Unspoken (20 page)

Carlyle sits still and calm, unfazed, almost bored.

‘Either way, the girl was messed up bad.’

‘So I believe,’ he says. ‘It’s tragic.’ There is coldness in his voice, as if it’s all a great inconvenience.

‘Firstly, I need to know where you were on the night it happened.’

David sighs. ‘I was at the surgery until six p.m. I drove home. I made myself a meal.’ He gestures briefly, flicking the memory away casually.

‘Just like that. You remember just like that?’

‘You said it was a Thursday. That’s what I usually do on Thursdays.’

‘But can you prove that you did it on that one?’

‘No.’

‘And what about your relationship with Grace? It’s clear from the evidence that you know her.’

‘Yes, I know the girl.’

‘Just how well do you know her, Doctor?’

David’s words are vapour thin, sending a shiver through me. He swallows. ‘People were talking.’ He bows his head. ‘I knew it had to stop.’

‘What had to stop, David?’ I hold my breath, already knowing what he’s going to say. How will I tell Julia that the new love of her life was having a fling with a teenager?

‘I knew it wasn’t right. All the appointments, secret meetings, phone calls.’ He sighs.

I go cold from the admission. ‘So you were having relations with a young girl.’ I hold it together. ‘Did anyone else see you with her the afternoon she was hurt? Apart from the CCTV cameras.’

David is vague, somewhere else entirely. ‘Yes, a few people, I would imagine. Her mother saw me with her. She came with Grace to my surgery for an appointment the morning before she was hurt.’

‘What happened while they were in your surgery?’

David wipes his hands across his face. ‘Grace argued with her mother in my consulting room. Her mother stormed out and left her daughter alone with me.’

‘What was the row about?’

David searches the ceiling for an answer. ‘Grace was pregnant. Her mother wanted her to have an abortion, but Grace didn’t want to. I spent a long time comforting her. She was incredibly distraught.’

‘Christ,’ I say, considering the implications. I have to ask. ‘Who is the father?’

David pauses before answering. ‘I can’t say.’ He stares blankly ahead, wringing his hands together in a knot of deceit.

I don’t say anything else; can’t say anything else. My lips have frozen together. I have to take a break. To get some air. To think. To work out why everything is folding in on me. I need a drink.

I stand up, gather my belongings and leave the room. The guard immediately slides into my place.

 

‘How did it go?’The bilge pump is noisy so I don’t hear her the first time. I leap on to the towpath.

‘She’s sinking,’ I say matter-of-factly.

‘Murray! I said how did your meeting with David go? Did you make an appeal for bail?’ Julia’s cheeks are glazed pink and her breath spurts out in shots of hope. She is wearing her pink mittens, clapping them against each other as if that will hurry me up.

‘Even God couldn’t get him out of there at the moment. Coming aboard?’ I’m moving the few things I had at Northmire back on to
Alcatraz
. There’s no point staying at the farm any longer, not when Julia’s returning to Ely.

‘No. Flora has a ballet lesson.’

There’s a thread of sadness to her voice and I’d like to think it’s because she doesn’t have time to come inside. But of course it’s because there’s no progress with David’s case and her mother’s in hospital and one of her students has been battered into silence.

‘I understand,’ I say, not even beginning to. ‘Send the kids my love.’

‘I will.’ Julia turns to walk back to her car at the junction. ‘Did David say anything? How is he?’

‘We made a good start,’ I reply vaguely. I could end it all for her, with one sentence –
Grace Covatta is pregnant with David’s baby
– but I haven’t even digested the news myself yet. ‘I need to see the coroner’s report and the police are waiting for DNA samples to come back from the lab. Don’t worry,’ I tell her, meaning the opposite. ‘The evidence is largely circumstantial. I’m shocked he was even charged.’ I smile, offering a little warmth for her shaking body. ‘And he’s bearing up well. He’s eating and sleeping. He sends . . . he says hi,’ I add.

Julia nods appreciatively, her lips tight. ‘Will you be in for dinner?’ she asks, and I wonder why. Then I realise she still thinks I’m staying at the farm.

‘No.’ I smile, enjoying the flash of irony. ‘I’ve gone and left you.’

Julia finally walks on, shaking her head, trying to figure out how you can leave someone who was never there in the first place.

I remember the sun on my back as we walked, his warm hand settled there too – fingers spreading like molten lust between my shoulder blades. He commented on my back, saying it was the prettiest he’d ever seen. That I had good muscle tone, and he even named them all, his finger tracing their striated path. Even these days, with my back hunched and my skin sallow, I can still feel his touch as he delved between my bones.

David’s university room was not how I imagined. Firstly, it was furnished with antiques and was actually more of a suite than a room. Already a cut above the average student. He had a living area, a bedroom and his own bathroom. It was all decorated in deep rich colours and two entire walls were lined with books, many of them antique.

‘Courtesy of my parents and their contacts.’ He grinned when he saw my mouth hanging open. ‘That’s just how they are. By furnishing me like this, by dumping funds into my bank account each month, they believe themselves to be . . .’ He paused. Another stroke of my back. ‘. . . parents. Rhomboideus minor. Arising from the seventh cervical and first thoracic vertebrae inserting into the spine of the scapula. And you are
very
tense.’

I sensed he had issues with his family but didn’t pursue it. It was a neat explanation for his flash outbursts of anger. I understood perfectly. ‘Shall we have tea?’ I suggested. He was right. I was tense. I perused his books, trailing a finger over their spines, as David had just done to me. ‘You still smell of death.’ I turned and grinned at him but his smile dropped away.

‘I’ll make you tea,’ he said, approaching me, leaving a tiny imprint of his lips on my bare neck. It’s still there all these years later.

We sat in the bay window of his room sipping on a Chinese blend, watching student life from the first floor. For that hour, I felt special, part of the elite group I had obsessed about for years. ‘I’d got it all figured out,’ I told him, but David didn’t seem particularly interested.

‘Hmm?’

‘My career. Veterinary science. Astronomy. Philosophy. Classics. History of Art. God, I didn’t really care.’ I laughed away the pain that spiked through my heart and counted myself lucky that I was at least taking tea with an intelligent, cultured and privileged young medical student at Corpus Christi. Second best; all that was left for me. ‘But still, I like my job.’

‘You’re a waitress,’ he said flatly, and pulled out a packet of Embassy. He lit one.

‘Maybe I’ll open my own café some day.’ Smoke rolled through the sunlight and tumbled over me. It was the same air that had just left David’s lungs. I sucked it up in case there was something of him to be had.

‘Why do you like me?’ he asked. Through squinting eyes, through a confident demeanour that a young man of his age had no right to possess, he appraised me. I knew he wanted me.

‘Well,’ I said, trying to keep things light. I was way out of my depth. I dabbed tiny drops of sweat from my top lip. It was hot in his room, a hot day everywhere. ‘You have nice eyes.’ That was true. Crazy dark irises swam behind a mop of hair that had been hand-picked to match. ‘And you’re intelligent. I like intelligent men.’ Yes, it was flirting. Yes, I crossed my legs one way and then the other, and yes, the fabric of my pretty skirt fell from my knees. ‘I have great admiration for intelligence. I find it—’

‘Sexy?’ He was grinning again, switching flawlessly from indomitable to childlike. That’s what I liked about David. Traversing the depths of his psyche had become an impossible yet enchanting puzzle. ‘I like older women,’ he confessed. I smelled his smoke again. ‘It’s all about experience, isn’t it?’

I remembered my vow and crossed my legs away from him. I respected David and I wanted him to feel the same way about me. I was an older woman and I wasn’t about to take advantage of the situation. I knew better. That was not what our relationship was about. For me, it was way deeper than that. I wanted to learn from him; absorb by osmosis the life I should have had. ‘Is twenty-seven old, then?’ Suddenly, I felt like his big sister.

‘Terribly,’ he confessed, and leaned forward so that his shirt stretched across his shoulders and his sleeves hoisted up his elbows. He dropped the cigarette into an ashtray and it continued to burn until it went out at the filter. I watched the smoke wind up to the ceiling. ‘That’s why I like you.’ And suddenly he was on his knees in front of me, trying to press his lips on to mine and fumbling with the tie of my top.

I dropped my cup to the floor – china smashing around my ankles. I pushed him away. ‘David, no!’ My voice was smothered by his lips.

It all happened so quickly. Fear told me to fight him off, yet it was fear of our friendship ending that made me want him to continue. His hand was on my breast, the hot cup of his palm sending a wave of lust to my brain.

‘I’m so sorry.’ As quickly as it had begun, it was over. David was back in his chair, his cheeks flushed, his eyes smoking like the dog-end dying in the ashtray. For a second, I felt eighteen again myself.

 

It doesn’t really matter where I sit. Here, at home, in the past. It’s all the same to me. The nurse has brought me to a clean white room where, even though it’s dismal and raining outside, everything makes me believe I’m on the verge of heaven. I sit and stare at a wall, just catching a whiff of all the smoke from the past that’s somehow seeped into the present.

It was only the shower curtain that smouldered. And apart from the smell and the black on the tiles, you’d never know that there had been flames or fuss at all. But because the window only opens an inch, the stench will take days to clear. It was the clothes that I’d wanted to burn, not the hospital.

Julia is visiting. I couldn’t look her in the eye when she arrived because of where she’s heading with her life. It’s hard to watch your daughter fall over the edge of a precipice; hard not to be able to tell her. But I hear her voice, shrill and seeking, cheerful yet veined with sadness, and here I sit, unable to answer. She mutters something about clothes and the hospital gown, and suddenly little Flora is climbing on to me, rocking what’s left of my world. Julia walks off.

Hello, Grandma. I don’t like it here. Flora shakes her head and her curls bounce against my cheek. Her hair smells of vanilla and I wish I was her. Everyone understands her reason for silence. When will you come home? Milo is missing you. She wriggles and positions herself better, wrapping and unwrapping the string of my gown around her fingers; effectively silencing herself.

Don’t you want your animals any more, Grandma? Did you lose your way home? Mummy says that your brain is sick and you might die. I heard her talking to Daddy. Flora’s hands whittle the air into wisps of words and I understand her perfectly. Saliva pools in my mouth.

When Flora was born, no one knew that she was deaf. Alex, instinctively acting as big brother, spoke for her as they grew up, so even before the doctors broke the news, it never seemed that Flora was without a voice, without comprehension. If she wanted something, she’d somehow communicate it to Alex through expression, crude signing or perhaps just a sibling sixth sense. Despite her disability, Flora never seemed different, never an outcast, never blamed or judged for living in her silent world.

Alex stands across the room. He looks so like his father – his body lean and pliable with the awkwardness of youth that never quite left Murray. His blue eyes poke from beneath messy brown hair that refuses to lie flat. He bends to compensate for his gangly limbs and precocious height. Bored, Alex walks off, despite his mother’s instructions.

It’s just Flora and me now, stuck in our mute worlds. My granddaughter rests her head on my chest and her quick child breaths fall into line with mine. She raises her hands in front of my face.

Isn’t there anything in your ears either, Grandma? Is everything hollow too?

She searches my face, desperate to communicate any way she can. She is allowing me into her mind through those pretty blue eyes, offering a helping hand like Alex did for her. Flora is safe, silent, a locked cabinet for my thoughts.

Yes, it’s all hollow, I tell her with fingers that bend from the first knots of arthritis. There’s nothing left.

Flora nods and rests her head on me again, as if my communicating with her had simply picked up from our last chat. Are you sad, Grandma?

No, I sign quite clearly. Just very, very sorry.

 

Before Julia leaves the hospital, she takes me back to my room, but we are intercepted by a nurse because they have moved me to another, less salubrious wing of the building. My new room doesn’t have a view of the chestnut trees, rather a tiny window about eight feet off the floor. There is no private bathroom, the floor is covered in linoleum and the bed is a metal-framed cot. A tiny smile catches the corner of my mouth but, thankfully, nobody sees. This room suits me perfectly.

‘Why is my mother in here? Her last room was much nicer than this.’ Julia’s voice is caught on the sharp point between tears and yelling.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Marshall, but we don’t have unlimited facilities.Your mother set fire to the last room, and until we have cleaned and redecorated, she will have to stay in here.’

I sit on the bed, the middle of it sagging under my weight, and absorb the heat from Julia’s eyes as she stares at me. Suddenly she is on her knees in front of me, nothing coming out of her mouth except a thousand unanswerable questions.