‘Don't underestimate him, B. If he gets riled enough, no telling what he might do.’
Monday
Got up at dawn, rode for two hours, then changed and drove to session. R very sweet, subdued, mellow, all the hard edges between us gone. Told him I'm starting to miss our battles.
‘That's because you think sweetness is boring,’ he said. ‘You think you need turmoil to feel alive. Your mother taught you that by her strictness and rectitude.’
‘She had no rectitude. She was a fake. She had all kinds of affairs, kinky sex, too.’
‘Do you know for a fact she had kinky sex?’
I shook my head.
‘But you sensed she did?’
‘I felt it in my bones,’ I told him.
Later – with T. He kissed me over and over, told me how much I meant to him and that if anything ever came between us he didn't know what he'd do.
‘You'd go on with your life like everybody else,’ I told him.
‘But nothing will come between us, will it?’
I told him about W and how he's threatened to feed stuff to A about our seeing one another. I told him people know, that maybe it's my fault, I haven't been careful enough, my car's too flashy, whatever, but my point was the story's been making the rounds and that isn't good for either of us.
‘We can change where we meet. This place is getting stale anyway.’
‘Changing motels won't' help if A has people following me.’
T lay back on the bed. ‘If this ever comes out, I'll be fired for sure.’
‘Don't worry about that.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘Why do you speak to me like that, T?’
‘I have so very much to lose,’ he said.
‘And I don't? Losing my boys is trivial, is that what you think?’
He started to cry, said he was sorry, begged me to forgive him. I hugged him, told him that of course I forgive him, but that with the boys coming back next weekend we're going to have to cool it down this fall. I could feel him wince when I said that, his whole body contract. He knows, poor boy, and now I wonder where I'm going to find the strength to tell him straight.
When we parted, I told him I'd call him late tonight and let him know how everything went with the Steadmans.
He shrugged. ‘We'll meet here Wednesday, usual time?’ he asked meekly.
Saw tears again in his eyes when he left.
Tuesday
J called in the middle of the night. ‘It's done,’ he said. ‘Burned to the ground.’
‘What about the people?’
‘Forget them. They don't exist.’
‘What are you telling me?’
‘Don't think about it, Barb. Just look ahead.’
‘You didn't find out anything?’
‘I didn't say that.’
‘Why are you being so cryptic?’
‘It's over, Barb. You're going to have to face the fact that it's all done now for good.’
I couldn't get back to sleep. Phoned T, told him what J said. He said he didn't understand. Told him I didn't either, but that I'll find out and let him know.’
Later – early morning, dreamt I was riding through a misty valley. Very bucolic until I noticed another horseman in the distance through the mist. He looked familiar, so I rode up from behind to see who he was. God, it was Goertner! ‘Oh, hello, how are you?’ he asked. Told him I was fine. ‘And your mother – how is she?’ ‘You fucked her, didn't you, Goertner?’ I demanded, furious. ‘Oh, yes,’ he answered grinning. ‘And a mighty sweet fuck she was!’
I kicked my heels into my horse, galloped away, but no matter how far and fast I sped from him, I could hear his laughter ringing through the valley.
What a dream!
Wednesday
Called J, insisted on seeing him, told him I needed to know everything, I want the whole truth even if it's bad. He said come out to the club tomorrow night and he'll tell me.
‘So is it bad news?’
‘It's the truth,’ he said.
‘Whose truth are we talking about?’
‘It's time for both of us to face some facts,’ he said.
‘What kind of facts?’
‘Facts about your problems, facts about mine, and a few facts about the two of us as well.’
Jesus!
Later – told R about my dream, reminded him that Goertner was my old riding instructor, the one I slapped, the first man to go down on me.
R excited. ‘I'm sure it's a variation on the broken horses dream. What we've got to do now is put the dreams together. I think one is the key to the other, but I don't know which one is the key and which is the lock.’
Whatever that means!
Later – bad feeling as I swam laps, then dressed to go over to the F. Have made up my mind today's the day to tell T we have to end it. Feeling anxious as I'm not expecting a particularly lovely afternoon.
And so it ends.
Within an hour of her writing that final line, she and Tom Jessup will both be dead.
So many things amaze me. Most of all, I think, is the mellowness of these last passages, the feeling that she has started to settle things, put there chaotic life in order. She has straightened out her relationship with Dad, is planning to break off her affair with Tom, is prepared to go to war over custody with Andrew, and seems to have decided that she and Jack, the ‘society bitch and the hood,’ properly belong together after all.
As to going to war with Waldo, there's no clear indication what her final decision would have been, but with the crucial custody case coming up, it's hard to imagine that a fight with him would have done her any good. Also it's clear he lied to the police when he feigned shock that she'd been carrying on her affair with Tom Jessup for months.
One other thing stands out: that Cody definitely engineered the fire and other vicious events that took place Monday night on Thistle Ridge, and that Barbara and Tom, the latter perhaps unknowingly, were to some degree party to that as well. ‘Burned to the ground,’ ‘they don't exist,’ ‘it's all done now for good’ – I interpret all that to meant that whatever specific information Cody may have extracted from the Steadmans, he learned for sure that Belle Fulraine was dead and would have told Barbara the following evening had she not been killed.
Closing Barbara's diary, I feel it has put me in close touch with this extraordinary, complex woman, that I now know things about her that even Dad could not have known. Seeing her through her own eyes as portrayed on these pages, I'm able not only to discern her unattractive qualities – selfishness, manipulativeness, and narcissism – but also the decency, integrity, and brave spirit that so often subsumed them. And what I find most poignant, and which belies any suggestion that these pages were intended for anyone's eyes but her own, is her troubled, tortuous, and admirable struggle to know herself.
In the end, it seems to me, that's her vindication.
16
With the diary comes relief: Dad was not the killer and maybe Waldo was. But as relieved as I am, I'm still
