Chapter 26
What the Debt Was Worth
They buried Kit Lyle on a Wednesday in the middle of November, in the rain, beside his father.
Nobody had told Amara she could. She did it anyway, quietly, through Mr. Alder, who came to the house on Marsh Lane on the Monday morning with his leather folder and his dry soft voice and said nothing at all when she told him what she wanted. He wrote it down. He said that the plot beside Mr. Hale's was, as it happened, free. He said that it was very proper. And she had looked across the front room at him, over the rim of a cup of tea, and understood that this tall dusty man, who had buried half of Wexcombe, had seen a great many families put together in a great many strange ways, and had learned never to remark on any of them.
There was no one else to tell. The mother was dead. The father was dead. The only living relatives of Christopher Lyle, nineteen, of 9 Fenner Road, Dunmarrow, were an Okeke woman who had known him eight days, her sister the nurse, and an elderly lady in Igbo-patterned wrapper cloth, with a rosary, who had taken a seat in the front pew of St. Aldhelm's and said to no one in particular, in a clear carrying voice, This is my grandson.
It was the first time that Ngozi had said it. It was the only time. Nobody contradicted her.
The church was not empty.
Amara noticed it as the coffin was carried in, borne by six men from Mr. Alder's firm, and she turned her head. They were standing at the back, in their coats, in ones and twos, in the gray light from the high windows. There was Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss, in a purple hat, with a plate of something wrapped in foil. There was Gail Dunstan, weeping already. There was the landlord, Mr. Pallister, in a suit, with his hat in his hands, and beside him, tall and thin and astonishing in a black overcoat and a clerical collar, a Father Ikenna whom she had not asked and had never been more glad to see. There was Ruth Anselm, small and upright in gray, with her glasses on her chest. There was Detective Inspector Quill, at the very back, alone, in a black raincoat, who gave her a small grave nod. And in the doorway, filling it, holding a bunch of wet yellow tulips, stood an enormously tall bent man in a dark coat. It was a minute before she knew him.
It was Dennis Alcott.
He had not been told. He had heard it from the porter. He had come down on the bus.
At the end, when the celebrant had said what he had been given to say, and the curtains had not yet closed, she stood up, because nobody else did. She had written nothing. She walked up to the front and laid her hand on the lid, where the brass plate gleamed. It was cold. She stood, and felt her own breath come and go.
"He came to my husband's door," she said. "In the rain, at night, at half past ten, and put his hand on the wood and said Dad. Nobody answered. He went away. He told me afterward that it was the worst thing he'd ever done." Her voice shook, and steadied. "I'd like to say he was a coward. He'd have liked that. He always said it of himself. But I saw what he did on the last day, and I'd like it on the record that Christopher Lyle was the bravest person I have ever met. He stepped between a man and an axe. He didn't know me well. He did it because someone had to."
She stopped. She had meant to say more.
"His father's name was Daniel," she said, instead. "He'd like me to say, he's with him."
And she went back to her pew and sat down, and Dera held her.
They laid him in the ground at noon, on the hill above the town, in the plot next to a plain pine cross that read DANIEL HALE. 1962–2006, among the old yews, with the rain beading on the oak. Amara laid a handful of earth on the lid, and it made the sound that she remembered. Then she bent, and slid something into the damp clay at the head of the grave, between the cross and the boy's new mound: a small flat gray stone with a seam like a vein, and a notch cut into the edge.
So the river remembers, she thought.
In her coat pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, was a small folding knife with a horn handle. She had been meant to give it up as evidence, and Quill had looked at her over the top of a form, and written, personal effect, returned to family. She did not know where it would go. She thought, perhaps, a drawer.
The headstone came from Dunmarrow, in a van, on the first Friday of December.
It was grey granite, unfussy, with a plain cut inscription. It had cost eighteen hundred and fifty pounds, and she had paid for it in notes, out of a purple Quality Street tin that had come to her in a plastic bag from Dera, with a note pinned to the lid in a boy's cramped hand that said For Mum. When I've got enough. There had been nine thousand six hundred pounds in the tin. She had spent eighteen hundred and fifty. The rest she had put in a savings account at the Wexcombe building society in the name of Christopher Lyle, deceased, and had not touched, and had told no one about, and did not know yet what she would do with.
The stonemason's men erected it that morning in the garden of remembrance at Dunmarrow Crematorium, in a bed of dark wet gravel, under a bare cherry. Amara stood beside it in her good black coat with her mother on her arm. It was a small ceremony. A nurse in a blue cardigan, who had come on her day off. A neighbor in a headscarf and a purple hat. A small gray woman in spectacles, who had come from Harcourt Square, and who had brought an umbrella and held it, without a word, over all of them.
ROSALIND MARY LYLE. 1955–2004. A nurse, a mother, a friend. Beloved of Christopher. Remembered by Daniel.
Nobody said anything. The rain dripped off the cherry. Somewhere a wood pigeon began, and stopped, and began again.
She did not open the letter until the ninth day.
It lay on the kitchen table in its cream envelope, propped against the sugar bowl, where she could see it from the stove. She went past it a hundred times. She boiled eggs. She filled the kettle. She answered the door to a locksmith, and an insurance man, and a woman from the Archive Trustees with a basket of fruit and a long embarrassed speech about leave, of course, for as long as is needed. She did not touch it. Dera, who did not ask, moved the sugar bowl twice a day to dust, and put it back.
On the tenth morning she woke before light and went down in her dressing gown. She sat at the table. She put the kettle on, and let it boil, and turned it off. She slit the flap with a boy's horn-handled knife.
There were two sheets, in his hand.
Mara,
If you are reading this, I have not been able to say it to your face, which is the one thing I promised myself I would do.
I am not going to tell you the story. I expect you know it by now. You will have found the book, because you are cleverer than I am, and you will have found Kit, or he will have found you, and you will have decided that I am a coward and a liar. I would like to say that both are true. I would like to say that I have been both for twenty years, and that I never once meant it to cost you. I should have told you on the first night. I wanted to, every day. Each day it got harder, and I told myself I would find the right moment, and that is the lie that all liars tell.
What I want you to know is this. The only true thing I ever did was you.
Fifteen years ago a woman in a green dress, with the wrong shoes, asked me what sort of paper I liked, and I fell in love with her, and it was the first time since I left Bristol that I was not pretending. I was not a debtor. I was not a smuggler. I was just a man who wanted to be in the room with you. You never asked who I was. You only asked me what I wanted for tea. I cannot explain what that was to me.
I know what I'm asking, and I know I have no right. But when it's over, and they have said what they'll say, I'd like you to go back to the river. You know the place. Take two stones. One for me, and one for the person I used to be, before I could not tell you. Throw them in, and let the Wex have them. Then go on. Be happy, Mara. Be loud and ordinary and cross about the washing-up. Do not turn into a museum.
Take care of the boy. He is a better man than I am. He doesn't know it yet.
I have never been able to say it as well as you could, so I will say it the only way I know.
You're just where I left you.
D.
She read it once. Then she folded it, and put it back in the envelope, and laid her forehead on the table, on her folded arms, and did not move until the kettle had gone cold.
The trial of Victor Crane began at Dunmarrow Crown Court on the fifth of February, in the old assize building behind the harbor, and lasted nine weeks.
She attended every day. She sat in the public gallery in her gray coat with a notebook on her knee and a flask of tea at her feet, between a woman in a green headscarf and a young man who bit his nails, and she listened. She was not called. There was no need. A man in a long black overcoat, with a small scar behind his right ear, stood in the witness box on the second day with his hands folded and gave evidence against his employer for six hours, in a soft level voice, and did not once look at the dock. He had a suitcase packed, he told the judge. He had packed it, at the latest count, eleven times in his career, and it had never occurred to him before that he might be left to carry it.
They played the tapes. They played them all. They played an old man's cultured voice on a rainy Friday in 1999 saying how is our friend? and a younger man's saying doing his best, and in the second week they played a third, a clear unhurried voice of her husband's on a night in September 2001, speaking to a tape recorder in a parked lorry on Berth Nine, an hour after. He had recorded it, he said, because he was afraid that one day nobody would believe him. He described a crane driver, and a stack of containers, and a man called Dennis Kerr. At the end of it there was a long silence in the courtroom. A woman in the front row of the public gallery, with two grown daughters on either side, bent her head, and her shoulders shook, and the girls put their arms round her. She had been told for five years that her husband had fallen on an unlicensed shift. Nobody had told her that someone had held his head.
Crane was convicted on eleven counts. He was seventy-one. The judge, a tired woman with a face like folded paper, said that he had built a long, careful, civilized life upon the fear of other people, and that she regretted the law did not permit her to say what she thought of it. She gave him fourteen years. He nodded, politely, as one acknowledges a train timetable, and was led away, with a hand under his elbow, in his camel coat. He asked, on the way out, whether somebody might see to the birds.
Martin Ashby had pleaded guilty on the eleventh of December, to two counts of murder and thirty-one of fraud, in a crown court she did not attend. He was sentenced to a minimum of thirty years. He was carried into the dock in a chair. Jo came to the house once, on a Sunday evening in late November, and stood on the doorstep in the rain, without an umbrella, with the spaniel on a lead, and Amara opened the door, and for a long time neither spoke.
"I didn't know," said Jo. "I want you to know that. I didn't know a thing."
"I know."
"I'd have staked my life."
"I know," said Amara. "So would I."
"I don't know what to do." The older woman's face crumpled, gently, as a child's does, all at once, with no sound. "He was in the house. Every night. He was in my bed."
Amara looked at her. She thought: there will be a long time for hating. She thought: it will not begin tonight. And she stood aside from the door, and said, quite simply, "Come in out of the wet, Jo," and put the kettle on.
They did not speak of it. They drank their tea in the kitchen, beside the cold stove, in a silence that was almost companionable. At the end of an hour Jo stood, and thanked her, and took the dog's lead, and went. She sold the house in the spring. She moved in with Ben, in Edinburgh. They never met again.
The second charge on Marsh Lane was set aside in March, by a district judge in a small bare room, in eleven minutes, on a single sheet of paper. It was a forgery, and it had been proved a forgery, and Ruth Anselm, in a gray suit, with her spectacles on her nose, said so in four sentences. The six hundred and twelve thousand four hundred and eighteen pounds disappeared as if it had never been. It had been, as it turned out, a number. It had been a number all along.
The real debts were smaller, and drearier, and she paid them. There was a tax claim on the yard, for duty evaded in eight years of false papers, which she settled by selling Hale Marine Freight, its lorries and its lease, to a firm of hauliers from Hull for a little under what it was worth. There was the bank, whose arrears were cleared by an insurance policy that nobody had told her about, taken out by a man in a gray overcoat in 1992 and renewed, every October, without fail. She stood in a notary's office with a pen in her bandaged hand and signed away the last of it, and walked out into the street, and found that she was crying with relief, and could not think why.
She kept the house. It stood at the end of the terrace with its wine-colored door and its brass letterbox, which she polished every second Sunday, and its hall light, which she left burning.
She had lost a husband, and a boy. She had lost, in a way, the whole of a life she had thought she was living, and the best of her friends, and a certain simple, warm, trusting belief that the world was made of people who would tell you the truth. She had lost three children before that, and a name on a headstone that she was not yet ready to read.
She had been given, and had kept, a house, a sister, and a mother who said my grandson in public. She had kept a stone with a seam in it, and a gray parka in a polythene bag, and a horn-handled knife in a drawer.
Do not turn into a museum, wrote Daniel.
She went home to the empty house on the evening of the last day of the trial, and took off her coat. The hall was dark. She did not turn on the light. She stood a long time on the doormat, with her keys in her hand, and looked at the table in the shadows, and the shoebox, and the telephone, and the pieces of the answering machine in a plastic bag beside it, where Dera had put them after the police gave them back.
She hung up her coat. She walked into the kitchen, switched on the lamp, and sat down at the table, and, for the first time in six months, she was hungry.