Kind of Cruel (57 page)

15

Friday 10 December 2010

‘You’re drinking wine,’ Dinah tells me. She, Nonie, Luke and I are having dinner at Ferrazzano’s in Silsford, our favourite Italian restaurant.

‘I know I’m drinking wine.’

‘If it’s bad for Mrs Truscott to give parents glasses of wine at school shows, then it’s bad for you to drink it.’

‘No, it’s fine for me to drink it,’ I say. ‘It’s wrong for Mrs Truscott to
sell
wine at school shows and pretend to be giving it away. And actually . . .’

‘Actually what?’ Dinah asks.

‘Nothing.’ Luke and I exchange a look. We are both thinking that Mrs Truscott can do whatever she likes from now on, and we will continue to think she’s a hero. Without the efforts of the headmistress I have endlessly derided, I don’t believe Dinah and Nonie would be alive today. Jo wasn’t the only one who had the idea of shopping in Rawndesley on the afternoon of Friday 3 December. Mrs Truscott spotted her with the girls in John Lewis and noticed that Nonie was crying, noticed that Jo seemed unresponsive to her distress. When Nonie spotted her headteacher, she ran over to her, ignoring Jo’s loud orders to come back immediately, and said that she wanted to go home but Jo wouldn’t let her. She was scared: Jo and Dinah were hatching a plan to go and play in the snow in Silsford Woods, and Nonie didn’t want to.

Mrs Truscott went over to speak to Jo, who at first snapped at her to mind her own business, then changed her demeanour entirely and became almost sycophantically reassuring. Mrs Truscott told the police later that she’d found Jo’s behaviour so alarming that she’d insisted on taking Dinah and Nonie away from her and driving them home to Luke.

Silsford Woods is about half a mile from Blantyre Gap. The council recently announced a plan to put a barrier there, to make it harder for people to drive their cars off the edge.

‘Let’s not argue about wine,’ Luke says. ‘Let’s talk about the brilliant school show we’ve just seen, the brilliant play by brilliant new playwrights Dinah and Nonie Lendrim.’ In the end, Nonie succeeded in intervening on behalf of Hector’s ten sisters. Their final fate was less gruesome thanks to her: covered in mud rather than dead.

‘So you liked it?’ Dinah asks us for what must be the twentieth time. ‘Really?’

‘Really,’ I tell her. ‘We loved it. Everybody loved it – you heard the applause. You’re both incredibly talented.’

‘You would say that,’ says Nonie. ‘You’re our parents.’

Luke squeezes my knee under the table.

‘You
are
our parents,’ Dinah insists.

‘Tell them,’ Nonie whispers to her across the table.

I force myself to swallow the food that’s in my mouth. Last time Nonie ordered Dinah to tell me something, it was Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel. It wasn’t something I wanted to hear. When she told me how scared she’d been when Jo had tried to force her to go to Silsford Woods in the snow, how she very nearly hadn’t had the courage to approach Mrs Truscott in John Lewis, I didn’t want to hear that either – it upset me too much.
Please let this be something good
.

‘We’ve made a decision,’ Dinah says, putting down her knife and fork. ‘You don’t need to adopt us. We’re already a family, you’re already our parents. We don’t need a piece of paper to make it true.’

‘You’re right,’ Luke says. ‘And we’ll be a family whether we adopt you officially or not.’

‘But if you stop trying to, nothing bad can happen,’ says Dinah. ‘No one will say you’re not allowed to.’

Nonie nods her agreement.

Luke looks at me, a question in his eyes. I transmit one back to him: is it up to me? I don’t want it to be up to me. Or maybe I do, because there’s no way I’m giving up, whatever Luke says. Whatever anyone says. ‘If you knew for sure that we’d definitely be able to adopt you legally, would you want us to?’ I ask the girls.

‘But we don’t know for sure,’ says Nonie.

‘She said “if”. Don’t you know what “if” means?’ Dinah snaps.

‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ says Luke. ‘You’re scared, like we are, that it’s not going to go our way. That’s why you want us to stop trying.’

Both girls nod.

‘We can’t do that,’ I tell them. ‘Luke and I are as frightened as you are, but if we all want it to happen then we have to try. And . . . it might be fine.’

‘It probably will be,’ says Luke.

‘Amber?’

‘What, Nones?’

‘What will happen to Jo?’

‘I don’t know, love. No one knows at the moment. But . . . she won’t hurt anyone else.’

‘I feel sorry for William and Barney,’ Nonie says.

‘If things aren’t fine, they’ll still be fine,’ says Dinah. ‘We’ll still be a family.’

We will be, from now on, a family whose members tell each other the truth without fear, knowing we will always be forgiven. When I said this to Luke last night, he laughed and said, ‘That’s a great policy for you and me, but the girls are going to be teenagers. Don’t be too disappointed when you find lager cans and tattooed boyfriends hidden in the airing cupboard.’

‘Yes,’ he says now to Dinah. ‘We’ll still be a family.’

Thank you for coming to see me. It must have taken a lot of courage. I wasn’t expecting you to agree, or even to respond to my letter, so that’s great. It’s great that you’ve got courage because you’re going to need plenty of it to help the boys to survive . . . well, I don’t want to say ‘losing their mother’, because that makes it sound as if Jo is dead. You know what I mean.

First of all, I want to tell you that in my one proper encounter with Jo – I tried to talk to her again at the police station, but she was unresponsive – when she came to see me here, voluntarily, we talked properly and it was clear to me that she adores you and the boys. She genuinely loves you, Neil. And William and Barney. I know she’s . . . inaccessible at the moment – she’s shut herself down in order to be able to survive the ordeal ahead – but I strongly believe she still loves you. You, William and Barney are the people in her life that she can love non-strategically, without calculation or complication. In a way that she can’t love Hilary, Ritchie and Kirsty, because she sees them all as in some way responsible for her problems.

So, although I mainly asked you here to talk about the boys and how to make this easier for them, I also want to say something about Jo. Don’t give up on her, Neil. She’s done terrible things, I’m not denying that, but it doesn’t make her a terrible person. Jo has never had the chance to get out from under her mother’s brainwashing and become the person she once had the potential to be. With your help, and mine – or with the help of any good therapist – she still could. She has never been allowed to feel or express her own needs, which is why she did what she did. I know it must be hard for you to understand, but although Jo is, legally, a fully responsible adult, psychologically she’s a frightened child fighting the annihilation of her frail identity.

We can talk more about this if you decide to come and see me again, but I’d like you to consider this: why fire? Why did Jo hire a fireman’s uniform and kill Sharon Lendrim in that particular way? It can’t have been the easiest option, surely. I know it’s painful for you to think about it, but Jo made life difficult for herself by choosing to attack Sharon in the way she did. She first had to obtain a key to the house, then let herself in at night, when she hoped Sharon, Dinah and Nonie would all be sound asleep, but she couldn’t guarantee it, could she? She had to change into her fireman clothes, get the girls out of the house . . . How did she know Sharon wouldn’t wake up and catch her in the act? Why did she take that risk?

I think, and Simon Waterhouse agrees, that it was important for her to be able to focus on the ‘rescuer’ role and disguise she adopted. She was Dinah and Nonie’s saviour that night, covered from head to toe in the protective clothing of the profession that does the
opposite
of the harm she intended to do. Symbolically, she protected herself from her crime – almost cancelling it out, in her mind. Do you see what I mean? She encased her whole body in this saviour costume, so that the real Jo was completely buried, and she rescued two children. That’s the part she’ll have focused on, blanking her mind to the fact that she was the cause of the fire, and to her true aim. She wouldn’t have allowed herself to think about that. I believe that it was only possible for her to commit murder for the first time in this very specific way: literally, encased in an identity that cancelled out her true identity, and neutralised her abhorrent behaviour. It will have been as abhorrent to her, on some level, as it is to you and me.

I believe, though I can’t prove it, that if it had been possible, Jo would have used the same method with Kat Allen, but Kat lived in a flat, not a house. She didn’t have her own front door, accessible from the street. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I disagree with the police about why Jo took William and Barney with her to Kat’s flat that day. I know this is one of the aspects of all this that upsets you the most, but if it’s any comfort, I genuinely don’t believe Jo simply used the boys. Yes, a mother in charge of her two young sons on a day a murder takes place is less likely to be suspected of having committed that murder, but I don’t think that’s why she did it. She didn’t want to fool others, she wanted to fool herself. She wanted to believe that, though she had to do something unpleasant, she was mainly having a fun day out with William and Barney. That she killed Kat during a day that was otherwise spent in the company of her beloved children would have made it just about bearable for her. She needed the boys with her for moral support, if you like.

I’m not justifying anything she did, Neil. I’m trying to help you understand what might have been going on in her mind, that’s all. Outward appearances are more real to Jo than her own internal reality, which has never been allowed to develop, never received any validation. Does that make sense? What I’m trying to say is that Jo could
still
develop in any number of ways. I’m not trying to make her your responsibility – believe me, I’m not. I just wanted to give you the chance to think about it in a different way, that’s all.

With regard to the boys, the most important thing is to help them understand that nothing that’s happened has been their fault. They are children, and are in no way responsible for the problems of adults. Please do everything you can to drum that into them, because they’ll need it. They’ll be thinking back over the past and wondering what they might have done differently to prevent their mother from becoming so unhappy. Your job – the most important one you’ll ever do in your life – is to make sure they know there was nothing they could have done to change anything. You can’t arrange for them to avoid suffering altogether, but you can ensure they don’t take on guilt that isn’t theirs, as so many children do.

Let me give you an example: when I was a child, on my first day at school, I was nervous and shy and didn’t really want to be there, so I hid behind a doll’s house and pretended I wasn’t there. I knew I was doing something naughty, and eventually I got scared and came out. My teacher spanked me with a ruler in front of the whole class, which is something I still find difficult to talk about. It’s the most humiliating thing that’s ever happened to me. When my mother arrived to collect me that afternoon, my teacher told her what I’d done, and my mother didn’t speak to me – at all – for nearly a week. It was absolutely clear to me that, by doing this one thing wrong, I had forfeited my right to be loved by her. And yet, for years, the dominant feeling I had when I recalled that incident was guilt. If only I hadn’t hidden behind the doll’s house . . . It was my fault, I was horrible and worthless. It took me nearly twenty years to realise that the guilty people in the story were my teacher and my mother. The adults. I was an ordinary child who did something naughty, as children do. When I realised that, I got angry. And decided to become a therapist, so that I could help people like me, like you, like Jo. Like William and Barney.

With the right help and guidance, they’ll be okay, Neil. They have you. Love them, look after them, and they’ll be fine.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful, as always, to my agent Peter Straus of Rogers, Coleridge & White (or Straus MD of the Princeton-Plainsboro Literary Agency as I prefer to call him, on account of his genius-maverick qualities), to my brilliantly incisive and supportive editor Carolyn Mays, to Francesca Best, Karen Geary, Lucy Zilberkweit, Lucy Hale and everybody at my wonderful publishers Hodder & Stoughton. Thank you to my long-standing copy editor, Amber Burlinson, after whom I cheekily named the protagonist of this novel without asking permission. Thanks to Montserrat and Jeromin, owners of the real Little Orchard – again: cheeky name theft, no permission. Thank you to all my international publishers who work so hard to distribute my peculiar brand of twisted fictional psyche all over the world. Thanks to Mark Pannone as ever, and to the Cambridge Stonecraft gang: Simon, Jamie, Lee and Matt. Thank you to Dr Bryan Knight, whose amazing website first made me think, ‘Hmm, hypnosis . . .’, and to Dr Michael Heap whose expertise proved invaluable.

The original
Hector and His Ten Sisters
was a short story I wrote with my children, Phoebe and Guy. I am grateful to Phoebe, also, for supplying Dinah’s quip about the hypothetical baby who would only grow up and work in an office. Thank you to Dan for too many things to list (and I won’t bother to try, in case he hates lists of things he’s done as much as he hates lists of things I’d like him to do).