We were both still falling when the world blew apart.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I lay short of the playroom door trying to breathe. My lungs felt collapsed. My head rang from the appalling noise, and the smell of the explosive remained as a taste as if my mouth were full of it. Malcolm, on his stomach a few feet away, was unconscious. The air was thick with dust and seemed to be still reverberating, though it was probably my concussion. I felt pulped. I felt utterly without strength. I felt very lucky indeed.
The house around us was still standing. We weren't under tons of new rubble. The tough old load-bearing walls that had survived the first bomb had survived the second – which hadn't anyway been the size of a suitcase.
My chest gave a heave, and breath came back. I moved, struggled to get up, tried things out. I felt bruised and unwell, but there were no broken bones; no blood. I rolled to my knees and went on them to Malcolm. He was alive, he was breathing, he was not bleeding from ears or nose: at that moment, it was enough.
I got slowly, weakly, to my feet, and walked shakily into the wide centre space. I could wish to shut my eyes, but one couldn't blot it out. One had to live through terrible things if they came one's way. At the point where the bomb had exploded, the black floor covering had been ripped right away, and the rest was doubled over and convoluted in large torn pieces. Serena – the things that had been Serena – lay among and half under the black folds of plastic: things in emerald and frilly white clothes, pale blue leg-warmers, dark blue tights; torn edges of flesh, scarlet splashes… a scarlet pool. I went round covering the parts of her completely with the black folds, hiding the harrowing truth from anyone coming there unprepared. I felt ill. I felt as if my head were full of air. I was trembling uncontrollably. I thought of people who dealt often with such horrors and wondered if they ever got hardened.
Malcolm groaned in the passage. I went back to him fast. He was trying to sit up, to push himself off the floor. There was a large area already beginning to swell on his forehead, and I wondered if he'd simply been knocked out through hitting the wood floor at high speed.
'God,' he said in anguish. 'Serena… oh dear God!'
I helped him to his groggy feet and took him out into the garden through the side-door, and round past the office to the front of the house. I eased him into the passenger seat of Serena's car. Malcolm put his head in his hands and wept for his daughter. I stood with my arms on top of the car and my head on those, and felt wretched and sick and unutterably old.
I'd hardly begun to wonder what to do next when a police car came into the drive and rolled slowly, as if tentatively, towards US.
The policeman I'd looked through the windows with stopped the car and stepped out. He looked young, years younger than I was.
'Someone in the village reported another explosion…' He looked from us to the house questioningly.
'Don't go in there,' I said. 'Get word to the superintendent. Another bomb has gone off here, and this time someone's been killed.'
Dreadful days followed, full of questions, formalities, explanations, regrets. Malcolm and I went back to the Ritz where he grieved for the lost child who had tried hard to kill him.
'But you said… she didn't care about my money. Why… why did she do it all?'
'She wanted…' I said, 'to put it at its simplest, I think she wanted to live at Quantum with you. That's what she's longed for since she was six, when Alicia took her away. She might perhaps have grown up sweet and normal if the courts had given you custody, but courts favour mothers, of course. She wanted to have back what had been wrenched away from her. I saw her cry about it, not long ago. It was still sharp and real to her. She wanted to be your little girl again. She refused to grow up. She dressed very often like a child.'
He was listening with stretched eyes, as if seeing familiar country haunted by devils.
'Alicia was no help to her,' I said. 'She filled her with stories of how you'd rejected he rand she actively discouraged her from maturing, because of her own little-girl act.'
'Poor Serena.' He looked tormented. 'She didn't have much luck.'
'No, she didn't.'
'But Moira…?' he said.
'I think Serena made herself believe that if she got rid of Moira, you would go back to Quantum and she would live there with you and look after you, and her dream would come true.'
'It doesn't make sense…'
'Murder has nothing to do with sense. It has to do with obsession. With compulsion, irresistible impulse, morbid drive. An act beyond reason.'
He shook his head helplessly.
'It's impossible to know,' I said, 'whether she intended to kill Moira on that day. I wish we could know, but we can't… she can't have meant to kill her the way she did, because no one could know there'd be a slit-open nearly- full sack of potting compost waiting there, handy. If she meant to kill Moira that day, she'd have taken some sort of weapon. I've been wondering, you know, if she meant to hit her over the head and put her in the car, the way she did you.'
'God…'
'Anyway, after Moira was out of the way, Serena offered to live with you at Quantum and look after you, but you wouldn't have it.'
'But it wouldn't have worked, you know. I didn't even consider it seriously. It was nice of her, I thought, but I didn't want her, it's true.'
'And I expect you made it clear in a fairly testy way?'
He thought about it. 'I suppose in the end I did. She kept on about it, you see. Asked me several times. Came to Quantum to beg me. I got tired of it and said no pretty definitely. I told her not to keep bothering me.' He looked shattered. 'She began to hate me then, do you think?'
I nodded unhappily. 'I'd think so. I think she finally believed she would never have what she craved for. You could have given it to he rand you wouldn't. The rejection was ultimate. Absolute. Extreme. She believed it, as she'd never really believed it before. She told me she'd given you a chance, but you'd turned her down.'
He put a hand over his eyes.
'So she set out to kill you, and finally to kill the house as well… to destroy what she couldn't have.'
I still wondered, as I'd wondered in New York, whether it was because I, Ian, had gone back to live at Quantum with Malcolm that she'd come to that great violent protest. I had too often had what she'd yearned for. The bomb had been meant as much for me as for Malcolm, I thought.
'Do you remember that morning when she found we weren't dead?' I asked. 'She practically fainted. Everyone supposed it was from relief, but I'll bet it wasn't. She'd tried three times to kill you and it must have seemed intolerable to her that you were still alive.'
'She must have been… well… insane.'
Obsessed… insane. Sometimes there wasn't much difference.
Malcolm had given up champagne and gone back to scotch. The constant bubbles, I saw, had been a sort of gesture, two fingers held up defiantly in the face of dang era gallant crutch against fear. He poured a new drink of the old stuff and stood by the window looking over Green Park.
'You knew it was Serena… who would come.'
'If anyone did.'
'How did you know?'
'I saw everyone, as you know. I saw what's wrong with their lives. Saw their desperations. Donald and Helen are desperate for money, but they were coping the best way they could. Bravely, really, pawning her jewellery. They thought you might help them with guaranteeing a loan, if they could find you. That's a long way from wanting to kill you.'
Malcolm nodded and drank, and watched life proceeding outside.
'Lucy,' I said, 'may have lost her inspiration but not her marbles. Edwin is petulant but not a planner, not
