What next?
While he was trying to reach that important decision, he might as well hear the rest of this tape which Dalziel clearly believed was important to his understanding of… what?
He pressed the “start” button.
After Alba died, there were those who began to talk of “a blessed relief,” but my reaction was so savage, the banalities rarely emerged complete from their lips.
Only Tony got it right.
“Life’s shit,” he said. “Be strong. It won’t get better. But you’ll get stronger.”
I don’t know what I would have done without Tony so many times in my life.
At the college they were kind and understanding but I had no energy for that stuff any more and I dropped out. I needed work and took the easy route of applying to go full-time in the A-P canteen. Easy routes were my preferred option then. I don’t recall much of that time, but I suspect I was such a lousy miserable waitress people were put off their food. I must have come close to being fired. Again it was Tony who saved me. One day a woman from personnel told me I was starting in Tony’s office the next day. I didn’t ask, Starting what? or offer any objection. I just turned up, sat down, did what I was told. And that was how I spent the next eight, nine, ten months-simply doing whatever the office supervisor told me-word processing, filing, making coffee-all she had to do was ask.
Slowly I began to emerge from my shell of grief. Very slowly. Some time in all this, I became aware there was important stuff going on-big shake-ups, crisis meetings, worried faces all over the place-but my awareness never got close to interest or understanding. Maybe my indifference somehow got confused with loyalty and dependability, for at the end of it all, I found Tony’s PA inviting me to work as her gofer. She was good, so good she got head-hunted. I’d been working with her nine months when she said she was leaving. I expected the job to be advertised and even wondered if I dared apply, but not very seriously. Then I came to work one morning and found my name being stencilled on her office door.
I was so knocked over, I didn’t think of Alba for over an hour.
And when I did, for the first time since she died I found I was totally aware of who I was, where I was, and what I was doing.
Still no men in my life. Understandable, as anyone who gave me the eye I automatically hated. Not that there were many. Under Tony’s watchful eye, I could probably have walked round the plant naked carrying a sackful of gold without fear of molestation. As for elsewhere, there wasn’t really any elsewhere.
Then we came to England for the Maciver takeover negotiations and I met Pal.
I could see he was interested from our first encounter, and he didn’t give a damn if Tony approved or not.
Me, at first I was amused. Twenty years older than me, a widower with three kids, a Brit-nobody needed to rehearse the strikes against him. And even if I’d fallen madly in love with him at first sight, my first sight of Pal Junior and Cressida would probably have nipped that in the bud. I don’t know in what terms their father had prepared them for my appearance, but they were on full security alert, all systems armed. I was the enemy, their mission was to destroy. I couldn’t blame them. Young Pal was fifteen, Cressida twelve, not the most rational of ages. And nine months earlier they’d lost their mother.
I would have signalled no-contest and got out of there if it hadn’t been for Helen. She had big blue eyes and blonde curls and she was just turned four, the same age Alba would have been. A kid that age loses her mother, it must leave a gap of instant unquestioning love no amount of sympathy and concern can fill. It was sympathy and concern I felt for the older children, but not for Helen. I saw her and all the love I’d had for Alba came surging through. She must have felt it, for there wasn’t even a moment when we were strangers.
And Pal watching us together at that first encounter must have known he’d got himself a wife.
I’d expected if not objection at least reservation from Tony but once more he surprised me. He was more than encouraging, he was enthusiastic. “The kid needs a mother,” he said, by which at first I thought he meant I needed a kid. But thinking about it since, I don’t recollect ever hearing Tony say something he didn’t mean.
Anyway, the marriage went ahead, the takeover went ahead, everyone was happy.
Except Pal Junior and Cressida.
They set out to make my life hell. Not too obviously and never in front of their father. But they worked at it, oh yes, they really worked at it. And they might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for Helen. She was my antidote. She made my life a heaven their feeble attempts at hell couldn’t touch. Naturally they tried to get to me through her, but I let them see that here was the line in the sand. Step over that and I’d go nuclear. They backed off, but the guerrilla war continued. There’s no defence against a guerrilla war; all you can do is tough it out and hope that at last simple fatigue will bring them to the conference table. I did try to talk to Pal Senior, but it was hard. He’d got himself the family grouping he wanted and he didn’t care to see any cracks in the plaster. I tried to get to him through his sister, Lavinia, but she was right off the map, both mentally and physically. I called in to see her once and it was like stepping into that Hitchcock movie The Birds.
So I just had to play the waiting game. I thought things might get better when Cressida went away to school. It was her own idea and her father was keen. Me, I’d never have wanted any child of mine to spend so much of those formative years away from home, but I wasn’t about to object in Cressida’s case. With Pal Junior out of the house for much of the time doing whatever teenage boys do, it meant I’d have lots of quality time with Helen. And I was still naive enough to hope every time Cressida came home for the holidays, that she’d have grown up a bit and grown out of her petty resentment. Certainly for a while I began to feel that maybe her brother had made this progress. He had gone into the sixth form and there’d been some friction between him and his father about his choice of subjects. Pal Senior had been the active outdoor type in his younger days, I gathered, climbing, shooting, that stuff, and later he’d channelled all those energies into the business, which made giving it up so hard. Pal Junior had never shown any interest in outdoor activities and now he announced bluntly that he certainly didn’t want to follow his father into a business career, instead it was his ambition to go to university and study art history. If the family firm had still existed as an entity, I dread to think what a schism this might have caused. Even without the inheritance factor, his father was seriously pissed, but I stuck up for the boy and acted as mediator and I guess I hoped that this might have helped him see what an asshole he’d been over the past couple of years. Certainly to start with he seemed much less surly towards me. In fact on occasions he was positively attentive. Then gradually I began to feel he was being over attentive. He always seemed to be around, bringing me drinks, checking that I was comfortable. If I sat on a sofa, he’d flop down next to me. And, even more worryingly, whenever I lay around the garden sunbathing in my bikini, he’d turn up too. Or if I went to have a shower, when I came out of the shower room with my towel draped around me, he’d just happen to be strolling along the corridor. I began to feel stalked. This was just a new technique to get at me, I decided. The bastard knew how hard it would be for me, after complaining for so long that he took no heed of me, to start protesting he was over-attentive!
But maybe I should have spoken up instead of just taking steps to keep out of his line of sight… Maybe he took my lack of open complaint for encouragement.
I’m being charitable here. I don’t really feel it.
It was towards the end of his last term in the sixth, exam time. I had the house to myself one afternoon. My husband was at the works-he still insisted on going in most days, even though it was clear to everyone else that his so-called advisory responsibility was merely a face-saver. Cressida was away at school, Helen was at a friend’s birthday party and Pal Junior, who was doing his last exam that morning, had announced he and his friends were going to spend the rest of the day celebrating. I took the chance to do some work in the garden. I love gardening but didn’t get much encouragement from my husband, who hired a man to come in two or three times a week and, like a true Yorkshireman, didn’t see why I should do work he’d paid someone else to do. Today wasn’t one of the gardener’s days, so I was able to really sort out a couple of the beds that had been irritating me for some time.
It was funny. From time to time I felt like I was being watched but whenever I looked up, I could see no one. After a couple of hours I’d worked myself into a good sweat and my back was beginning to ache so I went into the house for a shower. It was heaven just to stand there under the hot jet and feel the water washing the
