Chapter 17
The Boy in the Gray Parka
She sent the message at one in the morning, from Daniel's account, on the family computer in the sitting room that Dera had unearthed from under a pile of laundry, and she wrote it nine times.
Kit. It's Amara. I'm sorry for the stitches, the scarf. I'll give it back. Come to the river. The steps at the bottom of Marsh Lane, by the old plank. Sunday, at six. I'll be alone. I won't be alone. My sister will be at the top of the steps with a torch and a rolling pin, and she is more frightening than anyone you have met. Please.
She read it. She took out the rolling pin. She put it back. She pressed Send, and the little hourglass turned, and a gray envelope flew across the screen, and she sat in the dark with her hands in her lap and thought: I've written to a dead man's son. I've told him about my sister. I've told him I won't be alone.
It was the most hopeful thing she had done in a month.
Sunday came in under a low sky the color of wet slate.
She did what she had done every day since the funeral. She got up. She made tea. She went round the house with a duster, because she could not bear the study as the burglars had left it, and put the books back in their order, and swept the pale square on the floor where the machine had been. At ten her mother rang from Enugu Road. They had a short sharp conversation about the church committee and the price of yams, in which neither of them said a single word that mattered and both of them understood the whole of it, and when it was over Amara stood in the hall with the receiver in her hand for a long minute before she put it down.
At noon she rang Quill.
She did it standing in the garden, in the cold, with the dead geraniums knocking against her shins. Quill answered on the second ring, with the clatter of a kitchen behind her and a radio playing hymns. "Mrs. Hale. Sunday. I'd hoped you'd ring on Wednesday."
"I'm sorry. I've been, there's been a, somebody broke into the house."
There was a short silence. The radio was turned down. "When?"
"Yesterday. While I was out. They took Daniel's computer. And some papers."
"Anything else?"
A box. A tray of stones. A page of a forged deed. "No."
"Was there a forced entry?"
"No. The front door was open. And the spare key. They knew where it was."
"I'll send someone." Quill's voice was low and level, with a faint dry edge of anger. "Mrs. Hale, I want to say something, and I'd like you to listen. I've been doing this a long time. I've sat with a lot of widows. And I've noticed that the ones who ring me on Wednesday, and then not till Sunday, and who say nothing, no, nothing else, are the ones who've got something in a drawer." A pause. "I'm not accusing you. I'm telling you I'm patient, and I'm on your side, and I'd rather have a bad truth than a good silence."
"Yes."
"Is there something you'd like to tell me?"
A key. A notebook. A son. Amara looked at the pear tree. A single pear, brown and wrinkled, hung from the topmost twig, forgotten by the pickers.
"Not yet," she said. "Tomorrow. I'll come to Dunmarrow on Monday, and I'll bring it all. I promise."
"Eleven o'clock."
"Eleven."
"Don't go anywhere alone," said Quill. She sounded very tired. "I don't mean be frightened. I mean be sensible. There's something about this one I don't like. I can't put it in a report. It's a feeling in the back of the neck."
"Yes," said Amara. "I've got it too."
The river steps were a flight of eleven stone treads at the bottom of Marsh Lane, green with moss, going down into the Wex between two crumbling brick piers. They had been built for the barges. Nobody had used them for a hundred years. At the foot of them a short shingle bank ran out into the water, and on the bank, half sunk in the stones, lay a long gray plank, split by frost, under the low black branches of an alder. It had been there since before she was born. She and Daniel had sat on it every October since the year they were married, with a flask and a packet of ginger biscuits, throwing stones at a rotting post.
She came down the steps at ten to six, with a flask in her bandaged hands.
It was nearly dark. The river was high and brown and quick, and a mist had begun to lift off it in long slow smoking threads. Somewhere upstream, a long way off, a church bell rang six. The lamps along the lane above her had come on one by one and made a pale necklace in the dusk. At the top of the steps, a small square figure in a green parka stood against the rail, with a torch in one fist and, quite plainly, a wooden rolling pin in the other.
"Dera," said Amara, "you can't hold it like that."
"It's perfectly visible."
"It's a rolling pin."
"It's a statement." Her sister did not move. "I'll be here. Shout, and I'll come. Don't be sentimental. And if he's not what he says, you hit him with the flask."
"I don't think I'll need the flask."
"No," said Dera, after a moment, more gently. "I don't think you will."
She sat on the plank. She laid the flask beside her. The cold came up through the wood, and the river made its long soft slurring sound against the stones, and a moorhen went squawking into the reeds. She waited. She did not know for how long. She watched the last of the light go off the water, and the mist thicken, and the stars come out, small and sharp, in the east. She thought of Daniel on this plank. She thought of his long gray overcoat spread behind them both on the wet wood, and a flask of tea, and his voice, low and amused: Go on, Mara. Try the post. You never hit the post.
She heard him before she saw him.
It was the faintest sound, a scrape of shingle, a bootsole easing down. And then he was there. He had come, as she had half expected, from the water side, along the narrow strip of mud under the willows. He stood at the edge of the circle of light from the lane, with his hands in his pockets and his hood down, thin and straight and white-faced, the cowlick standing up at his crown in the gloom like a feather.
"You came," she said.
"You said you'd be alone."
"I am."
"You've got somebody on the steps."
"My sister. She's not alone either. She's got a rolling pin." Amara tried to smile. "It's a family tradition."
He did not smile. But something moved at the corner of his mouth, and he came forward, three paces, four, and stopped a yard from the plank, looking down at it, and at her, and at the flask. He was shivering. It was not from cold. She had seen the same thing in the faces of children in the archive reading room, brought to look at the register of a grandparent's death: the stiff careful courtesy of a person terrified of being found wanting.
"Sit," she said. "Please. I've got tea."
"I don't, I'm all right."
"It's very hot. It's the only thing I'm good at."
He sat. He sat at the far end of the plank with his hands between his knees, and she poured, and held out the cup, and he took it in both hands as if it were a thing that might break. The steam rose between them. For a long time neither of them said a word. They sat side by side, a yard apart, looking at the river, and the mist moved over it, and a long way off the bell stopped.
"This is where he used to come," said Kit. "Isn't it."
"Yes."
"He told me about it. He said he'd sit here with you, and you'd talk, and he wouldn't say anything, and you'd never ask why he was so quiet." He took a swallow of tea. "He said it was the one place he ever felt he didn't have to pretend."
"He never pretended with me."
"No?"
"He did," said Amara, slowly. "But I never caught him at it."
He told it in pieces, between swallows of tea, in a low gruff voice that grew steadier as it went. He did not tell it well. He was not a boy who had been given many people to tell things to. He started in the middle and went back and went forward and stopped, and she did not interrupt. She sat with her hands round the cold flask and let it come.
He had known him as Dan. That was the first thing. A friend of his mother's, who came on the first Saturday of every month in a gray coat, with a bag of sweets, and sat on the end of the settee for an hour while Rosalind smoked and watched him with her head on one side. A tall quiet man who knew a great deal about rivers and could tie every kind of knot. He taught Kit to fish. He brought him a bicycle, a red one, on his ninth birthday, and stood in the road with his hands in his pockets watching him fall off it. And one summer, in a field by a stream, he had taken the photograph.
"I thought he was an uncle," said Kit. "Then I thought he was a, I don't know. A man from the church. I didn't ask. You don't, do you? He was just always there. And then he wasn't."
"When?"
"When I was twelve. He stopped coming. Mum said he'd, he'd gone abroad. For work." His jaw set. "She lied. She wasn't any good at it. I knew. I thought, he got bored. I thought he found someone else to give bicycles to."
"Kit—"
"Then she got ill." He said it flatly, as one reads a figure off a card. "And I found the letters. After. She'd kept them all. The ones he'd sent, with the, with the money. And there was a birth certificate, and a note in his hand, and I sat on the floor of her bedroom with all of it round me, and I understood."
"That he was your father."
"That he was a coward." His voice cracked. "I'm sorry. That's what I thought. For three years. I thought, he had a wife, a proper one, a house, a name. And I was the thing he paid for. A mistake in a tin." He drew a long shaky breath. "And then he wrote to me. In June. And he said everything. And I thought, oh."
"What?"
"I thought, he's frightened. He's more frightened than I am." He looked at her. In the dusk his eyes were very pale. "Do you know what he said, the last time I saw him? He came to Fenner Road, on the thirtieth of September, on a Saturday, in the rain. He stood in the kitchen where my mother died and he said, Kit, I have to do something dangerous. When it's done, I'll tell my wife about you. I want you to meet her. She will be angry for about a day. And then she'll feed you."
Amara laughed. It came out of her like a sob. She put her hand over her mouth.
"He said it'd be a day," said Kit.
"It was an hour," said Amara. "It was less."
He turned his head away. His shoulders had begun to shake. She did not touch him. She sat very still, a yard away, on the long gray plank with the river going by in the dark, and heard him cry, quite silently, as people do who have been taught to do it in the next room. And then, after a time, he wiped his face on the sleeve of the parka, and sat up, and said in a thick voice, "Sorry."
"Don't."
"I never meant to do that."
"I do it every day at four o'clock," said Amara. "In the kitchen. With a tea towel."
"I was there," said Kit. "That night."
She had known he would say it. She had known it since the sixth of October, in the cold light of a computer screen. She sat with her hands in her lap and said nothing.
"I got to Quay Street at about half past nine. I'd taken the bus. I hadn't told him. I thought, I'll stand across the road and look at the window. I thought, just once I'd like to see where he is. I stood in the net-mender's doorway. The light went round, the, you know, the lighthouse. And I saw him. At the window. He was just standing there. And I, I wanted to wave, and then I thought he'll be angry. I sent him a text. Look out of the window. I didn't mean it to scare him. I wanted him to know it was me."
"He did."
"Did he?"
"I think so." She had not known she was going to say it. "I think he knew it was you. I think he was glad."
Kit shut his eyes.
"I went for chips at ten to ten," he said. "There was a place on the corner. I was away about half an hour. When I came back the light was still on, and I stood there again, and the shop door was shut, and I thought, I'll ring the bell. And then I thought, he doesn't like surprises. And then the door opened."
"Which door?"
"The shop's. The one at the side, with the bell on it. It opened, and a man came out."
"What man?"
"I don't know." He opened his eyes. "That's the thing. I've been over and over it. He was big. He was a big man, in a dark coat, and a hat, a sort of soft hat, with the brim pulled down. He had his head bent. He shut the door behind him very quietly, like a thief. And he stood on the step, and I saw him pull on a pair of gloves. Black ones. Leather. Slowly. One finger at a time, as though he were in no hurry at all. And then he walked up the street to the car park and drove away."
"What car?"
"A dark one. I couldn't see the make. It was raining."
"What time?"
"It was twenty to eleven. I looked at my phone." His voice dropped. "And I went up. After. I did. I went up the stairs. I got as far as the door. I put my hand on it, and it was warm, and I could hear nothing, nothing at all, and I thought, he's asleep. And I knocked. Very softly. I said, Dad. And nobody answered. And I thought, I'll come back in the morning." His whole face quivered. "I went to sleep on a bench, Amara. I slept on a bench in the park. While he was lying there on the floor."
"You couldn't have known."
"I could. I could have gone in."
"The door was locked."
"It might have opened."
"It wouldn't," said Amara. "It was a spring lock. It locked behind whoever left." She put out her hand. She laid it, in its bandage, on the back of his, on the wet wood. "Kit. Listen to me. If you had gone in, there might have been two of you on the floor."
He did not move. He looked at her hand.
"You wore gloves," said Kit, in a flat low voice. "The man. I remember thinking, why would anyone, it wasn't cold. And I was at the funeral, I stood at the back, I saw you go in, and the big man with the glasses came in behind you in a black coat and he had black gloves on. Black leather. And I thought, that's a coincidence. And then I thought, no."
She did not answer. She could not. She sat with the cold coming up through her hand into her arm, into her shoulder, her chest, a long slow spreading chill like the rising of a tide. Martin has worn black gloves for three weeks. She saw them. She saw them on the steering wheel of a green Volvo, and on the cuffs of a funeral suit, and on the white handle of a teacup in her mother's kitchen. He never takes them off. She saw four long parallel scabs on the inside of a forearm in the white light of a bathroom, and a hand dropping a towel.
"Don't say it," she whispered.
"I haven't."
"I'd like to, I'd like to be wrong."
"So would I," said Kit. "I liked him. He sent me a birthday card, once. I never knew who it was from." He took his hand away, gently, and put it in his pocket. "Dad knew it was him." His face in the darkness was white as paper. "On the third. Dad. He came to see me at the flat and he said, I've told a friend what I'm going to do, and he's taken it hard, and I'm going to have to be careful. He's a man who has never in his life been able to lose. And I said, who? And he said, The best man at my wedding."
She did not remember climbing the steps.
She remembered Dera, at the top, with her torch and her rolling pin, and a sharp whispered what's happened, and her own voice answering something she did not hear. She remembered the boy coming up behind her, slow and shy, with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground. She remembered Dera looking at him. A long, still look, in the lamplight, from his scuffed boots to the cowlick. And she remembered, quite clearly, the moment when her sister's face changed.
"Oh," said Dera, softly. "Oh, you've got his chin."
"Dera," said Amara.
"I'm sorry." She had begun to cry. She did it without any embarrassment, as she did everything. She put the rolling pin on the wall. She put the torch on top of it. And she stepped forward, and took the astonished boy in her arms, in his gray parka, on the cobbles of Marsh Lane, in full view of any neighbor who cared to look, and held him against her shoulder, hard, with her cheek on his hair.
"I'm your aunt," said Dera, in a thick voice. "I'm a nurse, I'm shouting, and you're going to come home and eat something."
He stood stiffly, with his arms by his sides. Then, slowly, as if he had forgotten how it was done, they came up.
Amara stood a little away. She was looking at the end of the lane. It was a long wet cobbled street, with its row of yellow windows, its gleaming gutters, its parked cars, and at the very bottom, where the lamp was out, under the black bulk of the chestnut, a car was parked. It was dark. It had its lights off. It was a big, square, familiar shape, with a rear bumper that sat a little crooked, and she could not see, in the dusk, what color it was.
She watched it for a long time.
It did not move.