The Pariah Read online

  I went into the kitchen, hesitated again, and then decided to make myself a cup of tea.

  Maybe a couple of aspirin would help, too. I went over to the worktop where the kettle was standing, and to my alarm there was already a thin curl of steam rising out of the spout.

  With the tips of my fingers, I touched the kettle’s lid. It was scalding hot. I stepped back from the kettle and frowned at it. My frowning reflection, ridiculously distorted, stared back at me from its stainless-steel sides. I knew that I had been thinking of making tea, but had I actually switched on the kettle myself? I couldn’t remember doing it. Yet the kettle had boiled, which usually took two or three minutes, and automatically switched itself off.

  I must have done it myself. I was tired, that was all. I reached up to the wall-cupboard to take myself down a cup and saucer. And as I did so I could hear it again, I was convinced that I could hear it again, that faintest of singing. I paused, straining my ears, but it was gone. I took out the cup and saucer, and the small Spode teapot, and switched on the kettle again to bring the water back to the boil.

  Maybe Jane’s sudden death had affected me more than I had realized. Maybe bereavement found ways of expressing itself in visions, tricks of the mind, and odd sensations. Hadn’t Jung talked about a collective unconscious, a pool of dreams in which we all shared? Maybe if one soul was lost to that pool, it set up ripples that everybody could feel, especially those who were closest.

  The kettle was almost boiling again when, slowly, its shiny surface began to mist over, as if the temperature in the kitchen had suddenly dropped. But it was a chilly night, and so it didn’t surprise me too much. I went across to the other side of the kitchen to fetch the old pewter tea-caddy. When I came back, however, for a few brief seconds, I was sure that I saw writing on the misted side of the kettle, as if somebody had quickly scrawled something there with their finger. At that instant, the kettle boiled, and the switch clicked out, and the mist faded away. But I peered at the kettle intently for a sign of what I had seen, and after I had filled up the teapot I boiled the kettle again to see if the writing reappeared. There was a smear which might have been an ‘S’ and another smear which might have been an ‘e’, but that was all. I was probably going quietly bananas. I took my tea into the living-room, and sat down by the still-warm fireplace, and sipped it, and tried to get my mind straight.

  That couldn’t have been writing. It couldn’t have been anything more than greasy marks on the side of the kettle, where the condensation wouldn’t cling. I didn’t believe in ouija boards or automatic writing, or ‘presences’. I didn’t believe in poltergeists and I didn’t believe in any of that occult thought-transference stuff, psychokinetics, moving ashtrays around just by thinking about them, any of that. I wasn’t saying that people weren’t entitled to believe in them if they wanted to, but I didn’t. Not really. I mean, I wasn’t prepared to reject occult phenomena out of hand. Maybe some people had actually witnessed that kind of thing. But I hadn’t, and more than anything else I prayed that I wasn’t going to.

  I very much didn’t want to think that Quaker Lane Cottage might possibly be haunted, especially by anyone I knew. Especially, God forbid, by Jane.

  I stayed in the living-room until the long-case clock in the hallway struck five, sleepless and unhappy and deeply disturbed. At last the North Atlantic dawn came austerely through the leaded windows, and dressed the living-room in gray. The wind had died down now, to a chilly breeze, and I went out through the back door and took a barefoot walk in the dewy garden, dressed in nothing but my bathrobe and my old sheepskin jacket, and stood by the garden swing.

  It must have been low-tide, because far out over the sands of Granitehead Neck, the terns were already swooping down for clams. Their cries were like the cries of children.

  Off to the north-west, I could see the Winter Island lighthouse, still winking. A cold photographic morning. A picture of the gone world.

  The swing was more than 70 or 80 years old, constructed like an armchair, with a wide carved splat. On the cresting-rail was chiseled the face of the sun, Old Sol, and the words ‘All, except their sun, is set,’ which Jane had discovered was a quotation from Byron. The chains of the swing were suspended from a kind of gallows; but this was hard to make out, because whoever had built the swing all those years ago had planted a small apple-tree beside it, and now the swing was completely umbrellaed with gnarled old fruit-branches, and in the summer the apple-blossom showered all around you when you were swinging, like snow.

  Swinging (Jane had said, as she swung and sang) was the pastime of fools and jesters, a kind of medieval madness not unlike the whirling of whirling Dervishes. It reminded her of motley and mummers and pig’s-bladders on sticks, and she said that it had once been a way to conjure up imps and devils and hobgoblins. I remembered laughing at her, as she swung; and as I stood there that early morning alone, I found my eyes following the arc in which she had once been swinging, although the swing-chair itself now hung still, beaded with dew, unmoved by the breeze, and quite unmoved by my memories.

  I thrust my hands into my jacket pockets. It looked as if it was going to be one of those clear, fresh Atlantic days, cold as hell , but bright. I pushed the swing a little so that the chains complained, but even when I pushed it harder, I couldn’t reproduce the noise I had heard last night. To set up that distinctive creakkk-squik, you had to sit right on the swing, right up on that high-backed seat, and push yourself back, and up, and back, and up, until your toes were almost brushing the lower branches of the apple-tree.

  I walked down through the orchard, right to the end of my garden, and looked down the twisting slope of Quaker Lane towards Granitehead Village. Two or three chimneys were already smoking, fishermen’s houses, and the smoke was leaning off westwards, towards Salem, whose skyline was already becoming clearer across the harbour.

  Slowly, I returned to the house, glancing from side to side as I went for any signs of crushed grass, or footprints, any sign that somebody had visited my garden in the night; but there was none. I went back into the kitchen, leaving the door open, and brewed myself another cup of Bohea, and ate three Pepperidge Farm coconut cookies, feeling unreasonably guilty that this was my entire breakfast. Jane had always insisted on cooking me bacon, or waffles, or shirred eggs. I took my cup of tea upstairs with me, and went to the bathroom to shave.

  We had fitted out the bathroom with a large Victorian basin we had rescued from a derelict house in Swampscott, and we had adorned it with huge brass faucets. Over the basin was a genuine barbershop mirror, surrounded by an oval frame of inlaid kingwood. I inspected myself in the glass and decided I didn’t look too bad for a man who had been awake for most of the night - not only awake, but scared to go to sleep.

  Then I turned on the faucets and filled up the basin with hot water.

  It was only when I raised my head to start shaving that I saw the writing scrawled across the mirror. At least, it could have been writing; although it might almost as easily have been nothing more than curving drips of moisture. I stared at it closely, frightened and fascinated, and I was sure that I could make out the letters S, V, E, but with indistinguishable letters in between.

  S something V something-something E? What on earth could that mean? SAVE? SAVE

  ME?

  I was suddenly sure that I caught the reflection of a movement, something white flickering past the open bathroom doorway behind me. I turned around and said, over-loudly, ‘Who’s there?’ and then I stalked on fright-stiffened legs out on to the landing, and looked down the dark carved staircase towards the hallway. Nobody there. No footsteps, no whispers, no mysteriously closed doors, nothing. Only a small Edward Hicks painting of a matelot, staring back at me in that bovine, placid way that all Edward Hicks people stare at you.

  Nobody there. And yet, for the first time since she had died; for the first time in a whole month of loneliness and silent pain, I found myself whispering, ‘Jane?’

  TWO
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  Walter Bedford sat behind his wide leather-topped desk, his face half-obscured by his green-shaded lamp, and said, ‘I’m taking her mother away next month. A few weeks in Bermuda, maybe, something to settle her mind, help her to come to terms with it. I should have taken her away earlier, I guess; but, you know, what with old Mr Bibber so sick …’

  ‘I’m sorry she’s taken it so badly,’ I said. ‘If there’s anything you want me to do …’

  Mr Bedford shook his head. To both himself and his wife Constance, Jane’s death had been the fiercest tragedy of their whole lives; even fiercer in some ways than losing their only other child, Jane’s brother Philip, at the age of five, of polio. Mr Bedford had told me that he felt when Jane died that he was cursed by God. His wife felt even more bitter, and considered that the agent of the curse was me.

  Although one of Mr Bedford’s younger partners in the Salem law firm of Bedford & Bibber had offered to execute Jane’s will, and to arrange for her funeral, he had insisted on handling all the details himself, with a kind of agonized relish. I understood why.

  Jane had been such a vivid light in all of our lives that it was difficult to let her go; and harder still to think that the day would one day pass when we didn’t think about her, even once.

  She had been buried at the Waterside Cemetery, in Granitehead, on a sharp February afternoon, aged 28, sharing her coffin with our unborn child, and her headstone read

  ‘Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.’

  Mrs Bedford had refused even to look at me throughout the ceremony. I think that in her eyes I was worse than a murderer. I hadn’t even had the civility to kill Jane in person, with my bare hands. Instead, I had al owed fate to do my dirty work for me. Fate had been my hired assassin.

  I had met Jane by accident; at a foxhunt, of all places, near Greenwood in South Carolina, less than two years before, although now it seemed like 20. My presence at the hunt had been compulsory: it was being run across the 1200-acre estate of one of my employer’s most influential clients; whereas Jane was there simply because a gushing girlfriend from Wellesley College had invited her to come for the excitement of being ‘blooded.’ There was no blood, the foxes escaped. But afterwards, in the quiet upstairs gallery of the elegant colonial house, we sat in extraordinary Italian armchairs and drank champagne, and fell in love. Jane quoted Keats to me, and that was why Keats was quoted on her headstone after she was dead.

  ‘I saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry’d -

  “La belle Dame sans merci hath thee in thrall!” ‘

  Ostensibly, we had nothing in common, Jane and I: neither style nor education nor mutual friends. I had been born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a shoe-store owner, Trenton’s Heel-&-Toe, and although my father had done everything he could to give me a superior schooling - ‘no son of mine is going to spend the rest of his life looking at the bottom of other people’s feet’ - I was an irredeemable mid-Westerner.

  Speak to me of Chillicothe, Columbia, and Sioux Falls; those are the names that move me. I studied business at Washington University, and when I was 24 I found myself a sales job with MidWestern Chemical Bonding, of Ferguson.

  I was a 31-year-old business executive who wore gray suits and dark socks and carried undogeared copies of Fortune in my personalized leather briefcase. Jane, on the other hand, was the only daughter of a venerable but not-so-wealthy family from Salem, Massachusetts, the only daughter and now the only child; brought up in prettiness and grace and old-fashioned ways, but sophisticated, too. What you might describe as the local Vivien Leigh. She liked antique furniture and American primitive paintings and hand-sewn quilts, but she had no time for any sewing of her own, and she very rarely wore any underwear, and whenever she went out into the garden she put on high-heeled French slippers, and sank into the dirt alongside the curly kale.

  ‘Damn it, I should have been a good country wife,’ she always used to tell me, when her bread lay doggedly unrisen in its tin; or her marmalade turned to tar. ‘But somehow I just don’t have that edge.’

  She tried on New Year’s Eve to make Hopping John, a dish of bacon and black-eyed peas traditional in the South, but it turned out like red rubber gloves and scorched glue, and when she took the lid off the casserole we laughed until we were weak, and I guess that’s what really close marriages are all about. But she said afterwards, as we lay in bed, ‘The legend is, if you don’t serve Hopping John on New Year’s Day, you’ll have a year’s bad luck.’

  She wasn’t as hopeless as Honey, in the country-and-western song, who wrecked the car and cried when the snow melted, but I expect you can understand why ‘Honey’ wasn’t one of those songs I ever wanted to hear. When it comes to people we’ve loved, and lost, all of us have an infinite capacity for deep-down slush.

  It all ended on Mystic River Bridge, in late January, in blinding snow when she was driving home to Granitehead after visiting her parents’ house in Dedham, and slowed up for the tollbooth, a young dark-haired lady six months pregnant, in a yellow fastback Mustang II; and the airbrakes failed on a Kenworth truck that was following behind her, too close. She was forced through the steering-wheel, baby and all, by 17 tons of truck and a full load of steel piping for the new sewage project up at Gloucester.

  They called me up and I said, ‘Hello’ really brightly, and then they told me that Jane was dead and that was the end of it.

  It was for Jane, less than a year before, that I had handed in my notice at MidWestern Chemical Bonding, and moved to Granitehead. She wanted tranquillity, she had told me, a life of tranquillity, in old country, old surroundings. She wanted children, and happy Christmases, and the kind of gentle Bing Crosby happiness that modern urban Americans had forgotten about. I argued that I was upwardly motivated, that I needed peer acclaim, and dollars, and a Jacuzzi, and garage doors that recognized my voice.

  She said, ‘You’re kidding, John. What do you want.to tie yourself down with all of that stuff for?’ and kissed my forehead, although it seemed to me that when we moved out to Granitehead we acquired more material possessions in the way of clocks and bureau and rocking-chairs than I’d ever dreamed possible or even desirable. I felt within me, too, a kind of deep-rooted panic at the prospect of not earning more money this year than I had the year before.

  When I handed in my notice I was treated as if I had suddenly declared myself to be a closet homosexual. The president read my letter, re-read it, and actually turned it upside-down, to see if it read any different that way. Then he said, ‘John, I’m going to accept your resignation, but I’m going to take the liberty of quoting to you from Horace.

  Caelum non anitnum mutant qui tram mare currunt. They change their skies but not their souls, those who travel across the seas.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Kendrick,’ I said flatly, and drove home to our rented house in Ferguson and finished the best part of a bottle of Chivas Regal before Jane came home.

  ‘You resigned,’ she said, when she came in, her arms full of parcels that already we couldn’t afford.

  ‘I’m home, and I’m drunk, so I must have done,’ I told her.

  Within six weeks, we had moved to Granitehead, within a half-hour’s driving-distance of Jane’s parents; and as summer blossomed we bought Quaker Lane Cottage, on the north-west shore of Granitehead peninsula. The previous owner had grown tired of the wind, the real-estate agent told us; tired of the freezing winters, tired of the Granitehead clams, and had already moved south to a condominium in Fort Lauderdale.

  Two weeks later, when the cottage was still in chaos and my bank account was beginning to look as if it had suffered a regular spraying with Agent Orange, we took a lease on a shopfront property right in the centre of Old Granitehead Village, overlooking the square in which Granitehead’s only witch had been hung up by her heels and burned, in 1691; and in which in 1775 a detail of British redcoats had shot and killed three Massachusetts fishermen. We called the sho
p Trenton’s Marine Antiques (although Jane’s mother had coldly suggested Knautical Knick-Knacks) and we opened it with pride and plenty of ivy-green paint. I wasn’t at all confident that we could last very long, selling nothing but windlasses and demi-cul-verins and clocks made out of flagstaff buttons; but Jane had laughed and said that everybody adored marine antiques, especially people who had never been to sea, and that we’d be rich.

  Well - we weren’t rich, but we made enough to keep i us in logs for the fire, and clam chowder, and Paul Masson red, and to pay the mortgage, and I guess that was all ; Jane really wanted. She wanted babies, too, of course, but babies are free; at least until they’re born.

  In the few short months that Jane and I lived and worked together in Granitehead, I made some of the most important discoveries of my whole life. I discovered, first of all, what love could really be; and it became clear to me that I had never known before. I discovered what loyalty could mean, and self-respect. I also learned tolerance. While Jane’s father treated me as if I were some i anonymous junior clerk he was obliged to amuse at the office Christmas party, and occasionally, though with obvious reluctance, would offer me some of his 1926 brandy, Jane’s mother would actually shudder whenever I came into the room, and pull faces whenever I spoke in my distinctive St Louis accent, and treat me with an ice-cold politeness that was even more chilling than bare hostility. She would do anything rather than talk to me directly. ‘Would he like a cup of tea?’ she would ask Jane, right in front of me; but Jane would retaliate by saying, ‘I don’t know. Ask him. I’m not psychic.’

  I wasn’t Harvard, you see; I wasn’t Hyannisport or Back Bay; or even Kernwood Country Club. They blamed me while Jane was alive for ruining her social prospects; and when she was dead they blamed me for killing her. They didn’t blame the truck-driver, who might have swerved; or the mechanic who should have checked the truck’s servo-lines, and probably hadn’t. They blamed only me.