The Fire Baby (31 page)

‘Her birthday?’ prompted Dryden a second time.

‘Yes. There’d been a party at home. A bit half-hearted, I’m afraid. The baby was a cloud over her parents. Maggie was an only child and I think they had high hopes for her. Suddenly those hopes seemed misplaced. Then Sally had called, that was her friend. She was quite different, very modern. She wore a low-cut blouse that could stop a plough team.’

Dryden thought of the disappointed woman he’d met at the dog stadium. They laughed and sipped their coffee in perfect synchronization.

‘I think they’d gone dancing – the old Mecca in Broad Street. It’s a bank now but it was pretty much the most exciting place on earth then. I got the impression they’d meet the boys there, as a rule. Anyway, I heard her come in. They’d given me a room in the attic at Black Bank. Servants’ quarters, how appropriate!’

The old woman’s eyes narrowed with malice. ‘Maggie was up there too – a teenager’s room next to the old retainer. Ha! That’s the problem with my life, things have gone too fast.’ She sipped the tea and looked beyond the sunlit garden.

‘She came home?’

A nurse approached to remove the tray and touched Connie on the shoulder. ‘Connie?’ he asked.

She laughed again. ‘I’m enjoying Mr Dryden’s visit,’ she said, clasping his hand.

Her smile vanished with the biscuits. ‘Horrible man,’ she said. ‘Pinches the senile ones for fun.’

She looked into Dryden’s eyes then, making her decision. ‘I found the photos on the stairs. I got up to see if she was all right; I could always tell. The quick steps and then the sound of Maggie throwing herself on the bed. So I went out and the moon was pouring in through the skylight above the stairwell. And they were there, three of them.’

Dryden didn’t help her then. Only she could finish Maggie’s story.

‘At first I thought they were all of Maggie. I was shocked, of course. But my life has been a lot less cloistered than people seem to think. They were naked, both of them, making love. Tangled up together. I could see it was Johnnie. But then I sat and looked at them when my hands had stopped shaking. And they weren’t her at all, they were other girls.’

She tapped Dryden’s knee firmly with her book. ‘Then I picked up the one she’d torn up. I knew, of course… I was putting them together when she came back out. I knew it was her this time. Just like the others. Naked with Johnnie.’

‘What did she say?’ asked Dryden, the scene Connie had brought to life as vivid as a memory of his own.

‘We never said anything. I just gave them to her and said
something reassuring and bland – something about fish in the sea, or experience, or such rot. She took them and went back to her room.’

‘And Johnnie didn’t come back after that?’

‘Apparently. Not for some time, anyway. I left within a few weeks. I’d got a job – a library assistant in Peterborough. I was glad to go. They’d shown charity but never bothered to disguise it as anything else. I wrote to Maggie often. She wrote back. Guarded, of course, but she told me things, about the baby. About how Bill – my brother – wanted her to bring Johnnie to Black Bank, to give the baby a father. I think she was in despair, actually. I even thought she might take her life. I told Bill not to push. But he was quite rude, told me to leave family matters to the family. Very pointed.’

Dryden stood and dropped the blind on one of the windows so that a slatted shadow fell over them.

‘What do you think the pictures meant?’

She pushed a call button on the wall beside her. ‘Does it matter? Johnnie was always decked out with a camera. He was a pornographer – that’s clear, I think. Perhaps he thought the pictures were funny. Perhaps he sold them to his friends. Perhaps he thought it didn’t matter. But it did, Mr Dryden. And Maggie made him pay for it in the end by giving away the one thing he really wanted – a son. I don’t think she could have faced life with Johnnie, so she gave Matty away and there was no need to marry any more. She’d give Matty a life away from Johnnie, and herself a life away from him. It was very neat, but she paid a terrible price, didn’t she? And the worst thing, of course, is that the price went up as the years went on.’

The proprietor came up behind them.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Tompkins,’ said Dryden, rising. ‘One last question. You didn’t keep in touch with Maggie, or Estelle?’

‘We move on, do we not? I told my husband about my life at Black Bank and he was horrified – he said it sounded Dickensian. He didn’t want anything to do with them, and Maggie moved anyway – from Black Bank. A few Christmas cards… then it was easier to send nothing.’

‘Lyndon needs to know why… Perhaps, could you?’

She took his hand for the last time. ‘You tell stories for a living, Mr Dryden. Tell this one for me.’

Back in Humph’s cab Dryden sat and tried not to think. He flipped down the vanity mirror and looked again at the picture he had downloaded to his PC that morning: a happy wedding-day shot, confetti on the groom’s smart pilot’s uniform, brother kissing sister. The visceral age-old revulsion swept over him again, and he tried to imagine what it felt like for them.

He found Maggie’s last tape in the glove compartment. ‘Black Bank,’ he said, and hoped it was for the last time.

41

‘Dry lightning,’ said Dryden, as Humph’s cab bumped through the gates to Black Bank Farm.

The bolt struck some trees at Mons Wood with a crack like an artillery shell, the light and sound in almost perfect harmony. The tallest pine torched itself, a crackling suicide of sudden purple flame. The sight of fire seemed, incredibly, to deepen the heat. The featureless horizon appeared to pulse, the hot air on the fen boiling over the shadowless fields.

Humph’s Capri skidded to a halt in the red dust before the old farmhouse. Estelle was at the door, one hand clutched defensively to her throat. She looked a generation older, but nothing like her mother. Maggie’s almost Victorian stoicism was beyond her reach. She looked very modern in the timeless surroundings of Black Bank. And very frightened.

Dryden produced the tape from his pocket and held it up like a trophy: ‘I think we should listen to this. It’s the last one. She said everything would be explained.’

‘Everything is,’ said Estelle, her voice crackling like the air. She turned on her heels and disappeared inside the cool blackness of the farmhouse. He found her in the kitchen, up on the wooden worktop with her legs folded beneath her. Beside her was a portable tape recorder.

‘Your husband?’ said Dryden, leaning against the whitewashed wall.

She flinched at the word, then began to twist the drawstrings of her sweatshirt in a tight knot. ‘I told him you’d find out. He had some crazy idea we could just live in the
States–Austin, perhaps. Say we were married in the UK. Keep the other secret. Pretend we didn’t know about that.’ Her hands shook as she lifted a can of Pepsi. ‘But you can’t keep a secret from yourself. And the passport was wrong. They’d have to change that. So we couldn’t just go. Could we?’

Dryden sensed time opening up to let them talk. ‘And the tapes… she did say why she gave Lyndon away?’

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Another lightning bolt struck the peatfields to the east and she jumped, every nerve alive to the fact that her world was being ripped apart: shredded by the lie Maggie had told twenty-seven years before.

‘I know too,’ said Dryden. ‘Constance Tompkins just told me. I went to see her this morning.’

Estelle looked at him. ‘We listened to the tapes after the funeral. Lyndon was there. Mum wasn’t very explicit, I guess. But it’s pretty clear. About Johnnie, Johnnie and the pictures… pictures of them, pictures of others. I think Mum was sick. Sick with anxiety. Sick that Lyndon – that Matty – would be abused–sucked into that life. How could she have married him? And in shock. She’d just seen her parents die, die horribly. And then she made that decision, almost instantly. I told Lyndon… he has to see it through the eyes of the girl, the girl Mum was.’ Water welled freely out of her eyes and down her chin. ‘She loved her baby,’ she said, as if insisting on a great truth which had been disputed.

‘But Lyndon doesn’t believe that?’

‘I think he feels it’s not the reason he wanted. He wanted something else… I don’t know what, Dryden. Just something that made it OK. This doesn’t make it OK. I don’t think anything could…’

‘You knew who the father was, didn’t you?’

She looked scared then. ‘Mum never said. I think she wanted it forgotten. That’s one of the reasons she went away. And Johnnie went away too for a bit. When he did come back he must’ve kept his distance. She never mentioned him. People forget, even in a place like this. But I knew. Kids, they talk. When we got back to Black Bank I was twelve. I went to the secondary school and I was famous – infamous. I came from the place where the plane had crashed. At the time, everyone knew Johnnie was the father. Why else would he have run into the flames? But you can imagine the scandal. So I found out pretty quickly. Sometimes, for a dare, we’d go to the Ritz and I’d buy a Coke. It was weird. He never knew I hated him.’

‘Did Lyndon know?’

‘Not before Mum died. But I told him that night–and it was on the tapes.’ She bit her lip.

Dryden walked towards the tapedeck. ‘Maggie said that the tapes would answer all the questions. We should give her that chance,’ he said. He took the last cassette and slipped it into the recorder, and as he did so he felt some of the burden of his promise to Maggie lift. They listened to the silence together and Dryden wondered if it might be blank. Somewhere he could hear seagulls trailing a tractor. Then they heard Maggie’s breath, laboured and intimate, unnaturally close. It filled the kitchen with a tangible sense of her, like an answerphone message played back for the first time.

Estelle watched the spools turn with appalled concentration. This was her mother’s last testament, save for those few words on her deathbed; the two words nobody ever heard: ‘The tapes’.

‘Estelle?’ The voice was an echo of the woman, speaking directly from what she knew would be her grave. It sounded extraordinarily strong and vital.

‘My love,’ said Maggie. ‘I lied to you as well.’

Estelle covered her mouth and waited to see which way her life would turn.

‘We promised each other we’d tell you. But then each year came and went and we wondered why. It made no difference to us. No difference… Every Christmas. Every birthday. All those chances missed…’

The breathing interrupted her, the failing heart bruising her ribs.

‘Then Don died. Don died and it was all down to me. I just couldn’t. He loved you too, Estelle, loved you more than anything–more than his life. He said that before he died – believe me – I haven’t the breath to lie. He didn’t count for anything without you. He told me that for you. His daughter…’

She took a breath and held it.

‘But you weren’t, love. Or mine. We tried to have a family, but it didn’t happen. I think it was a punishment for me, although the doctors said it was Don. But it was my punishment for giving Matty away. For walking away from a child. And a punishment for both of us for wanting a son. Only a son.’

The tape clicked off, then almost immediately back on. ‘The adoption service promised us a son. It was easier then, even with Don’s age. But it went wrong, the family took the boy back at the last minute and it broke my heart, Estelle, broke my heart again. So we said we’d be happy to take the next child. We didn’t mind then if it was a boy or a girl. We just wanted it… wanted you. And when Don brought you home I loved you from the minute I first saw you. I loved you like my own… more than my own.’

Estelle was frozen. ‘Mum,’ she said, and began to cry again.

‘More than my own,’ said Maggie again. ‘A few people
knew. But Connie had gone, and I didn’t really have anyone I could tell at Black Bank. So we thought it was best left. School: it worried us. That you might be teased. So we brought you back to Black Bank as our child. You are our child, love.’

Out on the fen seagulls wheeled, calling, sensing the long drought was about to break. The laboured breathing on the tape returned and slowly tapered into sleep. Dryden switched it off.

‘My God,’ said Estelle, and Dryden knew instantly that she was thinking about Lyndon. About the consequences of another lie.

‘Where is he?’ said Dryden.

‘My God,’ she said again.

‘Laura told me to watch out for Freeman White–Lyndon’s roommate.’

Estelle just said ‘Laura’, and cried again. ‘We didn’t know she could hear us. I’m sorry. We just used to talk. About us. About what to do after Mum died. We didn’t do it in front of Mum because she could hear us, even, sometimes, when she slept. We couldn’t be sure. We wanted to surprise Mum – about us, when she was better. We still thought that then – that she would get better. And after she died we went back to pick up her things. Laura must have heard. We talked about what to do. We thought she was in a coma. I’m sorry.’

Dryden nodded so that she could go on: ‘We asked Freeman to follow you. We were desperate. You were asking questions, so many questions. I couldn’t refuse because you were right, it was what Mum wanted. She wanted it all out. And you came out to see us. We thought you were close to finding out about the marriage.’

‘And the fire at the register office? White too?’

She looked him in the eyes, a silent affirmation. ‘We
thought it would destroy the evidence. Give us some time to think. We told Freeman not to hurt you. Lyndon told him that. But Freeman owes him everything, his life, really, because of Al Rasheid. Lyndon kept him alive, gave him water, food. When the Americans got to Al Rasheid they were both nearly dead. Freeman knows that, the loyalty’s fierce. So he agreed to help, when we told him we just needed to know if you’d got close. And if you had, we wanted to stop you. Warn you off.’

‘Where’s Lyndon?’ asked Dryden.

‘I have to tell him,’ she said. ‘Before…’

In the silence thunder rolled. ‘Has he ever talked about suicide?’

She nodded. ‘Sometimes, since Mum died. It got worse – when I wouldn’t go back. Back to the States. He left, left here, the night before Mum’s funeral.’