“Well . . .” Doug leaned in closer. The stools in the restaurant were packed densely around the central table, so that the other customers were well within earshot. It had perhaps not been the best place to come for a confidential chat. “It’s not that we’ve fallen out or anything. It’s just that she said something last night that . . . shocked me, I suppose. Or maybe it was what she didn’t say.”
Benjamin’s eyes were tracking a bowl of tori nambazuki. He wondered if there was going to be any left by the time it got round to them. “Go on,” he said.
“I suppose it started a couple of years ago. Mum came down to London for the weekend and we went out to Starbucks one afternoon—rather strangely, I know—and we were talking about all sorts of stuff. About your brother, among other things.”
Benjamin, half way through a chicken wing, grunted his surprise.
“It was when he was seeing Malvina. I was thinking of writing something about it.”
The grunts became more expressive, culminating in a swallow and the words: “You wouldn’t have done that, would you?”
“No, probably not.” Doug decided not to say any more on that subject. Now that Malvina seemed to have disappeared, and no longer figured in any of their lives, there didn’t seem to be much point. Hastily, he went on: “Mum advised me not to. She told me that nobody was perfect and people shouldn’t always be judged by what they did in their personal lives.”
Benjamin nodded. There were some mixed vegetable dumplings coming their way now.
“And that was when she told me—by way of illustration—that Dad had been unfaithful to her.”
“God,” said Benjamin, scooping up a couple of the dumplings and reaching for the soy sauce again. “Had you never suspected anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“Did she tell you . . . who it had been?”
“Nope. She gave the impression there’d been more than one, actually. But I didn’t ask who. It never really occurred to me that it might have been someone I knew. Anyway, last night I spoke to Claire and I found out.”
“Don’t tell me,” said Benjamin, pausing in the act of taking another mouthful. “It was Claire’s mother.”
“It wasn’t, actually.”
“Not Phil’s mother, surely?”
“No.”
Benjamin went a little pale, and put his chopsticks down. “ My mother?”
Doug shook his head impatiently. “This isn’t twenty questions, you know, Benjamin. Will you just listen to the rest of the story? Now, last year—just after Mum had her stroke—Claire sent me an email. She asked if she could go round to Mum’s house and look through Dad’s old papers. Which I believe she did, although they were in such a state that she didn’t manage to find anything.”
“What was she looking for?”
“I don’t know, exactly—but I think she’s started wondering about Miriam again.”
Benjamin was sorry to hear this. “That way madness lies,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, God knows what that must feel like—to lose your sister that way, and never know what’s happened to her—but it was . . . how long ago? More than twenty-five years, isn’t it? She’s never going to find anything out about it now. She’s got to let it go.”
“Easier said than done, I should think,” Doug reflected. “Anyway—” (he took a deep breath) “—you can guess what’s coming, I suppose.”
But Benjamin, apparently, couldn’t.
“Well, the reason she wanted to look through Dad’s papers,” Doug said, spelling it out, “is that she was the one. It was Miriam he was having the affair with.”
“Jesus . . .” Benjamin put down his wine glass and said nothing for a while, shocked beyond words. “When did she tell you?”
“Last night.” Doug pushed some food around his plate distractedly. He had hardly eaten anything. “Dad’s papers have all been taken away now. I gave them to Warwick university and they’ve put them in a proper archive. Last week I phoned them up and asked if they were accessible yet and they said yes, and then I emailed Claire, because I promised to tell her as soon as this had happened. Well, I didn’t get any answer to the email so last night I phoned her up. Seems she’d been on holiday and had only just got back.” He frowned. “Do you know anything about this new boyfriend of hers? Do you know who he is?”
“Not really. Phil said he was a businessman of some sort. A high-flyer. Absolutely loaded, by the sound of it.”
“Well, that figures, because he took her on holiday to the Cayman Islands, of all places. And it can’t have gone very well because Claire told me that she’d come home early, by herself. She’d only just got in when I phoned so she hadn’t read the email. Anyway, I told her she could go to Warwick now and look through the archive if she was still interested and obviously she is, because right away she said she was going to go this week some time.” He fell silent, and waited while Benjamin filled up his wine glass. Then drank deeply. “She sounded really excited about it: so I said, ‘What’s this all about, Claire? Are you ever going to tell me?’ and she went quiet for a bit at the other end of the line, and then she said, ‘What do you think it’s about, Doug?’ And I suppose I already knew, by that stage. So I said: ‘It’s my Dad, isn’t it? He was sleeping with your sister.’ And she said: ‘Yeah, that’s right . . .’ ”
In the long pause that followed, Benjamin noticed how noisy the restaurant was: how loud the music rippling in the background, restless with the thump and tick of drum machines and the wash of synthesizer chords; how boisterously all the other diners were enjoying themselves, laughing together, shouting jokes at each other, living in the present, living for the future: not locked in the past, as he always seemed to be, as his friends always seemed to be; the past that kept reaching out to them with subtle tendrils whenever they tried to break away and move forwards. Unfinished business.
“That’s not all, though,” Doug continued, slowly. “She said she’d made up her mind about something.”
Benjamin waited. “Yes?”
“She says she knows that Miriam’s dead. She doesn’t have any doubt about that any more. She’s not hoping to find her or anything. She just wants to know the truth.”
Hesitantly, Benjamin asked: “What does that have to do with looking at your dad’s papers?”
“That’s what I wanted to know. What I asked her, in fact.”
“And what did she say?”
“Nothing, for a while. So I said to her, ‘I’m presuming that you don’t think your sister died of natural causes. You think she was . . . murdered.’ And she just sort of said, ‘Yes,’ in a very quiet voice. Very distant. I wondered if . . . you know, I wondered if she’d actually used that word before. In that context. Even when she was just thinking about it.”
“Maybe she hadn’t,” said Benjamin, not knowing what else to say.
“So anyway—” Doug looked down at his wine glass, and swilled the golden liquid around slowly, unthinkingly “—so I had to ask her, didn’t I? I had to say to her: ‘Claire, you don’t think my father did it, do you? You can’t think that. You can’t possibly.’ ” He put the glass down, rested his face on his hands for a moment. When he looked up, Benjamin noticed how tired his eyes were. “And do you know what she said to that?”
Benjamin shook his head; though he could already guess the answer, by now.
“Nothing.” Doug smiled, the hardest and grimmest of smiles. “She did not say . . . a bloody word.”
Just behind him, a young man with spiked hair and a business suit reached the punchline of a joke and was rewarded with explosions of laughter from his two companions. They looked like sales reps, staying away from home and ready to make a night of it. Benjamin winced at the noise, could almost feel it knocking him backwards.
“Shit,” he said to Doug, feelingly, and put a hand on his arm.
“I hung up, then,” Doug told him. “I just said, ‘Bye-bye, Claire,’ and put the phone down.” He looked up at Benjamin and, although
he attempted a smile again, there was a sadness in it this time. He seemed to be looking back, back across the years to the schooldays which kept tugging at them: the past that wouldn’t let go. “I always knew Claire hated me,” he said. “Now I know why.”
They decided that the best solution was to get drunk. Doug had driven them both to Brindley Place, but his car was now safely tucked away in a 24-hour car park and they could easily share a taxi home. Doug reckoned he could claim it back on expenses anyway. So they abandoned their stools, and the endlessly revolving circle of food, sat down on square, unyielding cushions on opposite sides of a low table, with their knees wedged up almost as high as their faces, and ordered another bottle of wine to get themselves started.
Benjamin told Doug about the discovery he had made in Dorset. He had read the log-book entry so many times by now that he could recite most of it from memory. A lot of it made Doug laugh; but it was uncomfortable laughter. He reminded Benjamin of how Harding had once taken part in a mock by-election at school, and put himself forward as the candidate for the National Front.
“He always thought it was hilarious to take the piss out of those guys,” he said. “It started to become a little bit obsessive. Now it sounds even worse.”
“Even this was seven years ago,” Benjamin pointed out. “We still don’t know what he’s doing now, or where he is.”
“As I’ve said a hundred times—it could only be a disappointment to find out. But look,” he said, taking Benjamin by the shoulder, his speech beginning to slur, “you’re not seriously telling me that you’ve started to fancy your niece, are you? We’re all getting worried about you, mate. It’s been a long time now since you left Emily. It’s about time you found somebody new. Somebody your own age. And preferably not a blood relation.”
“I don’t fancy Sophie. Not in that way. We hit it off, that’s all. She takes me on my own terms. She makes an effort to understand what I’m trying to do, and she doesn’t pity me or think I’m some kind of weirdo. Besides, I can’t help it if all the nicest and most interesting people I meet are younger than me. I like young people—I find them easier to empathize with.”
Doug chuckled derisively. “Yeah, right.”
“It was the same with Malvina.” (At the mention of whose name, Doug merely raised his eyes to the ceiling.) “I don’t care what you think—I had a rapport with that woman, an amazing rapport. I don’t think I’ve ever felt such a strong connection with someone. A real, immediate emotional connection. Not since—”
“Please.” Doug held up his hand. “Do you think we could possibly get through the rest of this evening without mentioning the C-word?” Benjamin went quiet, at this point, and Doug started to think back to the evening a couple of years ago, when he had taken Malvina out for a drink in Chelsea, and had begun to realize how unhappy she was. It was a real, deep-seated unhappiness, too, the kind you probably need years of therapy to fathom. He felt suddenly cold at the thought of it. “I wonder what happened to her, anyway? Where she ended up after your brother had finished with her.”
And Benjamin said, surprisingly: “We’re still in touch.”
Doug looked up. “You are?”
“Well . . . sort of. I haven’t seen her or anything. But every so often I send her a text message.”
“And? Does she text back?”
“Sometimes,” said Benjamin, and left it at that. In all honesty, he had no idea where Malvina was living at the moment, or what she was doing. All he knew was that her mobile number hadn’t changed in the last two years. For a while he had tried calling her, but usually he just got the answering service, and on the two or three occasions when they had actually spoken, Malvina had been monosyllabic and evasive, and the conversation was impossibly stilted. Since then, he had got into the habit of texting her every two or three weeks. He tried to make the messages pithy, and amusing, and to tell her a little bit about what was happening in his life, and he liked the discipline of trying to accomplish all this in only 149 characters. It was like writing in some highly economic and constraining verse form. Sometimes she replied, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes the replies would come at the oddest hours of the night. He had noticed that she was more likely to reply if he finished his own message with a question, even something bland and formulaic like How r things with u? or What r u up 2 now?, to which she would more often that not furnish some even more generalized and unenlightening answer. But at least it was contact, of a sort. At least this way he knew that she was still alive. And it was more than his brother had: this, to Benjamin, was a very important point. He was the one who had found Malvina; she had been his friend, until Paul had stolen her away from him. But Paul had blown it. Paul was never going to see her again. Benjamin had scored a victory, in that particular contest. A tiny victory, maybe, to some people: but to him, a momentous one.
“I’m probably going to go away for a few days soon,” he announced now: and added (although at heart he knew that this was pure fantasy), “I was thinking of asking her to come along with me.”
“Really? Where are you going?”
And Benjamin told Doug about the Abbaye St. Wandrille in Normandy; how he had been there with Emily, and how he had known, from the moment he had set foot inside the chapel and listened to the monks singing their Complies, that it was a place where he might one day feel completely and blissfully at home.
Doug was puzzled. “But Malvina’s a woman.”
“There’s a dormitory there for women,” Benjamin said. “It’s outside the walls, and the female guests aren’t allowed inside to eat with the monks or anything like that. But, you know—it’s still a pretty nice place to stay.”
Doug looked at him for a while, amazement and amusement struggling for precedence on his face. “Benjamin,” he said at last, “I don’t know how you do it. Even when I think that nothing you say could surprise me, you still manage to pull something out of the hat.”
“How do you mean?”
“Only you, Benjamin—only you—could invite a woman to spend a dirty weekend with you at a fucking monastery!”
He laughed so hard that he fell backwards off his cushion and cracked his head against an adjoining table, while Benjamin just sat there sipping his wine and looking offended. He didn’t think it was that funny, personally. But he was glad that something had cheered his friend up.
2
After Claire had been shown to her desk, she sat there for several minutes, with the first of the dozens of folders lying in front of her, unopened. She had laid two sharpened pencils next to it, and an A5 notebook, with a silky blue hardback cover and thick, roughly cut pages, which she had bought in Venice some years ago, and which contained, so far, only one piece of writing: the long letter she had composed to Miriam, describing her return to England in the winter of 1999. As for the folder, she didn’t touch it. Not yet. It wasn’t that she lacked the will, more that she was waiting for her head to clear. She wanted to be alert when reading this material, she didn’t want the smallest detail to pass her by, and at the moment she felt anything but alert. The drive from Malvern to Coventry had been hellish: an hour and three-quarters, in the driving rain. The Warwick campus had been far busier than she was expecting, and she had struggled to find a parking space even in the biggest of the multi-storey car parks. She had arrived at the Modern Records Center fifty minutes later than the time agreed with the librarian over the telephone. Not that anybody seemed to mind: but Claire herself was flustered, disorientated. Right now, she didn’t feel up to the task.
Maybe some coffee would help.
It was less than a minute’s walk from Modern Records to the Arts Centre, but even in that time the rain managed to drench her. She asked for a double espresso and bought a hot chocolate as well, mainly so that she could keep her hands warm on the mug. She sat in a corner and watched the life of the university straggle before her on this Tuesday late-morning. Not many students in here, she noticed: it was more of a place where the academics and oth
er staff came to eat. The air smelt heavily of wet, steaming clothes and dripping hair. Young, whey-faced lecturers split open packets of crisps and shared them with female postgraduates in ceremonies of would-be flirtation. Single women in their mid-fifties sat looking through their Filofaxes, and pulled dripping tea bags out of paper cups, holding them aloft uncertainly before depositing them to spread hot brown tea stains on their paper napkins.
She was back in England again: no mistaking it now. No wonder she was disorientated, then, given that forty-eight hours ago she had been sitting on a private beach near Bodden Town, beneath a tropical sun. Two days ago she had also been in a relationship (of sorts); this morning, she was single.
And probably all the happier for it, on the whole.
The holiday had got off to a good, if somewhat surreal, start. Never having flown first class before, Claire, Patrick and Rowena had over-indulged themselves wildly, drinking more than one bottle of champagne each, gorging themselves on Beluga caviar and Italian truffles, and then watching seven or eight hours’ worth of movies on their personal video screens. As a result, they arrived drunk, bloated and exhausted while the other, more experienced travellers, who had spent most of the flight asleep, stepped off the plane looking in excellent shape. They were then met at the airport by George, the driver employed by Michael’s business associate (whose name they never discovered), and were driven the fifteen miles or so to his villa, Proserpina, on the south side of the island.
Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was the tiredness, but when they first stepped inside the villa, and when their cases had been taken away by the butler, and their coats by the maid, they all three simply burst into laughter. Opulence on this kind of scale was comical: they could not summon up any other response to it.
The very size of the rooms was staggering. The main reception room was as big as a hotel lobby, with six sofas, two bars, innumerable concealed speakers connected to a central Bang and Olufsen stereo system and French windows opening on to 500 yards of private beach. The smallest of the bedrooms contained a bed that could easily have slept five, raised—like all the other beds in the house—on a dais beneath a high ceiling with individual, hand-crafted oak mouldings. There were televisions everywhere, and bars everywhere (even, paradoxically, in the gymnasium). The study boasted a desk as wide as a snooker table, which faced a bank of twenty-four television screens which could be used either to provide surveillance of every room in the house, from every conceivable angle, or to watch all the satellite news and business channels simultaneously. For those who couldn’t cope with the arduous twenty-yard walk to the beach, there were swimming pools indoors and out. The sunken bath in the master bathroom was, in itself, a swimming pool by any ordinary standards.