You Don't Have to be Good (12 page)

‘Well, ask Bea first.’

‘I called her but her phone is off.’

There was a pause. Richard returned to the here and now.

‘Are you sure she wasn’t upset yesterday?’

Katharine peered at the details on the brochure. ‘Oh, you know Bea . . .’

‘I imagine it’s a shock for her. The children will miss her.’

‘She didn’t say much.’ She got up and put more bread in the toaster, then turned on him. ‘Richard, don’t look at me like that. I’ve done what I can for Bea, I really have.’ She marched over to the fridge and put her head inside. ‘I rescued her from that ghastly betting shop in Hastings, I found her the job at Shire Hall, helped her buy the house, did what I could to stop her wasting her time on that man Patrick, and practically
gave
her my children in the absence of any of her own.’ She brought two jars of jam to the table. ‘I mean, just what else am I expected to do?’

The toast popped up and Katharine sat down. Richard noticed the vein in her temple start up a warning throb. He put his hand on her arm and rubbed it.

‘I was simply suggesting—’

‘Well don’t,’ she snapped. ‘It’s not simple.’

Richard surrendered to her unreasonableness. This was marriage, he told himself with a long breath in. There were ups and there were downs and once there were children, well that was an end to it. He opened the paper, lifted himself from the scene and sent his mind off to the office again. Claudia would be running the show as usual, answering his emails, organising his diary and fielding calls. They would take a trip to the Seychelles again at Christmas and stay at the house on the beach. Katharine would relax there, the children would grow happy and brown and they would return to start their new life in London. He considered a lengthy visit to the lavatory with the newspaper.

Katharine felt better for her outburst and leant across to kiss Richard’s hand. He was extraordinary. She could throw anything at him and he just went on being there. That was what was so frightening. She was completely in control. Everything she decided on happened. Even Richard happened because she made him. He was Plan B. Plan A was escape from Hastings and become a success, and at twenty-nine when she found she had achieved that, she looked about her and noticed she had failed to achieve a husband. Time was short and she needed to act fast. When she came across Richard in the hospital, numb with grief and looking for the chaplain’s room, she showed him the way. Her friend Jane urged her on. ‘Snaffle him fast,’ she advised. ‘Widowers are
perfect
. But they only last a few weeks.’

It wasn’t very difficult. She looked after him and amused him with her breathless grip on life. She knew that her work impressed him and that her body comforted him. Within a year they were married and Laura was on the way and she knew she had a good man. But there was a part of her, a narrow, bad part that crouched below her ribs, that wanted to push him to his limits, wanted to see what would happen if she made herself so hateful that one day he broke her, walked out and never came back. Part of her wondered at the terrible fear and destruction that this would bring, longed to feel that pain, the Tuesday pain when Daddy never came home, never came and never came, the slow, empty terror of it that was more real than anything she had felt before or since.

She screwed the lid tightly back on the jam jar. A terrifying part of her needed a sacrifice to make her whole again.

T
HE VAN
driver was shouting. He was strutting and jabbing, effing and blinding at Nesrine, who stood in the middle of Oyster Row, a fistful of bindweed drooping from one hand. The courier held the parcel up and shook it at her like a birthday gift.

‘All I’m asking you is to just sign for it and keep it for them!’

Nesrine wiped her hands on her apron and looked unhappy. Her front door was open and the hosepipe lay on the crazy paving, water running down the path and into the gutter. Frank quickened his pace and reached the gate, hopeful suddenly.

‘Is it for me?’ Lancashire Arts had promised to send him some books.

The van driver swung round. ‘Number seventeen. That you?’

Thank God, thought Frank. He could do with a parcel. He badly needed an arrival, an entrance, a prop. He said, ‘That’s me. I’ll sign for it.’

‘She don’t understand a word I’m saying,’ said the courier, jerking his head in Nesrine’s direction. ‘Sign here.’ Frank squiggled blindly on the tiny screen. He held his hand out for the parcel. ‘Print as well.’ He did as he was told. ‘That’ll be two pounds fifty.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Excess postage.’

Frank looked at the package. It was wrapped in battered brown paper that looked like it had been used many times before. Evidently it had been backwards and forwards for some time. Several different-coloured stamps were stuck unevenly across the top and someone had written, ‘Not known at this address.’ Bea’s name was scrawled in blue pencil. The postcode was wrong. Frank stuffed the packet irritably into his coat pocket and paid the courier.

The van roared off and Nesrine shook her head apologetically.

Frank tried to smile. He had never acknowledged the woman before, much less spoken to her.

‘Have you seen my wife? Bea?’

Nesrine shook her head and said, ‘Yes. Oh yes. Your wife is very kind lady.’ She dropped the weeds and stepped towards Frank, patting her cheeks with her palms, mouth wobbling. ‘When my husband die, I didn’t know what to do.’

Frank took a step away. He didn’t want to get involved in any kind of rerun of the grieving process.

‘Every day she speak to me and one day she give me the roses.’ Nesrine turned to look at the bush by her front door. ‘Wait there,’ she told Frank. Nesrine went into her front garden and bent down behind the dustbin. She re-emerged holding a potted lily and came back across the road.

‘This is for her. I’ve grown it myself.’ She held it out to him and turned back to wave a hand in the direction of her garden. ‘She give me the roses, see? They’re beautiful.’

Frank took the lily and let himself into the house. He dialled Katharine’s number. A woman answered immediately, efficient and brusque.

‘Dr Cooper’s phone.’ Frank hesitated. Cooper? So Katharine took Richard’s name. He asked if Katharine was there, pointlessly, he realised, because presumably if she were, she would have answered herself. Or perhaps not, Frank thought, realising he had little idea how things worked in Katharine’s world of work. He was told, rather rudely in his opinion, that Katharine was in a meeting. The woman sounded rushed and keen to get back to whatever it was he had interrupted – Frank imagined parents sitting before her, being given bad news about their premature baby.

She said, ‘Who’s calling?’

‘This is her brother-in-law. Frank Pamplin.’

‘What’s it concerning?’

Frank had had enough of this. ‘It’s all right. I’ll try her mobile.’

He put the phone down and sat at the kitchen table. The phone rang at once and hope soared inside him then fell and died as he heard Margaret’s voice on the other end. Bea’s mother.

‘Is she there?’

Before Frank could answer, a shadow from the kitchen window moved across the table and he swung round to see a short, heavyset man crossing the patio. He wore yellow gloves and carried a rope in one hand. Some sort of metal cage swung from the other.

‘Who the hell is that?’

‘It’s me,’ said Margaret.

‘There’s a strange man in my garden.’

‘Is that Frank?’

‘Bea’s not here . . .’

‘It’s not her I want to speak to.’

‘Now listen, Margaret—’

‘No, you listen to me. I don’t want a party.’

Frank watched the man lift the cage. Claws, teeth and grey fur sent it jerking through the air with what Frank felt to be an obscene energy. He grimaced.

‘It’s the patio man.’

‘No, Uncle Derek told me, so I know she’s planning one.’

‘Hey!’ Frank banged on the window.

‘Pardon?’ said Margaret.

Frank watched as Urban tied the rope to the top of the cage. He removed the lid from the water butt, raised the trap close to his face and said something to the squirrel.

‘Hey!’

‘Oh, she won’t listen to me. That’s why I’m calling you.’

‘Margaret, something’s happened.’

‘And I’d want to get my hair done, but Leslie is in Lanzarote until the Monday, so that’s no good.’

Urban lowered the cage into the water, paying out the rope. Then he replaced the lid.

‘I think I’ve lost Bea.’

Urban lit a cigarette, then winked at Frank.

‘Frank?’ said Margaret.

Frank watched him smoke and stare wistfully up at the sky.

‘Well what do you mean, lost Bea?’

A protracted ring on the doorbell made Frank jump. ‘Margaret, I have to go. Could you call Katharine on her mobile and tell her we don’t know where Bea is? And keep an eye out for her yourself. She may have taken the train down to see you. She may have . . .’ Frank’s voice trailed off.

M
ARGARET PUT
the phone down and looked out over the great expanse of sea. Bea coming here? To Hastings? Whatever was she coming to Hastings for? On a Wednesday, of all days?

M
ARGARET WATCHED
the deserted beach through the window. The sky was stacked with clouds riding west and the surface of the sea danced and spangled in the October sun. Seagulls floated in the air and a tanker made its way steadily across the horizon. Margaret had watched from this window for fifty years. It pleased her that nothing very much was happening today. Events had a nasty habit of changing everything; she always lowered the blind if there was a storm.

From the cupboard over the sink she took two bottles and poured herself a Dubonnet and lemonade. She added an ice cube, carefully refilled the ice tray and took her drink into the lounge. Beneath the window, Eamon’s stereo stood in its smart teak casing. Its meshed speakers were where Bea used to press her face and see white horses cantering in a ring. Stockinged feet deep in the carpet, Margaret looked steadily at the round mouths of the laquered mesh and tutted. It annoyed her that she could never see these speakers without thinking of Bea’s nonsense. She knelt in front of the stereo and ran her fingers across Eamon’s record collection. All their favourites were there: Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Perry Como.

She slid the Perry Como album out and let the vinyl slip from its sleeve. Opening the lid of the record player, she set the turntable going with a click and held the record between spanned hands as she lowered it on to the spindle. She loved these preliminaries, the small sounds and sensations, like the roll of coins from Eamon’s trouser pockets on to the lino of the bedroom floor.

She took a mouthful of Dubonnet, held the bitter plum taste in her mouth and watched the soothing undulation of the turntable. She closed her eyes at the scratch and hiss of the needle in the liquorice groove, the quiet rip of fabric, the heat of Eamon’s mouth in her hair as they danced. The label at the centre lost its letters in a dissolve of magenta like the giddy spin of her in satin and net, Eamon’s hand at the base of her spine. For the good times.

His fossil collection was on the windowsill next to a photograph of him below the cliffs. She hadn’t walked there in years. That was where he searched for the remains of
Lepidotes
and
Iguanodon
, among those boulders and stones. He taught her all the names, showed her the drawings of three-toed footprints as big as bicycle wheels in a rock found along the eastern beach. Eamon loved a storm. After the winter storms, he and the girls would be there with hammers and chisels searching for their very own dinosaur footprint. To be truthful, Margaret doubted that Hastings had been a delta swamp inhabited by giant lizards 140 million years ago. It just didn’t seem very likely. She preferred it as it was, the town laid out below their front door just as a town should be, with its mossed slates, its pretty blue and pink masonry. She was never that keen on the beach, always preferred the clifftop walks where they did their courting – Ecclesbourne Glen, Covehurst Wood, Fairlight, Firehills. Such romantic names.

She would worry sometimes that there would be a cliff fall or that he would be cut off by the tide because that happened to people every year. There were stories of children being swept out to sea, fully grown men dropping to their deaths from the unfenced path near Warren Glen, dogs chasing seagulls off the cliffs and tumbling to the boulders below. But Eamon never came to any harm on the beach, and he never got the chance to find anything more than those few muddled remains of teeth and shell because the bread van took the corner too fast when he was coming the other way on his bicycle that Tuesday afternoon.

Perry Como had stopped singing and the record player had returned the arm to its cradle in a way that Margaret found gentle and considerate. She picked the arm up again, set the turntable going and dropped the needle down heavily so that it popped and crackled. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news,’ the policeman said with his helmet under one arm. The girls were already in bed and for a moment she thought it strange that he should choose her door to knock on to tell his bad news to. ‘It’s your husband,’ he said. But Eamon had only popped out to collect the balsawood he’d left at work. He was going to finish making a piece of furniture for Bea’s doll’s house. It was a sideboard with tiny drawers you could open and close. The policeman was only young and he had a red rash climbing up his neck. ‘I’m afraid I need you to come and identify the body,’ he said.

She put on her mackintosh, pulled her headscarf from the pocket, tied it over her hair, put the key under the mat, just in case he came back while she was gone, and closed the door behind her. She followed the policeman down Tamarisk Steps and over to the High Street where his Panda was parked outside the Washeteria.