Sour Grapes Page 8

  ‘What is it?’ Jemima asked. ‘You seem worried about something.’

  ‘That’s sensitive of you,’ said Willow, thankful to be presented with an opening. ‘In fact it was your mention of your husband that bothered me. I hadn’t been sure whether to say anything or not. I mean, it must be so awful for you waiting for news of the parole board. And I didn’t want to make it worse by talking about it if you—’

  ‘How did you know he was coming up for parole?’

  ‘When I was trying to find out why you might have been so unwilling to believe I was who I said I was, I talked to a friend who told me a little about what had happened to your husband.’

  ‘Friend? What friend?’

  ‘She’s called Jane Cleverholme.’ Willow remembered Jane’s advice to pretend there was no connection between them, but she had decided that a measure of frankness would work better with a woman like Jemima Lutterworth than any kind of lying manipulation.

  Jemima twitched at the sound of Jane’s name, but she said nothing. Willow waited, hoping that she had not blown her chances of hearing anything interesting.

  ‘I wish…’ Jemima began angrily and then stopped and shook her head. ‘Do you know her well?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Fairly well at any rate. We’ve been friends for a long time, and I tend to go to her for information.’

  ‘Did she send you here to spy out the background for whatever story she’s planning to run when the parole board decides to let Andrew out?’ Jemima demanded, her face taking on a suspicious hardness that made her look quite unlike the pleasant woman who had opened the door.

  ‘I’d hardly have said I knew her if that was what I was doing,’ said Willow mildly.

  Jemima nodded, but she did not say anything.

  ‘Anyway, why should she want to run a story?’ Willow added, hoping to get past the other woman’s prejudices. ‘It’s over now, surely. You husband will be released when it’s been decided that he’s served an appropriate amount of time. There’s nothing any journalist can do with any of that.’

  ‘Then you obviously don’t know much about them, however friendly you are with Ms Cleverholme. They’ll rake the whole thing up again as soon as he’s released, and have those horrible headlines about how he didn’t care that he’d killed those people and doesn’t deserve to be free when the victims’family is imprisoned in grief forever. As if we—’

  ‘That seems rather unlikely. I mean, he’s not a sadistic murderer or a paedophile or anything. He had a car accident. Serious, it’s true, but the sort of thing that could happen to almost anyone. A moment’s inattention on a dark night on a wet road. It’s not like a premeditated killing, after all.’

  ‘But he did not have a car accident,’ said Jemima, turning fully so that she was standing face to face with Willow. ‘Let this be understood once and for all. He was convicted of a crime he did not commit.’

  Willow opened her mouth, but the pent-up flow of words seemed much too powerful for Jemima to control and they continued to pour out.

  ‘Yes, anyone could have an accident; even Andrew, although he is a careful driver now. Far more careful than me. But he could never at any time run away from people he had injured. I’ve been married to him for years. I know him. He could not have done that any more than I could fly. His car was stolen that night, and whoever the joyrider was who took it was the person who must have crashed it and killed those people. Andrew should never have been convicted. And that is why I’m worried about the parole board.’

  Determined to take advantage of Jemima’s new and surprising readiness to talk, Willow sat down on the flat green sofa behind her and tried to look encouraging. After a moment Jemima followed her to the sofa.

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ said Willow. ‘What d’you mean when you say that’s why you’re worried about the parole board?’

  Jemima looked puzzled, as though she could not imagine how anyone could not have followed the argument that was so clear in her own mind.

  ‘Because they don’t release anyone they believe has not “come to terms with his crime”. If Andrew goes on telling the truth about his innocence, they won’t let him out. He’s either got to lie and say he was driving that night or stay in prison for his full sentence. It’s the cruellest possible situation for anyone to be in.’

  ‘But why …?’ Willow broke off and leaned backwards.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I thought you might not want to talk about it.’

  ‘It’s almost a relief really.’ Jemima smiled and her whole face lit up in a way that Willow would not have expected. ‘I know that must sound mad after my attempts to choke you off, but there it is. Now I’ve started I suppose I’d better go the whole way. What is it you want to know?’

  ‘Why he ever confessed to the accident in the first place.’ Willow frowned, exaggerating her sense of confusion to make her questions seem less threatening. ‘It seems astonishing in a well-educated professional like your husband.’

  Tears started welling in Jemima’s grey eyes. Willow was not at all sure what to do. She wanted to make some gesture of comfort, but they were strangers and she had no idea what would be acceptable to Jemima or even bearable.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said eventually. ‘I didn’t mean to make it worse for you.’

  ‘You’re not. Just give me a minute and I’ll be all right.’

  Nodding, quite able to understand Jemima’s wish to be left alone with her misery, Willow got up to look out at the garden, and waited until she had a signal that it would be safe to turn round again.

  She did not get one for nearly five minutes. Then in a strangled voice Jemima suggested making some coffee after all. Willow ignored the amount of caffeine she had already ingested and said she would like some very much. When she offered to help make it, Jemima said, ‘No, thanks. I’m not very good at sharing the kitchen. I won’t be long.’

  Willow went on looking at the garden, which was a curious mixture of exuberant shrubs and climbers and disciplined yew hedges. Knowing how long yew took to grow, she assumed that the Lutterworths had spent a fortune on mature trees and wondered whether the architect had had a hand in the garden design as well as the house. For the first time she began to think about the Lutterworths’money.

  Partners in large accountancy practices could earn huge sums, as she knew well, and profits had been particularly high during the 1980s when the house had been built; but even so it seemed likely that either Andrew or Jemima had some private money, too. After all, she must be living on something more than whatever was left of his last cheque from Hill, Snow, Parkes.

  The sound of her return made Willow turn away from the big window.

  ‘It looks like a wonderful garden. But it must take a lot of upkeep.’

  ‘A certain amount,’ agreed Jemima with most of her composure back in place, ‘but I quite enjoy it. I do it myself now, you see. After Andrew was…I got rid of the gardener. I had to really and anyway I needed something regular to do. I’d go dotty without any obligations.’

  ‘What’s down there inside those yew hedges? I can’t quite see from here.’

  ‘How do you take your coffee?’ asked Jemima abruptly.

  ‘Black, please. No sugar.’

  Jemima handed her the filled cup and poured out some milky coffee for herself.

  ‘I’ll take you round and show you later, if you like,’ she said, still not having answered either of Willow’s questions.

  They both drank and then both started to speak at once.

  ‘You first,’ said Willow with a smile, putting her cup and saucer down on a small glass table at her side.

  ‘The inner garden within the hedges is a memorial to our son,’ said Jemima in a completely expressionless voice. ‘Andrew made it soon after Pipp died.’

  ‘Your son? I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘No? Well, I’m not surprised. Very few people do, although it’s no secret. I’ve always thought that the papers weren’t inte
rested because it might have spoiled their picture of Andrew as a selfish, drunken monster.’

  Jemima sighed and sat with her cup forgotten in her hands, her eyes looking back to something no one else could see. Willow said nothing, and after a moment Jemima began to talk again in a less clipped voice.

  ‘Philip was born fourteen years ago, and…’ She bit her bottom lip hard. After a moment she was able to continue. ‘He was the loveliest child: clever, and wonderfully intuitive. I suppose he was my best friend in a way.’

  Her eyes filled with tears that did not spill over the lids. Willow sat watching her. She did not want to ask any questions that might seem insensitive and tried to think of something that would not sound crass or intrusive. It turned out not to be necessary. After a moment Jemima’s eyes dried and began to focus again.

  ‘Then four years ago he had to go into hospital to have his tonsils out. That’s all it was: a relatively routine operation. It was successful. He didn’t have one of those ghastly haemorrhages one sometimes hears about. He was getting better all the time, almost able to swallow comfortably again, and he was due to come home in two days.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Willow when the silence became unbearable.

  Jemima looked at her and the tears welled again, but she managed to control them without either sniffing or mopping her eyes.

  ‘He got necrotising fasciitis.’

  Willow, who had read several terrifying articles about the condition a few years earlier, was appalled. The Daily Mercury had run a whole series of stories about it, calling it a ‘monstrous flesh-eating bug’, but Jane had apparently had no idea that Andrew Lutterworth’s son had died of it. Willow could not remember whether it was caused by a virus or an antibiotic-resistant bacterium, but she knew that it lurked in hospitals, attacked patients who were already weakened by surgery or illness, and was nearly always fatal. The thought of any mother watching her child die of it was unbearable.

  ‘He was in the best possible hospital,’ said Jemima, sounding almost cold in her effort to keep control of her voice. ‘But there was nothing they could do. They amputated first one leg to try to contain the infection and then the other. But there wasn’t any hope, you see. I’d always known that, but somehow I couldn’t stop thinking it would be different for Pipp. It should have been.’

  ‘I am so sorry,’ said Willow, her mind full of her own all-consuming anxiety for Lucinda’s minor discomfort and mildly raised temperature. The thought of what her death could mean made it impossible to say anything else.

  ‘You’ve got children, haven’t you?’ said Jemima after a while.

  Willow nodded. ‘Well, one. I’m too old to have any more.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Jemima. ‘Now.’

  ‘It must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘Yes. I went mad for a while,’ she said calmly as though she were discussing the price of petrol. But when she looked at Willow, her eyes gave a hint of the full horror of what had happened to her. ‘And, you see, that’s why I feel so guilty.’

  After a moment Willow thought it would be safe—and not too rude—to say again that she did not understand.

  ‘No?’ said Jemima, looking as though her head was aching. ‘No, I suppose you couldn’t. I’ll try to explain. Although if…I may not get it out without crying. I haven’t much practice in talking about this to anyone and even now…’

  ‘Don’t worry about crying,’ said Willow, beginning to feel unpleasantly conscious that she was receiving confidences under false pretences. The fact that Jemima had decided to trust her because of her novels and the short, polite letter she had once written made her deceit seem even worse. Reminding herself of why she had come, Willow hardened her heart. ‘Since my daughter, Lucinda, was born a couple of years ago I’ve done more crying than in the whole of the rest of my life,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t shock me any longer, or even seem particularly weak.’

  Jemima managed a small smile.

  ‘Good. Well, you see, I wasn’t much help to Andrew after Philip died. It took us both so differently. We couldn’t talk to each other at all then. I thought his…the way he tackled it seemed so morbid. I wanted to remember Pipp as he was, running and laughing and chasing his friends up and down the staircases. I wanted to remember the happy healthy child I’d loved. Andrew couldn’t forget the dying one or what was happening to him—his body and, perhaps, his soul—afterwards. He kept reading bits of Frazer’s Golden Bough and telling me about all the old funerary customs. It was too horrible. I felt as though I could never get away from death and…and rottingness, and I wouldn’t talk to him any more. I couldn’t.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Willow gently.

  ‘But because I wouldn’t talk, Andrew started to come home later and later every day, and then afterwards I found out where he’d been.’

  Willow thought it better not to say yet again that she did not understand. She waited, feeling the other woman’s anguish, and quite unable to do anything about it.

  ‘He’d been at the hospital,’ Jemima said eventually. She sounded despairing. ‘It seems he’d got it into his head that Pipp was lonely—had been lonely as he was dying all those horrible days—and that the only reparation he could make for that was to do something for all the other children who were dying alone in that hospital. I couldn’t bear it when he talked about it. I’d have done anything to stop him.’

  ‘Anyone would have,’ said Willow carefully. ‘It must have been so hard for you to take on his sadness when you had all your own to deal with.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it must have been the same for him. I didn’t realise that then, but I’ve seen it so vividly since and felt so guilty. At the time I blamed him for making it worse for me and shut him out and wouldn’t—couldn’t—help, and hated his not helping me. I left him with nowhere to go except that place full of suffering, dying children. I found out later that he used to haunt the place, trying to help them. But he was too unhappy to be able to do anything good for anyone. In the end the nurses told him that he was frightening the children and ordered him to stop coming. After that he’d just sit for hours on a bench on the other side of the road, sometimes even in the pouring rain, staring at the door Pipp had been taken in by.’

  Jemima stopped talking and just looked at Willow. Tears welled again and spilled over on to her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped her face with the backs of both hands. The tears kept falling.

  ‘It must have been torture for you both,’ said Willow, hating the inadequacy of her comment but unable to think of anything better to say.

  Jemima nodded. ‘It was, which is why I didn’t understand for so long.’

  ‘Didn’t understand what?’

  ‘That Andrew wouldn’t say what he was doing on the night of the crash because he wanted to protect me from the knowledge that he’d been sitting outside the hospital again, trying to find a way to bear Pipp’s death because I couldn’t help him and kept accusing him of all sorts of things…’

  Willow shook her head, unable to deal with the savagery of the other woman’s pain.

  ‘I’m sure that’s why the lawyers couldn’t find anyone in the office to say he’d been there all evening. I think he’d been sitting on that bloody bench outside the hospital. And he wouldn’t tell the police because of me. It’s my fault he’s in prison.’

  Thinking that Emma would have recognised excessive and unnecessary guilt in Jemima, Willow said directly, ‘You mustn’t blame yourself for what your husband did or said or didn’t do.’

  ‘There isn’t anyone else to blame.’

  Willow thought Jemima was in serious need of psychiatric help, perhaps not surprisingly, but she could not think how to tell her so without sounding insufferably interfering.

  ‘Except Andrew himself,’ she said at last, making Jemima start in shock at the sound of her voice. ‘He chose, Jemima. He chose what to do. And if that’s what he was doing that night, he must have chosen not to say anything about it. People often d
o feel guilty when someone they love has died. Perhaps confessing to something he hadn’t done was a way of helping himself deal with that.’

  By the time Willow had finished speaking, hoping that she had not sounded as patronising as she feared, Jemima’s face had regained much of its self-contained expression and her tears had stopped. She shook her head and said with a resumption of the confident coolness that must have been used to defend her greatest vulnerabilities, ‘Perhaps. But it was me who’d made him feel guilty. You see, I’d shrieked at him that my breakdown was his fault, that if he hadn’t kept talking about Pipp’s death every single day and kept us both from putting it where it ought to have been—in the past—I’d have been all right. I told him that he was tormenting me, making me feel as though he was killing Pipp over and over again.’

  She stopped, looked out of the window and seemed to shudder. After a moment she collected the courage to go on.

  ‘I said I never wanted to hear any more about his horrible memorial garden or his self-indulgent trips to the hospital and that if he ever mentioned Pipp’s name to me again I’d leave him. I’d gone mad, you see,’ she added almost brightly. ‘Now, shall I show you the garden?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Willow felt an urge to touch Jemima’s hand or arm, but she resisted it. They were not on the sort of terms that would have allowed such intimacy.

  Back in London that evening, waiting for Tom’s nightly telephone call, Willow wrote to Emma, giving a vivid account of everything she had seen and heard at the Lutterworths’house. When she was halfway through the letter, at about twenty past nine, Tom rang. They talked for an expensive but satisfying forty minutes. He still did not know when he was likely to get home and Willow tried not to let herself feel any of the wholly unfair resentment she had ascribed to Jemima Lutterworth.

  Willow reminded herself that she did not resent Tom’s work in the least. She admired it and she knew perfectly well that he had to be in Strasbourg. Besides, she was entirely capable of living happily on her own for a week or two with Lucinda—or much longer. She had plenty of friends if she wanted company. None of it changed her feelings, and she had become honest enough by then to admit that she wished he did not have to be away for quite so long.