Case Histories - Страница 31

Jackson thought that Julia had said to him that Sylvia was a "greyhound" but perhaps what she'd actually said was that she had a greyhound, because she did. It was sitting patiently by her side when they came face-to-face with her. She was on one side of a grille and they were on the other, an arrangement that reminded Jackson partly of the charge desk in the detention cells and partly of a harem, although he wasn't sure what part of his memory the harem bit came from. Jackson supposed that Sylvia looked like a greyhound, inasmuch as she was long and skinny, but she wasn't bonny, as his father would have said. She was toothy and bespectacled, whereas the greyhound was a sleek, brindled creature, the kind of hound you saw in medieval paintings, accompanying a noblewoman to the hunt. Jackson wasn't at all sure where he had conjured that image up from either. Perhaps it was just because there was something medieval in general about a convent. The dog stood up when they entered and gently licked Marlee's fingers through the grille.

Franciscans, Jackson reminded himself. "Like some hippie order," Julia had said. "They go around barefoot in the summer and they make their own sandals for the winter, and they keep animals as pets and they're all vegetarians." Amelia and Julia had briefed him at length about the convent. They seemed genuinely to despise Sylvia's vocation. "Don't be fooled by that holier-than-thou stuff," Julia warned him. "Underneath all that penguin crap she's still Sylvia." "It's just a form of escapism," Amelia added dismis-sively. "She doesn't have to pay bills, or think about where her next meal's coming from. She never has to be alone." Was that why Amelia frowned so much, then, because she was alone? But hadn't Julia said something about a "Henry"? It was difficult to imagine Amelia in the arms of a man. Whoever Henry was, he wasn't doing it for Amelia. (When did he stop calling her " Miss Land " and start calling her "Amelia"?)

Amelia said that she hardly ever visited Sylvia but they kept up a fitful, dutiful correspondence, "although Sylvia doesn't exactly have much to write about – prayer, prayer, and more prayer – and then, of course, she does a lot of what is housework by any other name – they bake communion wafers, and starch and iron the priest's vestments, all that kind of stuff. And she does a lot of gardening, and knits things for the poor," she added disparagingly, and Julia said, "She's making the knitting up," and Amelia said, "No, I'm not," and Julia said, "Yes, you are. I have visited her, you know, quite a lot," and Amelia said, "That was when you were auditioning for a nun in The Sound of Music," and Julia said, "No, it was not," and Jackson said wearily, "Oh, shut up, the pair of you," and they both turned and looked at him as if they'd just seen him for the first time. "Well," he said, "really, catch yourself on," and wondered when he'd started speaking like his mother.

"Well, that was interesting," Jackson said, addressing Marlee via the rearview mirror. She looked as if she were nodding off to sleep. Sister Michael had taken her off to feed her, once she'd made the acquaintance of Sister Mary Luke's dog ("Jester" – his racing name apparently. He was a rescue dog). The other interns had fussed around Marlee as if they'd never seen a child before and she seemed more than happy with the beans on toast, angel cake, and ice cream they had rustled up for her. If they'd given her chips they would probably have had a convert for life on their hands.

"Don't mention to your mother that I took you to a convent," he said.

Actually it hadn't been that interesting. Sylvia knew he was coming, Amelia had telephoned ahead and explained that Jackson was looking into Olivia's disappearance again but didn't tell her what had prompted this. After Marlee had been taken away by Sister Michael, Jackson produced the blue mouse from where it had been squashed into his pocket ("enclosed") and showed it to Sylvia. He wanted the shock factor. He remembered Julia saying that Amelia fainted when she saw it, and Amelia, after all, was not a fainter. Sylvia looked at the blue mouse, her dry, thin lips compressed together, her small, mud-colored eyes not wavering in their gaze. After a few seconds, she said, "Blue Mouse," and reached a finger through the grille. Jackson moved the blue mouse closer to her and she touched its old, infirm body tenderly with one finger. A tear rolled silently down her cheek. But no, she hadn't seen it since the day Olivia disappeared and she couldn't even begin to imagine why it would be in among her father's possessions.

"I was never close to Daddy," she said.

"The angel cake was nice," Marlee said sleepily.

Jackson 's phone rang. He looked at the number – Amelia and Julia – and groaned. He let his voice mail pick it up, but when he played the message back he was so alarmed at what he heard that he had to pull the car to the side of the road to listen to it again. Amelia was sobbing, a primal inchoate kind of lamentation that was grief, raw and untempered. Jackson wondered if Julia were dead.

"Breathe, Amelia, for God's sake," he said. "What is it? Is it Julia?" but all she said was, "Please, Jackson [' Jackson?' He'd never heard her call him that. It sounded way too intimate for Jackson 's liking], please, Jackson, please come, I need you." And then she was cut off, or she cut herself off more likely so that he would have to go to Owlstone Road and find out what had happened (not Julia, surely?).

"What is it, Daddy?"

"Nothing, sweetheart. We're just going to take a little detour on the way home." Sometimes Jackson felt as if his whole life were a detour.

We went to a convent!" Marlee shouted as she ran through the front door.

"A convent?" David Lastingham laughed, catching Marlee as she ran past him and lifting her high in the air and then hugging her to his body. Jackson thought, I'll wait until he puts her down and then I'll deck him, but then Josie came out of the kitchen, wearing an apron for God's sake. Jackson had never seen Josie in an apron. "A convent?" she echoed. "What were you doing in a convent?"

"They had angel cake," Marlee said.

Josie looked to Jackson for an explanation but he just shrugged and said, "As they do."

"And the dog was dead," Marlee said, suddenly crestfallen at the memory.

"What dog?" Josie asked sharply. "Did you run over a dog, Jackson?" and Marlee said, "No, Mummy. The dog was old and now he's happy in heaven. With all the other dead dogs." Marlee looked as if she were going to cry again (there had already been a lot of crying) and Jackson reminded her that they had seen a live dog as well. "Jester," she remembered happily. "He was in prison with a nun, and they had a statue that cried, and Daddy's got a tin in his car with a dead man in it."

Josie gave Jackson a disgusted look. "Why do you always have to get her overexcited, Jackson?" and before he could say anything. Josie turned to David and said, "Will you take her upstairs, darling, and get her in the bath?" Jackson waited until Marlee and David – the usurper in his life, the man who now conducted his daughter's bedtime routines and fucked his wife – had gone upstairs before saying, "Do you really think that's wise?"

"Wise? What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about some man you hardly know being left alone with your naked daughter. Our naked daughter. Oh, and by the way, do you think it's really a good idea to allow her to dress like a child prostitute?"

Swift as a snake, she punched his face. He reeled, more with astonishment than pain – it was a girly kind of jab – because not once while they were married had they ever been violent toward each other.

"What the fuck was that for?"

"For being disgusting, Jackson. That's the man I live with, the man I love. Do you honestly think that I would live with someone I didn't trust with my daughter?"

"You'd be amazed how many times I've heard that."

David Lastingham must have heard them shouting because he ran downstairs yelling at Jackson, "What are you doing to her?" which Jackson thought was rich, and Josie, helpfully, said, "He accused you of interfering with Marlee."

"Interfering?" Jackson sneered at her. "Is that what the middle classes call it?" but by this time David Lastingham had reached the bottom of the stairs and aimed a sloppy but enraged right hook that Jackson didn't see coming but that he certainly felt when it landed. In fact he could have sworn he actually heard his cheekbone crack. Jackson thought, That's it, now I kill him, but Marlee suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs and said, "Daddy?"

Josie spat at him, "Get out of our fucking house, Jackson, and, oh and by the way, did I tell you – we're moving to New Zealand . I was going to sit you down and do the tea-and-sympathy thing, break it to you gently, but you don't deserve that. David's been offered a job at Wellington, and he's accepted it and we're going with him. So there, Jackson, how do you like that?"

Jackson parked the Alfa in one of the lockups he rented at the top of the lane, experiencing his usual momentary guilt about the noise his exhaust made. He was thinking about Sylvia, giving up her life to be shut up in that place. She knew more than she was telling – he was sure of that. But right now he didn't want to think about Sylvia. He wanted to think about a hot bath and a cold beer. He was furious that he'd let David Lastingham land a punch. He was thinking that the day couldn't get much worse, even though he knew from experience that the day can always get worse, and to prove that thesis a dark figure slipped out from the shadows behind the garage and hit him over the head with something that felt horribly like the butt of a gun.