Page 25 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
‘No,’ he said sharply. ‘No, you can’t, Cassy! It wouldn’t look good at all if you came here.’
‘Of course I wouldn’tstaywith you, Max: that would look a bit too “off with the old and on with the new”. (Or ‘off with the old, and on with the nearly as old’.) ‘Why shouldn’t a friend come to support you without anyone suspecting there’sanything between us? But I must see you and I ought to be with you at a time like this.’
‘No,’ he repeated with unflattering force. ‘You don’t understand at all, Cassy! There was a slight difficulty with the police over the accident. They didn’t think she was strong enough to get her chair out on to the sun deck like that, and then for it to go over the edge at the highest point, and they’vebeen very awkward about it.’
‘But of course it was an accident,’ I cried. ‘I mean – wasn’t it?’
‘Of course, and they fully accept that now. Rosemary had great strength in her arms, especially since Kyra’s been working with her, and, in any case, who would do such a thing on purpose to a helpless invalid?Iwas lecturing all that day, or with colleagues, of course,’ he added.
‘Yes, of course,’I echoed, thinking the alibi came a bit pat.
‘But now it’s turned out that the braking mechanism on her chair was faulty, so she probably wheeled up to the low parapet too fast, couldn’t stop, and was tipped over.’
‘Oh, I see,’ I said, relieved. Not that I’dreallythought Max would have had any hand in it, because he valued his venerable tanned and toned hide too much to do anything illegal.
‘So however much I’d like to see you, it’s better if you don’t come out just now. And there’s another thing, Cassy: Rosemary knew all about us.’
‘What do you mean? Of course she knew you were having a relationship with someone else, you had an understanding, didn’t you? You went off for weekends of “golf”, and she never asked any questions?’
‘She never asked me anything because she already knewthe answers: among her papers are reports on us she’d had done. The police found them, and it made things sticky for a while, until they accepted that it wasn’t possible for me to have been there when the accident happened. But it means that you must keep away.’
I felt suddenly like someone had lifted my rock and left my conscience exposed and squirming.
‘Max, that’s horrible! That she shouldcare enough – be jealous enough to find out about us. And you said when you told her you would never leave her, she more or less said she would turn a blind eye to … well tome.’
‘No, I could never leave her, she knew that,’ he said slowly.
‘Let me come out and be with you,’ I pleaded again, needing to see him face to face.
‘No, I’ve already said. Don’t you understand? Besides, I’m flying backwith – flying back for the funeral. I’ll come down and see you after that, before I return here to finish my year. We’ll talk then.’
‘But, Max, you do still—’
The phone went down with a click.
I don’t know what I did for the rest of that morning, except at some stage Pa phoned me again, with his usual message: ‘You’ll burn in hell, girl,’ he assured me with characteristic fervour and no preamble,although he did sound sober this time. I waited for him to put the phone down, but after asmall pause he sighed deeply and added: ‘And your sister with you!’
Thenhe put the phone down.
I stared at it like it might suddenly wake up and explain that I’d just had an auditory hallucination, and not to worry, but it stayed mum.
The telephone stirred like a snake under Keturah’s hand,the cordrippling and flexing—
What had they found out about Jane? That she only looked like an angel? Well, that took long enough. The evidence had been there before and they’d always managed to ignore it, just like all the other poor suckers.
Maybe they’d finally discovered what she got up to as a student in Oxford, which was far more thanIdid at my university, before Max began his siege of my heart– and the rest of me.
Whatever it was, I expected Jane would manage to explain it all away to their complete satisfaction, since she seemed to weave some hypnotic spell over the gullible so that they believed exactly what she wanted them to.
How many years of evolution will it take, before mankind realizes that the truth gene does not always go hand in hand with the ones for blond hair and blueeyes?
But something had clearly cast a blip in her relations with Ma and Pa, and I wondered if this was what had caused her to lay claim to the spare room? If so, by then I expected she had realized that staying with me (indeed, even admitting that we eversaweach other) would not help her cause with the parents.
At eight, the postman brought me a badly wrapped foreign package containing apair of pink Chinese silk slippers, but no message. They were exquisite but tiny, and I feared it was now too late to have my feet bound.
Not that I didn’t think I deserved the torture it would cause me, so perhaps I had better try it?
Certainly a punishment was overdue now the comforting bubble surrounding my long-standing affair had well and truly popped, exposing me to the cold blasts ofself-doubt and guilt, status quo rocked.
