‘You hold Lady Kira responsible?’
‘Oh yes. Everything tracks back to her. She never wanted me to have her daughter. And now she has helped deprive me of mine.’
‘And she did this, how? By helping with the arrangements for her to finish her education in France, out of reach of our prurient press?’
She deliberately let a trace of doubt seep into her voice, hoping to provoke further revelation of what was going on inside his mind, but all she succeeded in doing was bring down the defences even further.
He said indifferently, ‘If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.’
This for the moment was a dead end. Leave the mother-in-law, get back to the wife, she told herself.
She said, ‘If, as you claim, you are innocent, then someone must have framed you. Do you have any idea who?’
The question seemed to amuse him.
‘I have a short list of possibilities, yes.’
‘Is Imogen on it?’
The question seemed to surprise him. Or perhaps he simply didn’t like it. She really must find a way to get into this key relationship.
‘What does it matter?’ he demanded. ‘Which is worse? That she went along with a plot to frame me? Or that she actually believed I was guilty as charged?’
‘Be fair,’ said Alva. ‘The evidence was overwhelming; the jury took twenty minutes to find you guilty…’
‘Twelve strangers!’ he interrupted. ‘Twelve citizens picked off the street! In this world we’re unfortunate enough to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on, where squalid politicians conspire with a squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I’m sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.’
Wow! she thought as she studied him closely. That rolled off your tongue so easily, it’s clearly been picking up momentum in your mind for years!
His voice was still controlled, but his single eye sparkled with passion. What was it he said he felt about his ex-wife’s behaviour?
Contempt.
Revulsion.
Anger.
Dismay.
These were all necessary elements of that condition of self-awareness she was trying to draw him to. Perhaps by transferring these emotions away from himself to his ex-wife, he was showing her he was closer than she’d thought. His strained parallel with Mandela was also significant. A man of dignity and probity, imprisoned by a warped regime, and finally released and vindicated after long years to become a symbol of peace and reconciliation. It was as if Hadda’s denial could only be sustained by going to the furthermost extreme in search of supportive self-images.
Hopefully, if he continued far enough in that direction, he would eventually come upon himself unawares. And then it would be up to her to direct him away from self-hatred into more positively remedial channels.
Meanwhile it would be good if she could nudge him into a memory of Imogen in her fairy-tale princess phase. It was possible that by reliving that period when she had become the unique and obsessive object of his adoration, he might come to wonder whether it was in fact his idol that had fallen or himself.
Even if that admittedly ideal outcome didn’t materialize, this was the part of his life she had least information about, for there were few living sources but himself.
Now the passion had faded and he was looking at her assessingly.
He’s got something else for me, she thought. She knew how habit-forming this business of writing about your past could be. In many clients, it went beyond habit into compulsion. So of course since their last meeting he’d carried on writing.
But as what he wrote came closer to the most intimate details of his being, he naturally became less and less sure of sharing it with her.
So, show no eagerness. Do not press.
She said, ‘Wolf, time’s nearly up. I was wondering, is there anything I can get for you? Books, journals, that sort of thing? I should have asked before. Or something more personal. Something in the food line? Or proper linen handkerchiefs, silk socks, perhaps?’
He shook his head as if impatient at her change of subject, or perhaps at the silly notion that there could be something he might enjoy receiving, and said, ‘We were talking about Imo. I got to thinking about her after I wrote that last piece.’
She said, ‘Yes?’
He said, ‘That stuff about feeling hate, I mean it. Or part of me means it. But there’s also a part of me that hates me for feeling it. Does that make sense?’
She nodded and said gravely, ‘What wouldn’t make sense is for you not to feel it.’
That was the right answer. He pulled another exercise book out of his blouson.
‘You might like to see this,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said, taking the book. She opened it and glanced at the first page.
And she knew at once she’d got what she wanted.
i
I was a wild boy, in just about every sense.
My mam, God bless her, died when I was only six. Brain fever, they called it locally. Probably some form of meningitis, spotted too late.
We had my dad’s Aunt Carrie living with us. Or rather we were living with her in her farmhouse, Birkstane. Up there in Cumbria they still expect the young to take care of the old. Not that Carrie can have been all that old when we moved in with her. Birkstane was all that remained, plus a couple of small fields, of her husband’s farm. Widowed in her mid forties, already in her early fifties she was getting a bit forgetful. Also she had arthritis which gave her mobility problems. Normally up there supportive neighbours would have kept her going quite happily till her dotage, but she was a bit isolated, several miles from Mireton, the nearest village, right on the edge of the Ulphingstone estate.
Dad was her only living relative so when word reached him that there was a social worker snooping around, he knew something had to be done. I was still in nappies at the time, so I can only speculate, but I suspect it suited him to move into Birkstane. As head forester to Sir Leon, Dad had a tied cottage on the estate but as I often heard him say later, only a fool lives in a house another fool can throw him out of any time he likes. Not that he thought Sir Leon was a fool. In fact they got on pretty well, and far from dividing them, my liaison with Leon’s daughter only brought them closer together.
They both thought it was a lousy idea.
But that was a long way in the future.
Everything seems to have worked fine to start with. Birkstane was almost as handy for Dad’s work as the tied cottage had been. Mam got to work on the old farmhouse and dragged it back from the edge of dereliction, while Carrie, in familiar surroundings with someone constantly present to keep an eye on her, got a new lease of life.
All this I picked up later. Like I say, I was so young that my memory of those early years in Birkstane is generally non-specific, but I know how blissfully happy I must have been, for I recall all too clearly how I felt when they told me Mam was dead. No, not when they told me; I mean when it finally got through to me that being dead meant gone for good, meant I would never ever see her again.
I was in my second year at school. It had taken a whole year for me to come to terms with the daily separation from Mam; this new and permanent separation