The Things We Never Said (11 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After supper on Christmas Eve, they pack their presents for Fiona’s family into the laundry bag she keeps for the purpose. Now Jonathan has got used to the idea that they’re going to her parents, he’s quite looking forward to it. But the visit from that policeman is nagging at him. His mother is at her sister’s in Edinburgh for Christmas, but Hutchinson wants to talk to her as soon as she returns. ‘What do you think?’ he asks Fiona. ‘Should I call her at my aunt’s or wait until she’s back?’

‘I think you should leave it,’ Fiona says. ‘Why worry her now?’

‘Hutchinson wants to see her alone; he said there might be things she’d “find difficult to talk about” in front of me.’

‘Sounds fair enough. You don’t have to be there at the same time as him, do you? Here, hold this for me.’

He holds the edges of the bag while Fiona zips it up. ‘I suppose not. But he doesn’t even want me to tell her he’s coming. I can’t let him just turn up, can I? I mean, he’s as good as said he thinks my father was a violent criminal. What’s that going to do to her?’

Fiona stops what she’s doing and sweeps a strand of hair away from her face. She looks tired. It seems ages since he’s seen her smile. ‘I thought you said there’s only a chance it could have something to do with your dad?’

‘A strong chance, Hutchinson said. And I suppose it
is
plausible, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ She looks down, finishes zipping up the bag. ‘If you phone her now, it’ll spoil her Christmas and she’ll want to come rushing back. You had to talk her into going as it was.’

‘True.’ He lifts the bulging bag down onto the floor.

‘Let this Hutchinson guy talk to her when she gets back from Edinburgh, then you can go and see her when it’s had time to sink in.’ She pulls out a chair and sits down. ‘He won’t just go round there and blurt it out, surely? She’s an old lady.’

‘That’s what I said. He said he wouldn’t be “insensitive” but that basically, he’s got a job to do.’ He sighs as he sits down opposite her. ‘And the DNA aspect means I’ll have to tell her about being arrested – she’ll want to know how the whole thing came about.’

Fiona shakes her head and sighs. ‘Do you really think – I mean,
really
– that it’s your dad they’re looking for?’

‘At first I thought it couldn’t be, but from what Hutchinson said about the DNA . . . the odds are pretty high.’ As he thinks about what that might actually mean, he feels like a hole is opening up in his chest.

Fiona sighs again. ‘It’s just one bloody thing after another, isn’t it?’

He walks over and puts his hand on her shoulder, but she gets to her feet. ‘I’m going up,’ she says.

‘It’s only half past nine, I thought—’

‘It’ll be a long day tomorrow.’ She moves towards the door as though she’s dragging a heavy weight behind her. ‘And I’m tired. See you when you come up.’

A wave of disappointment breaks over him. They usually exchange their gifts on Christmas Eve; it’s always been their time together before diving into the cheery celebrations of her family or the frigid, restrained hospitality of his. He sits down again heavily. He always enjoys Christmas with Fiona’s parents; the friendly chaos of Jean’s warm, messy kitchen; Nick’s gleeful ‘let’s have a little nightcap’, which usually meant a whopping great whisky or two. But this is their last child-free Christmas, and he’d hoped they’d spend it here, just the two of them. She’d seemed keen, too, until the other night. He’d started telling her what he was planning to cook on Christmas Day – rare beef with fresh horseradish, crispy potatoes and red wine gravy, followed by mini Christmas puddings made with fresh figs and served with clotted cream – when he noticed she wasn’t smiling. ‘What’s wrong?’ he’d said.

‘It sounds lovely, Jonno, but . . .’ She sighed. ‘Do you mind if we go to Mum and Dad’s after all?’

‘But I thought . . .’

‘It’s just that, what with everything that’s going on, I think we both need the distraction.’

He’d been about to disagree, but then she said, ‘And I know this sounds silly and childish, but right now I feel like, I don’t know . . . like I want my mum.’

But he assumed they’d still have their own little celebration tonight, as usual. And now it’s Christmas Eve and she’s gone to bed, and the empty kitchen feels cold and miserable. Faint laughter from next door’s television wafts through the walls; the fridge shudders then resumes its humming. He should go to bed as well, but he knows he won’t sleep, so instead he wanders into the living room. It smells of Christmas – the green, fresh-pine scent of the tree overlaid with a citrus tang of oranges. He switches on the telly and lies down on the sofa to watch some celebrity chef shoving half-pound slabs of butter inside a turkey and telling viewers that Christmas was no time to be worrying about heart attacks; then the camera switches to a homely kitchen and a voluptuous woman in a low-cut holly-green sweater who, in between piping whipped cream onto mince pies, appears to be fellating her own thumb. He grabs the remote and hits the off button. As he lies there, listening to the house quieten around him, his eyes begin to close. He’s too drowsy to control his thoughts, but not drowsy enough to slip into unconsciousness, and in this state, his agitated mind begins to turn his father into various incarnations of murderers from the Yorkshire Ripper to Dr Crippen. It takes a supreme effort to rouse himself from this no-man’s-land, but he manages to force his eyes open, then he stands and switches the lamp on in the hope that the light will chase out the shadowy images lurking in his brain. In the kitchen, he pours a glass of milk, takes a sip then spits it in the sink; it’s on the turn. The foul, sour taste jolts him back to reality. ‘Sod it,’ he mutters aloud. He rummages in the bags by the door until he finds the port they’re supposed to be taking with them tomorrow; he pours a generous measure and goes back into the living room. Their presents for each other are still beneath the tree, which is hung with golden baubles and draped with ropes of twinkling fairy lights. But no matter how long he stares at it, he can’t quite absorb its cosy cheer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It is Sunday so there’s no performance today, and Maggie is sitting at the props table with a Peak Frean’s Teatime Selection tin full of broken eggshells in front of her. In the coming week’s play, the leading lady bakes a cake and is seen cracking two eggs into a bowl. With matinees three times a week, that’s a lot of eggs, so the entire company brings in their eggshells and it’s Maggie’s job to stick the halves together so they look like new. She’s mastered it now: she takes half an eggshell, wedges it just inside the other half, dips her brush in some fresh egg white and paints over the join, then sets it to dry. She is at her calmest when working. They tell her she’s the best ASM they’ve ever had and her willingness seems to impress them, so she tries to ignore the way her stomach churns when she sees a particularly gluey strand of albumen in one of the shells. Concentrating on work helps her to stop thinking about Jack. When the theatre reopened after the storm, Clive sent someone round to his digs, but his landlady said he’d left. Paid his rent up to the end of the month and moved out. ‘Huh,’ Vanda said when she heard. ‘That’s just what he did in Leeds, buggered off out of the blue without so much as a by-your-leave.’

At first, Maggie was relieved that she didn’t have to face him, but now she’s angry. How dare he do that to her and then just disappear, leaving her bruised and battered and bloodied? For a while, a tiny part of her had wondered whether she could possibly have got it wrong, whether there was some other explanation for her ripped clothes and torn body. Part of that night is still a blank, but every now and then, when she’s least expecting it, her memory dredges up some image or sound to throw at her, making her start and tremble until it fades away again. She feels her throat constrict and tears threaten, but she will not cry; she will
not
.

Jimmy is up the ladder, whistling as he paints the flats for the new play. Right now, there are just a few new strokes beginning to obliterate the reds and golds of last week’s Victorian drawing room. You can’t see yet what the new set will be, but when Jimmy has finished, it’ll be so realistic you will feel you could walk into it.

She picks up the next half-shell and is about to hold it against another when she spots a streak of blood in the sticky remains. Her stomach heaves. She drops the eggshell, scrambles to her feet and runs to the nearest lavatory where she brings up most of her breakfast. As she makes her way back, everything becomes suddenly oversized and vivid. And then there is a most curious occurrence: the next thing she is aware of is sitting on the wooden floor, leaning up against the leg of the props table with the battered biscuit tin in her lap. But now eight of the shells are stuck together, and she’s sure she has only done three. She shakes her head; perhaps she’s been daydreaming. But her mind is blank. No matter how hard she thinks, she cannot bring to the surface any memory of the last – how long? She looks around like a new-hatched bird, and that’s when she notices the flat Jimmy was working on. It is transformed. It now shows a cluttered farmhouse kitchen with a great oak dresser at one end and a blackened kitchen range at the other. Pots and pans hang from the walls and there’s a huge kettle on the range; he’s even painted flowers on the plates that adorn the dresser. Jimmy is an artist, a genius. She looks around, but he’s gone, and when she walks over to the board and gingerly reaches out a finger, the paint is unmistakably dry.

*

Over the next few days, Maggie feels increasingly unwell. She keeps getting a peculiar, detached feeling and yesterday she fainted. That must have been what happened the other day. And hadn’t Vanda warned her about Jimmy’s practical jokes? Apparently, he’s always sewing up the bottoms of the cast’s trousers while they’re onstage, or filling their gloves with dried peas. He must have stuck the extra five shells together while she was unconscious, just to give her the heebie jeebies.

Not long after the eggshell episode, as she is washing her smalls in the basement bathroom of her digs, it happens again. It’s Dot’s laundry day and the old copper is bubbling away in the corner, the room damp and full of steam. Dot prods around in the soapy water with her wooden tongs then hauls out great steaming tangles of bedlinen and drops them into the bath with a splat. She grunts every now and again with the effort. One minute, Maggie is standing over the stone sink, wringing out her nylons, the next, or so it seems, she is lying in bed fully clothed, her face wet with tears. Dot is knocking on the door and calling her name.

She stumbles across the room and opens the door; the hot, clean smell of Robin’s starch floods the room.

‘Whatever’s the matter, duck?’ Dot’s face is flushed from ironing and she’s wheezing from the effort of the stairs.

‘I don’t know,’ she says slowly. She’s not sure what time it is, or what she is supposed to be doing.

‘You must have had one of your turns,’ Dot says. ‘You looked a bit queer so I thought I’d pop up and check, and as soon as I came up them stairs I could hear you breaking your heart. Rooaring like a babby, tha was. You want to get yer sen to’t doctor’s, if you ask me; get summat for tha nerves.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

On Christmas morning, they barely speak. Fiona insists he’s probably still over the limit, so they take her car. He’s in no position to argue. She drives with her jaw clenched, knuckles whitening on the steering wheel and eyes fixed straight ahead.

‘I really am sorry,’ he says again.

She shrugs. ‘Yes, well.’

They exchanged presents before they left, but she isn’t wearing the bracelet he bought her. And when he gave her the early edition of
The Velveteen Rabbit
, a childhood favourite she’s wanted a copy of for years, she barely smiled. Her gift to him was a boxed set of fourteen Hitchcock films on DVD. ‘Fantastic!’ he’d smiled as he unwrapped them. The first weekend they’d ever spent together there’d been a Hitchcock Season on television and they’d spent the entire two days in bed watching the movies, eating snack foods and having sex. ‘That’s a wonderful present, and I know I don’t deserve it.’ He’d looked at her, hoping for a glimmer of shared memory, but by then she was putting her coat on and pointedly looking at her watch.

The drive to her parents’ house takes just over an hour. The silence in the car creates a vast, deep crater and each time he tries to talk, his words just fall into it and disappear.

*

The festive atmosphere at Nick and Jean’s means they have to make an effort, and they manage to get through lunch and a game of junior Cluedo with Noah and Molly fairly cheerfully. After lunch, they all settle to watch
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and Jonathan is relieved to be able to stop smiling. He steals the odd glance at Fiona, but she refuses to meet his gaze, so he gives up and tries to concentrate on the film. James Stewart’s character, convinced it would be better if he’d never been born, is about to throw himself off a bridge when Clarence, his guardian angel, intervenes. Jonathan suspects that right at this moment, even if he had his own jovial, avuncular guardian angel, it would probably tell him to just go ahead and jump.

Fiona had got up before him this morning, so she’d found the half-empty bottle as soon as she went downstairs. She’d come storming back up just as he was getting out of bed. ‘You selfish bastard!’ she’d yelled. He could see tears glinting in her eyes but at that point, he honestly hadn’t known what she was talking about.

‘Have you any idea how much this cost?’ She waved what was left of the port at him.

‘Er, no, not—’

‘Almost fifty pounds,’ she said. ‘You’ve had about thirty quid’s worth.’

‘
How
much? Why the—’

‘It was for my dad; for his birthday.’

He looked at her. He’d completely forgotten it was Nick’s birthday just after Christmas. ‘Oh God, I’m so, so sorry. I honestly didn’t realise it was a special bottle; I thought we were just taking it like we take a bottle of wine.’

‘But I
told
you I’d chosen it as a treat for my dad.’

And now he remembers: she
did
tell him, but he’s been so preoccupied with the arrest and with Hutchinson and the DNA thing that it went right out of his head.
What possessed you?
she’d demanded. The obvious answer was
too much vintage port
, but that wouldn’t go down well.

After
It’s a Wonderful Life
, they play a torturous game of charades, followed by a falsely cheery walk with Lucy, Matt and the kids while Jean prepares a supper of cold turkey, pickles and mashed potatoes. Over supper, Fiona knocks back a second glass of red and then bursts into tears because it’s bad for the baby. Then she goes to bed, leaving Jonathan to fumble for an explanation.

*

They set off home after lunch on Boxing Day, with Jonathan driving this time. ‘Well, that was nice, wasn’t it?’ he says as they turn onto the dual carriageway.

‘Yes.’

‘The kids clearly had a great time.’

‘They seemed to, yes.’

‘And I thought Lucy and Matt were on good form.’

‘Mmm.’

He glances at her, but she’s looking straight ahead. He starts to say something else, but her silence fills the car like expanding foam, so he shuts up.

They pull up outside the house, and as he draws level with his own car ready to reverse into the space behind, he sees a deep gouge in the paintwork, running the whole length of the offside. It looks like someone’s dragged a screwdriver or a key along it. He gets out and bends to examine the damage, running his finger along the rough metal.

‘Oh, my God. Who’d do something like this?’ Fiona says.

He hesitates. He’s not sure why, but a little voice is screaming at him that Ryan Jenkins has something to do with this.

Fiona is frowning. ‘You think it’s that kid, don’t you?’

‘Could be.’

‘But he doesn’t know where we—’

Then he remembers. ‘He was boasting in class a while ago about how easy it is to find addresses on the internet if you know the name and the area, and that wasn’t long after we saw him in Greenwich Market that time.’

Fiona looks doubtful, and just for a moment he wonders if he’s being paranoid. But then he sees her glance nervously up and down the road before going into the house.