People Who Eat Darkness (4 page)

Tim managed a shoe shop in the nearby town of Orpington, a relic of the dwindling chain of businesses that his father had once owned across the southeast. But the shop failed, and Tim found himself claiming the dole for six months. He ended up supporting his young family with odd jobs for friends and as a freelance painter and decorator. “We were living hand to mouth,” he said. “They were very tricky, very tricky times in the early 1980s, and we didn’t know where the next fifty pounds was coming from. But we were in this lovely place with our baby, this Laura Ashley–style cottage, and it was a very beautiful life. I loved that time when Lucie was little.”

In May 1980, less than two years after the first baby, Jane gave birth to Sophie, and, three years after that, to Rupert. Tim found a business partner and moved from decorating into property development; in 1982 the family moved a few miles north to the genteel commuter town of Sevenoaks, in Kent. Here, their period of hardship at an end, Jane was able to create for her own family the childhood she had always wanted for herself, an idyll of flowers and pretty dresses and the laughter of little children.

The house where they lived, which Jane christened Daisy Cottage, overlooked a private prep school—Granville School, or
the
Granville School, as it insisted on being known. It was the fulfillment of all her fantasies, a place of such self-conscious tweeness that everyone who went there remembers it with a smile. The girls, as young as three years old, wore a uniform of blue-checked dresses and gray woolly bobble hats; at the spring festival, they put rings of flowers called chaplets in their hair. The school curriculum included the study of curtsying and maypole dancing. “Our bedroom looked directly over the playground,” remembered Jane. “It was so perfect—at playtime, Lucie would come and wave to me and I could wave back.” It was a school out of the past, out of the pages of an illustrated children’s book. “Like living in la-la land,” said Jane, “not like the real world at all.”

*   *   *

From the beginning, Lucie was a grown-up, conscientious girl with a childish earnestness that made adults smile. When Jane gave her peas to shell, she would examine each one individually, rejecting any that displayed the smallest sign of imperfection. She loved dolls and would sit alongside her mother breast-feeding a plastic baby as Jane breast-fed Sophie. “She was so meticulous and tidy and neat,” said Jane. “Like me from an early age.” Sophie, by contrast, was “stroppy” and prone to tantrums, which her older sister gently and skillfully defused. The two sisters shared a big old-fashioned bed, and one Easter Sunday they spent the entire day living underneath it, taking their meals there, reading their picture books, and tending to their toys.

Lucie’s school exercise books suggest how successfully Jane created for her children a world of innocence and delight.

Name: Lucy Blackman

Subject: News

Monday 20th May

To-day Daddy is going

to collect me from

school and we are

going to go home and

I am going to get

my Laura Ashley dress

and it is bluey

gray and it has

little flowers and then

I am going to in to Tescos

home and wear and

I am going to get Gemma

a preasnt but I don’t

know what to get her

for her birthday treat

and she is having

four friends that is

me and Celia and

Charlotte and another

frend in her school

and I will be the

only one from Granville

friends friends friends friends

And from another exercise book:

Name: Lucy Blackman

Subject: Experiments

Light

I used a large mirror.

I looked at myself.

I saw my reflection.

I closed one eye.

I saw myself with one eye closed.

I touched my nose.

I saw myself with my right hand on my nose.

I clapped my hands.

I saw my hands clap.

I used a large mirror.

I put the mirror at the side.

I saw the world the right way round.

“Because my childhood was sad I always wanted to have a wonderful, happy family life,” said Jane. “I’d put their slippers down the front of the stove so they’d be warm when they came home from school. When Rupert used to play rugby, I’d take a hot-water bottle and a flask of hot tea when I met him from school. My biggest fear was losing them. Even when they were little. I had these leather reins with a little picture of a bunny rabbit on them, these reins that I used to make Rupert wear. I’d have him on reins, and to the girls I’d say, ‘You hold hands,’ and in the supermarket if I lost sight of one of them I would feel … It was the worst thing for me, loss, because of what had happened to me. That was always my biggest fear—losing. Because I’d lost my mother, I just couldn’t bear the thought of ever losing the children. So I was a very protective—an overprotective—mother.”

*   *   *

Lucie won a scholarship to Walthamstow Hall, a stalwart redbrick nineteenth-century institution founded for the daughters of Christian missionaries. She was a hard worker and might have been expected to flourish at “Wally Hall,” which took pride in the number of girls it sent to university. And yet Lucie never quite fitted in there. “Walthamstow Hall was quite a posh school,” said Jane. “A lot of girls on their birthday were given car keys. That was their birthday present, and that wasn’t the league we were in at all.” However, the darkest shadow over Lucie’s teenage years was not money but illness.

At the age of twelve, she contracted mycoplasma pneumonia, a rare form of the illness, which laid her low for weeks. “She was very, very ill and no one knew what was the matter with her,” said Jane. “She’d be propped up in bed on so many pillows, and I had to give her this treatment to get rid of the mucus, to pummel her back. There was a rattle when she breathed, you could hear it in her lungs.” Afterwards Lucie was afflicted with a malaise that caused her legs to ache so much that she could barely walk, and put paid to two years of schoolwork. For weeks at a time she had no energy at all; the effort of descending a flight of stairs left her spent with exhaustion, and a series of doctors could give no assurances about when, or even if, her good health would return.

Jane Blackman had a strong belief in the hidden powers of the mind, and in her own gifts of prediction and intuition. She worked as a reflexologist—a masseuse and a therapist of the feet—and frequently, she said, she had found herself accurately foreseeing imminent events—the death of an elderly relative, the pregnancy of a patient before the woman was aware of it herself. “I just have feelings about things when I’m working,” she said. “A voice will come into my head to tell me something and afterwards I’m right. It goes back to my sense of justice: I feel people’s pain. People say I’m very empathetic, but I think if you’ve been through a lot yourself it gives you that ability.”

It was during Lucie’s long illness, her mother believed, that her daughter’s own gift for supernatural perception first displayed itself.

Separately, both her parents began to notice a faint but distinctive smell in the master bedroom where Lucie was being nursed—the smell of cigars. No one in the family smoked them; Tim even called on the neighbors to confirm that the smoke was not coming through their shared wall. A few days later, Jane mentioned the strange smell to Lucie. It was a time when she was extremely weak, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, but it was still a surprise when she replied, “It’s the man who sits on the end of my bed.”

“What man?” asked Jane.

“In the night, there’s this old man who comes and sits on the end of my bed sometimes, and he smokes cigars.”

“Poof!” said Tim, telling the story later. “We all thought, ‘Lucie’s gone completely off her rocker.’”

Much later, after her strength had returned, Lucie visited the home of Jane’s father and stepmother. She came across a photograph on a sideboard of an old man and asked who it was. Jane’s own grandmother, Lucie’s great-grandmother, was there that day, and the man was her husband, Hollis Etheridge, who had died years before.

“That’s the man,” said Lucie, “the one who came and sat at the end of my bed.”

Throughout his life, he had been a smoker of cigars.

*   *   *

The disappearance of Lucie Blackman, the long months of uncertainty, and the discovery of her terrible fate added to the ill feeling between her parents. But it existed long before her death. The shrill, contending versions of the truth were the sound track to the last five years of Lucie’s life.

In Jane’s version, the breakdown of their marriage occurred at a precise moment in November 1995 in their latest home—a big six-bedroom Edwardian house in Sevenoaks, the place where Jane’s dreams of domesticity had finally been fulfilled. “It was the house where I was going to have my Aga,” she said, with a trace of self-mockery at the snugness of the image. “This was the place where it would all be. I would be round the kitchen, Aga cooking, and my children would be in there, and then grandchildren. It didn’t quite work out like that.”

It was Sunday afternoon, and the five members of the family were sitting together in the front room. A fire was burning in the grate. Jane had prepared what the children called “colored toast,” striped with a tricolor of Marmite and apricot and strawberry jam. “We were watching
The Wonder Years
, which I used to love,” Jane remembered. “We all used to love it. Tim had Rupert on his lap, and I’ll never forget what he said. He said, ‘I
love
being family,’ as we all sat there together. I’ll never forget it. ‘I
love
being family.’ That’s what he said. And then the next day it was all over.”

On Monday morning, Jane received a telephone call from a man, a stranger, who told her that Tim was sleeping with his wife. Confronted with the accusation that evening, Tim first denied, then admitted the affair. Jane demanded that he move out immediately. There was shouting and screaming. Overnight, black plastic bags were stuffed with clothes and belongings and tossed out windows. “I believed that Tim was a caring, family man,” Jane said. “But after nineteen years of marriage, I realized that I’d lived with someone who didn’t exist.”

Tim acknowledged that he had been unfaithful to his wife. But rather than the sudden collapse of an apparently happy marriage, he spoke of a long, grinding slide into uncommunicativeness and antipathy. “When Jane was unhappy with something I had done, she would simply ignore me,” he said. “There would be long weekends of stony-faced silence. It went on for weeks at a time, and then it lasted for months, months on end. I was the guilty party, according to the law and according to the whole standard procedure, and no one was particularly interested in whether there’d been a history to the breakdown. I’m sure that, in the children’s eyes, I’d been the one who broke the family up. It’s not quite as black and white as that, as anyone who’s been in a similar situation would understand.”

Jane and the three children spent an unhappy Christmas on their own in the big Edwardian house amid the unborn ghosts of future grandchildren. There was virtually no money from Tim, whose company had gone into liquidation. After the sale of their old home, Jane rented a small house, a grim brick cube in the less genteel quarters of Sevenoaks. It was a place with a history—its previous owner was Diana Goldsmith, a forty-four-year-old alcoholic who had inexplicably disappeared after dropping her children off at school. When Jane and the children moved in, the windows still carried traces of the dust that the detectives had used in their hunt for fingerprints. “The children and I used to say, ‘I hope she’s not under the bath,’” said Jane. “And it was only half a joke.”

The following year, Diana Goldsmith’s body was found buried in a garden in Bromley; her former lover was tried but acquitted of the murder. “Everyone hated that house,” said Jane. “It was filthy dirty and had this horrible past. I’m not at all materialistic, but I like nice things which please the eye, and it offended my sense of beauty. Lucie hated that house.”

It was her last home.

2. RULES

“A divorce makes you question everything,” said Sophie Blackman, “because the only thing you know growing up is: this is Mum, this is Dad, this is your brother and sister, and this is how you fit in. When that changes, it really does throw open the question of who you are and why you exist. Rupert was thirteen, so he cried a lot but got on with it. I was fifteen and just at that point where everything is so awkward anyway, and I didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Being seventeen, Lucie was that bit older. It wasn’t that Lucie took Mum’s side—there were no sides. But Lucie empathized with Mum, because it was Lucie who had always been like the mother to Rupert and me.”

Sophie Blackman was the closest that I ever got to meeting Lucie Blackman in person. The two had been born less than two years apart and had lived together all their lives. Everyone who knew them commented on their striking resemblance, partly physical, but mostly the consequence of those unmistakable mannerisms and rhythms of speech that all siblings share.