Chapter 13
Four Hundred Pounds on the First of the Month
The computer was in the corner of Daniel's study, under a dust cover she had made herself out of an old pillowcase, and she would not have thought of it at all if she had not been looking for a pen.
It was a beige Dell tower with a bulky gray monitor and a keyboard whose letters had worn pale where his fingers fell, and it had sat there since 1999 like a faithful dog. She had never used it. It had been a thing of his, like the shed, like the fishing rods, a place where he did the firm's accounts after supper with the radio on low and a mug of tea going cold at his elbow. She remembered the sound of it. The long grinding chirp of the modem dialing out. The small ruined tune that meant he was connected to the world.
On Wednesday morning, at ten past six, with the whole of Marsh Lane still dark and wet outside the window, she took off the pillowcase.
She had hardly slept. She had come in out of the rain with a scrap of paper in her hand, HE'S LYING ABOUT THE ENVELOPES, and had stood in the hall with her coat on for a full ten minutes, looking at the red light of the machine. Then she had made a pot of tea, and drunk none of it, and sat down with a pencil on the back of an old envelope and done the thing she did best, which was to list.
Facts.
One. Daniel owed Crane £260,000 in 1998. Two. He repaid, by Anselm, £400,000 in cash. Three. Crane's book says £184,200. Four. Martin carried the envelopes.
She drew a line.
Guesses.
Martin took it. Martin forged the deed. Martin killed him. Martin told Crane everything. Martin is a friend. Martin held my father's hand.
She had looked at the second list for a long time. She had crossed none of it out.
The machine woke with a low drawn-out groan like a dying cow, and a blue screen came up with a little green hill, and a box that said Please log on. There was a name in it already: Daniel. There was no password. She pressed Enter. She had expected, as one does, that a man's whole life would be guarded. It opened as readily as a gate.
He had not hidden it. That was the thing that undid her, afterward.
She had expected, in so far as she had expected anything, to find a vault: a locked folder, a buried file, a trail of coded numbers under a false name. Instead she found a perfectly ordinary desktop with a perfectly ordinary picture on it, the two of them on the long gray beach at Whitby under the abbey, in the March of the year they were married. She was laughing. She had been caught in mid-motion, with her hair blowing across her face in a dark streak and one hand clutching her hat, and Daniel had his arm round her waist and his face turned toward her instead of the camera. He was not laughing. He was looking at her with an odd wondering gravity, as if she were something that had been delivered to him by mistake.
She had never seen it. She did not know he had chosen it, out of all the pictures in the world, to be the first thing he saw when he woke the machine.
She touched the glass. She said, "You fool," very softly.
There was an icon of a blue e in the corner. She clicked it. The little hourglass turned for a long time, and the modem screamed, and a window opened on a plain gray page that said Hotmail, and under it, quite plainly, in a box, in a small neat row of dots where the machine had remembered what he typed, was a password.
The name above it was not one she knew. It said wexriver62. She did not have to think about what it meant. It was the river, and the year he was born, and she pressed the button and the whole bright page opened under her hand like a door.
There were sixty-one messages in the inbox. Every one of them was from one of two people.
The first called itself R. Anselm. She had known that one, with a cold nod of recognition, since Monday. It was short and sharp and entirely about the law.
The second said only K. Lyle.
She read for two hours. She read them as she had once read the letters of a dead Victorian clergyman for a county history, in order, from the beginning, with her finger moving down the screen, taking nothing for granted. It was not hard. He had written them as he talked, in short plain sentences with long silences between.
From K. Lyle, 9 June. Dear Mr. Hale. I'm sorry to write. I found your name in Mum's papers when I was clearing out. There's a lot of it. The standing order. A letter you wrote me when I was six that she never gave me. Also a birth certificate that has your name on it. I thought it was a mistake until I read the rest. I don't want anything. I only want to know why you stopped coming.
To K. Lyle, 10 June. Kit. I will tell you everything. I can't do it in an e-mail. I will tell you only that I never stopped wanting to, and that I have been a coward for nineteen years, and I am so sorry. I will come when I can. Will you give me till the autumn?
From K. Lyle, 10 June. You've given me nineteen years already. Autumn is OK.
She stopped. She sat with her hand pressed flat against her mouth. The screen hummed. Outside the window it was beginning to get light, a thin ashen gray coming up behind the shed, and somewhere in the lane a milk float was grinding along over the cobbles with its bottles ringing.
A letter you wrote me when I was six.
Nineteen years.
I thought it was a mistake until I read the rest.
She had not cried when she saw the photograph. She had thought that was the end of it, the first shock, and that nothing else could come in after it. She had not understood that it was only the first room of a house. There were corridors. There were stairs. And now she walked down them one by one with the blue light on her face, in the cold, in her dressing gown, with her bare feet on the lino, reading the whole of her husband's other life in the voice of a stranger.
He had a son.
It was not a question any longer. It stood on the screen in front of her in the plainest letters, in the dry polite voice of a boy who had been brought up to say thank you. She did not feel anger. That was the astonishing thing. She sat in the cold study with her heart beating slowly in her ears and waited for the anger, as one waits for a bus, and it did not come. There was only a vast low aching tenderness, like a wound that has not yet been opened, and under it a hundred small and terrible arithmetics.
Nineteen years. A birth in 1987. A standing order from 1999. Four hundred pounds a month.
Before me, she thought. Before, he met me in 1989. He had a child in 1987. He was twenty-five.
He never told me.
In all those years, with the three I lost, with the nursery at Mrs. Patek's, with the thing he said to me in the hospital in ninety-nine, when we came out into the corridor and I said I couldn't, I couldn't, and he held me and said, "We don't need it, Mara. We have each other." He had a child.
She put her head down on the desk.
She did not know how long she stayed there. When she lifted it, the gray light had grown white, and a shaft of sun had come in across the stone sink and fallen on the row of river stones in their tray, and the whole room had taken on that cold clean clarity that comes after weeping. She wiped her face with her sleeve. She sat up. She went on.
To K. Lyle, 14 July. You asked in your last letter what I was like when I was your age. I will tell you. I was a stupid, frightened boy with a lorry and a loan, and I thought that I could get away with it. I thought that if I paid for the sin often enough it would stop being one. It does not work that way. I have written you a letter, which I will give you. It is longer than this. It says everything, even the part about your mother, even the part about me. I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you to read it.
From K. Lyle, 14 July. I got the money. Thanks. I don't spend it. I've got it in a tin.
To K. Lyle, 15 July. Spend it, Kit.
From K. Lyle, 15 July. No.
There was a long gap after that, a whole month, in which neither of them wrote. And then, on the fourteenth of August, a longer message, in a different tone, formal and stiff and careful, like a note one writes to a headmaster.
From K. Lyle, 14 August. Dear Mr. Hale. I have thought about it. I understand now why you could not come. I read in the paper about the thing with the Inquiry and about the fire. I put two and two together. I think I know who you really are. I don't care what you called yourself. I'd like to see you, if you are ever not afraid. I'm not afraid. I'm nineteen, I'm sorry I'm not more useful. I'll be in Dunmarrow in October. I'll look out for you. I'll leave a stone on a windowsill when I'm near, like you taughtme, so you'll know it's me and not one of them.
She read it a second time. Then a third.
I'll leave a stone.
It was a thing he had done at nine, on a river bank in Aug 1996, with a fish, and she knew it as she knew her own hand. You pick one up, and carry it a while, and give it back to the nearest water. A father had taught his son that. And a son had taught it back, by notching it with a knife, so that he might say, in the one language the two of them had, I'm here.
She thought of a narrow boot print in the wet beside the mat. A gray hood under a lamp. A chin, a young unshaven chin, in the dark of a cold street, turned toward her bedroom window. A thin figure standing in a doorway across from a shuttered net-mender's, in the rain, in the lighthouse's sweep.
He was watching the house, she thought. He wasn't watching me. He was watching the place where his father lived.
He was waiting for someone to open the door.
There were three more messages. They were the last.
They had come in on the sixth of October, and the seventh, and the ninth. She had known, as one knows with an unopened letter, that she would come to them at last. She had put it off. She sat now with her hand on the mouse, and the sun on her hands, and clicked.
From K. Lyle, 6 Oct, 11.52 p.m. Dad? I'm outside. I saw your light go on at nine and then I went away for something to eat and when I got back it was still on but nobody answered the bell. I know you said Friday. I couldn't wait. It's raining. Please come to the window.
From K. Lyle, 7 Oct, 1.14 a.m. Dad please. I don't know what to do. There's nobody. The light's still on. I can see the lamp. I've tried the door, I'm not going to break it. Please.
From K. Lyle, 7 Oct, 5.03 a.m. They've taken you away, haven't they. I saw a police car and I got scared. I don't know what to do. I'm so sorry. I should have gone up. I could have gone up. I was there for four hours.
From K. Lyle, 9 Oct, 6.20 p.m. Dad I know you can't answer this. I read it in the paper. I know. I wanted to say, I'll go to the funeral if there is one. I'll stay at the back. You don't have to know me. I'm going to find out who it was, and I'll stay close to your wife. I think she's in danger. I think they're going to come for her next.
She read that last one slowly. She read it with her lips moving.
I'll stay close to your wife.
It was a small sentence. It sat on the bright glass like a coin on a counter, and she could not take her eyes from it. I think she's in danger. It was an extraordinary thing for a boy to say, in a rented room, with no money and no family and nobody in the world, to a man who could not read it. He had owed her nothing. He had never met her. He had stood in the rain for nineteen days outside a house in which she was cooking pepper soup for one, and had guarded it, and had said nothing, and he had done it because the man who gave him four hundred pounds a month had once cared for a woman called Mara.
You fool, she thought. She did not know whom she meant.
She went on to the folder marked Drafts. There was one message in it, unsent, addressed to kitl1987@hotmail.com. It was dated the fourth of October. It was short.
Kit. Friday, after the meeting. Eleven o'clock Harcourt Square, then lunch. I'd like to introduce you to Mara, if you'll let me. She doesn't know about you yet. I'm going to tell her myself. She will love you. I'm only sorry that it took me nineteen years to say so. D.
There was no more. The cursor blinked at the end of the last line, patient and regular, like a little red light in a hall.
I'm going to tell her myself.
She sat quite still. The sun had gone behind a cloud and the room had darkened. In the garden, in the pear tree, a blackbird began to sing, loudly, unbelievably, as it did every dawn, as though there had never been any reason in the world to stop.
And Amara Hale, forty-one years old, a widow, a daughter, a keeper of other people's secrets, lifted her hand from the mouse and laid it flat against her own breastbone, where something enormous and unexpected had come up through the floor of her and was spreading outward like warmth through cold hands, and said aloud, in the empty room, to the empty chair: "Yes. Yes. All right. Bring him."