The Judgement of Strangers (37 page)

‘I am. Coffee?’

When the food came I ate ravenously. I had not eaten a proper meal since the day before yesterday. We did not talk. Afterwards the waitress cleared the table and brought more coffee.

‘What next?’ Peter said.

‘The funeral. I must see to the funeral. She –’

‘After the funeral. What will you do then?’

‘I can’t think about that now.’

‘I think you can. It’s time to begin letting go.’

There was a silence. Peter struck a match and held it over his pipe. In the light reflected off the snow, the flame was drained of colour, almost invisible. No secrets in this light. No place for darkness.

‘While she was dying,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of Joanna.’

Peter dropped the match in the ashtray.

‘It seems so unfair to Vanessa. As if I can’t even mourn her properly.’

‘You’ve been mourning her for nearly eighteen months.’

‘No, I haven’t. For all that time it was as if she wasn’t a real person. As if I’d cheated her even of that.’

‘You did what you could.’

‘It wasn’t enough. After all, what happened was my fault.’

He shook his head. ‘Sloppy thinking. Not like you.
You
didn’t attack Vanessa and put her in a coma. Rosemary did. Just as she cut up that poor cat and killed Lady Youlgreave to shut her mouth. Just as she tried to blame Michael and the teenagers for what happened to the cat, and Audrey for what she did to Vanessa.
Rosemary
. Not you.’

‘I made Rosemary what she is.’

‘Don’t be so arrogant,’ Peter said. ‘She’s shown sociopathic tendencies since she was a toddler. We both know that. It wasn’t your fault that events conspired to tip her over the edge.’ He held up his hand and ticked off his points one by one on stubby fingers: ‘First she was furious because Vanessa took part of you away from her. Then she was jealous of Michael and your obvious liking for him. Then her exam results weren’t up to the ridiculously high standards she’d set herself: that was the catalyst for what she did to that wretched cat. Then she fell in love with Toby Clifford and he paid her back by raping her. And finally Toby twisted the knife by pretending to flirt with Vanessa.’

There was a silence. It was not easy to allow others to share responsibility. I wanted to keep it all for myself.

‘And then of course,’ Peter said, ‘there was Francis Youlgreave.’

I shrugged.

‘You can’t dismiss him.’ He sipped his coffee, then added, ‘Much as you’d like to. If nothing else, he gave Rosemary exactly the example she needed.’

‘This is all very well, but it doesn’t change anything. The point is, if I hadn’t been with Joanna –’

‘Exactly the same thing might have happened. In a sense, Joanna’s got nothing to do with this. Has it occurred to you that you’re hiding behind your guilt? It means you don’t have to engage with the world again. With people. With God.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘Is it?’ Shrouded in pipe smoke, he studied my face. ‘Vanessa’s dead. This is finished.’

I stared back. ‘Rosemary’s alive. So are Michael, and Audrey, and Toby. Not to mention Joanna.’

‘There’s a limit to what you can do for them. They won’t let Toby out of jail until nineteen-eighty at the earliest. And you’ve been advised not to see Audrey. You know what happened last time.’

I had visited Audrey in the nursing home that James Vintner had found for her. Though heavily sedated, she had flung herself at me, covered my face with moist kisses, and begged me to take her home with me. She was suffering from the delusion that she was my wife.

‘But Michael?’ It was Michael’s evidence which had clinched the case against Rosemary, and both of them had known it. ‘The stress of it all, and then the way Rosemary threatened him …’

The memory of that summer evening was as vivid as the memory of Vanessa’s lifeless face this morning. I had tried to talk to Rosemary while we waited in the Vicarage study for Inspector Jeevons. But you cannot talk to someone who is disintegrating in front of you. It was as if another person now inhabited the shell of my daughter and stared at me through her eyes and spoke to me through her mouth.

‘How could you do this to me? I hate you, hate you, hate you. And God damn Michael, send him down to hell. I’ll punish him if it takes me all my life. You wait and see … He’s ruined everything, the little bastard. But he’ll suffer for it, Father, I swear to God he will, and so will you …’

As the thick, barely recognizable voice was stumbling through its commination, I had looked up to see Michael in the doorway. His mouth was open but he said nothing. Through the open window came the distant sound of wings. I heard the wings at Roth, and I heard them now in the dining room of this hotel almost a year and a half later. Once again despair rolled towards me, grey and inexorable like a bore streaming down a tidal estuary.

‘David? Stop that. Now.’

A hand gripped my arm. I opened my eyes and blinked across the table at Peter.

‘Now listen to me. I know you’re tired but you mustn’t let your defences down.’

‘But Michael heard –’

‘Michael has his parents to care for him, as well as you. He’s young. He’ll manage perfectly well without you fussing over him.’

Peter released my arm, sat back and began to prod the contents of his pipe bowl with a spent match. Tension drained away from me. This time the wave had thrown me exhausted but alive on to the river bank.

‘And as for Joanna,’ he continued in a gentler voice, ‘I had a letter from her last week. She’s pregnant.’

Another silence stretched between us. I had not seen Joanna for nearly a year and a half. Peter had insisted on that. When he came back from Crete that summer, he had reinstated himself as my spiritual director and imposed several conditions on me. One of them was that I should not see Joanna again. It had been Peter who had arranged for her to go to the treatment centre, and he who made sure that she stayed. There she had met a medical student in his final year. After he had qualified, they had married and moved up to Northumberland, where he had been offered a partnership.

Peter had told me that Joanna was thinking of training as a nurse. I thought that the child would probably force her to postpone that. I found it hard to think of her married to another man, to think of her having another man’s child.

‘You need a change,’ Peter went on remorselessly. ‘Have you thought of doing some teaching again?’

‘But my job –’

‘You can’t spend the rest of your life acting as someone else’s curate in north-west London. You’d do far more good as a teacher.’

I shook my head.

‘There comes a point when punishing yourself becomes a purely self-indulgent exercise. The real question is how you can put your talents to best use. Let’s face it, they don’t lie in the pastoral direction. You’re a teacher, perhaps a scholar. The last time I saw you baptizing a baby you held it as if it was going to explode.’

I looked at him and saw the glimmer of a smile on his face. ‘In a manner of speaking, it did explode.’

‘I heard of a teaching job in America the other day. It’s an Episcopalian theological college in the Midwest. The chap who runs it trained at Pusey House. I used to know him quite well when I was up at Oxford. If you want I can put in a word. No need to decide now. But think about it.’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

‘You’ve done enough brooding. It would do you good to get out of this country.’

‘There’s Rosemary.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on her. I’ll visit, and I’ll see that other people do.’

‘She was a victim too. For God’s sake, Toby gave her a taste of heroin and
raped
her … She was so shocked and ashamed she couldn’t even tell us what happened. And to make matters even worse he managed to wriggle out of that charge.’

‘Rape’s notoriously difficult to prove. I know Rosemary has suffered – and still does. But there’s absolutely no point in your making her into another rod to beat yourself with.’

‘I can’t just run off and leave her.’

‘You can – and in the circumstances I think you should.’ Peter put his elbows on the table and leant towards me. ‘You’re using Rosemary as just one more excuse not to make a fresh start. Besides, if you take this job, you’d have a decent salary and plenty of opportunities to fly over and see her. If that’s possible.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘You know very well that she doesn’t want to see you. You have to accept that.’

I looked at him. Very good people can be as ruthless as very bad people.

‘Come on, David,’ he said softly. ‘You can’t go on drifting. You’ve got to leave all this behind you. You’re carrying the past around like a dead weight.’

I sat back and stared out of the window. It had begun to snow again. The flakes were almost invisible against the pale grey of the sky. I thought of the little girl whom Toby had seen crying in the crystal ball. I did not think he had made it up. He had sounded so surprised – at what he saw? At his ability to see it?

When Joanna took me up to Francis Youlgreave’s room in the tower, she had heard a child crying too. The same one? Had the child been merely the product of a drugged imagination? In that case, why had Toby seen it? Did that mean that the child was somewhere in the past or the future or another part of the present?

‘There’s so much I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The trouble is, I don’t know whether a fresh start is possible. I don’t know if all this is finished yet.’

‘It is always possible to begin again. And even if it weren’t, we should try.’

I stood up and smiled down at Peter, a round little man like Father Christmas without the beard. ‘I wonder,’ I said. ‘I wonder.’

Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of crime novels, including the Dougal series, the Lydmouth books and
The Barred Window
. His critically acclaimed, award-winning historical thriller,
The American Boy
, is a Richard and Judy Book Club Selection. He and his wife live with their children in the Forest of Dean.
     
The Judgement of Strangers
is the second volume of Andrew Taylor’s Roth Trilogy. The first and third in the sequence are
The Four Last Things
and
The Office of the Dead
, both available in paperback. The Roth Trilogy is now published in an omnibus edition, entitled
Requiem for an Angel
.

www.andrew-taylor.co.uk

The Judgement of Strangers
is the second novel in the Roth Trilogy, which deals, layer by layer, with the linked histories of the Appleyards and the Byfields. Each book may be read on its own as a self-contained story. The three novels are also designed to work together, though they may be read in any order.

The first novel,
The Four Last Things
, is set in London in the middle of the 1990s. The third novel,
The Office of the Dead
, is set in the cathedral city of Rosington over a decade before the events described in
The Judgement of Strangers
.

Andrew Taylor

‘Andrew Taylor is a master of the corrosive passions that fester beneath conventional facades …’

V
AL
M
C
D
ERMID

‘Taylor is a writer blessed with great compassion as well as an unerring eye for historical detail. His flawed heroes and heroines and narrators are people you have met before in the street’

F
RANCIS
F
YFIELD
,
Sunday Express

‘Like Hitchcock, Taylor pitches extreme and gothic events within a hair’s breadth of normality’

Times Literary Supplement