The Lives She Left Behind (18 page)

‘Will you join me for breakfast at Gally’s place?’ he asked.

‘Today and every day,’ she said and turned to hug him and their child.

With the air of a conjuror, he went behind the old tree and from the deep hollow in its heart he produced a vase of lilies, a basket of warm croissants and a pot of coffee.

But that was how it was in the beginning. That was how it was before Rosie turned two. They had two years of joy, then Rosie changed and the misery began. That was the
in-between time, the short gap before their lives together ended. He had started to spy on Gally, to watch over her and Rosie in a desperate wish to keep them safe. The effort of holding it all
together was tugging Gally away from him into an arcane world in which her old, old selves came to the forefront more and his simpler, present Gally was hidden in them. She had been back there on
the terrace, comforting the toddler who refused to be comforted. There was one small window in the kitchen wall, no more than a foot square, which looked out to the terrace. It was open an inch or
two and he heard her voice, calm, reasonable, strained, trying to talk Rosie into some sort of peace. ‘There, I know. I know what it’s like. We’ll be all right. We’ll get
through this. Just be a little patient, my love. We’ve had worse.’

Then to his surprise, because she wasn’t a singer, he heard her voice lift into what might have been a lullaby, but with words he had never heard before.

But Rosie howled louder and Mike heard the despair in her voice as Gally tried to hug the fighting child and his blood ran cold.

Six thousand days had inched by since Gally died. Most of those days had started with a snatched breakfast which was no more than refuelling. Many had ended in shallow sleep
with the bedside light still on and a book spilling from his fingers. Sometimes he would wake at dawn on top of the bedclothes, still dressed. In all that time he had only once faced up to that
place behind the house which represented all he had lost. That time, at least five years ago, he had fought his way through the undergrowth to no avail. The terrace had disappeared under a snarl of
brambles. Even their precious hollow tree had fallen and its wreckage lay across where the path used to run. How could a tree fall so close, he thought, and him not know? Because it was only a
small thing, a tree, compared to everything else that had fallen.

He walked back into the yard now and looked towards the far corner of the house, seeing how badly he had let it go in the intervening years. On that very first day when she had found Bagstone,
mobbed by the stems and tendrils which were prising it apart, Gally had immediately stepped in to start healing its wounds. He knew she would hate to see it as it was now. It wasn’t yet time
to face what lay behind the house but the yard in front was another matter. His old leather gloves felt stiff until he had worked the fingers back to flexibility, then he went out to the shed to
look for a scythe only to find a chest-high tangle of brambles barring the way to the shed door. Trampling them flat with his feet, he had to put his shoulder to it before the door would open,
shunting a pile of debris behind it.

Unexpected joy filled Mike as he got to work as if the energy he put into each swing of the scythe was turning back the reaper’s clock, preparing the way for the reversal of a death. He
went on until dark and by eight the next morning, an hour before his appointment with the lawyer, he was at it again. The hour passed quickly and he was still slashing away when the woman
arrived.

‘Gardening leave is only a name,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to take it seriously.’

He thought perhaps she had come searching for an icebreaker. ‘It needs doing.’

‘It certainly does. What a funny village this is. I was early so I drove around. It’s all over the place, isn’t it? There are fields then a few more houses then fields again.
There’s no middle, is there?’

‘It’s built on a non-nucleated medieval pattern,’ he answered absently.

‘What?’

‘Sorry. It’s a survival of the way farming villages used to be. Quite rare. The gaps have usually been filled in by now.’

‘Oh. Was that the sort of thing you taught at the university?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not now?’

‘Not any more, not at the school. School history these days is all World War One as seen by cartoonists.’

‘Do you miss the university?’

‘I miss having serious conversations.’ She recognised thin ice in the tone of his voice, a brittle bridge over a deep hole.

She looked around the yard. ‘Did you have to do a lot to the house?’

‘Everything.’

‘Were you living here while you did it?’

‘We camped out in an old caravan. Right there.’ He pointed to the side of the yard.

‘What was the house like?’

‘It had been empty for donkey’s years. There was a stream flowing through it.’

‘Did you enjoy doing it together?’

He detected a test, a question designed to open a small window on his relationship with Gally. ‘Yes,’ he said firmly. ‘We were very happy. Gally absolutely loved it from the
first moment she saw it.’ He didn’t say that she started seeing things, that she made him move the front door.

Back in the kitchen, the lawyer opened her folder. ‘The police are likely to want to interview you soon,’ she said. ‘They’ll be talking to the parents again and to the
boy, of course. I gather they haven’t seen him yet.’

‘And the school? I suppose they’re all talking about me there.’

‘I’m sure they are,’ she said. ‘That’s human nature, but there’s absolutely no point in worrying about that, is there? The school governors won’t be
discussing it, not officially anyway. They have to stay out of this sort of thing while the police do their stuff.’

‘This sort of thing? I don’t like being this sort of thing.’

She didn’t respond.

‘So what do we do?’ he asked.

‘We have a bit of time to get to know each other. I need to ask you more questions, I’m afraid. It will all help, I promise.’

So they sat there through a long hour of morning while he searched his memory for details from the past, groping for the reasons for things, conscious all the time that he was producing a very
imperfect explanation of who and why he was. They moved on to how he met Gally, how she had wandered into his history lecture one day.

‘Why was she there?’

‘She loved history.’

‘So you asked her out?’

‘She wasn’t a student.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting there was anything wrong.’

She went on asking about Gally but Mike thought she was taking care not to probe too far – asking about her moods, then bending the subject back to safer ground when Mike touched on her
nightmares and her sudden daytime fears and hesitated in his description. It never took her long to get back to it.

‘Did she ever have any treatment?’

‘Not after we met. She got a lot better when we moved here.’

‘And . . . from then on?’

‘She was fine.’

He knew perfectly well what it was that she wanted to ask. It was the same question that had lurked in the background of every conversation, every phone call, and every letter from Rupert and
his handful of other caring friends in the years immediately afterwards. He decided to get it out in the open on his own terms.

‘Listen. The inquest decided the balance of her mind was fine, that she wasn’t depressed, that she was happy and logical at the time of her death and there was no reason for her to
take her own life or to . . . to take Rosie with her. That’s what they decided after listening to all the evidence and that’s what the record says.’

The woman in the chair opposite him rocked backwards as if he had thrown a punch at her. ‘Okay, I admit that was what I was getting at.’

‘I’m sorry. Perhaps that came out a bit strong.’

‘No stronger than the time a judge told me off for wearing distracting earrings.’

He looked at her then, sufficiently surprised to see her properly for the first time. ‘Can they do that?’

‘Judges can do whatever they want.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I took them off and suppressed my desire to tell him I didn’t like his wig.’

He looked at her sober grey clothes and realised that might not be all that she was. It began to dawn on him that she was a person, not just some embodiment of the legal system foisted on him by
strangers – that she might really be an ally.

She looked back at him. ‘You don’t think it was an accident, do you?’ she asked gently.

‘It must have been,’ he said. ‘I know it must have been. She didn’t leave me a letter. She would have left me some sort of explanation, wouldn’t she?’

‘I’m sure she would,’ said the lawyer quickly, but in fact neither of them were sure.

After that she stayed on safe ground – his professional history, his teaching record, and so on. Then, just as she was gathering her papers and was getting ready to go, she asked the
hand-on-the-doorknob question and he knew it was the one she had really come to ask the whole time. There was a preamble.

‘The police might decide this complaint is a waste of time,’ she said. ‘That’s the best outcome we can hope for. It seems the boy’s parents don’t have a very
good reputation apparently.’

‘Not parents,’ he said. ‘The man isn’t Luke’s father. I’m sorry – I’m just being a pedantic schoolteacher, aren’t I? Go on.’

‘No, you’re quite right. She’s not the problem but he has a record of minor violence. He causes trouble with the neighbours – malicious complaints about everything under
the sun. This could be just another one.’

‘But?’

‘Did I say but?’

‘Your voice did.’

‘Did it? Yes, well, of course there’s a but. There’s a but the size of an elephant. What was going on with you and the boy? In the car and then back here? I need the real
reason, Mike. I need something that will stand up in court.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know.’

‘That won’t do. Imagine it. They will demand an answer. The judge will make sure they get one. You can’t say you don’t know.’

That word ‘court’ burrowed into his head. How would he reply to a prosecutor? There were no answers that could stand that test.

‘All I did was give him a lift.’ He explained about the dig and Luke’s sudden appearance. ‘I didn’t even know him before that. Then he came here. I didn’t ask
him to.’

‘But why?’

He wondered what on earth he could say and a half-truth presented itself. ‘He’s interested in the history of the place.’

‘The house?’

‘And the village. He’s into local history.’

‘So you talked about the past?’

He could agree to that without any hint of a lie.

‘That’s an unusual boy,’ she said. ‘I can barely get my daughter to talk about the present.’

‘How old is she?’

‘Twelve. Thirteen next month.’

‘Do you have any more?’

‘No. Is that it, then? Is it really just that you talked about history?’

Something slipped in Mike’s head. The mention of her daughter had distracted him for a second and he dropped his guard. ‘And Gally.’

‘Gally? Your wife? You talk about your
wife
. Why?’

‘Because . . .’ He had almost said ‘because he knew her’, but he stopped himself. He said, ‘Because he understands,’ and that was no better. The lawyer leapt
on it.

‘How could he possibly understand something like that? Don’t you realise how strange that would seem if you said it in court? It’s . . .’ She searched for a word.
‘It’s weird.’

‘You find me weird?’

She looked at him without answering for a long count of seconds. She had kind eyes.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I should have used a different word. That wasn’t very professional. But okay, yes, I find it weird. Here’s a better word,
a real lawyer-word. It’s
inappropriate
and I expect that’s a word we’ll be hearing a lot more of.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘In this case, it means that you’ve been talking about the wrong things to the wrong person and that it’s not fair to saddle a teenager who is a casual acquaintance with adult
angst he can’t possibly be expected to understand.’

Mike realised how many misconceptions were locked up in that one sentence but the truth was a path leading straight over a cliff. He tried evasion.

‘He’s older than his years.’

‘He’s an old soul, is he?’

‘That doesn’t sound like a lawyer speaking.’

‘I’m only a lawyer in the daytime. Mornings and evenings I’m a free spirit. I meet people who seem to fit that description and I can’t think of a better one.’ She
made a note on her pad and he wondered what she had written. It felt like some sort of verdict on him. ‘So at this point, the best we can hope to say is that you found you had a common
interest in history, that he came here uninvited and nothing improper ever happened between you?’

‘Yes. You keep talking about court. Is it going to come to that?’

‘We should know quite soon. The police will do their stuff with everybody concerned. They’ll want to interview you under caution. After that the Crown Prosecution Service will decide
whether there’s a case.’ She looked at him hard. ‘Everything you’ve told me about Luke, do you think that will match what he’ll be saying to them?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘And that big question that you haven’t quite answered yet, the shouting match in the car?’

‘I’d say it was tiredness and a bit of shock.’

‘Then him turning up here?’

‘It’s not my fault if he doesn’t like his house or his family.’

‘Are you lonely here?’

‘Oh.’ He was about to deny it but then he thought she deserved something nearer the truth. ‘Yes.’

‘All the time?’

‘Not all the time. Not when I’m busy.’

‘Do you have friends in the village?’