Disclaimer

52. LATE SUMMER 2013

The door gives its familiar stutter as it closes behind her. When she had finished speaking, she had looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” And then she had got up and walked out. I didn’t reply. I had only interrupted her once to ask a question and she’d answered it. I didn’t get up and see her to the door or thank her for coming. I stayed where I was. I wish I hadn’t burned Nancy’s notebooks — I would do anything to have them back. I need the comfort of her words, but the house is silent. Except it isn’t. I am trembling so much that the chair I’m sitting on is banging against the table and I have to grip the seat to steady it and me. Why did I destroy Nancy’s notebooks and keep the photographs? What a fool.

I feel raw, as if my skin has been licked off by a cat’s rough tongue, removing my protective layer, and I am not sure I can survive without it. I flail around for something to cling to and grab at the nearest thing. She is a liar. She has been lying for years, everyone knows that. She is lying again now. And I listen out for Nancy’s voice to echo mine but I can’t hear it. All I hear are Catherine Ravenscroft’s words describing how Jonathan cut a cross onto his arm and made her lick his blood, and I remember the purple marks I saw when we identified his body. Scarring from an injury sustained in the accident they told us. But so neat and perfectly drawn? I try Nancy again:

“Why didn’t you ask her about the photographs? Why didn’t you confront her when she said she had never met Jonathan?” But Nancy remains silent.

“She has no proof,” I howl.

I cannot stand the silence and put on my jacket and leave the house. The bus stop is at the end of the road and I march to it: left right, left right, eyes front. I can hear the low hum of the bus and turn to see it coming down the road behind me. I quicken my pace, turning round to try and catch the driver’s eye. I put out my hand. I am still twenty yards from the stop. He overtakes me, pulls in and waits. A youth gets off. I am nearly there, but the bus pulls out before I reach it. Didn’t he see me? He must have seen me. How cruel. He didn’t have the decency to wait, just a minute, three at the most. I give the rear of the bus a salute as it disappears round the corner and wait for the next.

Time passes without me noticing. I have emptied my head. When the next bus comes, I get on and sit behind the driver. An elderly woman sits opposite. She tries to catch my eye but I look past her through the window.

“It’s going to be a lovely afternoon. They said it’ll clear up later,” she says. I look at her. I want to reply but I cannot speak, so I nod and then turn away. A woman with two small children gets on at the next stop and the elderly lady pats the seat next to her for one of the children to sit down. The child looks nervous, she doesn’t seem to recognise the old woman, but the mother smiles, picks her up and pops her on the seat, then picks up the other child, a little boy, and carries him. They are about two years old; I think they must be twins. Now the little girl is staring at me too. I stare back. The two women chat about nothing, but it fills the space nicely between me and them.

She is right; by the time I get off the bus the grey has shifted and the sky is blue, the sun bright, but low. It shines directly in my sight line and I have to squint and even then all I see ahead are dark, ill-defined shapes. I turn left through the gate and now the sun is to my right and my vision clears.

This is where Catherine Ravenscroft and Nancy met: the place where Jonathan and Nancy are buried. I used to come regularly to tend their graves but I haven’t been for a while. With Nancy back at home, I haven’t felt the need. We bought our plot when Jonathan died, deciding to settle down with him when it was our turn. For some reason dog walkers seem to think this is an appropriate place for their dogs to stretch their legs and defecate. It usually annoys me but today I sit on a bench and watch them. Jonathan and Nancy are on a rise behind me.

The dog walkers here are good sorts, they always pick up after their animals. I watch a man scoop up his dog’s mess with impressive efficiency. One smooth move, hand in black bag, a swoop down, pick up, and then straight into the bin, the lid already raised by his other free hand. I smile and nod as he walks on. I watch him until he is out of sight. I look the other way. A jogger enters the gates but he takes another path, away from my bench. I get up and open the doggy bin and reach in and take out the little black bag. Holding it between finger and thumb I walk up to my son’s grave. I untie the bag and the reek makes me gag.

“You fucking little shit,” I shout and hurl it at Jonathan’s grave. Some of it flicks out, sticking to his headstone, and I am immediately ashamed. Nancy lies next to Jonathan: devoted mother, beloved wife, forever missed.

I look round to check if anyone has seen me, but they haven’t. I go to the tap and fill a watering can and bring it back, throwing water over Jonathan’s headstone. It takes three trips to clean it all off, and then I pick up the black bag and drop it into the bin. I return to the graves and kneel down between them and weep.

“Did you know, Nancy? Did you suspect?” And my weeping turns to sobs and I am on all fours, prostrate at their feet. I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Are you okay?”

I look up at the man I had seen earlier with his dog. He reads the headstones.

“Your wife and son?”

I nod, expecting another pat before he walks away, but he stays with me.

“How did your son die?” There is no prurience; it is a gentle question. My mouth is full of spit and tears and I struggle to get the words out. He offers me his hand and helps me up.

“He drowned,” I manage.

“How terrible,” he says. I want more.

“He was trying to save a child.” I hear him catch his breath.

“That’s incredibly brave,” he says and nods as if he understands now who Jonathan was. “And did he? Save the child?”

“Yes he did.”

“What a brave young man he must have been,” and then he gives me the pat and walks away.

Yes he was. Whatever else he may or may not have done, Jonathan was brave to have saved that child, no one can deny that. On that afternoon he had shown courage. He was the first to run in. That’s what the police said. He swam in without a thought for himself. If he hadn’t acted so quickly then, Nicholas Ravenscroft would have been swept out too far for anyone to reach. The young Spaniard may have been the one to drag Nicholas onto the beach, but it was Jonathan who really saved him. I would have been too frightened, most people would have been too frightened, but in that moment Jonathan forgot himself and found the courage to do the right thing. “He was a very brave young man,” is how witnesses had described him to the police and how they had then described him to us. “He sacrificed himself” was their dramatic translation from Spanish into English.

I know that I have never felt as proud of Jonathan as I should have. It shames me to recognise that I never quite believed in his courage. Was it bravery or recklessness? I try but fail to recall a single time, in the nineteen years he was with us, when he did not put himself before another human being. Not once. So why then? And why couldn’t he swim back? Was the sea really too strong?

“Why did the Spaniard make it back and not Jonathan?” I had once burst out to Nancy and she gave me the answer I wanted to hear.

“He was too far out by then. He was exhausted. He had done the hard work. The Spaniard only had the last leg.”

When I get home, I start to shiver again. The temperature in the house is colder than outside. I sit down at my desk and open the drawer where I keep the photographs. I look through them again. Pictures of a mother and son on a beach; in a café, her coaxing a spoon into his mouth; eating ice cream together. They look so natural. She smiles, he smiles. They are on holiday. In one photograph she is looking straight into the camera. You could believe the photographer was sitting with them at the same table, but I don’t believe that anymore. She didn’t know she was being photographed, just like Nancy didn’t know when Jonathan captured her sitting in the garden in the deck chair. He was good. He had a talent for photography. They are the sort of photographs you would see in a celebrity magazine taken by a member of the paparazzi. Up close and personal, but from a safe distance. An illusion of intimacy. We had bought our son the most expensive zoom lens we could afford.

The photographs in the hotel room are different. There is nothing natural about them. They are posed, I see that now. And as I look at them, horror is added to my shock. I see something I had chosen to miss before. It is fear.

If it had been me and not Nancy who had developed the film from Jonathan’s camera, and if I had sat alone looking at those photographs as she did so soon after his death, would I have seen what she saw? Or would I have remembered the collection of porn I found in Jonathan’s bedroom? Or perhaps I would have had the film developed first and found the porn later? Then would I have made a connection? I threw the magazines away so Nancy could remain innocent of her boy’s appetites. But I made myself an innocent too. I dismissed them at the time, and then failed to recall them when I came across the photographs all those years later. I saw what I wanted to see. But I wonder about Nancy. I wonder whether perhaps she did see something else. And I wonder whether that is what compelled her to write the book. She wrote it for herself, no one else.

Did she construct that story so she could lay her son to rest in peace? Not my son though. My son is in an altogether less restful place. I say a prayer for Nicholas Ravenscroft’s recovery and think how Nancy would laugh at me but I cannot conjure her up and I realise I am grateful for the silence. I return the photographs to their envelope.

I asked Catherine Ravenscroft, why hadn’t she told Nancy when they met? Why didn’t she tell her she had been raped? She looked at me in surprise.

“I haven’t told anyone,” she said. “And I didn’t want to cause her any more pain.” I was the first person she had told. And she told me because she had been forced to. She had been forced again, against her will. I think she actually meant it when she said she was sorry. She pitied me, but I don’t want her pity. I want her to hate me. I need someone to hate me more than I hate myself. I need to tell her what I did to her son. That I am the reason he is where he is now.

I dial her number. I have dialled it before, but never spoken. She picks up.

“Hello?” She must be driving — her voice sounds small against the hum of traffic in the background.

“I showed your son the photographs of you.” I wait for a response but none comes, so I go on. “My wife wanted you to suffer as she had,” I say and tell her about my contact with Nicholas. “I led him to believe you were in love with Jonathan, that Jonathan’s life was worth more to you than his.” I hear her breathing above the sound of the road, short little gasps, but she says nothing. I expect her to hang up, but she doesn’t.

“You should tell your husband,” I say as gently as I can.

“You fucking tell him,” she whispers, and her words give me hope that at last she has found it in her heart to hate me.