He shook his head. ‘I had a paternity test done. I wanted to know how tough the battle was going to be.’ He looked at me again quite fiercely, and for a moment I rather sympathised with Joanna when I saw what she’d taken on. I suppose nobody can be as successful as Kieran had been without having some steel in them somewhere. ‘When the results came back they showed Malcolm was mine after all.’
All my sense of matters being resolved deserted me on the instant. ‘How did she take it?’
‘How do you think?’ He rolled his eyes at me. ‘She wasn’t thinking straight by then. She said she didn’t believe me. It was exactly the kind of thing I would fix, blah, blah, blah. You can imagine.’ I could. ‘So we ran another test under her team’s supervision and obviously the result was the same again, and by then she was coming apart at the seams…’ He was standing, staring out of one of the windows, silhouetted against a dark-blue velvet sky studded with stars. He continued talking, facing on to the night, hardly aware I was there. ‘As you might expect, she hadn’t helped her case as a rational woman with all this screaming carry-on, so it wasn’t a huge surprise when the judge gave me full custody, with visiting rights for her, which was much more than I’d asked for. We got the decision in September eighty-five.’
‘And the following month she killed herself.’
‘She killed herself, or she took an accidental overdose. Anyway,’ he sighed, wearily, his remembered rage quite gone, ‘she was dead. That’s how it finished for Joanna. And it was all so unnecessary. Malcolm was fourteen by then. I couldn’t have controlled his seeing her even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, for more than a year or two at the most.’
Some decisions are so difficult to unravel; decisions made by countries and decisions of private individuals can be impossible to explain. Why did Napoleon invade Russia? Why didn’t Charles I make peace when it was offered? And why did Joanna Langley run away and marry this man when he was an anxious and desperate grotesque, but leave him when he was at the beginning of his triumphs? Why did she try to pull their boy in half when he was old enough to make up his own mind about both his parents and their warring philosophies? Why did she spiral into death-dealing depression when she really had nothing to fear?
‘I don’t understand why we never heard about it. Why isn’t it on the Internet?’
‘Mainly because I have spent an enormous amount of time and money making sure that no one hears about it. I kept the reporting to a minimum at the time, I will not tell you how, and I have one man who spends his working life combing the Web to get rid of any stories that I dislike, including even a whisper of Joanna.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I owe it to her. I ruined her life. I won’t let her be a tabloid item in death.’
I ruined her life. I was so struck by the unvarnished, stark, merciless guilt in this. He allowed himself no defence at all. ‘How sad,’ I said. And I meant it with all my heart. I was truly sad. Sad at the ruin that, in a few short minutes, I’d heard engulf the whole House of Langley. In my sorrowing mind, rich, nice Alfred and his scratchy, ambitious Valerie had been suddenly pulled from their golden pedestal, where they had been secure in my imaginings until now and dashed down, like Don Giovanni, back to the place below, from whence they came. While Joanna, my lifelong standard for how lovely a woman can be, lay desecrated and dead, her scabrous wrist pitted with needle marks, her dirty, tangled hair spread out on a urine-stained, concrete floor somewhere in the Midlands. ‘How very sad.’
I looked at my watch. It was time to leave. I understood now that Kieran had embraced the chance to talk about the wife who had left him against his will, but who would never leave his head. He had simply wanted to talk about her with someone who’d known her and those opportunities must be getting rare, even for him. He noticed me checking the time. ‘I’d like to show you something before you go,’ he said, and leaving the magnificent Chamber of Privilege he led me down the passage, past half-open doors revealing delectable rooms for eating and reading and other delights, until we came to the last door in the row. He opened it and ushered me into what was postulated as a study of some sort, with a desk and a comfortable chair. I could sense that Kieran probably did his actual work in it, as opposed to leafing through papers with a scribbling secretary in the glamorous library along the passage. Certainly he spent a lot of time here, as much as he could I would say, but the reason was not because it was quiet or tidy. In fact, its role as a writing room was not its moral purpose. This was a shrine. All four walls were covered with framed photographs, one consisting entirely of pictures of Joanna, Joanna as I remembered her, young and definitively gorgeous; then Joanna a little older and a little older still, but never Joanna old. Joanna at thirty, looking more harassed and careworn and lined than she should have done; Joanna at thirty-three, pictured leaving the law courts during the divorce, a candid picture of her unhappiness, so generously taken by the snapper of some evening rag but presumably unprinted; Joanna at thirty-five, sitting with her son, laughing. Kieran was looking with me. ‘That was taken by a friend of hers. Malcolm was there for lunch or something and this friend took it. It was the last picture of them together. It’s the last picture of her. She had less than a week to go. You couldn’t have told.’
‘No, indeed.’ I stared at the smiling mouth and the tired eyes. I found myself hoping it had been a really happy day, that last outing with her beloved child. I glanced around for newspaper pictures of the story. Even after all he’d said, I was surprised there weren’t any. ‘And there was no coverage at all? I still don’t understand how you kept it out of the papers completely. Even the local ones?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘There were a few squibs, but not much.’
‘I couldn’t find anything on Google. There was really nothing about her at all, once you’d separated.’
Kieran knew why. ‘She used my real name after the divorce. That was the name on everything in her bag when they found her. I managed to stop them making the connection.’ He hesitated. ‘You can read the coverage if you punch in Joanna Futtock.’
‘Futtock?’ I was so glad to know that I could still find something funny.
He looked rather sheepish. ‘Why do you think I never gave up “de Yong”?’
‘I did wonder. What was your mother’s maiden name?’
‘Cock.’ He gave a despairing sigh. ‘I ask you.’
‘Some people have all the luck,’ I said. Then we both did laugh.
I’d started to look round the other walls of this little star chamber. There were pictures of Joanna with Kieran, a young Kieran with his awful blond mop and an apparently endless supply of the ugliest clothes in the world. Then grown-up Kieran; Kieran successful; Kieran shaking hands with presidents and kings; even Kieran in better and better suits. And alongside Kieran, everywhere you looked, there were more and more pictures of the boy. Malcolm in the school photograph from pre-prep; Malcolm swimming; Malcolm on a bicycle; Malcolm on a horse; Malcolm the public schoolboy, with both parents, one on either side of the sulking child, resisting his role at some Speech Day celebration. Malcolm skiing; Malcolm at university; Malcolm graduating with a very serious face; Malcolm
