The Wanderer (17 page)

‘What was that? What did that mean?’ Duncan asked, clearly rattled.

‘I don’t really know,’ I replied. ‘Some drunk. The landlord threw him out.’

Duncan frowned, looked as if he were about to say something further, but, at that moment, Jane returned.

‘See the freak?’ she asked.

Elliot nodded.

‘Lots of them about, bedlam on the streets,’ he said, winking.

Jane sat, took a sip of her juice.

‘Shall I begin?’

‘Go ahead,’ I said.

‘Alright. Have any of you been through the foot tunnel under the Thames at Woolwich?’

We all shook our heads, though I told her I’d used the one at Greenwich.

‘Yes. They were built at the same time to similar designs, but, while the Greenwich tunnel’s been kept up, the one at Woolwich has fallen into disrepair. One hot summer’s day, about four and a half years ago, I’d taken my two boys to have a picnic and play in the fountains in Barrier Park. As a treat I decided to take them back by way of the tunnel. We’d been through it a few times, they liked to pretend it was the secret passage to a superhero’s lair…’

Jane paused a moment, looked down at the table, bit her lip.

‘First, though, I need to tell you something that happened a few years before that,’ she went on, a break in her voice. ‘It bears on my tale…’

One Moment Knelled the Woe of Years

Though it wasn’t till the bizarre and dread afternoon she wished to tell of, that Jane strayed from the path of the ordinary and everyday, and into weird regions (actually, less straying, than having that path wander from beneath her feet), the terrible foundations of that dark hour were laid four years before, on a muggy evening in early summer.

That night, her husband, Roderick, was late getting back from work. She’d had to put their boys, Jeremy and Peter, then aged six and four, to bed, and she knew he’d be sorry to have missed them. But she’d not been concerned about his tardiness; he was a university lecturer, English Literature, Victorian poetry his field, and was sometimes held up at work by unscheduled meetings, panicked students, and so on. When he’d finally arrived home, though, and she’d heard his key in the door and gone to greet him, she’d felt a vague foreboding; he was by nature dark-skinned and by temperament calm, but stood on the threshold, framed in the doorway, wan, twitching, his eyes darting this way and that. Yet, when she’d asked how things were, he’d said all was well.

During dinner he was quieter than usual, ate seemingly without relish, but otherwise seemed fine. They chatted. Then Roderick asked how the boys were, what they’d done at school that day. Jane, whose head was, just then, full of the charred ruins of London after the Great Fire, the setting of the book she was writing, had paid scant attention to their gabbling earlier, couldn’t tell him.

He was put out.

‘I wish it were the other way about.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, I wish I could stay here, that it was my job could be done from home, that I could look after them.’

Jane swigged her wine.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘It is fair. You know it is.’

‘Are you trying to start an argument?’

‘No, look, I’m sorry…’ Roderick began.

But Jane cut him off.

‘You’ve met my mother. It’s hardly surprising I don’t have the keenest maternal instincts, now is it? But I try, God knows I try.’

He reached out, took her hand in his.

‘You’re great with them. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Those boys…They really love you.’

Jane scowled, then, shaking her head, smiled wan.

‘Thanks, you. But I suppose I can be a bit distant…’ She hung in thought a moment. ‘Distracted. I wish I was as good with them as you are.’

Later after they’d finished dessert, Roderick shuddered, downed his wine at a draught. But Jane thought it was just exhaustion or the onset of a cold, sent him through to the living room.

‘I hope you’re not coming down with something. Go on, relax, I’ll tidy up here.’

He slouched off, without a word. Once she’d cleared the table, put the crockery, cutlery, and pans in the dishwasher, she went through to join him. She found him sitting in an armchair, rocking back and forth, eyes glazed, mumbling. Running to him, she then went down on haunches beside the chair, threw her arms round him. For a moment he sat, unstirring, tensed, hissing, then abruptly grinned, thumped Jane to the floor, stood, and stalked out of the room. When he returned, before she could get back on her feet, he had a large kitchen knife in his fist. Raving, snarling, he lunged at her. She’d just time to snatch up the heavy iron poker which hung on a stand in the grate, then he was on her.

Terror tempered and whetted, and, in spite of his greater heft
and thew, Jane, flailing with the poker, fended off Roderick’s frantic slash and stab and struck him a blow on the temple, knocked him to his knees. Then she fled the corner he’d penned her into, fleeted up the staircase, going to her sons. He tore after. Reaching the landing, she turned, swung the poker, caught him in the throat, sent him sprawling down the stairs. At their foot, he pitched forward, landed awkwardly, falling on the knife, driving it into his sternum. He grunted, then rolled onto his back. The knife was sunk to the haft, and blood welled, soaking into the rug he lay on and flowing sluggish along the grout lines of the tiled floor. He wallowed in his gore, then lay still. Jane howled. The poker fell from her hand, thudded down the stairs, spinning, end over end, struck the tiles, clanged.

Then she heard the door of the boy’s bedroom, along the corridor, opening, and, turning, saw Peter in the doorway.

‘Mummy, what’s happening?’

‘Peter, go back into your room, shut the door,’ she barked, wild. ‘Don’t come out till I tell you to.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do as I say!’

Sensing his mother’s panic, shaken, Peter did as told.

Jane turned back, then gasped. Roderick was gone. Bloody footprints crossed to the front door, which now stood open. She sank down on the stairs, sat with her chin on her knees, fell into a trance fit. She didn’t rouse from it till ten minutes or so later, when two police constables, a man and a woman, came into the house, called up to her.

Then she startled. Edging round the blood, the PCs crossed the hall, began climbing the stairs. The WPC said, sternly, ‘What happened here?’

Jane gawped. The WPC told her a man, bleeding heavily, a knife handle jutting from his chest, had rattled drinkers outside a pub on the banks of the Thames, then thrown himself into the river, been swept downstream. A trail of blood had led them
back.

‘You need to tell us everything.’

Jane sat in a daze, shaking her head.

‘Look,’ the WPC went on. ‘You’re not under suspicion of murder. Some of your neighbours are outside. They saw everything. We know you were just defending yourself. But you still need to tell us everything that happened.’

‘Why didn’t they help me!’ Jane yowled.

‘Who?’

Jane stared.

‘Oh, sorry,’ the WPC said. ‘Well, they were scared. They’re an elderly couple.’

Then there was the sound of muffled sobbing. Turning, Jane flew to the boy’s bedroom, opened the door. Peter and Jeremy flung themselves at her.

‘Mummy, Mummy, what’s going on?’ Jeremy asked, tearful.

Jane looked down at her sons bewildered. She turned to the PCs, shrugged. Then frowned, blinked, crumpled to the carpet, and lay there on her side, curled up, moaning low. Peter and Jeremy crouched down beside her, put their arms around her, held her as she wept. The PCs hung back, shuffled, uncomfortable.

Then Peter asked, ‘Has Daddy gone?’

Jane, howled, tore up fistfuls of the carpet’s thick pile.

‘Mummy. It’s alright. It’ll be alright.’

‘No, my love. No it won’t. I’m sorry.’

‘It will, Mummy. Who is she?’

Jane was thrown into confusion.

‘Who?’

Peter took her hand, puckered his face.

‘The other woman.’

Then Jane understood. The father of one of Peter’s school-friends had recently left his wife, run off with the family nanny. Jane seized on this with relief; the ordinary sorrow of a broken
home would be easier on her sons for the time being. When they were older they would be better able to cope. She choked her grief, began spinning her lie, then, remembering the PCs, turned. They’d come up behind her. She caught their eyes; they frowned, but nodded tacit agreement.

That night, Jane, with the PCs’ help, got the boys out without their seeing the blood, pretending they were playing a game, blindfolding them. The three of them then stayed in a local bed and breakfast while the forensic team were examining the house. When they were done, Jane went back and finished cleaning up, while the boys stayed with friends. It only took her a couple of days. Afterwards they moved back in.

The witness statements and evidence all backing up Jane’s account, no charges were brought against her. Roderick’s body was never recovered, so she was denied the end a funeral gives. But life, a kind of life, if a blasted life, went on. Though she came close, a number of times, to telling her sons the awful truth, she never did. The lie, as with all swaddling lies, became harder, not easier, to expose as the years passed. At first, Peter and Jeremy asked often whether they might be allowed to see their father. She told them he’d moved abroad, that she didn’t know how to reach him. Whether or not they believed this, she wasn’t sure, but, eventually, they stopped asking. Jane feared, though, that Peter bore silent resentment.

At first, Jane spent her days dozing, fuddled by booze and sleeping pills, and her nights, stark awake, cramming caffeine tablets down her gullet, in dread of dreams in which she relived every racking instant of that evening. But, finally, the raw fear lessened, and the nightmares abated, though they didn’t cease altogether.

When she woke on the morning of the day of her tale, however, it was from a less harrowing, if weirder dream. She
stood, at dusk, amid a clinkered plain, before a squat turret, a stump of dun masonry, set between two humped knolls and a craggy peak. Ranged on the hillsides, a host of riders. In her hand, a horn of some kind, brass tubing, a battered whorl. Taking a deep breath, she set it to her lips…

Then she was sitting up in bed, shaking, sweating. It was light outside. She strove, recollected herself. It was the first day of the school holidays, and she’d resolved to spend the next few weeks in fun with Peter and Jeremy, then aged ten and eight. She’d been a bit absent the previous months, slogging away at a novel; it wasn’t quite finished, but nearly so, and she felt she could take a break from it. She thought it the best work she’d ever done. As, about two years before, her novel,
The Feminine Monarchie
, had been optioned for a film, she’d been able, for the first time in her life, to ditch pecuniary aims and write with a solely aesthetic rationale; she’d abandoned the shallow seam of fool’s gold, trite historical romance, she’d been mining, passing off as the real thing, bored deeper, seeking rarer ores. She’d thrown herself into the work.

The book, in common with her other titles, had a historical setting, but was otherwise entirely distinct: strange, dark, nimble and clunking by turns. Its subject was Wenceslaus, the tenth-century Bohemian martyr.

It was the novel’s last chapter Jane was most pleased with. She’d been inspired by an ancient legend, of a cave beneath Blaník Mountain and a knightly host sleeping, enchanted, till the Czech motherland be beset by enemies and need defending. In this exhausted coda, Wenceslaus, roused from millennial sleep in 1939 by the tumult of an advancing Panzerdivision, wakes his page and rides, with the young lad following behind on foot, to Blaník’s summit, dismounts, surveys the hostile forces. Then the page asks, of the tanks in the van, ‘Sire, what nature of beasts are those?’

After peering at the war machines a while, Wenceslaus says,
‘Those, my son, are the dragons of yore. I reckoned the last of them slain, but it cannot be so. It seems they lived on in some wild places. Plainly a blackheart has done what only the evilest of men would, having happened on a clutch of eggs, he has dug them up, reared them from hatchlings. The brood will, then, be fiercely loyal. Dragons are devilish foe even without armour and these creatures, look, wear plate-steel barding. We cannot ride ’gainst them, ’twould go badly for us, ’twould be a slaughter. I rede we leave the knights slumbering, wash our hands of these wicked times.’

But the page, shamed by his master’s cowardice, leaps astride the saint’s white horse, charges the enemy troops. In the novel’s melancholy final passage, he is cut down by German machine guns, and Wenceslaus walks back down to the entrance to the cavern beneath the mountain, goes inside, intones a formula to seal, once more, the stone gate behind him, returns to sleep.

Jane had titled the novel,
His Master’s Steps
.

(I’d read one of her novels some years before, and, while decidedly popular, it was artful, tangled. When she’d retired, the press had cited the pressures of raising two children as a single parent; I felt we were about to learn the real reason.

His Master’s Steps
had never, as far as I knew, been published. I asked her if this was the case.

‘Yes,’ she answered, regretfully. ‘My agent didn’t like it, and after what happened, I hadn’t the heart or energy to seek other representation for it.’)

Jane got out of bed, showered. Dressing, she wondered how to spend the day ahead. She’d lots of nice trips planned for the boys’ holiday, but that day didn’t want to go too far from home. She’d been tired out by work on the book, and had been drinking more heavily the previous few weeks, around the anniversary of Roderick’s death. So she thought she’d take advantage of the fine weather, have a picnic in nearby Barrier Park. She went downstairs, proposed the idea to the boys, who’d been up for a
little while watching cartoons on television.

‘Sounds nice,’ said Peter, briefly turning from the antics of an anthropomorphic sea urchin. ‘Glad you’ve some free time.’

It was not said reproachfully, but still Jane felt a smart.