Tree of Hands (27 page)

Terence went back to the writing desk and wrote to Barclaycard, giving his change of address and requesting a new card. Only just in time he stopped himself signing the letter John Howard Phipps. He wrote to his solicitor, confirming 15 February as completion date, and then he braced himself for the signing of the contract. Thank God a witness wasn't needed.

A drink would be a good idea. Just one though. One to steady his hand and calm the ravening anxiety that gripped him whenever he contemplated taking this step which would commit him to selling Freda's house. One and a half inches of whisky and the same of water. The Valium he had taken after lunch had more or less worn off by now. He sometimes thought he had taken so much of it that it didn't really work well any longer. It was starting to get dark, though still afternoon. He put on some of the lamps with black shades and some with white shades and paced up and down on the black spaniel carpet, drinking his drink.

Outside in the courtyard the fairy lights someone had put in the catalpa tree winked and sparkled. First of all the green and yellow lights came on, then the blue and red, then the white, then the lot together. Terence walked purposefully to the desk, sat down and signed the contract. He took two or three deep breaths, grasped the pen firmly and signed the document with the signature of John Howard Phipps. It was the best signature he had ever done, almost better than the genuine article if that were possible.

The post wouldn't go out till morning now but he might as well take his letters to the box and have a drink in the White Bear on the way back. He had a couple of quid left. It was while he was in the pub, minding his own business in a corner over a half of Foster's lager, that he remembered the bank statement he had found in the zip-up compartment of Jessica's suitcase. So excited had he been over the
discovery of the credit card and finding it still valid that he hadn't even bothered to look at that statement. Suppose there was some money still in the account? Suppose there was as much as twenty pounds? There might be. He had never drawn anything out after leaving Jessica. Some kind of wariness had stopped him. At any rate he must check up on it. The last thing he wanted was to leave the country, having made the Anglian-Victoria bank in Golders Green a substantial money present.

First thing in the morning he would go there and ask his discreet question. Equally discreetly the girl would let him know what the account contained by writing the sum on a scrap of paper and passing it face-downwards to him under the grille. Not tomorrow, though. Tomorrow, he remembered, would be Christmas Day.

Next week, then. He still had to think how he was going to establish somewhere or other a bank account for John Howard Phipps. The mean underhandedness of the solicitors had staved off the need for an account for a while but only a while. The banker's draft for the balance of the £132,000 Goldschmidt would produce on 15 February had to be paid in somewhere. Terence couldn't ask his solicitors to convert it into cash for him. Or, rather, he
could
but he knew he wouldn't dare, he wouldn't take the risk.

And then suddenly he saw. He saw how it could be done. He was gazing into the clear golden liquid in his glass with its light swirl of foam, as if into a crystal. It became the elixir of life or a fount of wisdom. He drank it down and asked for another.

‘Merry Christmas,' he said to the girl behind the bar, though he didn't go so far as to buy her a drink.

The dream of a Christmas Party for Jason had come to no more in the end than three infant guests and their mothers confronted by more food than twice as many could have eaten and a bewildering display of decorations and presents. But it had been a success too. They had enjoyed themselves, and Chloe and her two-year-old daughter Kate who
hadn't seen James for six months were in no doubt Jason was him. The others, a boy and girl and their mothers living in the Vale of Peace, had of course no idea there was any doubt about it. They all called him Jay, though Chloe raised an eyebrow at the diminutive.

When they had all gone home and Jason was in bed, Benet sat in the basement room among the dirty plates and cups, the present wrappings and the glittering litter and looked at the two trees, the Christmas tree hung with lights and the tree she had painted on the wall and adorned with green and yellow and scarlet hands. Each hand had held – or had had cunningly hooked on to it – a tiny present for Jason: a toy car, an orange, a marble, a magnet, a packet of nuts. She knew she had gone overboard with excess. A more temperate climate must prevail in future. She mustn't spoil him just because they had so blissfully found each other. But this first Christmas with him, she had been unable to help herself. It had been a celebration of her own joy as much as for his pleasure. Pleasure for him there had been, enormous delight. She thought for the rest of her life she would remember his slowly dawning gleeful smile, his advance upon the tree and his last-minute glance up at her for permission to help himself to what the hands held. Nevertheless it was for herself she had done it, to see that look on his face, to exult. Since that day in the library she had been warm with joy – literally warm. It was as if she couldn't feel the cold of dark sleety December. Often she found herself going out wearing only a light jacket, she was so heated by inner happiness.

For the rest of that day when she had taken him to and snatched him from the Winterside library and for a day or two afterwards, she had been beset by fear amounting sometimes to terror that she had betrayed them both, had been detected, and that the police would come. And her fear had no longer been for publicity or disgrace or retribution but solely that Jason would be taken from her. But when no one came and when at the same time all references to Jason seemed to disappear from the newspapers, a happy
calm succeeded the fear. She moved into a lovely never-never land which had no past and no future beyond next week and which allowed for no thought about the impossibility of continuing like this or the inevitability of eventual discovery. She was happy, she was serene and she was working. She knew that no rebuff and no rejection could hurt her and it was in this frame of mind that she rang the hospital and asked for Ian Raeburn to invite him to the Vale of Peace.

He came that same evening. Jason had been in bed about an hour. It was curious what happened. Benet had never had such an experience before. It was as if they both knew what they must do, as if this was the way they had greeted one another for a long time now. They went into each other's arms and kissed passionately. What they were doing surprised them equally. They hadn't expected this, it had seemingly been involuntary, and they looked into each other's faces and smiled. But the smiles were brief because passion, until it is old and customary, is not amused. They held each other and kissed and Benet knew they wouldn't speak or explain or excuse but go up, still holding each other, to her bedroom up that long staircase. Only Jason cried. He screamed out in his frightened nightmare voice:

‘Mummy! Mummy!'

It broke what had existed between her and Ian. Running up the stairs to Jason, she knew it had broken it only for a while, that one day soon what they had begun would proceed to consummation, but not this evening, not now. She picked up Jason and held him against breasts that ached, a body where half-forgotten little pulses beat. But when she came downstairs and found Ian in the basement room, it was only to take his hands and sit beside him. And it was better so, better to go forward with caution into what she began to feel might be for a lifetime.

He asked her if she were fostering the boy called Jay with a view to adopting him and she clutched at this straw and said yes. Yes, she was.

‘He isn't a replacement for James. It isn't that at all. I don't know if you can understand.'

‘I'll try.'

‘It's as if I had two sons and one of them died. I'll never forget him and there'll always be an empty space in life where he used to be. An empty chair at the table, if that doesn't sound too sentimental.'

‘Not to me.'

‘I suppose the truth is you can't replace someone. You can just have other people. I won't say my feeling for Jay is greater or less than my feeling was for James. It's not even different. It's the same kind of love but for a different person.'

‘I'm glad for you,' Ian said. ‘You've done something very wise and clever for yourself, haven't you?'

She had a momentary shivery feeling of what would he think if he knew the real facts? It passed, swallowed by her happiness.

‘We're going to see each other all the time now, aren't we, Benet?'

‘All the time,' she said.

‘And this is
it
?'

‘Oh, yes, I think this is it, don't you?'

They laughed at each other. Benet said, ‘Every evening?'

‘Every lunchtime and every afternoon,' he said. ‘Just for the next fortnight anyway. I'm on nights.'

‘And I was forgetting I'm writing a novel.'

‘Could I make you forget
that
?' he said.

Since then they had met every day – with Jason. Ian had had to go home for Christmas to his parents in Inverness. At nine he would phone her. She began clearing up the basement room with the radio playing light country music. The new novel was going well. She wrote contentedly at night after Jason was asleep, sometimes until midnight. Of course there would have to be some changes there when Ian came back and went on day duty . . . In the glass, pausing with a tray of crockery in her hands, she saw a fuller and younger-looking face, though there were a few
white hairs among the dark, about an inch long they were or two months' growth, and she knew they had come when James died.

She picked up the phone and dialled her parents' number in Spain to wish them a happy New Year. Mopsa answered.

‘It's unlucky before the Eve itself,' said Mopsa.

‘Nonsense.' Benet astonished herself by speaking so robustly. ‘I'll probably be out on the Eve enjoying myself.'

There was a silence. Then, ‘I only wish I had it in me to be as selfish as that.' Mopsa paused for a reply and when none came said, ‘How is James?'

Benet's heart turned over, and for a moment she couldn't speak. It was to her father only that she had spoken when last they had been in touch a week before Christmas and he, of course, couldn't be expected to know. But Mopsa! I must not hate my mother . . .

But the explanation was simply that Mopsa had forgotten. Her actions in the matter of kidnapping Jason had not been well-received, still less applauded, so in the way she always reacted to any censure or criticism she had blocked the whole experience off with whatever mechanism of her curious mentality handled these things. She had forgotten. Memory for her had always been like the writing on a blackboard, which any kind of unease would wipe away at a single stroke.

‘He's well,' Benet managed to say. ‘We've had a party.'

‘I don't remember getting an invitation.'

‘Well, of course not. You'd hardly come eight hundred miles to a children's party.'

‘When your father's managing director's daughter got married in Santiago, she sent us an invitation and that was more like eight
thousand
miles.'

Benet knew the uselessness of pursuing this. She spoke to her father who sounded tired and subdued. Mopsa refused to come back to the phone. She said the line was so bad it hurt her ears.

I must not hate my mother . . .

And suddenly, at last, Benet understood that she didn't
hate Mopsa any more. That she would never have to adjure herself with those words any more. She would be eternally grateful to her and that was only a step from love. For without Mopsa she would never have had Jason. Mopsa had stolen him for her, knowing with a wisdom unsuspected in her that given long enough Benet would come to love him. And to this end she had risked what was most frightful to her, incarceration – indeed, forced imprisonment – in a mental hospital. She had stolen Jason and given him to Benet and, rather than be the only witness to this abduction, had with her methodical madness forgotten all about it.

‘It doesn't matter,' Benet said to her father. ‘Say goodbye to her for me. And give her my best love.'

The chill damp limbo that occupies the spaces between the high holidays of Christmas was making itself felt in Finchley High Road. On this the twenty-ninth of December, half the shops were still closed but not of course the banks. Buoyed up by a small whisky and two Valiums, Terence found ample parking space in Regent's Park Road for Freda Phipps's car. The few people about with shopping bags looked bemused, stunned by recent festivities.

Terence walked along rather slowly. He had passed the Westminster Bank and Lloyds and the Midland and Barclays and was beginning to fear (also in a way to hope) that there was no branch of the Anglian-Victoria here, that the phone book had been wrong or the branch had moved, when he saw it ahead of him, its A and V monogram on the orange signboard sticking out between the post office and a building society. He hesitated. He stood gazing into the darkened and barred window of a men's boutique as if the dimly discerned yellow pullover and beige cords in its shadowy depths held an obsessive fascination for him. There was no help for it, he had to go into the bank. It was either going in there or else giving up the whole thing, abandoning the project.

Eleven-thirty and the pubs were open. He was rather
well-off for actual cash, having, since the discovery in Jessica's suitcase, bought a good deal of his food, meals out and drinks on the still-valid Barclaycard. He could easily have run to a couple of Scotches. But he was scared of slurring his speech or of making a mess of John Howard Phipps's signature should he be asked to produce it.

What could they do to him in the bank after all but refuse him? They weren't going to send for the police because he asked for a bank account in the name of Phipps. It wasn't a crime to call yourself by a different name from your own, you could call yourself what you liked in this country. And he had found a foolproof way of getting round that reference business, hadn't he? They could do nothing but refuse him . . .