Текст книги "When Will There Be Good News?"

Автор книги: Kate Atkinson

Соавторы: Kate Atkinson,Kate Atkinson
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

The mug she drank her instant coffee from carried a message that was too complicated for this time of the morning. 'Bill of sale!

Eternal life paid in full in the blood ofJesus Christ.' Then she had phoned the hospital and -abracadabra -they had found him.

He was asleep and a nurse came to check his drip and said loudly to him, 'You've got a visitor. You've not been forgotten about after all.

He's still a little dozy from the accident,' she said to Reggie. 'He'll wake up in a bit.'

Reggie sat patiently on a chair by his bedside and watched him sleep. She had nothing else to do, after all. He was old enough to be her father. 'Dad,' she tried experimentally, but it didn't wake him.

She'd never said that word to anyone. It felt like a word in a foreign language. Pater.

*

He was a detective. ('Used to be,' he muttered.) He used to be a soldier too. What did he do now?

'This and that.' Something and nothing.

She peeled off a ten-pound note from the tight wad that cheapskate Mr Hunter gave her yesterday. She put it on his locker. 'In case you need stuff,' she said, 'you know, chocolate or newspapers.'

'I'll pay you back,' he said.

Reggie wondered how he intended to do that. He didn't have any money, he was penniless. He had no wallet, no credit cards, no phone, nothing to his name at all. He only just had his own name (,Yes, we had some trouble identifYing your father,' Dr Foster said.). No wonder the hospital had no record of him when she first phoned, they thought he was someone else altogether. Like Reggie, he'd been stripped of everything. At least now Reggie had a bagful ofTopshop clothes. And a dog.

'I thought you must have died,' she said to him.

'So did I,' he said.

While she was in the hospital Reggie left the dog lying placidly on the grass verge, near the taxi rank. She had written on a piece of paper, This dog is not a stray, her owner is visiting in the hospital, and stuck it inside Sadie's collar in case someone decided to call the SSPCA. Everywhere you went there were 'No Dogs Allowed' signs. What was a person supposed to do? It would be good if she could get hold of a guide-dog harness and put it on Sadie. Then she'd be able to take her anywhere. And, as a plus point, people would be sorry for the poor little blind girl and be especially nice to her.

'Good dog,' Reggie said to Sadie when she left her and the dog responded with a soft whine, which Reggie guessed meant 'Don't forget to come back.' Dog language was pretty easy to interpret compared to human language. (Something and nothing, this and that, here and there.)

As far as she could tell Jackson Brodie seemed an OK sort ofperson. It would be a shame if it turned out that she had saved the life ofan evil human being when she could have saved someone who was developing the cure for cancer or who was the only support of a large, needy family, perhaps with a small crippled child in tow.

Jackson Brodie had a wife and child so they would be grateful to her. Was Jackson Brodie's wife also Marlee's mother? It was funny how you could sound like a ditferent person depending on who you were attached to. Jackie's daughter. Billy's sister. Dr Hunter's mother's help.

Jackson Brodie said that he didn't want to alarm his wife with news of the accident, which was very altruistic of him. Word of the day. From the Latin, alteri huic, to this other. His wife ('Tessa') was 'attending a conference in Washington'. How sophisticated that sounded. She was probably wearing a black suit. Reggie thought of Dr Hunter's two black suits hanging patiently in the closet, waiting for her to come back and fill them. Where was she?

The automatic front doors of the hospital hissed open and Reggie stepped outside, pausing for a moment to make sure that there were no neds armed with Loebs waiting for her. She still hadn't been able to get hold ofBilly, she'd never known a person so good at not being found. Although Dr Hunter seemed to be trying to give him a run for his money.

Sadie spotted Reggie as soon as she came out of the hospital. She stood to attention, her ears pricked up, the way she did when she was on guard duty. Reggie felt a surge of something very like happiness. It felt good to have someone (if a dog was someone) who was pleased to see her. The dog wagged her tail. If Reggie had had a tail she would have wagged it too.

'Been visiting a friend?' an old lady in the queue tor the 24 outside the hospital asked her. 'Yes,' Reggie said. He wasn't really her friend, of course, but he would be. One day. He belonged to her now. 'I'll be back,' she'd said to Jackson Brodie. 'I really will,' she'd added. Reggie was never going to be a person who didn't come back.

She had forgotten to bring a book with her but found the mutilated lliad in her bag and read around the cavern at its heart. The beginning of Book Six was intact and she checked her translation _

Nestor shouted aloud, and called to the Argives: My friends, Danaan warriors, attendants ofAres, let no mal1 now stay back. Pretty close.

Her bus journey was fatefully interrupted by a call from Sergeant Wiseman, telling her that Ms MacDonald was still 'unavailable'.

'Toxicology tests and so on,' he said vaguely.

'So when do you think she can be buried?' Reggie asked.

Reggie wondered if Ms MacDonald (her dead) would want to be buried. Wormfood or ash? She is dead; and all which die, to their Jirst elements resolve. They had done that at school. They had done Donne.

Ha. There was a horrible emptiness inside Reggie, as if someone had scooped out vital organs. The world was falling away. She began to feel panicky, the way she felt when she was first told that Mum was dead. Where was Dr Hunter? Where was Dr Hunter? Where was she? He was a detective. Used to be. Detectives knew how to find people. People who were missing.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find BUT EASY TO LOSE.

She couldn't breathe. A heavy weight was pressing on her chest and suffocating her, a great stone crushing her, martyring her lungs. Louise woke up with a start, gasping for air. jesus, what was that about? It felt unnaturally early, sparrowfart time of day by the feel and sound of it. She fumbled for her spectacles. Yes indeed, the digital numbers on the bedside clock glowed a Halloween green and confirmed that it was all the fives, five fifty-five. Her head was throbbing and her stomach was roiling, the wine from last night still working its way slowly through her blood. Red wine was never a good idea, it dragged out the maudlin Scot from the dark tartan-lined pit inside her where it lived. Whisky soothed the embittered monster that lived in there, red wine boiled its blood.

She was still surprised to wake up every morning next to a man. This man. He was a neat sleeper, curled in a foetal position all night, far over on his side of their new emperor-sized bed. Patrick understood, without her having to explain, that she needed a lot of space for her restless sleep.

He had been amused that the brooding presence ofBridget in the bedroom down the hall had made sex a complete non-starter as far as Louise was concerned. Presumably he had done it with Samantha within earshot of his sister. Louise imagined Samantha was probably docile in extremis. Patrick certainly was, giving out nothing much more than a discreet but complimentary kind ofmoan. Louise was a bit of a howler.

Sex between them was good but it didn't tear up the carpet, it wasn't ravenous. Not fornication but lovemaking. Louise had always considered that 'lovemaking' was a euphemistic kind of word for something that was an animal instinct but this was clearly not a belief shared by Patrick. The marriage bed was holy, he said, and this from a godless man, although a godless Irishman which was almost a contradiction in terms.

At first she'd thought there was a considerable charm in their civilized coupling, she'd stewed in enough sweaty, feral encounters in her time, but now she was beginning to wonder. If she ever kissed jackson it would be the end ofdecency and good manners. A pair of tigers roaring in the night. Not last night in the hospital, that had been a chaste kiss for an invalid. If they ever kissed properly they would exchange breath, they would exchange souls. Never think about one man in another man's bed, especially ifthe man in the bed is your husband. Height of bad manners, Louise. Bad wife. Very bad wife.

She watched the clock tick over to five fifty-six and slipped quietly out ofbed. Patrick didn't normally wake until seven but Bridget and Tim were early birds and Louise didn't think she could face polite conversation with either of them at this hour of the morning. Or, God forbid, another breakfast enfamille. Still, she was determined that for the rest of their visit she would bite her tongue, bite it off if necessary, and be as polite as Mrs Polite Well-Mannered. The bitch was muzzled.

She put in her contacts and peered at herself in the mirror of the en-suite. She still looked exhausted -she was exhausted -but at the same time she felt overwhelming relief at the idea that she had to go to work today and not play at being a hostess.

The memory hit her ofjackson lying in the hospital bed, beaten up and mauled, down and out for the count. He was the kind who always got back up but, of course, one day he wouldn't. Why was he always in the wrong place at the wrong time? She could imagine him saying, Maybe it was the right place at the right time. He was the most annoying person, even in her imagination.

He had looked so vulnerable lying there in that hospital bed. The king sits in Dunfermline toun, drinking the blude-red wine.

The Fisher King, sick and emasculated, the land wasting around him. Did you have to bring the king back to life to restore the land or did you have to sacrifice him? She couldn't remember. Blood Sacrifice, that was the title of Martina Appleby's anthology of poems. She wrote under her maiden name, not the ill-fated 'Mason'. Louise had googled her and come up with a brief paragraph. Howard Mason had called her 'my muse'. For a while anyway. In a barely disguised roman aclif, she became Ingegerd, 'the gloomy Scandinavian millstone around his neck, pulling him under the water'. Not a great one for inventive metaphor, our Howard. Now Martina was out of print. They were all out of print. Every single one of them. Except Joanna.

She tiptoed around the house, thought about making coffee, decided against it as being too noisy.

Hobbled by her hangover, Louise didn't quite make the great escape. Just as she was buttoning up her coat, good old Bridget wafted downstairs -in an inflammatory orange-coloured satin dressing gown -and said, 'Off to work already?' and Louise said, 'No rest for the wicked, or the police.'

'Don't worry, I'll look after Patrick,' Bridget said and Louise -inlaw to outlaw at the flick of a switch -growled, 'I'm not worried, he's fifty-two years old, he can look after himself.'The bitch was out.

The flats shared an underground garage and as Louise was emerging she almost ran over the postman, bringing a Special Delivery, another volume of Howard Mason's oeuvre that she'd found on the net. She signed for it, stuck it in the glove compartment and drove away.

This time she didn't go in the fancy front door but took the path that went along the side of the house and led to the back door. It took her past the garage, through the window of which she could see Dr Hunter's virtuous Prius, just as Reggie had said. Louise had parked on the main road on Tuesday, waiting for Joanna Hunter to come in from work. She had watched her car turn into the driveway, watched her corning home and wondered what it must be like to be the one that got away. ('Guilty,' Joanna Hunter said. 'Every day I feel guilty.')

'Me again,' Louise said cheerfully when Neil Hunter opened the door. He seemed more dishevelled in every way than yesterday.

'Do you know what time it is?'

Louise looked at her watch and said, 'Ten to seven,' like a helpful Girl Guide. Early morning -best time for rousing drug dealers, terrorists and the innocent husbands of caring GPs. Louise never even made it to being a Guider, she was kicked out of the Brownies at age seven. It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did. ('Not a team player, a team leader, boss,' Karen Warner said diplomatically.)

'I said I'd be back,' she said, the queen of reason, to Neil Hunter.

'So you did.' He rubbed the stubble on his chin and stared at her absently for a moment. He didn't look in good fettle. Perhaps he was one of those men who needed a wife to keep his life ticking along (quite a lot of those about).

'I suppose you want to come in?' he said. He squashed himself against the doorpost so she had to squeeze past him. Just a little bit too close to Louise's perimeter fence. He smelled of drink and cigarettes and looked as if he'd been up all night, which was not as unattractive as it should have been. You wouldn't kick him out of your bed. If you weren't married that is, and he wasn't married, and there wasn't an outside chance that he'd somehow done away with his wife. Crazy talk, Louise.

'I noticed Dr Hunter's car is in the garage,' Louise said. 'It's dead, must be the electronics. I'm taking it in tomorrow to be fixed. Jo hired a car to go down to Yorkshire.' 'I've called Dr Hunter a couple of times, but haven't been able to get an answer,' Louise said. She hadn't, but hey. 'She does have her phone with her doesn't she?'

'Yes, of course.'

'Perhaps you could give me her aunt's phone number and address.'

'Her aunt?'

'Mnl.'

He put his fingers to his temple and thought for a few seconds before saying, 'I think it's in the study,' and reluctantly leaving the room as if setting off on a particularly challenging quest.

When he'd disappeared into the innards of the house a phone, a mobile, started to ring. It was somewhere close by but the sound was mumed as if the phone was buried. Louise traced the ringing to the drawer in the big kitchen table. When she pulled the drawer open, music suddenly escaped into the air. It sounded vaguely like Bach but it was too obscure for Louise to identifY. Thanks to Patrick, she recognized a lot now but could only name a few obvious pieces Beethoven's Fifth, bits of Swan Lake, Carmina Burana -'Classic lite,' according to Patrick. He was a serious opera fan as well, he particularly liked the ones that Louise didn't. She was 'a populist', he laughed, because she only liked the big heartbreak arias. She had a Maria Callas CD, a 'Best of' compilation, in the car that she played a lot although she wasn't sure it was necessarily a healthy choice of in-car entertainment.

Her instinct was to answer the ringing phone but she could see there was something intrusive if not unethical about that. She answered it anyway.

'Jo?' a male voice, a voice that you could hear the crack and the strain in, even in the one syllable.

'No,' Louise said. A perfect little two-footed rhyme No Jo, which was the truth. Louise realized she had been looking forward to seeingJoanna Hunter, and denying the fact to herself. Joanna Hunter was the reason she had come here this morning, not Neil Hunter.

Whoever it was rang off immediately. If this was Joanna Hunter's phone why was it in a drawer? And who was calling her -a wrong number? A lover? A crazy patient?

She replaced the phone and closed the drawer. It was down to its last squeak of battery. Neil Hunter must have been able to hear it ringing for the last couple of days. Why hadn't he just turned it off? Perhaps he wanted to know who was phoning his wife. He came back in the room and Louise said, 'I'd like to see Dr Hunter's phone ifyou don't mind.'

'Her phone?'

'Her phone,' Louise said firmly. 'We're having a problem locating Andrew Decker, I need to find out ifhe's phoned Dr Hunter in the past few days.' She was improvising. Making it up as she went along, wasn't that what everyone did? No?

'Why would Andrew Decker do that?' Neil Hunter said. 'Surely Jo's the last person he would contact?'

'Or the first. Just want to make sure,' Louise said. She smiled encouragingly at Neil Hunter and held out her hand. 'The phone?'

'She took it with her, I told you that.'

'Only there's never an answer from Dr Hunter's mobile when I call it,' Louise said innocently (or as innocently as she could muster). She dialled a number on her own phone and held it aloft as if to demonstrate her inability to reach Joanna Hunter. A few seconds later the tinny, mumed Bach started up. Neil Hunter stared at the wooden table as ifit had just kicked up its legs and danced the cancan. Louise opened the drawer and took out the phone.

'Fancy that. Jo left it behind, can you believe?' he said. He wasn't as good at mugging innocence as Louise. 'Honest to God, my wife can be so forgetful sometimes.' (What had the girl said, Dr Hunter never forgets anything.)

'You haven't spoken to her then?'

'Who?'

'Your wife, Mr Hunter.'

'Ofcourse I have, I told you I had. I must have phoned her on the aunt's number.' He handed over a piece ofpaper with an address and phone number on it. The aunt.

'When?' Louise asked.

'Yesterday.'

'Do you mind if I take her mobile?'

'Take her mobile?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Take her mobile.'

She was parked outside Alison Needler's house drinking a takeaway coffee.

Agnes Barker. The elderly aunt, like a character in a farce, not a real person at all (Enter Stage Left, 'An Elderly Aune). The aunt was seventy, not that old, not these days. Old age receded the closer you got to it. Live fast, die young, Louise used to joke, but it was hard to move fast when you were hampered by linen chests and silver napkin rings, not to mention having voluntarily shackled yourself to one man for the rest of your life. Was that what they meant by wedlock? One good man, she reminded herself.

Trawling the net, Louise had come up with some scant details about Agnes Barker -born Agnes Mary Mason in 1936, went to RADA, trod the boards in rep for a few years, married an Oliver Barker, a radio producer with the BBC, in 1965. Lived in Ealing, no children. Retired to Hawes in 1990, husband died ten years ago.

There had been a sister called Margot in The Shopkeeper -an uppity, snobbish girl -Agnes's fictional alter ego presumably. Louise was beginning to feel she could go on Mastermind and answer questions on 'The Life and Works of Howard Mason'.

Arty sister of an arty brother. In The Shopkeeper, Margot was still at school but had 'foolishly unrealistic' dreams of fame and success.

There wasn't a reason in the world to doubt either the existence of the aunt or the aunt's veracity. Except that when she examined Joanna Hunter's phone, as she was doing now, and checked it against the number that Neil Hunter had reluctantly given her for the aunt, there were no calls to or from Agnes Barker, no calls from Hawes at all. Perhaps Joanna Hunter and her husband were using the aunt as some kind ofcover, to give Joanna Hunter some space. For her escape. Long odds.

Joanna Hunter had made six calls on Wednesday and received five. On Thursday she had received -or at least the phone had received -several calls. She fished out Reggie Chase's number and, not surprisingly, most of them were from her. Any further investigation ofJoanna Hunter's phone proved impossible as the battery, on its last gasp, finally gave up on life.

She phoned Agnes Barker's home number and a politely robotic voice informed her that this number was no longer in use. She phoned the station, got hold of the handiest DC and asked him to find out when the number was disconnected. He came back in a snappy ten minutes and said, 'Last week, boss.' Disconnected and out of print. The Masons were like an illusion, all smoke and mirrors.

Louise flicked through the new Howard Mason novel, The Way Home, written a couple of years after his marriage to Gabrielle. The wife in the novel was called Francesca and had some kind of exotic parentage and a cosmopolitan upbringing, a world away from the novel's protagonist, Stephen, brought up in a claustrophobic West Yorkshire mill town -all dirty canals and soot-blackened skylines. (Louise wondered what Jackson would make of Howard's book.)

Stephen, having escaped his inheritance of northern misery, was now living a gypsy life with his new schoolgirl wife -he had eloped with her -amongst the bohemian enclaves ofEurope. There seemed to be an incredible amount of sex in the novel, on every other page Stephen and Francesca were going at it like rabbits, sucking and bucking and arching. Louise supposed it was all that fucking that had made Howard Mason fashionable in -she checked the publication date -1960. Louise yawned, it was amazing how tedious reading about sex could be at this time of the day, any time of the day, in fact.

The Needlers' front door opened and Alison poked her head out and checked the coast was clear before reappearing with the kids a couple of minutes later. She marshalled them down the street to school as ifthey were an unruly pack ofdogs but in reality they were as docile as zombies. Between the four of them the Needlers were on a pharmacopoeia of downers and uppers. Louise started up the BMW's engine and drove slowly behind them, peeling away once they were through the school gates. Alison Needler acknowledged Louise's presence with an almost imperceptible nod of her head.

It was still dark, they were hurtling towards the winter solstice and it was going to be one of those days where the sun never got out of bed. Louise checked her watch, the surgery where Joanna Hunter worked would be in full swing by the time she got back to Edinburgh. She started the engine and set offagain. Louise wondered how many miles she'd have on the BMW's clock when she finally felt she could stop moving.

No word from Dr Hunter at the surgery, no word since first thing Thursday morning when the practice had been apprised of her sudden leave of absence. Louise finally managed to track down the receptionist who had taken the call and phoned her from the car, parked outside the surgery. It was the receptionist's day off and she sounded as if she was already out Christmas shopping. 'I'm in the Gyle,' she said, her voice raised against a Slade track. The woman sounded understandably harassed, Louise would have been harassed if she had been Christmas shopping in the Gyle. What was she going to buy Patrick for Christmas? Archie was easy, he wanted cash (,Lots, please') but Patrick would expect something personal, something with meaning. Louise was no good with presents, she didn't know how either to receive or to give. And not just presents.

'No,' the receptionist said, after a moment's hesitation. 'Not Dr Hunter, it was her husband who phoned. He said there'd been a family emergency.'

'You're sure it was her husband?' 'Well, he said he was. He was Glaswegian,' she added as if that clinched it. 'She's gone to look after a sick aunt.' 'Yeah,' Louise said. 'I heard that.'

Sheila Hayes was running an ante-natal clinic at the end of the corridor. It unnerved Louise to be amongst so much fecundity, it was bad enough working around Karen but in the ante-natal clinic the air in the waiting room was saturated with hormones as a roomful of fertility goddesses the size of buses leafed through old, dog-eared copies of OK! and shifted their uncomfortable bulk around on the hard chairs.

Louise showed her warrant to the receptionist and said, 'Sheila Hayes?' and the receptionist pointed at a door and said, 'She has a lady in with her.' More ladies. Ladies of the lake, the lamp, the night. Louise waited until a woman lumbered out, already trammelled by two small infants, and slipped into the midwife's room.

Sheila Hayes smiled a welcome at her and glancing down at her notes said, 'Mrs Carter? I don't think we've met before.'

'Not Mrs Carter,' Louise said, showing her warrant card, 'Chief Inspector Louise Monroe.' Sheila Hayes's professional smile faded. 'It's a question about Dr Hunter.'

'Something's happened to her?'

'No. I'm conducting a routine investigation into her husband's affairs-'

'Neil?'

'Yes, Neil. I'd rather you didn't say anything about this to anyone.'

'Of course not.'

Louise supposed it would be all round the surgery before she was even out of the door. The receptionist was already agog at the sight of her warrant. 'I'm trying to locate Dr Hunter, she didn't tell you she was going away?'

'No,' Sheila Hayes said. 'She's gone to stay with an aunt apparently, according to Reggie -Reggie's the girl who helps to look after the baby. Jo was supposed to meet me onWednesday night but she didn't turn up, didn't answer her phone when I called to find out what happened. It's very out of character for her but I suppose it's something to do with the story in the newspaper?'

'What story?'

'Which do you prefer?' Karen Warner said, '''Mason Murderer Missing" or "Beast of Bodmin Moor". It wasn't Bodmin Moor.' 'Scottish paper,' Louise said, 'bound to be hazy on English geography.'

'L'ijter serving a full thirty year life sentence for the brutal slaying, blah, blah, blah. Face of a killer. This photo's over thirty years old. Joanna Mason) changed her name) believed to be working as a GP in Scotland, diddum, diddum ... They haven't found her yet then. Close on her heels though.'

'I kind of wish they would,' Louise said. 'Find her.'

'Do you?'

A DC called Abbie Nash popped her head round the door and said, 'Boss? You wanted me.'

'Yes, phone round the rental companies to check whether a Joanna Hunter rented a car on Wednesday. And Abbie,' Louise said, handing her Joanna Hunter's phone, 'can you get someone else to run all the numbers on this mobile, also Joanna Hunter's.'

'Right away, boss.' Abbie was a short, stocky young woman who looked as if she would hold her own in a fight. She was more imaginative than her badly cut hair suggested. 'Sandy Mathieson says she's the Mason massacre survivor,' she said. 'I googled her when he told me about her. Rumour is she's lost again.'

Louise wondered how many people had to die before murder became massacre. More than three, surely?

'Crisp?' Karen offered, rattling an open packet at them both. 'Roast beefflavour.' Abbie Nash took a handful but Louise waved the crisps away, even the smell made her nauseous. This must be how people became vegetarians.

'I just want to know where she is and if she's OK,' Louise said. 'And I want to make sure that Andrew Decker's nowhere near her.'

What had Reggie said? Has anyone actually spoken to her? No, apparently not. 'Trouble is, she's a missing person that no one's reported missing.' Louise sighed. 'I think it's a case ofcherchez fa tante.'

The thing was, as Reggie Chase would have said, Neil Hunter's reaction to the perplexing presence of his wife's phone in the house was worthy of Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight but wasn't nearly as hammy as his response to the sound of the Prius's engine purring happily when Louise started it. 'Miracle recovery?' she said innocently to Neil Hunter.

He tried to laugh it off. 'Do I need a lawyer?' he joked.

'I don't know. Do you?' she said.

Abide with Me SHE WAS NINE WHEN MARTINA DIED. SHE CAME HOME FROM SCHOOL -there was no sign of her father -and found two men carrying a sheet-draped body downstairs on a stretcher. Joanna wasn't sure who it was until she ran upstairs to Martina's room and saw the tumbled sheets, the empty bottles lying on the floor and smelt something sickly in the air that hinted at disaster.

The note that Martina had left was written in a flowery card, part of a stationery set that had been Joanna's Christmas present to her. It was on the dining-room mantelpiece and had been overlooked by the police. It contained nothing memorable, no poetry, just a sleepy scrawl that said 'Too much' and something in Swedish that would forever remain untranslated for Joanna.

She had gone looking for her father, found him in his study, where he had worked his way down to the bottom of a bottle of whisky. She stood in the doorway and held up the card. 'Martina left you a note,' she said and he said, 'I know,' and threw the bottle ofwhisky at her.

It had just been Joanna and her father for a while. At first, when she had gone to live with him, after everyone she loved had died, he had employed a nanny, a dried-up stick of a witch in severe clothes who believed that the best way for Joanna to get over her tragedy was to behave as if it had never happened.

It was a long time before Joanna was able to go to school. Her legs would collapse under her every time she got near the school gates and the psychiatrist that her father employed (a tweedy man who smelt of cigarettes and with whom she shared long, awkward silences) suggested she be schooled at home for a while and so the nanny did double duty as a governess and gave Joanna lessons every day, terrible tedious hours of arithmetic and English. If she did anything wrong, if she smudged her exercise books or didn't pay attention she was smacked across the back of her hand with a ruler. When one day Martina caught the nanny mid-whack, she grabbed the ruler and hit her across the face with it.

There was a terrible fuss, the nanny talked about getting the police involved but Howard must have got rid of her somehow. He was good at getting rid of women. All Joanna remembered was Martina turning to her after the woman had left in a taxi, saying, 'No more nannies, darling. I'll look after you from now on. I promise.' Don't make promises you can't keep, their mother used to say and she was right. She didn't use to say it to her children, she said it mainly to their father, Howard Mason, the Great Pretender.

The woman who came after the poet (who in truth came before the poet which was one of the reasons Martina lay down with her bottles of salvation) was Chinese, some kind of artist from Hong Kong, who assured Howard that Joanna would be happier, not at the local school where she had finally settled, but at a boarding school buried deep in the folds of the Cotswolds and so Joanna was duly packed off until she was eighteen, only coming home for holidays.