The Philosophy of Disgrace Read online

  Rachel lay back and closed her eyes, what did it matter what clothes she wore? As for the money, it seemed it was still an issue for him. When she had left, she had left a cheque for him, enough to buy a house just like this one for him and Amy. He had never cashed it. A while ago, she had invested the money in a trust fund for Amy. It would mature when she was twenty-one. Her solicitor had written to him to tell him, but had never had a response. There was a good chance Amy didn’t even know that on her 21st birthday she would have enough money to buy her own house, outright. Other than that, the stuff just kept accumulating.

  She opened her eyes to find him standing over her, a mug of tea held out. ‘You should eat something too.’ He said.

  It was pointless to argue, it seemed even her diet was to be dictated. ‘As long as it’s not bloody soup. I feel like I’m awash with it. I never did like soup much.’ She didn’t like tea either but drank it anyway.

  He made her a sandwich, the bread was dry, so was the cheese. But she ate it anyway. ‘This is a nice house, very homey.’ She said.

  ‘It’s a house. Amy does the decorating, and the choosing of things. I just pay for it.’‘You know she’s going to get the money, on her birthday.’

  He didn’t speak but picked up her plate and took it into the kitchen. That bridge could be crossed some other time.

  His phone rang; he went out into the hall to answer it, shutting the door behind him so that she couldn’t hear what was being said.

  While he was gone, she looked round the room, on the mantelpiece there was a photo of him and Amy when she had been a little girl. The glass was missing, and she didn’t want to look at it for long.

  He made her jump when he came back in; she wasn’t used to all this movement around her. It was hard to adjust.

  ‘Change of plan, Amy and Diana are going straight to mums, they’re going to stay there tonight.’

  Rachel felt a flutter of panic, ‘why?’

  ‘I only have two bedrooms; Amy has decided you should sleep in hers tonight.’

  ‘I’m okay here, on the sofa.’ She protested, the panic beginning to take a more solid shape.

  ‘No, she’s right, you need a proper night’s sleep in a decent bed. It’s going to be a tough day tomorrow.’

  ‘Please, it’s ok. I’ll stay here.’ She pleaded, her voice cracking. It felt like the final straw. How could she explain the need to avoid it? Amy’s room, her things, her memories, her personality displayed all over the walls. Her clothes, her books, maybe even her old toys. She had coped with what had happened at the house, she had managed seeing Charlie again, absorbed what he had told her. She could even contain the impact of what Stella had done, even Frances’s arrest. But being forced to digest everything she had left behind, everything she should have been part of, everything she had been deprived of, being immersed in Amy’s space... would be too much. It was bad enough just being in this nice little house, this family home. Since she had come through the door, she had been looking at it, subliminally trying to find a Rachel shaped space so that she could see if she was actually missing from the picture. But it wasn’t there. Because she had never been there.

  She started to cry. ‘I can’t. I can’t. Don’t make me do this.’

  It hit Charlie like a brick in the face. He had been so relieved at Amy’s change of heart, so relieved to find Rachel in almost one piece. So determined to get her where he could look after her. So desperate to relieve her of the burden of the lie, he had forgotten his initial reservations. The impact on her. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. Amy didn’t think. I expect she wanted to make you welcome, a gesture.’

  Rachel was shaking, ‘I know. I just don’t think I can face it.’

  Charlie pulled a tissue out of the box on the table, knelt by the sofa, and took her hand. ‘Here, wipe your eyes.’ He was nervous of touching her, of offering something more than wound management. He wasn’t sure how she would take it. ‘You can have my room. I’ll go in the princess’s parlour tonight.’ She pulled her hand away instantly. ‘It’s Ok, there’s nothing up there but a bed and a wardrobe. No knick Knacks, no trinkets. No memories that you don’t share. It’s just a room with a bed.’ She still didn’t look like she believed him. ‘Look, you need to rest that leg properly; you can’t do that on a sofa. If you rip those stitches you’re going to end up back in hospital.’

  Eventually she nodded. ‘I know it sounds stupid, but I’ve had to put certain things out of my mind. My instinct is to run, but I can’t. So I have to hide. I’ve spent all her life trying not to imagine what she was doing, how she was feeling. Trying not to look in shop windows and imagine the things she would like. I shut her out, because I had to. I shut you out too. Please, just let me deal with a little bit at a time. That’s all I’m asking.’

  He’d forgotten, she hadn’t been fighting for them all these years. Just fighting to stay away. ‘Okay. One step at a time. The first of which is to get you upstairs and into bed.’

  He had to half carry her up; she didn’t seem able to put much weight on the leg at all. He got her into the bedroom, ‘See? Nothing here, just a room,’ and sat her down on the bed. ‘Don’t bend it, keep it straight.’

  ‘I don’t have any nightclothes with me. I didn’t think.’ She said.

  He opened a drawer, picked out a T-shirt, passed it to her. Thinking about the one he kept in the chest at the bottom of the bed The one she had worn on that very first night.

  ‘You get sorted, I’ll fetch your antibiotics, you need to take a couple more.’

  ‘Can you help me into the bathroom?’

  Once inside she locked the door, keeping her eyes firmly focused on the sink, ignoring the personal things that littered the room. She managed to rudimentarily clean her teeth using her finger, wash her face with her hands, but the towel smelled of Charlie. The room smelled of Amy. Out on the landing she gasped for neutral air, and limped back to the bedroom, shoulder against the wall for support.

  Charlie was right, the room that was his was a blank canvas. Just a room. No ghosts. She eased herself onto the bed, and under the cover, hoping that the bed would smell of washing powder, just like the T-shirt. To her relief it did.

  He knocked, and it surprised her. ‘Ok?’ She called. It wouldn’t have felt right to give him permission to come in to his own bedroom.

  He made her take another handful of tablets. ‘Any Mogodon in there?’

  ‘Worried you might not sleep?’ It was stupid question, how could she sleep with all that had happened washing around in her head? Gingerly he sat himself down on the end of the bed, not missing the fact that she shifted herself away from him, only slightly, but enough for him to realise that no bridges had been built yet. ‘What do you do with yourself, up in London?’

  She didn’t want to talk about it really, but it was as hard as ever to refuse him. ‘I walk, mostly. Look at things, hang about in the museums, libraries. I help Diana out at the centre too, sometimes.’ It was an approximation of the truth. She did all of those things, but mostly she studied other people, constantly trying to figure out the traits that made them normal, functional human beings. What she had gathered was that normal people did not live in flats that were like an ark to someone else’s past. They did not wear their clothes until they fell apart, or buy the first thing that fitted in the first shop they found. They did not live on packet sandwiches and take- away coffee. They did not avoid eye contact because they were sure that everyone would be able to see their secrets in their eyes. They did not marry their fathers and bear him a child. But then again, their lives were based on some semblance of truth.

  Charlie was watching her, trying to read the passing expressions on her face, ‘Rachel, I have to ask, why did you believe it? Why did you think I would have done such a thing and never told you?’ Because he had, he’d told her everything, all about Patsy, all about his past.

  Rachel sighed, massaged her brow with the fingers of her good hand. ‘Why wouldn’t I? Is it the ki
nd of thing anyone would lie about? And would you really have told me you’d slept with my sister? Don’t think I haven’t been over it a million times. But no one’s mother would lie about a thing like that.’ More specifically his mother would never lie about a thing like that. Valerie might have, but not Delia. Delia cared.

  Charlie got it; even now, she still believed that Valerie wouldn’t have stooped that low. He supposed he could understand, his own mother had believed it, enough to keep it from him all that time, and she’d known Valerie better than any of them. For her sins.

  ‘I’m so sorry Charlie, I was in an impossible situation. I couldn’t stay, I couldn’t take Amy. I knew how much you loved us, the only thing I could think of was to protect you from it and give you at least something that you could build a future with. If I’d told you the truth, or what I thought was the truth, then all of our lives would have been ruined. I know I hurt you, but it was the lesser of evils.’

  Charlie almost laughed. The irony was pitiful.

  He stood up to go, but Rachel didn’t want to be left alone in the blank room where she would paper the walls with the pictures in her head. She had had too many years of that. ‘Don’t go’.

  Charlie was at the door, ‘You need to sleep. To rest.’

  ‘But I’m not going to, and we both know it. What am I supposed to tell them tomorrow, how can I possibly explain how things were?’

  He shut the door, and walked back to the bed, lay next to her on top of the covers, his arms behind his head. ‘Answer their questions, tell them what you know.’

  ‘I don’t know what I know, since everything I thought I knew is gone. Undone by one lie after another. I thought Valerie was my mother, I thought Frances was my sister, then that changed, and now I don’t know anything. Is Frances my mother? It might not have been you who got her pregnant, but did someone else? If she did have me, why has she always treated me as if I‘m an offensive smell under her nose. Why did she bring me back here if she hates me so much? If she is my mother, and knew what I had been told, why risk this situation, the truth coming out?’

  Actually, that last was a fair point. Charlie had already puzzled over Rachel’s sudden reappearance. It was as if France didn’t know why Rachel had left. ‘I’ve been thinking about that, I figured she needed you back to do something about the house, sell it or whatever. I don’t know, but you’re right, it doesn’t make sense’.

  ‘Do you think she did kill Roy?’

  ‘No idea, I was in prison at the time, remember? You were there, what do you think?’ It came out with more grit than he had intended.

  Rachel turned her head away, and bit her lip. She shouldn’t be raking up the past for him.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to come out the way it did. I meant, what do you remember about when Roy went missing.’

  The answer was, not a lot. ‘One day he was there, being, wellbeing him, the next he was gone. After, well, after Patsy he kind of lost the plot. I suppose I just figured he’d left. Let’s face it no one was sorry to see him go. He wasn’t missed.’ In fact, when she thought about it now, she couldn’t even remember the day he’d gone. It was just a blank, as if she just knew he had gone, without knowing when or why. She had never questioned it, life without Roy in the house had been such a relative pleasure, no- one had questioned it. It seemed it was a Porter quirk, never asking questions.

  ‘Charlie?’ She turned her head towards him, he was asleep. That was all it had ever taken for him, his head on a pillow for a few minutes. Was that how sleep happened for people with a clear conscience?

  Diana didn’t like Delia Jones. Fact. It had taken just a few seconds for her to form her first impression of the woman, and it hadn’t gone well.

  First of all, Diana didn’t hold with kitsch. Delia’s house was full of it, and she had the distinct impression that it was a disguise. There was so much junk in the house that every item jostled with the next, clamouring for attention. On first sight, Diana had noticed a hard streak in Delia Jones, which clashed with the way she presented herself, as if the little trinkets and ornaments that cluttered every surface were a distraction from the woman’s real nature. Diana was an excellent judge of character, she had to be, she dealt with difficult people on a daily basis and had honed her ability to sum a person up so that it had become a fine art. Delia Jones did not pass muster.

  Second, Delia was instantly wary, and did not seem to like the fact that Rachel had an ally. She had gushed a little too strenuously about how pleased she was that Rachel had found friends in London.

  Third, she served cheap tea, made from cheap tea bags, in bone china cups, anathema to Diana, who would rather drink from a jam jar than tolerate a poor quality tea bag. It was an idiosyncratic thing, and she would normally have let it go. But in this instance it sealed her opinion of Delia, who was relegated the category of all (faux) fur coat, and no knickers.

  Given that Diana was a guest in the woman’s house, it did not bode well for her stay. A fact categorically confirmed by Delia’s decision to put her in the peach and green themed bedroom, which sported a very soft and noisy bed, which had been made up with slightly damp nylon sheets. The combination of the colours in the room and the sensation of the bedding against her skin put Diana’s teeth firmly on edge all night. Consequently, she did not sleep well, and was uncharacteristically grumpy in the morning. Delia’s idea of breakfast was a cup of the abysmal tea and three Benson and Hedges. Amy had helped herself to sliced white toast with margarine, and offered some to Diana, who refused, claiming that she wasn’t a breakfast person though she could have murdered a cup of Earl Grey and a bowl of All Bran. Not that she considered herself a snob, well not much of one, it was just that she felt that it was important to appreciate good quality food. It seemed doubly ridiculous to her that a child died of starvation every three seconds somewhere in the world so that the people of the west could eat white sliced fluff spread with copious quantities of axle grease.

  ‘So, Di, how do you think Rachel will bear up today, when the police start questioning her?’ Delia asked, whilst slowly exhaling a stream of smoke that hung like fog over the table.

  ‘It’s Diana. I’m hoping she’ll cope well, after all it’s not as if she hasn’t had considerable practice at managing stress.’ She replied with forced politeness, battling the urge to wave her hand like a fan and clear the air.

  ‘So that’s why you’re here is it, to support her?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. I think she needs people in her corner, don’t you?’

  Amy was looking from one to the other, a piece of limp toast poised in her hand, she was confused. Something had passed between these two women, and she didn’t have a clue what it was.

  ‘In fact, I think I’d like to get round there and see her as soon as possible. Are you coming Amy?’

  Delia just raised her eyebrows and took another puff on her cigarette.

  Diana was up, gathering her things, whilst Amy crammed toast into her mouth and tried to catch up. ‘Thank you so much for letting me stay, it was very kind of you.’ Diana said with as much grace as she could manage on an empty stomach.

  ‘Anytime.’ Delia said, stubbing out her cigarette and immediately lighting another one.

  Amy ran upstairs to collect her bag, leaving Diana waiting impatiently by the door.

  Delia wandered out of the kitchen and leaned against the hall wall, ‘Just a word of warning Di, I’ve known Rachel a long time. She has her problems. She doesn’t, well how can I put it, always see things the way they are. I expect it’s to do with her having fits and that. Must do something to your head over time.’

  Diana narrowed her eyes and frowned at the woman in the floral dressing gown, ‘what exactly are you saying?’

  ‘Just that things aren’t always as they seem, that’s all.’ Delia said with a shrug, just as Amy came down the stairs.

  ‘Right, I’m ready.’ She said breathlessly hauling her bag onto her shoulder and heading for the door, ‘s
ee you later Nan, thanks for letting us stay.’

  Delia smiled at her granddaughter, but her cold stare was directed straight at Diana.

  Diana could only conclude that Delia had spotted something in her, some quality that she didn’t like. Probably the fact that Diana had made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t falling for the sweet old granny act. Delia Jones might be a lot of things, but sweet old granny she wasn’t. Since the moment they had met, each had instinctively been testing the others mettle. One thing Diana was sure about was that Delia Jones was not concerned about Rachel’s welfare, and she had more than a vested interest in the outcome of the girls return. Diana had met many Delia’s over the years, hard women who had lived hard lives. They were a breed apart and their motivations weren’t always immediately clear. From what she could gather, Delia’s history was closely woven with Rachel’s, and that of her family. Amy had told her a lot on the train journey yesterday, but not enough for Diana to have a completely accurate picture of what had led Rachel and her family to this point. Besides, it had been the Delia version, Amy had stressed that Charlie never talked about the past.

  According to Amy, her grandmother had been the single stable influence in the dysfunctional Porter family, her loyalty and hard work being the only things that had kept the household functioning at all. Valerie had been a neurotic drunk, Stella a mental case, Frances a prima donna of delusional proportions, and Rachel a poor victim of all their machinations. Amy explained that her grandmother had agreed to work for Valerie as a favour, an act of support for an old childhood friend who was down on her luck. She had stayed because she was worried what might happen if she left. Charlie had just been sucked into the family as a matter of course. Delia had painted herself as the old family retainer who had been ill paid for her efforts.