The Anderson Question Page 10

  Listening, Paul marvelled yet again at how good his mother was at that sort of thing; no hint in her voice of the crying he heard at night through the panels of her door. He hovered as she talked to the succession of tongue-tied people who came to the door to say how sorry they were (sorry, sorry, as if they were at fault, or a small crime committed, he raged); and Paul noticed for the first time how she always offered a general consolation, in the form of an image of his father he barely recognised. ‘Yes, Mrs Wright, thank you for coming … I know … David would have been pleased to know you felt like that. Honestly, it’s the same with everybody who comes to see me … you all prove how loved he was, and how happy. It makes me so proud of him.’

  ‘He was dedicated, I’d say, Mrs Anderson. You don’t get this in these young doctors nowadays.’

  The door would close (she rarely asked people in), and she would turn to him with a look that was almost satisfaction on her pale face. Yet at night – the weeping, and Paul listening, envying her all the time for the calm of the day and the night’s release.

  But two days after the rector’s visit, Eleanor’s Memorial Service plan lay forgotten on the kitchen table. The latest news had spread quickly through the village, and nobody came to the house. Eleanor and Paul shared a shock greater than anything that had gone before, and death, a simple little ending, took on the aspect of a benediction.

  At eight-thirty, early for him, Paul was making coffee in the kitchen, surprised to see no sign of his mother. Nine came, then nine-thirty, and still she did not appear. Paul felt uneasy, and trailed his mug under the running tap, wondering whether to call her, until the water ran so hot that he drew his hand back in shock. She had refused the sedative she was offered, though the policewoman had tried to persuade her. White-faced, eyes glittering, and mouth set into the thinnest line, Eleanor had stood by the fireplace refusing to sit, as though her body were an ancient papery thing that would disentegrate if bent. The young doctor from Newtonstowe had looked at her helplessly, then withdrawn. On the faces of the police Paul saw embarrassment mixed with … was it distaste? He had seen them to the front door, and almost closed it on their heels, before returning to the sitting-room where she stood, completely still, in the same place.

  He could not remember her staying in bed so late, only perhaps once a year when he was a child and she was ill. Even then she rose before fully recovered. She had seemed calm, and had taken no drug, Paul thought; surely not even the latest news could shift his mother from a lifetime of early rising.

  Sunlight poured through the tall landing window; the house was completely silent. Paul hovered outside her bedroom door, pressing his ear to the wood, before deciding to knock. There was no reply. Softly he turned the handle, expecting to find the room still in darkness, and his mother asleep. But the curtains were apart, and the tumbled bed was empty. For a second he felt afraid; then he saw that she was sitting in the chintz chair by the window, looking out at the garden. Her hair, normally tied back neatly at night, and swept into the immaculate chignon during the day, hung loose about her head, so he could not see her face. Her thin hands grasped the arms of the chair. She was still in her nightdress. ‘Are you all right, Mum?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Her voice was dead; there was neither weariness nor hostility in the question.

  ‘I just came to see if you wanted anything. Are you all right?’

  ‘I don’t want anything. Go away, Paul.’ The flat tone again, not dead now, but full of dislike, not for him personally (he felt instinctively) but for all things; a generalised hate. It paralysed him; he stood on the threshold of the room and stared.

  ‘I told you to go away.’

  She turned her face towards him, and the long strands of grey hair all round it, in a disorder he had never seen, gave her a bleak, witchlike appearance which disturbed him even more than that voice. It was as if the night had imposed a metamorphosis on her; Eleanor transformed into her own opposite, and anarchy let loose on the house.

  ‘I want to help, Mum, I want to do something. Can’t we talk about it?’

  Her eyes were like pebbles. ‘I’ll never talk about it, Paul, not ever. It’s all over. I don’t want you to mention his name to me, not ever. Do you understand that? Now please go!’ He closed the door behind him, blindly, and half ran into his own room, not knowing what to do, and curling up on the bed like a child.

  Conrad Hartley was sitting up in bed, reading his letters. Lately he had begun to live in the bedroom, withdrawing there as into a sanctuary which held all things most precious to him. The room was smaller than the other bedroom in Winter House, almost filled by the bed and his huge desk. Improvised wooden bookshelves filled the rest of the available wall space, and piles of books stood on the floor. The electric kettle stood in the hearth before the boarded-up fireplace, next to the electric fire which glowed even in the warmth of this morning, and two dirty mugs stood in the enormous cracked washbasin in the corner. The curling photographs of Alice looked down from the wall above his bed. On his desk stood a framed photograph of Angela, in full skirts and neat waved hair, and tucked into the edge of the frame was a recent one of her, a bespectacled, middle-aged woman, plump-faced and clutching a book in the self-conscious manner of American studio portraits. Once every two months she wrote to him, with news of her classes at the small University, and complaints that students were reluctant to read the classics, and anecdotes about her husband Jay, the professor of physics. ‘I have no grandchildren,’ Conrad thought sadly at times, as he looked at the images of young girl and mature woman and wondered at the transformation. After Alice’s death Angela lost the desire to return to England; Alice had been the link between them.

  He no longer cared about the dangers of obsession, or pretended to himself that he had any other interest. David’s death could be thanked for that, he thought, aware of urgency as he had never been before. On his desk an enormous piece of creamy paper bore his vindication: Alice’s family tree, drawn out in ink with his usual professional skill. Books were piled around it, the stack of letters and photocopies threatened to engulf it, and Tansy had left a muddy pawmark in the middle of it, but it lay there – the first stage, his homage and his proof.

  ‘But nowhere near complete,’ he murmured aloud, peering at the piece of paper he was holding. He reached for the spectacles he wore only for reading, mended in two places with pink sticking plaster, and focussed. The photocopy was very faint indeed; the letter it came with was from Alice’s nursing home in Cheltenham. In the first sentence the old lady apologised for her handwriting, ‘but you must lay the blame on my arthritis, which makes it difficult indeed to hold the pen,’ and went on to cover four pages with complicated details of cousins and marriages, all in a dense sloping hand, so that Conrad was forced ruefully to conclude that it must have been one of her good days for writing. It was interesting enough, but not what he wanted, simply confirming details he knew already, ‘So now I can fill in the whole female line back to 1700,’ he said aloud and lay back, letting the glasses slip from his nose. ‘Mmmm, but the clues, the clues … something missing. Yet the public record office in Coventry sounded promising, and there is that diary to come …’ He was unable to articulate, even to himself, his intuition that one day he would be led to something, to somebody in the past, or a place where her ancestors had lived, which would resound unexpectedly.

  A symbol, the sudden shift from the particular to the universal was what he wanted – the means by which his Alice would become transfigured and take her place in history, fittingly. ‘All the glimpses add up,’ he said to himself, ‘yet I know there’s a long way to go with the male line. There were no more Ranshaws after Alice and there will be no more Hartleys after me, so there two lines come to an end.’ The sudden thought did not make him sad. Propped on the pillows in his old dressing gown Conrad watched the sunbeams streaming somewhat milkily through his smeary bedroom window and saw in them his familiar spirits, the benevolent ghosts of straightbacked men and
women in rustling dresses who bore their children to be mourned by those children, so continuing, forward and back, whirling through change (the arrival of the motor car, the arrival of the carriage; the lamp standard, the gas mantle, the candle) with one constancy of faith throughout: that they, by the ordinariness of their rituals, guaranteed each other immortality. He sat up quickly, and let out a small chuckle. Yes, that was it, that was what he wanted. Somehow, in a way that seemed half-comical to Conrad since he knew that after his death his lumpen, academic daughter would hardly care, he knew that the almost completed family tree would give in palpable form to Alice what she already had. ‘Not the experience of one life only, but of many generations,’ he murmured, smiling to think it had taken him a lifetime to realise that immortality is possible, in the end, through love.

  He resented the sound of the doorbell, which hauled him from his satisfying reverie, and so he took even longer than usual to shuffle downstairs and unlock the front door. His eyes were misty; for a second the two forms on the doorstep were blurred, but he blinked, vision clearing, and stared in astonishment at the policewoman who had interviewed him three or four days ago, and Daphne Ryan.

  Daphne looked old, he thought, thinking how odd it is that you do not notice aging in people you see each day, and then suddenly the gap between you narrows. The fat on her face seemed slack today, and hung in folds like the jowls of a dog. (‘Not beautiful, poor Daphne,’ he often said to David.) ‘May we come inside, Mr Hartley? I’m afraid we have some rather unpleasant news.’ The policewoman’s voice had deepened a tone; it had lost the trace of restlessness, of boredom he had detected days ago.

  Conrad stood aside in silence to let them pass, and a sudden feeling of awe left him feeling suspended, as if all things – his pulse, the dust, the motion of life in the garden, even Daphne’s habitual puffy breathing – were waiting. It was Daphne who broke the spell, turning without bothering to hide the smears on her sagging face. ‘Oh Conrad, I don’t know how to tell you – it’s so awful, so awful. They found out now. It wasn’t what everybody thought. It wasn’t a heart attack at all. Oh Conrad!’

  He stared at her. ‘What’s happened, Daphne?’

  WPC Dix led Daphne to an armchair, and arranged her in it like a child playing with a doll; gentle but with an impression of power. ‘Miss Ryan insisted she came with me, Mr Hartley, though I suggested she should rest. You see, the results of the post mortem show quite conclusively that Dr Anderson took his own life. He killed himself.’

  He blinked at her, and his pink mouth fell open. ‘David? Killed himself?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Daphne thumped her own knee with a fist. ‘I just don’t believe it. It must be a mistake; how can they possibly know? How can they be sure? David’s the last person …’

  ‘Miss Ryan, there is no doubt! Look, he was a GP, and I’m afraid it’s a well-known fact that doctors who’re depressed have got all the chances and all the knowledge. There’s a lot of suicide amongst them for just that reason. Mrs Anderson was given all the medical details yesterday, and the full report has gone to the Coroner. There’s no doubt,’ she repeated, shaking her head.

  ‘Who told Eleanor?’ asked Conrad.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘How did she take it?’

  The policewoman grimaced. ‘Shocked, of course. Didn’t believe us at first, but then, she wouldn’t want to, would she?’

  Leaning forward in her chair, Daphne reached out and plucked at his dressing-gown cord. ‘We’ve got to help her, Conrad,’ she said urgently. ‘We’ve got to talk to her, and try to find out why. You can help. You knew him so well.’

  He sat down wearily; it was an effort to raise his head and meet the eyes of the two women who watched him with different expressions of expectation on their faces. What was he supposed to tell them? That now, quite suddenly, he could recall and analyse the precise nature of the despair that took David alone into the hills to end his life? He closed his eyes for a second to summon up the ghost – not Alice this time, not his dearest spirit, but David who was also dear, though distant too. Mostly they would sit upstairs in the bedroom, much warmer in winter Conrad said, excusing his need to economise on heating. David would pour the whiskey, and they would talk about what they had been reading, and people in the village, and sometimes politics too. The implications of headlines in The Times … the usual things. The trouble with David was that he disbelieved in history, Conrad often thought after he had gone. The doctor’s desire that things as well as people should grow better led him into perpetual disappointment, and his failure to expect randomness made him doubly vulnerable. But to what? Was it really despair? It had never struck Conrad as such, never crossed his mind that the prevailing lowness of spirits to which David confessed was more than tiredness with patients, but something as serious as grief, or depression, or any other clinical label. Despair was better; it was final.

  ‘You see, I never thought of David as the depressive type,’ Daphne was saying.

  It irritated Conrad. His voice was loud in the room: ‘David wasn’t any “type” at all. Yes, he was tired at times and felt that people came back to him again and again with physical and mental problems he couldn’t solve. But that’s normal. I challenge you to show me anyone in this village who doesn’t feel, at times, that the day to day struggle just isn’t worth it. But it’s not enough to kill yourself for. If it was we should all give in. Nobody would live. It would be all over.’

  ‘He didn’t leave a note, Conrad. I wish he had,’ said Daphne, in a small and puzzled voice.

  ‘No,’ said the policewoman wonderingly. ‘No note, not so much as a line. And yet most people who do … that … like to tell their families why. They want to explain. But not a thing! Unless …’ she paused and looked closely at Daphne, then at Conrad, ‘unless there was something going on in that marriage we don’t know about.’

  ‘Like what, for example?’ Daphne retorted, indignantly.

  ‘Like tension, that’s all. How do any of you know that the doctor and his wife weren’t having a terrible time? Friends don’t know what goes on inside a marriage. They might have been very unhappy, and you needn’t have known. They might have hidden it from you completely.’

  ‘No!’ Daphne almost shouted, ‘they wouldn’t!’ She shook her head so violently that her chair groaned.

  As they rose to go Conrad thought of something: ‘What will they say … in the court, I mean?’

  The policewoman hesitated. ‘Well, I shouldn’t make any comment at all, but on the basis … oh well, I think it’ll be the usual sort of thing: “Balance of the mind disturbed”, you know.’

  ‘Oh, it sounds so dreadful,’ Daphne moaned.

  ‘Sounds, Daphne?’ Conrad’s tone was wry. ‘Surely you’re not worrying about what people will think?’

  ‘But it will be in the newspapers, and everybody will know. So terrible for poor Eleanor. So humiliating.’ He looked at her curiously, raising his eyebrows, but the policewoman was already leading her away.

  Upstairs again, Conrad sat at his desk, looking down at the papers. Who were those people … Daphne Ryan, Eleanor Anderson, a policewoman whose name he had forgotten, David Anderson? Alice Ranshaw too … They were all as mysterious to him in that instant as Ernest Theodore Ranshaw (1840-1910), her grandfather, a Bristol solicitor, or Susan Bishop (1848-1914) his wife, or William Tremain Bishop (1820-1880) her father, the Warwickshire farmer, or … No, it was exhausting: it made him dizzy. Conrad put his hand over his eyes, and sat there without moving.

  ‘It’s terrible, really,’ Jean Orton said, as she walked along the supermarket aisle, searching for cut mixed peel. The cans of baked beans and tomato soup clanked in her trolley, and packets of frozen food spread a fine mist over the things they jostled. ‘I mean, when you think of what must have been going on in his mind! It don’t bear thinking about,’ Mrs Patrick nodded, waving a packet of spaghetti in the air. ‘They do say he gave himself a massive overdose of somethi
n’ or other. Easy for doctors, innit?’

  ‘Wicked, though.’ Jean frowned and paused, deciding on the walnut pieces. ‘Let’s face it, you must be pretty selfish to go and do that. If you stopped and thought for two seconds about them left after, you couldn’t go and do it, could you Mary? You couldn’t.’

  The other woman shook her head. ‘I tell you what, Jean. Sheila’s gone right down, because of it. You should see her!’

  ‘Bad, is she?’

  ‘Thin! Really terrible she looks. She said to me this morning, she said she didn’t know how he could go and do it. Not her Doctor Anderson.’

  ‘My Pete says she’s always been soft on the doctor. Sad, really. Mind you, when you think what she has to put up with at home.’

  In the newsagent’s Ray Tilley presided over similar conversations, and for once the daily papers lay unread on his counter as the morning filled itself with talk, speculation, recrimination, and emphatic shaking of heads. At one he closed the shop and walked along the High Street to The King’s Head, a treat he permitted himself only on very special occasions like his birthday, or an especially good match.

  He knew there must be only one topic of conversation in the pub and he wanted to take part; after all, Winterstoke was as dull as most villages, and an Event added lustre to their collective life, glamorising (however briefly) anyone associated with the drama. So it gave Ray an indefinable pleasure to say in his shop, ‘He came in here just the day before. Hadn’t seen him for days. Mind, I thought there was something funny about him. His eyes … I’m sure I said so to our Ann that night.’ And half Winterstoke listened, just as now they did at the bar, so that Ray credited himself with a perception he had never dreamt he possessed. Even the loud Adrian Wright listened respectfully to this anecdote which grew in significance with each telling, so that David Anderson’s apparent disorder became magnified, his face more haggard and his manner more strange, even in the purchasing of a tube of mints.