The Shades
To Julian
Contents
The Shades
Acknowledgments
The first and second interviews were conducted near the driveway. Her examiners were polite and serious, but they repeated back her replies as if asking more questions, obliging Catherine to reiterate her answers, creating a circular conversation that would have been absurd had not the content and the morning’s events been so especially awful. With every repetition, she hoped that she wasn’t beginning to sound rehearsed when she was not. Nothing could have prepared her for this surreal dialogue, and trying to account for the previous hours was challenging, as if she were suddenly required to tell a tale in a foreign dialect. Yet she remained calm. She had the feeling that she was at the end of a nightmare with an awareness that she would soon wake, but in the interim it was important to remain composed and refuse to be scared. Like the reconstituted wartime advice on a coffee mug her daughter, Rachel, had given her two Christmases back, she would keep calm and freak out later. Only after several others had come and gone to their separate conferences and huddles of activity did someone ask her if she wanted to sit down, which she interpreted as a sign of compassion. In an effort to be polite and not appear ungrateful, she accepted the offer and moved to the bench in front of the house.
Catherine took a seat and immediately felt damp rise through her skirt to the back of her thighs. It was surprising that the wooden slats still retained cold and moisture, as the location had plenty of light and exposure; recently it had been unseasonably dry with week upon week of fresh but mild late spring weather. Yet years of cool and shade seemed to have embedded in the grain, reminding her how strange it was that one piece of furniture could have become an object of continuity when all else had been subject to loss, flux, and change. This bench had been in her first flat, a basement in a Victorian terrace off Brook Green, abandoned outside by its previous owner to a snarl of brambles and untamed shrubbery, in the small apron of land that she hesitated to call a garden—the estate agent’s description had been one of his more fanciful flights of marketing. After her marriage to Michael, their combined incomes had allowed them to buy the unit above, then the one over that, and turn the building once again into a single dwelling to accommodate the needs of a growing family with two young children. Once the construction was complete, Catherine turned her attention outward and started a campaign to conquer what she called her bewilderness. That was before she understood anything about gardening: that a north-facing aspect and the height of the boundary walls would always condemn the parterre to shade and rheumatic damp; that nothing would ever grow there except moss and more moss, but at least she had managed to reclaim the seat. When she and Michael had moved to Hamdean, Michael’s folie de grandeur on the Weald of Kent, she’d placed it near the oak, with the idea that he would sit there at weekends—she hoped, into his dotage—to gaze in fulfillment of a lifelong obsession with houses. Only he could see the property as it had once been: an elegant Georgian manor surrounded by pristine parkland; blot out the golf course spotted with Tory retirees, and imagine they were deer grazing instead. Only he could envisage that the front portion, purchased advantageously from a bankrupt developer, was more than a façade two rooms deep, but an entire house that stretched back and beyond. That was Michael: his romance with history had always been greater than his understanding of contemporary reality. Whereas from the beginning of the project, all Catherine could see was a posh maisonette representing a separation from the family home in London, where almost three decades had passed, children had been brought up, ambitions realized, thwarted, evolved, and a transition to a new phase—a less fraught, more reflective one, where she and Michael could enjoy the freedoms involved with Rowan and Rachel being older. The idea had been that they would keep a base in London while the children were at school there, and on the weekends they would go to Kent—this was to be their new axis. But all this was before Rachel; before everything became the after, and the hours that passed only the enduring of them. That she ever could have conceived that Michael would be able to find peace in this spot now seemed as remote to her as his imaginary deer.
She watched the forensic workers erect a barrier and enclose the site in a tent. The crew then divided into two, with one group continuing inside and the other methodically combing the exterior. They were distinct from the regular uniformed police and plainclothes detectives. In white jumpsuits and protective clothing, their slow, mannered movements gave them the look of moonwalkers or actors in an episode of Star Trek. She wished she could say, Beam me up, Scotty, and be transported back a couple of years, away from all this mess. With a flash of irritation, she saw a photographer crouched nearby trying to get an angle of, she didn’t know what, and crush a tuft of daffodils with his plastic-covered bootie. She suppressed an urge to shout, Oi! I planted those—have some respect!, stopping short, as she wasn’t sure whether he would understand her tone, the need after a disaster to preserve what was left. She watched the spacemen walking in lines and wondered what they could possibly hope to find. She had already told detectives that it was clear that the girl had jumped off the roof: anyone could have told from her position of impossible flatness, that only a combination of gravity, velocity, and impact could have got her there. Maybe they were hoping to find a malfunctioned parachute? Or more likely, a suicide note? It was logical that they still hoped to find one. Anyone choosing to end life with such spectacular violence might well be expected to leave behind an explanation by way of dramatic follow-up. She didn’t begrudge them their work. They were professionals. It was their job to look for clues, make suspicion a virtue, and labor it all. They were not Trekkies: more like archeologists of the recent past.
Catherine had been to a dig once. She was taken to Sutton Hoo by the artist John Bramley. The careful survey brought that day to mind. The site was best known for the Anglo-Saxon ship’s burial of a chieftain thought to be King Raedwald, but the focus had moved to the periphery, where bodies had been discovered preserved in the sand—these were thought to be execution victims, as they were found a short distance from where the gallows had once stood. John Bramley had been dead eight years, the souls of Sutton Hoo fifteen hundred more, yet far from being ghosts, they seemed more alive and present than the girl, whom she had seen only that morning, whose body lay twenty feet away. She had known her nine or ten weeks, not yet one trimester. Was that long enough to tell? Women bonded with their children in utero in much less time. She was no daughter of hers. The girl would always be unknowable except for the damage she left behind.
“Is there anyone else here? Your husband, perhaps?” she heard a man ask.
The voice was disembodied. She refused to look to its source and acknowledge the man’s presence. Her thoughts had turned to Rachel and Rowan, almost simultaneously in the same exhalation; shock had displaced her children longer than usual. She rose from the bench and headed toward the group. She didn’t want to talk or answer any more questions.
Then Judith was there, flapping a blanket over her chest and shoulders. “Can’t you see the state of her?” she scolded the man. “Go away.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Catherine saw the inquisitor retreat.
“I’ll make you tea as promised. Chamomile and nettle, dear—with something extra for the nerves.”
Oh shit, she really is a witch, Catherine thought.
She had met Judith when she and Michael had first moved to Hamdean. Judith was already living in one of three apartments constructed by a developer within the original Jacobean house. Prior to conversion, the previous occupant had been the film director Clive Martin, a founding member of the British New Wave cinema, whose transition from making kitchen-sink dramas that were closer to documentary realism, to whimsical Ho
llywood comedies, earned him the drubbing “Quick Wave Clive” from his peers. The small manor had been built by a mercer in 1619. His office in Customs and Liveries, later Court of Wards, and profitable selling of favors, enabled him to buy ninety acres from a farmer, who’d purchased it from the Crown after its appropriation from an abbey, the ruins of which was run by a local conservancy and a local beauty spot for picnickers three miles away. Two hundred years later, a magistrate had doubled the size of the house with the addition of a façade, consisting of reception rooms, two floors of bedrooms, and an attic. He had employed an architect to lay out gardens and a deer park, “Because I cannot abide the sight of wooly sheepe.” Minus elaborate topiary, and an avenue of limes that had been swept away by a furious storm forty years after planting, the basic geometry of the garden was still visible in the crosshatch lines of the kitchen garden, part of Judith’s domain. Catherine found it curious that Judith occupied such a large apartment, a third of the original house, as she lived alone and was an herbalist by trade. She joked with Michael that Judith was a practitioner of the Dark Arts. One look inside her kitchen with its smoked brick inglenook, flagstones, and eternal mullioned windows, webs of washing lines draped with plants, plus a large pot (read: cauldron) boiling a soupy morass on the stove, was enough to fuel speculation that extended to their other neighbor, a financial analyst who owned the remaining apartment but was always absent, that he too was part of a cabal and a raging warlock. As to the nature of the conspiracy, the worst Catherine and Michael Francis could come up with was probably a projection of their own desires: that their neighbors were conspiring to displace them to rule house and grounds themselves. All meant to be fun, with a bit of a venal own truth thrown in. In answer to why she occupied such a large piece of real estate, Michael pointed out with some expertise, as property was his living, that it wasn’t unheard-of for a nonspecialist to occasionally make a favorable deal. He had a more practical explanation for why the financial analyst was never in residence: the flat was a shell company, a tax-avoidance scheme, and the owner lived elsewhere.
Judith pulled the fleece closer to Catherine’s neck. The yarn was soft and the swirls of orange and turquoise crochet were indecently bright in the gloom of the proceedings. She hadn’t realized that she was cold. Gazing up at Judith, she remembered how she had once disdained her salt-and-pepper braids that looped up around her head Heidi-style, judging them ridiculous on a woman her age, but now seemed extraordinarily lovely, actually Flemish Madonna beautiful. She realized that she had been wrong about Judith, as she had been about so many things. At first glance she’d pegged her for a busybody of the kind best kept at bay. The impression had been compounded by Judith’s timing. Whenever Catherine was trying to drive out pronto, to meet a train or get to an appointment, Judith would appear on the road, basket in hand, and flag her down to display her gorgeous greens culled from the wild and extol their antioxidant properties. Her neighbor’s expansive view of time was so much at odds with Catherine’s own that whenever she saw Judith at the newsagent’s, she’d duck behind the cereal aisle to avoid a long conversation about the difficulty of finding good produce and her suspicion that all the roadside fruit stands were in fact fronts for the supermarkets.
She blinked at her.
Why had she feared her so? The dread that overfamiliarity might lead to what?—an infringement of privacy, because she lived close by? How idiotic that all seemed now.
A friendly neighbor.
Rachel alive.
The girl as well.
Those were the good old days.
Why hadn’t she known it?
When Michael received the call from Judith, he had seen the number flashing on his mobile and assumed it was his wife telephoning from Hamdean. He had let it ring, allowing it go to voicemail. He needed a moment to adjust his thoughts away from the current preoccupation, which was not as it should have been, the survey of the Horsemead Equestrian Estate that was spread out before him on his desk. With 550 acres, one mansion, six cottages, stables, and outbuildings galore, the document had a list of dilapidations and demands from the buyer that were as excessive as the seller’s taste in soft furnishings—Berkshire brothel was how one person in the office had described it. The same colleague had cautioned Michael that their client and seller, venture capitalist Harry Breen, was a brinker who would refuse to negotiate for want of a concession; that he could look forward to feverish hours while offers would be fielded and rejected, and he’d be left sweating the possibility of a lost commission. But Michael had enough experience dealing with the shrewdly wealthy (as opposed to the stupidly wealthy—there was a difference) to know that Breen’s arrogance and willingness to walk could work in their favor and get them all what they wanted. Besides, the package was stunning. It was in the Cotswolds, with a scale and setting so gorgeous that he might as well be selling fields of manna or gold. Thankfully this type of high-end sale still existed, as it had helped him keep his head above financial quicksand. Low and average properties were tethered by market forces; extraordinary ones floated in bubbles above, unpunctured by spiking interest rates and pernicious mortgage-backed securities. In normal circumstances, the survey in question would have been read by him even before it touched his inbox, but it had actually lain there for two days unread. Earlier his assistant, Karen, had walked past and patted the folder as a tactful way of reminding him that massage duties on the deal were currently overdue. In the moments before he heard the phone ringing, and honestly a good part of the previous forty-eight hours, Michael had not been thinking about the million-pound shortfall conditioned by oligarch Dmitri Dhokhorov’s offer, he had been thinking about himself and his own personal ground plan that looked bleak and sketchy.
Swiveling his chair, he looked out the window that bowed over the city, thirty floors high. He did that whenever he had a problem to solve. His office had a view that never failed to impress, and helped mitigate the choices he’d made when he’d left the conservation department at English Heritage to work at Great Estates. Whenever he looked out at the interlapping roofs, a patchwork of existence expressed in architectural form, from the pinnacle of Wren to a surgical sheath of glass and iron jutting up next door, he saw a story of growth: that each building had emerged in spite of the next, monuments to the best and worst of human endeavor, feats of engineering and imagination just the same. He always said that looking at the skyline could clarify his thoughts, with the distance giving him a fresh perspective by elevating him from his cares below.
Today there was no solution in his sights, only a vision of the aspects of his life that were broken. Fucked. He disliked profanity, as it was crude and imprecise, but fucked suddenly popped into his head and seemed so much more expressive than any other description he could summon. Such thoughts were unfamiliar and undermined him; positivity wasn’t a mood but a precept of character. He had endured fourteen months of hell but still had managed to fulfill his obligations as a father, husband, and professional. He had never claimed to be the world’s best at anything, but at least he had known to value common sense and judgment above weakness and error. Yet, after one of the most challenging weekends, he’d come home from the office and, when least expecting, had a conversation that had begun innocently enough, then left him destabilized and wanting.
Paige Wells had telephoned the flat looking for Catherine. Paige was one of Catherine’s oldest friends from uni, although the decades had subjected their bonds to some of the attenuations of time. For over twenty years he’d heard a variation on the theme of Paige: Paige was the greatest. Paige could be full of herself. Once she became the successful editor of a woman’s glossy, Paige was a blowhard. “She talks at you. She thinks she’s dictating an angle for a magazine article without stopping to listen to the feedback.” There had been some further estrangement between them over Paige’s attitude toward a young woman whom Catherine had wanted to help, but he hadn’t had the mental energy to understand what had happened, or to adjudicate who had
been right and who had been wrong. Yet, when her bossy ex– best friend had telephoned the flat looking for Catherine, she had stayed on the line and they had talked for a while. Contrary to her reputation, she was sympathetic and kind.
Paige was worried that Catherine hadn’t been returning her calls. “She’s isolating, Michael. That can’t be good. I don’t know what I can do if she won’t talk to me.” He had the same concerns—and more. Yet, knowing that the two women had some issues between them, he listened and said as little as possible, as he didn’t want to aggravate the situation between two friends. Paige asked how he was, and he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know—all he could think to talk about was an incremental rise in the market, the day’s penthouse viewing in Hyde Park, and the surprise of finding a naked man in the kitchen. She countered by admitting to the brain damage of lunch with advertisers, the boredom of which had compelled her to go to the bathroom mid-course, to read the gossip pages on her mobile, and then in a moral expunging read “Burnt Norton” on a poetry app. The effect of these minor confessions was cheering; the easy inconsequentiality of their banter had an intimacy that he realized he was craving and made him yearn for something more. He would have liked to have prolonged their dialogue with something other than husky admissions, such as inviting her over with the intention of doing something shameless, but that was ludicrous, so he left the idea where it belonged: as a silly, juvenile fantasy.
After decades of fidelity these impulses were disturbing, as it left him exposed, but this wasn’t entirely bad, as it forced him to assess himself and confront some difficult questions. After an epic night alone, he had been forced to stare down the fall lines of his marriage to Catherine. He had seen how they had clung to each other out of fear and habit, and wondered whether it was time to let go and jump—the unknown abyss was looking a lot more preferable to the purgatory he was in. Much as he had tried not to dwell on emotions aroused the previous day, as they were distracting from the bigger picture—whatever that was—although images of Paige’s ripe limbs and aubergine hair kept coming back to him and were probably all the more delicious for being forbidden, he had surrendered to lustful thoughts in the early hours, hoping that they didn’t constitute lechery or betrayal. At 4:10 a.m. he got up and made himself porridge.