You Don't Have to be Good (31 page)

Bea had made the best of the place, he realised, its absence of cliffs and of sea, its petty Town–Gown divide. She had walked out into it every day and that was more than he had done until recently. When he first stopped working she had suggested they move away. ‘Why live in one damp corner of the planet, Frank, when there’s a whole world out there?’ He had been disdainful. He had dissed her, as Laura would say. Disdain and opposition were his default positions. ‘It doesn’t matter where you are,’ he told her. ‘It’s what’s in here that matters,’ and he tapped his forehead as if to say, I have worlds in here that you can barely imagine. Bollocks to that, he thought now. She hadn’t given up, though. ‘You could work anywhere, Frank. We could live somewhere hot, somewhere beautiful.’ But he knew she was thinking of Ithaca. The Ithaca stories had been offered by her in the early days in exchange for his own sorry stories of life on the
Oriana
. It had sounded idyllic and he had sewn them inside himself with tight jealous stitches. He knew Bea was thinking of her days there with Patrick, and what she had lost. He had looked at her, seen the loosening of skin at her jaw, the slackening around her eyes, and he had swallowed a mouthful of whisky, felt it sluice the fear and the sadness in his groin. ‘Don’t let’s die in this grey, flat town,’ she had said, threatening tears and putting a hand on his arm. ‘Let’s make a new start.’ He knew too that when Bea met him on the
Oriana
she had mistaken him for an adventurer who would take her out of the ordinary. The very last thing he wanted was adventure, and when, as the years passed, he saw the disappointment in her eyes when she looked at him, he shrank from her and grew to hate her. To do this, he shut out the determined brightness of her voice, the plump curve of her mouth. ‘What in God’s name would we do perched on a hillside in the middle of nowhere in the baking sun?’ She didn’t answer at first. ‘It would be an adventure,’ she said, at last. ‘It would be a disaster,’ he said, because it always felt better to end a scene with his voice not with hers. Exit Bea.

He turned a corner of a street and looked around to discover that he was lost. He appeared to have come to a dead end and was about to turn back when he noticed a gate in the wall at the end of the road. It was standing half open and framed by a low arch of yew. He walked the rest of the way down the street, opened the gate and went through. Raindrops brushed his hair and shoulders and he found himself in what at first he took to be a large, wild garden. Towering copper beeches, oak and yew told him the place was old, and neatly trimmed gravel paths told him it was cared for. A few steps further in and he realised he was in a cemetery. Wild rose, heavy with hips, holly and trees and shrubs that Frank didn’t know the names of but which Bea would know. There was no sound of traffic here, just birdsong.

‘I’m lonely,’ Frank said out loud. It was no good shutting himself away to write without the knowledge of Bea or Wanda or the children on the other side of the door. Oyster Row was his world now. He winced at the joke. A couple of years back, he and Bea had taken the ferry to Calais. It had been a cold day in February. She had spent most of the crossing up on the deck watching the horizon and being battered by the wind. They had eaten
moules
in a deserted restaurant on the seafront and got drunk on cheap red wine. It had been a mad thing to do, Bea’s idea, and he was sure it wouldn’t work but it had been fun. The sea had been rough, the wind had been wild and the very fact of crossing the sea, leaving England behind, had been surprisingly exhilarating.

Jim had told Katharine, ‘Passport or no passport, they can be very lax with security on ferries – especially out of season. And a middle-aged woman, well . . . who’s interested?’

‘I doubt she’s in Calais,’ said Frank.

Jim laughed. ‘Ferries go all over the place. Once you’re over the channel – Spain, France, Holland, you’re away. It’s possible to go a long way without being seen once you leave this island.’

‘What about money?’

Pete looked at him and rubbed his chin so that Frank heard the stubble scrape on his palm. ‘Wanda does all right, doesn’t she?’

Frank blushed. So they knew about Wanda. What had she told them? Had they talked to that awful Urban too? Surely not. Wanda said that Urban had been missing for years. Crows fussed and squawked in the ash tree above his head. He hated those birds, their malevolent heads and unnatural way of walking instead of hopping.

‘You can always change a name,’ Wanda had told him. ‘If you really don’t want to be found.’

Frank read the headstones nearest him. They leaned towards one another – Nelly Read, Jess Darnell, Blanche Cooper, Ellen Leader . . . He thought of Wanda, that body of hers, close beside him. He tried to summon an image of her naked in one of those poses. At the back of his mind, a faint one flickered, then failed. He shivered. It looked like rain again.

‘I want my life back,’ he said.

Frank stood in the drizzle and looked at the gravel. Did he really want Bea back? It was more the parts around her that he missed: Adrian, the smell of cooking, the central heating, his escape to the writing that never had to be finished. He remembered Pete’s voice, gentle and kind. ‘Sometimes, when you go missing, you go further than you thought you ever could. One day you wake up and realise there is no way back.’

The rain began to fall with an intensity he couldn’t ignore. He nodded as drops hit his forehead and wondered just how long and how often Wanda and Urban had been lovers.

It took Frank a while to find the way out. The graveyard was bigger than he had thought and the paths wound this way and that so that he found himself in parts he hadn’t seen before. Adrian would find this highly amusing. It was the kind of thing that would spook Laura. Perhaps he would ring them when he got home and suggest an outing. Richard would probably be all right about it.

This spot felt familiar, he thought; he must be near the exit. There were the Victorian headstones he remembered, and one that stood alone, leaning at an angle, just off the path. The name caught his eye. He looked again and stopped. Urban Feake.

B
Y
S
T
Valentine’s Day, Katharine had begun to lose things. She lost her wallet, her keys, her phone. Then she lost the job in London. When she phoned Richard at work, he took control immediately. He asked Claudia to come into his office. It was something he should have done a long time ago, he told himself as he looked down over the silver ribbon of the Thames. He waited patiently while Claudia noted down his instructions. He wanted her to contact the Cambridge estate agent and drop the price by £50,000 for a quick sale, then she needed to phone round the Chiswick agents and alert them to an urgent purchase – five bedrooms minimum, quiet road, large garden, must be south-facing. Will go up to £1.5 million. And if she could pop down there in a taxi and scout around one day this week, that would be brilliant. He asked her to call his brother, Christopher, a consultant at Bart’s hospital and arrange a lunch date as soon as possible. Christopher,
Sir
Christopher as he was now, would sort out Katharine’s job. Finally he asked her to phone the school they had earmarked for the children. The places had unfortunately gone, but he was sure that once they heard his generous promise of £25,000 to the swimming pool appeal, the Bursar would get back to him forthwith.

Laura and Adrian found Katharine sitting on a bench by the river, smoking a damp cigarette. Katharine was mortified and told them she was just holding it for a passer-by who had gone to find her dog. The children sat either side of her and stuffed their hands deep into their pockets. There was an awkward silence. Adrian took a hollow twig out of his pocket, took the lighter from Katharine’s open bag and lit the end of his twig. He leaned back.

‘Mmm, now that’s what I call a mellow smoke.’ Then he said, ‘Does Dad know you smoke?’

‘Of course. But I don’t. Only every now and then. Not any more.’ She dropped the cigarette into a puddle.

‘. . . give us this day . . .’ muttered Laura.

Adrian said, ‘Bet he does know.’

Katharine shook her head.

‘. . . and forgive us our trespasses . . .’

Adrian tapped non-existent ash from the end of his twig. ‘Secrets aren’t really secrets. People know each other’s secrets.’

Laura was still mumbling. ‘. . . those who trespass against us . . .’

‘I don’t think that’s true.’

‘People know but they don’t necessarily know they know.’ There was a pause. Then he said, ‘If you know what I mean.’

‘. . . and deliver us from evil . . .’ Laura sighed loudly.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Katharine.

She turned and nodded at her mother. ‘I was praying.’

‘Good heavens.’ Katharine pushed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Where did you learn that?’

‘At school.’

‘Does it work?’

‘I don’t know. Chanel says it does.’

Adrian said, ‘The secrets become physical things because they don’t like being invisible.’

Katharine leant her head back and looked up into the branches of the tree. The light was going and a sodium lamp had come on, shining through the tree so that the raindrops looked like shimmering jewels hanging from the black twigs. She began to cry soundlessly.

‘They become a little madness,’ she heard Adrian say. ‘Migraines, twitches, stammers, funny walks.’

‘Funny walks?’ she said, gasping into a tissue.

‘You know, like everyone has a way of walking. Some people walk with a suspicious limp.’

‘I think you mean surreptitious, darling.’

‘Suspicious. The limp is suspicious because it has noticed the secret that won’t be named.’

Katharine thought of Frank’s walk. Laura thought of her mother’s migraines. Adrian stood up and stretched. ‘My twig’s gone out,’ he said.

Katharine rested her head against Laura’s and stared at the river. She had seen the pages of the unidentified on the Missing People website. Bodies found in woodland, on wasteland and most often, again and again, washed up on beaches. Bent over at her laptop, frozen and horrified, she studied the little photographs of the hundreds of found but not missed. Some were not photos but sketched drawings and sculpted heads taken from death. No smiles in these, only exhaustion and a vacant sadness. At the bottom of each photo was a link you could click: ‘I think I know this person.’ Sometimes the photo was not even of a face, just a shoe, a buckle, a tattoo. It was the other side of lost and the loneliest thing she had ever seen.

‘I have an awful feeling,’ she said, putting her arm through Laura’s. ‘I have the feeling that Bea isn’t coming back.’ She looked down at their shoes and struggled to stop the tears again.

‘It’s going to be all right, Mum,’ said Laura.

‘Is it?’ Katharine dabbed at her face. ‘I don’t see how really.’

‘You’ve got us.’

I
T WAS
Urban who found the body. The end of February had brought freezing fog, which had blanketed the city. Its presence felt oppressive; it obscured and muffled everything beneath it like a collapsed creature too ill or tired to move. Workers and schoolchildren hurried in silence, eager to be out of it and inside. It had none of the beauty or magic of snow, it dissolved definition and deadened sound. Traffic slowed to a fearful crawl. No planes flew.

The day after the fog lifted, Urban was clearing the ditch below the railway embankment on Stourbridge Common. Torrential rains since the New Year had flooded the common and meadows. He was to clear the ditches and use the digger to create a route for the water to run back to the river.

The deserted common had an exhausted air, as if the fog had drained it of light and life. He saw her handbag first. This was not in itself a rare discovery. Muggers and burglars threw away bags and cases as they sprinted from the scene. Sometimes people just lost them or left them behind, although what she was doing this close to the railway line and so far from the path was anyone’s guess.

He shuffled in closer beneath the bramble and hawthorn to pull the bag clear. When he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck, he knew. Urban was no stranger to death, and every corpse made its presence known with that moment of suspended stillness: time and place ceased; he felt hyperalive. He froze and sniffed the air: the odour was faint but present. His eyes searched the rough brambles around the hawthorn. There, unmistakable, like a mushroom glowing from the darkness, the partially revealed globe of a human skull.

Silence.

He held his breath and bent further in beneath the hawthorn. The thorns scraped and hooked his scalp. He took off his gloves and moved away a clump of leaves. The ground was soggy beneath his knees, water trickled nearby. He exhaled and took a deep breath of leaf mould and peat. It always touched him, this, the beauty of the human skull, still, after all he had done and seen. It was the back of the skull he could see, the face turned away into a pillow of mud, the collar of a woman’s coat along the jaw as if turned up against a bitter wind. Urban looked down at the toe of his boot. There, the white of bone, three fingertips curled up gracefully from the earth. He shuffled further towards her legs and uncovered a pair of feet, shod in brown leather, crossed at the ankles.

He drew himself away and sat back on his heels. A train thundered past like a jet fighter. When all was quiet again he rolled a cigarette and smoked. Compared to the corpses he had seen in the burnt hayfields and ruined towns of Chechnya, this looked to him like a good death. From what he could see, she had lain down and gone to sleep.

The handbag was stiff, mottled and blotched with mould. He lifted the flap and saw a packet of ten cigarettes, a lighter and a brown leather purse. He lifted it out: a fold of damp notes, no ID, a few coins but no cards. He held his cigarette between his lips and unpeeled a ten-pound note from the sheaf of three or four. He thought a moment, then unpeeled two more. That was a point of principle for Urban. He only took what he knew would not be missed.