Breaking Light (41 page)

How well they understood each other. They accepted it all. As close as any two strangers looking unflinchingly at the world could be – and as alone. But the day, at least, was bright. One must not stoop into a mood.

‘We certainly would, Ms Turpin,' he said, cheerfully, knowing for sure that uncertainty could never be quite destroyed. ‘We most certainly would.'

*

The room, when he entered it, was a painting – a bright seascape of blues and specks of white. Diamonds of sunlight. There were three large windows, all facing the sea, although, because Edencombe sat high on the rocks, it was the horizon that could be seen rather than the waves themselves. The image was fixed in its frame, forever caught in the moment. There was no flux, nothing stirred, apart from the plankton of dust filtering slowly down. A bed in the middle of the room, its head against the wall to the left: white, standard-issue with a lifting device. A tartan rug had been spread over the washed-out white sheets. This unexpected blotch of colour seemed slightly out of place, too bold, almost reckless.
Twelve ships with bows red painted
. Next to the bed was a stool and small table, untidy, cluttered, as if a small child had, briefly, been let into the best room with its toys; there was a box of latex gloves, a couple of packets of tissues, a blue plastic pill organiser, a glass of water (half full), some browning grapes on a plate, a biro and an abandoned Sudoku puzzle, ripped out of a magazine and left behind by a yawning night nurse, perhaps. A scene within a scene; a still life, at once symbolically explicit and unbearably private. A television set had been pushed into a corner. It was unplugged and somebody – a cleaner? – had draped the lead over the top of the screen. A door on the opposite wall
from the bed led into a bathroom large enough to accommodate the wheelchair that was parked, for now, by the door. That was it, apart from the large leather armchair, which had been drawn up to the window, its solid back facing the visitor.

Mr Askew, who had stopped for a moment inside the door, watched the crown of the head of the woman in the armchair. Amazingly, the thick hair still had some brown in it; the overall impression was muddier, perhaps, but not yet altogether grey. It was almost as if her aging had stopped when she was placed here – or as if her life had been suspended. There's life in the old dog yet. What an absurd expression, Mr Askew thought to himself as he picked up the stool by the bed and carried it over to the window. It made him contemplate his own life.
When
was his life? Was it in the beginning? Was it now? Would there be a future? Ah, all those questions. Those questions … When young, we are in such a hurry to experience, he thought now as he sat down and looked for a moment at the sea outside, to free ourselves from the dredge of the present, that our gaze is already ahead of us. Should we, at any point, look over our shoulder at our own past, we would be surprised to find ourselves still there, in real time, but already fading. There's something so vague, almost dull, about it all – in spite of the extraordinary setting.

‘Yes, the setting is extraordinary,' he said aloud, with emphasis, and then, leaning in, he said, ‘Happy Christmas!' His voice seemed somewhat too loud and it carried that awful tone of a sickroom. He cleared his throat.

The old woman in the chair did not stir. The skin of her face was pale, finely lined, but not unhealthy. Her eyes were dead, fixed. Someone, probably Ms Turpin, had set her hair and dressed her in proper clothes: a dark green dress of soft wool,
which he thought he might have seen before, thick stockings and felt slippers. Her wedding ring was hanging on a gold chain from her neck. Proper, but not accurate – she would never have worn such stockings and slippers. She had always been very elegant. But Ms Turpin wasn't to know that. For a moment, Mr Askew wondered if Ms Turpin had bought the warm stockings and slippers herself. He suspected perhaps she had. Dignity mattered to her. And warmth. An expensive-looking grey woollen shawl had been draped loosely around the woman's shoulders. She seemed to be watching the horizon. Mr Askew smiled; she still had that soft beauty.

‘I brought you something special from Oakstone … to brighten this place up a bit,' Gabriel said. ‘Better than grapes, at least. Found them in a box in the attic. Now, hang on …' He stooped to reach the net bag at his feet and pulled out a small bundle. Ever so carefully, he untangled strips of red and yellow fabric.

‘Ta-da! Do you remember these?' The streamers were flowing from his hands like Christmas tinsel. ‘I made them for Michael. Did he ever tell you? Mother was very cross.' He laughed. ‘I'd cut up some precious old nightie of hers. I think he liked them, though, no?'

Mrs Bradley's blank eyes were fixed on the horizon. Could she even see the ribbons?

Gabriel gave them a last shake. ‘I'll put them over there, on your bedstead,' he said, indicating. ‘That's if you don't mind, of course …' He sat back on the stool and stole a sideways glance at Mrs Bradley's face – such familiar territory and yet so uninhabited. ‘I made them for Michael to say sorry for something awful that happened to him … I didn't know what else to do at the time. We were just kids … None of us should blame ourselves.

‘Ah, well, no use crying over spilt milk, eh?' He nudged her ever so slightly with his elbow. And then, after a moment's hesitation, he reached out his hand and put it over hers, which lay folded limply on her lap.

‘There was something else I wanted to tell you … I've been asking Ms Turpin to fill you in on things that have been happening over the years, since you moved here. Well, as I was saying, I have some pretty great news for you … Blackaton got ten years. That'd be enough to finish him off, I'd say. Old Jim is not as strong as he once was …' He gave Mrs Bradley's hands a squeeze. They were dry and not very warm. ‘I finally got to testify against him, as I knew I would. It was a long time coming, but, in the end it was my testimony that brought him down. I'm not saying that to brag, just to … well, just to say that he's nothing to us any more. To you and me and Michael – and Mother and Mr Bradley and Uncle Gerry. To our family.' He was silent for a moment, thinking, remembering that day the previous year at Exeter Crown Court.

The first thing that had struck him as he saw Jim of Blackaton being led into the courtroom was how insubstantial he seemed these days. Once the black-faced Harlequin, roaming the moor with his demons, Blackaton had been reduced to somebody you might glance at through the smudged and sooty window of a train slowing into a station – a figure of blurred edges, of drizzle and strips of plastic bags, moving vaguely this way and that.

Documents had appeared in the court proceeding, pieces of evidence retrieved from Blackaton's secret files. In amongst them had been a note for Gabriel on a scrap of paper. His name and the address of his department had been written at the top, perhaps at a later date. It was impossible to know when, of course, as it was
never posted, or if there had been others like it over the years that had never reached the recipient. This one, Gabriel Askew calculated, must have been written shortly after they met in the Pelican Club for what proved to be the last time. Michael had written:

Why had Blackaton kept the note? Could it be that he had actually been jealous of their friendship – their closeness – back then, in the beginning?

‘I think I am free now,' Gabriel said to Mrs Bradley. ‘I mean, really free. We can start living, for real.' Was there a movement in one of the dry hands? A twitch? A lizard blinking once on a hot stone. At once, he regretted the absurdity of his remark. ‘In our hearts, I mean.' Mrs Bradley's eyes stayed level on the horizon.

‘Anyway, I've got to go now. I'm invited for Christmas dinner … at a friend's house. In fact, it's Mother's old house. She lives there – this friend, I mean. You'd like her. She's a bit like us. Quite a coincidence, eh?'

He stood up, but hesitated for a moment. Then, without knowing quite why, he bent down and put his cheek to Mrs Bradley's, breathing in the smell of her neck, of her hair, just behind the ears. She smelt of very little, he was surprised to find, except for a faint, old woman's muskiness and woody iris and a hint of something familiar, but very distant … like butter frying in another part of the house. But perhaps that was just his imagination. He straightened himself up, his face quite flushed.

‘I'll be coming to see you more often from now on. To speak to you, like this. And there's this note I'd like to read to you, if you'd care to hear it … You know I have been here every week, don't you? It's just that I couldn't face staying for very long; I find it terribly upsetting, seeing you like this. And the shame of it … I promised Michael, you see, to look after you when he died. But, as usual, I was too late.' He stopped talking for a
moment and the sealed room was so quiet that he could hear his own heart – or was it hers?

‘Oh, dear – I expect you don't wish to hear that all that much – I'm sorry.' He wanted to escape, but felt compelled to linger. Why? Was it guilt? ‘Perhaps you'd be able to come back to Oakstone one day. Yes, why not? I'll speak to Ms Turpin about it. She can come, too. Quite a girl, ain't she? Stand and deliver, eh?' He chuckled and looked, for a moment, into Amélie's brown eyes. He looked right into the black pupils and saw, in all that dark, an amber glow – a faint flash of a coded message. Then he pulled back. What was that? He was sure he heard Amélie say something. ‘What did you say?' He laughed briefly at his own folly, shaking his head. ‘All right then, my dear; see you next week.' As he left the room, the door seemed to close on a vacuum.

*

Ms Turpin was still at the reception desk, reading a paperback novel. She looked up as he approached. ‘Well?'

‘Have you ever heard her speak?'

She looked at him sharply through her reading glasses.

‘Well, have you?'

She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so, but it doesn't necessarily mean that she's aware of things. You mustn't—'

‘Ms Turpin, for the love of Christ, I'm asking you straight: do you think she's in there? Might she actually have understood what I said to her?'

She took off her reading glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose while looking past him out of the glass doors. Then she turned her eyes back to him. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes, I'm quite certain of it.'

*

It was not until he was on the road, driving back towards the moor, that he realised what he had heard Amélie say: ‘Gabe' – and then another word – was it ‘life'? Or ‘live'? Or could it have been ‘love'? Or was it all just a fantasy, brewed amongst this new lightness he felt inside his head?

As the road left the sea behind and started climbing towards the moor, he passed a rambler who stopped at the roadside and raised his hand in greeting. It was an oddly familiar gesture. And that head of hair … Those copper curls … Did he really see the man wink? He glanced in the rear-view mirror but, to his surprise, the rambler was already gone.

He slowed down when he reached the edge of the village. He drove in second gear past the old school and the willow by the river, where he used to hide as a child. He crept past Rowden's and the church, passing the lane with the cottage where he grew up. He drove even more slowly up the drive to Oakstone and parked to the left of the front steps. After killing the engine, he sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel, staring up at the big house – the house that had started to become his, not because of its history or because he tried so hard to acquire it, but simply by him coming back here after a visit to a loved one, by him parking the car in its usual spot. Because this was the kind of comfort one could dare to draw dreams from.

He stepped out of the car, his legs a bit stiff from the cold and the drive. The gravel underfoot could be anywhere but it gave him consolation to think that it was here. Here, outside Oak stone: his home.

An hour later, Mr Askew set out again, this time on foot, wearing his best suit under the tweed coat. He had decided, against his own better judgement, on the shoes with the leather soles. He carried a bottle of Amarone in a canvas bag and two gifts wrapped in brown paper. It was still very cold – colder now, as the sun was setting – and the grass was spiked, each blade pared and ready. There was something solid about the way they stood to attention. He stepped off the gravel drive, on to the lawn, enjoying the way his feet crushed and sank, leaving behind a march of ghostly footprints. Dusk was gathering over the short day, a blue shadow tumbling silently from the moor, descending like the seventh wave, its force softened by its own advance. This was the same darkness that he used to hug against his chest at night as a child. Still a friend, it touched his hands now, and his face, pressing softly, coyly against its hollows, finding its way into the hole that had been mended. What was he ever, in his own life? A memory – a ghost – always at the periphery of his own story, stroking the shadows. Being stroked by the shadows. But now the tautening imprints on the frosted grass gave him a sense of being there. Yes, he was here.