The Long Shadow (21 page)

“… And the awful thing was,” she confessed now, “that the Twickenham house was actually
hers,
in a way. That is, it was Dad’s really, it was in his name, but she’d lived in it most of her married life, and after the divorce as well. Whenever she wasn’t in hospital she’d go back there—you realise, don’t you, that Minos was
her
cat to begin with? I thought you might have guessed from his name. She got him for company, when he was a tiny
kitten, a year or two before she went into hospital for good—and the amazing thing was, he still seemed to remember her! That was one creature she really
did
get a welcome from, purring and rubbing his head against her…. Oh …!”

Here Dot’s remorse overcame her once again:

“Oh, I should have welcomed her … I should have had her to live with us. But how
could
I? You don’t know what she was
like,
Imogen…. Demanding … aggressive … and so weird, sometimes, I was quite scared for the children…. She kept banging on the door … phoning up … even letting herself in with her own key sometimes. I kept telling Herbert he should …”

So
that
was what those quarrels about “
H
er
” had been about—the latter ones, anyway. Not about That Woman at all, but about Lena, and about all the things Herbert could have done about her if he’d been half a man….

“And so we
had
to do
something
”—Dot was continuing her defence. “I mean, it was beginning to break up our marriage, the strain of it all…. Our happy,
happy
marriage….”

She sounded as if she really believed it; and Herbert, from the way he reached out for his wife’s hand, seemed to be finding it within the bounds of credibility too. What more could you ask?

“… and it was then that I realised we’d just have to sell the house,” Dot was continuing. “There was nothing else for it. I’m sorry, Imogen, I suppose we should have told you, but I felt so guilty and awful about the whole thing, I just couldn’t bear to tell anyone … I should have told you, too, about the awful things Piggy was saying about you … of course, I knew right from the start that it must have been Mother, not you, raising all that commotion at the hotel … but it seemed simpler just to let it ride. I was feeling so awful, you see…. Oh, I’ve been so wicked, so awful …! If only I’d helped her more … sympathised more … right from the beginning….”

Here it came; the bad memory; the worst one of them all. Imogen had heard it several times already in the last three days, and would hear it again, many times.

Dot, at the age of fourteen, gazing distastefully at the mother
she had never really loved, and who was disgusting, now, with alcohol and depression.

“I was appalled … she looked so little and hunched, crouching there. She was a big, tall woman really, you know, and always so dignified … I hated her for being so small, and so changed … really hated her.

“‘
Of
course
you’ll get better,’ I said impatiently—I was sick to death of the whole thing, you see, and revolted, too—
‘Of
course
you’ll get better’ … But even as I spoke, I knew already that whether she recovered or not,
I
never would. This was the reward of goodness that I saw in front of me, and the long shadow of it would reach to the end of my days….”

*

Dot would cheer up, of course, after the funeral; people do. Also, Robin would no longer be there, the eternally teasing younger brother, deliberately needling his sister. For Robin was flying to Bermuda this very afternoon.

“Didn’t I mention it?” he’d remarked, casually, only this
morning
. “There’s this ex-boy-friend of Cynthia’s, you see—no, not the one with prostate trouble; I mean the religious one, who can’t divorce his wife unless it should turn out that Cynthia really
is
getting a sizeable slice of Dad’s estate—well, anyway, he’s starting up this jewellery business, and he happened to mention in his last letter to Cynthia that he was looking for a bright young man with varied experience—”

“Well, why doesn’t he look for one, then?” Imogen had retorted, somewhat tartly—she couldn’t help thinking that Robin could have given her some inkling of these plans a bit earlier.
“Your
experience isn’t varied at all. There’s nothing varied about being given the sack, and I’m sure they do it exactly the same way in Bermuda as anywhere else….”

Robin had hugged her, delighted.

“I love you Step!” he’d declared. “Or I would, if I was capable of loving anyone but myself; but you know what we psychopaths are!”—and giving her a quick, warm kiss, he was gone.

*

Sitting, now, in the front pew of the icy church, Imogen fancied that she could still feel the warmth of it on her cheek, and found herself crying, most becomingly; she felt Edith’s approval boring into her from the pew behind.

She would miss Robin terribly—that is if he wasn’t sacked and back home again within six weeks flat. But how wonderful to be crying, at last, about someone who wasn’t Ivor. It was like a sudden, undreamed-of vista as you turn the bend of a mountain after a long, bitter climb; it was like the beginning of spring; the first snowdrop….

“Look, the first snowdrop!” whispered Edith, with appropriate melancholy, as they picked their way among the frost-bound graves. “The first snowdrop of spring—look, Imogen!”

Such was the hushed funereal quality of her voice that Imogen determined to look absolutely anywhere except at the unfortunate snowdrop in question. Swivelling her eyes randomly in the opposite direction to the one indicated, she suddenly felt them widen in amazement. There, stumbling towards her between the tombstones, she saw Teri, except that he was only three feet tall and dressed in a pixie-suit. Teri to the life, scowl and all … and close behind this apparition, nagging fluently in a clear, ringing tone came Margot, its mother … Margot of the coarse black hair; and this—yes,
this
was the yellow, scowling baby that Imogen had so feared might be Ivor’s grandson….

And it wasn’t! It wasn’t! She nearly executed a little dance of sheer delight behind the coffin.

Good old Robin! Evidently, he’d got himself off to Bermuda just in time. Because, of course, women like Margot don’t come to an ex-boy-friend’s estranged mother’s funeral on a freezing January afternoon for nothing.

She wasn’t going to get it, though, whatever it was. Not now. Not with that miniature Teri whining and grizzling at her heels.
I’ll
show her, thought Imogen: Let her breathe just one single word about making any more demands on Robin, and I’ll …

*

The Psychopaths’ Moll. I’m doing it again, thought Imogen
wryly. Protecting him … cushioning him … saving him from the consequences of his follies.

“You know what we psychopaths are,” he’d said: but did she? Did
anyone
?
For all the millions of words written on the subject, for all the decades of learned research, did anyone really
know
?

*

They were born out of their time; that was for sure. You only had to look back quite a little way in history to find Ivor’s by the score, by the hundred, all of them hell-bent on that
larger-than-
life-size ego-trip which used to be known as the Quest for Glory.

Kings, princes, generals, wiping out whole cities, massacring whole populations, to the ecstatic applause of contemporaries and posterity alike. Teenage hoodlums in their shining armour off to the Holy Land to find a bit of aggro. Rome … Carthage … Babylon … back and back, as far as you cared to look, to the Trojan wars and beyond … and there they still were. Achilles, Hector, Odysseus and the rest—they’d all have ended up in Broadmoor if they’d lived nowadays, every last man of them.

And Ivor? Ivor hadn’t murdered anyone, or sacked any cities. He certainly wasn’t as bad as Zeus, or as the God of the Old Testament. Born into an age when the clash of the long spears has been silenced, and the wheels of the chariots are still; when the black blood no longer gushes forth to the greater glory of victim and assailant alike—what place is there, any longer, for such as Ivor?

Glory? Ego-trip? Call it what you like, it was to this thing that Ivor had devoted all his life and all his talents, as did the heroes of old. Deathless glory had been the prize, then as now, and Ivor had sought it single-mindedly in all the ways that
present-day
society allowed him…. Ivor of the glancing helm, careering over the University campus as if it was the Plain of Troy….

*

“Like father, like son,” Robin had once said to her, implying that his father’s glowing success had all been phoney; but this wasn’t the answer, either. All over the world, there were men
and women who owed their successful careers to the faith they’d thought Ivor had had in them; people whose lives had been enriched and illumined by what they had imagined to be his friendship. Walking the earth this very January afternoon were grown men, alive and well, who, in their long-past student days, had been saved from suicide and despair by what they took for Ivor’s sympathy and concern.

What can you say of such a man? What conclusion can you reach about a charlatan whose lies and deceptions have illumined all who came near him?

Well, not quite
all.
Some, like his first wife, had had their lives wrecked by him.

Or had they? In the end, which of these two was the victim of the tragedy, and which the perpetrator? Ivor, with his callous, arrogant selfishness? Or Lena, the mature, beautiful and brilliant woman who had allowed a foolish, infatuated boy to tie himself to her for life?

And if, on that wet, treacherous motorway, at one o’clock in the morning, some final answer was given, no living ears were close enough to hear it.

*

After the funeral was over, and the small gathering at Imogen’s house had broken up, it was Myrtle who was the last to go. She stood for a minute, uncertainly, at the front gate, sniffing the cold, late air in which, already, there was a hint of spring.

“Darling Ivor,” she murmured softly. “I’m so glad, Imogen, that you and I, who both loved him, have managed to remain friends.” Sighing, she reached out and plucked idly a bare, brown lilac twig, on which the first faint, pinkish leaf-buds were beginning to show. She turned it this way and that, slowly, between her fingers, and a few tears welled into her eyes.

“Sad! … so sad …! You know, Imogen, I think I shall always feel a little bit sad as I pass this particular bit of road: it will always remind me so much of darling Ivor. And of darling,
darling
Desmond.”