The Light of Day: A Novel (10 page)

23

I turn, I walk away at last. It’s only the thick taste of hate that lets me. As if I need to go and puke.

Look what you did to her, look what you made her do.

Even as I walk I feel the tug, the pluck at my back.

But don’t be fooled. It’s only a grave. Don’t look round—a last glance, as at some abandoned victim. The roses like a blotch of blood.

Don’t be fooled by the words you think you hear, whispered, icy.

“Go on, walk. You can do that, can’t you? You’re free, you’re glad. But you haven’t got her yet, have you? Not exactly. Eight more years, if you’re lucky . . .”

Keep walking, close your ears.

But is that where he
is
in any case, in that grave behind you? Is that where the dead are, locked up in their graves— prisoners in their cells as well? Aren’t they the freest ones of all, watching us maybe, wherever we go, like perfect unseen detectives, when we think we come to stare at them?

“So you can’t ever walk away, not from me, can you? And you haven’t got her yet. Eight more years . . . You poor sad bastard.”

But I reach the line of trees and feel safe. Out of range, in the clear. Only a grave, only a slab of stone.

From the region of the crematorium, the sound of car doors shutting. One party leaving, another arriving—even in the time I’d been standing there.

And it’s only the old, old question, the common question. How long have we got? What’s our sentence? Eight, nine years . . .

My God, there was a time when a year yawned for ever, it was time you could waste. Now it works both ways:
only
eight years.

“When I come out, George, you won’t want me. I’ll be years older, you won’t want me.”

“It’s not like that, it doesn’t work like that.”

(It would work on
his
side, if it did.)

I breathe deep, the black taste subsiding—thank God for this crisp bright air. And now it’s past mid-morning, there’s even a faint hint of warmth when you lift your face to the sun, like warm water in a cold glass.

I walk on. Twenty to twelve. Time on my hands, even allowing for the drive to come. I find a litter bin and get rid of the balled-up wrapping paper. The cemetery is a grid of paths and plots that someone must have planned once, like you plan a town. But not far from the crematorium is a separate laid-out garden, a wall at one end, facing south—a terrace beneath, with benches. In summer the wall must be a mass of climbing plants. Even today it looks like it’s being granted a brief midday bask.

Women in the Tanning Centre, doing both sides. The sun in my empty office, touching my desk.

I sit on one of the benches, hands in coat pockets. A graveyard tramp. Beyond the flower beds, through more lines of trees, the ranks of graves. But they’re okay, seen at a distance, seen all together: harmless gravestones taking the sun. They’re almost reassuring, these well-behaved guests, given their space here in the land of the living.

Who on earth are they all?

24

But Helen didn’t clear out. Right or wrong. There she was, once a week: my daughter, my dinner date, my food sampler.

“What’s it tonight?”

“Wait and see.”

Chicken Marsala (though I use sherry). The secret is in the scrapings from the pan.

“Have some wine.”

I lit the candles. A little vase of flowers. I’d put on a good shirt. It’s not just the cooking, it’s the presentation, the whole thing.

When had Rachel and I last done this? When had we had the time?

I’d bring in the serving dish with a flourish.
“Voilà!”
(I can speak French.)

“Dad—this is really
good.
”

You can tell when someone’s pretending, only saying what you’d like to hear. She’d let the first bites linger in her mouth, give me marks out of ten. Below seven was rare.

But if Helen had become the woman in my life—if that was the unspoken fact—who was the man in Helen’s? A fair question. Another unspoken fact.

“You know . . . if one of these days you wanted to— bring someone. I’m sure I could manage for three.”

Clumsy maybe. Helen had her own life somewhere, what did it have to do with me? And why should I want to upset these precious weekly visits? A lifeline, simply: they kept me afloat. The mercy, the miracle that, after everything, she and I should be friends.

“If there
is
someone . . . at the moment.”

But it seemed she’d been waiting for the subject to come up.

She put down her knife and fork. A quick sharp breath, a slight wobble of her chin.

“Yes, there is someone. There is someone. She’s called Clare. We’ve been living together for over a year.”

What do you say when you hear such a thing? The truth is, when I heard it—she said it perfectly clearly—I didn’t feel anything much. No jolt, no shock, no lightning reaction, unsuspected inside me, leaping out. I was pretty numb in those days, maybe. But anyway, why should I be shocked? I was a policeman—I’d been a policeman. I’d seen some things.

I suppose what I felt was the great airy gap of my own ignorance. My blindness. “You don’t notice things.” This is your daughter Helen, who you hardly know.

And then what I thought, suddenly, rapidly rewinding years, was: it makes no difference (it hasn’t knocked me off my seat), yet it does. Because this is something that Helen has taken all this time to tell me, something she hasn’t been able to tell me, for fear of how I might react. So now if I
don’t
react, it will be like a disappointment, a humiliation to her, it will be like saying all those years of being my enemy were just a waste.

She’d
like
me to be a blustering, ranting dad.

I suppose what I thought was: my own daughter has been afraid of me, most of her life.

And now I was washed up, now I was no threat . . . Now I wasn’t a senior cop any more, or even a successful husband . . .

Unless it was Rachel she’d been afraid of.

I don’t know how long I just looked at her.

“Sweetheart,” I said.

I don’t remember choosing the word. It came out of my mouth like a bird: “sweetheart.” A word I’d never used to Helen before.

There was a tear—no more than a glint in her eyes. Like that glint I see in clients’ eyes.

I must have smiled at her, because a smile spread over her face too. The tremble of her chin. How brave.

“I never knew,” I said.

“You do now,” she said.

I wouldn’t have taken her hand, wouldn’t have known if that was the thing to do, if she hadn’t pushed it first across the table.

And then (then and afterwards) I thought all the thoughts that you think. How long had
she
known? But was it like that? A point when you knew? Or just a long awful time of not knowing, of not knowing which side you were of a line?

“Well,” I said at last, “it doesn’t alter what I said. Bring
her.
”

She looked thoughtfully, seriously at me.

“I think maybe that’s not a good idea. Not now.”

“But—tell me about her.”

And now she became flustered, awkward—as if she was a boy and the question was from her mum.

“She’s . . . She’s . . . brilliant at interior design.” She couldn’t help one of her quick searching glances round the room. “We’re thinking of setting up—as interior designers, I mean. Of going into partnership—”

She laughed at the phrase she’d used. I laughed too.

I thought: so it was simple. Your big love was art. Big pictures in frames. But you’d settle for interior design: that was your big love now.

Maybe she could tell what I was thinking. She looked down at her plate.

All those years, I thought, all those years of not saying. And now, in a few moments, it was said. So it wasn’t about me being a policeman—though my being a policeman can’t have helped.

And later I thought, half guiltily, half excitedly, of Helen in bed with another woman. Clare. In much the same way, I suppose, as Helen must have thought of me and Rachel, her parents, in bed together.

“This is delicious,” she said. She meant my Chicken Marsala.

I must tell her, I thought, I must tell her about Rachel and me.

But maybe she won’t come any more—not now. Now it’s over with, now she’s said it. Maybe that’s what it’s all been about, these visits. Not about my cooking, my managing, my proving I could look after myself.

But she did keep coming. (She hasn’t stopped coming.) In the fullness of time I even got to meet Clare.

Though it was after that evening when she made her announcement that she began to get more direct, more pushy, even more plain damn nosy, about me finding someone else, someone, that is, who wasn’t her.

I went on a weekend cookery course. She nudged me into it. I had a real talent, didn’t I realize? Buried by twenty-four years in the Force. It needed bringing out.

Though I didn’t need that much nudging, I was keen myself. This new me, this unsuspected me, this kitchen me.

“How was it?” she said.

“Fine. I picked up lots of tips.”

“Did you pick up anything else?”

I wasn’t going to act dim.

“I was the only bloke there, if that’s what you mean . . . they all admired my pastry.”

But it was only after I went into private detection— which she hadn’t been pushing for at all—that facts began to race ahead of her little teasing schemes.

I think she was glad for me. And I think, the way it turned out,
she
was the one to be shocked. Her dad. Not just finding another woman in his life but, so it seemed, more than one. But it was my life, like it was hers. Fair exchange, and let’s be frank (and she’d have known if her dad was having her on), I slept with clients. There. One or two. Difficult not to. Breaking all the professional rules. But hadn’t I taken that turn already? Already been branded?

Corrupt, through and through.

I think she didn’t know how to take it, I think she was a little ashamed. Do you remember, Helen, when
you
were a rebel, impossible to handle? But I think she was also entertained. She hadn’t known this man before (nor had I), this— what’s the word?—womanizer. I think she was taken aback but I think she found it mainly comic. And maybe, mainly, it was.

Life was a comedy after all, maybe. As opposed to all that tragic teenage stuff. As opposed to all that grim stuff you find in police files.

“This is really delicious.”

Lifting her fork daintily. Like a woman on a date again, like a man’s woman making sweet and obliging comments, testing the ground. But she meant it too. And there’d been all those wretched months when I’d struggled round art galleries, an off-duty policeman, staring at pictures, trying to see in them some clue, some lead to my daughter.

Chicken Marsala, followed by lemon tart. A bottle of wine. A man and a woman at a candlelit table. Interior design. Don’t knock it—what’s civilization for?

Beyond the window, the back garden, hidden and dark. My last days in the old house. Rachel, Helen, me. I turned and pointed at the glass, at our two faces looming in a pool of light.

“Caravaggio,” I said.

25

I never found that lost golf ball, hidden in the rough. And now there was something else that would have to stay out of sight: the little wild black ball of what I’d heard, that had come slicing, whirring towards me. I’d caught it and put it in my pocket, and that’s where it had to stay.

I wish I could have found that missing ball—the white, the right one. Held it up with a smile, like something that put everything back where it was.

But you know when you’ve crossed a line.

“Never mind. It’s only a golf ball . . .”

They got up from the bench. We moved on to the next hole, me pulling the bags on their trolley, a little way behind. Before we reached the tee I’d already made my decision: that I’d have to pretend—so Mum would never know. Keep mum. That was my mission now.

I’d never been this way before—where words, that were just bits of air, could turn scary and black and hard. The word “wrong,” for example. It gets chucked all the time at kids, gets chucked at you all the time at school. I’d never caught it, never felt the weight of the word “wrong.”

We got to the tee. He drove first and I handed him his club. I felt the weight of the word “club” in my hand.

Pretend, keep silent. I couldn’t even tell Pauline Freeman, who must know already—because she’d given me the brush-off. Tell her that I knew too. Though that might have been a way of getting back together with her. Partners in secrecy. Like her mum and my dad . . .

I thought of the little black ball of knowledge Pauline had been carrying around with her for months already. And it would have to go on. Because you’d never not know.

And the other thing I decided, even as I followed Dad to the next hole, was that I’d have to
follow
him—other sense. Watch him, trail him. Because if you knew something then you had to
know
what you knew, you had to have proof. Otherwise you might be tempted to think it was all a mistake, everything was like it had always been.

But I didn’t follow
him
—how could I follow him? He’d turn and recognize me at once—I followed her: Mrs. Freeman. Though she too might recognize me. That smile, that wave outside the school gates (had nothing been happening then?). And once, later, I’d passed by Maynard’s estate agents in the High Street where she worked part-time (Pauline told me), and I’d looked in through the window, past the photos of houses, and seen her, Mrs. Freeman, dressed like a secretary, and she’d seen me, I’m sure, but hadn’t waved or smiled. And I’d thought that was because Pauline and me weren’t friends any more.

But that’s how it came to me, how a whole rush of things came to me. Part-time at the estate agent’s—Wednesdays to Fridays, Pauline had said. And Maynard’s was just fifty yards or so from Dad’s studio, on the other side. So during that three-day stretch each of them would know that the other was there, across the road, near yet far. Was that how it began? He’d invited her across? “Taking her pic.” What kind of pic? The old beach photographer. After hours maybe. But it couldn’t carry on like that (if it was going to carry on) in his studio.

So . . . ? Three days a week in Maynard’s, which left two days when she was just—to use the word then—a housewife. Free to come and go. And Mr. Freeman worked all day in town. And Dad worked in his studio of course, but he still went out on jobs, even though he had assistants, packing his gear in the back of the car. And he could pretend. Though he’d hardly go to the Freeman house in Gifford Road.

But she worked in Maynard’s, and working in an estate agent’s she’d surely know about places that were briefly empty, waiting for buyers, tenants. She might even be able to get, or get a copy of, a key . . .

There are always these simple, mechanical questions. Where? When? How? Often they’re half the battle. For them, as well as you.

“ ‘Matrimonial work,’ Helen. That’s what they call it.”

I looked in his appointments diary. Not difficult. He carried a pocket-size version of the one he kept on his office desk. In the evening he’d often leave it, for ready reference, by the phone in the hall. Nothing suspicious inside—unless you already had a theory and saw that on Monday afternoons for two weeks ahead there was a gap between one and four. And once on a Tuesday.

Detective work. It’s mostly graft and slog but there are times when a light comes on in your head.

I couldn’t follow him: he drove a car. I followed her. She didn’t drive, but they’d make separate journeys, I was sure. He wouldn’t risk picking her up. Gifford Road joined White Horse Hill, a bus route, so I waited near the bus stop on White Horse Hill, reckoning that if they rendezvoused soon after one, I should be on watch from about a quarter past twelve.

Summer. The school holidays: I was free too. Summer, but pouring with rain. But that was a blessing. I could wear the hood of my anorak up. I could loiter, as if sheltering, under the awning of the newsagent’s some twenty yards from the bus stop. And when she appeared, round the corner of Gifford Road, she was carrying an umbrella, which is like a kind of hood too, a barrier to knowing you’re being watched. Rain: the detective’s friend.

She might have crossed, to take the bus in the other direction—I’d have crossed over myself—but she stayed on my side. A bus came. I dashed, at the last moment, to get on. Then it was a case of sitting with my head turned mostly to the window. And if she saw me—well, it was a coincidence and I’d have to settle for studying her face.

She didn’t see me. She got off at the Spencer Arms. I timed my exit neatly, hung back while she walked on. Then I followed her round two, three corners, remembering the names of the streets.

At any moment, of course, Dad might have driven by and spotted me, hood or no hood. But I was lucky in that too. She was well ahead of him.

Collingwood Road. She turned into a house—number twenty. Yes, it had an agent’s sign outside. Yes, she had a key. I scurried to the other side of the road and walked on a little—carefully eyeing each parked car. This was the tricky part. A residential street: where do you hide? But some way along was the entrance to a little park, a recreation ground— deserted in the rain—and I tucked myself in the gateway, under the branches of a chestnut tree.

And it was from here that I saw Dad’s Wolsey drive by and park, not so near number twenty, though there was a gap, and saw Dad, a blurry figure in the rain—half hidden, too, by an umbrella, but unmistakably my dad—hurry to the same house. He didn’t have to wait to be let in.

I stood, not moving, under my tree. You know when you’re committed, when there’s no going back.

I suppose I had the thought: now I could pounce. I could go to number twenty, bang on the door. Open up! I had him—them—trapped. It was even, maybe, the right thing to do.

But I didn’t move, as if I was on guard. The mysterious urge to protect. My shoes were leaking, my neck was damp. I thought of the sound of the rain from inside. Gurgling gutters and down-pipes. The smell of a room that isn’t yours. The feeling of shelter, of taking shelter wherever you can.

And was this their only shelter, here in Collingwood Road? Did they have—according to their strategy and the state of the housing market—a whole string of shelters, in Chislehurst, in Petts Wood, Bromley, all round the not-to-be-trusted suburbs?

I suppose that’s what I felt, under my chestnut tree: that I didn’t have any shelter, real shelter, any more. I was shelter-less. Rain dripped from the leaves.

I could slink off home now but I didn’t have a real home any more, just a pretend one, and I’d have to work hard— just me and for as long as it took—to stop the pretend-walls and pretend-roof from tumbling down.

Until the thing that was going on there in number twenty died a death. Whenever that might be. But even then— because I’d always know—I’d have to go on pretending, even after it had died a death.