Trial by Fire (5 page)

Christine was immune. She had lived here longer, relished the sounds of rural suburbia. 'Won't take a minute,' she said cheerfully. 'Only a small patch of lawn. Anyway, sitting still is so much my favourite pastime I can stand any accompaniment.'

`This is the point,' said Helen. 'I should formally thank you for your company. You saved my sanity in the High Street.'

`Thank me? It's your house, your coffee, your Saturday morning. Such formality. Does that mean you want me to go?'

Òh, please don't. Have some more coffee, piece of cake, gin and tonic. Stay and talk.

Otherwise Geoffrey gets an earful when he gets home. No, I only mean I'm grateful for a kindred spirit, if that's the right phrase. Eat the cake, anything to keep you.'

Èat the cake? Encouraging me, you thin hypocrite. You can afford to eat the cake. I can't, but I'll eat it all the same.'

Ìnside me,' said Helen, 'is a fat person trying to get out. Six more months of domestic bliss in Branston and this damaged butterfly will have gone back to chrysalis. Fat chrysalis. I can't afford cake, either. Cake and country: why do they go together? Eat your calories, get lethargic, sit back and listen to the butterflies. OK, for once I admit the pleasure of it.'

The two women were a sharp contrast to each other. Christine Summerfield bore a seasonal name for a buttercup nature, resembled an attractive advertisement for dairy food —

pleasantly plump and fair, heavy bosom, blue eyes, and expression of shrewd honesty. On first sight her role as professional caretaker of man or animal seemed obvious: she looked like what she was. Helen had guessed nurse first, then social worker. Right the second time.

Christine resembled the kindly guardian she was, sympathy implicit in every line of her face, while Helen — so easily ridden with pity, guilt, confusion, and fury, so prone to every surreptitious kindness or mercy her job or her life afforded — did not carry her compassion like a flag in her eyes.

She was small and dark, slender but muscular, occasionally fierce. She had a slightly lined face full of hidden humour, huge eyes, and a scar on her forehead. Christine considered her beautiful; Bailey did, too. Helen's previous Boss had called her a stubborn little brute.

Vividly attractive on any estimate, but unlike Christine, not a thing to be embraced soon after shaking its hand. She was too quick in wit, too articulate to present as the immediate comforter, the bosom for all sorrows, as Christine patently was, and yet they found Helen, the lamed and the disgraced, the troubled and the children.

Can we play in your garden, miss? Can we sit in your car? Of course you can. Tell your mother where you are, and if you eat the plants or puncture the wheels, I'll brain you, understand? Any use for these biscuits, have you? Thought you might. Staccato common sense, endless generosity almost gruff in the giving, parameters firmly set. Old men in pubs, young women in shops talking while she listened and understood, patient with fools. An instinctive grasp of what was important in any tale.

Christine the caretaker knew herself drawn in the same way to that calm understanding which was quite devoid of criticism, was charmed and relieved when the confidences that had poured unbidden from her own mouth and into Helen's ears were rewarded by confidences in return. Incomplete confidences, but still something tantamount to shared secrets. 'Dear God,' she had said to Helen, 'social worker and prosecutor, I ask you. By tradition we sit on opposite fences, but we manage to talk for hours.'

Òpposite fences?' said Helen. 'Rubbish. We're all on the same side. Two professionals doing a job. Tradition has a lot to answer for.' They had gravitated beyond such considerations, still discussed them.

Ì like it here,' said Christine. 'But I can see why you don't. You're playing second fiddle to Bailey — professionally, I mean.'

Ì've always played second fiddle. That's what solicitors do, after all. We never make big shots, in public at least.'

But you don't even deal with big shots, not here.'

`True, ' Helen admitted. 'It's a bit lower-powered than I'm used to, but that isn't what I mind, most of the time. Some of the time, but not most of the time. It's a bit of relief, and if the truth were known, the small cases are often as complicated as the big ones. Shame they don't get the same attention.'

`What about your little-shot clients, if that's the right word for them? Do you ever have any doubts about their guilt?'

I very rarely doubt their being guilty as charged, if that's what you mean, especially here, where truthful witnesses are less at a premium. But I still think them innocent in many respects. Fault and blame are so often irrelevant.'

They were content to sit in silence, Christine waiting, Helen finally restful.

`Damn that lawnmower. I never understand how an age that forces people to live in closer proximity than ever before should give them all the tools to make it impossible.

Stereos, lawn mowers, food mixers, such a bloody racket. London was quiet compared to this.

Speaking of proximity, how's Antony? Come on, tell me.'

Helen was well aware that her companion had been waiting to tell for the last hour, only needing a cue, ever since they had met in the High Street, grinning over the heads of the shoppers, she buying for Bailey, Christine for Antony, Helen making heavy weather of chores Christine took lightly. Oh, I can't make up my mind. What the hell shall I buy? There's so much of it. Decisions in shops were far harder than professional ones. Even their love affairs were different.

Àntony? He's at home making lunch.' Christine blushed slightly. 'He likes cooking, actually.'

Now there's luck for you. Still love, I take it?'

Yee . . . es. With open eyes. Early days yet, very early, but optimistic. I know what he is, you see, and I don't mind.' She curled up in the garden chair, which Helen found the only comfortable seat in the house, settled to the telling. 'I know he's a dreamer, been a bad lad in the past. Knee deep in poetry, bewailing his lot teaching Shakespeare to reluctant kids. Likes it, really. He has this peculiar ability to teach. I'd forgive him a lot for having that.'

`What's peculiar about it? Any special technique?'

`He makes children want to write,' said Christine. 'I don't know how. He says that's the essence of teaching English. Gets them to write down everything they think and put some form into it. They seem to love it, although the results are hilarious and sometimes disconcerting. Tell it like a story, he says to them, and they do.

Then, lo and behold, the little blighters began to like reading, too.

Much in demand, our Antony. All for his talent of getting them to record their lives on paper.'

Ì like that,' said Helen. 'He goes romping up in my estimation.

So that's one thing you love about him. You were just beginning on the reservations.'

`Well, he can't help looking like Byron. It's rather turned his mind, given him this fatal attraction for the opposite sex, which includes me, of course. Says he is redeemed by the love of a fair woman, and provided I can put up with that kind of nonsense as well as the naïveté that seems to have survived school, which I can, he's a lovely, generous, open-hearted man.

He'll do nicely for a frustrated thirty-two-year-old social worker once he's over the complications. I only wish he was more truthful. The rest I'm happy to take.'

Helen, who knew these diffident descriptions hid a great yawning gulf of love in the only Branston inhabitant to whom she had drawn close, probed further in gentle cross-examination. `What do you mean, more truthful? Does he fib?'

`Well, they all do a bit, don't they?' said Christine doubtfully. `Men, I mean.'

No, they don't, Helen thought. Bailey doesn't. Lies choke him. Unfortunately he prefers silence.

Ì only mean he doesn't tell the whole truth. This affair he had —you know, I told you, before me — God, has it only been three months? I can't believe it, seems like for ever.

Anyway, this married woman whose daughter he was tutoring, extra English lessons . . . you know, he was giving the daughter this knack and habit of writing things down, although I gather she was pretty clever already. Quite rich, this family; he won't tell me who the woman was, but she was older than he. He had an affair with her, more off than on, for a year. All tailed out. She was keener than he, he says, pursued him like a tank across the desert. He insists it's all off; he's met me, the love of his life, et cetera. Swore he never touched her after me, and I believe him.

But he met her last week because she cried on the phone at school, threatened to tell her husband, suicide, the lot. He was a bit distraught. They met at The Crown — I'd been forewarned — and finished it for ever, he says, and again I believe him. He may be a bit of a womanizer, but only one at a time. I just wonder, that's all. Didn't see him for two days, and when I did he looked as if he'd done two rounds with a tiger, still does. Says he fell over a bramble bush while trying to mend a fence in his garden. Antony does not mend fences, not that kind anyway. He may cook, but he doesn't mend fences.'

Ì see. No word of how the meeting went with the lady?'

`That's just it. I don't know. He refuses to elaborate. That isn't typical Antony. He relates every wretched shameful thing he's ever done since childhood. His honesty's pathological, exhausting at times. He makes his pupils enjoy mild catharsis on paper, and he enjoys it in words. But not over this, and I don't know why.' She crumbled the last of the cake, dispirited.

`He probably behaved as badly as anyone would when there's no kind way to say the things he was having to say,' said Helen. 'Spoke all the wrong words in the wrong way.

Maybe honesty was his downfall, he should have lied a lot, and instead they ended up screaming, he for his skin, she for her dignity. No one would notice in The Crown, after all.'

Ì see all that. But scratches? Antony's quite capable of violence, you know. Only when cornered. I know that,' Christine added hastily, 'from the confessional of his early youth, not from anything he's ever done to me. He's wiry, with all the aggression of a bullied boy.

That's what worries me. If this rejected matron scratched him, what did he do in return?'

Ì hope he didn't scratch back.'

Christine shrugged. 'I hope so, too.'

Helen looked at her friend, alarmed by a sudden premonition, a hateful vision of that corpse in the wood, encounters at The Crown, the disjointed memories of the Featherstones, all recounted as amusingly as possible by Geoffrey the evening before, all merging into the landscape of tragedy. She stripped her face bare of thought, dismantled and dispelled the premonition as it rose like an ugly monument in her mind, smiled, and spoke firmly. 'Nothing you can do now, whatever he did then.

Wait and see. But ten days? That's nothing. I tell you, in the realms of male silence, especially if they feel guilty, really nothing. He'll tell you when he's ready, surely.'

Sophisticated platitudes for a mature companion, not doubting her tentative analysis of a nasty event, too honest for that, simply suggesting that all sounds of alarm could be postponed, perhaps for ever.

Allowing time for a good lunch, a peaceful afternoon, and with luck a peaceful lifetime, but not entirely omitting the doubt. Ointment for a troublesome graze, not suggesting a cure. The balm discharged Christine from the house in a state bordering on optimism, leaving Helen pacing the pastel carpets, full of worry without name. Putting a lid on it was as futile as attempting to suppress a jack-in-the-box with a wicked spring and cruel face, unsuitable for children.

Of course she would tell her Geoffrey, her own Detective Chief Superintendent Bailey, of course she would. Or maybe not. She would tell, feeling foolish for once in the telling, no more than an aside: Darling, do you know what else has been going on in The Crown. . . ? Nothing at all to add to the scenario that gripped him in the current search to find a face for this body, a signature for this murderer, preferably appended to a confession. She would tell him, nevertheless, as she told him everything.

Almost everything, she reminded herself; no one tells it all. She might have learned to speak truth automatically and had not yet discovered the day when there would be a serious conflict of loyalties, a question of betrayal. So far there had been no conflict, but without conscious thought of Christine Summerfield or of the Branston way of life, which he seemed to enjoy and she to suspect for its very tranquillity, she feared the imminence of decisions.

One thought led to another. No potato peeling today; Geoffrey out on inquiries, plenty of freedom for thinking. Silly disconnected thoughts involving plenty of nonsense, seen as such. Practical considerations above all, such as what to do with a restless afternoon. I could go to London and get crushed and dirty in Oxford Street. Lovely, if I had the energy. I could stay here and pick daisies, worry a bit, sit in the jungle at The Crown, and pray above all that I never have a lawnmowing husband and that Christine does. No, I shall not wash the car, since the children would like it less, or clean out the garage, because of the starlings' nest, nor shall I deadhead these tidy roses; let them rot. I'll go and have a meaningless conversation instead or paint a picture.

Helen could paint. Charming scenes that tended to become caricatures with captions as well as faces. When words failed, she would grab pen and paper in her urgency to explain.

'Listen, it's like this' — gesturing with one hand as diagram or illustration emerged from the pen in the other, on a napkin, a tablecloth, best linen not immune, on the back of a brief or an envelope. In a lecture hall as a student or waiting in court, she would create a litter of doodles, noses, eyes, hairlines, and winks, summoning up for Bailey a presence on paper. 'Listen, will you? He looked a bit like this, as I told you,' producing a likeness of sorts with all the salient and funny features first. 'He had a nose like this,' or an animal face, catlike, doglike, snakelike, or blank, or a face resembling a car, or three lines that caught some angle of the features.