Chapter 36
The Other Face of Helen Marlow
They came for her at seven in the morning, with a warrant and six officers and a van, up the long drive of limes in a pale watery sunlight. The first thing they saw was that every window of the house was lit.
Callum saw it from the back of Kovac's car. He sat very upright in the gray suit with his hands on his knees and watched Rookhill come toward him between the trees: the slate roof, the stone, the great front door. It looked exactly as it had on a hundred evenings. It blazed. It was a liner at a quay, a hundred small yellow squares laid out against the morning, and he thought, with a pang that had no particular name, that she hadn't turned them off. She had sat up all night with the lamps burning in every room, as she had when Gerald died.
"You'll stay in the car," said Kovac.
"She asked for me."
"She asked for you in the voice of a woman who has been told she's about to be searched. I'll tell you what I tell everyone. People ask for the person they most want to hurt." The black eyes didn't move from the house. "Wait until I send for you. And Mr. Wray."
"Yes?"
"Whatever she says. It isn't an answer. It's a performance. Even if she means every word." She opened the door. "Especially then."
He was sent for at twenty to nine.
The house was full of people. They moved about in the hall under the portraits in rubber gloves and paper overshoes, with clipboards and evidence bags, with a quiet, polite, ruthless efficiency that made the Chinese vases look like exhibits at a trial. Someone was taking down the barometer. Two constables carried a filing cabinet down the stairs between them like a coffin. In the library a woman in a white suit was photographing a desk. Mrs. Pym stood at the foot of the great staircase with her hands folded and her gray face composed, and as he passed she said, without moving her lips, "She's in the conservatory, sir. She wouldn't go anywhere else."
The conservatory was empty of officers. They had cleared it, and stood now at the door, two young men, rather pink, looking at the floor.
Helen sat at the far end in the basket chair.
She wore a blue dressing gown. He had never seen her in anything but day clothes; he had never imagined there was a thing under them. It was a quilted garment of faded silk, much washed, with a frayed collar, and inside it she was small. That was what he saw first, at the end of the long green aisle between the lemon trees: she had shrunk. The silver hair, unpinned, hung loose to her shoulders in thin rope-like strands, and her face without powder was the color of a candle. She hadn't put in her teeth. The long jaw had fallen in. Her hands lay open in her lap, the left one a little turned, and the wrist of it, bare, was gray and swollen, with a faint pale line round it where a band had been.
She didn't rise.
"Dear boy," said Helen.
"Helen."
"Sit down. I can't offer you tea. They've taken the pot." She gave a small ghastly copy of a smile. "The young man said it was an item."
He sat in the other basket chair. It creaked. Between them stood the low table where, on the afternoon of the twenty-third of May, she had put a cup in his hand and said a bridge and a river and a bad night. It was bare. The tray was gone.
"I've had a long night," she said. "I've been thinking about what to say to you."
"You don't have to say anything."
"I do. I've been told I'm not obliged. The solicitor was most firm." She made a small, weary, cold gesture with the swollen hand. "But I find I'd rather say it to someone I'm fond of, before I say it to a stranger with a tape machine." She looked at him. Her gray eyes were bloodshot and dry. "May I?"
He nodded.
"Then I'll begin where it began." She drew a breath. "I did not push my daughter."
She spoke for twenty minutes.
He sat and listened with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the tiled floor, and didn't once look away. She didn't weep. She didn't raise her voice. She told it in the flat, clear, polite, careful tone of a woman giving evidence at a board meeting, and he understood slowly, with a growing coldness, that it wasn't a confession. It was a statement. It was an account of events by a person who had already cleared herself, thoroughly, in private, at three in the morning, many hundreds of times, and had arrived at a version in which every fact was true.
"It was a cold night," she said. "I took the car. Tobias drove. I'd had a text from Verity that afternoon, you see. She said Isabel meant to tell everyone. That she would tell you, on Sunday, and the child, and then the school." Her lips thinned. "I thought she was ill. I thought it was another of her episodes. She had been so quiet for so long. I thought, if I could see her face to face, I could make her see."
"And on the bridge?"
"She was standing by her car. In the scarf." A flicker crossed her face. "She looked wonderful. Her color was high, her eyes were bright. And there was another."
"Nora."
"I didn't know her. I'd paid for her and I'd never seen her." The cool voice shook. "You don't know what it is. To see your own child, twice. To stand on a bridge in a storm and see her standing there, and her again, the same, side by side, and know that one of them is a stranger, and you can't tell which." She put her hand to her throat. "For one second I thought I'd gone mad. I thought: I have one daughter, and here are two."
"And you took Isabel's arm."
"To bring her to the car."
"Hard."
"I don't know how hard." She said it very quietly. "I've gone over it. I've gone over it a thousand times. I took her arm and she said, Let go, and I held on. I thought if I let go she would go. I'd never in my life let go of anything." She swallowed. "And she pulled. She pulled so hard that my wrist went. I heard it. I cried out. And she stepped back onto that rotten rail that no one had mended, and it gave."
"You didn't call anyone."
"Tobias said she was gone."
"Did you look?"
The question lay on the damp air between the lemon trees, soft and hard as a stone.
Helen's mouth opened. For a moment nothing came out. Her eyes slid to the glass roof, where a thread of light lay on the iron, and back to his face. He saw in them, quite plainly for the first time, the thing she had kept under the surface all her life. It wasn't guilt. It wasn't grief. It was a terrible, confused, offended amazement, like a person asked to account for something she's always believed to be a law of nature.
"I couldn't," she said.
"You could have looked over the rail."
"I could not move." The words came out in a rush. "I stood, and my wrist was on fire, and my daughter had gone. I saw the whole of it. And I thought: I have lost another one. Callum, I have lost four. A boy, a baby, a husband, a daughter. And I thought, quite clearly, the way a woman thinks when there's a fire in a house: I must save what is left." Her hands closed. "Verity. And the child. And the name. I couldn't bear it. I couldn't bear that it should all come out, tonight, in the rain, under a lamp, in front of a man in a hut."
"So you let Quist send Nora away."
"I let him do what was necessary."
"And you let me think she'd killed herself."
"I let the police think what they liked." The chin lifted a quarter-inch. "It was the kindest thing. She had been unwell. It was quite believable. I did not tell a single lie." A tremor passed over the loose jaw. "I just did not correct anyone."
"And the cheques?"
"What cheques?"
"For the Conservatoire. For St. Aldric's. For Mrs. Albright."
"Oh." She waved a cold hand. "Those. Those were love. Don't you see? Those were every one an act of love." Her voice rose, high and thin and uncertain. "I kept that girl from a scandal. I gave my other daughter a child. I gave her a name, and a school, and a husband, and a house, and you. You, Callum. Who do you suppose put you in the way of that exhibition? Who do you think sat on the committee that asked Mr. Aubrey's physiotherapist to bring him to the Museum on an open day?"
He went entirely still.
"What?"
"It was arranged." She had caught herself too late; he saw it in the sudden stiffening of her thin shoulders, the quick hand at the collar. "It was arranged. Not by me. By a friend. A little push. I thought, she is twenty-five, she is lonely, she needs a steady man. I thought, a gentle sort of person, who handles old things with care." The hand dropped. "I wanted her settled."
"You sent her to me."
"I gave her to you." Tears sprang into her eyes at last. "And she loved you. She did. She loved you more than I ever, more than any of my children ever loved anyone. And I thought, at last, I have done one thing right."
The conservatory was extremely quiet.
After a long time he said:
"The telephone."
She looked blank.
"On Wednesday night. At seven minutes past three. A voice rang me from Isabel's number. It said come." He kept his own voice flat and low. "Quist had Nora record it. In March. In the stables."
Her face didn't change. But something happened behind it, a slow draining and settling, like silt in a clouded glass. He saw her lips part, and her eyes go to the wall, to the ranked shining citrus trees, to the distant outline of the stable block in the morning light, and come back.
"Studio," she said.
"Yes."
"He built it for me."
"For you?"
"He said it was a, a sort of memorial. For the family. A room where one could record the, the voices." She was whispering. "He played me something. Once. In April. I couldn't sleep, and he came in with a tape machine, and said, 'Madam, I have found a few of her messages, collected, to comfort you.' And he put on the earphones." Her long hands had begun to shake. "It was her. It was Isabel. She said, Mother. I'm sorry. I forgive you. I wept for an hour."
Callum closed his eyes.
"It wasn't her," said Helen. Her voice cracked on the last word. "Was it?"
"No."
"It was the Albright girl."
"Yes."
"Doing my daughter." She said it quite softly, in a kind of wondering horror. "Doing her forgiveness. And I took it. I took every word, and I wept, and said thank you." She put both hands over her face. "Oh, God. Oh, God. He gave me that. He gave me the one thing I wanted most in the world, and it was a lie, and I knew it was a lie as I took it, and I did not care."
He didn't move.
She sat with her face hidden, her thin shoulders heaving, in the pale green light among the lemon trees. And he saw at last, with a quiet pain that was almost pity, and wasn't, that there had never been a mask. There had only been a woman who decided, in the first week of her marriage, that nothing she loved would be allowed to break, and went on deciding it for fifty years, one cheque at a time. That was all. It was a kind of love, perhaps. It had killed her daughter.
She will not hurt you out of malice. She will hurt you out of love, and that is far worse, because there is no appeal.
"Helen," said Callum.
She lowered her hands.
"Was she frightened?" The question was barely a breath. "At the end. Do you know? Did she say anything?"
He looked at her.
He thought of a woman in a gray cardigan at a kitchen table with her chin lifted. He thought of the pale-lemon coat on a hook, and a voice saying, in a flat bright light, I've been waiting twelve years. He thought of a face tipped back in a storm, looking up, with a hand fastened round a tearing strip of wool, and of what it had said. He could have lied. He could have said, no, she was calm, she felt nothing. It would have been the kindest thing in the world.
"She wasn't frightened," he said. "She looked at Nora. She said, Well. There's a thing."
Helen Marlow's mouth opened.
It was a small movement. It was no more than the loosening of a hinge. And then it came, from somewhere under the quilted silk, from the bottom of the shrunken chest, a sound he hadn't known a woman of that kind could make: a low, hoarse, wrenching, animal cry, like the tearing of cloth. She doubled over in the basket chair with her arms across her stomach. The gray head came down. The loose hair swung forward and fell across her face.
At the door the two young officers looked at their shoes.
Down the long glass room, between the lemon trees, a door opened, and Kovac's quick, even, calm step came toward them over the tiles. She stopped a little way off. She didn't speak. She stood with her hands in her pockets and her head on one side and looked down at the woman in the chair, and her tired, lined, intelligent face was quite grave.
"Mr. Wray," she said at last, very low. "I think that will do."
He rose.
"One thing," said Kovac as he passed. She spoke without looking at him. "We've been to the flat in Pellam Mews. Quist's. It's empty. Bed made, kettle cold, a plate in the rack. He left in a hurry, or he left in a very great deal of order." The dry black eyes lifted. "His car's at the station. The ferry goes at noon."