My Policeman (25 page)

You may have wondered, even at the time, why I did this. Why didn’t I let the row build to a climax, and have us pack up and leave? Why did I sit on the fence, unable either to defend my husband or to push him to denounce you? Although I hadn’t yet admitted the truth about you and Tom to myself, I still couldn’t bear to see how easily you provoked his passion, how obviously he cared about what you thought of him. I didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

But it was also that I agreed with what you said. I thought women who went to work could also be good mothers. I knew you were right and Tom was wrong. And this wasn’t
the
last time I would feel this, although each time it happened, I continued to deny it.

On our last day on the island, I got my own way about a trip to Osborne House. I’ve never been that interested in royalty, but I’ve always enjoyed snooping around stately homes, and it seemed to me that a visit to the Isle of Wight wasn’t complete without taking a look at Queen Victoria’s holiday home. Back then, the place was open only on certain afternoons and many of the rooms were out of bounds to visitors. There was certainly no gift shop, tearoom, or even much information; the whole thing had a rather musty, forbidden flavour. It was as though you were prying on a private world, albeit one that had come to an end many years ago, and that was exactly what I liked about it.

You objected, mildly, to the idea, but after the previous night’s discussion, Tom was on my side, and we ignored your smiling protestations about the terrible taste of the royals and their second-rate furnishings, and being herded around with a load of tourists (what made us so different from them, I didn’t ask). Eventually you relented and drove us there.

No one’s making you come, I thought. Tom and I could go alone. But you joined us in the queue for tickets and even managed, towards the end of the tour, to stop rolling your eyes at everything the guide told us.

The most striking part of the house was the Durbar Room, which seemed to have been fashioned completely from ivory and was almost blinding in its whiteness. Every surface was embellished: the ceiling deeply coffered, the walls sporting intricate ivory carvings. Even you stopped talking as we entered. The long windows looked out on a shining Solent, but inside it was pure Anglo-India. The guide told us about
the
Agra carpet, the chimneypiece and overmantel, shaped like a peacock, and, most wonderful of all, the miniature maharajah’s palace, carved from bone. When I peered inside, I could see the maharajahs themselves, their tiny glittering shoes turned up at the ends. The guide said the room was the Queen’s attempt to create a corner of India on the Isle of Wight. Although she’d never been there herself, she was entranced by Prince Albert’s tales of his travels on the subcontinent, and she even employed a particular Indian boy, to whom she became very close, as a personal secretary, although he, like all servants, was instructed to look away when he spoke to his sovereign. There was a photograph of this boy in the room, wearing the turban that the Queen had apparently insisted he thread with gold, although it wasn’t his custom. His eyes were large and serious-looking; his skin gleamed. I imagined him unlooping the turban to reveal the black snake of his hair, and Victoria – fifty-something, trussed up in corsets, her own hair tied so tightly it must have made her eyes ache – watching, and longing to touch it. He looked like a beautiful girl, that boy. No wonder they went in for beards and swords, I thought.

Although the room struck me as incredibly frivolous and even verging on the immoral – all those elephant tusks, just for the amusement of a queen with a liking for the exotic – I knew what you meant when you praised its audacity, its
fabulously pointless beauty
, as you put it. In fact, I was so engrossed in the place that I didn’t notice you and Tom slip out of the room. When I looked up from studying yet another embroidery fashioned from a million gold threads, the two of you were nowhere to be seen.

Then I caught a flash of your red cravat, out amongst the topiary. Our guide had begun preparing the group to leave,
but
I hung back, close to the window. Tom, I now saw, was standing, hands in pockets, half hidden by a tall shrub. You were facing him. Neither of you were smiling, or saying a word; you were just looking, as intensely as I’d looked at the photograph of the Indian boy. Your bodies were close, your eyes locked, and as your hand fell on Tom’s upper arm, I was sure I saw my husband’s eyes close and his mouth fall open, just for a moment.

LAST NIGHT, WHILE
you were sleeping, I stayed awake in the hope of being able to talk to Tom. This involved a disruption to our usual routine, which has been in place now ever since we both retired, and goes as follows. Every evening I prepare a rather lacklustre meal, nothing like the feasts you used to offer us: oven-ready lasagne, a chicken pie or a few sausages from the butcher in Peacehaven, who somehow manages to be both surly and obsequious. We eat at the kitchen table, perhaps engage in a little conversation about the dog or the news, after which I wash up whilst Tom takes Walter for his final walk around the block. We then watch television for an hour or so. Tom buys the
Radio Times
every week and high-lights the programmes he doesn’t want to miss using a yellow marker pen. We have a satellite dish, and so he has access to the History Channel and National Geographic.

While Tom watches another documentary about polar bears, how Caesar built his empire, or Al Capone, I tend to read the newspaper or complete the crossword, and it’s no later than ten o’clock when I turn in, leaving him to at least another two hours’ viewing.

As you’ll have gathered, there is something about this routine that inhibits real conversation or deviation of any kind. There is also, I think, something about it that both Tom and I find reassuring.

Since you’ve been with us, I make sure you have your meal, which I feed you from a spoon to avoid upsets, before Tom and I sit down to ours. And even though you are in your bed in the room down the hall, we do not speak of your presence.

Lately, though, I’ve got into the habit of sitting with you whilst my husband watches television. Tom has said nothing about it, but rather than joining him in the living room, I sit at your bedside and read aloud. We are currently enjoying
Anna Karenina
. Although you still cannot speak yourself, I know you understand every word I read, Patrick, and not just because you are doubtless very familiar with the novel. I see you close your eyes and enjoy the rhythm of the sentences. Your face becomes still, your shoulders relax, and the only sound apart from my voice is the television’s regular hum coming from the living room. Tolstoy’s grip on the female mind is, I’ve always thought, remarkable. Last night I read one of my favourite sections: Dolly’s reflections on the sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth, and tears came to my eyes because so often, over the years, I’ve longed for those sufferings, imagining that a child could have brought Tom and me closer together – despite everything, I’m convinced he wanted children; and even when I knew this could never happen, I imagined a child might bring me closer to myself.

Whilst I cried, you looked at me. Your eyes, which have a pickled look about them these days, were soft. I chose to interpret this as a look of sympathy. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and you made a slight movement with your head – hardly a nod, but close enough, perhaps.

When I left your room I felt curiously elated, and perhaps it was this that made me sit, fully clothed, on the edge of my
bed
until past one o’clock in the morning, waiting for Tom to retire.

Eventually I heard his light tread on the hallway runner, his loud yawn.

‘You’re late turning in.’ I stood in my doorway and kept my voice low. He looked startled for a moment, then his face crumpled back into tiredness.

‘Can I have a word?’ I held my door open by way of invitation, feeling again like the deputy head during my last days at St Luke’s, when I often had to have a ‘little chat’ with a new teacher about taking the responsibilities of playground duty seriously, or the dangers of becoming too close to the more needy children.

He looked at his watch. I held the door open a little wider. ‘Please,’ I added.

My husband didn’t sit in my bedroom. Instead, he paced around as if the place were deeply unfamiliar to him (which I suppose, in some ways, it is). It reminded me of our first night together at the Ship. My bedroom is very different to that room, though: instead of curtains, I have a practical wooden-slat blind; instead of an embroidered eiderdown, I have a duvet cover that needs no ironing. These items I purchased, along with the bedroom furniture, from IKEA when we moved in. I gave the whole exercise very little thought, and IKEA helped me, as they said, to ‘chuck out the chintz’. And so out went all the bits and pieces I’d inherited from Mum and Dad – not that there was much: a fringed standard lamp, a wall mirror with ornamental shelves, a scratched oak table – and in came the IKEA look. I wanted blankness, I suppose. Not so much an attempt at a new start as a refusal to engage with the process. Perhaps a longing to negate myself from the location altogether. To this end, the walls are painted
a
biscuity shade, and all the furniture is made of artificial wood in a colour they call ‘blonde’. That word makes me smile – such an odd word to apply to a wardrobe.
Blonde
. It’s so glamorous, so voluptuous. Bombshells are blonde. And sirens. And Tom, of course, although now his hair is grey; still thick, but without the shine of youth.

My one extravagance in the room is the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that I had built along one wall. I’d always admired your bookshelves at Chichester Terrace. Of course, mine are nowhere near as impressive as yours, which were fashioned from mahogany and were filled with leather-bound hardbacks and outsized art monographs. I wonder what happened to all those books. There was no sign of them in your Surrey house, where I went a month or so ago, first in a bid to find you before I knew you were in the hospital, and then to pick up some things for you to bring here. That house was a very different place to Chichester Terrace. How long must you have lived alone there, after your mother died? Over thirty years. What you did during that period I have no idea. The neighbour who told me about your stroke said you’d kept yourself to yourself but you’d always said hello and asked very attentively after his health in the street, which made me smile. That was when I knew I’d definitely found the right Patrick Hazlewood.

Tom finally came to a halt, having made a full circuit of the room, and stood in front of the blind with his arms crossed.

‘It’s about Patrick,’ I said.

He let out a little groan. ‘Marion,’ he said. ‘It’s very late …’

‘He asked for you. The other day. He said your name.’

Tom looked at the beige carpet. ‘No. He didn’t.’

‘How can you know that?’

‘He did not say my name.’

‘I heard him, Tom. He called for you.’

Tom let out a breath, shook his head. ‘He’s had two major strokes, Marion. The doctor told us it’s only a matter of time before there’ll be another one. The man can’t talk. He’ll never talk again. You’re imagining things.’

‘There’s been a real improvement,’ I said, aware that I was exaggerating. After all, there’s been no word from you since the day you uttered Tom’s name. ‘He just needs encouragement. He needs encouragement from you.’

‘He’s nearly eighty years old.’

‘He’s seventy-six.’

Tom looked me in the face then. ‘We’ve been through all this. I don’t know why you brought him here in the first place. I don’t know what weird scheme you have in mind.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘If you want to play nursemaid, fine. But don’t expect me to be part of it.’

‘He has no one,’ I said.

There was a long silence. Tom uncrossed his arms and drew a hand across his tired face. ‘I’m going to bed now,’ he said, quietly.

But I blundered on. ‘He’s in pain,’ I said, my voice wheedling now. ‘He needs you.’

Tom stopped at the door and looked back at me, his eyes glowing with anger. ‘He needed me years ago, Marion,’ he said. And he let himself out of the room.

Early summer 1958. It was already hot; at school, the smell of warm milk became overpowering, and the children’s nap time was a lovely, drowsy affair, even for me. So when Julia proposed we take both our classes on a nature trip to Woodingdean, I jumped at the chance. The head agreed
to
a Friday afternoon. We were to take the bus and then walk to Castle Hill. Like most of the children, I’d never been there, and the thought of a break from the usual school routine was just as exciting to me as it was to them. We spent the whole week drawing pictures of the plants and wildlife we expected to see – hares, larks, gorse – and I got all the children to learn how to spell the words bugle, orchid and primrose. I have to admit, Patrick, that this was largely inspired by the things you’d pointed out to Tom and me, on our Isle of Wight walks.

We left school at about eleven thirty, the children clutching their packets of sandwiches, walking in a crocodile with Julia at the front and me at the back. It was a glorious day, windy but warm, and all the blowsy horse chestnuts held their candles out to us as the bus made its way over the racecourse towards Woodingdean. Milly Oliver, the quiet, rather scrawny girl with the masses of black curls from whom I’d found it hard to look away on my first day, was sick before we’d even reached the downs. Bobby Blakemore, the boy with the boot-mark hair, sat at the back of the bus and stuck out his tongue at passing cars. Alice Rumbold talked loudly all the way of the new motorbike her brother had bought, despite Julia shushing her several times. But most of the children were quiet with anticipation, looking out of the windows as we left the town behind and the hills and sea came into view.