‘How was the journey?’ he asked, saying the first thing that came into his head in order to break the awkward silence that had begun to build up between them since he sat down.
‘It was all right,’ she said nervously, putting out the half-finished cigarette that she’d been smoking when he came in. ‘I haven’t been to London for a long time. It’s bigger than I remembered — more people.’
David saw how she darted quick looks at the other couples sitting at the adjacent tables — the men in their drab prison uniforms, the women decked out in their Sunday best. He wondered whether his mother had ever been inside a prison before — he doubted very much that she had.
‘Well, thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I know it can’t have been easy.’
‘No, it wasn’t,’ she said, glancing up at him for a moment before she lowered her eyes again. ‘But it’s the right thing to do. I should have come before. I’m sorry.’
‘So you’re only here because it’s right, not because you wanted to come?’ asked David, suddenly irritated. He had his dignity too: he didn’t want to be an object of pity.
‘I’m here because I want to be here,’ she said quietly, holding his gaze this time. ‘I told you I’m sorry.’
‘All right, I’m sorry too,’ said David, mollified. ‘I’m glad you came. Did you tell Ben?’
‘Yes; I don’t tell lies. You should know that by now.’
David nodded. ‘So what did he say?’ he asked.
‘He was angry. Shouted and swore. But he calmed down when he saw that I’d made up my mind.’
‘He hates me. You know that?’
‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks.’
‘That’s not what you thought before though, was it?’ said David, unable to leave the past alone. ‘Why did you change your mind?’
‘Because I saw you, because you came home…’
‘And waved a gun at Ben, stole his car, terrorized Max…’
‘Max wanted me to come,’ she said. ‘He wants to know that you’re going to be all right, and I don’t know what to say.’
There were tears in David’s mother’s eyes, and they tore at David inside his chest. He held on to the table hard, resisting an impulsive longing to get up and run back to his cell and shut his mother and his family out of his mind forever, because he had no words of comfort to give them, and he didn’t want to think about the future or his lack of one.
‘Max is a good kid,’ he said, trying hard to keep his voice steady. ‘He’s a credit to you, Mother.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘You know I’m not,’ said David, bowing his head. ‘But for what it’s worth, I didn’t do what they say I did. Like I told you before, I only took that gun with me to protect myself. Fat lot of good it did me,’ he added bitterly.
‘That’s what the policeman said,’ she said, nodding. ‘He said you didn’t commit either of those murders.’
‘What policeman?’
‘Inspector Trave: the one who was in charge of your case and then got taken off it when he didn’t think you were guilty.’
‘The one who got me caught, you mean. If I hadn’t gone to meet him in that bloody cricket pavilion I wouldn’t be here,’ said David angrily.
‘They’d have found you in the end. You know they would. And it wasn’t that inspector’s fault. He didn’t know they were following him when he went to St Luke’s: he told me that. They’ve suspended him from duty for what he did. He’s probably going to lose his job.’
‘Well, at least he’s not going to lose his life,’ said David furiously, and then immediately regretted his words as he saw his mother blanch and grip on to the table for support.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, reaching out and touching her clenched hand for a moment. ‘It’s going to be all right. I’m innocent, remember,’ he added with a thin smile, trying to provide his mother with a reassurance that he didn’t believe in himself. She nodded wanly in response, struggling to regain her composure.
‘When did you talk to Trave?’ David asked, changing the subject.
‘A few days ago. He came to the house when Ben was out at work. He said he couldn’t come and visit you because prosecution witnesses can’t talk to a defendant but that he was going to do everything he could to help you. He wanted me to tell you that. He said he believed in you and told me that I should too.’
‘Oh, so that’s why you changed your mind,’ said David with a knowing smile.
‘No, it wasn’t just that. It was seeing you too. I already said I was sorry about not coming before.’
‘I know, I know,’ said David, holding up his hand. ‘I’m glad about Trave. Perhaps he’ll find something out.’
But David wasn’t holding his breath. Tomorrow his trial would begin. In two weeks or even less he would know his fate, and he couldn’t see any jury acquitting him on the evidence as it stood. In less than two months he could be dead.
‘I brought you clothes for your trial — a suit and two clean shirts,’ said David’s mother. ‘They said they’d give them to you in the morning.’
‘Thank you,’ said David, biting his lip. He remembered his mother ironing his school uniform before the start of term at St Luke’s, and now she was buying him clothes for his trial at the Old Bailey. It was too much, too painful. He was grateful to his mother for coming, but now he wanted her gone so he could escape back to the impersonal safety of his cell. He shuddered with relief when the horn sounded for the end of visits and hoped that his mother hadn’t read his mind.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, standing up. ‘Thank you for coming. Safe journey home.’
She looked at him hard as he spoke his inadequate words and then silently leant forward and took hold of both sides of his head with her hands and, reaching up, kissed him once on the centre of his forehead.
‘I made you,’ she said. ‘They’ve got no right to take you away.’
And then, without another word, she turned and walked away down the hall. He watched her until she disappeared from view, but she didn’t once look back.
Toomes was still at court when David got back to the cell. He lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes. His mother’s visit had unsettled him, and images from the past came floating unbidden into his mind. He tried to drive them out but one remained. It was a winter afternoon nine years earlier, and he was standing by his father’s open grave in a far corner of Wolvercote Cemetery. His mother was beside him wearing that same grey dress that she’d been wearing for her visit. It was cold, and a slow, heavy rain had begun to fall out of a grey, overcast sky. David was getting wet but he hardly noticed. Instead his eyes were fixed on the light brown coffin in the hole below his feet, on which the raindrops were falling one after the other — tap, tap, tapping out a steady staccato beat. Each one that fell exploded on impact, adding to the pool of water already spreading on the lid of the casket. David knew that his father was underneath that lid, dressed in a thin black suit, the same colour as David’s own, and he wondered if his father was getting wet too, if he was feeling the cold.
There was a small brass plaque screwed into the centre of the coffin bearing the legend john david swain 1900–1952. John David Swain, father of David Swain, lying in a box in a hole in the ground with the rain coming down, while his relatives looked down on him from above. This is it, David had thought at that moment. This was the truth — not shops and cinemas and cafes, not fleeting sensations of love or happiness, but this — rain falling on a box. Everything else was nothing more than a pretence, worse than a lie.
He’d stood there beside the grave after the funeral was over and the mourners had drifted away, until in the end there had just been him and his mother standing there side by side in the rain. Finally she’d taken his hand and tried to pull him away, but he’d silently resisted, staying where he was, until eventually she’d given up and walked round the mound of earth at the bottom of the grave and away down the path toward the car. And he’d stayed there alone with his dead father in the gathering gloom until he could hardly see the coffin any more and one of the sallow-faced undertakers had had to lead him away.
CHAPTER 19
Trave sat bent over the kitchen table with his head in his hands and ignored the telephone, which was ringing again for the third time in ten minutes. He felt like throwing it at the wall — he needed some outlet for the anger
