Thirty-Two

The days and the nights started to become normal, lacking in obvious incident so that one slid into the other. It would be an overstatement to describe the result as blissful, but it was just about bearable, and that would do for the moment. Things happened, of course. After a month more of grim concentration, the book was finished. My printer coughed out a satisfyingly large pile of paper, which I sent off to Sarah for a quick read and some encouragement. There were developments with Elsie. I started to suspect that if a word in one of her reading books was very short indeed, like ‘cat’ or ‘son’, then, given time, and when she was in a good mood, she might be able to work it out without the help of the picture above the text. And she made a third friend: Vanda, whose real name was Miranda. I invited her – or rather Elsie invited her and I confirmed the invitation – to stay the night.

And my unit was about to start, it really was. Two doctors and an SHO were appointed and on their way. I spent many hours in offices talking about details of pay and national insurance, I attended meetings about internal market practice at Stamford, and I went with Geoff Marsh on a round trip of insurance companies discussing the protection we offered against liability over rubber chicken and mineral water. Just one week of Dr Laschen’s famous snakebite medicine and you are guaranteed free from all lawsuits. I sounded so marketable, I only wished I could own a piece of myself.

I thought of Danny, but not every bit of the time. He wasn’t in every room of my house any longer. Occasionally I would open a door, a cupboard, and there he would be in some silly detail or object or memory but that was all. Sometimes I would wake in the night and cry, which was fine, but the obsessive, pointless speculating about the rest of our lives together, the bitterness at having him snatched away from me by a wicked lunatic, I didn’t dwell on that so much any more.

The press attention was slackening off. The articles about the fallibility of the trauma industry had metamorphosed into columnists’ analysis of the nature of female courage. My heroism had replaced my failure but I was no more interested in the second than in the first. There were invitations to be photographed in my garden, to discuss my childhood, my influences, to respond to questionnaires, to go on the radio and play my favourite records. I was offered the opportunity of talking to a radio psychiatrist about what it was like to have my lover murdered and then almost to be murdered myself. As, for the time being at least, the most famous expert in Britain on recovery from mental trauma, I decided that such exposure would not be helpful so, to the lightly suppressed exasperation of Geoff Marsh, I turned everything down.

There was one day, though, that didn’t merge into all the others. It was the day when Miranda was coming to spend the night with Elsie and I had promised them a midnight feast. Over breakfast, Elsie had ordered biscuits, lollies, miniature salami sausages in silver paper, fromage frais, chocolate fingers, and as I wiped her mouth, brushed her hair and teeth, I calculated how I could go to the supermarket between meetings. We were in a desperate rush out of the door and I noticed it had started to pour with rain in iron-coloured streaks. I threw off my jacket and pulled on a raincoat and put a cap on my head.

‘Put your raincoat on, Elsie,’ I said.

She looked at me and started giggling.

‘I haven’t got time to play,’ I said. ‘Get your coat on.’

‘You look funny, Mummy,’ she said, in between gurgles.

With a sigh of exasperation I turned to the mirror. I started to laugh as well. I couldn’t help it. I did look funny.

‘You’re like Hardy Hardy,’ Elsie said.

She meant Laurel and Hardy. She had remembered a scene in one of her videos where they had got their hats mixed up. The cap was too small for me and perched precariously on the top of my head. What the bloody hell was it? I pulled the thing off my head and examined it. It was one of Finn’s. I tossed it aside and grabbed my old trilby and we ran for the car.

‘That was a funny hat, Mummy.’

‘Yes, it was… er…’ Well, why not? ‘It was Finn’s.’

‘That was Fing’s too,’ she said, pointing at the trilby which nestled neatly on my head.

I stopped short and looked at it.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s right. It was. It…’

‘Mumme-e-e-e. It’s wet.’

‘Sorry.’

I ran around the car and let her into the passenger seat and fastened her in, then ran back to the other side and sat beside her. I was very wet.

‘You smell like a dog, Mummy.’

We had played musical statues, musical bumps and a complicated game whose rules I never quite understood but which made Elsie and Miranda echo with laughter. They had their secret midnight feast at a quarter past eight and then I came in in the form of a ghost with a toothbrush to tell them a story. I looked for a book but Elsie said, ‘No, out of your head, Mummy,’ knowing that I only knew one story, so they sat back while I tried to remember the principal events of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Did the grandmother die? Well, she wouldn’t in my version. I tiptoed through all the details until I reached the climax.

‘Come in, Little Red Riding Hood,’ I said in a croaky voice.

‘Hello, Granny,’ I said in a little-girl voice. ‘But what big ears you’ve got, Granny.’

‘All the better to hear you with, my dear,’ I said in my croaky voice. There were giggles from the bed.

‘And what big eyes you’ve got, Granny,’ I said in my little-girl voice.

‘All the better to see you with,’ I said in a croak that made me cough. More giggles.

‘And what a big mouth you’ve got, Granny,’ I piped. I left a long pause this time and looked at their expectant wide eyes.

‘All the better to-o-o-o eat you up.’ And I leaped on to the bed and enfolded the little girls in my arms and snapped at them with my lips. They shrieked and laughed and wriggled under me. After we composed ourselves, I spoke again in what was left of my normal voice.

‘So who was it in the bed, Miranda?’

‘Granny,’ said Miranda, laughing.

‘No, Miranda, it wasn’t Granny. Who was in the bed. Elsie?’

‘Granny,’ said Elsie and they both howled with laughter, rolling and jumping on the bed.

‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then what is it?’

‘A gra-a-anny,’ shouted Elsie and they both howled once more.

‘You two are like naughty little wolf-cubs,’ I said, ‘and it’s time you were asleep.’ I hugged and kissed them and went downstairs where the lamp was swinging on its flex from their continued bouncing on Elsie’s bed. There was a bottle of some old white wine in the fridge and I poured myself half a glass. I needed to think for a moment. There was something buzzing around in the recesses of my skull and I wanted to grab it. If it knew I was chasing it, it would escape. I would have to sneak up on it. I began muttering to myself.

‘If something has eyes like a wolf, and it has ears like a wolf, and it has a mouth like a wolf, then it’s a wolf.’ I sipped at my wine. ‘But if it doesn’t have eyes like a wolf, and it doesn’t have ears like a wolf, and it doesn’t have a mouth like a wolf, and it doesn’t howl at the moon, then what?’

I found a piece of paper and a pen and began to write things down. I compiled a list and then began to underscore and circle and join things with lines. I let the pen fall. I thought of Geoff Marsh and his medium-term strategy, I thought of Elsie and my new peaceful life, I thought of the absence of press attention and finally and inevitably I thought of Danny.

In a pocket of my purse with some ticket stubs and credit-card slips and my identity card for the hospital and bits of fluff and stupid things I should have thrown away was a slip of paper with Chris Angeloglou’s home number on it. The last time we had met he had given it to me, saying if at any time I wanted to talk about things, I should feel free to give him a call. I suspect the plan was for him to apply his own brand of intrusive remedial therapy and I had responded with the driest of smiles. Oh God. The police were totally sick of me. Everybody – the family, the hospital, everybody – just wanted these terrible events to go away. If I let it go, there would be no problem. It would interfere with my work, unbalance me emotionally and stir up old memories for Elsie which could only harm her. And if I actually phoned Chris Angeloglou now, on top of everything else, he would probably imagine that I was asking him out on a date. But when I was sixteen I had sworn a very stupid oath to myself. At the end of your life, it is the things you didn’t do, not the things you did do, that you regret. So, faced with a choice of action or inaction, I promised myself that I would always act. The results had been frequently disastrous and I didn’t feel optimistic. I picked up the phone and dialled.

‘Hello, is Chris Angeloglou there? Oh, Chris, hi. I was ringing… I wondered if we could meet for a drink. There’s something I wanted to talk to you about… No, I can’t do the evening. What about lunch-time? Fine… Is that the one in the square?… Fine, see you there.’

I replaced the receiver.

‘Stupid, stupid, stupid,’ I said to myself, consolingly.