Page 83 of The Man Who Didn't Call
Jeanne seemed convinced that Derek could help find a solution. ‘It’s his job,’ she kept saying. ‘He’s a community psychiatric nurse, Eddie: he’s there for both of you.’
And I kept replying that there was no way I could hand my mother over to Derek. However wonderful he was. ‘I’mthe only person she wants to call when she needs help,’ I said. ‘There’s nobody else she’d trust.’
‘You don’t know that for certain.’
‘But I do! If I told her she couldn’t call me – even if I said she couldn’t call me asoften– she’d either take no notice and carry on as before, or she’d become dangerously ill. You know her history. You know I’m not just being pessimistic.’
By the time our hour was up, we had made no real progress, but I had promised I’d continue next week without any tantrums.
Jeanne laughed. She said I was doing really well.
I reach the top of the hill, finally, arriving underneath the beech tree I’ve come to check. (It’s metres from the mystery welly.) Back in June, when I was tramping the countryside, thinking angry and confused thoughts about Sarah, I noticed it was suffering dieback – only it’s looking much worse now. I’m guessing some sort of beetle, as there’s no obvious pathogen in the bark, but it’s definitely a goner. I rest a hand on the trunk, saddened to imagine this magnificent beast felled by a snarling chainsaw.
‘Sorry,’ I tell it, because it feels wrong to say nothing. ‘And thank you. For the oxygen. And everything.’
I check the surrounding trees (the welly is still there) and then walk back down the hill, hands in pockets. My brain keeps trying to slide me back in the direction of Sarah, and her sister’s visit to a grief counsellor, but I resist. I make myself think about the tree instead. The tree is a problem I know how to solve. I’ll call Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust tomorrow, see if they’d like some help bringing it down.
By the time I get back to my barn, I’m feeling quite normal again.
Then I step inside and find my mother standing by mydrawer of purple letters. My secret drawer of purple letters, which nobody on earth other than Jeanne knows about. And I realize that Mum is reading –she is reading quite calmly –one of my letters to Alex. She holds it in one hand, an ugly expression on her face.
I have to take a moment to be certain this is really happening. To be certain that my mother – my dear mother – is committing a breach of privacy on this level. But at that moment Mum turns the letter over, so she can read the back of the page, and I know there’s no doubt.
Disbelief melds slowly into fury.
‘Mum?’ I say. My hand is clamped to the doorframe like a bench vice.
In one movement she slides the letter behind her and turns to me.
I reread in my head the text message I sent her before going out:I’m going for a walk. Just to warn you, I’ll be leaving my phone, for a bit of peace. But I’ll be back in a couple of hours.
I always deliberately overestimate the time it’ll take me to do something. She panics otherwise.
‘Hi, darling!’ It’s that voice again, the one she does when she’s pushed me too far. Only today it’s even higher. ‘You were very quick.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘I . . .’
There is a thick, panicked silence as she weighs up her options. Everything is still. Even the trees outside seem to have paused, as if waiting for confirmation of treachery. But she can’t do it. She can’t tell me the truth. ‘I could hear something,’ she says, and her voice is so full of inflection she could be on children’s television. ‘It sounded like a mouse. Have you had trouble with mice recently, Eddie? It was near here.I’ve just been poking around . . . I’ve opened a few drawers. I hope you don’t mind . . .’
She continues in this vein until I shout— No, I actually bellow, ‘HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN READING MY LETTERS?’
There is a bottom-of-the-sea silence.
‘I did find some letters, just a second before you arrived,’ she says eventually. ‘I haven’t read them, though. I took a look at one and thought,Oh, this has nothing to do with me, so I was just putting it back when—’
‘Don’t lie to me!How long have you been reading my letters?’
Mum’s hand flies to her face, and she starts to take off her glasses, but then changes her mind, leaving them skewed across her nose like a child’s seesaw. I look at her and I don’t see my mother. Only rage, a giant hotplate of fury.
‘How long have you been reading my letters?’ I ask, for the third time. I don’t think I have ever spoken to her in this tone. ‘And don’t lie,’ I say. ‘Not again. Seriously, Mum, do not lie to me.’
I’m wholly unprepared for what comes next. I’m expecting weeping, my mother slumped on the floor begging forgiveness, when suddenly she turns, sweeping the letter into the air as if it were a parking ticket or some other insult to her existence. It zigzags slowly towards the floor. ‘Like you’ve lied to me?’ she says. ‘Like you lied to me about wanting to go to LA for a “holiday”? About wanting to see your friend Nathan, do a bit of surfing? Like you lied to me about Alan having an “emergency” the day you got back?’
With a deliberateness I find mesmerizing, she moves forward and plants her hand on the bench that runs down the centre of this part of the workshop. ‘Like you lied to me about that . . . thatgirl?’ She stares wildly at me, as ifsearching for her son in the face of a serial killer. ‘How could you? How could you havesleptwith her, Eddie?How could you betray your sister like that?’
She must have been reading my letters for months.
