Telling Tales Page 2

  “Nothing is worth getting that upset for,” Mary said. “Whatever’s the matter, we can sort it out.” She meant, You know your father only does what he thinks is right. If we explain to him he will soon come round.

  Then Emma pulled her to the ditch and made her look down on Abigail Mantel’s body. She knew that not even her mother could sort that out and make it better.

  There was a horrified silence. It was as if Mary too had needed time to take in the sight, then her mother’s voice came again, suddenly brisk, demanding a reply. “Did you touch her?”

  Emma was shocked out of the hysteria.

  “No.”

  “There’s nothing more we can do for her now. Do you hear me, Emma? We’re going home and we’re going to tell the police and for a while everything will seem like a dreadful dream. But it wasn’t your fault and there was nothing you could have done.”

  And Emma thought, At least she hasn’t mentioned Jesus. At least she doesn’t expect me to take comfort from that.

  In the Captain’s House, the wind continued to shake the loose sash window in the bedroom. Emma spoke in her head to Abigail. See, I faced it, remembered it just as it happened. Now, can I go to sleep? But though she wrapped herself around James and sucked the warmth from him, she still felt cold. She tried to conjure up her favourite fantasy about Dan Greenwood, imagined his dark skin lying against hers, but even that failed to work its magic.

  Chapter Three

  Emma couldn’t tell the aftermath of her discovery of Abigail as a story. It didn’t have a strong enough narrative line. It was too muddled in her head. Details were missing. At the time it had been hard to follow what was happening. Perhaps shock had made it difficult to concentrate. Even these days, ten years on, the image of the cold, silent Abigail flashed into her mind when she least expected it. That evening, the evening after the discovery of the body, when they had all sat in the kitchen at Springhead House, it had lodged in her brain, blocking her vision and making all the questions seem as if they were coming from very far away. And now it made the memories jerky and unreliable.

  She couldn’t remember the walk back to the house with her mother, but could see herself, hesitating by the back door, reluctant still to face her father. She always hated to disappoint him. But even if he’d been preparing a lecture when he heard them approach, he soon forgot about it. Mary took him into a corner, her arm round his shoulder, and gave a whispered explanation. He stood for a moment still as a stone, as if it was too hard for him to accept. “Not here,” he said. “Not in Elvet.” He turned and took Emma in his arms, so she could smell the soap he shaved with. “No one should have to see that,” he said. “Not my little girl. I’m so sorry.” As if he, somehow, was to blame, as if he should have been strong enough to protect her from it. Then they wrapped her up in the scratchy blanket which they used as a rug on picnics and there were urgent phone calls to the police. Shocked as she was, she sensed that once he’d come to terms with what had happened, Robert was rather enjoying the drama.

  But when the policewoman arrived to speak to Emma, he must have realized that his presence might make things more difficult and he left the three women on their own in the kitchen. That would have been difficult for him. Robert always felt he had a contribution to make at a time of crisis. He was used to dealing with emergencies: clients who slit their wrists in his waiting room, or had psychotic episodes, or jumped bail. Emma wondered if that was why he enjoyed his work so much.

  Perhaps someone else came to Springhead with the detective and talked to Robert in a different room, because occasionally in the lull in the conversation, while Emma struggled to answer the policewoman’s questions, she thought she could hear muffled voices. Above the wind it was difficult to tell. It was possible that her father was talking to Christopher and she was imagining the third voice. Christopher must have been in the house that day too.

  Mary made tea in the big brown earthenware pot, and they sat at the kitchen table. Mary apologized.

  “It’s so cold in the rest of the house. At least here there’s the Aga…” And for once the Aga behaved itself and gave off some heat. Condensation had been running down the windows all day and had formed lakes on the sills. Mary hated the Aga then, before she got more used to its ways. She faced it every morning as if preparing for battle, muttering under her breath, a prayer, Please get hot today. Don’t die on me. Please stay warm long enough to cook a meal.

  The policewoman, though, still seemed cold. She kept on her coat and clasped her hands round her mug of tea. Emma must have been introduced to her though that bit escaped her memory, escaped as soon as it had been spoken. She could remember thinking that the woman must have been a policewoman although she was wearing her own clothes, clothes which had seemed so smart to Emma that she noticed them as soon as she walked in. Under the coat there was a skirt, softly fitted, almost full length and a pair of brown leather boots. Throughout the enquiry Emma would struggle to remember this woman’s name, although she would become the family’s only contact with the police, returning whenever there was a development in the case, so they wouldn’t have to find out from the press.

  As soon as she sat down the policewoman Kate? Cathy? asked that question, “What were you doing there, out on your own in the storm?”

  It was so hard to explain. Emma could hardly just say, Well, it’s Sunday afternoon. Although in her mind that was all the explanation needed. Sundays were often tense, all of them in together, trying to be a model family. Nothing much to do after church.

  That Sunday had been worse than usual. Emma had some good memories of family meals at Springhead, occasions when Robert was expansive, telling silly jokes that had them doubled up with laughter, when her mother waxed passionate about some book she was reading. Then it almost seemed that the good times they had enjoyed in York had returned. But those had all been before Abigail died. That Sunday lunch had marked a watershed, a change in atmosphere. Or so it would seem to Emma later. She remembered the meal with unusual clarity: the four of them sitting at the table, Christopher uncommunicative, caught up as usual with some project of his own, Mary dishing out the food with a sort of desperate energy, talking all the time, Robert unusually silent. Emma had taken the silence as a good sign and slipped her request into the conversation, hoping almost that he wouldn’t notice.

  “It is OK if I go round to Abigail’s later?”

  “I’d rather you didn’t.” He’d spoken quite calmly, but she had been furious.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think it’s too much to ask you to spend one afternoon with your family, do you?”

  She’d thought that was so unfair! She spent every Sunday cramped in the horrible damp house while her friends were off enjoying themselves. Never before had she made a fuss.

  She’d helped him wash the dishes as usual but all the time her fury had been growing, building like a flooded river behind a dam. Later, when her mother had come in to see how they were getting on, she’d said, “I’m going out now, to see Abigail. I won’t be late.” Speaking to Mary, not to him. And she’d rushed past them, deaf to her mother’s frantic requests.

  All that seemed stupid and trivial once she knew Abigail was dead. The temper tantrum of a two-year-old. And with her mother, sitting beside her, and the smart woman looking at her, waiting, it was even harder to explain her frustration, her need to escape.

  “I was bored,” she said in the end. “You know, Sunday afternoons.”

  The policewoman had nodded, seeming to understand.

  Abigail was the only person I know. It’s miles by the road. There’s a short-cut across the fields.”

  “Did you know Abigail would be in?” the policewoman asked.

  “I saw her at youth club on Friday night. She said she was going to cook her father a special Sunday tea. To say thank you.”

  “What did she want to thank her father for?” Though Emma had the impression that the policewoman already knew the answer, or at least
had guessed at it. How could she? Had she had time to find out? Perhaps it was just that she carried round with her an aura of omnipotence.

  “For asking Jeanie Long to leave, so they could have the house to themselves again.”

  And at that the policewoman nodded once more, satisfied, as if she was a teacher and Emma had answered a test question correctly.

  “Who is Jeanie Long?” she asked and once more Emma had the impression that she already knew the answer.

  “She was Mr. Mantel’s girlfriend. She used to live with them.”

  The policewoman made notes in a book but she made no comment.

  “Tell me all you can about Abigail.”

  Emma, no longer the rebellious teenager that had been shocked out of her was eager to please and started talking at once. Once she started there was so much to say.

  “Abigail was my best friend. When we moved here it was hard, different, you know. We were used to the city. Abigail had lived here most of her life but she didn’t really fit in either.”

  It had been something they’d talked about at sleep-overs, how much they had in common. How they were soulmates. But even at the time Emma had known that wasn’t true. They’d both been misfits that was all. Abigail because she had no mother and her father gave her everything she asked for. Emma because she’d moved from the city and her parents said grace before meals.

  Abigail lived on her own with her dad. Until Jeanie came to stay, at least, and Abigail couldn’t stand her. There’s someone to do the cleaning and the cooking, but she lives in a flat over the garage and that doesn’t really count, does it? Abigail’s dad’s a businessman.”

  Those words still conjured up for Emma the same glamour as when she’d first heard them. They made her think of the big smart car, with the leather seats, which had collected them sometimes from school, of Abigail all dressed up to go out to dinner with her father because he was entertaining clients, of the champagne Keith Mantel had opened when it was her fifteenth birthday. Of the man himself, suave and charming and attentive. She couldn’t explain that to the woman, though. To her ‘businessman’ would just be the description of an occupation. Like ‘probation officer’ or ‘priest’.

  “Does Abigail’s father know?” Emma asked suddenly, feeling sick.

  “Yes,” the policewoman said. She looked very serious as she spoke and Emma wondered if she’d been the one to tell him.

  “They were so close,” Emma murmured, but she felt those words to be inadequate. She pictured father and daughter cuddled on the sofa in the immaculate house, laughing at a comedy on the television.

  She must have told the policewoman more about Jeanie Long at that first meeting, about why Abigail disliked her, but lying in the bed next to James, the details of that part of the conversation eluded her. Neither could she recall seeing Christopher in the house between lunch and much later in the evening. Now Christopher was a scientist, a postgraduate student, studying the breeding behaviour of puffins and spending part of every year on Shetland. Then he had been her little brother, self-contained and annoyingly brainy.

  Had he always been like that, so distant and closed off from the rest of them? Or had that only happened after Abigail’s death? Perhaps he’d changed then too, although he’d only witnessed the drama second hand, and it was her memory which was faulty. Had it been the move to Elvet that had changed him and made him so focused and intense, or Abigail’s murder? At this distance she couldn’t decide. She wondered how much of that day he remembered and whether he’d be prepared to discuss it with her.

  Certainly in York he’d been more open, more … in her mind she paused, hesitating to use the word, even to herself, more… normal. She remembered a rowdy little boy, chasing round the house with his friends, waving a plastic sword in the air, then at another time sitting in the back seat of the car on a long journey, giggling at a joke he’d brought back from school until tears had run down his cheeks.

  She was now certain that he was in the house on the day Abigail died. He hadn’t been away on one of his solitary walks. Later, once the policewoman had gone, they sat together in his bedroom which was in the roof, and which looked out over the fields. The wind blew a gap in the clouds and there was a full moon. They watched the activity in the bean field, the flashlights throwing strange shadows, the men below them looking very small. Christopher pointed to two of them struggling through the mud, carrying a stretcher between them.

  “I suppose that’s her.”

  Then one of the stretcher bearers tripped and fell onto one knee, and the stretcher tilted alarmingly. Emma and Christopher looked at each other and both gave an awkward and embarrassed giggle.

  The church clock struck two. The baby cried out in his sleep as if he were having a nightmare. Emma began to doze, and remembered, as if she were already dreaming, that the policewoman’s name had been Caroline. Caroline Fletcher.

  Chapter Four

  In the beginning was the word. Even as a teenager Emma hadn’t believed that literally. How could you have a word without someone to speak it? Impossible for the word to come first. She’d never had it properly explained though. Not in the sermons she’d sat through during the family service on Sunday mornings. Not during the dreary evenings of the confirmation classes.

  What she’d thought it meant was: In the beginning was the story. The Bible was all stories. What else was there to it? The only way she could make sense of her own life was to turn it into a story.

  As she grew older the fiction was it fiction? grew more elaborate.

  Once upon a time there was a family. An ordinary family. The Winters. A mother and father and a son and daughter. They lived in a pleasant house on the outskirts of York in a street with trees on the pavement. In spring the trees were pink with blossom and in autumn the leaves were gold. Robert, the father, was an architect. Mary, the mother, worked part time in the university library. Emma and Christopher went to the school at the end of the street. They wore a uniform with a maroon blazer and a grey tie.

  And repeating the story in her head now, Emma saw the garden in the York house. A red brick wall with sunflowers in a row against it, the colours so vivid that they almost hurt her eyes. Christopher was squatting next to a terra cotta pot with lavender growing in it, a butterfly trapped between his cupped hands. She could smell the lavender and there was sound too, the bubbling notes of a flute from an open window, played by the teenage girl who came occasionally to babysit.

  I’ll never be so happy again. The thought came unbidden into her head, but she couldn’t allow that to be part of the narrative. It was too painful. So she continued the story as it was always told…

  Then Robert discovered Jesus and everything changed. He said he couldn’t be an architect any more. He left his old office with the long windows and went to university to become a probation officer.

  “Why not a vicar?” Emma had asked. By now they had started going regularly to church. She’d thought he’d be a good vicar.

  “Because I don’t feel the calling,” Robert had said.

  He couldn’t be a probation officer in York. He wasn’t called to stay and anyway there wasn’t enough money to keep the big house in the quiet street. Instead they’d moved east to Elvet, where the land was flat and they needed probation officers. Mary had left the university and took a job in a tiny public library. If she’d missed the students she hadn’t said. She’d gone to the church in the village with Robert every Sunday and sang the hymns as loudly as he did. What she’d thought about their new life in the draughty house, the bean fields and the mud, Emma hadn’t been able to tell.

  But of course that wasn’t the complete story. Even aged fifteen Emma had known it couldn’t be. Robert wouldn’t just have discovered Jesus in a flash of lightning and a crashing of cymbals. Something had led up to it. Something had made him change. In the books she read, every action had a cause. How unsatisfactory if events came out of the blue, at random, unexplained. There had been some trauma in Robert’s li
fe, some depression. He had never discussed it, so she was free to create her own explanation, her own fiction.

  It was Sunday, and on Sunday the whole family went together to family Communion in the church on the other side of the square. After Matthew had been born Emma had been allowed a few weeks off, but a month after the birth Robert had called at the house. It had been mid morning, a week day, and she’d been surprised to see him.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she’d said.

  “I’m on my way to Spinney Fen. Plenty of time for a coffee and a look at my new grandson.”

  Spinney Fen was the women’s prison with the high concrete walls on the cliff next to the gas terminal. He had clients there, offenders he’d been supervising in the community and others about to be released on licence. Emma hated driving past Spinney Fen. Often it seemed shrouded in sea mist, so the concrete walls seemed to go up for ever into the clouds. When they’d first moved to Elvet she’d had nightmares about his going in through the narrow metal gate and never being allowed out.

  She had made him coffee and let him hold

  Matthew, but all the time she’d wondered what he was really doing in her home. On his way out he’d paused on the doorstep.

  “Will we be seeing you at church on Sunday? Don’t worry about the baby. You can always take him out if he cries.”

  And of course on the following Sunday she’d been there, because since the death of Abigail Mantel, she hadn’t had the will to stand up to him. To stand up to anyone. And he still had a way of making her feel guilty. Part of her felt that if she hadn’t disobeyed him that Sunday, ten years before, history might have been different. If she hadn’t been there to find the body, Abigail might not have died.

  Robert and Mary always arrived at the church, St. Mary Magdalene, before Emma and James. Robert was churchwarden and dressed up in a white robe himself, when it was time, and served wine from the big silver chalice. Emma was not quite sure what he did in the half hour before the service began. He disappeared into the vestry. Perhaps there were practical tasks; perhaps he was praying. Mary always went into the small kitchen in the hall to switch on the urn and set out the cups for coffee afterwards. Then she went back into church and stood by the door to hand out hymn books and service sheets. When Emma had still been living at home she had been expected to help.