Falling Off Air Page 10

  “Look, Suze, I'd rather know now. Don't beat yourself up over it.”

  “I just wish I could have you working with me.” Suzette was disarmingly sweet about it. Indeed I was surprised how upset she seemed, on the edge of tears. “You keep me sane, Robbie.”

  It was a sad phone call, but it seemed to confirm our friendship in some strange way, and when it was over I felt resigned. One door closed, another was creaking ominously open. It was already ten, but if I didn't do it now I would chicken out. I called Maeve. I tried home, but she wasn't there, so I tried her mobile. It turned out she was still in the office. I told her I'd take her job.

  “That's really great news, Robin,” she told me. “You're not going to regret it.”

  I knew I would.

  We settled on Wednesday as a first day at work, which gave me exactly a day to sort out child care. Maybe in time I could wangle a place in the Corporation nursery, but for the moment it would have to be the redoubtable—not to mention expensive—Erica.

  “There's just one thing,” Maeve was still talking. “This thing with Adam Wills, it's not going to happen again is it? I mean frankly it's already an embarrassment.”

  “No, Maeve,” I said, my heart heavy, “it's not going to happen again.”

  Chapter 10

  SO how did he ask you for money?” The next day I still couldn't get my father out of my head, and I was questioning Tanya closely.

  She looked at me over the rim of her coffee cup. At her elbow was a home improvement magazine and it was open at a double-page picture of a model kitchen, everything about it glossy and bright, a pot of tulips on the polished marble, a puppy capering in the sunlight on the Italian-tiled floor. I knew Tanya fantasized about a kitchen like that, and I knew she couldn't afford it.

  I sipped my coffee. It was the first time I'd had instant coffee at Tanya's house. This was serious belt-tightening. Today the children had been offered generic economy digestives in a plain white wrapper.

  “You think I made it up?” she asked.

  The three girls were at school. Patrick was doing the washing up and making sure that my two were happy while I talked to Tanya. He had given them saucepans to bash with wooden spoons and a bowl of water with soapsuds to whisk, and they were making a noisy and delighted mess on the linoleum floor.

  “Well, did he look hard up?”

  “Appearances are deceptive, my dear,” she said wryly, holding out her polished nails for my inspection. “I had a manicure, but it doesn't mean I paid for it. It just means Patrick's pretty handy with the nail file.”

  At which Patrick turned and took a bow.

  Tanya rolled her eyes and I smiled thinly at him. I knew he could feel the tension between Tanya and myself as we discussed our father, and I knew he was trying to break it.

  “He looked clean and tidy, if that's what you mean,” Tanya said. “He was wearing a raincoat.”

  “Did you recognize him?”

  “I did once he'd said who he was. He looked like that photo, the one in the drawer, you know the one I mean? He was older and grayer, but it was him I'm sure. Same face.”

  The photograph. The only surviving photograph of my father. God knows what my mother had done with the rest—burned them probably. This one had been of our father lolling on the beach and grinning into the camera, with the three of us clambering all over him. He looked tall and gawky, with a clear bright smile and oiled hair. It had been kept in a drawer in my mother's bedroom, and was only brought out when my mother deemed it necessary. “Necessary” usually meant that a school friend had been teasing one or other of us about not having a father. The photograph would be produced as proof to quash the friend's scurrilous allegations. Sometimes I invented a playground feud just so I could see it.

  Tanya was two years old when our father left, hardly more than a baby. You might have thought they would have done some bonding by that point, but there wasn't a trace of it left now. Over the years we'd had variations on this argument a million times. Was the mysterious Gilbert Ballantyne really a crook, or was that just an invention of our mother? Was he dead? If not where was he? And, most important, what would we do if he came looking for us?

  Tanya was the most fiercely protective of Ma. She had also had the toughest time at school and had hated not having a father. Her position never wavered. She would have nothing to do with him. I had always been more ambivalent. Lorna, I realized now, had consistently been uncharacteristically silent on the matter.

  “The thing about money …” Tanya was thinking hard. “It wasn't the first thing he said. He said … I mean I said I didn't … then … Sorry. You need the context … I open the door, this man is there. He doesn't look like a tramp. Still, I'm on my guard, you know, he shows up unannounced, I haven't a clue who he is, he could have been anyone. People are always getting robbed in broad daylight in this street. He says, ‘Hello, you don't remember me but I'm Gilbert, your father.’ I say, ‘Why are you here?’ He says, ‘I just want to see you, I've never forgotten you, I want to make contact.’ I say, ‘Well you've made contact, you've seen me, good-bye for another thirty years.’ He says he doesn't want to go. But by this point he thinks I'm about to close the door in his face, and he starts to talk in a panicky sort of a way about how we're family, we should stick together, and I suppose when he gets panicky, I panic too. I don't want him to come inside, I don't want him to see the children, and I end up almost shouting at him, asking what he wants, anything to make him go away, and at last he says something like, ‘I want help.’ And I say, ‘You want money from me?’ I mean I'm amazed at the effrontery, and he just stands there silently for a minute and then he has this strange look in his eyes, really hard, and he says, ‘Will you give me money? To make me go away?’ And I slam the door in his face,” she made a gesture with her hands, “and that was it. I looked out the window a few minutes later, and he was gone.”

  It was pretty unambiguous. I rubbed my hands over my face, then reached down to William who was crying and clinging at my knee, and hauled him onto my lap. He was still clutching the wooden spoon, and he bashed me on the chin with it. I removed it from his grasp, and he yelled and wriggled to get off my lap and onto the floor again. I set him down and he grabbed another weapon and set about my ankles.

  “The whole thing's left me with a horrible taste in my mouth,” Tanya said. “I'd have felt more kindly disposed to him if I'd never seen him again. It would be better if he'd died.”

  “Tanya,” Patrick scolded. Tanya had worked hard to find a man like Patrick. He was solid, he was kind, and he would never leave her. Sometimes I found his goodwill to all mankind hard to take, but mostly I was just glad for Tanya that she had him.

  “Well it would,” she insisted.

  I didn't join in the argument. I didn't want to believe in this down-and-out father.

  “Tanya, could he possibly have said ‘I want to help,’” I put the stress on the third word, “not ‘I want help’?”

  She looked at me as though I were mad.

  “How could he possibly help me?”

  “That's not the point. What I mean is could he have meant that? Could you have misheard?”

  “No.” Tanya screwed up her face, convincing herself. “And anyway, he asked for money. You think I misheard that too?”

  I threw up my hands.

  “I don't know what to think,” I said to Tanya. I got up to pour myself more coffee.

  I hadn't intended telling Tanya and Patrick that Adam was coming to see me that night. I had assumed that Tanya would disapprove of any contact with Adam, just as she disapproved of contact with our father, and I didn't think I could face another prefight analysis. But too many secrets can be a burden and so I changed my mind and told them. It came as a relief to me that Tanya was not immediately horrified. Indeed she hardly seemed surprised.

  “We all need all the help we can get.” She shrugged. “And Adam's a good man in some ways. He's funny, he's sweet, he's got a good job. He screw
ed up as a lover, but you've both had time to cool off.”

  “He'll fall in love with the kids,” Patrick said. “Although I keep asking Tanya why on earth we had three of the blighters. Just don't have another.”

  “There's no danger of that,” I said.

  Talking to them had been a comfort, as though I'd heard the voices of reason. I felt as though this was a day of touching base, drawing nourishment from my roots, building up my strength for the confrontation to come. I was under no illusion that my meeting with Adam would be easy, because there were no obvious solutions to our situation, no clear objectives. My parting with Adam had been raw with emotion and as rapid as it could be. Jane had asked me a few months afterward whether I felt we'd achieved closure, and I hadn't even been able to grasp what she meant, let alone say yes. How could there be any sort of closure with the twins a giggling, squirming memorial to what had been? Every time I looked at the children I saw Adam. But if there was to be no closure, then I was left with the same old problem, which was how to coexist with him.

  When I left Tanya's house I dropped the car off for its inspection at her local garage, then unloaded the children, put them in the double stroller, and walked from the garage to my mother's house. A watery sun was in the sky and the exercise helped to keep my anxiety about the evening ahead at bay. What's more the movement lulled both the children to sleep, so that when I arrived I had the rare luxury of parking them in the hallway and settling down to a cup of tea and the newspapers at the kitchen table. As long as I can remember, which means since the departure of my father, my mother has never felt the need for her house to be a show home. Her idea of interior design is sheer self-indulgence. Food sits in cupboards and in the fridge until it is capable of speech and can ask to be put out of its misery. Mounds of books and magazines cover every surface. If she sees something she likes, whether it is an essay on international relations or a cartoon or a photograph, she sticks it in a clip frame and puts it on the wall. Her house is like a giant scrapbook.

  “Did you see this?” My mother had folded the diary section of the Guardian and marked a small item with a cross. I read:

  After a series of scandals about editorial standards in daytime talk shows and months of spirited resistance, the Corporation has finally given in to government pressure and appointed its first Ethics Czar, former award-winning television producer, Robin Ballantyne. Industry insiders say the appointment is tantamount to an admission by the Corporation that it has a problem. But Maeve Tandy, head of television, last night told this diarist that it was “a simple restatement of our commitment to high-quality programming. I would be very surprised if Robin Ballantyne finds that we are not fulfilling our editorial standards.” Robin Ballantyne has kept a low profile for the past year, and is believed to be taking up her high-visibility position at a time of personal strain.

  My heart sank. I hadn't expected Maeve to be so quick off the mark, but I imagined she wanted to get the newspapers off her back. I knew it was only propaganda, but still, the tiny article sounded like a death knell for my career.

  “A girl's got to do what a girl's got to do,” I told my mother, handing the article back to her, and turning to the other papers to see what was happening in the Carmichael case.

  I'd noticed that the mourners making a pilgrimage to the house had thinned to almost nothing, and the newspapers, like Finney, seemed to have few new leads to go on. Jane's suggestion that Richard Carmichael must be a suspect had come to nothing. The initial debate about what would become of the Carmichaelite charities had been largely settled by Paula Carmichael's deputy, a woman called Rachel Colby, who had made a public statement saying that their work would continue and expand. Already, she said, sadness over Paula's death had galvanized more people to become involved in the work she had pioneered. However, the news coverage had discovered a new lease on life because Carmichael's funeral was taking place that afternoon.

  “Why didn't anyone tell me?” I looked up from the newspaper in alarm.

  “What do you mean?” said my mother from the stove, where she was boiling tortellini for lunch and heating a ready-made carbonara sauce.

  “This woman watched me out of her window, she wrote about me in her diaries, and then I watched her die. I can't not go to her funeral,” I said with a wail. “Why didn't Finney tell me?”

  “Isn't it in Birmingham?” my mother said. “That's where she was from.”

  “Well, Birmingham's hardly the end of the earth,” I grumbled. “I could have got on a train.”

  I went back to reading. There were endless column inches filled with who would attend and who would not. In particular there was the question of whether the prime minister would be there. The commentators suggested that he could make political capital out of going. Soon I realized that my mother was wrong. The funeral was to take place in London. Paula Carmichael had been Roman Catholic, at least in name, and her funeral was to take place at a local church right there in south London.

  “Ma?” I took a deep breath. “Would you mind taking the children for a couple of hours?”

  Chapter 11

  I arrived with fifteen minutes to spare, but the overflow from the church was spilling onto the street, and there was a move under way to set up speakers outside so that the funeral service could be heard there. I dug out my Corporation pass and convinced the man at the door that I belonged to a television crew.

  “All right, love, but don't make a racket,” he whispered, as he pushed open the heavy door for me. Inside, the organ was playing Bach, and there was the softest rustle of low conversation from the congregation. The pews were full, and extra benches and chairs had been brought in at the back of the church. I spied a small empty space in a pew near the front and walked quietly along the side aisle until I reached it, glad that I had taken time before I rushed out of my mother's house to borrow a black skirt and jacket. Luckily we were about the same size, my mother and I, but she wasn't as tall, and I was uncomfortably aware that the skirt was shorter than was ideal for a funeral.

  In the side chapels hundreds of candles had been lit under representations of the Madonna in paint and stone. I reached the pew and only then did I see that the space I had identified was smaller than I had expected and it was next to Detective Chief Inspector Finney in a black suit and tie. I hesitated and he glanced up at me, his eyebrows raised in recognition. I gestured weakly at the space and he and his neighbor moved along a few inches to make more room. It was still a tight squeeze, my hips pressed against the end of the pew on one side and against Finney on the other. I could feel the warmth of him through the layers of fabric that were between us. My skirt rode up over my thighs. I tugged it down, but to little effect.

  Beside me I felt Finney tense and I looked up. Richard Carmichael had arrived, and was walking down the central aisle with his stepsons trailing behind. All wore black, even the youngest was in a black polo neck sweater and blazer over black jeans. Carmichael himself looked grim, his mouth tight, jaw muscle working. He was holding hands with the elder son, who nevertheless did not walk at his father's side but a step behind. Carmichael nodded in acknowledgment at the murmurs of condolence that followed his progress.

  I did not see his elder son's face, but the younger one had clearly been crying. His eyes were red, his face puffy, and his hands were clenched into fists at his side as though he was holding on for dear life. His ear was multiply pierced and the row of silver rings caught the light that trickled down from the small circular windows in the dome above us. The Carmichaels were ushered into a reserved pew at the front of the church next to an elderly woman who I assumed was Paula Carmichael's mother. I saw that the prime minister had made a low-profile entrance and was being guided in from a side door to take his place just behind the family.

  I spotted other familiar faces and realized that Finney had positioned himself carefully, not for a view of the pulpit, which was partly obscured, but for a view of the congregation. I saw Suzette and Adam a row apart on th
e other side of the church. I had expected Adam to be there and felt at peace with his presence. We would go to battle later. We exchanged smiles. Many of the pews were filled not with politicians or media, or even with family, but with the Carmichaelites themselves. They were mostly women, but that was the only generalization one could make about the gathering. In other ways—race, status, wealth—my impression was that all the world was there. Two pews had been removed to make space for a row of wheelchairs. Without exception everyone looked grim, as though they would never smile again.

  The organ ceased and the silence took on the quality of expectation. Paula Carmichael's coffin seemed very distant, on a trestle to the left of the altar, and piled high with wreaths. I thought of her body, all broken, her hair soaked around her head.

  The priest, Father Joe Riberra, was a young American with spectacles and a goatee, who spoke as though he was at the dinner table, quietly and conversationally. He talked as though he had known Paula Carmichael well, and at points his voice was so low that I could only just make out what he was saying. The congregation was silent, straining to hear every word.

  He told us that the only possible response to Paula Carmichael's death was grief, but that we were also there to celebrate the life of a woman who had given birth to a great movement for social regeneration. He described Paula's life. She was not, he said, born to a privileged family. Her father was a trade unionist, her mother a teacher. It was from them that she had learned of the importance of principle and social activism. He had visited Paula's home and seen that her bookshelves were full of the biographies of those who had tried to change the world.

  “Paula wasn't terribly good at modesty. I'd have said she wanted her own biography up there next to the great men of history, and I'd say she may yet get it, that she probably should. But towards the end, she wasn't happy. Things changed, none of us really knows why. She told me she didn't want to be remembered. Well, I hate to contradict her even in death, but we're here because she made an impact on our lives.