A Traitor to Memory (7 page)

She knew he was following her. It wasn't the first time she'd come out of the Sixty Plus Club to see his silhouette under the trees on the street, but it
was
the first time she wouldn't allow herself to talk to him. So she hadn't turned in his direction when she could have done, at the natural moment to offer an explanation to what he'd witnessed
in the car park. Instead, she'd headed for Market Place with no clear idea of where she was going.

When her gaze had fallen upon the church, she'd made the decision to slip inside and adopt an attitude of supplication. For the first five minutes in the Lady Chapel, she even knelt on one of the dusty hassocks, gazed upon the statue of the Virgin, and waited for the old familiar words of devotion to spring into her mind. But they would not. Her head was too filled with impediments to prayer: old arguments and accusations, older loyalties and the sins committed in the name of them, current importunacies and their implications, future consequences if she made an ignorant misstep now.

She'd made enough missteps in the past to devastate thirteen dozen lives. And she'd long ago learned that an action taken was the same as a pebble dropped into still water: The concentric rings that the pebble effects may lessen in substance, but they do exist.

When no prayer came to her, Eugenie rose from her knees. She sat with her feet flat on the floor and studied the face of the statue. You didn't make the choice to lose Him, did you? she asked the Virgin silently. So how can I ask you to understand? And even if you did understand, what intercession can I ask you to give me? You can't turn back time. You can't unhappen what happened, can you? You can't bring back to life what's dead and gone, because if you could, you would have done it to save yourself the torture of His murder.

Except they never say it was murder, do they? Instead, it's a sacrifice for a greater cause. It's a giving of life for something far more important than life. As if anything really is …

Eugenie put her elbows on her thighs and rested her forehead in the palms of her hands. If she was to believe what her erstwhile religion taught her to believe, then the Virgin Mary had known from the start exactly what would be required of her. She'd understood clearly that the Child she nurtured would be ripped from her life in the flowering of His manhood. Reviled, beaten, abused, and
sacrificed
, He would die ingloriously and she would be there to watch it all. And the only assurance she would ever have that His death had a greater meaning than what was implied by being spat upon and nailed up between two common criminals was simple faith. Because although religious tradition had it that an angel had appeared to put her in the picture of future events, who could really stretch their brains to fit around that?

So she'd gone on blind faith that a greater good existed somewhere.
Not in her lifetime and not in the lifetime of the grandchildren she would never have. But there. Somewhere. Quite real. There.

Of course, it hadn't happened yet. Fast-forward two thousand brutal years and mankind was still waiting for the good to come. And what did she think, the Virgin Mother, watching and waiting from her throne in the clouds? How did she begin to assess the benefit against the cost?

For years newspapers had served to tell Eugenie that the benefits—the good—tipped the scales against the price she herself had paid. But now she was no longer sure. The Greater Good she'd thought she was serving threatened to disintegrate before her, like a woven rug whose persistent unraveling makes a mockery of the labour that went into its creation. And only she could stop that unraveling, if she made the choice to do so.

The problem was Ted. She hadn't intended to draw close to him. For so very long she hadn't allowed herself near enough to anyone to encourage confidence of any kind. And to feel herself even
capable
now—not to mention deserving—of establishing a connection to another human being seemed like a form of hubris that was certain to destroy her. Yet she wanted to draw close to him anyway, as if he were the anodyne for a sickness that she lacked the courage to name.

So she sat in the church. In part because she did not want to face Ted Wiley just yet, before the way was paved. In part because she did not yet possess the words to do the paving.

Tell me what to do, God, she prayed. Tell me what to say.

But God was as silent as He'd been for ages. Eugenie dropped an offering in the collection box and left the church.

Outside, it was still raining relentlessly. She raised her umbrella and headed towards the river. The wind was rising as she reached the corner, and she paused for a moment to wrestle against it as it struck her umbrella with more force than she expected and turned it inside out.

“Here. Let me help you with that, Eugenie.”

She swung round and Ted was standing there, his old dog droopily at his side and rainwater dripping from his nose and jaw. His waxed jacket glistened brightly with damp, and his peaked cap clung to his skull.

“Ted!” She offered him the gift of her spurious surprise. “You look positively drowned. And poor P.B.! What are you doing out here with that sweet dog?”

He righted her umbrella and held it over both of them. She took his arm.

“We've begun a new exercise programme,” he told her. “Up to Market Place, down to the church yard, and back home four times a day. What're
you
doing here? You haven't just come out of the church, have you?”

You know I have, she wanted to say. You just don't know why. But what she said was, lightly, “Decompressing after the committee meeting. You remember: the New Year's Eve committee? I'd given them a deadline to decide on the food. So much to be ordered, you know, and they can't expect the caterer to wait forever for them to make up their minds, can they?”

“On your way home now?”

“I am.”

“And may I …?”

“You know that you may.”

How ridiculous it was, the two of them in such an idle conversation, with volumes of what needed saying deliberately going unsaid between them.

You don't trust me, Ted, do you? Why don't you trust me? And how can we foster love between us if we have no foundation of trust? I know you're worried because I'm not telling you what it was I said I wanted to tell you, but why can't you let the
wanting
to tell you be enough for now?

But she couldn't risk anything that would lead to revelation at the moment. She owed it to ties far older than the tie she felt to Ted to put her house in order before burning it down.

So they engaged in insignificant chat as they walked along the river: his day, her day, who'd come into the bookshop and how his mother was getting on at Quiet Pines. He was hearty and cheerful; she was pleasant albeit subdued.

“Tired?” he asked her when they reached the door of her cottage.

“A bit,” she admitted. “It's been a long day.”

He handed her the umbrella, saying, “Then I won't keep you up,” but he looked at her with such open expectation in his ruddy face that she knew her next line was supposed to be to ask him in for a brandy before bed.

It was her fondness for him that prompted the truth. She said, “I've got to go into London, Ted.”

“Ah. Early morning, then?”

“No. I've got to go tonight. I've an appointment.”

“Appointment? But with the rain, it'll take you more than an hour…. Did you say an
appointment?
”

“Yes. I did.”

“What sort …? Eugenie …” He blew out a breath. She heard him curse quietly. So, apparently, did P.B., because the old retriever raised her head and blinked at Ted as if with surprise. She was soaking, poor dog. At least, thank God, her fur was thick as a mammoth's. “Let me drive you in, then,” Ted said at last.

“That wouldn't be wise.”

“But—”

She put her hand on his arm to stop him. She raised it to touch his cheek, but he flinched and she stepped away. “Are you free for dinner tomorrow night?” she asked him.

“You know that I am.”

“Then have a meal with me. Here. We'll talk then, if you'd like.”

He gazed at her, trying—she knew—and failing to read her. Don't make the attempt, she wanted to tell him. I've had too much rehearsal for a rôle in a drama you don't yet understand.

She watched him steadily, waiting for his reply. The light from her sitting room came through the window and jaundiced a face already drawn with age and with worries he wouldn't name. She was grateful for that: that he wouldn't speak his deepest fears to her. The fact that what frightened him went unspoken was what gave her courage to contend with everything that frightened her.

He removed his cap then, a humble gesture that she wouldn't for all her life have had him make. It exposed his thick grey hair to the rain and removed the meagre shadow that had hidden the rubicund flesh of his nose. It made him look like what he was: an old man. It made her feel like what she was: a woman who didn't deserve such a fine man's love.

“Eugenie,” he said, “if you're thinking you can't tell me that you … that you and I … that we aren't …” He looked towards the bookshop across the street.

“I'm not thinking anything,” she said. “Just about London and the drive. And there's the rain as well. But I'll be careful. You've no need to worry.”

He appeared momentarily gratified and perhaps a trifle relieved at the reassurance she meant to imply. “You're the world to me,” he said simply. “Eugenie, do you know? You're the world. And I'm a bloody idiot most of the time, but I do—”

“I know,” she said. “I know that you do. And we'll talk tomorrow.”

“Right, then.” He kissed her awkwardly, hitting his head on the edge of the umbrella and knocking it askew in her hand.

Rain dashed against her face. A car raced up Friday Street. She felt spray from its tyres hit her shoes.

Ted swung round. “Hey!” he shouted at the vehicle. “Watch your bloody driving!”

“No. It's all right,” she said. “It's nothing, Ted.”

He turned back to her, saying, “Damn it. Wasn't that—” But he stopped himself.

“What?” she asked. “Who?”

“No one. Nothing.” He roused his retriever to her feet for the last few yards to their front door. “We'll talk, then?” he asked. “Tomorrow? After dinner?”

“We'll talk,” she said. “There's so much to say.”

She had very few preparations to make. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth. She combed her hair and tied a navy blue scarf round her head. She protected her lips with a colourless balm, and she put the winter lining into her raincoat to give herself more protection from the chill. Parking was always bad in London, and she didn't know how far she would have to walk in the cold and windy storm-stricken air when she finally arrived at her destination.

Raincoat on and a handbag hooked over her arm, she descended the narrow staircase. She took from the kitchen table a photograph in a plain wooden frame. It was one of a baker's dozen that she usually had arranged round the cottage. Before choosing from among them, she'd lined them up like soldiers on the table and there the rest of them remained.

She clasped this frame just beneath her bosom. She went out into the night.

Her car was parked inside a gated courtyard, in a space she rented by the month, just down the street. The courtyard was hidden by electric gates cleverly fashioned to look like part of the half-timbered buildings on either side. There was safety in this, and Eugenie liked safety. She liked the illusion of security afforded by gates and locks.

In her car—a secondhand Polo whose fan sounded like the wheezing of a terminal asthmatic—she carefully set the framed photo on the passenger seat and started the engine. She'd prepared in advance for this journey up to London, checking the Polo's oil and its tyres and topping up its petrol as soon as she'd learned the date and the place. The time had come later, and she'd balked at it at first, once she realised ten forty-five meant at night and not in the morning. But
she had no leg to stand on in protesting, and she knew it, so she acquiesced. Her night vision wasn't what it once had been. But she would cope.

She hadn't counted on the rain, however. And as she left the outskirts of Henley and wound her way northwest to Marlow, she found herself clutching the steering wheel and crouching over it, half-blinded by the headlamps of oncoming cars, assailed by how the blowing rain diffracted the light in spearheads that riddled the windscreen with visual lacerations.

Things weren't much better on the M40, where cars and lorries put up sheets of spray with which the Polo's windscreen wipers could barely keep pace. The lane markings had mostly vanished beneath the standing water, and those that could be seen seemed to alternate between writhing snakelike in Eugenie's vision and side-stepping to border an entirely different traffic lane.

It wasn't until she reached the vicinity of Wormwood Scrubs that she felt she could relax the death hold she had on the steering wheel. Even then she didn't breathe with ease until she'd veered away from the motorway's sleek and sodden river of concrete and headed north in the vicinity of Maida Hill.