Someone to Watch Over Me (19 page)

Although a few days passed without sight of Rupert she didn't allow herself to relax. The two of them spent as much time out of the house as possible, but when they came back, Molly checked and double checked the doors and windows and as soon as it began to get dark she was careful to close the curtains to the very edges of the window frames. She tried not to think about the fact that maybe he was in the garden looking through the window at them as they moved through lighted rooms, as visible as fish in an illuminated tank. She thought of Rupert's hands and the way he had of holding them tight on the table and she felt her chest compress. His hands had been beautiful that first evening, the long fingers moving adeptly over the table, handing her things in bowls. She thought again of the way he had touched her leg, laying claim to her.

Not knowing where Rupert was and when he might next turn up began to torment her and she decided to ring his mother to see if she knew anything. Elizabeth answered the phone on the first ring, as if she had been hovering over it.

‘It's Molly. I hope this isn't too late to ring. You weren't eating or … anything?'

‘No.' Elizabeth managed to make the solitary word sound like a disappointment. Molly was sure she had been expecting someone else to ring. She knew the other woman had no interest at all in her grandson, but she had to say something, and Max felt like a safe subject to talk about. Something about the way Elizabeth withheld herself always provoked Molly to inane chatter. Some part of her still wanted this woman, who had always been so dismissive of her, to like her. She remembered the way Elizabeth had gone round a table Molly had laid in her own home, moving the pudding spoons from the top of the plates to the sides, and the way Molly had thanked her afterwards.

‘Max is fine. Thanks so much for the book. He'll write and say thank you himself soon.'

‘I'm so glad,' the older woman said coldly. ‘Now, is there anything else? Because I really must …' Not even bothering to give a reason for her impatience, Elizabeth allowed her voice to trail off, as if the thought of saying anything more to Molly at all was absolutely exhausting.

‘Well, I was just wondering if you had seen Rupert recently?'

‘No. He's in America. How would I have seen him?' Elizabeth replied, and Molly thought that for the first time ever, the other woman sounded rattled.

‘I thought that perhaps he might have decided to come back for Christmas,' she said.

‘As you know he is managing a holiday resort in California. He wrote to me and said that he was spending the holiday period with some new friends,' said Elizabeth, who had recovered her habitual poise.

‘Oh, never mind,' Molly said, ‘sorry to have disturbed you. I'll let you get back to whatever it was you were doing.'

‘I'd absolutely know if My Son was in the country,' said Elizabeth, and in that moment Molly felt sorry for her. Through the dislike in the other woman's voice, Molly could hear the pride and the loneliness.

‘Of course you would. Don't worry.' As she put the phone down she thought of Elizabeth in her pale, carefully textured house, touching throws, arranging leaves, unable to settle.

When she heard that Carrie was taking Peter to a session with the medium, Pam insisted on going along too, saying that since Simon was her discovery she wasn't going to be left out. Carrie wondered why her mother, who manifested an unhealthy scepticism about most things, including the ability of her daughter to manage her own affairs, so readily believed in the possibility of an afterlife. Pam rushed upstairs to assume her grey costume, this time accessorising it with a powder blue silk scarf and matching kid gloves;

‘Did you know that it has been scientifically proven that men are most attracted to powder blue above all colours?' she said, preening herself in the hall mirror while Carrie tapped her foot impatiently and thought longingly of her fire-warmed sofa.

As Carrie plodded wearily along over the railway bridge between her two companions, she heard the plaintive toot of a train pulling out of the station. The melancholy sound was like a lament and made her feel gloomier than ever. The trees by the bridge looked stark against the evening sky, the occasional ragged nest hanging between the high branches like a blood clot in an artery. Her life was not shaping up well. She was hurtling towards forty, her mother was apparently permanently ensconced in her spare room, she was sleeping with her ex-husband and wasn't sure she should be and on top of all this, her sense of duty towards her bereaved friend was so overdeveloped that she was willingly subjecting herself to an evening with the cardiganed and credulous.

The thought of Oliver Gladhill rose unbidden to her mind and Carrie wondered what he would think about what was about to take place in Romsey Community Hall. He would probably make Simon Foster into his mentor and then the pair of them could cut a swathe through the neighbourhood, hoodwinking the desperate and the big breasted. She wondered what had happened to him to make him so keen to continually prove his sexual credentials. He wasn't bad looking if you liked that kind of sexy, slightly rumpled thing he had going on. What was it he had said he did? She thought it was something in conservation and she remembered again the practised way he had held the bird. He had told her that it had made a full recovery after spending the night in a shoe box. ‘He flew away like a bat out of hell,' Oliver had said, demonstrating the bird's trajectory with an exuberant swing of his arm. He was full of vitality, and yet his vigour was cut through with a certain reserve, as if there was a side to him that he kept hidden.

Heading towards the hall, Carrie saw that Peter was looking sideways at her and remembered why it was that she was putting herself through the next two hours. She could see that he was getting far too attached to her and she knew she was in no way the solution to what ailed him. He clearly needed to be given a focus other than herself. She wondered if there ever could be a solution for anyone who had lost something as precious as a child, or in his case, a whole family. How does anyone ever recover? The best you could hope for, surely, was that you learn to manage the pain; to stop expecting it to go away and instead find a way of living with it that was not too destructive to the life you had left. She hoped that one day she would reach a point when she could think of Charlie with more pleasure than pain. To see him more as the blessing he had been to her rather than the fact that that blessing had been so short lived. She thought of the way his hand had stroked her face that last time. Her flesh and blood. The very best of her.

The only familiar face in the group was the tearful man; the others were all new, although they shared the same expectant, hopeful look that she had seen on the faces before. Simon Foster looked tired when he came into the room. He had purplish shadows under his eyes and the lines on his face appeared to have deepened. After apologising to those who had been there the week before that they would have to hear it all again, he gave a potted version of his biography, and Carrie noticed that this time he added a detail that he hadn't mentioned before, which was the fact that his father had been driving the car when it crashed. Carrie wondered why he had left the fact out last time. Was it an oversight? Or did the man embroider his story as he went along, adding new elements as they came to him?

The session went very much as the last one had, only this time the medium seemed to have adopted a more scattergun approach, claiming the voices were coming thick and fast and moving feverishly around the room as if there was nowhere to stop. At one point, his hands went up to his head and Carrie thought he was perhaps experiencing the beginnings of one of the migraines he had alluded to before. She also wondered if the voices he heard were some sort of prelude to the onset of an attack. A symptom of a disease rather than a so-called gift, like the visual disturbances and the feeling of dislocation that other migraine sufferers describe. Perhaps the man was even suffering from some sort of mental illness and really should be in a hospital being taken care of rather than in a room with a bunch of gullible strangers.

As she had suspected he would be, Peter was completely wrapped up in the whole experience. His eyes never left Simon and more than once Carrie heard him give a great intake of astonished breath. He looked at her in absolute amazement when Simon was claiming to channel the long dead brother of the tearful man, whose face was hidden in his handkerchief, his shoulders convulsing with … sorrow? Joy? It was hard to tell. Just when it seemed as if the session was winding up, and Carrie was already mentally out of the room and halfway home, Simon stopped stock still in front of her. Her heart sank. She was hoping that she might have made it through without undue attention. Pam gave a kind of subdued yelp and clutched Carrie's arm. Simon's face did that strange rippling that she remembered from before.

‘He's talking to me about a flamingo,' said Simon in his odd monotone, his bleached eyes wide open.

Carrie froze. She felt the room turn about her. For a moment she couldn't speak.

‘Who told you about that?' she said, her voice harsh. ‘Tell me who told you.'

‘He did,' said Simon. ‘A young boy. Sweet voice. He says he went to feed the flamingo something pink.'

Carrie had the sense that Simon's voice was coming from a great distance. She heard it as a rushing sound funnelled through a narrow space towards her, so quiet when it arrived in the room that she could barely hear it. It had nothing to do with her, this noise. She reached for her mother's arm.

‘What're you talking about?' said Pam, suddenly belligerent, seeing the effect of his words on her daughter. ‘Are you OK, Carrie?' she said, alarmed at her pallor.

Without saying anything, Carrie turned and ran out of the room.

Lying rigidly in bed, unable to get to sleep, Carrie closed her eyes and conjured up her grandparents' house in a small Yorkshire village. She had not been back there for at least twenty-five years, yet every detail of it remained vivid. It was far clearer in her mind than other places she had been to more recently, maybe because she associated it with happiness; her indulgent grandparents, the summer stretching ahead forever. Thinking about the house usually made her feel relaxed enough to fall asleep, something she desperately needed to do tonight. She took a deep breath, rolled over onto her back and walked along a lane thick with fountains of hawthorn, through the green front door, across the terracotta tiled kitchen floor and past the larder, with its smell of earth-covered potatoes and sponge cake. Next was the dining room, where the long lacquered table was made up with place mats of Dickensian London and silver soup spoons smelling of the mildewed satin-lined box they were kept in on the sideboard. She saw the crossed swords on the wall above the fireplace and the two Chinese fishermen with real string fishing lines on the mantel. Down two deep stairs into the hallway and then the living room where her grandfather's glossy side table held his radio and spectacles and deck of cards, placed just so. Through the bay window there was a view of roses in lines and a sloping lawn down to a river. Try as she might tonight, her mind would take her no further through the house than this. She was left looking out of her grandparents' window, running and re-running what the medium had said.

She had walked home in silence, resisting answering her mother's concerned questions. After Peter had been more or less forced out of the house by Carrie's rudeness and clear unwillingness to offer him a drink, Carrie asked her mother if she had ever spoken to Simon Foster either before or after the first session they had attended, a suggestion that was hotly denied.

‘What are you suggesting, Carrie? Are you saying that you think me and Simon Foster might have been in some sort of cahoots?' Pam pronounced it ‘
Car
hoots' which would have made Carrie smile if she hadn't been so distracted. She didn't put it past her mother to have let slip relevant information. Perhaps she had met him in another context? It only needed the lubrication of a couple of glasses of white wine for her mother to become quite loquacious on the subject of herself, people connected to herself and herself. The problem was that she didn't remember ever mentioning the flamingo to her mother in the first place. It had been a fleeting sighting, quickly superseded by what had happened afterwards and it had been forgotten until now. Carrie certainly hadn't consciously thought about it since.

Sleep was clearly going to elude her, so she wrapped herself in her dressing gown and went downstairs to sit at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, fighting the tears that kept coming, despite her efforts to remain in control. Nothing in her education, experience or temperament allowed her to believe that what had happened that evening had been genuine. It was impossible. The truth of it must surely be that the man was a con artist who had somehow managed to find out this piece of information about what had happened on the beach that day and used it to trick her. To suck her into believing in the sad lies he was peddling. She felt blazingly angry and found that she had bitten her lip and drawn blood. Could someone else have told him about it? She was certain that the only people who could possibly know what they had seen on the beach that day were Damian, herself, and of course, Charlie. She thought, with a twist of her heart, about the story of the lost bird she had never had the chance to tell him. Just one more untold story, along with all the hundreds of others she might have told him. Had she ever told him about the hawthorn in the lane at her grandparents' house and the wood nearby with fossils in the slate-filled banks? She couldn't remember.

Carrie fought to keep her mind clear and to focus on the facts. What were the alternatives? Simon Foster was obviously a trickster with a way of finding out things that seemed impossible for him to know. Perhaps he had somehow hypnotised her and caused her to reveal her memories? Had there been any point in the whole proceedings when she had felt altered in any way? Surely not. Perhaps he had met Damian in another context? Yes, that had to be it. He'd been in a pub and heard Damian tell someone about the flamingo. That couldn't be right either; the man would hardly base his whole act on random snippets of overheard conversation. Was it possible that Simon Foster had seen Charlie himself on the beach? Had he witnessed them as a family walking in the shallows? It was too elaborate a fantasy to imagine that he would wait all this time until she found her way to him and the community centre. Had he seen Charlie more recently? For a moment this seemed with terrible, sudden fear and hope to be a possibility. Simon Foster knew Charlie. Or he had Charlie with him. Carrie allowed herself to believe this for a moment, but she knew she was indulging herself. If he had Charlie he would hardly let her know that was the case by quoting her son's words to her. It was fantastical to imagine that he would have recognised her and decided to torment her in this specific and peculiar way.