Tree of Hands (30 page)

‘I never told the fuzz he was. I'm not saying I don't know who did but it wasn't me.'

Terence shrugged. He told Carol he had sold his house and would she mind witnessing his signature to a document. He reasoned that Carol was the only person he could possibly ask, the only person he knew who, if questioned about it – before 15 February that is, for after that who cared? – would lie stoutly for the mere sake of lying, the only person who wouldn't look too closely at the document itself, knowing by a sort of nose for that kind of thing that there was bound to be something fishy about it.

The fishiness was that Terence had photo-copied the document at an instant print place on his way over. He intended to sign it in his own name in her presence. What he wanted was a specimen of Carol's signature to copy on the real transfer when he signed it later on in the name of Phipps.

She signed in her round backward-sloping hand but not before she had proved him wrong and read it, pausing at and rereading the bit where the price was given.

‘Three years ago,' said Carol, ‘you were as skint as me.'

‘I've had a bit of luck,' Terence said vaguely.

She asked him what he was going to do with the money and Terence told her he was going round the world. ‘You fancy coming along?'

‘You're kidding,' said Carol, all round doll's eyes and baby curls.

Terence admitted that he was. He was really. It would be more of a business trip than pleasure. But she'd come out and have a meal, wouldn't she, the night before he went? Barclaycard would pay, he thought.

OVER DINNER IN
the Villa Bianca, Ian told her about the job he had been offered in Canada. It was the first time Benet had been out in the evening since Jay came. She had phoned one of the babysitters from her Tufnell Park days, an eighteen-year-old who had last sat for her when James was fourteen or fifteen months old. Jay was in bed and asleep anyway by the time she came.

‘It would be a great opportunity for me,' Ian said. He smiled. ‘My big chance. The hospital is new. It's equipped as a matter of course in a way that would be just a dream here.'

‘When would you go?'

‘I don't have to let them know definitely for another month.' He hesitated and she found herself holding her breath. ‘Would you consider living in Vancouver, Benet?'

Would she? When her parents had gone to Spain, she had categorically declared nothing would persuade her to live outside England. She hadn't known then that she would fall in love and that would change everything. Then, as always now when she contemplated any plan or change, she thought of Jay. The last risk of his being identified would be removed if she took him half across the world. But to commit herself utterly and so soon . . .? She laid her hand over his on the table.

‘Let me think about it. Give me a little time, will you, Ian?'

He said, ‘I'll give you all the time I have. I was sure you'd say no. You've made me ridiculously happy by not just saying no.'

They were a little later getting back than they had told
Melanie they would be and she was ready to leave. Benet had time only to pay her and thank her before Ian drove her home. She found the note by the telephone in the basement room:
Edward Greenwood phoned 8.30.
Reading the words, Benet knew now why she had felt uneasy about Jay answering the phone and not always telling her. She was afraid there had been phone calls from Edward. It was a month now since she had seen him but thoughts of him had been niggling there under the surface of her mind. To go to Vancouver would be to escape him also . . .

She said nothing of any of this to Ian when he returned. It was their last night together before he went back on night duty. She tried to rid her mind of Edward and believed she had succeeded but she dreamed of him, a bad nightmare in which he threatened her with a knife and tried to persuade her to enter into a suicide pact with him. She awoke screaming, terrified, looking for Ian. The other half of the bed was empty. She put on bedlamps and called for him in a panic of fear. He came rushing in from Jay's room.

‘He started yelling first and then you joined in.' He took her in his arms. ‘What's got into the pair of you?'

‘I don't know, I don't know. What would I do without you?'

‘You don't have to do without me,' he said.

In the morning when Ian had gone and they had arranged to meet and have tea somewhere, Benet steeled her nerves and dialled the number Edward had given her. She thought she might finally get rid of Edward by telling him she was getting married and going to live in Canada. There was no reply. Very likely there wouldn't be at eleven in the morning. No doubt Edward had some sort of job and had to go to work. Had she phoned him at eleven because she knew he wouldn't be there? To quieten some pricking of alarm and disquiet, to be able to say to herself, I did phone him, I did try?

She was upstairs at the front door giving a pound to someone who had called collecting for charity when she
heard the phone ringing. It rang twice and stopped. Jay must have answered it. No small shrill voice called, ‘Mummy, Mummy!' Benet ran down the passage and the basement stairs. Jay was on the rocking horse, swinging vigorously.

‘Phone ring,' he said and he gave her his widest, most radiant smile.

Edward wore his thin clothes and the thick long scarf wound twice round his neck. His face was red, with a bluishness about the lips. Jay's face would go like that, Benet thought, if he were really cold. He was behind her now as she opened the door, clutching on to her skirt.

‘If you'd sent him to answer the door,' Edward said, ‘I'd have had it slammed in my face.'

All day she had somehow known he would come and had been bracing herself for it. ‘Come in,' she said. ‘It's freezing.'

He took her to imply he was letting in the cold. ‘Forgive me for making a draught.'

‘Edward, you know I didn't mean that. Don't always make me out such a bitch. When you phoned, I'm afraid Jay was playing with the phone and didn't always tell me. I'm sorry.'

‘You shouldn't let that little devil answer the phone.'

Benet said nothing, though she didn't like hearing Jay called a little devil. Jay himself, silent, was staring with fascinated wonderment at Edward in the way very young children stare at those they dislike. It was the middle of the afternoon. Having had lunch with Ian, Benet had been about to take Jay out for his walk in the pushchair and, on the way, make inquiries about the play group she wanted him to join two mornings a week. She wondered why Edward had come, and as they went down the stairs to the basement room, two answers to that came to her mind. He wanted money. He wanted to bring some sort of action against the hospital for negligence leading to James's death.
Well, she could handle that. She could handle either or both of those contingencies.

The tree of hands, denuded of course of the packages the hands had held, still hung on the wall. She saw Edward look at it and then, with the same mild reflective distaste, at the piles of toys which filled this end of the room. Ringed by a zoo of cuddly animals, lay the two drawing blocks she had bought Jay while they were out, the top sheets of which he had already covered with shapes of birds and flowers and trees in bright crayon colours. Having had his fill of gazing at Edward, he returned to his work, selecting with a smile a hitherto unused coloured pencil in a brilliant shade of veridian green.

‘You shouldn't let him scribble on that,' Edward said in exactly the same tone as he had admonished her for letting Jay answer the phone.

Suddenly Benet remembered that, the last time Edward had been here, nearly two months ago, she had told him she was minding Jay for a friend. Eight weeks was a very long time, an unheard-of length of time, to mind someone else's child. She filled the kettle and plugged it in. She set cups on a tray and opened a jar of orange juice for Jay. Edward would say something about that any minute now, he would ask why Jay was still here, and she would have to have a reasonable anwer for him. He had seated himself in the rocking chair where he could watch Jay. After a moment or two he got up again and picked up, first, the drawing block Jay wasn't working on and then, murmuring something to him, the one on which Jay was filling in with his bright green pencil the outline of a tree.

Jay didn't cry out or scream. He simply stood up and stared in stupefaction. It was Benet who wanted to yell at Edward. She made a mammoth effort at self-control. She explained to Edward that she thought Jay had a real talent for drawing, that he should be encouraged in every possible way, knowing as she did so that the words she spoke made her role as a mere temporary minder of Jay less and less likely. His lips had begun to quiver now. He started to cry
and, putting up his arms, threw himself against her skirts. Picking him up, holding him, she waited for Edward's inevitable comment: Who is this child? What is he to you?

It didn't come. Edward shrugged and put the drawing blocks back on the floor. The blood, drawn into the surface of his skin by the cold, had receded and he seemed paler than usual. His face had a concentrated look. Benet wiped Jay's tears and put him back on the floor.

‘Gugly,' said Jay to Edward who fortunately had no idea of the significance of this word.

Benet made the tea, putting the single flat teaspoonful of sugar into Edward's cup.

‘You remembered,' he said.

‘Well, of course. You don't forget something like that.'

He was silent. Jay finished his tree and started drawing a strange bird with large feet and red legs. Benet found she had nothing to say. There was absolutely nothing she could think of to say to Edward to fill this silence. It became embarrassing, almost tangible. He filled it with an abruptness and with a subject that astounded her.

‘Benet, I want us to get together again, be as we once were. I want to come back and live with you. It's the natural, obvious thing to do. There hasn't really been anyone else for either of us – at least there hasn't for me.' He added a kind of envoi that made her stand up and take a step or two away from him: ‘We belong together, Benet.'

‘It isn't possible,' she said. ‘It's out of the question.'

‘Why is it? We're older now. I'm older, if you like. I shouldn't resent your success and I've lost any ambition of my own. I'd be content to take any routine job I could get. There's a course going teaching English to foreign students. I could get in on that. I've got a degree. I'd be quite content for you to go on in your high-flying way and be a humble teacher myself.'

She nearly laughed but it would have been unkind. She was less in danger of uttering the base retort about relative incomes which came to her. He had said nothing yet to deserve that. And she was so enormously relieved that he
hadn't come here to talk about Jay that something like real affection warmed her, moved her back to sit beside him and lay her hand gently on his.

‘It really isn't possible, Edward. Dear Edward. It's not your fault any more than mine. Maybe it's more mine. I know I did you an injury.' She didn't want to name that injury, confident he would understand what she meant. ‘But it's too long ago.' Should she mention Ian? There was no need, not yet. ‘I've changed – and not in a way to bring me closer to you.'

‘I can't see any change in you.' He hesitated. ‘We could have more children, you know. I could put up with children for your sake.'

Her heart hardened again. Jay was watching them in silence, aware without understanding it of the emotion with which the room had become charged.

‘I couldn't do it, Edward. I've already said it isn't possible.'

‘Perhaps I didn't make myself clear, Benet. I was suggesting we get married. I'm asking you to marry me.'

He said it with the air of one conferring a great benefit. He said it pompously. An enormous compliment was being paid, a reward bestowed. This time she did laugh.

‘A proposal isn't necessarily something women feel passionately grateful about these days, Edward. I can't think of any good reason for marrying you and I've one very good reason against. I don't want to.'

He bowed his head, looked down at his hands in his lap, then up at her, into her eyes.

‘I'll tell you a good reason.' He cocked his thumb in Jay's direction. ‘Do you think a judge would allow you as a single woman to adopt that child over there?'

Something clenched and chilled inside her. She felt muscles stiffen. Had she told him Jay was a child she was fostering and hoped to adopt? She was sure not. The last time she had seen or spoken to Edward she was still – incredible as it now seemed – bent on finding a way to return him to his family.

‘That's what you want, isn't it?' he said. ‘That's what you're planning on?'

She nodded, held still, mesmerized, by his eyes. What he said next made her feel faint. The room darkened and she thought she would fall as she had fallen in the hospital when they told her James was dead. But she stood still, she held her shoulders back, driving her nails into the palms of her hands.

‘I know who he is, you know,' Edward said. ‘I put two and two together. It wasn't difficult. He's Jason Stratford, the missing boy.'

AFTERWARDS SHE WONDERED
why she hadn't denied it. She could have bluffed it out. But she hadn't had the nerve or been cool enough. She hadn't been cool at all. By asking him how he knew – and that was the first thing she did – she admitted everything.

‘How did you know?'

‘You calling him Jay for one thing. You don't use shortened forms of people's names. You're the only person I know who's never called me Ted. Then his colouring. He's been described often enough in the papers as fair-haired and blue-eyed. Your situation – it's women who've lost a child that abduct a child. And then the place he comes from. You used to live round the corner.' Edward looked pleased with himself. ‘Satisfied?' he said.