Disclaimer (14 page)

He only drove up into the next street, he didn’t go far. He didn’t know where to go, so he parked and sat there, half expecting her to appear at the bottom of the road, having run after him. He kept checking in the rear-view mirror, but she didn’t come and so he reclined his seat and drank the whisky.

He should feel sick from it, but he doesn’t. It is his wife who conjures up the nausea. Her lies – he doesn’t want to hear any more and he ignores all her calls, finally switching his phone off. His anger is solid within him and he clings to it, to stop himself disintegrating. It sickens him to think how she has manipulated him. He should have known. It’s the tool of her trade, something he’s always admired: her ability to persuade people to do things they’d prefer not to. He never dreamed she’d use that trick on him.

He started reading the book last night while he swigged the whisky. He didn’t get far – he was too distracted and couldn’t concentrate – but he will read it today, this morning. He’d slept on the back seat, curled up like a baby, his knees tucked into his chest. He is still in the back, sitting upright now, as if he’s waiting for his driver. His head aches and his mouth tastes as if he’s drunk the contents of the toilet before it’s been flushed. He reaches to the front of the car and jams three extra-strength pieces of gum into his mouth. He needs food, he needs coffee and he needs time to sit and read. He can’t drive though, he daren’t risk it. He must still be over the limit. So he locks the car, straightens his clothes and heads off to the bus stop.

It is five thirty. He has hours before he needs to be at work for his first meeting. He waits for the bus. It is a beautiful day, sunny, quiet. He is the only person waiting, but when the bus pulls up there are a couple of people already on it. People he doesn’t normally travel to work with. He guesses that the young African woman is going home after a night shift. He notices the edge of a uniform below her anorak. She looks tired, deep purple rings under her eyes. A hospital worker, perhaps; auxiliary rather than medical. A good woman, he thinks; a woman who works shifts to support herself and her family; a woman without vanity, who has no time for affairs and deceit. He wonders whether his thoughts are racist, and decides they probably are, this presumption of simplicity – the imposition of worthiness to her existence. And the elderly man – Eastern European, he guesses – with a knitted hat even in the summer, and a rucksack with a lunch Robert can smell from two seats away. A builder, he guesses, off to tart up some privileged Londoner’s home. A home like his. Where this man, who should have retired by now, will be begrudged cups of coffee and the use of the toilet. On him, Robert imposes a quiet dignity, a silence from where he observes the lives of the people he works for without making judgements on them. When he gets up, ready for his stop, Robert smiles, first at the woman, then the man. Neither of them notices him. Sanctimonious twit is his judgement on himself.

This is a morning of firsts, and he finds a small café, the type he would never normally choose, but it’s the only one open at six in the morning around Berkeley Square. He asks for tomatoes on toast. Brown bread, not white. No – toast, please, not fried. And a cup of tea, which when it arrives is the colour of toffee. He has chosen a corner at the back and settles down to read.

He can’t resist reading the last line first. He agrees with it. It really is
a pity
, these omissions of his wife’s, her
omission
to tell him anything. She only wants to talk now because she’s been cornered. He admires the restraint in the language, but can’t share it. It’s more than a fucking pity.
Deadly?
An idle threat. He feels no need to protect her.

Last night she tried to convince him that the book was not how it had been. It hadn’t happened like that. He couldn’t listen to her; he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice. It was fake. Everything about her felt fake. Of course she would say that. As far as he’s concerned, she’s lost her chance to give him her version. He can only trust this printed word. She had her chance years ago and now he can’t believe anything she says because he knows it will be nuanced. She will try anything to excuse the inexcusable. And it is inexcusable, because of Nicholas. Because he was there.

Less than a week ago it would have been a luxury to have hours to sit in a café and read a book, but now it makes his mouth dry and his fingers shake. He flips back to the first page:

Victoria station on a grey, wet, Thursday afternoon. The perfect day on which to escape. Two young people queued at the ticket office, clutching at each other’s hands, then letting go again, but not for long. They couldn’t bear not to be connected for more than a couple of minutes …

It is not the sort of book Robert would normally read, but he finds it a real page-turner. He can see why it might have attracted Nicholas and why he would have kept reading. It is easy, fluid and light, about a young man, younger than Nicholas, who travels across Europe with his girlfriend. Robert reads of their anticipation and sense of adventure. They have thrown in their jobs to go travelling, determined not to squander their youth. Two people still young enough to travel on a young person’s railcard. The smell of trains at night; waking in the morning and arriving in another country; pulling down the window and breathing in Mediterranean skies as they speed through landscapes of freedom. They are in love. They are meant to be together.

What seeps through the airy text, and what Robert imagines had kept Catherine from dismissing the book after the first few chapters, is the slow-coming dark of tragedy. This paradise will be short-lived. All the good things – the smells, the tastes, the heat – are tinged with the threat that this cannot last. By the time Robert has moved from tea to coffee and the couple have arrived in Nice, bad news from home pulls the girlfriend, Sarah, back to England. John, her boyfriend, says he’ll return with her, but Sarah will not hear of it. She knows how much this trip means to John; how long he has thought about it, planned for it, saved for it. Sarah is the sort of girl every parent would like their son to be with. There is a tearful farewell at Nice station. John buys a postcard and sits in a café to write to his parents. He buys a pack of Gauloises and smokes one. Sarah doesn’t like smoking. Even his parents don’t know that he smokes. He buys a stamp, posts his card and continues his journey alone. So now it starts, thinks Robert, and he orders black coffee.

26

Summer 2013

We were definitely the odd ones out at the airport. Perhaps that’s just how it felt, and others didn’t notice, although I suspect the more perceptive travellers would have spotted the middle-aged couple, red-eyed, looking in desperate need of a holiday, yet apparently dreading getting on the plane. They might have assumed fear of flying. But it was fear of landing that afflicted Nancy and me – the fear of it all becoming real. So far all we had been able to do was imagine. Now we must look at the body of our son, who had gone ahead and experienced something he should have waited for us to do first.

Before we left for the airport, I had taken down from the dresser the three postcards Jonathan had sent us: Paris, Nice, Seville. Glossy and bright. Dashed-off words, which carried little weight when first read but would later be scrutinized over and over. The one from Seville was the last we received: the cathedral bathed in sunshine and tourists being pulled in a horse-drawn carriage in the foreground. How could these tourists know their image would be frozen for ever in our heads? That when that postcard landed on our doorstep, we would see them, then turn them over and read the words which were to become the last words we ever had from our son:

Dear Mum and Dad
,

Have spent two days here. Heading to the coast tomorrow.

Want to get the ferry to Tangiers.

Love
,

J xox

Neither of us spoke Spanish so the consulate in Jerez helped us through the bureaucracy. There was a lot of it. Certificate after certificate that needed to be signed, stamped and handed over to various authorities before we would be allowed to take our boy home.

It had been many years since we had seen Jonathan naked, but he was nearly naked when we looked at him lying there, with only a cloth to cover his genitals. He was perfect. Preserved in death, his eyes closed, and unmistakably our son. The consulate had informed us he would be embalmed – Spanish law insists on it before a body can be transported. I understood the technicalities of the embalming process, we both did, though neither of us wanted to think too much about it.

Jonathan had drowned, but his face wasn’t swollen the way I had expected it to be. There was a mark running along the inside of his left arm. I traced it with my fingers, stroking the cold flesh along a purple line which crossed with another. An injury he sustained, we were told, during the accident.

I cried, as quietly as I could, but I did cry. Nancy shook. Tremors ran through her whole body, not just her shoulders. She was not shaking with sobs. This was prolonged, lengthy. Something had ruptured inside her, sending wave after wave of shock through her. It was as if she had been plugged in and couldn’t be switched off. I put both my arms around her to try and steady her, but I couldn’t. And the worst thing about it was her silence. Absolute silence. When I tried to pull her away and get her out of the room, she wouldn’t move. She leaned forward and took Jonathan’s hand. It was stiff. It wouldn’t curl around hers any more. We saw his palm was purple and scuffed, the skin ripped and burned where he had held on to something. He must have held on for dear life. Nancy sank to her knees and kissed his poor hand and I put both mine on her shoulders. The man from the consulate shuffled. There was no doubt this was our son but we still needed to sign a piece of paper to confirm it. He thought it was time for us to leave, I could tell. I must have looked helpless, so he came over.

‘Mrs Brigstocke, Mrs Brigstocke, we can go now.’

I was relieved that she ignored him; it left me some space in which to act. I pulled her hand from Jonathan’s and put it in mine.

‘Nancy, come on, darling.’ Finally she let me lead her from the room. The consulate had organized a car to take us to the seaside town where Jonathan had died. I didn’t really think about whether we would have to pay for any of it. We did, as it turned out. Jonathan’s travel insurance didn’t cover it.

We drove in silence from Jerez to Tarifa, sweating in the back of the car. The first thing Nancy wanted to do when we arrived was go to the beach. I asked the driver to wait. It was too hot. Midday. There was no shelter, nowhere to escape the burning sun. It was the largest beach we had ever been to: miles and miles of white sand. It was a desert, except there were crowds of people there. Hordes, cooking, glistening in oil. We were the only ones fully clothed, and our shoes sank into the sand and I wondered whether to take mine off and walk in bare feet, but Nancy marched on so I followed. She headed in a straight line to the sea, her hand holding her hat on to her head. The wind whipped around us and I squinted to stop the sand getting into my eyes. It was a hostile place. It took fifteen minutes for us to reach the edge of the water and then we stood there and stared out. It was like staring into space; I could see no end to it. The wind played on the water, teasing it into white froth, but there were children playing in there and windsurfers helped along by the wind. To them it was a friendly place. The top of my head was burning and I imagined how the skin would blister, then peel in a few days. I couldn’t stand it and put a hand on Nancy’s arm, but she shook me off. She was not ready to leave. I felt ashamed that I had shown weakness. I looked behind me and wondered which patch of beach Jonathan had lain on. I wondered whether he had tried windsurfing. When I turned, Nancy was taking off her shoes. She hitched up her skirt with one hand and held out her other for my hand. I took off my socks and shoes, rolled up the bottom of my trousers and stepped into the water with her. We stood there for a few moments and I saw her close her eyes, so I closed mine. ‘Goodbye, Jonathan,’ I said in my head and imagined her doing the same. Then we returned to the car and drove to Jonathan’s hotel.

Our driver knew exactly where to go: a cheap hostel for backpackers in a side street about twenty minutes from the beach. I expected kindness from the staff at the hostel, but we didn’t receive much. They said they had barely seen Jonathan during his stay. They didn’t know him. He was a stranger who happened to die while he was their guest. I found them evasive, almost embarrassed, as if we might turn round and blame them for our son’s death. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, we kept being told. It was an accident. The sea is treacherous, the wind can suddenly come up, as it did that day. Was there a red flag flying? No one seemed to remember.

Jonathan’s rucksack was sitting on a chair in the room he had occupied. It was an inhospitable room: a single bed with a sheet and a blanket; a chipped chest of drawers which still held his clothes. The police had returned the bag he had had on the beach. They had found his room key and located his hotel. And there they had found his passport, and that had led them to us.

Nancy took charge of everything. She took his clothes out of drawers and folded them before laying them out on the bed. She wouldn’t let me help. It was her domain. While she sorted through Jonathan’s things, I sat in a chair at the window and looked out at what Jonathan would have looked out at. He didn’t have a sea view – his room was at the back of this cheap hotel. So while I was staring down at two, possibly Scandinavian, backpackers sitting on white plastic chairs at a white plastic table on a yellow-and-pink crazy-paved courtyard, Nancy must have found Jonathan’s camera. Did she put it into his rucksack? I don’t know. Or did she hide it in her own bag? I will never know, but I wonder when it was that she decided to have the film developed. Was it then, or later, after we’d returned home? I never saw his camera – I always assumed that it had got lost somewhere, or been stolen by someone in the hotel when they knew Jonathan wouldn’t be back for it. It was an expensive camera – the most expensive present we had ever bought him. A Nikon, top of the range, with a super-zoom lens. Our gift to him on his eighteenth birthday. If he had lost it, he wouldn’t have wanted to tell us.