Simon Beckett - Owning Jacob - SA

Ben dreaded the next question, but it had to be asked. “Kale said... he told me that it was my wife’s fault that Jeanette died. What did he mean?”

She didn’t answer. Her husband folded his hands together on the table. His knuckles were white. She reached out and patted them. Her own hands were swollen and deformed.

“He meant she killed herself.” She drew in a deep breath that had only a hint of tremor in it. It seemed to inflate her bony frame. “But I don’t know.” She gave her husband’s hands a squeeze before removing hers from them. “I don’t know. They say she walked out into the traffic without looking, but whether she meant to, or just didn’t think...” She shook her head. “John had been around the day before. He was on leave. Compassionate leave.” She gave a humourless laugh at the thought. “He turned up and said she was going home with him. Like that. No asking, no talking. Just straight out with it. Ron told him she wasn’t doing anything she didn’t want to, and... and John knocked him down.” She glanced at her husband.

His hands were clenched tighter than ever. He spoke without looking at either of them. “If I’d been ten years younger he wouldn’t have done it. Soldier or not.” His voice was gravelly with emotion. His wife’s hands twitched on her lap, as if she were about to touch him again. This time she didn’t.

“John walked out after that without another word,” she went on. “The following morning Jeanette went for a walk, and the next we heard she was dead.”

Oh Sarah, what did you do?

“We haven’t seen John since then, except at the funeral,” Mary said. “And he didn’t speak to us there. So I don’t think there’s much we can do to help you. I’m sorry.”

Ben couldn’t look at either of them. “He blames me,” he said. Me and my wife. He blames us for Jacob being autistic.” He felt as though the words had been cut out of him. He had to go on to fill the silence that followed. “The doctors say it isn’t caused by anything like that, being taken from his mother, but he still thinks it’s our fault.”

He heard Mary Paterson’s chair creak as she stirred. “I think sometimes things just happen. It doesn’t do any good trying to guess why.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben said, and it was only after he’d said it that he realised it was the first time he had apologised for what Sarah had done.

“You’ve got nothing to apologise for.” She sounded weary. “You weren’t to know. And your wife... losing a child does strange things to you. Your wife did what she did because of it, and our Jeanette did what she did. One way or another you never get over it.”

That was as much absolution as Ben could hope for. He wanted to thank her, but when he looked across he saw her face was drawn and pale.

“You’ll have to excuse me now,” she said. Her voice was slurred with fatigue. “Ron...”

In response her husband stood up and silently pushed her out of the room. Ben heard the chairlift start up, then her husband returned. His face was stoic.

“Is she all right?” asked Ben.

“Just tired. It’s arthritis. Some days are better than others.”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

“She’s glad you did.” He didn’t sit back down, though, or invite Ben to stay any longer. Ben stood up to leave, but there was one more thing he had to ask. “Do you think Jacob’ll be all right with him? With Kale, I mean?”

“He’s his son. He’s been missing him for the last six years.”

That wasn’t what Ben had asked. He rephrased the question. “He’s your grandson, as well. How do you feel about Kale bringing him up?”

Paterson seemed to deliberate before he spoke. “I don’t know John Kale any more. I can’t say what he’s like now. The last time I saw him I thought he was a man on the edge. And that was before he got shot up in Northern Ireland. But it isn’t for me to say.”

“What about his wife?”

Paterson’s expression darkened. “That one. I’ve heard—” He broke off.

“What?” Ben asked.

“Nothing.”

Ben would have liked to have pushed, but he could see the old man had said all he was going to. He went to the door.

“Can I ask a favour of you?” Paterson asked, abruptly.

“Photographs... we haven’t got any. Of Jacob, I mean. I wondered if you could let us borrow some. It’d mean a lot to Mary.” There was a minute trembling in his lip. “Just so we can see what he’s like.”

He tried listening to the radio as he drove back to take away the silence in the car, but soon switched it off again. The quiet oppressed him, but the noise and chatter ran against his mood. He reached a junction where he had turned off earlier.

A road sign pointed to Tunford. The indicator arrow on his dashboard clicked softly as it winked on and off, pointing in the opposite direction. Ben flipped it the other way and followed the sign.

He didn’t know why he was doing it. But he couldn’t come this close to where Jacob was and just go home again.

He tried to keep his mind clear as he approached the town, as though if he didn’t think about what he was going to do something would occur to him. There was an acid tightening in his gut as he came to the shops, but no inkling of a plan.

If Kale’s car isn’t there I’ll stop and knock at the door. He took the first of the turnings that would lead him to the house.

A group of small boys were playing football in the middle of the road. They grudgingly moved to the pavement as he drove past. There was a sudden bang that made his foot leap for the brake before he saw them sprinting away, and understood that they had kicked the football at the car. Little bastards. His grin of nervous relief faded as he turned on to Kale’s street.

The rust-coloured Ford Escort was parked outside the house.

Ben gripped the steering wheel, agonising over whether or not to stop anyway. He slowly cruised past. He saw the piles of junk in the garden, gathered now into two big piles instead of several smaller ones; he saw the guttering hanging loose from the eaves, but he didn’t see either of the Kales or Jacob.

He stayed rigid with indecision until the house disappeared from the rear-view mirror, and the moment when he might have stopped was gone. He continued to the end of the street, deflated, as if he had failed some kind of test.

The road curled away around the last of the houses before climbing a hill behind them. Ben hadn’t followed it this far before, but he didn’t want to turn around and go past the Kales’ again. The hill was covered with scrubby woodland, so that he soon lost sight of the town. Towards the top there was an overgrown lay-by leading to a wooden five-barred gate, thick with nettles. Impulsively, he pulled into it and switched off the engine. It ticked like a time bomb as it cooled. He sat in the car for a while, then got out.

The wind had picked up. It slapped his coat around him, watering his eyes and tugging at his hair. The field beyond the gate dropped steeply to a flooded gravel pit. Each gust sent a shiver racing across its surface like goosebumps. He turned away and went across to the other side of the road.

An old and uneven stone wall bordered the woods. Through the trees he could see snatches of the houses below. The branches thrashed in the wind, their remaining leaves showing dark green, pale green as they whipped about. Others were wrenched off, spinning through the fast air, abandoned to the death of another season. Ben thrust his hands in his pockets and faced the wind. He felt as though he had been torn loose from everything that had anchored him, that he was on the verge of being ripped up and blown away himself.

A section of the wall had tumbled to a low heap of individual stones. It was topped with rusted barbed wire, but the posts that had held it up had also slumped and given up.