Disclaimer

57. AUTUMN 2013

Catherine is shedding layers too. She has told work that she is not coming back. She cannot face it — for the moment at least, it seems pointless to her. She has given up on her therapist too, not bothering to return after that second session, but perhaps she will try again with someone else. She probably should.

She glances over at her mother. They sit in twin armchairs, side by side: Catherine in the one her mother used to sit in before her father died, her mother in Dad’s chair. They are watching some antique jamboree, jolly, carefree, warm TV, both with a cup of tea in their hands. The doorbell rings and Catherine answers. It’s Nick. He said he might pop over and see Granny, but Catherine hadn’t been sure he meant it. The fact that he did, and is standing there, makes her heart leap.

“Mum, Nick’s here,” she calls, and her mother struggles out of her chair and totters over to her grandson.

“Hello, darling,” she says and reaches up to kiss his cheek. “Are you all better now?”

“Yes, Gran, I’m fine,” he says, but he isn’t of course. He is depressed. He is lonely. He is a drug addict. He needs help. But Granny helps a little. She has always adored Nick and Catherine watches her take his hand and hold it between hers, fuelling him with her clean love. He relaxes a little and sits down in Catherine’s chair, taking a handful of sweets from a bowl on the coffee table.

Catherine goes to fill the kettle, hovering on the threshold between kitchen and sitting room while she waits for it to boil. She studies the back of her mother and son’s heads, how they move constantly — her mother’s from the tremor which afflicts her now and Nick’s from his manic chewing of sweets. Perhaps she and Nick should have therapy together? But she dismisses the thought as soon as she has it: he is already seeing someone as part of his rehab and she doesn’t want to interfere with his progress. She tops up the teapot and takes it in, sitting down on the floor and leaning back against Nick’s chair.

“Do you want to sit here?” he asks.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she says, patting his leg.

She wonders how different it would be for Nick if she and Robert had had more children — if he’d had a younger sister or brother to deflect some of the scrutiny. She was an only child and a very happy one — that had always been her argument to Robert whenever he tiptoed into the arena of whether they should have more children. Nick had almost had a brother, or perhaps it was a sister, she will never know.

Catherine was pregnant when she came back from Spain. She didn’t know it at the time. Her periods were pretty irregular so she left it for just over a month before she did a pregnancy test. She had been back at work for a week and went out in her lunch hour to buy a kit from Boots, then she locked herself in the toilet. Of course she knew it was a possibility but she had convinced herself the test would be negative. She deserved one bit of fucking luck, didn’t she? Evidently not, because there it was. A baby inside her. She put the loo seat down and sat for a while, gently rocking back and forth, thinking. It could be Robert’s baby. They had had sex during the holiday. Just once. Despite the effort he’d made with her underwear, it was still just the once. But maybe a baby might help. A baby might be the distraction she needed. Not work but a baby. But whose baby? What if it looked like him? What if it had dark hair and dark eyes? She didn’t cry and she didn’t make a decision right then. She needed more time. She unlocked the cubicle and dropped the test in the bin then stood and looked at herself in the mirror.

“Good news I hope.”

She jumped. She hadn’t noticed anyone else come in. A colleague was standing next to her, smiling.

“Your meeting with Tony. Did you get the commission?”

“Oh yes — yes — well, he seemed to like the idea anyway — said he’ll let me know tomorrow.” She smiled and grabbed some paper towel, giving her hands a cursory wipe then dropping the paper in the bin, making sure the pregnancy test was buried. She felt slightly mad, the way she could pretend so easily — make people believe what she wanted them to believe. She’d had no idea she was so good at it.

The more she thought about having another baby, the more she realised it was an impossibility. So she booked herself into a clinic and told Robert she was going to her friend in the country for the weekend. But she didn’t leave London. It was like a sleepover with a bunch of girls in a boarding school. A few of them had come from Ireland. All of them were relieved when it was over — and they sat up in their pyjamas, eating biscuits and drinking tea and joking with a nurse who came in to discuss contraception with them. To make sure that there wouldn’t be any more unwanted pregnancies. And she joined in. It was nice to be with these women, be part of their gallows humour. She didn’t tell them about the rape — she didn’t want to spoil the mood, but she wondered if she was the only one. She was tired and pale when she got back home on Sunday evening. It was only then it hit her. It had been a pretty ghastly weekend she’d said to Robert.

“Be with you by 7.” She reads the text from Robert then texts back: “Great, see you then.”

He is coming to pick them all up and take them out to supper. She looks at the time. It is a quarter to six.

“Mum? Do you want me to help you do your hair before we go out? I could wash and dry it for you.”

“Yes please, darling,” her mother says as she pushes herself out of her chair. “Your mum is good to me,” she says to Nick as she makes her way to the bathroom.

“You will come with us, won’t you?” Catherine whispers to Nick.

“Well…,” he sighs.

“Oh please, love, Granny’d love having you there. We’ll be home by nine.”

“Yeah, okay. Oh, by the way, a letter came for you when I was leaving the house. I had to sign for it.” He hands her an envelope. There is a stamp from a solicitor’s office in the corner and she rips it open with a frown, wondering what fine it is she has forgotten to pay. She reads the letter twice then folds it up and puts it in her bag.

WINTER 2013

“Are you okay?” She nods, letting Robert’s hand rest on hers. He leaves it for as long as he can before taking it away to flick the indicator. They take the next left then slow to a crawl, dragging along until they find a space to park. He stops the car and Catherine releases her seat belt. Robert leaves his on and puts out his hand in gentle restraint.

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” she says, failing to conceal her irritation. It is the fourth time he has asked her. She opens the door and gets out.

The pane of glass in the front door is still broken, but this time Catherine uses the key to let herself in. It is hers now. The house and everything in it. She walks through, looking around, taking stock. It looks even more of a mess than when she was last here.

“Jesus,” Robert says.

She goes upstairs, looking over the banister at him standing in the middle of the sitting room, openmouthed with horror.

“Disgusting,” she hears him mutter. Yes it is. It is all disgusting. She opens the first door at the top of the stairs and looks into Stephen and Nancy Brigstocke’s bedroom: a double bed, dressing table, chest of drawers, wardrobe. The bed is still as it was the last time Stephen Brigstocke lay in it. Catherine will not be the one to drag his dirty sheets from the bed: she has organised others to come in and clear the house in a few days. She hears Robert’s feet on the stairs and within seconds his arm is around her, but she is restless and turns on her heel, marching on to the next room.

It is the only other bedroom. It must have been Jonathan’s. The walls are pale green and there are marks where pictures, or perhaps posters, have been ripped down — clean rectangles of missing things. She walks out, passing Robert, who hovers in the doorway, not knowing whether to go in or to follow her. She wishes now he hadn’t come. He looks like a husband whose wife is dragging him around a house he has no intention of buying while the owner looks on. She peers into the last door upstairs. A relic from the seventies. A bathroom with an avocado suite. She closes the door on it and goes back down. Robert follows.

They walk through the sitting room to the kitchen and look out at the garden. Since Catherine was last here someone has been at the plants. They have been cut back, hacked at, and their branches thrown, probably, onto the blackened hole in the middle of the lawn. It must have been quite a fire. He was the last thing to go onto it. The neighbours really complained about the smell then. They’d got on the phone to the council when they smelled that other, sickening smell. Catherine heard one of them on the local news.

“He didn’t make a sound,” the neighbour said. “He didn’t cry out. We didn’t hear a thing.” Otherwise of course they would have phoned an ambulance, not the council. And nobody had seen. They’d kept their windows shut after he’d started with his bonfires. Catherine had been watching television with her mother when they saw the story on the local London news. Her mother had tutted at the horror of it. An elderly man, living alone, burned to death. The police did not treat it as suspicious. A can of petrol was found near the body. She hadn’t realised it was Stephen Brigstocke until she met his solicitor and he told her what happened. He had made Catherine his sole beneficiary. This house and the flat in Fulham.

“Come on, darling, let’s go,” Robert says.

“No, you wait in the car if you like, I’m not ready yet.” But he won’t leave her and stays, opening kitchen cupboards and recoiling at the filth. He kicks at a broken cup which has been left where it fell on the greasy linoleum floor. She watches him wander back into the sitting room, his hand holding his coat away from the doorway, protecting it from picking up any dirt. He looks around for somewhere to sit but thinks better of it.

“Why don’t you wait in the car?” she says. “I’m happy to be on my own for a bit.” He looks at her, not understanding.

“I want you to. I’d like to be on my own. Please.”

“Are you sure?”

She nods.

“I’ve booked a table for lunch,” he says. “One thirty, Pier Luigi’s — I’m not going back to work this afternoon.” He is a thoughtful man. He is trying so hard. He leaves the house and she goes to the sitting room window and watches him get into the car. He takes out his phone and makes a call. It will be to work and she is glad because it means he is not thinking of her, and that gives her a breath of freedom. She has decided to leave Robert. She hasn’t told him yet. She has been thinking about it for weeks, wrestling with herself: stay or go. Now she is clear.

She needs to forgive, but she cannot. She cannot forgive him because she has watched him over the last few weeks manage the idea of her being raped so much more easily than he had managed the idea of her having an affair. Of course he was upset and angry: he felt impotent; he hadn’t been there to protect her. But it seems to Catherine that the new truth he was offered was easier for him to swallow than adultery. When she is at her most brutal, she thinks that, given the choice, he would rather she had suffered than to have enjoyed a burst of illicit pleasure. He was so hurt. He was so betrayed. He was so angry. He said his anger was because he felt he didn’t know her, that she became a stranger to him. Now he believes he has his old Catherine back. But he is wrong. She can never be that woman again. Robert’s Catherine was the one who couldn’t tell him the truth. The Catherine who preferred to strap the burden to her own back rather than share it with him. She was a self-sufficient, independent woman — a Catherine he could be proud of. Not his fault, more hers than his.

She remembers an evening soon after Nicholas came out of hospital when Robert grabbed her hands and said: “I’ll never forgive myself, Cath — how could I have believed you would have done that to us? I’ll never forgive myself….” And every word he said buried her love for him a little more. He cried, and she cried too but their tears were travelling in parallel lines. It was too late. They should have cried together years ago.

And there was anger mixed in Catherine’s tears. Robert had looked at those photographs of her being tortured and seen pleasure. He had missed the savagery and seen only lust. He had been too caught up in his own jealousy to see her. She could never forgive him for that. She thought when Jonathan died she would never have to tell anyone; she would never have to prove her innocence. Robert had made her feel that she had had to.

She opens the back door and goes out into the garden. It is drizzling, a soft grey damp that she breathes in as she walks across the patio, putting her hands in her pockets and looking down at the crooked grey slabs, wondering whether Stephen Brigstocke had laid them himself. She steps onto the grass, trimmed now into a lawn, and walks towards the blackened pit in its middle. A flutter of yellow catches her eye, a scrap of tape caught on a bush: a remnant from the short police investigation. A few charred remains have been dragged from the fire and then left there, relics which perhaps the police thought would give them some idea of what had happened. But they learnt little and concluded that it was an act of desperation by a lonely old man. By the time the police arrived, there was very little of him left and what there was was taken away for examination. She dips the toe of her shoe into the black pulpy mess. Robert had told her Stephen Brigstocke had blamed the book on his wife. Was that true? Did she write it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Does it matter? Not really, not anymore.

She looks back at the house and tries to imagine how it must have been once. A young couple, a small child, their first home together. A cared-for garden, sunshine. A paddling pool? A picnic on the lawn? But this is her memory. It does not belong to this house. She is remembering herself and Robert with Nick when he was little, when he was very little. Before that trip to Spain. Nick jumping in and out of a paddling pool, her crouching down by his side, him naked, gleeful, wielding a wooden spoon and Tupperware which he banged like a drum. Her memory. But she imagines that Stephen and Nancy Brigstocke had moments like that in this garden with their little boy. Poor them, poor them, she thinks. She has no anger for either of them anymore. God knows they suffered. She is even grateful to Stephen Brigstocke. He sat opposite her and listened to her story. He didn’t call her a liar. He didn’t make her prove her innocence.

She went alone to meet Stephen Brigstocke’s solicitor; she didn’t tell Robert about the will until later. It was an odd meeting: the solicitor lacked curiosity, didn’t ask anything about her relationship with his client even though the will had been changed only a few months before. All quite straightforward, he said to describe Stephen Brigstocke’s last wishes. She said nothing. It was only when she stood up to go that he handed her a letter. He told her his client had asked him to put it directly into her hand. She didn’t open it then — it took her a few days to pluck up the courage to read it.

It was a faltering, awkward letter, hard to imagine it had been written by a man who’d had a career teaching English. He didn’t want his “gesture to feel like another assault.” He didn’t want her to be “burdened by my legacy.” He assumed she would sell both properties, and his hope was that the “money could be used to make your life and your family’s easier.” He was careful not to use the words “compensate” or “compensation.” He finished up by saying that by the time she received this, his “pain would be over” but he wanted her to know: “I am aware that you and your family must continue to live with the pain I inflicted on you.” He ended: “I hope you can forgive my lack of courage.” She puzzled over this. Was he calling himself a coward for killing himself? Or because of the negative he enclosed in the letter which he should have been brave enough to give her in person? A negative which had never been developed, he explained. Dismissed as a dud by both him and his wife. It was folded into the heart of his letter. “… I enclose it for you now.”

She holds the small brown square up to the light: shades of darkness with Catherine, a smudge in the foreground, an unrecognisable blur. The feeble winter sun moves behind a cloud, denying her enough light to see the ghost in the frame, but she knows he is there. Stephen Brigstocke searched through the negatives for his own son, but instead he found hers.

He would have seen and heard everything from his position in the open doorway. The door which she thought had stayed closed. The door behind which she’d believed he was asleep. But he had got out of bed and opened the door. He was standing looking into the room. The only light in the negative, a small white figure, unmistakeable once you know he is there. A little ghost who appeared, then disappeared again without anyone knowing.

She has studied it over and over, securing it on a light box, squinting at it through a magnifying glass, just to be sure. He would have heard everything too: her fake groans of pleasure. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t call out to her. He closed the door again and went back to bed, too frightened and shocked to speak. Perhaps he lay there for a while, hiding under the bedclothes, trying to make sense of what he had seen. Perhaps he woke the next morning and thought he had dreamt it. His child’s brain erased the memory of what he saw and heard that night. But it has always been there, this image and memory of his mother. An alien mother who he could never quite trust, never quite believe in. In that hotel room in Spain all those years ago she had tried to imagine what it would do to her son if he had seen what was happening to her. He had seen and heard. And all through his growing up the signs were there, but she had failed to recognise them.

Yesterday Nick saw the negative for the first time. Catherine feared she’d made a mistake and wished she hadn’t shown him.

“I don’t remember it… I don’t remember anything,” he said. He shook his head and studied his small self, but he couldn’t get back into that child’s head. She put her hand over his as tears gathered along his eyelashes. He tried hard not to cry, holding his breath and swallowing down a sob. She reached over, expecting him to resist but he came into her arms and rested his head against her chest, allowing his tears to fall. He allowed her to stroke his back and hold his head, and she was overcome with gratitude for the chance he was giving her to get to know him at last.