She opened the front door, wanted to shout his name, but found she couldn’t. It was such a long time since she’d thought of him as ‘Marcus’. Instead, in her mind, he’d become an obstacle, an adversary, a stranger. Was that how he saw her? She didn’t know, because she hadn’t cared.
He was sitting, as she expected, at the dining-room table, laptop open, work spread out around him. He looked up when she walked into the room, his face guarded. It stopped her from saying anything. She felt unable to pick out the right place to start, from the welter of thoughts and emotions in her head. Instead she walked across to him and put her hand on the back of his neck, lightly, nervously. He let it rest there for a few seconds, before leaning forward to close his laptop.
Chapter 76
SOMETHING ABOUT her face looked different. Not the expression – her actual face. It was as if the bones had softened and her features had blurred. It was Fran, but not Fran. She walked across the room without saying anything and laid her hands on him. They hadn’t touched each other for so long that the sensation of her fingers on the back of his neck was strange. Marcus’s instinct was to pull away, but he didn’t, not immediately.
They sat opposite each other at the table and he waited for the fallout, but when Fran finally spoke, it wasn’t the tirade he was expecting. It was a question. A mundane, small, hesitant question. ‘Have you managed to get any work done?’
‘Some.’
She nodded. Still there was no gush of words and emotion. Instead she seemed to be holding herself in check. This was new.
He asked, ‘So how did it go?’
She shrugged off her coat, buying time. Despite everything, he was struck once again by how thin she was. ‘It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.’
‘Okay.’ He said, still wary, waiting for the explosion. ‘How?’
‘I can’t really explain.’ She saw his face and hurried into the next sentence. ‘Not because I don’t want to, but I just can’t – not yet. I don’t know how to.’
He wasn’t surprised that Fran wasn’t prepared to tell him what Harry had or hadn’t said. They’d long since ceased sharing. They both hugged their own versions of grief to their chests fiercely, protectively. Why share, when the only thing you have is so personal and private that you can’t even reveal it to the one person who might begin to understand? Even the facts of their daughter’s death – even that information – she still wanted to hoard for herself. He was reduced, as ever, to the inconsequential. ‘Was the trip all right?’
She looked at her hands. ‘No.’
‘Why? What happened?’
She scratched at the palm of her left hand. ‘I very nearly caused an accident on the Staincliffe Road. A young woman was using the crossing with her little girl. I didn’t see them. I don’t think I even saw the crossing. I missed hitting the little girl by this much.’ She held up her hands, indicating a narrow margin. ‘I could’ve killed her.’
‘Jesus!’
‘I’ve left the car. I couldn’t drive it afterwards. I didn’t think I should.’ Her features seemed to smudge even more. ‘Marcus. I’m sorry.’ He waited for her to say more. ‘I was so angry that I wasn’t paying any attention to what I was doing.’
‘Because of the meeting?’
‘Yes.’ She stopped. Thought. ‘That, and because Jess is dead.’ The honesty of the statement surprised him. ‘I’ve been angry ever since we let her go. So angry that I haven’t been able to be anything else, think about anyone else. And for that I’m sorry.’ He reached out across the table and held her hand lightly, committing himself to nothing more than sympathy. ‘I want it to be different. And I know, for that to happen, I need to change. And I want to try.’
He nodded. He believed her. Or at least he believed in her desire to change, but not necessarily in her ability to do so. That would take a Herculean effort, and if she felt even a fraction as exhausted as he did, it was unlikely to happen.
As if to prove his point, Fran yawned. A long, body-racking yawn. The accumulation of the long drive, the meeting with Harry, the shock of the near-accident, it seemed to hit her all of a sudden.
‘I’m sorry. I’m shot. I really can’t think straight.’
‘Go and have a rest. We can talk later. This will keep,’ Marcus said.
‘Are you sure?’
Again a question, a taking on-board of his feelings. It was such a long time since he’d felt like he even existed in her universe that Marcus was surprised and touched. ‘Of course. You try and get some sleep, and I’ll go and fetch the car. Where are the keys?’ The safety of the mundane again.
‘In my handbag.’
‘Can I get them?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She levered herself up, using the table for balance. As she passed, she paused for a second or two. It was only as she started the slow climb up to bed that Marcus realised she’d been waiting for him to kiss her.
He found Fran’s keyring in her bag, pulled on a sweater, took his own keys from the hook in the hall and headed out.
It was one of those in-between winter days, not particularly cold, not bright, not wet, not much of anything really. As he opened the front gate, he sensed the curtains in their bedroom being pulled across. He had a few hours. Not that he could do much with them. Once again he was waiting for Fran to set the agenda. His own car was parked at the kerb. He stood beside it, thinking, but without arriving at any great insight or reaching any conclusions. After her rest, Fran would tell him her version of what had happened at the prison and he would listen, but he doubted whether it would answer any of his questions. Because he and Fran wanted different resolutions. She wanted to reclaim Jess’s death. He wanted to remember her life.
He didn’t need – no, it was more than that – he didn’t want any more of the horror. The hospital had been bad enough. He had no desire to know every awful detail of the events that put Jess there. What he wanted was to find out everything he could about her living, breathing loveliness: her thoughts and fears, her feelings and passions, her highs and lows and, most of all, her relationship with Harry. He wanted the Jess that he, as her dad, had never got to know – the one glimpsed in the mementoes and photos in her room and in the messages on her phone. But the conversation he needed to have with Harry was not one to be had in a room full of strangers inside a prison, amidst a swirl of anger and recrimination. It was an exchange that required calm and understanding and forgiveness. It was a conversation that might never happen, but he was prepared to wait.
Marcus opened the boot of his car and moved the old picnic blanket aside. The bag was there, wedged at the back, exactly where he’d put it a month ago. A medium-sized, anonymous-looking holdall. It was modestly filled with the essentials: clothes, toiletries, a couple of books, some photos of Jess, her phone. All neatly packed inside, ready for the day he decided that he and Fran had truly run out of road. Ironically, it was the thought of the bag being there that had given him the strength to stay. That wasn’t as illogical as it sounded. Planning an escape route had seemed the only sane action he could think of, in response to the sense of claustrophobia that had been building up since the day Jess died. He re-covered the holdall with the rug, slammed the boot and set off to retrieve Fran’s car. He should at least hear what Fran had to say.