Chapter 18
Dinner at the Ashbys'
She almost didn't go.
Quill had texted at seven on Monday morning, six curt words that did not sound like Quill. Called to Leeds. Thursday. Eleven. Careful. It was the first time that Amara had been glad of a delay. She had spent Monday with a pencil and a notebook of numbers, and Tuesday standing at the sink.
The invitation came on Tuesday, at the end of a day she spent standing at the sink with her hands in hot water and her mind in a gray room in Dunmarrow, waiting for a telephone that did not ring. Jo rang at four. She said come tonight, and then, more softly, please, love, I can't bear you sitting alone in that house. There was a note in her voice that Amara had not heard before, a kind of thin high anxious brightness, like a woman talking to a child on the edge of a roof. And behind it, faintly, she could hear the sounds of the other house: a kettle, a radio, the slow deep cough of a man in an adjoining room.
"Martin's been so low," said Jo. "He's not sleeping. He thinks the world of you, you know. Both of you. He'd feel so much better if he could see you were eating."
"I don't know, Jo. I'm not very good company."
"Nobody's asking you to be company. It's a roast chicken."
Dera, from the doorway, shook her head violently. Dera had swapped two shifts that week. She had hung up her scrubs, and spent three days making lists in a jumper of Amara's, on the principle, she said, that any problem could be solved by someone with a clipboard. The boy was at her own flat across town, where nobody knew his name, with the cards in their shoebox and strict orders not to open the door. She had suggested, at one point, that they set a trap. She had drawn it on a napkin.
Don't go, she mouthed.
I have to.
Why?
She had not been able to answer. She did not know. She only knew that for seventeen years she had sat at the Ashbys' table on the second Tuesday of the month, and that if she did not go, somebody would notice. And she knew something else, too, dimly, shyly, with a feeling that was close to shame. She wanted to be there. She wanted to sit in a warm kitchen that smelled of roast meat and gravy and wet dog and see Martin carve a chicken, and hear Jo say oh, you, and have it be exactly as it always was. She wanted, with a bleak and desperate longing, to be proved wrong.
"I'll come," she said.
The Ashbys lived on Ferndale Road, in the tall Edwardian semi at the end with the monkey-puzzle in the front garden, and the lights were on in every window.
She stood on the step in her good black coat, with a bottle of Daniel's wine in a carrier bag, and looked at it. It was a house she knew as she knew her own. She knew the green door with the cracked fanlight and the brass dolphin knocker and the boot-scraper shaped like a hedgehog. She knew the smell that would meet her in the hall, of beeswax and onions and wet raincoats. She knew that on the third stair there would be a pile of Jo's library books, and that in the downstairs loo there would be a framed cartoon of a man being chased by a goose. It had been the setting of her happiest evenings. It was the house in which she had met her husband.
The door opened before she could ring.
"Oh, love," said Jo.
She was a short round freckled woman of fifty-four, with a mop of bright russet hair going gray at the roots and a broad kind plain face scrubbed pink by constant weeping, and she wore an apron with a picture of a cow on it. She threw her arms around Amara's neck with a clatter of bangles. She smelled of onions, and flour, and Pears soap, and the faint worn warmth of a woman who has been standing at a cooker for four hours. "Oh, come in, come in, you're frozen. Look at your hands. What have you done? Martin! Martin, she's here!"
"I'm here," said Martin.
He was standing in the doorway of the kitchen with a tea towel over one shoulder, and he looked as though somebody had let the air out of him. He had shaved. He had put on a clean white shirt and a gray cardigan with leather buttons, and he held a glass of sherry in his gloved hand, and he said, with a smile that did not quite reach the corners of his mouth: "You came."
"I said I would."
"I wasn't sure." His voice was hoarse. "I told Jo you wouldn't. I said you'd, I said you'd want to be left alone."
"Don't be silly."
"I'm not being silly. I'm being, I'm being a coward." He crossed the hall and kissed her on the cheek. His skin was dry and hot, and he smelled of sherry and sleep and, very faintly, of the clean bitter medicinal smell she knew too well. "Come and sit down. Come in the warm."
It was the same. That was what she could not bear.
She sat at the scrubbed table in the long low kitchen, in her old place by the Aga, with a glass of wine in front of her and the dog's head on her foot. They had a dog now, an elderly spaniel named Biscuit, who had belonged to Jo's mother and who lay under the table with a long mournful sigh, breathing out gusts of biscuity air. The windows were steamed. A radio was playing, softly, a violin concerto she did not know. On the dresser stood the photographs: their son Ben at his graduation, Jo and Martin at Carrow Water in matching oilskins, a fat gray cat in a box. The roast chicken sat in its tin on the hob, bronzed and glistening, in a puddle of juice, and beside it a dish of roast potatoes and a bowl of sprouts with chestnuts and a gravy boat steaming like a small ship.
"I did the sprouts with bacon," said Jo. "You always liked them. Don't tell me you don't. Martin, carve."
"Yes, dear."
"And roll up your sleeves, for heaven's sake, you'll get gravy on that cardigan."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine, it's your good one. Honestly. I don't know what's got into him." Jo shook her head and began to ladle. "He's been so peculiar since the roses. He used to be as bad as a boy about it, up to the elbows in everything, and now he goes about in long sleeves like a monk. I said, you'll cook, Martin. You'll cook in that."
"I'm cold," said Martin, mildly.
"You're not cold. It's the Aga."
"I'm cold, Jo."
He took the knife and the long fork, and stood at the end of the table with his sleeves buttoned to the wrist and his shoulders bowed. He carved with a slow awkward precision, not a flourish, not a joke. The white meat fell away from the bone in clean even slices. He laid them on a warm plate. He did not look up. And Amara, with her wine glass held in both hands and her heart beating small and cold in her chest, watched his hands and thought, with perfect lucid detachment: There was a year he did it with his sleeves up to the shoulder. He said it was surgery.
Hands up, ladies and gentlemen.
"Here," said Martin. He put a plate in front of her. His eyes were red. "Eat. You've lost a stone."
They talked about nothing. It was a skill that Jo had, that Amara had always admired: a gift for conversation without content, like the pleasant meaningless warble of a bird. They talked about Ben, who was in Edinburgh, doing something in marine biology that required him to stand in rivers. They talked about the spaniel's gall bladder. They talked about Jo's mother, who had broken her hip in September and was now in St. Aldhelm's Cottage Hospital, being wooed by a retired bus driver in the next bed. It was warm and silly and soothing. Amara ate her chicken, and felt it go down like sand.
"He's had a bad week," Jo said, at one point, to the table at large, in a low conspiratorial voice, nodding toward her husband, who had gone out to fetch another bottle. "You mustn't mind him. He's been walking about in the night. I wake up at three and he's not there. I find him in the kitchen with the light off, just sitting. And he talks in his sleep. He never used to." She shook her head. "He was at it again last night. Calling out. It frightens me, honestly. I don't know what he sees."
"What does he say?"
"Oh, it's all muddle. It's all names. Dan, Dan. And a lot of sorries. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I said, what for? And he said he didn't know what I was talking about."
Amara put down her fork.
She did not know how she did it. She laid it with great care on the edge of her plate, quite level, and folded her hands in her lap. She said, in a voice that sounded to her entirely ordinary: "What else?"
"Last night it was awful. He said, I didn't mean it to be you. I didn't mean it to be you, Dan. And then he was crying. And he said it was only supposed to be the book."
The kitchen was very silent. The violin on the radio rose in a thin high sweet phrase, and held, and fell.
"Jo," said Martin.
He was standing in the doorway with a dusty bottle of claret in his hand. He had come in so quietly that neither of them had heard. He was looking at his wife. And his face was not angry, not even troubled: it was a perfectly smooth, mild, tired, slightly puzzled face, such as a man wears when his wife has said something silly in front of a guest.
"I don't talk in my sleep," he said gently.
"You do, darling."
"I think I'd know."
"You wouldn't. That's the point of it."
"It's the books." He set the bottle down. His hand, Amara saw, was perfectly steady. "I've been in Dan's ledgers for a fortnight, Jo. I dream in debits. Only supposed to be the book, I expect I was thinking of the cash book that's gone missing. As for the rest, I wouldn't wonder if I did say sorry. I'm sorry every minute of the day." He gave a small wry grimace, and turned to Amara. "I'm afraid a man doesn't get over a thing like that. He sits down at the end of his life and finds he's been arguing with a dead man."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be." He picked up the corkscrew. "More wine?"
She held out her glass. He filled it. She watched the dark red stream go in, and rise, and tremble. And she did not say what she was thinking, which was that Dan had never, in seventeen years, had a thing to be forgiven for where Martin was concerned, and that I didn't mean it to be you is not a sentence one says to a ledger.
It was only supposed to be the book.
---It was only supposed to be the book.
Jo took the plates out at nine. She stood at the sink, in the steam, with her back to them and the radio turned up, and began, with a clatter, to wash.
"Go and sit by the fire, you two," she said. "I'll bring coffee. I won't hear a word."
The sitting room was at the front of the house, low and warm and crowded, with a coal fire and a squashy chintz sofa and a hundred years of books on every wall. Martin made up the fire. He did it on his knees with a poker and a scuttle, silently, with his back to her. She sat on the sofa in her coat, and looked at the pictures, the sailing boats, the oil painting of a lake, a photograph in a frame of two men on a bench, laughing, with their arms round each other's shoulders, in the sun.
It was Martin and Daniel. It was fifteen years ago, or sixteen. They were sitting on a bench by the river at Wexcombe in the spring, with chips in paper, and Martin's mouth was open in a roar and Daniel's long face was creased with silent mirth. She had taken it. She had stood on the bank in a green dress and shouted say cheese, and they had said, in unison, in a ridiculous voice, Brie.
"I never thanked you," she said.
Martin's back stiffened. He did not turn. "For what?"
"For introducing us."
There was a long pause. The poker stopped. The fire cracked and spat.
"Don't," he said. His voice had gone odd, very low and rough. "Please. Don't, Amara."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't deserve it."
"Martin—"
"Because I don't deserve it." He turned. He was kneeling on the hearthrug in the firelight, with the poker in his hand, and his broad face was wet. The tears ran down it in two shining tracks and fell on the cardigan. "He was the best man I ever knew. And I, and I let him. I should have, I should have done something. I should have seen."
"Seen what?"
"That he was in trouble." He wiped his face on his sleeve. "I thought it was the job. I thought it was money. I never thought, I never thought it was anything like this." His mouth worked. "I'd give my arm. You know that. I'd give anything."
She believed him. That was the dreadful thing. She sat in the fire's warmth, with her gloved hands in her lap, and looked at the broken, shining, red-eyed, honest face of the man who had held her father's hand, and it was the truest thing she had ever seen. He was weeping with his whole body. He was not acting. She would have staked her life on it.
And yet.
She did not say it. She sat there with a long cold hollow growing inside her, as a stalactite grows, drop by slow drop in the dark. And it came to her, quite quietly, from a great distance, in her own cool voice, that it was possible for a man to weep like that and mean every tear. That grief and guilt wear the same face. That a man might love someone entirely, and also have killed him.
"Martin," she said.
"Yes?"
"Silas Rook told me that you'd been very helpful to him. Over the years."
He did not move. It was an extraordinary thing to watch. The tears were still wet on his cheeks, but everything behind them, every particle of life, seemed to stop, as a clock stops. His face was perfectly blank. He looked at her with round clear pale eyes, like a deer looking at a lamp. And then, quite slowly, he smiled.
"Did he?" he said. "When did you speak to Silas Rook?"
"At the funeral."
"He's a poisonous little man. I carried envelopes, love. I told you. I was a postbox. If he wants to say I was helpful, it's because he's a liar by trade and he'd like you to think I was in it up to my neck." He rose, stiffly, with a hand on the mantel. "I'd tell you if I were. You know that. You know I'd tell you anything."
Jo came in, at that moment, with a tray. There was coffee, and a plate of shortbread, and a small trembling dish of trifle. She set it down with a bump. She said, Well, what are you two looking so solemn about, and sat on the arm of the sofa and put her arm round Amara's shoulders, warm and heavy and smelling of washing-up liquid. The spaniel rose and flopped across their feet. The fire hissed. And for the next half hour nothing was said at all.
He drove her home at eleven.
It had come on to rain again, a fine cold mist that hung in the headlights like smoke. The Volvo's heater roared. The wipers swept. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and looked straight ahead through the glass, at the wet black road unrolling in the beam, the shining tarmac, the hedges, a flash of white where a fox ran across.
She was looking at the dashboard.
It was very clean. That was what she noticed. The sweet wrappers were gone, and the spare fuses, and the litter of dockets and receipts. There was nothing on it but a pair of sunglasses and a packet of mints. She sat looking at the bare gray plastic, as one looks at a room one has not been in for years, searching for the one thing that has moved. There was a small, faintly paler patch on the vinyl, just above the speedometer, in the shape of a rectangle.
"You've tidied," she said.
"Jo," said Martin. "She had a go at it on Sunday. She said it looked like a skip."
"There was a ticket there. A car park ticket."
"Was there?"
"The day we drove to Dunmarrow." She heard her own voice go on, level and polite. "From a supplier lunch, you said. In Dunmarrow. Last week."
"Ah. Yes." He did not glance at her. His eyes were on the road. "I think it must have gone in the bin. It was probably, it was out of date, it was nothing."
"Quay Street car park."
"Was it? I don't remember. It's a big town." He shifted down for the junction. "Is something wrong?"
"No," said Amara.
They stopped at the lights on Silver Street. The red light spilled across the wet windscreen in a long slow stain, and ran down it, and drained away. Neither of them spoke. She could hear the wipers, and the drum of the rain on the roof, and the quiet steady wheeze of his breathing, and somewhere beneath it, very faintly, the slow irregular tick of a hot engine cooling.
"Amara," he said.
"Yes?"
"That book." He was looking straight ahead. "The one he always carried. The Dumas. Did the police give it back?"
The lights changed. She did not move. She was aware of her whole body, of the skin on the back of her neck, and the cold small stone of her heart.
"Yes," she said.
"Was there anything in it?"
"Only my handwriting."
"Ah." The Volvo pulled away, smoothly, into the dark street. "I always thought it was an odd thing to carry. A man like that. A man who never read anything but spreadsheets." He gave a short, dry, affectionate laugh, a sound so like his real laugh that she could have wept. "You gave it to him, didn't you? That first anniversary. I remember. He rang me in the middle of the night to say. He said, Martin, she's given me a thing that's mine."
She did not answer.
"You must have been very proud," said Martin.
They turned into Marsh Lane. The street was empty, and dark, and glistening, with a single yellow lamp at the corner and a cat's pale eyes on a wall. The house stood at the end of the terrace, blind and silent, the windows black, the porch light off. Her mother was at Enugu Road. Dera was across town with the boy. There was nobody home.
"I'll walk you in," said Martin.
"No."
"I'd feel better."
"I'd rather you didn't." She had her hand on the door. Her voice had gone quite steady. "I'm very tired, Martin. I'd like to go to bed."
"Of course."
"Thank you for the dinner."
"Of course. Of course." He put out a hand, and for a second, as she opened the door and the cold wet night came in around her, his gloved fingers closed over hers on the leather of the seat and held them. They were very warm. They were trembling. "You'll lock the doors."
"Yes."
"And the back."
"Yes."
"And you'll ring me. If anything." He drew a breath. "Amara. Promise me. If you find anything, anything at all, you'll ring me first. Not the police. Not that lawyer. Me. I'm the only one who can help."
She looked at him. And in the green glow of the dashboard, in the beating rain, she saw the face of her oldest friend: the thick glasses, the thinning hair, the patient doglike dark eyes. He was gazing at her with such naked tenderness, such unbearable appeal, that her throat closed. He was begging. He was asking her, with every fiber of his body, to tell him that she trusted him.
"I promise," said Amara.
It was the lie that cost her most. It tore out of her like a thread being drawn through flesh, and she saw it go into him, and saw him believe it, and saw the great slow weary relief that went over his face, like a hand smoothing a sheet. He sat back. He took his hand away. He said, Good girl, in a thick soft voice, and she got out of the car and went up the path in the rain without looking round, and let herself in, and shut the door, and shot the bolt, and stood with her back against it in the dark hall with her eyes closed.
Good girl.
He had never called her that. Not once. In seventeen years.
She heard the Volvo idle at the gate. She counted. It was a long time, nearly two minutes, before the engine note changed, and rose, and the tires hissed away down the lane. And only when the sound had faded completely, only when the silence had settled back over the house like a lid, did she push herself away from the door, and walk down the passage to the kitchen, and turn the key in the lock of the back door, slowly, softly, with her fingers shaking.
And then turn it back.
She stood for a long time with her hand on the cold brass. Beyond the glass, the garden lay black and glistening. The shed. The pear tree. The blue pot by the wall. She thought of a boy on a wet plank saying, in a flat low voice, He wore gloves.
She left it unlocked. She had put the Monte Cristo on the kitchen table in a pool of lamplight, where it could be seen from the door, its cracked spine toward the window, and the notebook and the cards and the key were with Dera, across town, in a drawer under a pile of towels. She went and sat down at the kitchen table with the lamp off, and her father's old ash stick across her knees, and thought of a man in black gloves taking his time on a step in the rain. If he wants the book, she thought, let him come where I can see him. And she waited, in the dark, to see who would come.