The Long Shadow (4 page)

“Do you often practice for beauty-competitions when you’re on your own?” Robin enquired with interest, moving forward into
the room to give his stepmother a perfunctory hug. Then, holding her away from him: “What’s the matter. Step? Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

Imogen looked up at her stepson warily. A six-footer like his father; and broad with it: but there the resemblance ended. Instead of Ivor’s shaggy lion’s mane, Robin’s hair was dark and straight and smooth, and already thinning on top. The heavy shoulders, powerful and bull-like in the father, made the son look merely overweight. Although he was only a year or two past thirty, his body was already running to fat—and at these tiny, preliminary signs of future middle-age, Imogen felt a little twinge of sadness, as at a fresh, tiny bereavement.

His face, though, was as boyish as ever—rosy, beaming, and imperturbable, just as it had been when Imogen had first met him, nearly twelve years ago: she a nervous, strung-up prospective stepmother, he an amused, unruffled, infinitely tolerant
undergraduate
in his second year.

“I’m going to call you ‘Step’,” he’d informed her, after a careful scrutiny (so it seemed to Imogen) of her every inadequacy, from her flushed face and wilting hair (it had been July, and a
heat-wave
) to her white pointed shoes that hurt, and were already smudged with green from the immemorial lawns across which Ivor was privileged, as a Senior Member, to walk, and to escort her, introducing her to the glories and honours of his status in the University.

“‘Step’”—Robin tried out the word experimentally, and nodded. “Is that O.K. with you? This way, you see, we bypass the Mummy-Mother-or-Ma thing. And since I’ve already got a Mummy, a Mother, and a Ma …”

Imogen saw his point, and smiled; and from that moment a firm friendship sprung up between them which had withstood, somehow, eleven years of almost non-stop family rows.

For Ivor’s charm, so potent in the world at large, seemed to be brought up short as against a brick wall when it came to dealing with his own son. Impervious to blandishments,
unperturbed
by rage, Robin had seemed to take a delight, from his
earliest years, in annoying his father to the limit, and then getting out from under just before the explosion. Someone else, of course, was left to take the brunt of it—usually Imogen.

“Robin, why do you
do
it?” Imogen had once protested—it was when Robin had chucked his Dip. Ed. in the middle of the second term, and had then turned up at home, carefree as
springtime
, to borrow money.

“It seems they won’t keep on my grant, now I’m not there,” he’d explained, aggrievedly; and then, while the house rocked to the repercussions of this remark, he’d slipped out to the garden shed to tinker with his bicycle. Imogen found him there, an hour later, eating Coxes from the apple-racks, and reading
Private
Eye.

“Why can’t you at least be more
tactful
?”
she’d pleaded with him. “It’s as if you’re
trying
to madden him. Why do you
do
it?”

A reasonable question: but Robin had just given a little laugh.

“Like father, like son,” he’d said lightly, through a mouthful of apple: and Imogen had been left to conclude that he was joking. For what could possibly be found in common between Ivor’s sky-ride to glory in the University firmament and Robin’s aimless teetering from one failure to another on the lowest rungs of the academic ladder?

Anyway, that’s what he’d said; and then, while all hell still raged at home, he’d cycled quietly away to wheedle the required sum out of his sister Dot, and had vanished with it to Istanbul for months and months. By the time he reappeared, there was so much else that was new, and worse, for his father to be angry about, that the original misdemeanour quite faded from recollection.

This had always been the pattern: as Robin’s current
tiresomeness
escalated, so did the past tend to get forgiven. Or perhaps not so much forgiven as wearily obliterated: the day came, at last, when Imogen realised that the battle of father and son was over: Ivor no longer cared. After all, success was by now coming to him from so many directions that he hardly needed a successful son as well. And anyway, Imogen told herself, you can’t go on
worrying for ever. By the time delinquent sons are nearing thirty, most parents have surely given up trying to be proud of them, and are merely thankful that they are still alive—if they are—and that all the things that almost happened to them, didn’t.

And now Ivor was dead: and here was Robin, smiling, as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, his same old nineteen-year-old smile (or almost): and asking her, reproachfully, if she wasn’t pleased to see him?

“Is it some girl?” she asked him warily. “Or is it money? You do realise, don’t you, dear, that until we get Probate …”

“
Step!
You mercenary old monster! As if I’d mention the sordid subject of money ‘at a time like this’—as your precious Edith-next-door would put it! Honestly, Step, you must think I have a heart of stone! Right first time—I have. But all the same, it’s not money. Not this time. What I was wondering, Step dear, is whether it wouldn’t be a good idea, now that Dad’s popped it, for me to come back and live at home? What think you, Step? Good idea? Yes?”

T
HE QUESTION MARK
in his voice was phoney. He wasn’t asking her, he was telling her. So sure was he of being able to twist her round his little finger he hardly bothered to do it any more. There he stood, beaming, utterly satisfied with himself, and waiting for her little cries of rapture.

“I shan’t actually
be
here,” he continued, a shade less
confidently
, when she didn’t answer. “I’ll be taking-off almost at once, as a matter of fact, for maybe Sardinia. Or there’s a chap I know in Spain who runs a ceramics factory…. It’s just that it seems silly to keep on the flat when …”

“You’ve lost your job, you mean?” interposed Imogen resignedly. “They sacked you, I suppose, these Fertiliser people …?”

“They did not! I wish you’d try to summon up a bit of faith in me, Step, just now and again. I sacked
them,
as a matter of fact. I just wasn’t going to stand for …”

Here it came again. Yet another lot of antedeluvian directors, obsessed with paper qualifications: yet another blinkered has-been of a firm, blind as always to their own best interests in the matter of retaining on their payroll this incomparable, this irreplaceable employee, who could have put everything to rights, from top management to office-boy, and have set their export figures
soaring
, if only he could have managed to get up in the morning.

*

Unemployed. Idling around the house all day. Eating. Borrowing the air-fare to Sardinia. Or Spain, as the case might be. Coming back penniless, and slightly ill, and with mountains of luggage to clutter up the house. On the other hand …

“I don’t know, Robin, I’m sure,” she began, trying to sound as if the decision was at least partly in her hands and not his.
“I don’t want to be rushed into anything. Everyone’s been on at me, what am I going to do about the house … I might sell it,” she finished, on a little spurt of defiance.

“You won’t, though,” predicted Robin, flopping down on the big bed (without removing his shoes, as always) and arranging the pillows under his head, “widows never do. They
talk
about it, yes, endlessly. For the first six months, they give you the ‘
I-can’t-
stand-the-memories’ bit, non-stop. They can afford to, you see, at this stage, because no one is so hard-hearted as to expect the poor grieving creatures to
do
anything. But then, when recovery looms, and they are confronted with the sheer bloody bother of actually moving, then they drop the memories thing like a hot brick, and instead they decide that they can’t bear to leave the rhubarb that
He
planted, or whatever. That’s why I won’t have anything to do with them, I stick to divorcees …”

At these words, Imogen was struck by a new and appalling possibility.

“Margot!” she exclaimed. “What about Margot? You’re not planning to bring
her
here, are you?”

“Margot? Good God, no! That’s all over. Didn’t I tell you, her mother wouldn’t keep the kid any longer: and so that was that.” He paused; and when Imogen remained silent, he continued, a little defensively: “Everyone has their breaking-point, Step. Mine’s kids. I told you.”

Ivor’s grandchild, was he talking about? Or just any old unimportant baby, the offspring merely of Margot and some unknown man? Imogen had never dared to ask: nor did she dare now. There was no point: there’d be nothing she could do. She’d never liked this Margot woman anyway; a predatory creature with coarse skin—just what Robin deserved, no doubt; but she was glad, all the same, that he wasn’t getting her.

Forget the baby, then, dark and yellow like its mother, and a slow talker into the bargain—almost two, and with barely a dozen words at its command. Change the subject, quickly.

“Oh, Robin, such an extraordinary thing!” she burst out,
perhaps
a little too exuberantly, and over-effusive: “I must tell you!
There was this extraordinary young man, you see, I met him at Myrtle’s party, and what does he do afterwards but phone me up at two in the morning to say …”

She laughed, and stumbled, and fell over her words as she recounted last night’s adventure: not sure whether she was telling a funny story or confiding a problem. Robin hitched himself higher on the pillows as he listened, and lit a cigarette. At the end, he nodded gravely.

“I didn’t know you had it in you, Step,” he commented. “But tell me—how did you get away with it? Don’t the police suspect anything …?”

“Robin!”
She hurled a cushion across the room at him, sharply and dead straight—though whether in fun or in genuine outrage, she couldn’t for the life of her have said.

“That’s right, set the house on fire as well,” he remarked equably, bending down to retrieve the cigarette that had been hurled from his fingers, and had landed, still smouldering, under the bed. “But go on, Step, tell me some more. This chap with Dutch Elm Disease—what’s his name?”

“… a
thesis
on Dutch Elm Disease,” Imogen interposed, giggling—it was the first giggle of her widowhood, and it felt strange—“His name’s ‘Teri’, believe it or not. Not ‘Terry’. ‘Teri’, with an ‘i’.”

“He accused you of
murder
?
This Teri …?”

“Why—yes—” Imogen looked at her stepson in sudden
unease
. Murder was a serious subject, surely?—why wasn’t he laughing? “What is it, Robin? What’s the matter? Do you know him, or something?”

Thankfully, she heard the bantering tone return to his voice:

“Know him?
Really,
Step. I don’t have to consort with these loons and goons, why should I?
I
only got a Third, remember? It’s the First-Class brains that addle, not the Thirds.”

He paused, and once again appeared to be thinking more deeply than was quite natural.

“What did you tell him, Step?” he asked at last. “What did you say,
exactly
?”

“Say?” Imogen frowned, trying to remember. “Well, nothing really. I was so—well, you know—so startled, and shocked. I think I just put the phone down. I might have said ‘Nonsense!’ or ‘don’t be ridiculous!’ or something like that. But that’s all. Nothing, really.”

“You didn’t challenge him, then? Or ask him anything? Like what had put such an idea into his head? If he’d heard it from someone …?”

“No. I told you. I was just—well—thrown, for the moment. I couldn’t think
what
to say. I suppose I
should
have said
something
—made it clear that whatever it is he’s trying to do, it’s an absolute non-starter, because here I was, at home, two hundred miles away, when—when it all happened. They know I was here—the hospital, I mean—because they phoned me up straight away. I could have told him all that, I suppose.”

“You could, yes. Just the same as you told the police.” Robin drew deeply on his newly-lit cigarette. “But that wasn’t quite what was in the papers, was it? ‘
WIDOW’S STORY QUERIED
’, I seem to remember: and ‘
THE MISSING HOURS OF GRIEF
’. That sort of thing. Maybe this Teri creature read them, too? If he
can
read, that is to say—he’d be on the Science side, wouldn’t he? All the same, they can count, these science chappies: they’re numerate. The ‘24 hours’ bit would have been comprehensible to him. He could even have checked on it, if he’d thought it worth while. It looks as if he did, doesn’t it? Tell me, Step, what
were
you doing during those twenty-four hours? I’ve often wondered.”

*

And that makes two of us, thought Imogen wryly. That a woman should carry on for a whole day, telling no one, behaving as if nothing had happened, after receiving news of her husband’s death, seemed to her now as incredible as it had seemed to
everyone
else: and yet, at the time, she had not felt that she was doing anything particularly strange. “Well, it was Sunday, you see,” she’d explained to the police—as if Sunday was a day that didn’t exist, as other days do. They’d seemed to understand, after a
while. They were even quite sympathetic, in an embarrassed sort of way; but by then it was too late to alter what she’d said to the newspaper reporters. The lies she’d told them were already rolling off the press.

It was only one lie, really; a small fib told to the young man from the local paper. “Monday,” she’d told him, “yes, two o’clock on Monday morning.” The lie seemed, at the time, the easiest way of explaining her peculiar inaction all through Sunday. How could she have guessed that this offhand young reporter, who’d kept glancing at his watch while she talked, was going to bother to check her statement against the police report? Or that the discrepancy he revealed was going to be seized on by other papers—short of news, as it happened, that week—so that eager young men and women would come knocking on her door, notebooks poised, eyes bright, and a good story almost in the bag?

A good story. Ivor would have liked that. As the hero of a good story he had lived, and no doubt would have wished to have died. Which was all very well: but what else could she, his widow, have done, except lie, and go on lying?