Enduring Love (15 page)

It was difficult to see her beyond the terms of her bereavement. Was the brown stain on her pale blue cashmere sweater, just below her right breast, anything other than the self-neglect of the grieving? Her hair was greasy and pulled back harshly across her scalp and held in a ragged bun by a red rubber band. Grief too, or was it a certain kind of academic style? I knew from the newspaper stories that she
taught history at the university. If you knew nothing, you might guess by her face that she was a sedentary sort of person with a heavy cold. Her nose was sharpened and bloomed pink at the tip and at its base, around the nostrils, from the friction of sodden tissues. (I had seen the near-empty box on the floor at my feet.) But it was an attractive face, almost beautiful, almost plain, a long pale uncluttered oval, with thin lips and nearly invisible eyebrows and lashes. The eyes were an irresolute sandy color. She gave the impression of a stringy kind of independence, and of a temper easily lost.

I said to her, “I don’t know if any of the others, the people who were there, have been to see you. My guess is they haven’t. I know you don’t need me to tell you that your husband was a very courageous man, but perhaps there are things you want to know about what happened. The coroner’s court doesn’t sit for another five weeks …”

I tailed off, uncertain why the coroner had come into my thoughts. Jean Logan still sat on the edge of her chair, hunched forward over her mug, breathing its heat into her face, perhaps to soothe her eyes. She said, “You thought I’d like to go over the details of how he lost his life.”

Her sourness surprised me and made me meet her gaze. “There could be something you want to know,” I said, speaking more slowly than before. I felt more at ease with her antagonism than with the embarrassment of her sadness.

“There are things I want to know,” Jean Logan said, and the anger in her voice was suddenly there. “I’ve got lots of questions for all sorts of people. But I don’t think they’re going to give me the answers. They pretend they don’t even understand the questions.” She paused and swallowed hard. I had tapped into a repeating voice in her head, I was overhearing the thoughts that tormented her all night. Her sarcasm was too theatrical, too energetic, and I felt the weight of
exhausted reiteration behind it. “I’m the mad one, of course. I’m irrelevant, I’m in the way. It’s not convenient to answer my questions, because they don’t fit the story. There, there, Mrs. Logan! Don’t go fretting about things that don’t concern you and aren’t important anyway. We know it’s your husband, the father of your children, but we’re in charge and please don’t get in the way …”

Father
and
children
were the words that undid her. She set down the mug, snatched a balled-up tissue from the sleeve of her sweater, and pressed it, screwed it, into the space between her eyes. She went to rise from her chair, but its lowness defeated her. I felt that empty, numbing neutrality that comes when one person in the room appears to monopolize all the available emotion. There was nothing for me to do for the moment but wait. I thought she was probably the kind of woman who hates to be seen crying. Lately she would have got used to it. I looked past her, into the garden, past the cherry blossom, and saw the first evidence of the children. Partly obscured by shrubbery was a tent, a brown igloo-style tent on a patch of lawn. The struts had collapsed on one side and it was teetering into a flower bed. It had a sodden, abandoned look. Had he put it up for them not long before he died, or had they erected it to make contact with the sporty outdoor spirit that had fled the house? Perhaps they needed somewhere to sit and be beyond the penumbra of their mother’s pain.

Jean Logan was silent. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her and she stared at the floor, still needing to be, as it were, alone. The skin between her nose and her thin upper lip was raw. My numbness disappeared with the simple thought that what I was seeing was love, and the slow agony of its destruction. Imagining what it would mean to lose Clarissa, through death or by my own stupidity, sent a hot pricking sensation up through the skin of my back, and I felt myself drowning in the small room’s lack of decent air. It was urgent that I return to London and save our love. I had no course of
action in mind, but I would have been glad to get to my feet and make an excuse. Jean Logan looked up and said, “I’m sorry. I’m glad that you came. It was kind of you to make the journey.”

I said something conventionally polite. The muscles in my thighs and arms were tensed, as though ready to push me out of my chair, back toward Maida Vale. What I saw in Jean’s grief reduced my own situation to uncomplicated elements, to a periodic table of simple good sense: when it’s gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. You’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it. Everything else, Parry included, is irrelevant.

“You see, there are things I want to know …”

We heard the front door opening and closing and footsteps in the hall, but no sound of voices. She paused, as though waiting for a summons. Then the footsteps—three people, perhaps—went up the stairs and she relaxed. She was about to tell or ask me something important, and I knew I could not possibly leave. Nor could I make my legs relax. I wanted to suggest that we talk in the garden, under the blossom, in the fresh air.

She said, “There was someone with my husband. Did you notice?”

I shook my head. “There was my friend Clarissa, two farm laborers, a man called—”

“I know about them. There was someone in the car with John when he stopped. Someone got out when he did.”

“He came from the other side of the field. I didn’t see him until we were all running toward the balloon. There was no one else then, I’m sure of that.”

Jean Logan was not satisfied. “You could see his car?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t see someone standing beside it, watching?”

“If there’d been someone there, I’d remember.”

She looked away. These were not the answers she wanted. She assumed a let’s-start-again voice. I didn’t mind. I sincerely wanted to help.

“Do you remember the car door being open?”

“Yes.”

“One door or two?”

I hesitated. The summoned image held both doors open, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to mislead her. There was something at stake here, perhaps a powerful fantasy. I didn’t want to feed it. But in the end I said reluctantly, “Two. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think two.”

“And why do you think two doors would be open if he was on his own?”

I shrugged and waited for her to tell me. She rolled the amber of her necklace faster than before. A pained excitement had replaced the sorrow. Even I, knowing nothing, could tell that vindication in this was going to mean more distress. She had to hear what she didn’t want to know. But first she had questions, roughly put, in the tone of an aggressive barrister. For the moment I had become the surrogate object of her bitterness.

“Tell me this. Which way is London from here?”

“East.”

“Which way are the Chilterns?”

“East.”

She looked at me as though a substantial proof had been concluded. I continued to look blank and helpful. She was having to lead me by the hand toward the self-evident center of her torment. She had lived so long in her head with it, she could barely keep the irritation out of her voice at having to say, “How far is London?”

“Fifty-five miles.”

“And the Chilterns?”

“About twenty.”

“Would you drive from Oxford to London by way of the Chilterns?”

“Well, the motorway cuts right through them.”

“But would you go to London by way of Watlington and all the little lanes around there?”

“No.”

Jean Logan stared at the threadbare Persian carpet at her feet, lost to her case, to the misery that could never be set free by a confrontation with her husband. I heard footsteps in the room above us, and a voice, a woman’s or a child’s. Two or three minutes passed, then I said, “He was supposed to be in London that day.”

She closed her eyes tight and nodded. “At a weekend conference,” she whispered. “A medical conference.”

I cleared my throat softly. “There’s probably a perfectly innocent explanation.”

Her eyes were still closed and her voice dropped to a low monotone, as though she were speaking under hypnosis to recall the unspeakable day. “It was the police sergeant from the local station who brought the car back. It was on a breakdown lorry because they couldn’t find the keys. They should have been in the car, or in John’s pocket. That was why I looked inside. Then I said to the sergeant, ‘Have you gone through the car? Did you look for fingerprints?’ And he said they didn’t look and they didn’t take prints. Do you know why? Because there hadn’t been a crime.”

She opened her eyes to see if I had taken in the significance of this, the full impact of its absurdity. I didn’t think I had. I parted my lips to echo the word, but she said it first, repeating it loudly.

“A crime! There hadn’t been a crime!” She was suddenly on her feet and crossing the room and seizing a plastic bag from a corner
where books were piled waist high. She returned and thrust it at me. “You look. Go on. Tell me what it is.”

It was a heavily weighted white carrier bag printed with a crude picture of children dancing in and out of a supermarket’s name. Whatever was in there sagged heavily to the bottom. As soon as it was in my hands I was aware of the smell that rose from it, the coarse, intimate whiff of rotting meat.

“Go on. It won’t hurt you.”

I held my breath and parted the top of the bag, and for a moment the contents made no sense. There were plastic wrappers buckled around a grayish paste, a sphere of tinfoil, a brown mess on a square of cardboard. Then I glimpsed dark red, curved in glass, mostly obscured by paper. It was a bottle of wine, the reason for the bag’s heaviness. And then everything else fell into place. I saw two apples.

“It’s a picnic,” I said. The queasiness I felt was not entirely due to the smell.

“It was on the floor by the passenger seat. He was going to picnic with her. Somewhere in the woods.”

“Her?” I felt I was being pedantic, but I thought I ought to continue to resist the suggestive power of her fantasy. She was pulling something from the pocket of her skirt. She took the bag from me and put in my hand a small silk scarf with gray and black zebra markings in stylized form.

“Smell it,” she commanded as she carefully stowed the bag in its corner.

It smelled salty, of tears or snot, or of the sweat of Jean’s clenched hand.

“Take a deeper breath,” she said. She was standing over me, rigid and fierce in her desire for my complicity.

I raised the scrap of silk to my face and sniffed again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t smell of anything much to me.”

“It’s rosewater. Can’t you smell it?

She took it from me. I no longer deserved to hold it. She said, “I’ve never used rosewater in my life. I found it on the passenger seat.” She sat down and seemed to be waiting for me to speak. Did she feel that as a man I was somehow party to her husband’s transgression, that I was the proxy who should come clean and confess? when I didn’t speak, she said, “Look, if you saw something, please don’t feel you have to protect me. I need to know.”

“Mrs. Logan, I saw no one with your husband.”

“I asked them to look for fingerprints in the car. I could trace this woman …”

“Only if she has a criminal record.”

She didn’t hear me. “I need to know how long it was going on and what it meant. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded, and I thought I did. She had to have the measure of her loss, and to know what to grieve for. She would have to know everything and suffer for it before she could have any kind of peace. The alternative was tormented ignorance and a lifetime’s suspicion, black guesses, worst-case thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” I started to say, but she cut me off.

“I simply have to find her. I have to talk to her. She must have seen the whole thing. Then she would have run off. Distressed, demented. Who knows?”

I said, “I’d have thought there was a good chance of her making contact with you. It might be impossible to resist, coming to see you.”

“If she comes near this house,” Jean Logan said simply as the door behind us opened and two children came into the room, “I’ll kill her. God help me, but I will.”

It was
with a touch of sadness that Clarissa sometimes told me that I would have made a wonderful father. She would tell me that I had a good way with children, that I leveled with them easily and without condescension. I’ve never looked after a child for any length of time, so I’ve never been tested in the true fires of parental self-denial, but I think I’m good enough at the listening and talking. I know all seven of her godchildren well. We’ve had them for weekends, we’ve taken some on holiday abroad, and we devotedly cared for two little girls for a week—Felicity and Grace, who both wet the bed—while their parents tore each other apart in a divorce hearing. I was of some use to Clarissa’s eldest godchild, an inwardly stormy fifteen-year-old befuddled by pop culture and the oafish codes of street credibility. I took him drinking with me and talked him out of leaving school. Four years later he was reading medicine at Edinburgh and doing well.

For all that, there’s an uneasiness I have to conceal when I meet a child. I see myself through that child’s eyes and remember how I
regarded adults when I was small. They seemed a gray crew to me, too fond of sitting down, too keen on small talk, too accustomed to having nothing to look forward to. My parents, their friends, my uncles and aunts, all seemed to have lives bent to the priorities of other, distant, more important people. For a child it was, of course, simply a matter of local definition. Later I discovered in certain adults dignity and flamboyance, and later still these qualities, or at least the first, stood revealed in my parents and most of their circle. But when I was an energetic, self-important ten-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me—they were all aged—I worried that what showed in my face was pity.