Cold in the Earth (3 page)

Langlands was waiting expectantly. Fleming made a pyramid of her fingers and propped her chin on it, considering. Then, ‘Right,’ she said. ‘He’s due for appraisal soon and we’ll talk anger-management courses. I’ll warn him now that if there’s any formal complaint his career’s on the line. That’ll put his gas on a peep and I think you’ll find he’s sweetness and light to your baby copper. Will that cover it?’

The constable’s face cleared. ‘Sort of “deferred sentence to allow him to be of good behaviour”? Thanks very much, ma’am.’

He was on the way out when she said, ‘Fancy her, do you?’ and had the satisfaction of seeing his cherubic face turn bright scarlet.

Once he had gone, though, Fleming grimaced. They were an odd lot, the Masons. Grandfather had gone off to join the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got in tow with Hemingway – all that Thirties stuff with bullfights and roistering and Being a Man. He’d come back obsessed, called his son and daughter Jake and Brett after characters in one of the novels and set up a pedigree herd of Welsh Black cattle. Brett was Conrad Mason’s mother and to this day you heard of them going off to Spain for the
corrida
. Marjory’s sympathies were all with the bull, and she couldn’t hack it with Hemingway either. She’d had to study him for Higher English and had got into terrible trouble for writing that his women were so compliant they might as well be inflatable.

She could remember hearing about incidents involving the Mason temper – there was something about Conrad’s Uncle Jake at the bull sales once – but the details escaped her. She knew her patch, was famous for it even, but her father still had the edge; she could ask him about it this evening. He always enjoyed the chance to show off his vast local knowledge – and pathetically, perhaps, she still found herself anxious to please him.

Marjory picked up her pen again, though her mind was running on the Conrad Mason problem. She’d been there before and it was a bit like domestic abuse; he was apologetic, self-abasing and totally plausible in his promises never to do it again. Until the next time.

And she didn’t have much time for psychology generally. Anger management, counselling, personal development – they all seemed to her scams designed to keep more people in comfortable desk jobs. Still, she’d recommend Mason for the course since that was what you were supposed to do. She just wouldn’t be betting her hen-money on a successful outcome.

2

‘Oh, my dear, I shall miss her so terribly! She was never too busy, always had time to listen . . .’

‘I simply don’t know where the choral society will be able to find another pianist like her!’

‘Did anyone ever have a better neighbour?’

The ladies with their soft, pink, crumpled faces and pastel tweeds clustered round like a swarm of cooing bees. Laura, too thin in black wool challis, smiled and smiled and pressed the gnarled, wrinkled hands. They patted at her with nervous goodwill and then at last set down the sherry glasses meticulously on coasters protecting the French-polished furniture and began to drift away, still murmuring their gentle lamentations to one another as they went down the path in the grey drizzle.

The woman who still lingered had a sharper face; her long nose quivered slightly as she spoke and behind gold-rimmed glasses her eyes were bright with intrusive curiosity. She indicated a photograph on the grand piano, an informal shot of a laughing young woman, her profile with its chisel-tipped nose and her blonde hair very like Laura’s own.

‘
Such
a pity your sister never came back – well, your half-sister, I suppose I should say, only I expect it was much the same thing really, wasn’t it?’ Her gums showed when she smiled.

‘Yes,’ said Laura.

‘It would have meant so much to poor Jane. You never hear from her, I suppose?’

‘No.’ Laura felt the eyes scan her face with a sweep like a searchlight, registering the dark circles, no doubt, and the puffiness of recent tears about her grey-blue eyes. In a calculated gesture, she held out her hand decisively. ‘So good of you to come, Mrs Martin.’

That left the woman with no alternative but to accept the hand and her dismissal; being a psychologist did have some practical uses. Mrs Martin set down her sherry glass reluctantly, directly on the rosewood surface of the piano, and then she too was gone.

With a tension headache pounding, Laura closed the door behind her, thankful to have the ordeal of the funeral formalities over, yet when she returned to the empty sitting-room it seemed oppressively quiet without the hum of hushed voices. She could hear the wheezy tick of the grandfather clock in the hall, the whisper of flames from the fire in the basket grate which she’d lit in a vain attempt to lift the gloom of the weather and the occasion. Listlessly she cleared away the sherry glasses, her own untouched; she’d never so much as taken a sip of the stuff since she was eight years old when Dizzy, having smuggled a bottle out of the drinks cabinet, gave her a couple of glasses. Laura had been so sick that her mother had sent for the doctor, but even then she didn’t tell. She’d always kept Dizzy’s secrets.

The kitchen was neat, orderly, just as her mother had left it. She washed the delicate cut-crystal glasses carefully, polished them with a glass-cloth, then carried them back to the sitting-room and put them away in their allotted space in the cupboard, just as if the next person to handle them wasn’t going to be a dealer, clearing the house.

Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Seconds. Minutes. Hours. Years. Wasted years. As Laura sat in her mother’s favourite Victorian tub-chair, looking round the sitting-room with its evidence of a pleasant, tranquil life filled with friendships and hobbies – the piano, the tapestry frame, the invitation cards still tucked into the mirror above the fireplace – she knew it for a sham. Her cultured, elegant mother had lived with a hell of inner despair as agonising as that of any of the desperate women Laura had counselled in New York.

Not knowing for all these years, that was the awful thing. She could see herself now, a leggy, skinny eleven-year-old, sitting miserably on the stairs, her arms wrapped round her bony knees, eavesdropping as best she could because her parents were in the sitting-room talking to a strange man about trying to find Dizzy. It hurt badly that her sister hadn’t told her where she’d gone; she knew she could have trusted Laura not to give her away.

She’d adored Dizzy. Dizzy – Diana – was nine years older than Laura, beautiful and zany and casually affectionate to her little half-sister. Her father had abandoned his wife and child for a career as a professional hell-raiser, drinking himself to death not long after; Dizzy was sufficiently his daughter to want to raise a bit of hell on her own account, doing wild things which drove their mother and Laura’s solicitor father into fits of grown-up rage and anxiety and which, as recounted by her idol in whispers later, made Laura laugh so much that she cried.

Dizzy had done all the exotic things Laura longed to do – and still hadn’t, somehow. Equipped with a secretarial diploma and the ability to fry an egg, she’d gone off to backpack her way round the world, picking up casual work on Australian cattle farms and South American ranches. She’d swum with dolphins and run with the bulls in Pamplona. She’d even joined a circus for a bit, until she got alarmed about the ringmaster’s intentions – men always fancied her – and came home only when the money finally ran out.

It hadn’t been easy for anyone, having an adult, fiercely independent Dizzy living at home. Then one day there had been the row to end all rows, with shouting and slammed doors and tears of rage. Laura had kept well clear, waiting for the storm to blow over; she never remembered one quite as bad as this, but sooner or later everyone would presumably calm down. Even when they discovered she’d gone, leaving a note saying she was going to live her own life, thank you, Laura hadn’t worried – and nor, she thought, had her parents, really. There had been a phone call three weeks later, a brief phone call saying that she was fine and she had a job, then ringing off without giving her mother time to say more than ‘Darling—’

It was the last word she spoke to her. Jane Harvey had died after fifteen years of living with the dreadful alternatives that her daughter was dead or that she cared so little for her mother as to let her spend the rest of her life in that anguish of uncertainty.

And there was worse. As she sat on the stairs, six months after Dizzy had gone, Laura had heard them talking about her to the strange man. She was old enough to guess he was a private detective; the police had taken no interest in a twenty-year-old who had quarrelled with her parents and left home. She heard him ask if he could have a photograph and her mother saying she would fetch one; guiltily, Laura fled to the upper landing as the door opened and her mother went to the study where the photo albums were kept.

Then Laura heard the man say, ‘While her mum’s out, just between ourselves – try something on with her, did you?’

Laura couldn’t see her father, of course, yet when she thought of it now she could picture Geoffrey Harvey’s face as clearly as if she had – his austere, scholarly face set in lines of shock, eyes wide behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. ‘
I
, Mr Wilkinson?’

Wilkinson jerked his head to a framed photo on the piano. ‘A looker, isn’t she? Can’t say I’d blame you—’ She could remember the man’s hateful, suggestive titter, a fraction of a second before her father’s uncharacteristic roar of rage.

‘Get out of my house, now, this minute! I won’t sit here to be insulted by your vile insinuations—’

‘Have it your own way,’ Laura heard the man saying, and leaning over the banister railing saw him come out of the sitting-room, smirking, unhurried. Then she saw her mother in the doorway of the study, standing transfixed, and knew that she too had heard it all.

Her father slammed the front door behind his visitor, then turned and saw his wife. The angry colour was still in his cheeks. ‘I’m sorry, my dear. I found him very unpleasant. I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else if you think it’s worth pursuing.’

‘Yes, of course,’ her mother said, her voice a little unsteady. ‘He – he didn’t give me much confidence either.’ They went back into the sitting-room and shut the door; Laura suspected it was never mentioned between them again.

Yet, looking back, it was after this that their marriage – happy enough, in Laura’s childish estimation – began to drift slowly, almost imperceptibly, as her mother seemed no longer able to bring herself to make the gestures of intimacy which hold any marriage together. They had lived almost estranged under the same roof until her father died, uncomprehending and sad, eight years later.

Laura hadn’t believed the accusation then, of course, and even now, looking back with the suspicious eye of a professional, she thought it was most unlikely. Dizzy had borrowed her mother’s car without permission and stayed out all night; the violent row which followed was a perfectly plausible explanation for her flinging out of the house in a fury, even if not for so cruelly disappearing out of their lives for ever. What her mother believed – well, again as a professional Laura could recognise a subconscious temptation to lay the blame for such a catastrophic estrangement on someone other than yourself, and she did remember her mother saying hopefully, when Geoffrey Harvey died, ‘Perhaps Dizzy will see the notice and get in touch.’ She hadn’t, of course. How sad to think that Laura’s father’s death might have meant to his wife only a barrier removed!

Had there been later attempts at tracing her? Laura didn’t know: certainly during her brief visits home from the States Jane Harvey had never mentioned Dizzy’s name, and neither had Laura, shrinking from the thought of upsetting her. She was ashamed now of her moral cowardice, of never having defied the comfortable conventions of their relationship to talk about things that mattered. For instance, had Laura’s decision to live in New York been seen as another loss, another rejection? They hadn’t discussed it. Her mother had never complained, never been other than bright and brave, and Laura had never actually said, ‘I love you, I miss you, I wish I wasn’t so far away.’ If only she had perhaps she wouldn’t feel quite so guilty now.

But then, of course, suffering from guilt was one of Laura’s personal vices. Had her sister been immune to such qualms of conscience? Had she simply put her family firmly out of her mind? Had she seen the notice of her mother’s death and ignored it, telling herself perhaps that it was too late now? There were so many questions unanswered, unanswerable.

There was no record of her death, in Britain at least; lawyers were checking registers overseas while advertising for Diana Warwick now in all the major world newspapers. The executors had agreed with Laura that the house should be put on the market immediately. The estate, divided equally between the sisters, was a very substantial one and with her share Laura could take her time to work out what to do with this new, empty life. She had come to feel an exile in the States; it was a bitter irony that having returned she should find herself rootless, a displaced person in what she had thought of as home.

If only Dizzy had been here! Faced with the grim task of sorting through their mother’s intimate possessions, they could have cried and laughed together over the memories they invoked – though of course that was an idealised picture. She couldn’t really remember much of her sister, beyond her glamour and her careless kindness.

She’d been self-centred without a doubt. Thinking about it now, it was possible too that her parents’ divorce had made her to an extent self-destructive like her father. With that heredity, she could have been vulnerable to alcohol abuse and her daring, try-anything mentality might have led her into drugs – into prostitution, even. Yet somehow Laura couldn’t see Dizzy as human flotsam. It didn’t fit: she’d been tough-minded, a rebel, not a drop-out.

So where was she? Happy, busy, absorbed in her own life and indifferent to the havoc she had wrought in the lives of her mother, her stepfather, of Laura herself? Even now, all those years later, she still dreamed of Dizzy – sometimes vibrant, exciting as she always had been, sometimes in a context of horror from which Laura would wake sweating and with her heart pounding. Always, afterwards, there were tears.