The Anderson Question Page 5

  She stared at him. ‘Do you mean he had secrets?’

  ‘No special secrets, although indeed he might. But you see, we all have secrets. I’m quite sure you have a few yourself.’

  He grinned at her, showing yellow teeth. WPC Dix dropped her gaze, feeling out of her depth and annoyed. Ignoring the inappropriate playfulness of his last remark she made a few notes in silence, whilst he watched her. Suddenly he laughed, a dry but high-pitched sound. ‘It’s all absurd you know. You are probably writing down that I said Dr Anderson had hidden depths, or something like that. Yet you could take your notebook into Winterstoke High Street and interview the first person you meet, and in fifteen minutes you’ll discover just as many puzzles, if you ask the right questions.’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t disappear, do they?’

  ‘They might want to.’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere, Mr Hartley. Now, tell me if the doctor might have had any … friendships … nobody knew about.’

  ‘Well you know, I think David’s only real relationship was with himself. Oh, he loved Eleanor, and I like to think he was fond of me, and his patients, but … yes, with himself. And sometimes they quarrelled, David and himself, and sometimes that made him unhappy. But he wouldn’t ever tell me about that, because most of us don’t. But I’ve known him for many years, and I could tell. But I could be wrong. It’s easy to be wrong.’

  ‘It would help if …’

  ‘Help if I could tell you something definite to write in your little notebook, eh? But it’s not for telling, not because I’ve nothing to tell, or anything to hide, but because it will not be put into words, not that easily. David and I had one thing in common, and that was intuition. Guesswork forms a part of my profession, and his.’

  ‘But I thought … Are you a doctor too?’ She looked at her notebook for guidance.

  He smiled, ‘Oh no, I don’t think I could bear all those aching joints. No, I deal in history, and odd as it may seem to you, I am in fact a doctor of that. Diagnosing the ills of the past! Not that I do any of that any more, not for years.’ Sandra sighed heavily, but he did not hear. ‘Now I only concentrate on what used to be my hobby, the direct links between the past and the present, rather than the casual ones. The simple things – like who your grandmother was, and who her grandmother was, and where they came from and who they married. Tracing it back and back.’

  ‘What’s the point?’ she asked, sullenly.

  ‘Well, sometimes it can mean people inherit money, you know – some point in that, I should say! But people like to discover. Sometimes it makes them feel secure, or helps them understand. People feel so confused so much of the time …’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ she interjected, with heavy irony.

  ‘… that they’re comforted by the design of it all. The tree itself, and all the little branches, coming right down to you. Would you like to see one?’

  ‘Er, no thank you, I really think we should concentrate on Dr Anderson. All I’m trying to discover is if anybody in this village can suggest what might have happened to him. And I’m going round in circles.’

  ‘Well, things do, don’t they?’ he said, beaming at her and rising to his feet so that she had no choice but to do the same.

  ‘But you haven’t told me what you and he talked about,’ she said desperately.

  ‘Oh, the usual things – books, politics, God, nothing unusual. I should say that David Anderson was as interested in the world as most people, and as sad as most people too.’

  ‘Sad?’

  ‘Oh yes, nothing dramatic. Perfectly ordinary. People get tired.’

  ‘Do you realise that all the time you talk about him in the past, Mr Hartley, as if you assume he’s dead?’

  ‘Do I? Well, so I do. And I can’t explain that either.’ He beamed at her again.

  As the policewoman walked down the High Street the thought of Steve Jennings at the rendezvous suddenly seemed very enticing. At least he was normal and young, not like this village of impossibly tedious lunatics. She had borne Sheila Simmonds’s snuffling loquaciousness, the gloomy mumblings of the gardener and his wife, the breathless effusiveness of that over-made up fat old maid, and the snootiness of Mrs Anderson; now the session with Conrad Hartley made her long for a transfer to Bristol where she could deal with some healthily difficult girls on the game. Outside the newsagent she stopped, knowing her duty.

  Ray Tilley was reading the Daily Mirror, standing behind the counter with his hands spread flat to support his weight.

  ‘A packet of Silk Cut, please.’

  He reached behind him, and handed her the cigarettes, whilst she kept silent, knowing that if she did he would speak.

  ‘Found anything out, then?’

  ‘Not much. We’ve talked to just about everyone in this village, but no one’s come up with any answers.’

  ‘What did you expect then?’

  ‘Oh, anything. People don’t just disappear. They run away, or they get murdered, or they have an accident. There’s always an explanation. And if you talk to people long enough you usually find a lead. What about you? Any thoughts?’

  He folded his arms, willing to talk. ‘Well, we all knew him, like. He delivered my boy and girl, and the wife has trouble with her back. He’s very good.’

  The same routine, the same slow nods and irrelevant answers, and all of it entered in the notebook. WPC Dix fought her impulse to walk out of the shop and light a cigarette in the middle of the street. ‘Who cares?’ she thought. ‘What does it matter what’s happened to him?’

  Ray Tilley was shaking his head. ‘He didn’t come into the shop much. Non-smoker, of course. But he used to come in a lot to buy chocolate for little Todd Ainslie,’ he paused, ‘until he didn’t need to anymore.’ She nodded, noting. ‘Mrs Anderson’s in here a lot, though, so I know her very well. Fine woman too – the backbone of this village, if you ask me. I’ll tell you something …’ He lowered his voice and leaned towards her across the counter, ‘all this talk of him running off with someone else is so much nonsense, to my way of thinking. She’s a fine-looking woman, Mrs Anderson, and you could tell they was suited, like. My wife always says they’re a perfect couple, kind of thing. Still, you never know, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said WPC Dix, ‘you don’t.’

  Paul lay on his bed, and when Eleanor came in he did not immediately remove the tiny headphones. Her mouth made shapes, her hands fluttered in the air, and at last she frowned, pointing at the small cassette player. He stared up at her, as if from a great distance as the music thundered in his ears and then closed his eyes – knowing how badly he was behaving and that the guilt would hit him immediately, making the gesture pointless. The darkness was a warm apricot; it welcomed him. Phone calls, rings on the doorbell, questions, tears from Margaret Ainslie, and through it all his mother’s tight, white face staring at him like an unwilling supplicant, one too proud to speak, to ask for help from one she knew to be weaker than herself … it was all intolerable, and he longed to leave. Yet all the while he could not rid himself of his own questions, not the simple one of what had happened to his father (for that seemed permanent now, as the nightmare hours had merged, making the normal past a myth) but the dizzying mental search for sounds and images just out of reach, beyond obvious recollections. It was the voice he could not find, and now the face had faded too, and although his parents’ wedding photograph stood on the bureau in the sitting-room, it gave no clue, nothing that could be analysed, like the bite of lines at the corner of eyes and mouth, which always betray. David Anderson’s face floated in and out of Paul’s mind, in the pale opacity behind his eyelids, hovering just out of reach as an escaped balloon tantalises a child.

  He felt a hand on his arm, and opened his eyes to see that Eleanor’s were wet. He pulled off the headphones and sat up quickly, hating himself. With no time to think, he reached out an arm and put it round her shoulders.

  ‘Sorry, I just wanted to be by myself.’

&nbs
p; ‘It felt so empty downstairs. Yet I was usually alone in the daytime, when I was in.’

  ‘You saw people a lot.’ He withdrew his arm.

  ‘Yes, but that’s different. That’s my life – out there.’ She pointed at the window. ‘All my committee work. But in here it was just me and David. We saw people less and less. He didn’t like formal social things, as you know.’

  ‘All those drinks before Sunday lunch,’ Paul said, with a child’s vivid memory of forests of legs, loud voices, and faces waving down to him on stalks, and roast potatoes burnt.

  ‘You have to see people, when you live in a village,’ said Eleanor, defensiveness creeping into her voice.

  They sat on the edge of the bed without speaking, until Paul felt uncomfortable and got up, acting a particular sort of agitation he did not feel, to give himself an excuse to move. He strode about. ‘I think he’s dead, mum,’ he blurted. ‘He has to be dead.’

  ‘No.’ Eleanor stared straight ahead, and said the word with certainty, not protest.

  ‘Then what could have happened? Unless there’s something you haven’t told me. Had you and he … er … not been getting on lately? Had you had a quarrel?’

  ‘Paul!’ she said angrily, opening the door. ‘You’re as bad as everyone else. David and I never quarrelled, not ever! We loved each other more than you can possibly understand. And it’s that which keeps me going.’ She slammed the door, before he could see the sudden collapse of her face.

  ‘I suppose we’ll have to have a rehearsal,’ said Daphne, handing Enid her tea.

  ‘I hope you didn’t put any sugar in it.’

  ‘People need to, even if they do it year after year. Last year Mr Wright nearly forgot to announce the raffle, do you remember?’

  ‘I remember those youths lumbering out during my nocturne,’ Enid said, angrily, flexing her long fingers which glittered with garnet and opal. She wore their mother’s wedding ring too, on her right hand, and regarded the jewellery as the elder daughter’s right.

  ‘That was rude,’ said Daphne mildly.

  ‘Is this Earl Grey?’

  ‘I put a touch of Assam with it. The Victorians always blended their own teas … those pretty tea boxes they kept near the fire.’

  ‘Hmmm. Well the next time you conduct an experiment I’d rather be consulted first, if you don’t mind. I think I’ll have some Lapsang Souchong, and for heaven’s sake make it weak!’ Daphne rose obediently, but just as she reached the door her sister gave way to the temptation she had so far resisted, to gossip. ‘Mrs Madison was talking to me about the Andersons. She says the whole village is convinced it’s a bad business.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Daphne sat down heavily.

  ‘Well, they don’t think David’s been murdered, although that’s been my theory.’ Two Agatha Christies lay with the Trollope by the armchair. ‘Mrs Madison says that the general view is that David had been looking a bit secretive lately, and somebody says they thought he must have a mistress – and that Eleanor has brought it on herself.’

  Daphne was amazed, as well as indignant. ‘What an appalling thing to say,’ she shouted, growing crimson. ‘Why should they think such things?’

  Enid put on her glasses, and surveyed her hands again, spread out before her on the light grey rug that covered her knees, despite the warmth of the day. ‘Don’t be naive, Daphne. You always find that people resent the people they depend on. That’s why they enjoy it if they’re pulled down in some way. It’s a sort of revenge for dependence, and a consolation too. They want there to be a scandal, because if it emerges that David has left Eleanor, it will make all their own unhappy marriages seem more tolerable.’

  ‘You’re so cynical, Enid.’

  ‘Not cynical at all. I just spend all my time reading those,’ (she waved her hand at the bookshelves) ‘and those awful library books you choose, and so it’s obvious to me that most situations have love or envy at the core. Or plain despair. Now, what about that tea?’

  Daphne walked quickly into the kitchen, feeling that she had betrayed somebody, although she did not know who. ‘Not Eleanor, not David,’ she murmured, feeling that not even the spite could touch them now. ‘Perhaps it’s me,’ she thought, reaching to take the correct tea from the cupboard. The kitchen clock ticked, the canisters stood in their neat rows, labelled with the contents, and all the formica surfaces were clear and clean, but Daphne took no pleasure in the kitchen she thought of as her refuge. She stood staring at her bulbous reflection in the kettle, wondering at the realisation that she lived her life through those mysterious others, complete in their perfection, with her outside, her nose pressed to the glass – so that all insults diminished her own faith. The kitchen filled with steam, and Enid called sharply.

  The view from here is beautiful, we should have come more often. Paul liked it when he was a little boy, but there always seemed so little time. When I was small my father sometimes took me with him on his rounds, to see the old people with their twisted hands and houses that smelt of age and poverty. They frightened me; I turned my eyes away from the withered limbs they offered him, and the wrinkled stomachs and thighs suddenly exposed. Then there would come the time when we would pass by that particular door and he would tell me that Mrs or Mr had passed on – never sadly though, always with acceptance. Once I heard him murmur to himself that usually it was a relief. We would ride along Lavender Hill in his tall square Austin and visit families in Victorian flats with winding stone staircases. I would stand at the door, not daring to follow him into rooms that smelt of urine, inhabited by children my own age who stared at me with cold eyes in dirty faces. I used to wonder at those children: what they were born for, if it was to be so miserable and not have any proper clothes, let alone toys. But once when I said that to him he reproached me; you must never judge, he said, for there is always the possibility of happiness. For everyone. I did not believe him, and when we went home for tea by our bright fire, and my mother’s face shone as she took me on her lap, I thought in secret that for me the mere possibility would not be enough. Only that would do; everything else would be a falling-off, a slow melting away into the earth.

  School changed it all, inevitably. I still find myself wondering why they chose to send me away; we were right not to do it to Paul. She cried and said it would be good for me. Good for me? But how? I asked, knowing it would still happen. It was the end of that unnoticed happiness children expect, the kind you do not value because you never think about it; because afterwards everything came in a package. School and the sniffing dormitory, then home and my own room; staff and matron and boys with red legs, then mother and father and the talk of patients. The patients … They became an extension of the family in the end: I knew their births, their foibles, their ailments, and I watched, through him, their deaths. The smell in my nostrils was disinfectant, although I did not know it; and already (by the time I was sixteen or seventeen) I was infected by that nameless thing which somehow he escaped. It is hard to name, although I used to think it was a sense of dread. No, not that… more a sense of being false, a fraud, someone who could seem to care most deeply and yet not care at all.

  You understand more, looking back, but there is never enough time. Eleanor never makes time, and I sometimes look at her across the kitchen table at breakfast, and wonder what it is she runs from without ever allowing herself a backward glance. Does she feel it closer all the time, and snapping at her ankles? Perhaps she does not feel it at all – so useful, Eleanor, and convinced of everything she does. Enviable, that certainty. And yet she does not enjoy my little case histories, as mother liked father’s; no talk of patients permitted, and perhaps she is right. It is so wearisome in the end, after all, and there is nothing I can do. That is why this is so comforting, so beautiful; to lie back and look at the sky, not minding the freshness of that wind, feeling all of it so far away.

  Poor Sheila. I’ve let her down at last, as I knew I would. If I think of her panic, if I think of them all waitin
g there, and wondering … No, no, no, I will not. That bird up there, is it a hawk? Only a dot. I didn’t ever learn the names of birds and trees; always a city person at heart. But lying here, with him far above me and the little rustling noises all around, and the springiness of this whatever-it-is beneath my back, I want at last to know, although typically I say it when I know it is far too late.

  Perhaps I do know, though, something more vital than the naming; something instead to do with the essence of all that is around me: room for questioning. The names deceive, just as ours do, packaging us off into isolated corners: me, Eleanor, Conrad, Jack, Paul, Sheila, Mr Wainwright, the bird above, that tree with spiky grey-green leaves, this beetle running over my hand, turning frantically to avoid the forest of hairs. Because I do not know the names I cannot know the history, and so I accept, without choice, what is. Yet with us it is misleading and entrapping: the identities build up around us, like the walls of our houses, trying to keep the darkness at bay, when we know deep down that were we to venture out, to walk into the blackness and submit ourselves naked to the gale, we should be the same in the end: ‘unaccommodated man’.

  A relief to realise that, and an escape too. So perhaps he was right after all: ‘always the possibility of happiness’, yet wrong not to point out to me how unexpected it might be, and not necessarily to be found in the usual places, like endless replicas of the fire at home, and mother. Here. It may be here. Emptiness in that sky above me now, because the bird has dropped, and delivered death to a small creature who should not, after all, have expected anything else.