The Tenth Gift (8 page)

“I never saw it coming,” Alison said at last. “I knew he was depressed. I kept trying to persuade him to go to the doctor, but he just wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t talk to his sister, his friends, no one. Kept saying there was no point, that what had happened had happened and no one could change it. I had no idea what he was talking about, still don’t. But suicide … how could I have been so blind?”

I threw my arms around her, and she wept loudly for a good long while.

“I miss him!” she wailed. “I miss the smell of him in the house. I even miss his cold feet in bed.”

Eventually she broke away from me to blow her cracked, red nose.

“Al, darling, I’m quite sure there was nothing you could have done to stop him,” I said. “How could you possibly have foreseen such a thing? I mean, I never saw Andrew as someone who took life that seriously.”

She shot me a look. “Neither did I. Even when he proposed to me, I thought he was joking.” She grinned weakly. “In fact, I think he was. We were both drunk, and then suddenly everyone was talking about it and we just sort of went with the flow. And then I got pregnant, and, well …”

She’d been four months pregnant when she walked down the aisle, but no one other than me, Andrew, her mother, and her best friend, Susie, had known. The dress had been Empire line, the bouquet carefully positioned, and no one made any awkward little jokes. Which was just as well since two weeks later she miscarried and almost died and had never been able to get pregnant again by any natural means.

“The thing is …” she started, looking away as if making an uncomfortable confession. “The night he … died … I was trying to persuade him to have a go at IVF. I never saw him so furious. I honestly thought he was going to hit me. ‘Don’t you ever try to trap me like that!’ he screamed at me. ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got me caged up in this godforsaken corner of the world, in this bloody house, without passing the whole fucking disaster on through our genes?’ And then he stormed out of the room and went up to his den. It was the last thing he said to me. So when he didn’t come down for supper I wasn’t surprised—to be honest, I was relieved. I couldn’t face having another argument with him. I picked at a salad, went up to bed early, fell asleep. I woke up at three in the morning, suddenly, in that way that you do sometimes. My heart was knocking so hard I could hardly breathe. And then I knew.” She turned to me. “I just knew. And still I couldn’t go up there. Not till it was light.” She gulped, mastering herself. “The police surgeon said he’d been dead since before midnight, so there was nothing I could have done. But I feel terrible that I didn’t try to patch things up, didn’t take him up his usual glass of brandy. Something. Anything …” Her words ran out.

I gazed at her, not knowing what to say. She dug in her pocket and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper.

“It’s just a photocopy,” she explained as I stared at it. “The police took the original, though they’ve said I can have it back. Not that I need it—I know it all by heart.”

“Are you sure?” I knew as I took it from her that I didn’t want to read it. As if on cue, my stomach rumbled loudly, breaking the somber mood. I looked down at it as if at a badly behaved pet. “God, I’m sorry.”

She looked at her watch. “Have you not eaten anything? I didn’t think …”

“The buffet car pretty much ran out of supplies before Plymouth,” I said, relieved to change the subject. “I ended up ordering one of their microwaved hamburgers, but when it came out of its wrapping all damp and wrinkled-looking, I just couldn’t fancy it.”

Alison made a face. “That sounds disgusting.” She thought about it for a moment, then added, straight-faced, “Reminds me of a couple of men I’ve known. Good thing it wasn’t hairy as well.”

I stared at her, then we were both roaring with laughter, and didn’t stop for the next ten minutes as humor gave way to a huge release of tension and made the world a better place again.

E
VEN SO
, BY the time it came to go up to bed that night, I was feeling apprehensive. Paper-thin, paper-light, the letter lay in my pocket like a lead weight. I put all the lights on in the master bedroom and lay there on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Was the attic beam from which Andrew had hanged himself directly above me now? I wondered, and had to push the thought out of my mind.

I got up, ran a bath, and settled back with a book I’d picked up at the Smiths at Paddington Station, but within three pages I just didn’t feel like reading it.

I got out, dripping, wrapped myself in a towel, and sat down on the bed. Andrew’s letter lay there, folded in quarters: a silent rebuke. Gingerly, I opened the sheet of paper and smoothed out the creases. Andrew’s handwriting was small and neat and rather old-fashioned looking, not what I had been expecting at all.

“Dear Alison,” it read, formal; formulaic.

I sat there with the photocopied note trembling in my hands for twenty minutes. At last I got up and went over to the window, looking out across the lawn to the ocean beyond. This lovely light-filled house that he and Alison had made, with its pretty garden and its wide-open views, gave me no sense of a prison, or a cage. It was hard to hear Andrew’s voice in the phrasing or in the sentiments expressed, but I had never known Andrew in extremis, only in the grip of alcohol and/or lust, full of bonhomie and testosterone. Even so, something about his words rang true in a part of me I could not quite access.

Up above a slender crescent moon shone like a glimpse through night into another world. An owl hooted in the distant trees. My mother had always averred that owls called with the voices of the dead. She, with the deeply ingrained superstitions of a long Cornish ancestry, had touched wood (but only without legs, for fear your luck would walk away from you), and if she spilled salt, had tossed some
over her left shoulder to ward off the devil, even though she said she didn’t believe in him. She believed that there was a transitional state between life and death and that spirits walked till they were at peace; she believed that some spirits never found that peace.

I found myself shivering despite the warmth of the night, but even so, I felt suddenly compelled to throw open the windows, as if to cleanse the atmosphere, to allow myself to breathe more easily—or to let Andrew’s spirit out.

S
OME DAYS LATER, IN ORDER TO DIVERT
A
LISON FROM HER
misery, which pressed harder upon her now that the adrenaline of the initial shock had run out and the distractions of the funeral and practical arrangements had passed, I told her some of my more entertaining Michael stories.

My affair with Michael had driven a bit of a wedge between Alison and myself, especially once she had experienced the ignominy and pain of Andrew’s adultery. She had never approved of Michael, even as Anna’s husband. “There’s something essentially untrustworthy about him,” I remember her remarking to me very early on in their relationship. I hadn’t dared tell her about the two of us for more than a year after it had started, and when I did she had gone completely silent, her lips pursed. At last she’d said, “I ought to call Anna right now. I ought to just pick up the phone and tell her that her best friend’s screwing her husband and she should get rid of them both.”

I’d half-willed her to do it, though I knew Anna would be furious and hate me. But I also knew that no matter what he had done, she would not let Michael go that easily, and that he would never leave her, not for me. Partly, it was her money, but it went deeper than that in a way I did not want to examine too closely.

In the end Alison had told me exactly what she thought of me, then left a long pause and added: “If you ever screw Andrew I’ll kill you.” She managed to keep a straight face for all of thirty seconds. But I knew she kind of meant it.

We’d done our very best to patch up our friendship since then,
but the specter of infidelity was always there with us. I was deeply touched that Alison had turned to me in the depths of her misery, so as a poor form of repayment, I rolled out all the funny stories I could muster—how on an early date Michael had taken me to a smart Chinese restaurant; how I’d been desperate to make a good impression, yet while eating my noodle soup I’d managed to inhale too hard so that a strand had whipped across my chin, leaving a red weal that promptly blistered in a highly unattractive fashion; how we’d made love in a bluebell wood and he’d run a naked half mile trying to get rid of an earwig that had crawled into his hair. How Anna had one day turned up at my flat and Michael spent four hours freezing his nuts off in the garden shed.

I got quite carried away with this heady rehashing of what had been for a lot of the time an anxious, emotionally unprofitable experience. It was a relief to talk about it at all, let alone make it into an entertainment for someone. I began digging out ever more excruciating anecdotes, often at my own expense, and soon Alison was giggling.

At last I found myself staring down at the surface of the table, at the gouges and stains that marked its antique surface. At the beginning of its existence it would have been a smooth sheet of pine, honey-colored, clean and wholesome, but even then it would have had its natural knots and whorls. None of us were perfect, and life made us infinitely less so. Tears of self-pity pricked my eyes.

“Ah well,” she said softly, seeing that I had come to a halt. “He always was a shit.”

Well, we agreed on that. I told her about the breakup dinner. “He gave me a book as a farewell gift. Let me show you.” I dug in my handbag and brought out
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie.

“Good grief,” she said after a while, turning it over in her hands. “I’m pretty sure this was one of the batch Andrew unearthed from the attic a couple of weeks ago and sent up to Michael to sell for us. In fact, I’m sure of it, because it was one of a pair, and that struck me as odd. How weird that you’ve ended up with it.”

This statement hit me like a rabbit punch. So he hadn’t even
bought
the book for me, and in addition, by giving it to me, he had cheated Andrew and Alison out of whatever money they could have sold it for. I felt terrible. “Oh. God. Perhaps you should have it back.” I paused. “Or I could give you something for it?”

“Don’t be an idiot. It’s yours. Anyway, look, it’s been defaced. He probably wouldn’t have been able to sell it in this condition, anyway.” She peered at Catherine’s tiny penciled handwriting, then she sucked in her breath. “Hang on,” she said. “Did you do this?”

“No!” I was shocked that she would think I would deface such a lovely, ancient thing.

“It’s just … well, your writing is so similar.”

I frowned. “Is it?”

“Apart from all the funny
s
’s and curlicues, yes. It’s not a typical secretary hand—it’s more cursive, freer of form. See here, how the
g
loops up, just like yours? And she—I take it she was a ‘she’—dots her
i
’s a little way to the right, just like you do.” She held the book up to the window, screwing her eyes up. “And see here—this italic
a—
no one else I know forms their a’s like that.”

I write my
a
’s the way they are printed in books, rather than the usual
o
with a tail. My frown grew deeper.

“That’s really odd. It’s never struck me at all. Even so, I’m not sure you’re right.”

Alison pushed her chair away from the table with a screech of wood on wood and walked off into the dining room. When she came back, she carried a notebook and a pencil. With a knife from the kitchen block, she sharpened the lead to a needle-point.

“There you go,” she said, sliding notebook and pencil across the table to me. “Go on. Write something—write it as small as in the book.”

“Write what?”

“Whatever you like—no, hold on.” She opened the book somewhere in the middle, turned the page sideways, and scrutinized it
closely. “Write this: ‘An Ægyptian woman came to the scullery door today.’ And that’s ‘Egyptian’ with a diphthong.”

“A what?”

Alison rolled her eyes. Despite her wild times at university, she had come away with a good degree and had always regarded me, affectionately, as a bit of an intellectual dullard.
“AE
run together, you dope. ‘An old Ægyptian woman came to the door today. She came on—’ I can’t read the next bit. …”

I took the book from her. “I think it’s ‘a mule.’” I passed it back.

“ ‘—and was arrayed most strangely with bells and scarves, her face and hands almost black’—that’s ‘black’ with an
e
on the end. …”

I duly wrote it all down. I had to admit that when we held my version close to Catherine’s, they were more similar than I expected. But “Mine has more of a slant, and the verticals are longer,” I said stubbornly.

“You’ve just taken up more space than she has. She had to squeeze it in to wherever she could. Mind you, it’s surprising that she was able to write at all—she’s not an aristo or anything, is she?”

I shook my head. “No, but I think her mother must have been educated, and it sounds from what she says at the start as if her mistress might have taken a bit of a shine to her and encouraged her.” I paused, staring at what I’d written. “Egypt’s a very long way from Cornwall,” I said dubiously. “Are you sure that’s what it says?”

“It’s the old word for ‘gypsy’—they thought they came from Egypt. Some of them probably did.” She paused. “Did you say Cornwall?”

I had forgotten to explain that small detail. “Um, yes. She’s called Catherine Anne Tregenna—Cat, for her initials—and she worked at a manor house in the seventeenth century, somewhere around here, in fact. Ken … something.”

“Kenegie?”

I looked at her in surprise. “That’s the name, yes. Why, do you know it?”

Alison’s eyes were wide. “It’s the name of the Elizabethan manor
house—we’re within its old boundaries. In fact, we had a load of old rubbish from the manor house stuffed in our attic. Good heavens, that book must have been here for the best part of four hundred years. She probably lived right on this estate!”

The back of my neck prickled. “Is the manor house still here?”

Alison hesitated. “It’s probably not what you expect.”

I looked at her, waiting.

“It’s … well, the Elizabethan house is still there, though it’s been renovated to within an inch of its life. They’re turning it into executive apartments.” She snorted. “As if there were a load of aspiring executives converging on Penzance. And the rest of it is a sort of holiday village now.”

“A what?” I was horrified.

She spread her hands. “You can’t blame people: Cornwall’s the poorest county in England. All that’s left down here is tourism and fishing, and precious little fishing, given all the EU restrictions and the foreign factory ships. People have to make their money in any way they can.”

“I suppose so.” The picture she painted was rather different from the one I had been cherishing.

“We could walk down there later, you could see it.”

“Mmmm,” I said noncommittally. Sharp little shards of mundanity were beginning to puncture the illusion I had been happily constructing. Cat’s neat, secretive little jottings had been my escape from the unpleasant realities of the world. Poking around the place she had lived in meant sharing her with Alison, and I realized I didn’t want to share Cat with anyone.

“What was her name again?” she muttered, flicking to the title page. Her eyes lit up. “Catherine Anne Tregenna. You know, I think there are Tregennas somewhere in our family. In fact, I’m sure there are. Or Tregunna. Or was it Tregenza? There’s a greengrocer in Penzance called Tregenza’s; then there’s Tregenna Castle at St. Ives. I wonder if we’re all related? I’ve got the family Bible somewhere.…”

Her face fell.

“What is it?”

“It’s in the attic,” she said flatly.

“Oh.” I didn’t feel like volunteering for that task.

“I have to go up there again sometime, I suppose.…” She left the sentence hanging, as if I was meant to finish it in some way.

I said nothing, but I felt her eyes on me like a weight.

“I’ll go,” I said heavily at last. “If you can tell me where to look.”

She stood on the landing at the bottom of the stairs while I went up, her hands clutching the newel post like claws.

The attic space was as bright and fresh as the rest of the house, but a lot more untidy. A huge Velux window set into the hidden roof slope to the north of the house let in a wash of daylight for which I was profoundly grateful. Along one end ran Andrew’s desk, piled high with papers. The computer sat there blank-screened and resentful. No one had switched it on in the best part of a fortnight. The suicide note had, Alison had told me, been propped up against the monitor. In the center of the room ran a huge wooden beam. A length of rope remained attached to it, its end severed as if by a sharp knife—by the police, I imagined, since Alison said she’d not been able to bring herself to touch the body. I tried not to look at it, but my eyes kept straying back to it. It was bright blue, of some manmade fiber, nylon or polypropylene, and looked rough to the touch, hard to make a good knot with. I wondered where Andrew had learned what knots to tie, whether his fingers had fumbled as he pulled it tight. I imagined how its coarse texture would cut into the delicate skin of the neck, and had to push the thought away.

“Can you see the boxes?” Alison called up, sounding falsely cheerful. “They should be beside the big wooden plan chest.”

That at least was hard to miss: An old architect’s plan chest dominated one end of the room beneath the gable, three cardboard boxes in a jumbled tower beside it. The top one of these was thick with dust; they obviously hadn’t been opened in a while.

I hoisted the top box down and opened it. Andrew’s face stared out at me, florid and grinning, and his presence suddenly filled the
room. I dropped the box, and photos spilled over my feet. Alison and Andrew; Andrew and Alison—the AA, or “fourth rescue service,” as friends had jokingly termed them—a hundred, two hundred images of them together and taken singly; in groups at weddings, on boats, on holiday, in overalls working on the house: twenty years of bright Fujicolor history packed into a dusty old box.

“Sorry!” I called down. “Dropped something.”

I scooped the photos up and crammed them back into the box, averting my eyes from these images of another, better world. The second box contained old notebooks and diaries, a faded visitors’ book, but nothing that looked like a family Bible. That left the last box. I wrestled it open. Under a bundle of yellowing newspaper lay a huge, musty-smelling object. I levered it out. Its leather cover felt damp to the touch and it smelled of mildew, though the box and attic space seemed dry and weatherproof; it was as if it brought its own climate with it.

“I’ve got it!” I called down. As I hefted it, something shifted from inside its back cover and several pages of foxed, brown-edged paper dislodged themselves. For a moment I thought the whole thing was disintegrating; then I realized the papers were loose: old letters, at a glance. I shuffled them carefully back inside the cover and took a last look around the attic space where Andrew Hoskin had taken his life. Despite the bright light streaming in through the window, it felt oppressive in the room, as if not only the beams and joists and tiles of the roof were bearing down on me, but also the sky, the stars, and the heavens beyond. Suddenly I felt a wash of utmost despair. I was a tiny, worthless speck of life in a huge universe. What did I think I was doing here? I was wasting my time, wasting my life. There was nothing for me here; indeed, possibly nothing for me anywhere. I had no job, no family, no man, no children, no prospects—and certainly would find none of them in Cornwall. Moreover, I was a woman, and faithless. The thought came to me, clear as a clarion call, that I should leave at once, just
go away.

Clutching the Bible, I fled down the stairs, already calculating the length of time it would take me to pack, call a taxi, and make my way to Penzance Station.

“What on earth’s the matter?” Alison’s eyes were blue-rimmed and hollow. She looked like a stranger, an intruder in the house. All I wanted to do was to barge past her and get out.

I put a hand out as if to push her away. “I—” And then the feeling passed. I blinked.

She took the Bible away from me: I probably looked too unsteady on my feet to be carrying it. “Let’s go downstairs,” she said firmly, tucking the huge volume under her arm. She put her other arm around me. “You look in need of a cup of strong tea.”