The Long Shadow (20 page)

On the icy grass, by the light of the mist-ringed moon, Ivor’s first wife sat down … lay back with a sigh of contentment and closed her eyes.

“It’s funny,” she said, “I can never imagine it not being summer in this place. Always, the sun is shining, hot and golden … always, I can hear the insects humming in the long grass … always, the cowslips are in bloom. Here, right here, is where we always used to come, Ivor and I … here, in the long grass, we lay like gods together, and the scent of the may-trees was everywhere….

“Oh, he was an Adonis in those days … a golden boy! He came to my lectures, you know, my lectures on Minoan Crete, that’s when I first noticed him; in the front row of the
lecture-room
, and his auburn hair like the sun. I was amused, at first, at the way he never took his eyes off me; and later, when he began coming to me for tutorials, I noticed that his writing was growing more and more like mine as the weeks went by, until at last you couldn’t tell which was which.

“Even then, I was still only amused—and a little flattered, too, of course—well, what woman wouldn’t be? To have your very handwriting immortalised by love….

“But he was shy in those days—so shy. I never dreamed it would come to anything—how could it, with him a first-year student not yet twenty, and I a thirty-four-year-old lecturer, just coming up to the peak of my career? … Perhaps I should never have let it come to anything … so many years’ difference in our age … but I loved him, you see. Loved him wildly, passionately, just as he loved me. Besides, I was afraid of what he might do—so young and wild! He used to say that if ever I left him, he would throw himself off Cobley Tower….”

And would too, Imogen reflected drily, if enough people had been gathered below to watch … but aloud she said nothing, and the older woman continued:

“… A love like ours … how can it be wrong? How
can
it, no matter what a person’s age may be? … Listen, isn’t that a cuckoo? Do you know, just for a moment, I thought I heard a cuckoo. How silly I am! How could there be a cuckoo, at night, and in the winter …?”

She laughed, a small, uneasy laugh, and half sat up, raising herself on her elbow. Her head-scarf had become dislodged, and
the tumble of grey hair, blanched by the moonlight, could just as easily have been bright gold; golden hair falling about her, just as it must have fallen all those years ago when Ivor, laughing, had pulled out the pins and combs that held the severe, shining bun in place, and changed his love, all in a moment, from a brilliant Classics lecturer to the girl of his dreams.

Imogen tried once more to bring her back to the present.

“The boys?” she urged anxiously, “The little boys … your grandsons? We can’t just sit here….”

“Oh dear! Yes!” Lena sat up hurriedly, and passed her hand across her forehead. “Yes, they should be here by now …” She peered round her into the blurred, empty radiance that stretched as far as the eye could see.

“Oh dear, they
are
being naughty! I
told
them that this was where we’d be having the picnic. Perhaps, if I get out the food …?”

*

It looked like rubbish more than food; but it
was
food. A
doughnut
, complete with crumpled paper bag; a couple of tired cheese sandwiches; and a digestive biscuit, wrapped in newspaper. Lena laid them, wrappings and all, on the moonlit grass. A battered packet of peanuts came next; an orange, and a flattened piece of chocolate: she gazed at the meagre, messy little display uneasily.

“I’m sure there was more than this …?” she muttered, rootling again in the depths of her winter coat. This time, she brought out some liquorice, a bath-bun, and a greasy little packet of crisps, already half-finished. Laid out under the moon, the collection looked like the contents of an over-turned dust-bin.

The old woman looked at it, puzzled, as if not quite sure what was wrong.

“We used to have hot rolls, of course,” she said, sadly. “Lovely fresh, crisp rolls … but of course the shop is gone now, there’s a launderette where the baker used to be. And I used to bring chicken wings sometimes, and ham, and Ivor would come leaping towards us through the grass like Dionysus, with a bottle of wine in either hand … Oh, he loved me, then! He loved me….”

In the moonlight, her eyes glittered with a kind of joy: “Yes,
he loved me! That’s something I’ve got that
she
will never have, because, after he stopped loving me, he never loved anyone….”

Was is true? Imogen looked at the grey old woman, wraith-like under the moon, and tried to picture her in her golden prime, forty years ago. To picture Ivor loving her, deeply, passionately, through all the years when he was capable of loving; and then moving on, into a brighter, colder, more exciting world….

*

Imogen clutched her coat about her. Her teeth were chattering.

“The boys …?” she protested, yet again. “The children …? Surely they’ll never find us here …? They never could have thought you really meant …” suddenly, with terrible premonition, she turned on her companion:

“
What
did
you
tell
them
?
Please,
please
try to remember! What did you
really
tell them …?”

*

At first, under the pale, eldritch light, she thought the older woman’s face was contorted with fury. It looked grotesque, deformed, rutted with evil. Then, all at once, she realised that Lena was merely on the verge of crying. The old, tired mouth was working with emotion, her whole face twitched with the effort of control. This, then, was the face that Vernon must have seen leaning over him that night: his real, own grandmother trying to fight back the tears of love and longing….

This time, the fight was successful; with a huge effort, the old woman recovered herself, blinking back the moonlit tears before they could fall. She even smiled a little, uneasily.

“Tell them …? What did I tell them …? Why, as I’ve been saying, I told them …”

Her voice wavered, stumbled into silence; and now, for the first time, Imogen saw a look of fear flicker in the great luminous eyes.

“I … I …” Lena stared to left and right, then left again, as if scanning a page of print: as if the answer lay scrawled in vast black letters across and across the moonlit wastes.

“I told them … well, naturally, I told them …”

And now Imogen saw the old lips quivering, watched the terror darkening in the brilliant eyes.

“I told them—Oh, what a fool I am! Oh, how
could
I have done such a thing! I said just now, didn’t I, that I couldn’t imagine it not being summer in this place?—well, I told them—I
think
I told them—that they could bathe! Over there, in the river—I told them they could swim until I called them…. I forgot, you see, that it was winter, and night-time…. I just didn’t remember…. Oh, they’ll be cold. So cold!”

It was Imogen who was on her feet first; gasping, stumbling, almost sobbing in her terror as she raced desperately in the
direction
of the river: raced with all her strength, her heart
thundering
, her breath almost gone; but even so the older woman
overtook
her easily, skimming over the ragged winter fields like an athlete, like a goddess, like something immortal under the immortal moon. And as the flying figure reached the water’s edge, there came a wild, unearthly cry of panic and despair:

“Come out, darlings, come out! You’ll die of cold …! Dot … Robin … come
out
…!”

Imogen was too far behind to hear that the names echoing through the freezing night were the names of children long grown-up; and by the time she had caught up, whatever Lena had seen in the black water could be seen no more; there was only the dark, quiet river, gleaming eerily under the moon. And right here, at the water’s edge, face-down among the shallows, lay Lena, just as she had fallen.

*

It wasn’t drowning, the doctors said afterwards; Imogen had pulled her out in plenty of time. It was shock, over-exertion, and chill.

Though how she could have got a chill in all that golden summer sunshine, with the cowslips out, and with the cuckoos calling, the doctors were never able to explain.

They were never asked, of course: it would have been a crazy, idiotic question.

V
ERNONAND
T
IMMIE
weren’t allowed to go to their
grandmother’
s funeral. As Dot pointed out, it wasn’t as if they’d ever realised that Lena
was
their grandmother. And in any case (she insisted) they were still suffering from shock. Should be, anyway.

Actually, the little boys seemed to have recovered with
remarkable
speed from their frightening experiences of that night; they hadn’t even caught cold. The police had picked them up on the tow-path less than a mile outside the town; and by the time Imogen reached the same spot, an hour or so later, they were already (had she but known it) safe at home, revelling in hot cocoa, hot-water-bottles, and such a degree of solicitous attention as they might never enjoy again. By the day of the funeral they were suffering less from shock than from a slight sense of
anticlimax.
People had stopped praising and hugging them for just being alive; and by now the story of their adventures (even as elaborated by Timmie) was beginning to bore even themselves. The funeral, with a real grave, and real earth being shovelled on to the coffin, would have provided a welcome distraction.

But Dot was adamant.

“They hardly knew her, they can’t possibly feel any grief,” she asserted, cupping her hands round a mug of the hot coffee that Imogen had brewed to sustain them through the coming chilly ordeal by the grave-side in the icy wind. “Even I, her own daughter, can’t pretend to be sorry … it would be hypocrisy …” and with these words, Dot set her mug down with a jolt on the kitchen table, and burst into tears.

She had been crying like this, on and off, for three days now, and she herself would have been the first to admit that it was guilt, not grief, that was the cause.

“If only I’d visited her more often in hospital … If only I’d
taken her side more…. If only I’d realised that after Dad left her she just couldn’t help going to pieces … If only I’d sympathised when she had that first breakdown … when she started
drink
ing
…. If only … if only … if only …”

If only she’d been infinitely patient, infinitely understanding. If only she’d been a better daughter, a more saintly child….

“Even at seven, I knew that something was wrong. I knew that Mother
needed
me, needed my support. I could see, even at that age, how unkind Dad was being to her … how unfair. I listened to their quarrels, I witnessed their fights and rows, and I could see very well that, every time, she was in the right, and he was in the wrong. She was good … so good … and he was bad and wicked; and yet he was the one that everybody loved—always! I used to lie in bed at night crying about the unfairness of it all—and all the time, the most terrible thing of all was that I knew, deep down in my heart, that I, too, loved him best; far, far better than I’d ever loved her. He was selfish, conceited, even cruel—and yet he was the one I loved. Always. And so did Robin. Robin adored him. As a little boy, Dad was his hero, he couldn’t do enough to please him … to try to be like him…. And now he
is
like him”—here Dot’s voice rose to a sort of howl—“and it’s all my fault! I was his big sister…. I could have stopped it….”

Such all-embracing guilt cannot be tackled head-on; the victim has to work through it at her own speed. For the third time in the past forty-eight hours, Imogen pointed out to her step-daughter that a little girl of eleven can hardly be held responsible for her four-year-old brother’s psychological development; but Dot just shook her head despairingly.

“I
could
have saved him, I
could
,”
she wailed. “I could have guided him … helped him … and I didn’t! Robin is all my fault …”

“Boasting again?—How it runs in the family.”

Robin’s voice from the doorway made Dot jerk her head up, blinking at her brother with swollen, tear-filled eyes. “I’m sorry to disillusion you, Sister-mine,” he went on, coming farther into
the room and leaning his elbows on the back of a chair the better to harangue them. “I’m sorry, but I’m not your fault at all. Or hardly at all. I’m
her
fault”—here he pointed a sudden accusing finger at Imogen. “It’s
her
!
She
dunnit! Always spoiling me … interceding for me with Dad…. Just like she was always spoiling
him
and interceding for
him
with the rest of the world. You did, Step, and don’t deny it. You found yourself with a couple of psychopaths on your hands, and it was just your cup of tea, wasn’t it? You encouraged all our most objectionable qualities and made us worse and worse, it was marvellous”—here he reached across and patted her on the shoulder approvingly. “You’re just a psychopaths’ moll, that’s what you are, Step. You’ll be getting to work on Timmie next, just mark my words. He’s another one. You can see it already—”

“He’s not! Stop it! You mustn’t say such horrible things …!”

Robin looked pleased at having succeeded in getting a rise out of his sister. He smiled.

“They’re not horrible things at all. They’re flattering. I only wish I could say as much for poor Vernon, but I’m afraid he takes after you, Dot. No one would ever guess that he comes of a long and distinguished line of successful psychopaths. A pity, poor lad; he’ll never know what he’s missing. He’ll never know the glory, the triumph, of being always, in every situation, the one who
doesn’t
care.
The one who doesn’t care can always make rings round the one who does, you know, because he has nothing to lose. It’s like a fairy gift, lifting you high above the heads of other mortals. You look down at them pityingly … you watch them struggling away down there, tied hand and foot by the things they care about … and you feel as if you’re flying … you feel like a god among men. That’s why everybody loves us so much, why they let us get away with such a lot … it’s because they recognise us as the nearest thing to a god that they will ever know….”

“Don’t-Care was made to care”—this was the best that Dot could manage in response to her brother’s lyrical outburst. “One
has
to care, Robin, or …”

Robin swung round on his sister.

“Look at you!
You
care—you care about every damn thing, and look where it’s got you! And incidentally, look where it’s got the people on the receiving-end of your caring, too. All those months of guilt and soul-searching about whether you ought to invite Mother to live with you—and what happens? You don’t invite her. Just like I don’t invite her. From Mother’s point of view, there must have been damn-all to choose between your contortions of guilt and concern, and my straight-forward
heartlessness
. It all added up to not bloody having her. Didn’t it?

“Not that it was your fault, actually, Dot. Nor mine. It was Dad’s fault.”

*

Robin was right. Now that the whole sorry story had been pieced together, no one could have any doubt that it was Ivor himself—or rather, the glorified self-image that had served him for a self so long and so faithfully—who must be blamed.

*

He must have panicked, of course. After years of comfortably assuming that his first wife was going to remain safely tucked away in hospital for the rest of her days, the news of her
impending
discharge must have come upon him like a thunder-clap. Confronted with the appalling verdict that she was
recovering
… that the new drugs, the new treatments, and the new, more liberal regime within the hospital, had, in her case, worked, and rendered her capable of living outside, provided she had a
supportive
family to go to—he must have been knocked sideways.

A more honest man would have told them No, she hadn’t a supportive family: a kinder one would have made some sort of effort to provide her with one. But Ivor could not bring himself to do either. He had immediately liked the image of himself as the head of a “supportive family”—Imogen could imagine the way he would have charmed and reassured the superintendent, giving the impression of being the kindest, warmest, most concerned fellow in the world, with the kindest, warmest, most supportive family at his back.

A delightful picture of family devotion and solidarity: the
only item left out being the fact that Ivor himself had not the slightest intention of ever being bothered with any of it ever again once he was safely through those swing-doors. He hadn’t even bothered, it seemed (unless this was a piece of genuine
forgetfulness
) to warn his children that their mother would shortly be reappearing in their lives.

And so it was that Lena’s first experience of the outside world was one of horrified rejection; first by her daughter, in a turmoil of guilt and indecision, and next by her son, who of course made short work of the problem, and without any guilt or indecision at all. He simply bundled his mother into his car and scorched northwards with her up the motorway towards the city where his father (so he had ascertained) happened to be giving some kind of a learned lecture that very week-end. Let
him
cope with her, the old scoundrel: it’s
his
fault—in some such state of mind had he dumped his mother on the steps of the lecture-hall and fled, without even ascertaining that she would be allowed in without pre-arrangement.

She wasn’t: a bitter disappointment, no doubt, if by this time she had been indulging delectable visions of revealing herself to her astounded ex-husband by rising to her feet with some brilliant question or comment from the body of the hall….

*

“Mrs Barnicott” … “behaving oddly” … at the hotel that
evening
… No wonder, poor woman, with her ex-husband, whom she still loved, dodging her from room to room … from lift to
reception
-desk and back again … doubling-back like a cornered fox as she hunted him up and down the long, lush corridors—probably, by now, with her grey hair coming adrift from its pins and combs and flying loose as if she was an aged Artemis, the Huntress Queen …

“Odd” could have been an understatement.

And in the end, after all this, Ivor had escaped her, scrapping his hotel booking without a word to anyone and blazing off along the motorway into the night.

*

Understandably, Piggy was reluctant to accept this revised version of events. She had naturally assumed, at the time, that the “Mrs Barnicott” referred to by the hotel staff was the current one, and she wanted it to stay that way.

“Well, all right,” she allowed at last, grudgingly, “but all the same, I’m bloody sure that
someone
was to blame. He was a super driver, he’d never have gone into a skid like that unless someone, somehow, had given him some sudden, terrible shock …”

*

Someone had, of course. Imogen could only hope, for the girl’s own sake, that she would never find out who it was.

A frantic, love-crazed teenager, soaked with rain, wildly
gesticulating
from the dark verge of the motorway, her pale, bedraggled hair falling like seaweed across her obsessed, shining face … such an apparition could be a little confusing to a man who is at the moment fleeing as if for his life from yet another obsessed, frantic, wildly-gesticulating woman, her grey hair wild and dishevelled all about her, bleached to a pale no-colour under the harsh
strip-lighting
of the dim, carpeted corridors…. A man in such case might, for one fatal fraction of a second, feel his heart stand still with shock; his brain reel at the impact of a long-forgotten image. His love, his goddess of long ago; the woman who had hypnotised his tongue-tied adolescence with her beauty; and with the brilliance of her intellect had guided him, nurtured him, and launched him on the path to fame … here, in the black, rainy night, she was back again at last: back in all her power and her glory, once more hunting him down; an avenging Fury now, dim hair flying, seeking retribution for the long years of indifference and of love betrayed….

*

And of course it had been a shock for Robin, too; must have been. Having so gleefully dumped the burden of his mother back where (in his view) it belonged, it must have been disconcerting to find that sudden death had entered the picture.
Now
there’d be a whole lot of goddam enquiries, bound to be. They’d be nosing into everything.
Was
it a crime to dump your ageing mother, just out
of hospital, in the middle of a strange city all by herself? Actually, the old girl had been tickled pink at the idea of going to her ex-husband’s lecture and scaring the pants off him by popping up in the middle of the audience … it was just rotten bad luck that after all they wouldn’t let her in. He, Robin, couldn’t be blamed for
that.

He would be, though. Sudden death made people unreasonable. “Culpable negligence” they’d call it, or something of the sort; and even if it didn’t rate a prison sentence, the whole thing would be bound to land him in trouble of one sort or another. Best, then, to deny the whole thing—surely his word would stand up well against that of a rambling old lady just out of a mental hospital?—and to make assurance doubly sure, he’d get that boy-friend of Piggy’s—“Teri” wasn’t it, or some such idiotic name?—to fix an alibi. He was reputed to be clever at that sort of thing.

And clever he proved to be. By attentive comparison of
newspapers
and police reports, Teri soon cottoned-on to the fact that someone was lying about something. First, this stepmother woman swearing that her husband was alive and well all through
Sunday
… and then, on top of that, swearing that her stepson Robin had been at home on the fateful night when Teri knew for a fact that he hadn’t … this multiplicity of alibis was intriguing, and set Teri’s mind toying with thoughts of blackmail (Imogen had been wrong: he
did
know the word, but was a bit shy about using it). First, though, he needed more facts: and this was where Piggy came in….

*

Meantime, Dot had been writhing silently under her burden of secret guilt.