Hidden Depths (3 page)

Julie paused again. She wanted the fat woman to understand what it had felt like, the relief of knowing that the tantrums and the moodiness weren’t her fault. Her mam had been wrong about that. Luke was special, different, had been from the beginning. Nothing she could have done would have altered the fact. And the woman seemed to know how important that had been because at last she allowed herself to speak.

‘So you weren’t on your own.’

‘You don’t know,’ Julie said, ‘how good that felt.’

The woman nodded in agreement. But how could she know, when she’d never had children? How could anyone know, if they hadn’t had a child with a learning disability?

‘I could put up with people talking about us and the whispering at the school gate about the special help he was getting, because it was out in the open and most people were dead kind. There was a classroom assistant who came in just to help him. And Luke did all right. I mean, he was never going to be a genius, but he tried hard and his reading and writing came on, and some things he was good at. Like, anything to do with computers he took to really quickly. They were good years. Laura had started school too and I had some time to myself. I got a part-time job in the care home in the village. My mates couldn’t understand why I enjoyed it so much, but I did. It made me feel useful, I suppose. Geoff was never very interested in seeing the kids, but he was OK about money. I mean, nothing exciting ever happened, no holidays or wild nights out, but we managed.’

‘It can’t have been easy, though,’ the detective said.

‘Well, maybe not easy,’ Julie conceded. ‘But we coped. Luke started getting into bother again when he moved to the high school. Other kids saw he was an easy touch and took advantage. Set him up to act out in class. He was always the one that was caught. He started getting a reputation. You must know how it happens. You must see it all the time. The police were called when he was caught thieving from a building site. Plastic drainpipes. What would he want with those? Someone had offered him a few quid to take them, but it wasn’t that. He wanted people to like him. All his life he’d felt left out. He wanted friends.’

You could understand that, couldn’t you? Julie thought. She didn’t know how she’d have managed without her friends. The first trouble with Geoff and she’d be on the phone to them. Sharing her worries about Luke when he’d been ill. And they’d be straight round with a bottle of wine. Keen for the gossip of course, but there for her.

‘He did have one special friend,’ she went on. ‘A lad called Thomas. They met up when Luke started at the high school. He was a bit of a scally. In and out of trouble with the police, but when you talked to him you could see why. His dad had been in prison for most of the time he was growing up and his mam never seemed to bother with him much.

‘I’d never have chosen Thomas as a friend for Luke, but he wasn’t a bad lad, not really. And he seemed to like spending time in our house. In the end he was almost living with us. He was no bother. They’d be up in Luke’s room, watching videos or playing on the computer, and while they were there they weren’t thieving, were they? Or taking smack like a lot of their mates. And they got on really well. Sometimes you’d hear them laughing at some daft joke and I was just pleased that Luke had a friend.

‘Then Thomas was killed. Drowned. Some lads were messing about on the quayside at North Shields. He fell in and couldn’t swim. Our Luke was there too. He jumped in and tried to save Thomas but it was too late.’

Julie paused. Outside a tractor and trailer with a load of bales went past. ‘Luke wouldn’t talk about it. He shut himself in his room for hours. I thought he just needed time, you know, to get over it. To grieve. He stopped going to school, but he was fifteen by then and he wasn’t going to get any exams, so I thought I’d just let him be. I’d talked to the lady who runs the care home and she said she might be able to find some work for him there when he was sixteen, helping in the kitchen. He’d come to work with me a few times and the old folk really took to him. But I should have realized he needed help. It wasn’t normal the way he carried on, but then our Luke never really was normal, was he? So how could I tell?

‘He stopped washing and eating and he was awake all night. Sometimes I’d hear his voice, as if he was talking to someone in his head. That was when I got the doctor. He got him taken into St George’s. You know, the mental hospital. They said he was very depressed. Post-traumatic stress. I hated visiting him in there, but it was a relief not to have him at home. I mean, I felt guilty thinking like that, but it was true.’

‘When did he come home?’ the fat woman asked. Her first question.

‘Three weeks ago and he seemed better. Really. I mean, still sad about Thomas. Sometimes he’d burst into tears just thinking about him. And he was still seeing the doctor at the outpatient clinic. But not crazy. Not mad. This was the first night out I’d had in months. I really needed it, but I wouldn’t have gone if I hadn’t thought he’d be all right. I never thought he’d do something like that to himself.’

The woman leaned over and took Julie’s hand, covered it in her great paw.

‘This wasn’t your fault,’ she said. ‘Luke didn’t commit suicide.’ She looked at Julie to make sure that she’d taken that in, that she really understood. ‘He was dead before he was put into the bath. He was murdered.’

They were sitting at the table in the kitchen eating breakfast and already it was sunny, the sunlight bouncing off the yellow crockery on the dresser, reflected onto the ceiling. Peter was buttering toast and talking, complaining about a record he’d sent to the British Birds Rarity Committee, which had been rejected. Felicity seemed sympathetic without giving the conversation her full attention. She’d had a lot of practice. When he was a young man Peter had been convinced that he was destined for greatness. He’d been described as the best young scientist of his generation. Now, close to retirement, he had come to realize that the natural history establishment did not recognize his abilities. He expressed his disappointment in a way Felicity considered churlish and ugly – there were snide comments about other staff in the department, their lack of rigour, and he dismissed other birdwatchers as chasers after rare birds, saying that they didn’t appreciate the importance of covering a local patch. Felicity understood the background to his disillusion. She wished with all her heart that his talent would be recognized. How wonderful it would be if he found a spectacular rarity close to home. Or was given promotion within the university. But his complaining irritated her. Occasionally she found herself wondering if he really was the great man she had believed him to be when they married. Then she would look at him, at the anxiety and sadness in his face, and feel disloyal. She’d stroke his face with her finger or kiss him while he was still in the middle of a sentence, shocking him into a sudden grin which made him look twenty years younger.

‘What time are the others arriving?’ he asked, breaking into her thoughts. He sounded excited. The gloom seemed to have lifted. She thought he was more excited about seeing his friends than he was about her. She never had that effect on him any more.

Felicity had been wondering about Lily Marsh, the student teacher, about whether she would accept the offer of accommodation. Felicity realized that they hadn’t discussed money. Perhaps that had been the problem, why Lily had run off in that way. Perhaps having seen the cottage, very picturesque, if a little primitive, Lily had thought the rent would be beyond her. She was only a student after all. Felicity wondered if she should send a note to school with James, something welcoming but very precise, mentioning a sum which wouldn’t put the young woman off. She’d been composing the letter in her head when Peter spoke.

She turned her thoughts to the matter in hand. Peter’s birthday meal. A ritual. The same three friends invited each year. ‘I’ve told them dinner at eight, with a walk to the lighthouse beforehand.’ The walk to the lighthouse was a ritual too.

She heard the postman’s van down the lane and then the flop of envelopes onto the hall floor. She left Peter to his toast and went to collect them. All the letters were for him. She recognized the children’s writing on three of the cards. She set the letters on the table in front of him. He put them into his briefcase without opening them. He always did that, always saved them to open at work. She’d wondered once if he had something to hide, in a moment of fantasy imagined another wife, a secret family. But it had just become a habit. He did it without thinking.

As he shut the briefcase, he stood up. There was a flurry of activity; Peter had promised James a lift up the lane to the bus and stood at the bottom of the stairs shouting for him to hurry. There were bags to be picked up and the packed lunch was almost forgotten. Felicity realized the note to Lily Marsh had never been written. She almost shouted to James as he ambled towards the car.
Tell Miss Marsh to give me a ring about the cottage.
But Peter would want to know what it was about and she couldn’t hold him up now. Besides, he might disapprove of the idea. She would need to sell the plan to him when things were less fraught. She put Lily Marsh out of her mind. At last the car drove off and the house was wonderfully silent.

She sat over another coffee and made a list for the farm shop. She had planned the weekend meals already in her head. There was a cake of course, already baked and iced. It was a pity the three older children lived too far away to share it. For dinner tonight she’d made a daube of beef, rich and dark, slippery with olives and red wine. It stood in the pantry and needed only to be reheated. Now she changed her mind. It was too hot for beef. If Neil at the farm had a couple of chickens, she’d do that Spanish dish with quartered lemons and rosemary and garlic. It would be much lighter, beautifully aromatic and Mediterranean. Samuel would like that. She could set a long table on the terrace under the veranda and they’d eat it with plain rice and a big green salad, and make believe that they were looking out over orange trees and olive groves.

Occasionally, when she talked to other mothers, who rushed in and out of her house to drop off their sons, or to pick up hers, she wondered if she was missing out by not having paid employment. They seemed astounded when they found out she was at home all day. But what could she have done? She hadn’t had much of a life before her marriage. She had no qualifications, few practical skills. Besides, Peter depended on her being there, calm and rested, to look after him when he came back from the disappointments at work. Certainly he needed her to be no competition. Imagine if she had become a successful lawyer or businesswoman, if she had started to win awards in her own right! The idea made her smile.

The farm shop was cool, the door into the yard open, letting in the smell of cows and grass. She was the first customer. Neil was still filling the fridge. The huge wooden board, the cleaver, the long pointed knives were still clean. He weighed the chickens and packed them into her bag.

‘They’re not free-range.’ He knew Felicity would be interested. ‘But barn-reared, not battery. You’ll taste the difference.’

‘That was a wonderful piece of pork I had from you last week.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘It’s all in the cooking, Mrs Calvert. And in the growing. I only cut it up.’

Another ritual. Like Peter taking his letters to work every day and the same three friends being invited for his birthday. This exchange passed between them every week. He carried the veg box out to the car for her and winked as he had added a few extra links of sausage for free into her bag.

‘I hear it’s a special birthday for Dr Calvert.’

She wondered, as she always did, how the butcher could possibly know all her business.

When she unlocked the door the phone was ringing and she ran inside, leaving everything on the drive. It was Samuel Parr.

‘I wondered if there was anything you’d like me to bring tonight. A pud?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Really. Nothing.’

She found herself smiling. Samuel always put her in a good humour. He, too, was always at the back of her mind.

Later, when the chicken was cooking and the house was full of the smell of lemon and olive oil and garlic, the phone rang again. Felicity was sitting outside with the paper and another cafetiere of coffee, enjoying the last hour of silence before she had to drive into Hepworth. James had chess club after school and she’d arranged to collect him. A heat haze covered the fields towards the sea and in the distance the lighthouse seemed to shimmer, insubstantial. When she heard the phone she hurried inside. Her feet were bare. The flagstones on the terrace were so hot that they almost burned and the tiles in the kitchen were cool. The contrasting physical sensations on her feet excited her, made her suddenly catch her breath.

She had been certain it would be one of the children calling, but when she answered the line went dead. She dialled 1471 and was told that the caller had withheld his number. That had happened several times recently. She wondered if she should mention it to Peter. There had been a couple of thefts in the area. Perhaps the phone calls were to check if the house was empty. But she knew she would not tell Peter. Her life’s work was to protect him from unpleasantness and worry.

She finished her coffee, looking out towards the sea. A bath, she thought, using some of that expensive oil she’d bought in Fenwick’s on her last trip to town, to relax her before the guests descended.