Still Waters

Forty

As soon as the car crested the hill across the moor and he saw the rose window of the abbey outlined against the stubborn blue of the sea, Resnick remembered when he had been here before. Whitby. The summer of ’76. Himself and Elaine young enough and still in love enough not to care if the cups they drank tea from in the café on the West Cliff were cracked, if the wind laced chip papers around their feet each time they crossed the harbor bridge, or if the seagulls woke them at dawn in the B amp;B where they stayed. Especially that.

Why was it, Resnick wondered, dropping down a gear to make a show winding descent into Sleights, that those were the times he rarely thought of? Elaine working as a secretary for that firm of solicitors on Bridlesmith Gate, typing heaven knows how many letters and invoices by day and going off to evening classes when she was done, business management and administrative skills; Resnick a young copper new to CID but eager already to mug up for his sergeant’s exam. Nights when he and Elaine would sit up in bed, blankets wrapped round them to keep back the cold, testing one another on what they had read. Elaine with the glasses slipping off the end of her nose as she fidgeted for the biro that had got lost in the sheets.

Some people, he knew, invented rose-tinted versions of their past; lives spent together in barely screened dislike and studied acrimony became, with the benefit of time and absence, near idyllic passages of mutual bliss. What he remembered were the petty rows, the jealousies, arguments about the bill that she forgot to pay, the meal he missed; what he saw in her face were want and pain, when the wanting was no longer for him and the pain was his to share.

He could still remember the carelessness of Elaine’s infidelity, like a child who can’t say no to sweets.

A vague geography of the town coming back to him, he turned left in front of the small municipal park, right again at the top of the street, and parked. Walking down past still impressive Georgian houses set well back from the road, he cut through onto Back St. Hilda’s Terrace, then down again into one of the narrow yards, snug there, almost hidden above the outer harbor.

The house he was looking for had flowers spilling from hung baskets and window boxes, the already small windows cloistered behind pink and white petals.

He wasn’t sure what he had expected of Diane Harker from their sparse conversations on the phone, but possibly not this trim woman in cut-off blue jeans, a lemon top knotted above the waist, and violently bleached blonde hair that sprang wildly from around her head. If there was a resemblance to her elder sister, Resnick could not see it yet.

A small child-a boy he thought, though he was less than certain-sat on Diane’s right hip, supported by her arm, and a second child, a girl of three or four, clung to her other hand.

“You found it all right, then?” she said, glancing at his warrant card.

“Yes.”

“People get lost.”

“I can imagine.”

“You’d best come inside. But mind your head.”

Resnick negotiated the first beam but not the second, the hard edge grazing away a good square inch of skin. He had the grace not to cry out or complain. The room was small yet somehow bright, every surface above four-year-old height crammed with ornaments and photographs, postcards rearranged into surreal collages, pieces of weathered driftwood in the shapes of fish or birds. A one-eared cat, the color of pale marmalade, sat, sphinx-like, on the arm of the one easy chair. The elder of the two children sat on the bottom tread of the curving stairs, jiggling a faceless doll in her lap.

Diane pushed a mug of herbal tea into Resnick’s hands. The younger child was nuzzling her breast. “We’ll go out,” she said. “In a minute. It’ll be easier to talk.”

They walked toward the West Pier, slow progress between the fish dock and the tat and glitter of amusement arcades and shops selling Whitby rock or doughnuts, six for a pound. Outside the Magpie Café, where he and Elaine had eaten gargantuan plaice and chips, followed by hazelnut meringue, Resnick bent low to retie the little girl’s shoe, for all the world, in his loose dark suit and flowered tie, like a flustered uncle come to visit.

Diane stood jiggling the small boy-it was a boy-on her hip and talking to him in a low voice: seagull, fisherman, boat.

At the lifeboat station, they crossed the street and walked past the wooden bandstand, out onto the pier, Resnick asking Diane about her family and hearing a familiar tale of jealousies and jumbled expectations. The oldest child, the brother, who did well at school and university, leaving three sisters uncertain in his wake. While James was successfully pursuing wife and career, the oldest daughter was poised to bury herself beneath the hard work and constant grind of being a farmer’s wife, and the next, Jane, had a secure job and was respectably married, even if she had failed to provide the necessary grandchildren by the expected time.

“And you?” Resnick asked.

“I was the one who bunked off from school, started going out with boys when I was thirteen, got drunk on Southern Comfort and cider, smoked, sniffed glue. It’s a wonder, as my dear mother never tired of telling me, I didn’t get into more serious trouble than I did.” She glanced across at him. “I didn’t even get pregnant till I was seventeen.”

“But …” Resnick was looking at the four-year-old, skipping up ahead.

“Oh, I had an abortion. More than one. Funny, really, Mum being a midwife and all. A miscarriage at twenty-one.” She laughed, the sound silvering away, brittle, on the wind. “I was beginning to think I’d be like Jane, never have kids at all. That was before I met their father. He painted some Pentecostal sign on my belly and played Jimi Hendrix at full volume. Oh, of course, he had to stick it in as well. Worked first time, just about.”

“He’s not still around?” Resnick asked.

“I think he heard voices telling him to move on. The last we heard he was living in a bothy on the Isle of Mull and practicing white magic. Presumably on the sheep.”

“And you stayed here.”

“I like it. Besides, I was pregnant again at the time. Making up for Jane.” She stopped and there were tears in her eyes. “God, poor Jane!” She shifted the child across to her other hip, tugging a tissue from the pocket of her jeans. “If anything awful was going to happen to anyone, you’d have thought it was going to be me. All the stupid things I used to get up to, the risks I took. And Jane, I doubt she took a serious risk in her life-you can’t even include Alex, he wasn’t a risk, he was just a bloody mistake. So how, how does she end up the way she did? How does she end up bloody dead?”

Distressed by her mother’s tears, the girl clung to her leg while the younger one pressed his face against her chest. Resnick hovered on the verge of putting an arm around her, putting an arm around them all, but then Diane was wiping her face and smiling and promising ice cream on the way home and the moment had passed.

They stopped again near the end of the pier and leaned against the rail, the ruins of the abbey and the weather-beaten church high behind them on the East Cliff, below them the tide dragging the sea back along the Upgang Shore. Dogs and children ran and chased balls and a few intrepid souls swam in the nearer edges of the water. With a stick in the sand, someone had scratched the words I think and nothing more, having thought, presumably, better of it.

“Were you close, you and Jane?” Resnick asked.

Diane didn’t answer right away. “Not really close, no. When we were growing up, it was she and Margaret who were friends, did stuff together. I was … I was just the little one getting under everyone’s feet and getting in the way. Real runt of the litter. But there was a while, it must have been when Margaret had gone off to university and Jane was in the sixth form, I suppose, we became sort of close then.”

“And more recently? Since you’ve been here?”

“Oh, Jane would occasionally persuade Alex to drive up for the day. I mean, he hated it, just hated it. You could see it in everything about him from the minute they arrived-that supercilious manner of his, just the way he stood. It was all I could do to get him to sit down in the house. I think he was always afraid there’d be something organic and squashy beneath the cushions. And, of course, he didn’t know what to do with the kids, didn’t have a clue. Creatures from another planet, as far as he was concerned.” She gave a mock shudder. “No wonder children are afraid of dentists.”

“How about Jane,” Resnick said. “How was she with the kids? Did they get on okay? Did she like them?”

“She loved them. And they loved her. I remember once, it couldn’t have been so long after this one was born, Alex must have been off at some conference or something, anyway, Jane got to come over on her own for the whole day. It was wonderful. We just fooled around on the beach in the morning; made up a picnic and drove up onto the moors.” For a moment, Diane’s voice was breaking up. It must have been the last time she saw her sister; Resnick didn’t need to ask, and she didn’t need to say.

“It wasn’t her decision then, as far as you know, not to have children?”

Diane squeezed her hands around the metal of the rail. “Decision? In that relationship, there wasn’t much question of Jane making decisions. Oh, I dare say mustard or cranberry sauce with the turkey, two pints of milk or three, but that was about as far as it went.”

“Why did she put up with it?”

Diane shrugged, turned around, and leaned the small of her back against the railing. Her daughter was tugging at the uneven hem of her cut-offs, eager for ice cream. “Why does anyone put up with anything? Because we’re too lazy to do anything different? Too frightened.”

“You think she was frightened of Alex?”

Diane looked at him. “Probably. But that wasn’t what I meant. Frightened of the alternatives, that’s what I meant, all that great unknown.” She cuddled the smaller child to her, and nuzzled her chin down into his hair. “Frightened of being alone.”

“You don’t think,” Resnick said-they were walking now, back along the way they had come-“you don’t think she could have been having an affair?”

“God!” Diane said. “I wish she had. I wish she’d had the gumption, never mind anything else.”

“But you don’t think she was?”

Emphatically, Diane shook her head.

“Would she have said?”

“To me, you mean? I’m not certain. Once I might have said, yes. And maybe that day she was here, if anything had been going on …” A smile brightened Diane’s face. “The only time I can remember her going on about something like that, you know, boys, men, love, she was home from university and we went off into town, shopping for clothes. There was this lad she’d met and she just couldn’t stop talking about him. On and on and on. ‘I’ll never want anyone else,’ she said, ‘not as long as I live.’” They stopped at the curb and waited for a car to ease past. “Well, you say things like that, don’t you? Young and in love. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Back in the house, radio playing, children stalking the cat, Diane blew the top layer of dust away from a cardboard box she had pulled out from under the bed. Inside were photographs, old Christmas cards, torn concert tickets, letters, badges. Diane shuffled and sorted while Resnick watched.

“Here,” she said, finally, separating one small colored photograph from a batch of a dozen or so others. “Jane and Peter. Love’s young dream.”

Resnick looked down at two nineteen-year-olds, arms wound about each other on a white bridge, smiling not at the camera but at each other.

“Where’s this taken?” Resnick asked.

“Cambridge. It’s where they went to university.”

Resnick looked at the young man with a wide face and a shock of dark hair, unable to see anything other than the young woman beside him. Even in that small, slightly battered photograph, it was impossible not to respond to the adoration he was feeling, not to see her beauty through his eyes.

“You’ve no idea where he might be now?” Resnick asked.

“Peter?” She shook her head. “I haven’t a clue.”

“And Jane never mentioned him? More recently, I mean.”

“Never, no.”

Careful to avoid cat and child, Resnick got to his feet. “If I could just borrow this, a few days? I’ll make sure it gets back to you in one piece.”

“I suppose so,” Diane said, a little surprised. “Can’t do any harm.”