A Deep Deceit

Twenty

Carl had never told me any of it. I found that hard to take. In a peculiar way I felt a certain sense of guilt, too. I had always been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own past. Maybe it was because of this that Carl had never felt he could confide in me.

It was a truly horrific story and explained so much about Carl. I dreaded to think what he must have gone through when he found Robert lying in a pool of blood – exactly the way he had found his own mother. Then there was his daughter’s horrific death, in an accident for which he was responsible.

I bought Frank Harvey another beer and he carried on with the story.

It seemed that Doctor Harvey was actually a qualified clinical psychiatrist but he just hadn’t been cut out for a big-time specialisation. ‘Too much Key West in my blood,’ he said with a chuckle rasping hoarse from the effects of years of cigarette smoking, I reckoned. He accepted a bourbon chaser, lit up another Marlboro, passed one to Mariette, coughed some more and carried on talking, telling us how something unfightable had drawn him back to practise general medicine in his home town.

‘Guess I’m just another Keys bar bum. Only difference between me and all the others is that I used to keep the old doctor’s bag behind the bar.’

I reckoned he was probably not doing himself justice. Through the haze of cigarette smoke his eyes blazed clever and clear, perhaps surprisingly so in view of his obvious love of beer and whiskey.

The case of Harry Mendleson, my Carl, had fascinated him, he explained. ‘Guess I sometimes used to hanker after what might have been. Trying to sort young Harry out did me as much good as it did him, I reckon, maybe more. I became his therapist, unofficially, but that’s what it was. Mind you, if Harry had heard it called that he’d probably have refused to have anything to do with me.

‘He abandoned his art college, simply didn’t go back, wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk at all. He was sick, no doubt about that. I took him under my wing, I suppose, even put him up for a bit. The house his parents lived in was rented, of course, and he couldn’t afford the rent. About a fortnight after the tragedy I went round there and the landlord had had him out already. Took me two days to find the boy. He was sleeping rough under the pier. Didn’t look like he’d eaten or drunk a thing in days. I took him home with me, fed him chicken and fries, and he bolted it down like he was starving. Still didn’t speak, though. I installed him in the spare room, got my books out and went to work. Every spare minute I had I talked to him, but it was three months before I coaxed a word out of him.’

I was moved by the image of Carl being shocked into silence. After all, the same thing had happened to me as a child, although I had been so young that I did not remember it, only what Gran had later told me.

‘Now three months doesn’t sound much, but it’s some long time for a man not to speak, believe me,’ Frank Harvey continued. ‘Then, when he did start to talk, well, it was like unstopping a blocked pipe in your sink. The words gushed out. Guilt and blame, that was the sum of it, really. The kid had nothing to be guilty about, nothing to blame himself for. He tried to do his best, took on more than any kid his age I ever knew, but he didn’t see it that way. If he’d done something different, if he’d taken his mother away straight off, or if he’d told his father instead of leaving that to her, it would never have happened. He could have prevented it. That’s what he kept saying.

‘Took almost a year before he was halfways functioning properly again. He never did go back to college but I had this old pal who ran an ad agency up in Largo – tourist stuff for the hotels and all. He owed me. I sent him Harry. In spite of everything the boy did good and he worked there till all his other troubles started.’

Frank Harvey sighed deeply and drank deeply. I bought him another bourbon and waited.

‘More than his share of troubles, no doubt about that. And him always just wanting to look after people, to protect them.’

I spoke then. ‘That was it from the beginning, with me. I needed protecting and there he was, just longing to protect me.’

‘It is a sickness, you know,’ went on Frank Harvey. ‘Carl became anankastic. I’ve always been quite sure of that. It’s an extreme personality disorder, associated with excessive controlling behaviour. His overwhelming desire to protect those he loves is all part of it. You’ve probably heard of Othello syndrome, that’s excessive jealousy. Then there’s Oedipus, obsession with your mother, generally sexual. Those are the more high-profile conditions. If you’re anankastic you probably have a bit of both of those in you too.’

I felt a shiver down my spine. I had loved Carl so and there was no doubt that he had loved me. If only I had realised how flawed he had been, maybe I would have been able to help him.

Frank Harvey continued to talk. ‘An anankastic is obsessive in his personal habits as well, meticulously tidy, scrupulously clean and insisting on those standards all around him. He’s a very ordered person, likes routine, always has to be the one to check the house is locked up at night, would never leave a single dish in the sink when he goes to bed. That kind of thing. And of course, he’d want to know where the person he loved was and exactly what she was doing every minute of the day and night. Does that sound like the man you knew?’

I nodded bleakly. It all flashed through my mind, from how he liked to wash himself and me after sex, to how scrupulously he kept his paintbox and catalogued his work, and above all how he had always taken over my entire life.

‘In lay terms an anankastic is an extreme control freak,’ Frank Harvey continued. ‘His motives are nearly always good. Harry’s almost certainly are. He just wants to take care of those he loves, that’s how he sees it.’

Frank Harvey was suddenly sounding like a doctor. I noticed how kind his eyes were as well as everything else. I could see how Carl, who never liked to talk about himself, had been able to confide in this man. I struggled to take in the enormity of what he was telling me.

‘I could forgive him everything, except letting me live a lie all those years,’ I said softly. ‘I think he may have let me believe I had killed my husband. I think he may have known all along that I didn’t. And that’s such a cruel thing...’

Frank Harvey interrupted me there. ‘But you’re not sure that he did, are you? And in any case, self-delusion is part of his condition. Even if he did know at the beginning that you hadn’t killed your husband, he almost certainly came to believe that you had as much as you did yourself. In self-defence, of course. So he had to protect you, look after you like nobody else could. He was sick, Suzanne, remember that. He is still sick.’

I had never thought about it that way round before. I was grateful to the doctor. It hurt me so much to think that Carl could have deliberately lied to me about Robert’s death. I grasped at the straw, comforted to think that maybe he had been as weak and confused as me, and that he had never wanted to be cruel.

I thanked Frank Harvey for his words of solace. ‘I guess I had come to understand that he must be sick, even before I met you and you told me all of this. I still feel... I am not sure, really, but I suppose I still love him.’ I fell silent.

‘He’s the kind of man to inspire that sort of love; he was as a kid.’ Frank Harvey sounded as if he was talking to himself not me. He was staring into his glass. When he looked up his voice was quite brisk. ‘And you think he may have come here, come back to his roots?’ he queried.

I nodded. ‘I didn’t know where else to look,’ I said. ‘At first I thought he’d come looking for me. I thought that might have been why he broke out of jail. Perhaps I was just kidding myself – in any case, he didn’t come to me. I waited. The police were sure he would come to me too. Then I just got this feeling that maybe he needed to return here for something. Now you’ve told me the dreadful story I feel all the more sure I’m right. Though I don’t even know how he could have got here. He had no passport...’

‘Plenty of initiative, Harry. Needed it, the way he was brought up,’ muttered the doctor.

‘So you think he could be here?’

‘Key West is a village. Can’t imagine he’d be here long without me getting to know. Any case, he’d want to see me, I reckon.’

‘Maybe not straight way,’ I said. ‘Look, does it make sense to you that he would come here? That’s what I want to know.’

‘Yes, I guess it does.’

‘So where could he be?’

The doctor shrugged. ‘I’d love to help you find him, Suzanne, if I could. I’ve my own guilt, you see. Maybe I wasn’t qualified to help Harry. Maybe I should have sent him to a place where he could get proper help. My partner back then reckoned Harry ought to have been in a hospital. I thought it would be the end of him, that I could do better. Maybe I was wrong. I never in my wildest imaginings thought Harry would ever hurt anybody.’

‘But he didn’t,’ I said quickly; then, remembering all that had happened: ‘Not really...’

Frank Harvey smiled sadly. ‘Suzanne, his daughter got killed, he abducted you and kept you prisoner.’

‘He didn’t mean to hurt his daughter. He was trying to help her, wasn’t he? And he didn’t abduct me, that wasn’t the way he saw it, he only wanted to keep me safe. He didn’t mean to hurt anybody.’ I blurted the words out, tears misting my eyes. It was all such a mess and I knew it even as I spoke.

‘But he did hurt people. I know he didn’t mean to. It’s not in his nature. Harry isn’t an evil man, he’s never been that. He’s always been a gentle, kind person. But he carries a lot of demons around with him. Maybe I didn’t realise quite how many.’

‘You’ve nothing to be guilty about, Doctor Harvey,’ I said. I found I already liked and trusted this old man, who so clearly had his own flaws.

He smiled fleetingly. ‘Call me Frank,’ he said.

‘Do you really think he believed I had killed Robert, that he came to accept it as the truth?’ I asked.

‘Almost certainly. It would have been intolerably cruel otherwise to have allowed you to bear that burden for so long. Harry would not deliberately be so cruel. It’s just that, well, we all make ourselves believe certain things, particularly about those we love. With Harry it goes a bit deeper. He puts those he loves on a pedestal, wants them to be in a situation where only he can take care of them, and that’s what he makes himself believe, that he has to protect them.’

I reached out and touched the doctor’s hand. It was veined blue with age and shook slightly, the result of all that whiskey no doubt. ‘Thank you, Frank,’ I said and I meant it.

He understood at once, I could see that, and put his other hand on top of mine. ‘You’ve loved a good man, Suzanne,’ he murmured. ‘But a good man with a terrible weakness.’

I smiled, lapping up the reassurance. I had lost a lot of my belief in myself when I stopped believing in Carl. You do that, I think, if you have devoted many years of your life to something you discover might have been a lie. I had come to think this about my whole relationship with Carl. I knew now that it hadn’t been a lie, I knew it with devastating clarity. I just wanted to find Carl and tell him too.

‘Come and see me tomorrow at my house,’ said Frank Harvey, jotting down his address on a beer mat. ‘I’ve got something I want to show you.’

‘The letter?’

‘Sure. And something else besides...’

Mariette tucked her arm through mine as we walked back to the Artists House. It was a beautiful night. The moon cast long shadows along the streets and the stars were so bright that in patches the black sky turned almost to silvery white.

When we got back to the house Mariette ordered me to put on my bathing costume, produced a bottle of white wine from the fridge in our room and led me to the jacuzzi in the backyard. ‘We need a drink and a bit of relaxing,’ she said.

The water was warm and frothy, and the wine was cold and smooth. The combined effect was indeed relaxing. And although Frank Harvey’s story had shocked me rigid it brought me closer to understanding Carl and what had made him into the kind of man he was more than anything that had come before.

By the time we came to go to bed I was pleasantly drowsy and I slept more soundly than I had in weeks.

In the morning I felt refreshed both in mind and body. ‘He has to be here, he just has to be,’ I said.

Mariette did not look convinced. ‘You heard what Frank Harvey said, Key West is a village. He’d know...’

‘Not necessarily, not if Carl did not want him too. It was fifteen years ago that anybody here last saw him. People change and Carl is very resourceful, you know.’

‘Yes,’ said Mariette crisply. I knew that she was still not at all sure that Carl really was worth looking for.

‘I have to find him,’ I told her simply.

Mariette sighed. ‘I know, it’s just that... well, all this psychobabble, it doesn’t actually change the dreadful things he did, does it?’

Mariette was Cornish and down to earth. Her reaction was entirely predictable and probably very good for me.

‘It does for me,’ I nonetheless replied firmly.

The next morning after breakfast I left Mariette lazing in the Artists House gardens and contemplating yet another session in the jacuzzi, while I found my way to Frank Harvey’s house, an attractive wood-fronted old place in a quiet tree-lined road just a block or two away from his favourite bar.

He took me into a small book-lined sitting room, slightly shabby but homely and comfortable, fed me coffee, then gave me his letter from Carl. It held no surprises. It was just as Frank Harvey had told me, but I found it quite moving to hold it in my hand and to see Carl’s neat, carefully formed handwriting again.

I have a new identity and a new love in my life. Her name is Suzanne and she means everything to me. I dream of one day being able to bring her back to Key West, but I do not know if it will ever be possible. I would have to live as the person I now am, not Harry Mendleson any more. Would anyone there remember me, apart from you, do you think?

Carl had included a Post Office box number in Penzance, something else I hadn’t known about.

‘I replied, but I’ve never heard any more,’ said Frank Harvey.

‘By the time your letter arrived in Penzance, Carl was probably already in jail,’ I reflected wryly.

The doctor nodded. Then he picked up another envelope from the table beside his chair, removed a photograph from it and passed it across to me.

The picture was of a man and a woman with a small boy. I knew instinctively that the boy was Carl, even though I had never before seen any photographs of him as a child. The man looked a bit like Carl did now, only his reddish-blond hair was much longer, almost down to his shoulders, and he had a full beard.

It was the woman who was the shock. I could almost have been looking at a photograph of myself.

I gasped. ‘Is that why you said “should have known it” when you first looked at me properly in the bar last night?’

Frank Harvey nodded and gestured towards the picture. ‘Harry with his parents,’ he remarked unnecessarily.

I studied the photograph more closely. When it was taken, Carl’s mother would probably have been a little older than I was now, in her early thirties, I thought, and her hair was approaching waist length, very Seventies. But the likeness to myself was staggering. ‘All three of us are alike. Claire looks just like her too,’ I said quietly.

Frank Harvey nodded again. ‘Yep. That worried me from the start. And Harry married her within six weeks of meeting her. I reckoned he was looking for his mother more than for a wife and Claire was never going to be that. Harry felt that he had let his mother down, not looked after her properly. I never managed to change his mind about that. It’s what turned him anankastic in the first place, I’m sure of it. He kept trying to put it right, you see, I think that’s how he saw it. That’s what he did with Claire, and he failed. Tragically...

‘Then you came along and he tried to do the same thing with you.’

I thought again, as I did so often, about my first meeting with Carl. So that was why he had approached me in the way he had. He had seen his own mother sitting there on that old decaying tree trunk, his mother crying those awful, desperate tears. That was why he had loved me so obsessively and why he had always been so determined to protect me. Fleetingly I wondered if that was all there had ever been behind his love for me.

‘Can an anankastic be cured?’ I asked suddenly.

Frank Harvey looked thoughtful. ‘Probably not,’ he replied. ‘But his condition can be controlled. I reckon Carl managed to do that a lot of the time, from what you’ve told me, didn’t he.’

I nodded agreement. I had nothing to say. I was shaken by just how little I had known of the man I had shared my life with.

Over the next few days I despatched Mariette to ride the Conch Train through the city streets, visit Hemingway’s house and take part in the other tourist rituals that were almost obligatory for visitors to Key West, while I looked for Carl.

This was all I wanted to do. It was what I had come to America for. And I was happiest alone. I prayed that I would catch sight of him around every street corner, in every bar I hoped to meet someone who had seen him. Most didn’t even seem to grasp what I was saying, or maybe that was just the impression they gave, and appeared to regard me merely as possible pick-up material.

At night Mariette and I had dinner together and maybe visited a bar or two, while I tried desperately not to spend the entire time pumping everyone we encountered about Carl. Mariette, of course, fitted into Key West as if it were a pair of old slippers – as, indeed, to anyone born and bred in St Ives it more or less was. I truly felt there was a strange kinship between this idiosyncratic island at the southernmost tip of America and the little Cornish seaside town in which we had made our home. Those who are left of the indigenous population of Key West are a weird and wonderful lot. Curious though it may seem, I really could believe that you could swap them with the remains of the indigenous population of St Ives with not a lot of trouble. Carl had been right about that. They would fit easily into each others’ environments. So strange to come halfway across the world and feel this.

Mariette, of course, denied it hotly. ‘When we go back you can try asking for a margarita down the Sloop and I’ll just watch,’ she said, deliberately refusing to understand what I was trying to say.

I gave up, then. But I still believed I had discovered a truth.

Every evening at sunset, while Mariette drank margaritas at Mallory Dock and flirted outrageously with the waiters, something of a reflex action for her, I reckoned, I got in the habit of walking by the sea. I had a vague belief that I would find Carl on a beach somewhere at this time of day, away from the masses of people on the pier, all alone watching the sun go down.

Mariette and I had bought the cheapest air tickets available and were locked in to a flight home after ten days. Having spent eight of these in Key West, fruitlessly searching for my lost man, it was time to head back towards Miami. With a heavy heart, now, I went for my last evening beach walk. I had lost my initial optimism, my stubborn belief that Carl must be here somewhere. I was coming to have to accept that the world was a pretty big place. He could be anywhere.

As far as Key West was concerned my search had become merely automatic. I no longer believed Carl was there.

On this last night on the island I walked along the beach over by the big hotels at the back of the old town with my head down, kicking my toes in the sand, not even bothering to look around me.

I heard the music first, those familiar haunting strains wafting through the cooling evening air.

Then I saw him. He was sitting on the sand with his back to me, hunched into some kind of dark coat, silhouetted against the setting sun. I could just see the top of his head, the familiar sprouting of spiky fair hair. The music was coming from a ghetto blaster by his side.

For a second or two I stopped in my tracks. I stood absolutely still. Then I began to run, calling his name, but still he did not turn round.

By the time I reached him the tears were pouring down my face. I flung myself on to the sand in front of him and reached out my arms towards him. His head was slumped almost on to his chest. At last he looked up.

His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. His skin was filthy and covered in red blotches. His hair was actually peroxide white, black at the roots and filthy. He stank. The eyes stared, the trembling, cracked lips began to shape a parody of a smile. ‘Who are you, then, sweetheart? Come to keep me warm in the night, have you?’

He swayed his body towards me. I recoiled sharply, at the same time noticing the empty syringe nearby on the sand. From the ghetto blaster I vaguely heard the voice of a disc jockey. ‘And there we have it, folks, an ultimate sound of the Seventies...’

My arms were still outstretched. Gravity allowed them to fall to my sides. I shuffled further back from him, found my feet and started to run, the tears falling freely now.

It had not been Carl sitting on the beach waiting for me to come to him, to find him, while he played our song over and over again. Just some sad druggie giving himself a fix. Oblivious, probably, to the music being played on his radio, to the song that had shaped so much of my life.

I slowed to a walk and wiped away the worst of my tears before rejoining Mariette on the pier. Nonetheless she gave me a curious glance and the muscle-bound young man in singlet and shorts who had no doubt been chatting her up took one look at me and retreated fast.

My distress had turned to anger, and I think it showed. ‘C’mon let’s pack and get out of here,’ I said. ‘I’m done with chasing shadows.’