Death Watch (28 page)
Slider felt a cold shiver go down his spine. Old photographs like this made him feel melancholy. The world had moved on so far and so fast from that earless, crimeless, tellyless, always summer place he’d grown up in. The Richard Neal in this photograph had – and thank God! – no idea what a horrible, pitiful, grievous end he would come to; but the fact that he was there smiling out of the photograph made Slider feel that the young man still existed somewhere, and that the bad end was still to come, without his being able to do anything to prevent it.
It was like those dreams where you tried to shout out a warning, and could only whisper.
‘You’d known him a long time, then,’ he said at last.
‘Dick used to say we went to different schools together,’ she smiled, taking the photograph back. ‘His grammar school and mine were almost next door to each other, and we lived in adjacent streets. We started going out together when I was sixteen – my mother wouldn’t have let me have a boyfriend before that. It seems impossible to imagine nowadays, doesn’t it? But Dick had been waiting outside the school gates for me and walking me home since I was fourteen.’
While she spoke, she handed him other photographs: variations on a sunlit theme, Dick and Marsha doing innocent, healthy, Famous Five things together. Bicycles and rickety tents and country lanes featured prominently in their activities. And here they were at last actually holding hands with a mountain in the background.
‘When we were in the sixth form our schools did a joint school journey to Switzerland. Pretty revolutionary stuff in those days. Of course, we were put up in different hotels, the boys and the girls, but all the same …’
‘Yes,’ said Slider.
‘When we got back, I told my mother that Dick had kissed me. She tried so hard not to be shocked, poor dear.’ She took back the Swiss mountain. ‘We were the ideal couple in those days. Everybody thought we’d get married eventually.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know really,’ she said vaguely, hunting through the box. ‘Maybe just because everyone expected us to. You know how contrary young people can be. Then when I left school I went to University College to train as a doctor, and Dick and I didn’t see so much of each other for a while. Our experiences were very different – he had to do his National Service, of course.’
‘Where did he serve?’
‘Oh, right here in England. At Eastbourne, in fact – a cushy number, as they used to say. We used to have
frightfully naughty weekends in Brighton. I was still living at home at that time, so I had to pretend I was going to visit a girlfriend. And to book into a hotel we had to pretend to be married – a Woolworth’s wedding ring, and signing in as Mr and Mrs Neal, so funny when you think back!’
She handed him a black-and-white snap of her and Neal on the front at Brighton. He had his arm round her waist, and they both looked faintly apprehensive through their smiles. Brighton, Slider thought. Jacqui Turner, seafront photographers – how the wheel turns.
‘You were obviously a trail-blazer,’ he said.
‘Oh, I think studying medicine gives you a sense of proportion. You can’t worry too much about purely local and contemporary taboos when you’re dealing with the eternal verities of life and death.’
He handed back the picture. ‘So you went on seeing each other for the whole two years?’
‘Yes. It was a really happy time, when I think back on it. Perhaps the best time.’ She was silent a moment, with a smile hovering near the surface. Then it went in. ‘When he was demobbed he joined the fire brigade. His parents were terribly upset – they wanted him to pick up where he left off and go to university. They thought he was letting himself down, and I must say I was surprised myself. He had a good brain, and it seemed dreadful to me that he should waste it doing a job like that. We quarrelled about it when he told me. It was almost the end of us.’
Echoes of Catriona Young, Slider thought — the intellectual girlfriend who thought she was too good for the likes of him. It was almost as if Neal was acting out his own life story.
‘Why do you think he did it?’ he asked.
‘He said he’d always wanted to be a fireman, ever since he was a little boy. You know, one of those eternal passions like wanting to be an engine driver. I don’t know if that was true — he’d never mentioned it to me before. But on the other hand, he seemed perfectly happy afterwards being a fireman, so maybe it was. He told his parents he
didn’t want to go to university and be another three years behind everyone else, which made sense, but they never really accepted it. It caused a breach between them, which was never properly healed. They died without forgiving him – Dick minded that very much. He was a very sensitive person underneath it all.’
Yes, he could believe that, Slider thought. Only a man obsessed with his own emotions could spread so much devastation around him. ‘And you, meanwhile, were still studying to be a doctor?’
‘Five long years,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘It was a hard struggle, too. My father died, and all his estate was tied up in a trust, so my mother had very little to live on, and I had less. Still, one manages.’ She shrugged. ‘They say adversity builds character.’
‘Why did you decide to specialise in pathology? That was an unusual choice, wasn’t it?’
‘The perversity factor again: just because it was an unusual choice. I liked shocking people, and
were
they shocked at the idea of a young lady cutting up dead bodies! But there were also practical reasons – it was the least well subscribed specialisation, which meant there was no competition for places, and none later for jobs. I can’t say I’ve ever regretted it,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘When I think of my contemporaries who went on to be GPs, being coughed over by ghastly, washed-out, depressed women, and dragged out of bed at all hours …’
‘Surgeons have a pretty decent life, though, don’t they?’
‘Yes, and I did use to think I’d like to be a surgeon. That would have been almost as shocking, too. But to be a surgeon you first have to go through being a houseman, and they never get to bed at all. No, I made the comfortable choice, I think.’
‘And did you go on seeing Dick Neal?’
‘Oh yes. We were always friends. And of course he introduced me to Gil — my husband — so I have him to thank for that.’
‘How did he take it, when you got married?’
She hesitated. ‘He didn’t like it, of course. I think he still
thought we would get married one day. For a while he was furious with both of us. But Gil asked him to be best man, and managed to talk him round. Gil was a great diplomat. And Dick really loved him. I don’t think he could have borne to lose both of us. So he had to accept it.’
‘Your husband knew that you and Dick had been – fond of each other?’
‘Gil knew everything,’ she said firmly, and looked at him, and then away again in a curious access of embarrassment. Now what, he wondered, did that relate to? ‘The three of us were always close, from the first day we all met. It was a very equal relationship. No-one was left out. All for one and one for all, as Gil used to say.’
Slider flinched away from Dumas-yet-again and tried a banana shot. ‘Why
did
you marry him instead of Dick?’ he asked, as though she had already admitted there was something odd about it.
She had taken out another photograph, and stared at it unseeingly as she answered. ‘Because I knew he would make a more suitable husband than Dick.’ She drew a faint, shaky sigh, and then looked across at Slider. ‘There, that’s said. Not much of a reason, is it? But it seemed a good one at the time. Gil was a steady, reliable man, the sort who’d make a good husband and a good father, who’d save, and get on, and provide for one. I was sick of being a poor student by then,’ she went on in a muted burst of passion. ‘Scrimping and scraping and making do, never having anything nice to wear, or going out anywhere. I couldn’t bear that kind of life. Gil was kind and generous, and he cared for me as a husband should. Dick was a spendthrift. Oh, he was good fun to be with, but you’d never have known from one day to the next whether the bailiffs would be knocking at your door.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ said Slider.
She looked up. ‘Do you?’
‘Yes. But did Dick?’
‘You’d hardly expect him to, would you,’ she said. ‘Especially as—’
‘Yes?’
She obviously changed her mind. ‘When I was twenty-five the Trust ended and I came into Dad’s money,’ she said, and it made enough sense to have been a sequitur, but Slider felt certain it was not what she had been going to say. ‘It wasn’t a huge fortune, but it was enough to be comfortable on. So I could have married anyone, you see – even Dick. But by then it was too late. In the mean time, there was Eleanor.’
She handed him the photographer she had been holding. There in the middle was Marsha Forrester, looking like Millicent Martin by now, only prettier, in an A-line coat that showed her knees and little hat perched above her curved hair, holding a baby whose dress and shawl trailed almost to its mother’s knees. On one side of her stood Neal in a suit, button-down collar and narrow tie, his hair brushed straight back but still unruly: handsome, debonair, faintly raffish,
On the other side was a taller man, broad-shouldered, fair, with straight, light hair, already thinning, and a pleasant, kind, unemphatic sort of face. The kind of man any child would want as a father. The men were wearing identical proud smiles and carnation buttonholes; Marsha looked faintly apprehensive, as if she was afraid she was going to drop the baby. Behind them was a large-stoned wall and the corner of a church window; and the sun was shining down on them still, dropping short shadows on the grass at their feet.
‘My hostage to fortune,’ Mrs Forrester said. ‘After that, I couldn’t have left Gil, even if I’d inherited fifty fortunes.’
‘She’s your only child?’
‘Yes. I think Gil would have liked more, but it just never happened. So she was extra special to him. She was Daddy’s Little Angel.’
There seemed to be a faint irony in the last words. Had she been jealous of the child’s adoration of her father? Or was she apologising for the pukey nature of the words?
Still, it must have been nice for Forrester to feel he had beaten his rival at something. Slider was not entirely convinced by this Three Musketeers baloney: it would be a
very strange man who would welcome his wife’s ex-lover into the fold without even a hidden reservation. Slider stared at the photo. Whoever had taken it was less than expert: he had not centred the group properly, with the result that Dick and Marsha held the middle of the frame, and Gil Forrester was almost off the edge of the picture. It made him look, poor man, like a hanger-on at his own daughter’s christening.
THE SHERRY GLASSES HAD BEEN refilled. Mrs Forrester was talking freely now. It was an effect Slider had seen before, a sort of self-perpetuating hypnosis. By talking to him she had produced the atmosphere in which she felt it was safe for her to talk, and the longer she went on, the safer she would feel. All he had to do was not to alarm her, or break the mood.
The box of photographs had been put away. Those she had shown him had been more variations on the same theme: the three of them being happy together in fields, at fairgrounds, on beaches, before notable buildings, always in the sunshine, domestic or foreign. Marsha, Dick and Gil, where before it had been Marsha and Dick; and later Marsha, Dick, Gil and Eleanor.
A remarkably pretty, dark-haired little girl grew up through the pictures: pick-a-back on Gil, perched on Dick’s shoulder, swinging between the two with a hand held by each; seven years old sitting between them on a wall with her short legs dangling and a smile with gaps in it; nine years old astride a pony with two unnecessary guiding hands on the bridle; eleven years old and solemn with new self-consciousness at the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Slider was glad when there were no more photographs. They made him feel desperately sad. Which was perhaps just as well, when they came to discuss the subject of Gil’s death.
‘Why did you go round to the station afterwards?’ he
asked. ‘Did you really feel the others were to blame?’
‘In the philosophical sense, they were,’ she said. ‘That was where Gil’s one-for-all-and-all-for-one really applied. But if you mean, did I think there was any negligence on anyone’s part – no. I certainly don’t now. Whether I really did then I can’t honestly remember. It’s a long time ago, and I was in a state of shock. I wasn’t really responsible for my actions.’
‘Do you remember anything of what you felt at the time?’
She thought about it. ‘Anger mostly, I think. I was angry with Gil for being so stupid, so careless, as to get himself killed. Is that shocking?’
‘Understandable,’ he said.
‘I was always that way with Ellie, too. If she hurt herself, fell down and cut her knee or whatever, my first reaction was furious anger with her. But it was only because I cared about her. I couldn’t bear her to be hurt, to feel pain or fear, and that’s just the way it came out in me. Can you understand that?’
He nodded. Her focus sharpened.
‘Are you married?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Children?’
‘A boy and a girl,’ he said. She needed something back from him, reaction to having given so much out. He had seen that before, too.
‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘They are, too. I hope they realise that.’
He smiled by way of answer, and said, ‘How did Eleanor cope with her father’s death?’
‘Very well, really. She was very upset at first, of course, but she recovered much more quickly than I expected. She had a week off school after the funeral, and I would have been happy to keep her at home longer – in fact, I did think of taking her away for a holiday somewhere. But she said she wanted to go back to school, so I let her. She was starring in the school play, and said she didn’t want to miss the rehearsals. I suppose she needed something to keep
her occupied,’ she added, answering her own unasked question. ‘She was probably right. I know I felt better once I went back to work. Stopped me thinking all the time.’
