An Accidental Shroud (4 page)

She picked up her lute and strummed a desultory chord or two, breathing deeply until she was calm enough to go downstairs.

But still she hesitated. And presently, she found herself reluctantly reaching out for the morocco box on her dressing table where she kept her small collection of 'real' jewellery, the Victorian pieces she loved, all of them presents: the turquoise necklace from her mother, the delicate gold and seed pearl cluster ring Nigel had given her for her eighteenth birthday, the hair brooch and the pretty pair of tiny Victorian coral drop earrings from Jake. She scarcely ever had occasion to wear them, but they were there if ever she did. They were the only kinds of jewellery she really liked.

Finally, she took a small flat package from her shoulder bag. After staring at it uneasily for several minutes, she pushed it into the box underneath the jewellery.

From outside came the sound of a motorbike drawing up on the gravel by the front door. She jumped up to look out of the window. Cassie!

In two minutes she was downstairs.

Christine, taking a bowl of salad from the kitchen to the dining room, heard the cries of welcome and stopped to watch the two girls through the open dining room door. For a moment she felt a stab of jealousy. How long was it since Lindsay had been so forthcoming with her? What was it about this strong, stocky girl with her smouldering dark eyes, her mass of black hair and, let it be said, her sometimes undesirable manners, that so attracted Lindsay? She didn't care who she offended and seemed oblivious of the fact that Jake neither liked her nor made her welcome. She would certainly invite herself to supper, and Christine wasn't best pleased about that; apart from buying the pistachio ice-cream Lindsay doted on, she'd gone to some trouble to prepare a special meal. There was just enough, which would mean eking out. Cassie ate a lot, as Christine knew to her cost, for she'd continued to come here in Lindsay's absence, having somehow formed an odd sort of friendship with Matthew as well. Friendship was all it was, Christine didn't believe there was anything more than that between them. Cassie Andreas was secretive; despite the fact that she'd been coming to the house on and off for several months, Christine knew virtually nothing about her, except that she was half Greek and that she and her mother had only recently come to live in England, and that Cassie now worked part time on the petrol pumps at the Esso station down the road – and most of this had been dragged out of either Matthew or Lindsay. It wouldn't have made her feel any better to learn that neither of them knew much more about Cassie than she did – the difference being that it didn't matter to them.

Ostensibly watching
Friday Night with Callaghan
with Jake, after the two girls and Matthew had wedged themselves into Matt's car and roared away like 1920s bright young things, Christine found herself thinking again about the situation and growing tight-lipped. The time for finesse had gone. This was their house, hers and Jake's, Matthew and Lindsay were their children. As parents, she and Jake had a right to know who it was they brought home.

'Good, isn't he?' Jake broke into her thoughts, lounging back and watching Tom Callaghan on the box, a suave figure with wavy, prematurely white hair and twinkling grey eyes. The show was very popular at the moment, the ratings were high. Jake liked to watch it because Callaghan was his old school chum, one of a once inseparable trio: Jake, Tom and Jake's cousin, Nigel Fontenoy. That was possibly why Jake wasn't as critical of the programme as Christine, but didn't explain why millions of others liked the show, too. Christine, however, wondered how long it would last. Callaghan probed serious issues, but with a smiling urbanity and an impression of such thorough investigation, that his viewers were left with the comfortable feeling of being absolved from the disagreeable necessity of having to do anything personally about it.

Tonight, he had been interviewing victims of street crime – mugging, assault, rape, one survivor of a bomb attack. The rape victim was being asked whether she didn't honestly think it possible that some women did in fact provoke such attacks by the way they dressed. The woman answered shortly that no, she didn't, women had the right to dress as they wished, less than delighted with the hoary old question but looking Callaghan straight in the eye. The camera zoomed in on her tight red top, short leather skirt and long, long legs. 'I'm sure we all agree with you,' said Tom Callaghan sincerely, and launched smoothly into his wind-up speech and all-purpose smile.

The credits began to roll and Christine went into the kitchen to make some tea. She'd long ago decided she didn't like Tom Callaghan.

Arriving home that night after the show, Callaghan felt an immense weariness. He switched on the lamps and set the air-conditioning as high as it would go, threw his jacket across a chair back and took off his tie and his shoes. Then he poured two inches of Glenfiddich and made himself a ham sandwich. He could never eat before or immediately after the show, his stomach was too screwed up, but by now he was hungry. He could have eaten a good solid meal but his wife had recently walked out on him, and in any case, had never bothered to cook. He was nothing of a cook, himself.

He sat on the sofa to eat his sandwich, allowing his gaze to rest for a while on the photograph on his desk, a thing he always did every time he came back home, as if by doing so he might will the subject of it to materialize. It was the only photograph in the room.

The big picture window gave on to the river; the view was one of the best things about the flat, which was bare, almost monastic, as he preferred it, now that Joanna had taken with her all the fancy bits and pieces. What furnishings remained were plain but good, chosen by him. He had grown up with the second rate, but he knew a good thing when he saw it. He was careful over what he bought, canny with money. He had made – and was still making – plenty, but, as he well knew and heeded, there were fashions in celebrities, as in anything else. Nothing lasted.

He sipped his whisky and slowly he began to relax. The show took more out of him every time. You had to be alert and on your toes the whole time, to think fast, though he was naturally a quick and agile thinker, as journalists have to be. In his game, you couldn't afford to miss a trick, you could allow yourself to forget nothing. That never bothered him, however. His memory was phenomenal. And there were some things no one ever forgot, or forgave. A ghost from the past laid a gentle hand on his shoulder, but it wasn't his runaway wife's. He felt a warning of the recurrent pain in his head, the one that had signalled trouble ever since he was a child, that he'd always been wise not to ignore. He shivered in the air-conditioning and thought it was a night to go to bed with a pill.

Sleep didn't come easily, however. Tonight, as so often, he was haunted by memories from the past.

His father, Rory Callaghan, had been an Irish Protestant dockworker of the Ian Paisley persuasion, who believed in hell fire and damnation, who had never forgiven himself his own lapse in marrying a foreigner, nor her either. Marietta had been a bright, volatile, clever woman, and though Italian, not religious, who could make his bigoted opinions look ridiculous, and frequently did as it became more and more apparent that their marriage was a disaster. Religion had not been the only source of their strife, however. There had been plenty more.

Yet – for the sake of the child, Tom, it was said – they'd stuck together until Rory had died, mercifully for Marietta though not for Rory, of a stomach cancer. Marietta had come to England, found herself a series of jobs teaching Italian, the last of which had brought her to Lavenstock. And there Tom had stayed, too, working first on various local newspapers, going on to radio and graduating to television.

His parents' marriage had been an explosive combination, and Tom's childhood hadn't been happy. The two strands of his inheritance still warred too much in him, irking him like the failure of his marriage, though he allowed none of it to inhibit him professionally. His public persona, and his private one, he had always kept as strictly apart as possible, for the very good reason that his private life contained a grief so huge it encompassed him entirely, one that could never be shared by anyone.

He fell asleep, as he did most nights, his mind feeding on the great wrong that had been done, to dream, as always, of revenge.

Jake was singing as he washed the breakfast dishes, his shirt sleeves rolled up. It was not an image associated with his tough, public one.

The kitchen windows were steamy, bubbles flew as he squirted detergent into the hot water with abandon. He enjoyed washing up, he said it was therapeutic. He sang in the kitchen like other people sang in the bath, ritually, his not very tuneful baritone belting out songs from his youth, or from the latest show.

'
Yesterday. All my troubles seemed so far away –
' he sang under his breath, off key, plunging muscular, hairy forearms into the sinkful of hot, soapy water.

'You've put too much Fairy Liquid in,' Christine said, annoyed, picking up a teatowel and wiping the suds off a plate. 'And what's wrong with the dishwasher?'

'Doesn't do the saucepans properly.'

'You could wash up twenty times with that amount.'

'If that's all you're bothered about, I'll buy you another bottle, for God's sake.
And I believe in yes-ter-day.'

'Jake –!'

Last night they'd been lovers and this morning here they were, washing up and bickering like any old married couple, she thought, dispirited, as she turned to put a pile of plates away.

'Hey, what's the matter?'

She felt his arms round her waist from the back and leaned into him. 'Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But Jake -'

'Hm?' He nuzzled his chin into her shoulder.

She turned herself round in his arms. 'Jake, we have to talk. Please don't try to put me off again.'

'About?'

'About Cassie. I think we ought to know more about her.' She had a sense of urgency about this that she didn't quite understand. 'I'd like to meet her mother.'

Jake was silent for a while. 'I need notice of that question,' he said eventually, 'though personally I don't see any point in it. If it's Matt you're worried about, forget it. He's more interested at the moment in long-legged blondes with nothing much between their ears than in Cassie Andreas.'

'I'm not worried in that way! Not when their sole topic of conversation's compression ratios and overhead camshafts and differentials-'

Jake gave a snort of laughter.

'But I'd still like to meet that mother of hers.'

'Leave it. Let things take their course.' Jake was terse.

There was a warning there, if she had heeded it. 'Anyway, I'll bet you wouldn't – like to meet her, that is. It seems to me that one Andreas is more than enough.'

It was shady in the plot at the back of the brick house above the railway embankment, and quiet enough between trains, though they ran for most of the twenty-four hours, the big Intercity ones whooshing by every half hour, gone in an instant. Each time any one of them passed, the unsteady little house, erected by the railway with other, now derelict buildings at the turn of the century for some obscure and long-forgotten purpose, seemed to have moved one step nearer total extinction.

Outside at the back, there were three old apple trees which, in a garden of this size, made the kitchen as dark as Hades, but they were already heavy with the early-ripened fruit of this hot summer. A great many apples had dropped off and lay rotting on the ground, giving off a boozy, cidery smell. The untended, uncut grass where Naomi walked was shiveringly sensuous and cool under her bare feet. They were long and elegant feet, brown but not very clean.

She was wearing an ankle length granny print cotton skirt with a deep frill round the hem that she'd had for maybe twenty years, and an embroidered cotton blouse brought home from a far-off holiday in the Greek islands with that painter whose name she'd forgotten. She'd had a lot of style when she was younger and still had when she took the trouble, though she was beginning to do that less and less. Her hair was grey and untidy, tucked carelessly behind her ears. She had a long, aquiline face and she would never see forty again. It wasn't until you noticed her very beautiful grey eyes and the lovely bone structure that you realized why she had once been considered beautiful.

Sitting on the ground in the shade of one of the trees, leaning against its rough bark, she ate her lunch, consisting of a handful of fresh dates, a carob bar and a glass of wine, while reluctantly bringing her mind to the problem of what she must do. She was in an impossible situation and knowing that she'd brought it on herself made it no better. She didn't waste time in self-recrimination ... she was too used to bringing trouble to her own door by now to blame herself when it happened.

All the same, it wouldn't have happened if she hadn't come back to England, or at least to this part of it. Why had she, when she could have gone anywhere? In retrospect, it was easy to see that it was bound to cause complications. But she'd always been fond of the place, and when her mother had died and left her the house at a time when she was homeless and nearly penniless it had seemed crass stupidity to refuse to return and live in it. After all, they were all civilized people. She couldn't see that it would matter to Jake now. And she'd wanted to see Matthew. She had a right to see him. He was, let's face it, she thought, her own flesh and blood, her son – conveniently forgetting that she'd never sent him so much as a birthday card in eighteen years.

She should have approached Jake before this. But she hadn't, and now ... What was she going to do about Matthew and Cassie? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Who could have imagined
that
happening?

How serious was it, with Cassie and Matthew? How did you find out if your daughter was sleeping with her boyfriend? Well, just ask! That was easy, it was what she'd always done before, anyway, though she'd been too stunned when Cassie had produced Matthew last night to probe too deeply. Suddenly, out of the blue, 'This is Matthew, Matthew Wilding.' Besides, they'd had that owl-eyed girl, Lindsay, with them.