Till We Meet Again

  Steven felt it was going to transpire that this Reuben was nothing more than a trickster who preyed on the lost and vulnerable. ‘But you did agree to it?’

  ‘Yes. You see, I wanted what Reuben promised, a happy, simple life. It seemed to make sense that while I still had all that stuff from the past, I couldn’t move on.’

  There was a shake in her voice, and her eyes were filling with tears again. Steven felt they were for more than losing all her possessions – Reuben had clearly duped her in other ways.

  ‘Did he persuade you into doing it by saying he loved you?’

  She nodded and hung her head.

  Susan could remember the day Reuben said it so clearly. It was a lovely day, the afternoon sun coming in through the window of the little sitting room in Ambra Vale. As she polished the furniture she was thinking about whether or not she should let everything go and move to Wales.

  When Annabel died, and for weeks afterwards, Susan’s home and belongings meant absolutely nothing to her. She had wanted death herself. Many a night she’d been so consumed with grief that she could easily have walked up to the Clifton Suspension Bridge and hurled herself off. But gradually, after joining the church and meeting other people who had troubles like her, she had begun to see her home as a refuge again. Maybe she had experienced the worst that life could throw at her here, but there were so many good memories as well.

  She was ecstatic with excitement when she first found her house in Ambra Vale. Maybe it was only a two-up, two-down Victorian terrace, the front door opening straight on to the street, but it had a good feel about it and she knew she could make it cosy.

  She papered and painted it all herself. The pretty Laura Ashley wallpaper she chose suited both the period of the house and the furniture she’d brought with her from Luddington. She put the round walnut supper table and the four matching chairs from the old sitting room in front of the window, a couch against one wall, and the rocking-chair next to the gas fire. She re-upholstered the chair in pale blue Dralon, and made a loose cover in a blue print for the couch. With books and ornaments on the shelves in the fireside alcoves, and the traditional-style blue-patterned carpet from her parents’ old bedroom on the floor, it was just perfect.

  She found it odd she could think of everything as being perfect, without Liam. The day she left Luddington for Bristol she had been convinced that the pain inside her would never leave her. Maybe it helped that she went to a new place that held no memories of him, and that she had too much to do to dwell on the past. But it was the moment she first felt her baby move inside her that all the misgivings, the worries and the sorrow about her past seemed to fly away. Hundreds of women had a baby alone, there was no stigma to it any more, she was blessed with a trouble-free pregnancy. She was happy.

  When Annabel was born, she was filled with such joy she even found it in her heart to forgive Martin, and wrote to him telling him he was an uncle and enclosing a photograph of Annabel. She wasn’t really surprised he didn’t reply and she felt too strong and happy to let it hurt her.

  Other mothers she met when out walking with her baby often said they couldn’t wait till they could go back to work, but Susan never felt that way. Money was tight as she only had income support to live on, but being at home with a small child was utterly fulfilling to her.

  Every day she felt blessed. Whether she was out in the park with Annabel, reading to her, bathing her or feeding her, she felt a sense of purpose she’d never known before. Every stage of her development, crawling, then walking, the first words, mastering toilet training, was so totally engrossing. She had a little friend, not just a child, and every day was sheer enchantment.

  But then Annabel died and Susan’s whole world collapsed around her, leaving a huge, gaping void where the little girl had been. There was no point in cooking, gardening, sewing and cleaning when she had no one to do it for. Mostly she just stayed in bed with the curtains tightly closed. It was too painful to see Annabel’s paintings on the kitchen wall, her little clothes still waiting to be ironed and put away.

  Once she began going to church, the sympathy and understanding from the people there had made her start to eat regularly again, to clean up and go out occasionally. But she still couldn’t go into Annabel’s room without crying. It was just as it was when she was alive. The Peter Rabbit duvet cover that matched the curtains and the frieze round the walls still smelled of her. Susan couldn’t bear to go through the boxes of toys or the shelves of dolls and soft toys and pack them to give them away. She had tried to give the room a good clean once, but when she pulled out the bed and found an old baby’s drinking cup beneath it, she became hysterical with grief.

  She believed Reuben was right in saying that once she left this house, she would recover completely. He had said only the good memories would move with her, the bad ones would disappear. Yet however much she wanted to leave all the sorrow behind, it was so hard to face giving up everything.

  A tap on the window startled her. It was Reuben, and she rushed to open the front door.

  Reuben was a relic from the Flower Power days of the Sixties. Although he was in his early fifties, he wore his long grey hair tied back in a pony-tail, one earring, love beads round his neck, and the Christian symbol of two fishes tattooed on his forearm. He was tall and thin, with sharp features, but his eyes were mesmerizing. Right from their first meeting Susan had seen them as two blue laser beams that seemed to burn right down into her soul.

  That day he was wearing faded jeans and a pale blue tee-shirt, and he was perspiring heavily, having walked up the steep hill from Hotwells.

  ‘I was afraid you’d ignore the door-bell,’ he said in his compellingly deep, husky voice. His blue eyes swept over her face as if searching for evidence she’d slid back into depression. ‘I had to see you, Sue, I don’t think I made it quite clear last time we met about my own motives for wanting you to come to Wales.’

  She invited him in and took him into the kitchen to get him a cold drink. He wandered out into the garden.

  Susan remembered suddenly feeling very nervous. He had only called at her house once before, they always met at the church or at the Rowan Tree café up in Clifton. Even when they went to Wales he picked her up at the bottom of the street. She wondered what he meant by his motives, she didn’t think he had any, other than wanting her to become a whole person again.

  Carrying the glass of orange juice, she joined him in the garden. It had been something of a challenge to turn what was a series of steep steps overgrown with weeds and ancient buddleia bushes into a garden. It was dangerous for a small child – the only flat part was down by the kitchen door – and Susan had put a gate up by the steps for fear of Annabel climbing up and falling back down. But it was pretty now as the many alpines and rockery plants she’d planted had covered the ugly breeze-block walls. Right at the top there was a good view of the Cumberland Basin and across to South Bristol.

  Reuben drank the orange juice in one long gulp, then turned to her, took her hand and made her sit beside him on the bench. ‘You know I want you to come to Wales because I believe I can heal you completely there, don’t you?’ he said, turning on the bench to look at her.

  She nodded.

  ‘You see, here in a city there are so many negative and destructive forces at work which countermand my powers. Once you are in a serene and beautiful environment, away from pollution and noise, surrounded by love, you will be far more receptive. You will become like a child again, learn to trust, to laugh, to let the holy spirit enter you. I want to do this for you, because I know what you are capable of.’

  He paused for a moment or two, putting his hand on her cheek and caressing it. ‘You are so full of anxiety and suspicion. That is those negative and destructive forces at work. So I came here today to explain why I chose you, over dozens of others who would like to join us.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Because you are a sweet and gentle person, a peacemaker. And because I love
you.’

  Susan didn’t think he meant ‘I love you’ in a romantic way. At the church they used the word ‘love’ all the time.

  ‘That’s a nice thing to say,’ she replied a little awkwardly. All her new friends from the church talked about their emotions, and were prone to analysing others too. She still found it a little embarrassing.

  ‘I meant I love you as in, I want you to be my woman,’ he said.

  Susan was startled by this, it was the last thing she’d expected. She stiffened.

  ‘Don’t recoil from me, Sue,’ he entreated, putting both his arms around her and holding her tightly. ‘The first time I saw you, so lost and full of pain, my heart went out to you. Let me show you what joy there can be in loving intimacy.’

  All at once he was kissing her.

  It wasn’t thrilling the way it had been with Liam, but then she had been wanting him for a long time before it finally happened. But it was pleasant, and it was good to feel desired again.

  Had Reuben asked her if she wanted to go to bed with him, she would have said no. But he didn’t ask, or try to persuade, he just got up, took her hand and led her upstairs. There was a moment or two in the bedroom, as he stripped off his clothes, when she almost turned and ran. He smelled of sweat, he had no underpants beneath his jeans or socks under his trainers, all of which repelled her, and his body was very white and bony. But she’d left it too late, for suddenly he was kissing her again and pulling off her clothes so fast there was no going back.

  Yet whatever her reservations were, within minutes of being naked in the bed with him she lost them all. She didn’t know whether or not it was because she’d been starved of love for so long, or just that he was an accomplished lover, but she moved into a blissful state where nothing mattered but here and now.

  He said at one point that he was giving her ‘sexual healing’, and she almost broke into laughter, reminded of the song. But he wasn’t joking, he meant what he said, and it did seem to heal her.

  He stayed there with her for several days, and he wooed her with all the things they would do together in Wales. Long walks exploring the beautiful countryside, gardening together, listening to music and sharing a life which would be complete. He said he wanted her to have his baby.

  ‘I really thought it was going to be for ever,’ she said to Steven, a lone tear trickling down her cheek. ‘I really wanted what I’d seen in Wales, good friends sitting down to dinner every night together, all the work shared for the common good, all the sadness of the past banished by a new kind of life. Reuben didn’t have to promise undying love for me and say we’d have a baby together to get me there. I probably would have gone anyway.’

  Steven felt a rush of sympathy for her, and disgust that any man would prey on someone so vulnerable.

  ‘Tell me, Susan, did you see your stuff sold before you left for Wales?’

  She shook her head. ‘Reuben told me to pack one bag of clothes to take with me, that’s all. He said I could take a couple of personal things if I wanted, and he would handle everything else. He said he wanted to protect me from the pain of it all.’

  ‘Was your father’s gun one of those personal items?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t really know why I wanted to hang on to it. I suppose it was just the good memories of going shooting with him. Then there was the photo album of Annabel and a couple of rings which were my mother’s.’

  ‘Tell me about the commune,’ Steven asked.

  ‘It was an old, rambling place, quaint and a bit dilapidated, half-way up a hill, miles from anywhere. There were outhouses where we did the craft work, and a couple of rooms above the old stable.’

  ‘How many people?’

  ‘Including Reuben and me, we were twelve in all, two couples, four single men and six women. The youngest was Megan, she was only twenty-two, Reuben was the oldest, the others mostly younger than me, in their early thirties. We had a rota for chores, everything from laundry and cooking to looking after the vegetable garden. Mostly it worked very well, because if you were busy in the craft workroom, someone else was cleaning or cooking the meals. You could opt out of certain chores if you were better at something else. Megan, for example, was a brilliant artist, but she was hopeless at cooking or cleaning so she painted all day, every day. One of the men, Justin, was much better at handyman stuff, so he did that.’

  ‘What about you?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Well, that became one of my bones of contention. I wanted to work outside in the garden, and in the craft room, but because I was good at cooking and housekeeping, I kept being expected to do that. It became very tedious, the food budget was tight, we didn’t get much variety.’

  ‘And what about you and Reuben? Did you love him?’

  A look of pain crossed her face. ‘I’m not sure that I did at first, I think it was more gratitude for being flung a life raft. But it kind of grew from there, for it was just how he said it would be. I was his woman, I felt safe and happy, and we spent a lot of time together, alone. I couldn’t forget about Annabel, of course, that was still there like a dull ache inside me.’

  ‘And what about the others? Did you get on with them?’

  ‘At first I thought they were all fantastic characters.’ She smiled. ‘They all, including young Megan, seemed to know so much more than me about everything. In the evenings I would just sit and listen to them talk about the places they’d been, the things they’d done. But after a while it all became very repetitive, sometimes I felt they were telling lies too, and they all had so many hang-ups. Shannon, one of the women just a bit younger than me, was always talking about her father raping her as a child. Anyway, it transpired she was living in a fantasy world. She’d been brought up by her grandmother and an aunt. No father at all.’

  ‘A bunch of crackpots then?’ Steven raised an eyebrow.

  Susan half smiled. ‘Crackpots, losers, dreamers. A couple of the men had been in prison, the only real common denominator was that we’d all been rounded up by Reuben, our so called Psychic Healer, when we were needy.’

  ‘So when did you wise up to that?’ Steven asked.

  ‘When he brought a new woman into the house,’ she said sadly. ‘He’d told me in the past that we were both free to have sexual relationships with other people, and that petty jealousy was what caused breakdowns in “families” like ours. But I’d never wanted one, and I didn’t think he did either. It was an awful shock to me.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’ Steven said. ‘But what about everyone else? Did they think he was right to do what he did? Or were they sympathetic to you?’

  ‘They thought everything he did was right,’ she said with a touch of bitterness. ‘I can understand why, of course. He had this way of making you believe in him totally. He brought the money in, made all the decisions. He was a very calm man, you see, he had this way of looking at you when you made some kind of protest, as if you were just a child who needed loving out of it. He would talk at our evening meals, hold us all spellbound, and we all wanted to please him. I think if he’d told us all to take poison we would have done. You see, we all bought into the idea he did everything because he loved us all. We were all people who couldn’t really hold our own lives together, for one reason or another. He held us together.’

  ‘So you felt rejected when he brought this new woman in?’ Steven asked. ‘Is that what made you turn against him?’

  ‘I didn’t turn against him,’ she said firmly. ‘I just got disenchanted with the whole set-up. I began to look at some of the things we made there and work out what he could sell them for. I soon realized he was making far more out of it than was coming back into the house. He wasn’t the altruist I’d thought he was.’

  ‘Did you say anything to him or anyone else?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t prove it. He didn’t keep accounts books, he sold the stuff for cash from his van, no tax or anything like that.’

  ‘So when and why did you finally leave?’ r />
  ‘Early April of ’93. Reuben went away, and I left while he was gone because I didn’t want to cause a scene.’

  Steven felt deeply for her, her whole life seemed to have been spent avoiding causing a scene, when perhaps it would have been far more beneficial to scream and stamp her feet, rather than let more injustices be piled on to her.

  ‘How did you manage to live? Did you have any money left at all?’

  She shrugged. ‘No, but I sold Mother’s rings. They weren’t worth much, but it was enough to pay the train fare back to Bristol and get that room in Belle Vue.’

  Steven thought about it all for a moment or two. He wondered why, if she was together enough in Wales to realize what Reuben was, and get out, she fell apart when she got back to Bristol.

  ‘Can I ask when you started drinking?’ he said.

  ‘I was never an alcoholic,’ she said indignantly. ‘I liked a drink now and again. That’s all. I began to drink more once I was back in Bristol, just because it was a way of numbing the edges.’

  ‘So would you say you were depressed then?’

  ‘In despair describes it better,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I had nothing and no one. Nothing to look forward to, just pain behind me. I felt like someone thrown on the scrap-heap. I phoned my brother once, I was feeling so bad. It was a stupid thing to do really, I might have known he’d only be nasty. When he was, I felt even worse.’

  Steven felt a twinge of anger that there was no organization which could help people in Susan’s position. They had to commit a crime before anyone took any notice.

  ‘How did you pay your rent?’ he asked. ‘There’s no record of your signing on.’

  ‘I did office cleaning in the evenings.’ She told him that it was for a firm in Bristol. She had a key and let herself in and out to do the work.

  ‘Why did it take you two years to shoot Doctor Wetherall and Pamela Parks, Susan?’

  She looked at him for a few minutes with her one good eye, the other remaining disconcertingly shut.