We went down to the Daneway Inn for lunch and sat outside, scarfed and sweatered against the chill. I described my trips to Cambridge, Albany and Bordeaux. I left nothing out, reckoning Sarah if anyone deserved to hear it all. After the reappraisal she’d been forced to make of her mother’s character, the extent of her stepmother’s selfishness was no big deal. Besides, Bella’s desertion of her father was something Sarah had already anticipated.
“The sooner she goes the better. Perhaps then Daddy will be able to come to terms with what’s happened.”
“You think he will?”
“Eventually. There’s still quite a lot of time for all of us to prepare ourselves.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“I’m trying to. So’s Paul, I suppose.”
“Have you seen him recently?”
“No. I have nothing to say to him. But I met Martin Hill the other day. He’d been round to see Paul.”
“Did he say how he seemed?”
“Yes. Martin was expecting some histrionics, I think. But instead he got what you got. This immense chilling calm. Paul’s reading the Bible, apparently. I don’t mean he’s dipping into it. I mean he’s reading it from cover to cover, memorizing whole chunks. Can you believe it? He sits in that house, with Rowena’s possessions-Rowena’s memories-thick about him, reading the Bible. All day every day as far as I know.”
I shook my head, admitting my unwillingness as well as my inability to guess the state of his mind. I’d start feeling sorry for him, I knew, if I tried to imagine his plight. And I didn’t want to feel anything for him, even contempt. I didn’t want to share Naylor’s innocence or Paul’s guilt. I didn’t want to rail against an injustice or rejoice at its correction. All I craved now was what I could only have had if I’d read the newspaper articles and watched the television reports back in July 1990-and said absolutely nothing. Uninvolvement. Indifference. The stranger’s sanctuary. Which for better or worse I’d turned my back on.
“I came across something this morning that might interest you,” Sarah said suddenly, reaching into her handbag and taking out a pocket diary, which she laid on the table in front of me. The red leather cover had the year embossed on it in gold. 1990. “It’s Mummy’s. Returned by the police at some stage, I suppose. Daddy must have hung on to it, then forgotten he had it.”
I reached out and picked the diary up, turning it over in my hand. I wanted to open it at once, to rifle its secrets. But I needed Sarah’s permission to camouflage my desire. “May I?” I said.
“Of course. There’s not much. Mummy was no diarist. Just the usual. Hair appointments. Telephone numbers. Flight times. Birthdays. Anniversaries. Dinner dates. Deadlines. What you’d expect. The normal everyday fixtures of life.”
Already I was flicking through the pages, seeing her handwriting for the first time, sensing her fingers close to mine as she penned the entries. Sarah was right. There was nothing unusual. But even mundanity can be portentous. Wednesday March 7: Oscar’s Private View. Allinson Gallery, Cambridge, 6.30. I turned on. Friday March 16: Collect pictures from Allinson p.m. My gaze flicked to the next day. Saturday March 17: Take pictures to Kington. There it was, then. Confirmation of Sophie’s claim. According to her, that was the day Louise had met her “perfect stranger” on Hergest Ridge. “The weather was unusually warm for March. She wanted a breath of fresh air. You were there for the same reason, I suppose.” But it wasn’t me. It never had been.
“Look at the entry for April the fifth, though,” said Sarah. “That’s not quite so normal.”
Thursday April 5: Atascadero, 3.30. I frowned. “What does it mean?”
“It was just a hunch, but when I checked with directory enquiries and phoned the place, it turned out to be right. Atascadero is a café in Covent Garden. The one where Mummy met Paul to give him his marching orders.”
“So this corroborates his confession.”
“Yes. I suppose I shall have to bring it to the attention of the police. But there’s something else. Something much more significant to my mind, though I doubt they’ll agree.”
“What?”
“Turn to the week of her death.”
I leafed through to the week containing 17 July. There was only one entry. An Air France flight number and departure time for the morning of Monday 16 July. Nothing else. But why should there be? By 18 July, she was dead. “What of it?” I said.
“Turn on.”
I did so. But there were only blank weeks, their days and dates printed on empty uncreased pages. No trips. No appointments. No aides-mémoires. Nothing.
“Don’t you see? There should be something. I don’t know. A dental check-up. A hotel booking. Some trivial commitment. But there isn’t a single one. It’s as if-”
“She knew she was going to die.”
“I remember Rowena saying that. I remember telling her not to be so absurd. And now there it is, in Mummy’s handwriting. A full stop. An end. A void.”
“That she chose to step into.”
“But she can’t have done, can she? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.”
“It could simply have been a precaution,” I suggested. “She might have refrained from putting her plans for the rest of the summer down on paper in case your father got hold of the diary and deduced from the entries that she was planning to leave him.”
“Wouldn’t a total blank look even more suspicious?”
“I suppose it might, but… what other explanation can there be?” I gazed across at Sarah and saw my own incomprehension reflected in her face. There was never going to be an answer. There never could be. Rowena had known as much without the need of a diary to prove it. Her mother’s life had reached a turning point. And become her death.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to analyse my own behaviour as well as other people’s. I’ve come to understand that just as every mood is temporary, so is every triumph and every disappointment. It isn’t much of a consolation, but it’s an effective antidote to despair. One day, I suppose, it’ll make even death seem an acceptable trade-off with reality.
Meanwhile, as November advanced, there were surrenders to be negotiated and escape routes plotted. On the third, I drove up to Worcester and made my promised statement to Inspector Joyce, admitting Louise Paxton could well have been actively seeking male company when I met her during the evening of 17 July 1990. On the fourth, I attended the last board meeting of Timariot & Small as an independent company, made an impassioned speech urging Simon and Jennifer to change their minds, then lost the vote by a slim-but for Adrian expensive-margin. Uncle Larry entered a plea for family unity; Adrian tried and failed to be more gracious in victory than he’d been in defeat; Simon burbled contentedly; and Jennifer twittered about completion dates. None of which prevented me minuting a formal protest at what they’d done and resigning with immediate effect.
My strategy was clear in my mind. And though I gave my fellow directors no hint of it, the future I’d mapped out for myself was in many ways preferable to leading a long struggle for commercial survival at Timariot & Small. More or less by default, I’d been granted another twelve-month extension to my congé de convenance personelle. So, until November 1994 at the earliest, I was a free and unfettered man. I was also about to become a moderately wealthy one, thanks to Bushranger Sports. And since it was wealth I’d tried hard to resist acquiring, I’d decided I might as well enjoy disposing of it.
For a variety of reasons, I didn’t walk out there and then, despite implying I meant to. It took several weeks for the sale to be finalized and I eventually agreed to stay on until a Bushranger apparatchik could be flown in from Sydney to take over my duties. I tried to reassure the staff about the new régime, but felt rather like Kerensky explaining how wonderful life was going to be under Lenin. Nobody believed me, any more than I believed myself. And they all knew I had something they didn’t. A way out.