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‘He was too far out by then. He was exhausted. He had done the hard work. The Spaniard only had the last leg.’

When I get home, I start to shiver again. The temperature in the house is colder than outside. I sit down at my desk and open the drawer where I keep the photographs. I look through them. Pictures of a mother and son on a beach; in a café, her coaxing a spoon into his mouth; eating ice cream together. They look so natural. She smiles, he smiles. They are on holiday. In one photograph she is looking straight into the camera. You could believe the photographer was sitting with them at the same table, but I don’t believe that any more. She didn’t know she was being photographed, like Nancy didn’t know when Jonathan captured her sitting in the garden in the deckchair. He was good. He had a talent for photography. They are the sort of photographs you would see in a celebrity magazine taken by a member of the paparazzi. Up close and personal, but from a safe distance. A delusion of intimacy. We had bought our son the most expensive zoom lens we could afford.

The photographs in the hotel room are different. There is nothing natural about them. They are posed, I see that now. And as I look at them, horror is added to my shock. I see something I had chosen to miss before. It is fear.

If it had been me and not Nancy who had developed the film from Jonathan’s camera, and if I had sat alone looking at those photographs as she did, would I have seen what she saw? Or would I have remembered the collection of porn I found in Jonathan’s bedroom? Or perhaps I would have had the film developed first and found the porn later? Then would I have made a connection? I threw the magazines away so Nancy could remain innocent of her boy’s appetites. But I made myself an innocent too. I dismissed them at the time, and then failed to recall them when I came across the photographs all those years later. I saw what I wanted to see. I wonder about Nancy though. I wonder whether perhaps she did see something else. And I wonder whether that was what compelled her to write the book. She wrote it for herself, no one else.

Did she construct that story so she could lay her son to rest in peace? Not my son though. My son is in an altogether less restful place. I say a prayer for Nicholas Ravenscroft’s recovery and think how Nancy would laugh at me, but I cannot conjure her up and I realize I am grateful for the silence. I return the photographs to their envelope.

I asked Catherine Ravenscroft why she hadn’t told Nancy when they met. Why didn’t she tell her she had been raped? She looked at me in surprise.

‘I haven’t told anyone,’ she said. ‘And I didn’t want to cause her any more pain.’ I was the first person she had told. And she told me because she had been forced to. She had been forced again, against her will. I think she actually meant it when she said sorry. She pitied me, but I don’t want her pity. I want her to hate me. I need someone to hate me more than I hate myself. I need to tell her what I did to her son. That I am the reason he is where he is now.

I dial her number. I have dialled it before, but never spoken. She picks up.

‘Hello?’ She must be driving – her voice sounds small against the hum of traffic in the background.

‘I showed your son the photographs of you.’ I wait for a response but none comes, so I go on. ‘My wife wanted you to suffer as she had …’ I tell her about my contact with Nicholas. ‘I led him to believe you were in love with Jonathan; that Jonathan’s life was worth more to you than his.’ I hear her breathing above the sound of the road, short little gasps, but she says nothing. I expect her to hang up. She doesn’t.

‘You should tell your husband,’ I say, as gently as I can.

‘You fucking tell him,’ she whispers, and her words give me hope that at last she has found it in her heart to hate me.

53

End of summer 2013

It is Robert who is at Nicholas’s bedside when he opens his eyes and it is Robert who tells Catherine the news. He sends her a text and she receives it during her second session with the therapist she had agreed to see through work. She had almost not gone, but she had a feeble hope that maybe it would help her. The therapist frowns when the text comes in. Her phone should have been turned off. Catherine stands up and says she has to leave. The young woman cocks her head and says nothing. The therapeutic experience feels to Catherine as if she is having her teeth individually pulled out with great earnestness and super care, and that the new dentures she will eventually be fitted with will make her feel a whole lot better. In the meantime though, it is important for her to get used to the gaping, bloody holes in her mouth.

‘It’s my son. He’s just opened his eyes.’

The head cocks the other way.

‘He’s in intensive care.’

A look first of surprise, then of enlightenment as if the therapist suddenly understands what this is all about. She doesn’t, but it’s not her fault. Catherine hasn’t told her. She hadn’t asked. She hadn’t asked any of the right questions and Catherine had only responded directly to questions, not volunteering anything herself. She is an uncooperative patient: a patient who seems unwilling or unable to help herself.

When Catherine arrives at the hospital a nurse tells her Robert left five minutes ago. He is careful to time his arrivals and departures so he doesn’t have to see her, but she is not sure she cares any more. She sinks to her knees, leaning into Nicholas, telling him that she is there, telling him everything is going to be all right, telling him he is safe now, telling him she loves him more than anybody – more than she has ever loved anybody. Nicholas has opened his eyes but he doesn’t focus on anything. He stares at nothing, unresponsive; still the doctor is hopeful. Patience. It will take time. They will carry out more tests; in the meantime the signs are good. He is likely to make a slow but possibly full recovery. It is good news. If the good news had not come, Catherine had decided she would kill herself. She’d thought about how she might do it. Throwing herself under a Tube train was not an option: pills and alcohol were her preferred choice of death.

Robert still doesn’t know she was raped. She is waiting for the moment when he will be told. She hopes it will come soon. Surely Stephen Brigstocke will find the courage to do this one thing for her? If he doesn’t, she will have to tell Robert herself and she feels sick at the thought that he might not believe her. She shouldn’t have to persuade him; she shouldn’t have to convince him that she is telling the truth, yet she fears that that is exactly what she would have to do. His contempt for her is so solid now that he is more likely to believe Stephen Brigstocke than her. Even so, it would be cruel to leave him in ignorance much longer. She is punishing him by delaying the revelation, but it was Robert who was so quick to allow a wall to come between them, Robert who slammed the door shut on her.

She will not hesitate to tell Nicholas. Now she knows they are both going to live, he must hear it from her and no one else. However painful it is for both of them, he must know. But he is not strong enough yet; it will be a while before he is ready. She strokes his hand. His fingernails are too long. She will bring in some clippers and tidy them up. She has a sudden memory of the tiny clippers she’d used on his nails when he was little. How soft his nails were. In the end she’d used her teeth to gently nibble them down so he wouldn’t scratch himself in the night. She checks the time, Robert should have been here by now but she is glad that he is not. She catches the eye of a nurse. She saw Catherine look at her watch; she disapproves. They all disapprove of Catherine. They prefer Robert. The poor husband. The devoted father. She is a hysterical, unstable mother. The woman who attacked that frail old man. Once she would have cared what they thought; not any more. She lays her head on the bed and closes her eyes, grateful for this extra time alone with her son.

54

End of summer 2013

‘My son raped your wife. She told me and I believe her. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything …’

Poor man. It is a lot to take in. I have been too abrupt. We are sitting in the café at the hospital. He has brought me a cup of tea. Insisted on it. I tried to stop him, I said I didn’t want one, but he was trying to put me at ease – to make me feel welcome. He said he was getting one for himself anyway. He misread my nervous state – he thought I was anxious because of what had happened the last time I was here. He had only just put the cup down when I told him. I say it again more slowly.

‘My son raped your wife. She told me what happened and I believe her. I am ashamed to say it, but I believe my son was capable of that … I’m so sorry.’

I want to say more, but I make myself stop. He needs time to digest. He will have questions, and I will answer them.

‘My wife told you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Catherine?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you believe her?’

I nod. He looks beyond me, over my shoulder. There are people sitting near by, but we have a table to ourselves. We look like a father and son. People will assume that my wife, his mother, is in a ward and that we are there to comfort each other.

‘I am sure she was telling the truth.’ I repeat myself: ‘Your wife was raped by my son.’

‘When did she tell you?’ His voice is flat as if he is speaking under hypnosis.

‘Yesterday. She came to my house …’

He takes this in, his eyes avoiding mine. They graze my shoulder as they move down to look into his tea, both hands wrapped around the cheap china.

‘Yesterday?’

‘Yes. She came to my house yesterday morning.’

Then he looks up at me and I see his exhaustion. His eyes are blue and his hair, once blond, is washed out with grey.

‘Why didn’t she tell me? She should have told
me
, not you.’

I cannot answer that. Ask me something else. Ask me something I can answer. The silence grows, chewing at the air between us, and I see anger build inside him. He is waking up … four, three, two, one.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before? You must have known. You bastard! Why didn’t you say anything before?’

‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know until yesterday. I hadn’t met your wife before. But when she sat down in front of me and told me what happened, I knew she was telling the truth. No one wants to believe their son is capable of such a thing.’ He is grasping around, searching for something. He is mind-fucked. Now I know what that means. We have both been mind-fucked.

‘He raped her?’

I nod.

‘You think he was capable of that and you didn’t say anything … He’d done it before—’

‘No, no, I’m sure he hadn’t,’ I protest. ‘It was hearing her describe to me what happened: the details, the knife and … I know she was telling the truth.’

‘The knife?’ He closes his eyes, imagining. ‘But the photographs …’

I watch the guilt begin its descent on him. He reaches over and grabs me by the coat, spilling scalding tea on my legs. A woman at the next table turns to look. She must wonder why I don’t move or make a sound, but I don’t feel a thing.

‘I felt sorry for you,’ he says. ‘I was grateful to your fucking son …’

Then he pushes me away and sinks his face into his hands.

‘I needed to tell you face to face – I couldn’t do it over the phone.’

And oh, shrivelling creep that I am, I remind him that it was my wife who wrote the book, not me. I see revulsion crawl on to his face. I sound as if I am blaming her, but I am not. I believed what she wrote and I felt I owed it to her to make it known. It was her book, her words.

‘She never meant anyone else to read it. I should have left it where it—’

‘You sent it to my wife. And my son. You sent me those photographs. Jesus Christ! How could you not know? You’ve admitted you thought him capable of it, so why didn’t you question it?’

‘Why didn’t you?’ And I squirm under the pain my question inflicts on him.

‘Why didn’t I question it?’ His face sags into his hands. I watch his shoulders shake and I want to put my hand out and touch him, but I can’t. I can’t comfort him, there is nothing I can say that will ease his guilt or take away the image of his wife reading that vile book and feeling as if she was being raped all over again. I have no business here any more. It is done. He knows. I leave him there and go up to the ICU. I don’t go in, I just look through the window, hoping for a glimpse of Nicholas, and I see her on her knees at her son’s bedside. She looks as if she is asleep.

55

End of summer 2013

He kneels down beside her and she feels his arm across her shoulders. She keeps her eyes closed. His face is close to her neck. It is wet. He is shaking.

‘Forgive me, Cath. I am so sorry. Please forgive me. I know what happened. He told me what his son did …’ These last words are buried in her neck. Still, her eyes remain closed. She is dizzy. He takes her hand and she opens her eyes, but it is Nick’s eyes that meet hers, not Robert’s. Nick, who is looking right at her, seeing her. It had happened before Robert came, not opening his eyes, but being able to focus. Catherine was holding his hand at the time and his head shifted a little and then he looked at her and she knew he could see her, recognize her, and a wave of happiness swept through her and she smiled and cried.

‘Hello, my darling,’ she said. He hadn’t answered, just looked at her. She had texted Robert. She hadn’t known he was in the hospital café with Stephen Brigstocke. A nurse had been with her and for the first time in a while, Catherine received a smile from her. Then the doctor came and confirmed what they already knew. This was real progress. If he keeps this up, he could be out of the ICU within a week.

Nick closed his eyes again, and she closed hers. And then Robert came in.

‘Dad’s here,’ she whispers to Nick. Robert had been too busy looking at Catherine to notice his son open his eyes, but she hears him gasp and feels the joy pulse through him like the low hum from electric pylons.

‘Nick,’ he says. ‘We’re here. We’re both here. It’s going to be OK.’ And he squeezes Catherine closer to him.