Untold Story (37 page)

“Take my car,” said Tevis. “I can borrow one from work. Go to the cabin. I haven’t got it cleared out and set up, but no one will know you’re there except us.”

“What else do we need to do,” said Esther, “to make it possible for you to come back?”

She put on her clothes and called to Rufus, who had ambled into the woods. They set off, this time hugging the shoreline, and she marched with the sun on her back, and in the red, brown, and black slate, flecks of gold sparkled out.

By the time they reached the cabin her legs were aching and she kicked off her boots and sat down on the couch. There were cobwebs in each corner of the ceiling and rivulets of dust everywhere. The curtains, which were half-drawn, were pale yellow, almost translucent, at the top and solid mustard below the ledge, as if over the years the color had trickled ever downward to form a thick crust at the hem. The air smelled of old carpets and damp cardboard and very faintly of the thickets of dried lavender that were bundled up on the table.

Her cell phone rang and she pulled it out of her pocket.

“He’s gone,” said Tevis. “I followed him to the airport.”

“It’s beautiful up here,” said Lydia. “I’d like to stay a few days.”

“Take all the time you want. Amber went to Mrs. Jackson’s this morning and got that thing you needed out of his desk. The stick with all the photos. She threw it away.”

“I still don’t know,” said Lydia, “if I’ll be able to come back. Will you call me if . . . if anything else happens?”

“I will, but Lydia—this is the last place he’s going to look for you now.”

“If I could tell you . . .” said Lydia. “You know, if I could tell you, I would.”

“It’s like Esther said. You don’t have to tell us anything.”

She stretched out on the couch with her hands behind her head. If Grabowski had lied to her, if he’d already sent the pictures, then by this weekend at the latest Kensington would be under siege. That’s why she’d come out here, in case it all went up in flames.

All the cobwebs were abandoned, dilapidated, spiderless. There were boxes half-filled with books and magazines on the floor below the empty shelves. Perhaps the previous owner ran out of space in the car and didn’t think it worth another trip back. Would Grabowski have lied? If he’d lied to her, he wouldn’t have been so desperate to reach the bed-and-breakfast to get that stick. He’d hit Mike on the nose. Poor Mike. She’d caused a lot of trouble for her friends. Perhaps it would be best for everyone if she moved on, started again.

She thought about calling Carson. She hadn’t replied to his text. But what could she say? She’d allowed herself to start spinning a fantasy about telling him everything. The fantasy had been that he would understand. That one person in this life would understand. What she had to understand was that she would always be on her own.

Was she on her own? Her friends had done more for her than she had any right to expect, but what kind of burden, what kind of strain, would be placed on those friendships now?

Always spinning fantasies. They were as empty as those cobwebs up on the ceiling. She’d thought she would be able to see her boys again, that she would find a way. If, ten years ago, she had been the person she was now, then she would still be with them, they wouldn’t be motherless children. They weren’t children any longer. It was hard to imagine now the person she had been. If she met that younger self, how much would they have in common, and what would they say to each other?

The next morning she walked and swam and then she started to straighten up the house. There was no vacuum cleaner but there was a broom and she rolled up the rugs and started with the ceilings. She found a duster and a can of polish under the sink and cleaned the shelves and the table, unfolded the chairs and wiped them down. Then she swept the floors, and Rufus got in the way and sneezed and sneezed. In the kitchen she mopped the linoleum, scrubbed the tiles with a nailbrush, and scraped the mold off the grouting. She polished the taps until they shone.

Whenever she paused for breath, John Grabowski floated into her mind. There was a moment when she had considered squeezing the trigger. What if she’d done it? Could she have done it? Was she capable of killing a fellow human being? She couldn’t have done it. She told herself she couldn’t have done it. There was a moment when she might have. And for what? For doing, as he’d said, what anyone else in his position would do.

She took down the curtains in the sitting room and bedrooms, washed them in the sink, and hung them over the fence that ran around the front deck. She cleared out the cupboards in the kitchen and washed the plates and dishes, wiped the shelves with a damp rag, and put the crockery away. Then she started on the bathroom, scrubbing the stains on the toilet, scouring the inside of the bathtub, washing and drying the mirrors, buffing them up with a twist of old newspaper.

Amber had given her some sheets that she now stripped off the bed. She dragged the mattress outside to air. Took the other one out as well. Then she dusted and swept the bedrooms and cleaned all the windows. By now it was getting dark, and she ate some bread and cheese and gave Rufus a pâté sandwich.

She looked through the boxes for something to read. There were fishing and gardening magazines, more old newspapers, a bird-spotting handbook, an old car manual, an encyclopedia, cookbooks, travel guides, a series of hardback atlases, and a few battered paperbacks. All but two of the paperbacks were novels in French and her French wasn’t good enough. She set them aside. Of the remaining two, one had lost its cover and the first few pages. The other was
Crime and Punishment,
one of the books Lawrence had given her.

She switched on a lamp and sat down on the couch with the book in her hands. She read the back cover, turned the book over, and set it on her lap. She hoped Lawrence hadn’t been alone when he died, she would have been with him if she could. “If I’m not there on that date,” he’d said, “it can mean only one thing.” She’d stayed up all that night, waiting, knowing in her heart that he wouldn’t come, knowing what it meant. At dawn she had gone into the yard with a lighted candle, picked some flowers to lay at the foot of an oak, and said a prayer, a funeral without a body.

Lawrence had thought she could read this book. She opened it to the first page but she couldn’t see the words for the tears. And he was always so kind to her, thought so much of her, that it was probably another way of showing his love. It didn’t mean that she was actually up to it. She closed it and put it down.

She went outside and looked at the star-strung sky and at the silver moon that had fallen onto the velvet lake.

On Friday she swam first and then walked for the rest of the morning. In the afternoon she polished the wardrobes and tried to get the brass handles to shine. The oven looked as though it had seen a few cremations and there was no oven cleaner, but she did her best to scrape out the worst of the charred remains with a knife. When she was nearly through, her hand slipped and she cut her thumb. She ran it under the water until the skin turned puckered white and the bleeding had stopped. Then she cleaned the stove top and the kettle, scalded the pans with boiling water, and scrubbed them with a wire brush.

She swept the deck and pulled the weeds out of the gaps in the wooden steps. What else was left to do? She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans and her forehead with the back of her arm.

The rugs were still rolled up at the back of the sitting room and she fetched them outside and beat them with an old baseball bat until the dust no longer exploded with each swipe. She took them inside and laid them down.

After supper she sat outside with Rufus on her lap and thought again about calling Carson. Would he want her to call? If she told him who she had been would he still see her for who she was now? There was no way to tell him anything without telling him about her monstrous crime. He had given up his daughter, but she had already been taken from him. And a mother who leaves her children can never be forgiven by anyone.

Every day, for the rest of her life, she would ask herself the same question: could she have stayed?

To begin to know the answer she had to meet herself again, the way she was then, to remember how things had been. It was like meeting a stranger. Could she introduce that troubled stranger to Carson? Expect him to understand?

She stroked Rufus’s ears and he whimpered in his sleep.

On Saturday her cell phone bleeped a text message alert and her spirits soared. If he’d texted again she would call him and they would find a way through. It was Amber,
Just checking you’re okay
. She sent a message back to say she was fine, not to worry, and thank you for everything.

She walked and swam, wired up the tears in the window screens, and rubbed linseed oil into the deck furniture.

She thought about Carson cutting up the tree in her backyard, the specks of sawdust across his collarbone. She tasted his sweat. She heard his voice. She felt it in her chest. “Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, that’s part of the job. I never thought he was crazy.”

The next day she followed her morning routine of walking and swimming. Every step and stroke took her farther away from John Grabowski, made her believe that he had really gone, that he was no longer on her heels. She shook him off. She found her balance. He would still be looking for her, and he would never understand that the person he was looking for was no longer to be found.

She couldn’t think of any more tasks to do around the house. She mopped the kitchen floor again. Then she went to the boxes and flipped through the gardening magazines. She looked at an atlas. She picked up the coverless novel and started reading, still sitting on the floor.

She moved up to the couch and read on. It was about a character called Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, an inmate in some kind of prison camp. She turned the book over and flicked through, trying to find the author’s name. All the characters’ names were Russian so the author was probably Russian too. It was an easy book to read, short sentences and nobody spoke like Lawrence, straight from the dictionary. The prisoners had to work at a construction site and they were so cold and hungry that all they could think about was how to survive another day. It was forty degrees below zero and the prisoners were badly clothed. If they added extra layers beneath the prison uniform they were punished. Shukhov thought about the piece of bread he’d saved from breakfast and sewn in his mattress.

She thought he would die by the end of the book, that would be the story. The conditions were so extreme, that would be what would happen. She read on.
Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?

For the next four hours she read without lifting her head; when Rufus jumped up and wanted to play, she petted him but carried on reading. She moved around the couch, changed positions, stretched her legs, switched the book from one hand to the other, all without interrupting her flow. It was starting to get dark and she fumbled for the lamp. The guards were searching Shukhov and he had a piece of metal hidden in his glove. They didn’t find it and she breathed easier. She wasn’t so sure he was going to die, he was a survivor.

At the end of the book Shukhov was grateful to have lived another day. He’d decided it was a good day, he’d managed to get some extra rations. She closed the book and sat there filled with a longing, a yearning, so strong that it made her tremble.

She walked outside to look up at the stars. When she came back inside there was a new text on her phone, and this time it was from Carson.
Where are you? I miss you. Can we try again?

For a while she sat and stared at the screen. She hadn’t decided what was possible. Was she going to leap again into the unknown?

She got undressed and went into the bathroom and picked up a towel. Then she ran out of the cabin, across the deck and down the stairs, and without pausing ran thigh-deep into the water. She plunged in and swam in the dark and she was swimming away and toward and she saw Lawrence in the rowboat, the gleam of his bald head, bobbing up and down, and she raised an arm and waved at him, and he disappeared but she swam on.

Acknowledgments

My research for
Untold Story
relied on many books, articles, and websites about the institution of royalty, how it has evolved in recent years, and the role that the paparazzi have played in that change. In particular, I drew inspiration from the facts and insightful analysis contained in
The Diana Chronicles
by Tina Brown. I would also like to acknowledge my debt to four other books:
Diana: Her True Story
by Andrew Morton,
Diana: The Life of a Troubled Princess
by Sally Bedell Smith,
Diana and the Paparazzi
by Glenn Harvey and Mark Saunders, and
Paparazzi
by Peter Howe. I am grateful to all these authors.