“Come in. James is cooking supper. I’m sure there’s beer.”
The kitchen was at the back of the house and she led Chris through. During the day it seemed dark and rather gloomy, but now, after the chill of standing on the step, it was warm, even welcoming. James had returned to chopping onions. He sliced them into fine, almost translucent semicircles.
“Will there be enough food for three? Look who’s come to supper.” Her voice sounded unnaturally bright. She wasn’t really sure how well the two men got on. They seemed pleasant enough to each other, though once, in an unguarded moment, James had told her he thought her brother arrogant. It was true, she thought. Sometimes Chris gave the impression that he despised the whole world, apart perhaps from a couple of Nobel scientists.
James looked up from the chopping board. He must have heard Chris’s voice at the door and had his response already prepared.
“Sure,” he said. “It’s great to see you.” He paused for a beat. “Do Robert and Mary know you’re here? We could invite them round too.”
“God, no.” Chris was horrified. “I need a good night’s sleep before I can face that.”
James slid the onion from the board into a frying pan.
“There’s beer in the fridge,” he said. “You can get me one too.”
When Chris had his back to them James rolled his eyes and pulled a face. What was that about? Chris’s attitude to his parents, or his own disappointment that they would no longer have the evening to themselves? Emma couldn’t tell.
They would eat in the small narrow room which led immediately from the kitchen. Emma lit candles and set the table, while Christopher went upstairs for a shower. James moaned gently at her through the open door while he prepared a salad.
“Really,” he said. “Chris could have given us some warning. We might have been busy. Who else would just turn up on the doorstep like that?”
“He’s very focused,” she said. “He decided he wanted to visit and that was it. He wouldn’t think much of anything other than how he’d get here, once the decision was made.”
Christopher had always been like that, even when he was quite young. He would become obsessed with an object of study or a project. All his energy would be taken up with that. Other school subjects would be dealt with in a cursory, detached way, but his teachers would know that his mind was elsewhere. The fixation would end as suddenly as it had begun and he would move on to something else dinosaurs or gravity or an obscure composer. He had stuck with seabirds for a surprisingly long time. Perhaps the puffins had come to bore him and that was why he was here.
At the time the family had put his sudden passions down to the eccentricity of an academic. Now Emma wondered again when the fixations had begun. With the move to Elvet or Abigail’s murder? And were they as harmless as they had seemed at the time or the indication of a deeper disturbance? She wished she’d made more effort to understand him when they’d both been living at home, decided that his appearance was a good sign. It wasn’t too late to understand him better.
They ate at first in silence. The wind had dropped to a murmur, but Emma was aware of it still in the background. She made a few attempts at conversation, asking about Christopher’s work, the flat in Aberdeen, but soon realized that he was exhausted. He sat with his left elbow on the table, resting his head on his palm, holding his fork in his right hand, pushing pasta into his mouth. She could tell James disapproved. He had an obsession about table manners. Occasionally Chris’s eyelids would droop, then something would jerk him awake and he would stare wildly at them for a moment as if he’d forgotten who they were. He had drunk the beer and most of a bottle of Australian red. Emma considered what problem might have brought him home. Could he have become addicted to drugs? Is this how someone who was suffering withdrawal might behave? She had no idea. Perhaps his depression she thought he probably was depressed was the result of the end of a love affair. It didn’t occur to her that Chris’s arrival in Elvet could have anything to do with Abigail Mantel.
They had moved on to the cheese and fruit. James said to him, quite gently, “Look, you’re obviously tired. Go to bed whenever you like. We won’t mind.”
“No!” Christopher’s head jerked back in spasm again. “It’s no good. I won’t sleep yet.”
“Well, I think I’ll go. I’ve got an early start in the morning.” He gave Emma a meaningful look. Perhaps he thought they could carry on where they’d left off when Chris interrupted them.
“I won’t be long.” But she was careful to keep any hint of promise from her voice. And she knew him. Once James was in bed he would go straight to sleep.
She waited until he’d gone upstairs then fetched more wine from the kitchen, opened it and poured ‘each of them a glass. It was the most she’d drunk since she’d found out she was pregnant. She’d never had to play big sister before. As a child she’d been the needy one. Chris had been independent, self-contained.
“What is it, Chris?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
He sat upright for the first time, looked directly at her.
“Don’t you know?” Brutal, cruel. “Really, are you so thick that you never realized?”
She felt her eyes prick with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a mess. I haven’t slept since it all started again.”
“What?” she demanded. “What started?”
Abigail Mantel. All that.”
“Jeanie’s suicide was only in the paper yesterday.” She couldn’t make sense of it.
“That was what made me come, of course,” he said. “But it started long before that. There was that piece in the Guardian. It seems as if people have been talking about her for weeks.”
“I didn’t realize she meant anything to you.” i She thought of the evening after she had found Abigail’s body, the two of them looking out of his bedroom window at the moonlit image of the stretcher bearers. He hadn’t seemed upset then, had he? Or had she been so absorbed by her own place in the drama that she hadn’t noticed?
“She meant everything,” he said. At the time.”
“But you were young.”
“Fourteen,” he said. “Given to obsessions.”
“You can’t have gone out with her?” Abigail had considered herself too sophisticated for the lads in their own year. Certainly she would never have deigned to go out with someone like Chris.
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that.”
“Well then?”
“I followed her. Everywhere she went. All that summer.” He stared into his glass. “It started when we met up on the Point. The first time you spoke to her. We’d just moved. Dad had dragged us out for a bike ride. You remember?”
“We were eating ice creams.”
“Yes!” he was almost shouting. “Yes!”
“And Abigail arrived in her father’s car and got out to introduce herself.”
“That was the start of it. After that I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Literally. I’d wake up thinking about her, she was there, lurking at the back of my mind all day, and at night I’d dream about her.”
“She was your project for the summer.” She was frightened by his intensity and hoped to tease him out of it, but he answered her seriously.
“No. Projects are intellectual. Abigail was more than that. I can’t explain it even now. I don’t expect you to understand. Look at you. Married, a mother, too sensible to have dreams.”
“Marriage doesn’t stop you dreaming,” she said, but very quietly and anyway, he wasn’t listening. She thought suddenly, If Abigail had heard me say that she’d have pretended to be sick. So predictable. So cheesy. For the first time in years she missed the girl who had been a real friend despite all the later misgivings.
He went on. “It’s never gone away, you know. If she hadn’t died I expect I’d have moved on, got over her. As it’s I’m stuck with it. A passion I’ll never satisfy. A fantasy I can never make real.” He tried to smile. “Crazy, huh?”
He reached for the wine bottle. She saw that his hand was shaking. “Do you know I’ve never had a girlfriend,” he said. “Not a real one. The occasional fumbled one-night stand. Usually when I’m drunk. Usually with a girl with red hair. But nothing more than that.”
For a moment Emma said nothing to him. She looked at him across the table, not sure what to make of it. Christopher had never spoken to her like this before. He had never spoken to her about anything important. She wasn’t even sure she believed him.
“I never realized,” she said in the end. “Why are you telling me now?”
“Because I had to talk to somebody. I think I’m going mad. I’m not sure what’s true any more.”
“It is crazy,” Emma said. “You have to let go.”
And did you?”
“What do you mean?”
, “You’re holding onto stuff. What is it? Guilt? You never liked Abigail much, did you? It must have been a shock but I doubt if you felt much grief.”
“She was my best friend.”
“No,” he said. “She was your only friend. All you had. And she never let you forget it, did she? She never let you forget how much you owed her.” He held her eyes for a moment. “I always thought,” he paused, ‘that deep down you hated her.”
“No,” she said, but the image she’d had a moment before, of Abigail pulling faces, of them laughing together, had already faded.
Chapter Fifteen
Emma left Chris sitting at the table, staring moodily into his wine glass. He had become silent and unresponsive, and when she said goodnight he seemed not to hear. She climbed the stairs slowly, not prepared to make more effort on her brother, but not yet ready for bed.
The day before, they’d moved Matthew into his own bedroom. James had prepared it when she was pregnant. A labour of love, because the colours she’d chosen hadn’t been to his taste at all. Under her instruction he’d painted the grubby wallpaper yellow and stuck up a frieze of waves and boats and fish. A mobile of silver stars hung from the ceiling. At the open door she paused to look in. The baby was lying on his back in his cot, his arms flung out, relaxed and floppy as a rag doll.
As she’d expected, James was already asleep. She stared down at him trying to recreate something of the excitement she’d felt when she’d touched him earlier, but it had quite gone. He didn’t stir when she moved around the room. She began to undress, but still felt too restless for sleep. The wooden floorboards were uncarpeted, stained and varnished and the feel of them on her bare feet always reminded her of PE lessons in the gym at school. One of the teachers had been keen on contemporary dance, and dressed in black leotards, they’d leapt and writhed around the hall to weird electronic music. Expressing themselves. Abigail had thought the exercise ridiculous and made her feelings clear. Emma had been torn. Secretly she’d enjoyed the freedom of the movement. It was like running across a beach towards the sea. The same exhilaration. But because of Abigail, she’d had to sneer too.
Chris had been right in one sense. After Abigail’s death, school had become more bearable. In the few weeks before the summer holidays and in the first half of the Christmas term she was known only as Abigail’s mate. Afterwards, she had become an object of interest in her own right; the pupils had been curious about the murder investigation, the teachers sympathetic. Under their attention she had flourished.
Was it that autumn term she’d discovered her facility for languages? It had been a piece of translation, German into English, and when it had come to her turn she’d rattled it off, understanding immediately what the writer had been trying to say.
“Very good, Emma,” the teacher had said automatically. Emma had come in for a lot of praise since Abigail’s death. As if that was some compensation for the shock of finding a strangled body. Then the teacher had repeated, meaning it, surprised. “Really, that was very good.”
So language had become her thing. French and German to A level and Spanish as an extra GCSE in the sixth form, then Russian for her degree. She hadn’t been brilliant. She’d just scraped a 2.1. But it had been more than her teachers would have predicted when she was fifteen. Her parents too had been surprised by her success, though they’d tried not to show it. How could she explain it? Well, it’s much easier to speak in other people’s voices. It’s more comfortable. How would they understand that?
That had led to her meeting James. After university she’d taken a job with a small shipping company based in Hull. Why had she come back? After being in Exeter for three years and Frankfurt for one, she’d thought herself free of the influence of Robert and Mary. She could have found work anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. Yet, almost without making a conscious decision, she’d found herself back here. She had felt some responsibility for her mother of course. She couldn’t imagine what it could be like for Mary, with just the two of them rattling round that big house. Even now her parents’ marriage was a mystery to her. What was it about Robert which inspired such devotion? Not just from her mother but from all the women in the parish. But that hadn’t been the only reason for her return. She’d been scared all the time she’d been away. Of the strange places and the jostling cities and of people she didn’t know. Of the unexpected. Perhaps that had been the legacy of discovering Abigail’s body. She was terrified of stumbling across another horror. She knew she wouldn’t cope with it on her own. Here, her parents drove her to distraction, but they’d be there to support her, as they had the first time.
There’d been some translation work in the Hull office, but she’d felt her grasp of the languages slipping away through lack of use. When she’d been approached to teach an adult education class she’d taken it on reluctantly, just as a way of keeping Russian at least real in her mind. And at the first class James had walked in, straight from work, still in his uniform. Her dreams about him had been just as vivid as those about Dan Greenwood. Hadn’t they?
She moved across to the window, had to fight against the compulsion to relive her favourite day dream: Emma sees herself slipping out into the square and, keeping to the shadows, walking across to the forge. She pushes open one of the big doors which form an arch, like the door of a church, and steps inside. It would be so hard to let this go. But how could she continue now she knew there was no attraction, just an embarrassed recognition of a schoolgirl who had once been on the edge of one of his cases? She would miss those languid afternoons when she lost herself in daydreams, the nights when she looked out to see if he was there.