Part 27 (2/2)

'Me?' said Caspar, raising his hands in mock alarm.

'When we spoke that time before you came to the public meeting about the hostel... You said something about a study that showed that once people had made a public commitment to something, then even evidence that contradicted their stand would only make them more committed to it. That's how it went isn't it?'

'Yes.'

'I want to be rea.s.sured but I want to be right right and rea.s.sured.' and rea.s.sured.'

'Then I can't rea.s.sure you.'

'I don't know about that.'

We both placed our gla.s.ses on the table and I don't know who made the first move but we were against each other, kissing each other hard, running our hands over each other. I pushed open the b.u.t.tons of his s.h.i.+rt, pop, pop, pop, and pulled my mouth from his and ran my lips in the soft down of his chest. He lifted my sweater over my head and pushed my bra up off my b.r.e.a.s.t.s without even undoing it.

'Wait,' I gasped. 'Let me undo my boots.'

My boots were fastened like Victorian stays. He shook his head and I felt his hands on my knees and then moving up my legs. No tights, thank G.o.d. He reached my knickers, took a double-handed grip and pulled them down, over my boots and off. I fell back on the sofa, my skirt above my waist and he was inside me.

Later, we went to the bedroom and took off our entangled, twisted clothes and examined each other's bodies all over in precise detail and made love again and I felt, almost for the first time, that s.e.x was something I could become really good at. We lay together for hours, talking, until at about five Caspar murmured something about f.a.n.n.y and I kissed him deeply and got up and got dressed, then kissed him deeply again and left. As I cycled in the dark early morning, I thought with sweet contempt of all the people who were in bed asleep.

Thirty-Five.

The day before the trial, a couple of photographers had lurked outside my house and snapped at me as I'd come out to buy a carton of milk. I'd put my hand over my face, knowing as I did so how that would look in the next day's papers. I could imagine the captions : 'The hidden face of the accuser', 'The defiant daughter-in-law'.

I didn't attend the trial itself, such as it was. I knew that I would be summoned if required. On the morning it began and ended, I left for the office very early before seven to avoid any further press attention, but still a journalist managed to collar me. 'Are you going to the trial?' he shouted, and I blundered past him, pus.h.i.+ng my bike, saying nothing.

On the way home, I saw it on the news-stand in block capitals : NOVELIST : 'I KILLED MY DAUGHTER'. I braked to a halt, and bought a Standard. Standard. An old handsome photograph of Alan dominated the front page. Sweat broke out on my forehead and my breath came in short, frantic gulps. An old handsome photograph of Alan dominated the front page. Sweat broke out on my forehead and my breath came in short, frantic gulps.

I biked home, fumbled the Chubb lock. A package had been squeezed through my letter-box, and I recognised the handwriting : Paul's. This must be his video. All I needed.

The house was chilly, so I switched the heating on early and made my way to the kitchen. I put on the kettle and placed two slices of bread in the toaster. The answering machine was flas.h.i.+ng messages at me but I didn't play them back. I was pretty sure they'd be from journalists, asking for my comment. The paper, still folded in my bag, was like a magnet, but I resisted it at first. I spread bitter marmalade (given to me the year before by Martha) onto toast and poured boiling water over a tea bag. I sat at the table in my coat and took a gulp of weak tea.

My eyes hopped through the text, trying to find the important details. Alan had pleaded guilty, refusing to make any plea in mitigation. The prosecution QC had made a brief evidentiary statement (much of which consisted of Natalie's note, the circ.u.mstances of its finding and my memory). He concluded that, in the light of the psychiatrist's report, the prosecution saw no reason to doubt that Alan Martello was sane. There was nothing about him having made Natalie pregnant. I didn't know why. Before the judge pa.s.sed sentence, Alan had made just one statement : 'I am expiating a horrible crime which has haunted my family for decades.' He refused to elaborate on this or to say anything else at all. The judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the most heinous and primal of crimes and said that Alan's refusal adequately to acknowledge what he had done or to co-operate fully with proceedings had only made matters worse. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he serve at least fifteen years.

There was a large photograph of the Martello brothers, grim-faced, all present at the trial. They had refused to make any comment to the press and the Standard Standard called them 'dignified, almost heroic'. Claud, apparently, had held Fred while he wept. There was a smaller picture of me, hand flung over my face, and a cropped portrait of Natalie which I'd never seen before. She looked younger than sixteen in it and conventionally pretty. Nothing threatening or sinister about that face. There was a two-page story under the heading, NATALIE'S SHORT LIFE AND BRUTAL DEATH. Under a slightly blurred photo of the seven Martellos all together and smiling ran a short piece starting : 'They seemed such a happy family.' There was another story about the police investigation; my own name flared up at me from the first paragraph but that story I didn't read; couldn't. called them 'dignified, almost heroic'. Claud, apparently, had held Fred while he wept. There was a smaller picture of me, hand flung over my face, and a cropped portrait of Natalie which I'd never seen before. She looked younger than sixteen in it and conventionally pretty. Nothing threatening or sinister about that face. There was a two-page story under the heading, NATALIE'S SHORT LIFE AND BRUTAL DEATH. Under a slightly blurred photo of the seven Martellos all together and smiling ran a short piece starting : 'They seemed such a happy family.' There was another story about the police investigation; my own name flared up at me from the first paragraph but that story I didn't read; couldn't.

The phone rang, and I froze, cupping my cooling tea in my hands.

'Jane, it's Kim. Come on, you can pick up the phone.'

'Kim.' I think I'd never been so glad to hear a voice. 'Kim, thank G.o.d it's you.'

'Listen, we can talk later. I've booked us a room in a little hotel in Bishop's Castle, on the Welsh Borders. I'm taking you away for the weekend. Can you be ready by half past five? I'll pick you up.'

I didn't protest. 'What would I do without you, Kim? Yes, I can.'

'Right. Pack walking boots and lots of warm clothes. Bye.'

I ran upstairs and threw some long-sleeved T-s.h.i.+rts, jumpers and socks into a large hold-all; dug out my walking boots, still caked with mud from a year before; found my cagoule wrapped up in itself at the back of the cupboard. A quarter to five. I lit a cigarette, and turned on the small TV at the end of the bed. Alan's face again stared at me, all beard and fierce eyes, before the camera switched to the earnest face of an absurdly young reporter. 'Pa.s.sing sentence, the judge described the murder of a daughter by her father as one of the worst, and most unnatural crimes that could be imagined...' I leant forward, in a panic, and shoved Paul's video into the player. The young reporter disappeared abruptly. Through a curl of smoke, the Stead appeared on the screen as the t.i.tle and credits rolled.

Paul's making of his film about the family had seemed so sporadic and arbitrary that in spite of having seen the final sequence I think I had expected something like a camcorder picture of a holiday. It wasn't like that at all. Paul began by reading an extract from A Shrops.h.i.+re Lad: A Shrops.h.i.+re Lad: Into my heart an air that kills From you far country blows.

What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

The camera moved slowly over the Shrops.h.i.+re landscape around the Stead, skeletal in its winter garb, but still gorgeous. The sun glinted through the bare branches, and the old house sat rosy-stoned and welcoming. It was the house of my childhood and the land of my lost innocence.

I sat entranced while my cigarette burnt down to my fingertips and gazed as Paul spoke intimately to the camera. Memory, he was saying, is intangible, and die memories one has of childhood, which glow so vividly through all of our adult life, are seductive and nostalgic. And if one's childhood is happy, then adulthood is like an exile from its joy. We can never return. More music, and the camera zoomed in on the door of the Stead. Alan walked out. My ash fell onto the duvet cover and I brushed it heedlessly away. He quoted something from Wordsworth, and spoke about love. He said, with all the old Alan bravado, that he had been a wild young man who had scorned the concept of family and kicked against its traces. But he had learnt that this he gestured at the Stead was where he could be himself. He talked about the family as the place where you could be most tormented, or most at peace. 'For myself, I have found a kind of peace,' he said. He looked, as he stood on the threshold, like a ma.s.s-produced wise patriarch that you might buy in a souvenir shop. I watched his broad hands as he gestured, and I shuddered. Martha, thin as a tree branch, came through the doorway carrying a broad basket and some secateurs, smiled strangely at the camera and walked off screen. The camera moved sideways, and came to rest on the site where Natalie's body had been found. Paul stated the facts. Then came a series of stills of Natalie : as a baby, a toddler, a ten-year-old, a teenager; on her own, with her family. Then her tombstone.

Claud appeared and now that I was his audience I saw how handsome he was, how serious. I sat like a coiled spring while I waited for him to talk about me, and our marriage break-up, but all he said was that 'some things had not turned out as he had hoped'. I was shocked by the spasm of pity and love that jolted me. Cut to Robert and Jerome playing frisbee on Hampstead Heath. So young and carefree. Then Jerome, affectionately derisive on how the older generation was obsessed with the past. Fred, at home with his family on their well-tended patio. Alan again, drinking brandy and being expansive on the power of forgiveness. Theo comparing a family to a computer program.

Me, that was me, red-faced in my kitchen. Oh G.o.d, Christmas but the Christmas I watched as I waited for Kim to arrive was one of festive hilarity : laughter boomed out of the television; I smiled a lot and handed round wine (had I smiled a lot that evening? I couldn't remember). Erica and Kim looked like two extravagant birds of paradise in their purple and yellow get-ups. Dad was distinguished Old Age, and my sons fresh Youth. The power of editing to splice images so that collective trauma becomes a display of boozy unity.

I smoked the last cigarette in the packet. In spite of being revolted by the film's message, smashed as it was into a thousand pieces by Alan's confession, I was half seduced by its melancholy insistence upon the past as a place of innocence and joy, the lost Eden in everyone. The music, the winter greenness of Shrops.h.i.+re, the faces that came and went on the television screen, as familiar as the palm of my hand, the way that Paul, somehow, had made even his most resistant interviewees talk with a kind of inner concentration so that they seemed to be discovering truths about themselves for the first time these things filled me with rich sorrow.

The film was nearing its end now. Paul was walking along the Col, hands in his pocket. The brown water was swollen with all the recent rain. He stopped and turned towards the camera, held out his hands in a gesture of offering. Oh, G.o.d, he was reciting poetry again : That is the land of lost content, I see it s.h.i.+ning plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

I was getting confused. Was the point of this doc.u.mentary that you could could go home again or that you go home again or that you couldn't couldn't But Paul was talking again. 'The family,' he said. 'Alan Martello called it torment and peace. Jane Martello, my sister, said that it is where we are our best and our worst selves.' [Oh, Christ.] 'Erica, my wife, calls it a haven and a prison we can always return to it, but no matter how far we go from it, we can never escape it.' (Which Christmas cracker did she get But Paul was talking again. 'The family,' he said. 'Alan Martello called it torment and peace. Jane Martello, my sister, said that it is where we are our best and our worst selves.' [Oh, Christ.] 'Erica, my wife, calls it a haven and a prison we can always return to it, but no matter how far we go from it, we can never escape it.' (Which Christmas cracker did she get that that from?) Paul smiled with the wisdom of the ages and walked on, into the final sequence I had already witnessed, full circle back to the house and the site of the body. from?) Paul smiled with the wisdom of the ages and walked on, into the final sequence I had already witnessed, full circle back to the house and the site of the body.

I switched off the television, resolving to sell it. Or maybe a crack addict would break in and steal it while I was away with Kim. It was nearly five thirty. I buckled up my suitcase, then on an impulse I opened it once more and threw in my childhood diary. I quickly punched in Paul's number but was answered by a machine. After the bleep I said: 'Paul, it's me, Jane. I've just watched your film. It's very impressive honestly, in spite of everything, it holds its own ground. I'm going away for the weekend with Kim, but I'll call you as soon as I get back. Well done.' I was going to replace the receiver but a thought struck me. 'Oh, and Paul can you just tell me : which side of the river were you walking along at the end?'

As I put the phone down, I heard Kim's horn. I put on my leather jacket, picked up my bag and walked into the weather.

River Arms was a small white inn with low beams and a huge open fire in the bar. We had a double room, with a bathroom. Kim said that when we woke in the morning we'd be able to see the river and the mountains from our window. Now it was dusk and damp. I sat on my bed, feeling too tired to move.

'It's nine o'clock,' said Kim. 'Why don't you have a bath, and I'll meet you in the bar in half an hour. They do wonderful meals here, but we'll wait until tomorrow for that. Let's just have a snack by the fire tonight.'

'Fine.' I yawned and stood up. 'How do you know about this place?'

Kim giggled. 'My romantic past. It comes in useful sometimes.'

I had a deep warm bath, breaking open all the bath gels and foams. I washed my hair and dressed in leggings and a thick baggy cotton s.h.i.+rt. Downstairs, Kim had ordered two large gin and tonics, and had managed to secure a place by the fire. She raised her gla.s.s and c.h.i.n.ked it against mine.

'Here's to better times,' she said.

My eyes filled with tears, and I took a long swallow of cold clean liquid.

'I've ordered our meal, as well,' Kim continued. 'Cold roast beef sandwiches, and a bottle of red wine. Okay?' I nodded; I was glad, today, of someone to take decisions for me.

'Tomorrow we can go for a long walk, somewhere high up, with thin air and fine views. If it doesn't rain. I've got Ordnance Survey maps in my bag; we can look at them at breakfast.'

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