dress billowing behind her, a galleon in full sail.

Feeling sick, Peg sent the article to print and logged off. She folded the printout and slipped it in her back pocket. Then, barely able to walk, she headed for the returns trolley and her afternoon’s work.