Chapter 28
Hollin Wing
The Hollin Wing was on the third floor of the Infirmary, at the end of a corridor so long and so evenly lit that it seemed less a place than a rule.
It was pale green. The walls were pale green up to shoulder height and cream above, with a rail along them at hand level, and the floor was a gray rubbery stuff that gave back no sound. A line of tall windows ran down one side, looking onto a courtyard garden laid out with box hedges and a sundial, where nobody ever walked. At the end of the corridor, beyond a double door with a keypad, the light grew blue and dim as at the bottom of a pool. Callum was put into a room on the left. It had a bed with a blue cover, a locker, a chair, a window with a safety catch, and a mirror above the basin that wasn't glass but polished steel, so that his face, when he looked in it, came back warped and dull, like a face in a spoon.
"It's the policy," said the nurse who showed him in. "No glass." She was a stout, quiet, brown-skinned woman of fifty called Tilda, with huge patient eyes. "Nothing breakable. Don't take it personally. It's the same for the Bishop."
"Is the Bishop here?"
"Not this week." She smiled. "Get some sleep, Mr. Wray. I've put you on the quiet end. Nobody will bother you. It's the best view in the house."
He slept for eighteen hours.
They were kind to him. That was what he hadn't expected: how kind. They moved about him in soft shoes and spoke in low voices and brought him trays with a cup of tea and a plate of toast cut into triangles. Every time he opened his eyes there was a face bending over him, concerned and clean, and a hand taking his pulse. On the second morning a doctor named Rajan, young and precise, with a tidy beard, sat on the end of his bed and asked him a great many questions in a polite voice and wrote down the answers in a small black book. Do you have thoughts of harming yourself? No. Do you hear voices? One. Only on the telephone. Do you believe you are being watched? He thought about it. I believe I am being followed by a man in gloves. The young man wrote that down too, without comment. He closed the book. He said it was an interesting case, that Mr. Wray was in excellent hands, that the Wing was a gentle place, and that it was entirely voluntary: a few days' rest, a chance to clear the head.
Voluntary, thought Callum.
He had signed. He remembered signing, on the first night, in the white light of a side room with Dr. Sorel at his elbow, on a form with a number of boxes. It's only paper, she'd said. You can leave at any time. They will ask you to stay. I will ask you to stay. But you are free to go. He had looked at her face. It was tired. It was the face of a woman who had been woken at four and sat in a hospital corridor in her coat, and he had seen in it, plain as print, that she was afraid of what she was asking, and was asking it anyway.
What if I'm right? he had said.
Then you will be right in a bed with a blanket, said Dr. Sorel, and not on a railing in the rain.
He had signed.
Helen came on the third day, with flowers.
She came at four, in the thin gold light, in a gray coat and a small black hat with a veil, carrying a bunch of white tulips wrapped in tissue. Tilda showed her into the day room with every sign of respect. She stood in the door a moment, looking about her at the pale green walls, the vinyl chairs, the fish tank, the half-finished jigsaw of Windsor Castle on a table. Then she crossed the room to where he sat in a chair by the window with a rug over his knees, laid the tulips in his lap, and bent and kissed his cheek.
"Dear boy," she said.
He said nothing.
"I wanted to come before. They said you needed to sleep. Dr. Rajan has been most helpful; he rang me yesterday." She drew up a chair and sat with her bag on her knees and her ankles crossed, looking at him through the veil. "He thinks a fortnight. Perhaps three weeks. He thinks it would be wise not to hurry."
"Does he."
"I've told the Museum you're unwell. Nothing more. I said it was exhaustion. Mr. Hargreaves has been marvelous, he's put the Mackenzie in Priya's hands, and she's thrilled. Everything is arranged." She smiled. "You're not to worry about a single thing."
"The telephone."
"What telephone?"
"On Wednesday night. Isabel rang me." He kept his voice quite flat. "From her own number. At seven minutes past three. She asked me to come to the bridge."
There was no change in her face. It didn't so much as flicker. She sat with her gloved hands folded and her head slightly tilted, and a light, grave, kind regret came over her features like a veil drawn across a window.
"Oh, my dear," she said. "Oh, you poor, poor boy."
"It was her voice."
"I'm sure it was."
"It said well, there's a thing."
"Yes." She drew breath. "Callum, Dr. Rajan has been quite frank with me. He says it's not uncommon. In the bereaved. That the mind, under great strain, produces perceptions so bright they can't be told from the real." She laid a hand on his sleeve. "He thinks you've been through a kind of, a storm. That you must be allowed to rest."
"There's a log on my phone."
"Of a call?"
"Yes."
"May I see it?"
He looked at her. He looked at the tilted veil, the pearl at the throat, the cool gray eyes. And something came to him with the force of a cold hand on the back of the neck: the phone was in the locker, in the plastic bag with his watch and his wallet and his belt, and if he took it out and showed her the screen, she would read it with her head on one side and say gently, I see nothing.
She wouldn't say it because it was gone. She would say it because she was fond of him.
"No," he said.
"Good." She patted his sleeve twice. "I'm so glad. I think it best that we don't dwell." She rose. She smoothed her skirt. "You're a very brave man, Callum. Isabel always said so. She said you had a way of going into the dark with your eyes open." A pause. "I do hope you'll let us help you not to."
"Helen."
"Yes, dear?"
"Why did you keep her telephone?"
She was already half turned toward the door. She stopped.
It was the smallest of pauses. It might have been a catch of breath, or a shift of weight on a heel, or the drawing of a glove. But he was watching her, as he watched a surface, and he saw the pearl at her throat rise and fall once, and the veil, which had been still, tremble.
"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean," said Helen Marlow pleasantly. "Do rest."
She went out. He heard her heels on the rubber floor, light and quick and quite even, and the double doors sighing shut behind her. Through the day-room window as dusk came on he saw her cross the courtyard garden below, between the box hedges, past the sundial, the white hat drifting through the dim green like a moth. At the gate, under the lamp, a long black car waited, and a man held the door.
Dev came on the fourth.
He came at dusk, with a tin. It was a large round biscuit tin painted with Highland cattle, held in both hands in front of his stomach the way you carry a cake. He stood in the door of the day room and looked about him with a look of enormous sorry cheer that fell away, like a slipping mask, as soon as his eyes found Callum's face.
"Oh, God," he said. "Oh, you look—"
"I know."
"You look well. You look, you've got color." He crossed the room in three strides, put the tin on the windowsill and stood in front of him with his hands hanging. "I couldn't come before. They said no visitors but family. Tilda said she'd make an exception."
"Tilda's the Bishop's friend."
"What?"
"Never mind." He found, to his surprise, that he was smiling. "Sit down, Dev."
Dev sat.
He sat on the edge of the vinyl chair opposite with his knees together and his hands between them, and looked at the tin. It was quiet in the day room. The fish tank bubbled. Down the corridor somebody was crying softly, with a high, thin, tuneless patience, the way a child cries who long ago stopped expecting to be comforted.
"It's the aubergine," said Dev at last. "I thought you might be sick of the food."
"Thank you."
"It's not going to help."
"No."
"I'm going to tell you something, Cal. And you'll want to hit me." He drew a long breath. "I've been rehearsing it for six months. I had a speech. I can't remember a word."
"Say it."
"She came to see me."
The words dropped into the air.
"On the Friday. The fourteenth. About four. I was in the Mill, at the bench." Dev didn't raise his eyes. "She'd never come on a Friday. She sat on the stool by the window, in her scarf, with her hands in her lap, and she looked the way she always looked, a bit sad, a bit funny. She said, 'Dev, I need you to keep something for me.' And I said, 'What?' and she said, 'An envelope.'" His voice cracked. "She said, 'If I don't come for it on Monday, give it to Cal. Not before. Not to anyone else. Promise me.'"
"And you promised."
"I promised."
"And on Monday?"
"On Monday," said Dev, "Tobias Quist was sitting on my stairs."
He lifted his head.
His face was gray. It was streaming. His thick lashes were stuck together, his cheeks and beard were shining, and for the first time in all the fifteen years Callum had known him he looked old: a stout, small, tired man of forty-five with a broken look about the mouth.
"He didn't threaten me. He never threatens. He said Mrs. Marlow was anxious about some papers Isabel might have left. He said he knew she'd come to see me. He knew the hour. And he said Mrs. Marlow had been thinking about the Mill's rent. That the Trust was reviewing it, as it did each year. That she'd always been so fond of me." A short sob. "I've three apprentices, Cal. I've a mother in Leicester. I'd have been out on the street by March."
"So you said nothing."
"I said I'd seen no one."
"And the envelope."
"Is under my bed. In a shoebox." He wiped his face with both hands. "I've never opened it. I've never even touched it. It's been there six months, like a, like a bomb. I lie in the dark over it every night. I hear her voice. 'Give it to Cal.'" His own voice broke. "I'm a coward. I know I'm a coward. I've always known. But I couldn't, I couldn't."
Callum sat quite still.
Then he leaned forward and took the big wet hand in his own and held it.
"You're here now," he said.
"Don't."
"You came."
"I'd have come in November if I had any, if I'd been any sort of—"
"You came," said Callum, "now."
The envelope was in the biscuit tin, under a layer of tinfoil, under a dozen small hard oatcakes, where Dev had hidden it on the way. It was long, white and stout, sealed with sellotape, with a single word on the front in blue ink in a forward-leaning hand. CAL.
He took it to his room.
He sat on the edge of the bed under the dull steel mirror with the blue cover drawn up round his knees and the light from the corridor falling in a bar across the floor. He didn't open it at once. He held it and looked at the name, at the C she made with a little flourish like the handle of a cup. It was heavier than he'd expected. It had a faint smell of her, of coat and tea and the dry sweet trace of pencil.
At last he slit the tape.
There were four sheets of lined paper, covered on both sides in her quick hand. He read them under the bar of light, slowly, with his lips moving, the way he'd read the labels of the dead.
Cal,
If you're reading this, it's Monday or later, and I haven't been able to say it myself. I'm sorry. I'd hoped to tell you in the kitchen, with a pot of tea, in the right order. I'm no good at the order.
I'll say the main thing first, because I'm a coward and I don't want you to get to the end and wonder. I have a daughter. She's fourteen. Her name is Esme. She was born when I was twenty-one, and Mother arranged for Verity to have her, and I've regretted it every single day of my life. I'm so sorry I never told you. I was frightened that you'd look at me differently. I'm frightened of that now.
The second thing is that I did something terrible when I was nineteen, to someone I loved. I let her take the blame for something that was my fault, and I've been trying for sixteen years to put it right, and I think I finally know how. Her name is Nora. You'll hear me call her Nonie. She's the other half of a thing I never told you about, and I'll explain, if I can, on Sunday.
The third thing is the portrait.
I bought it at Pelham's on a whim. Cal, I'm not a fool. I saw the frame. It's Dad's. It hung in his study for thirty years. The sale lot said "from a private collection," and it was Mother's consignment, a clear-out, she said, of "things he never used." I bought it with the housekeeping money so she wouldn't know. And when I got it home and took off the backing board, there was a flap. A pocket of linen, tacked behind the lining.
I didn't open it. I want you to know that. I looked, and I put it back. I thought: if there's a secret in it, it isn't mine to open. It's Dad's, and Dad wasn't a man who put anything in a painting by accident. He said once that a face keeps secrets better than a safe, because no one wants to look at it too long.
So I've sent it to you. Start with the face. Slowly. There's an overpainting, he told me, over the sitter's eyes. When you've cleaned it, you'll see why he put what he put behind it. It's about Mother, and what she's done, and what she'll do to keep it. I don't want it in the flat. I want you to find it as you find everything, in the right order, with a steady hand.
Take it to the police. Not to Sergeant Cairns; he plays golf with Mother. Find someone who doesn't.
I'm not afraid of Mother. I want to say that. I'm only afraid of what I'll do to the people I love by telling the truth about her.
Cal. If I've gone somewhere you can't follow, it was never because of you. You were the best thing that ever happened to a woman who had spent her life being a copy of someone. You looked at my face and you saw me. I've never been so grateful for anything.
Tap, tap, tap.
I.
He didn't weep.
He read it a second time. He folded it along the creases and slid it back into the envelope and put the envelope inside his shirt, against his skin, where he could feel the stiff paper rise and fall with his breath. Then he went to the window and stood with his forehead on the cool glass, looking down into the courtyard, where dusk was coming up blue between the box hedges and a single lamp had been lit above the sundial.
Start with the face. Slowly.
It's about Mother, and what she'll do to keep it.
Behind him the door opened, and Tilda said gently, "Mr. Wray? Time for your tablets."
"I'd like to go home," said Callum.
She stood in the doorway with the little paper cup. Her huge patient eyes rested on his back for a time.
"I thought you might," she said. "Dr. Sorel's downstairs. She says if you're ready, she'll sign you out herself."