Limelight, p.9
Limelight, page 9
Evelyn, when I finally get back to her bungalow, has come to the same conclusion.
‘Poor woman.’ She shakes her head. ‘If we’d only known.’
The fact that she seems to be including me in this act of oversight comes as some comfort.
‘And Andy?’ I nod outside.
‘I haven’t seen him, not properly, not to talk to. That’s another admission, isn’t it? Maybe we should have lived somewhere like this all our lives. Maybe we should keep closer to people.’
‘McFaul’s a grump,’ I say at once. ‘I’m not sure he needs other people.’
‘You really think so? I’ve seen them together, remember, when they didn’t know anyone else was watching. From where I was standing, he doted on her. Go next door, my lovely. Give him a hug. Tell him we’re here for him. You’re much braver than me.’
This, unusually for Evelyn, has the force of an order and we both know it. When I first knock next door, nothing happens. Only when I try a third time does McFaul finally appear.
‘You,’ he says. He’s rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He looks totally knackered.
I try and explain how sorry I am, how sorry we both are, me and Evelyn, but he simply holds the door open wide and gestures me inside. We go through to the kitchen. To my surprise, it’s been tidied up: no mountain of unwashed plates, no smears of grease on the oven knobs, no swing-bin brimming with rubbish, not a single knotted black sack awaiting disposal. The clutter has gone from every working surface and I can even smell the faintest hint of disinfectant.
‘It helps,’ McFaul says simply. He’s noted my interest.
‘I’m sure it does. If you want a hand anywhere else …’ I leave the sentence unfinished.
He shakes his head, puts the kettle on, invites me to sit down. I watch him limping slowly around the kitchen for a moment or two, looking for the jar of coffee he’s tidied away. The last couple of days seem to have aged him immeasurably. I’m looking at an old man with barely half a face.
‘You never told me,’ I say at last. ‘About what was wrong with her.’
‘You know about that shit? MND?’
‘The police mentioned it. I’m just curious why you never did. Either of you.’
‘Not my call. Chrissie was a proud woman. In her own good time, maybe, but even then she’d probably keep it to herself. Share news like that, and you were dead already. That’s what she thought. That’s what she always told me.’
I nod. It fits perfectly with my own impressions of Christianne. A stumble or two? A lunge at the wine glass? Who’s watching? And what does it matter?
‘When did you know she was ill?’ I ask. ‘For sure?’
McFaul takes his time answering. He’s spooning instant coffee into a couple of mugs. He does it with intense concentration, the way a drunk might, and I’m guessing he must have had this same fierce attention to detail when he was in the minefields. Then, it would have helped save his life, and now is probably no different.
‘First signs were in Portugal,’ he says at last. ‘We’d gone to the coast for a couple of days, camping in the dunes. Chrissie always loved swimming, but she kept falling over. She’d watch the waves coming, and knew how to cope, but it didn’t seem to work any more. Her balance had gone. The waves were in charge. At first it made her laugh, me too, then there was other stuff. Back home, she’d miss a light switch with her finger. In the local store, she couldn’t get the right change out of her purse. Once, we were standing in a car park and she needed money for the machine. It was always windy down there. The coins were at the bottom and she had to take a couple of notes out first and a big gust took them out of her hand. We both did the chasing, I can see it now, the cripple and his wonky mate. We’d stopped laughing by then. Even Chrissie.’
He’d managed to find a local doctor who referred her to the local hospital in Evora, but the facilities were basic.
‘They were good people. The specialist guy suspected MND from the off, but for a proper diagnosis you need all kinds of shit, nerve conduction tests, MRI scan, an electro-something, and even if you went to Lisbon you’d be waiting for ever. So, when he said we’d be better off going home, we took the hint. He was right, too. The medics here have been brilliant. There’s fuck all they can do to cure it, but that’s not the point. We wanted an answer, and that’s what we got.’
‘No cure at all?’
‘None. There are cells in the nervous system that stop working, motor neurone cells, and without those you start losing control. There’s no magic drug, no magic bullet, so basically, you’re stuffed. What’s worse is all the guff on the subject. Fifteen minutes on Google scared us to death. Weakening grip, balance all to fuck, rubbish coordination. Then your speech starts to go, and you’re slurring like an idiot, and finally even swallowing, even breathing, becomes a problem and so you end up in a wheelchair with a tube down your throat. All that just to stay alive?’ He shakes his head.
Scared us to death. Too right, I think.
‘Timescale?’
‘They told us six months to two years. And that was back in the spring. Chrissie had the patience of a saint but there was no way she was waiting that long. She was a nurse, remember. Once she was sure that they’d got the diagnosis bang on, she knew she wanted out.’
‘She told you that?’
‘Of course.’
‘And?’
‘I agreed. Who wouldn’t?’
Who wouldn’t? McFaul has a talent for cutting to the chase and I’m guessing Christianne loved him for it. In a situation like this, you can wring your hands and share your grief on Facebook for just so long but none of that stops it getting worse. In the end – and ‘the end’ is le mot juste – you have to do something. There’s an obvious question here, and I know I have to ask it.
‘Did you know about last night? Going swimming? Never coming back? Was that planned? Something you talked about?’
McFaul glances up at me, just the hint of a smile on his face. This is a man, I sense, who welcomes bluntness, maybe even admires it.
‘No,’ he says. ‘She’d never have told me, warned me, discussed it. Inside she was very private. Once, quite recently, she said I was never to be afraid. Whatever she did would be for the best. But that was it. Finito. End game. In her own time. When she thought it was right. Strictly no tears. All gone.’
With anyone else, on the page, on screen, or – God help us – in real life, this would have triggered a flood of tears, but McFaul simply holds my gaze. Should I reach out? Should I give him a hug? Should I call him Andy? I do none of those things and when I later ask myself why, I realize that the answer’s beyond simple. He doesn’t need it.
‘So why did you report her missing?’ I ask. ‘Why not let her drift away?’
‘Because it took me a while to realize what was going on. When I found her clothes there was no note. I thought she’d gone swimming, just like always, and I thought she might be in trouble. I went looking for her. I tried to find her. I shouted her name. Nothing. Fuck all. So I made the call and the rest …’ He shrugs. ‘Just happened.’
‘Evelyn says they brought you back here, to the bungalow.’
‘They did. She’s right. Apparently, they always search the home premises. People can be odd, they told me. You think they’ve gone missing and they turn up in the strangest places, under beds, in wardrobes, up in tree houses, weird shit like that. I told the guy he was wasting his time, but he found that note for you, so maybe I’m wrong.’
‘Where did she leave it, as a matter of interest?’
‘On the bathroom floor, beneath the basin. She probably propped it against the mirror. Pull the door shut, and the draught would do the rest.’
I nod, swallow hard. McFaul might be immune to grief but I’m not sure I am. He watches me for a moment, then asks me if I’d like something to drink. When I nod, he struggles to his feet and limps next door before reappearing with a bottle of brandy.
‘Neat?’ he says.
‘Neat,’ I agree.
He pours two glasses, slides one across to me, and proposes a toast.
‘She was an incredible woman,’ he says softly. ‘And nothing any of us can do will ever bring her back.’
McFaul and I spend the rest of the day together. A second brandy follows the first but after that he caps the bottle and suggests we go out. We head down towards the seafront, pausing en route to buy a big bag of chips. Both of us, it turns out, are famished.
Walking through the town centre, to my surprise, McFaul appears to know as many people as Christianne. Most of them are tradesmen, middle-aged or younger, buried in the back of a white van or working high on a scaffold. Word has gone round about Christianne, and McFaul accepts condolence after gruff condolence with a grunt and a nod of the head.
‘They’ll find her,’ murmurs a pensioner emerging from the bakery. ‘Bet your life on it.’
At the car park, we head for the incident van. Instead of the icy Inspector Hollick, another officer has taken charge. He’s older, voluble, slightly overweight, and introduces himself as Paul Bevan. He has a light Welsh accent and seems nerveless in the face of near-impossible odds. Had Madame Beaucarne really gone swimming, he agrees, then the outlook would be grim. The water might still be warm, and it’s a glorious day, but even so there are limits to survival time in the English Channel.
‘You think she never went in? Never left the beach?’ McFaul asks.
‘I’m saying I don’t know, can’t be sure. We’re into elimination here, Mr McFaul. We’ve had the lifeboat out all night, and the police chopper was up at first light. With infra-red, even deceased, we’d still find her. The guys who understand these things have plotted the tidal flows. We have eyes on the clifftops, blokes on the beach clear round to Straight Point. Agreed, she might have taken weights into the water, stones from the beach say, but if that was the case she’d have gone under close in. As I understand it, high tide last night was around the time you found her clothes. In which case her body would have washed up later. So …’ He nods towards the beach. ‘Maybe she wasn’t swimming at all.’
Headquarters, he’s glad to report, have allotted a couple of extra officers to the search, and with their help his team are moving from beach hut to beach hut, and combing gardens along the seafront, in case – for whatever reason – Ms Beaucarne has chosen to hide herself away.
‘But why would she do that?’ McFaul again.
‘You want the truth? I have no idea. This job teaches you many things and one of them, I’m afraid to say, is never to discount the impossible. Eliminate everything else, like I said, and you’re probably left with the truth. Does that sound unduly philosophical? If so, you have my apologies. If and when we find something, you’ll be the first to know.’ He pauses. ‘No mobile? Am I right?’
‘Yes.’
‘My congratulations, Mr McFaul. One day, when the penny drops, the rest of us may kick the habit, but somehow I doubt it. Armageddon is more likely than surrendering our smartphones. You’re a lucky man, sir. Stay sane and we’ll do our best to find your partner.’ He turns away to confer with an unseen voice on a proffered radio. When it becomes clear that this is another conversation he finds hard to finish, we turn away.
‘You want me to leave him my mobile number?’ I ask McFaul. ‘Just in case?’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Why not?’
We settle on the beach. The tide is out now, and I can feel the warmth radiating up from the huge, egg-shaped pebbles. A huddle of swimmers in the shallows, all of them women, are preparing to take the plunge and further down the beach an elderly couple are scolding a child for feeding the seagulls.
At length, McFaul stirs. He’s obviously been thinking about Christianne. ‘The last time we went to the GP was back in the early summer,’ he says. ‘She’s a lovely woman but every medic has the same problem with MND.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning it’s incurable, meaning there’s nothing they can really do. That’s not what they’re there for and so they fob you off with forms. That was the real killer. The bloody form. It’s called a DS1500. I’ll remember that forever. She gave one to Chrissie. Signed. Stamped. Witnessed. Everything.’
‘And?’
‘It tells anyone who needs to know that you won’t survive beyond six months. I’m sure it’s really useful, and I’m sure it opens all kinds of doors, but Chrissie was gutted. She called it an advanced death certificate and I guess she was right, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t being dead that mattered. It was what lay behind all those doors.’
‘Like?’
‘Like all the benefits you can get, all the care packages, all the blokes who are going to turn up and fit grab rails in the bathroom, and wheelchair ramps, and all the rest of it. The GP talked about the hospice, too, how Chrissie could make drop-in visits to begin with, just to get used to the place, make friends, see what’s on offer. People talk about The Journey. I’m sure they mean well, but what fucking choice do you have?’
I nod, and agree it must be horrible, but McFaul hasn’t finished.
‘Voice banking?’ he says. ‘Is that a phrase you’ve ever come across?’
‘Never.’
‘Again, it’s useful, obvious, really helpful. A bloke comes along and records a whole load of phrases while you’ve still got the power to speak. Your own voice. Your own way of putting things. Then, later, when you can’t talk at all, you use this special machine, pretending you’re someone that you’re not, someone who’s long gone. Chrissie couldn’t get her head around it. The thought of someone having to cut her food up and feed her was bad enough, but this was way off the scale. She never cried, never. That morning, outside the surgery, she was all over the place. No way, she told me. No fucking way. You understand now?’ He nods at the water, and then gestures back towards the car park and the incident van. ‘So you see why everyone’s wasting their time?’
ELEVEN
At my insistence, the three of us go out to dinner. On Evelyn’s recommendation, I book a table at the local Indian restaurant and we spend a quiet-ish evening trying to cheer McFaul up. It doesn’t help that a couple at a nearby table are discussing the day’s developments on the beach and when they agree that the whole thing – the husband uses the word ‘pantomime’ – is a huge waste of public money, I’m half-expecting McFaul to thump him. Far from it.
‘He’s right,’ he grunts.
Back home, McFaul mumbles a thank you and disappears into his bungalow. Evelyn and I share a nightcap or two and agree that only time will resolve what might have happened to Christianne. When I tell Evelyn about the form from the GP, and how distressed she’d been at the thought of what lay in wait, she nods.
‘We went shopping a couple of weeks ago,’ she says. ‘I drove her over to Exmouth and we dropped in at the big Tesco. There was a woman there with a zimmer frame on wheels. She wasn’t old, not at all. Christianne couldn’t take her eyes off her, barely said a word on the way back.’ She runs her finger around the glass of port. ‘Should I have been nosier? More intrusive? And what on earth are we to do with Andy?’
This, of course, is the million-dollar question. Try as I might, I can’t get that final paragraph of Christianne’s letter out of my mind. Whatever else I owe her memory, I need to keep an eye on the men in her life.
Next morning, I find a number for Sir William Penny and make the call. To my surprise, he recognizes my voice.
‘My dear,’ he says. ‘How’s life up there in the real world?’
When I tell him I’m back in Budleigh, he appears to be delighted. Then he wants to know why.
‘It’s Christianne,’ I tell him. ‘You must have heard, surely?’
‘I have. Of course I have. Is it a tragedy? Alas, yes. Am I surprised? Sadly not. I was talking to Andy early this morning. The poor man’s in a bad place. On his behalf, one can only hope, of course. It’s grand to see the police making such an effort, and here’s hoping it all pays off, but I fear she’s probably gone forever. A lovely, lovely woman. I’ll miss her like hell.’
If anyone else knows why Christianne chose to end it all, I think, then it has to be Budleigh’s distinguished ex-ambassador, not that Sir William wants to dwell on the matter.
‘Where are you just now?’ he asks brightly.
‘I’m staying with Evelyn.’
‘Pay me a visit, then. I’m just round the corner.’
This is confusing. Like most women, I have an uneasy grasp of geography, but Sir William’s pile has to be at least a mile or two away. When I check to be on the safe side, he roars with laughter.
‘I’m doing a spot of gardening on Andy’s behalf,’ he says. ‘Ask Evelyn how to get to the croquet club. They’re forecasting rain so bring a brolly.’
Evelyn supplies the directions. Andy, she says, has one of the allotments adjacent to the croquet pitch, though this is the first time she’s had Bill Penny down as a gardener. When I finally make it to the croquet club, I find him on his hands and knees beside a row of lettuces, hunting for slugs. Gardening, he readily admits, isn’t altogether his thing, but given Andy’s current situation it’s the least he can do.
We take coffee and a toasted bun in the clubhouse. By now, Sir William has emphatically become Bill. He wants to know whether I’ve seen McFaul since what he delicately calls ‘the incident’.
‘Yesterday,’ I say. ‘We spent the afternoon together.’
‘Really? Brave girl. That man can be difficult.’
That man? This doesn’t marry with Christianne’s take on their relationship.
‘I thought you two were close,’ I say lightly. ‘I thought you spent lots of time mending stiles on the coastal path.’
‘We do, we do. And what a pleasure that is. I meant difficult with the fairer sex, my dear. Andy’s a one-girl man, and I suspect he always has been. Courtly? No. Awash with politesse? Sadly not.’
