Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

Subject:Sorry!

Dear Dan,

I received your first email so you don’t need to keep bombarding me with new ones. I’m sorry you’ve been feeling sick and I’m sorry that my long silences are making it worse. It has nothing to do with not trusting you, it’s just that I’m finding it hard to write anything at the moment. The only reason I haven’t given you a telephone number is because the lines here are hopeless and I’m having to use my mobile to email. As soon as I’ve worked out a better arrangement, I’ll let you know how to contact me.

Please don’t worry. I am fine. I’ve tucked myself away in a valley in the south-west of England where soft winds blow and people are scarce. It’s very pretty and peaceful-rolling fields of golden corn, a chocolate-box village half a mile away and a tumultuous sea just out of sight beyond an upland. I spend most of my days alone, and I really do like it that way. The house is quite big, but very basic. There’s even an old well in the garden-heavily disguised as a woodshed-though thankfully I’m not expected to use it. I do have running water and electricity, although the rest of the mod cons leave a lot to be desired. Hence the telephone problem. I’ve made friends with some sparrows. I’ve found that if I scatter birdseed around my feet, they appear out of nowhere to feed. It’s only now that I realize I never saw a single bird in Baghdad. There’s also a fishpond with no fish. I’m thinking of buying some so that I can sit and watch them in the evening.

As for Jerry Greenhough and the stick you’re getting, can you please keep stonewalling for me? I honestly don’t care what the Baghdad police and an unknown Yank think about me. It’s all so far away and unimportant at the moment. They won’t sack you, Dan, because you’re too important. Also, you have broad shoulders, and I can’t think of anyone better qualified to say “get stuffed” to the men in suits!

I realized on the plane going home that it was going to be worse talking about it than not talking about it. I know you believe counselling worked for you but you’re much stronger than I am and you don’t mind admitting your weaknesses. It’s a form of bravery that you and Adelina have…and I don’t. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in time, although I doubt it. My nightmares are never about what happened, only about the way I’ve gatecrashed other people’s lives in seach of a story. Nothing is ever straightforward, Dan. I’m far more troubled by my conscience than a few forgettable events in a cellar.

I’ll always be pleased to hear from you as long as you stick to other subjects and shelve your concerns about my mental state. If you don’t, I won’t answer! Let me thank you one last time for your care and kindness and end with love, Connie.

OF COURSE I looked for scars on Jess’s wrists and of course I found them. They were only obvious if you knew they were there, and I did it as surreptitiously as I could, but she must have noticed my interest because she took to buttoning her cuffs. I compensated with over-friendliness, which made her even more suspicious, and she stopped coming after that. The odd thing is, her absences didn’t register at first. Like a toothache that suddenly stops, it only occurred to me at the end of the week that the niggling irritation had gone.

It should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. I started jumping nervously every time my parents phoned, and peered cautiously out of the windows as soon as darkness fell. For the first time since my arrival I felt anxious about being alone, and my mother picked up on it one evening when I refused to speak until she did. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

I told her the truth because I didn’t want her imagining something worse. She was quite capable of populating Dorset with Iraqi insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists. She listened without interrupting and, at the end, said simply: “You sound lonely, darling. Do you want me and Dad to come down next weekend?”

“I thought you were going to Brighton.”

“We can cancel.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t do that. You’re coming at the end of the the month, anyway. I’ll be fine till then.”

She hesitated before she spoke. “I expect I’ve got it back to front, Connie-I usually do-but from the way you describe them Jess has been a better friend to you than Madeleine. Do you remember Geraldine Summers…married to Reggie…they had two boys about your age who went to university in America?”

“Vaguely. Is she the fat one who used to turn up out of the blue with cakes that no one ate?”

“That’s her. They lived about thirty miles from us. Reggie was a tobacco planter and Geraldine was a teacher before he married her. They met in England during one of his leaves, and she came home as his wife after only knowing him for a couple of months. It was a terrible mistake. Reggie had never read a book in his life, and Geraldine had no idea how isolated the farm was. She thought she’d be in the middle of a community and able to get a job as a teacher, and instead she discovered that Reggie and the radio were going to be her only source of stimulation.”

“I remember him now,” I said with feeling. “Thick as two short planks, got sozzled on gin and told smutty jokes all evening.”

My mother laughed. “Yes. He was worse after the boys were born. They inherited Geraldine’s brains, and he had trouble keeping up with them. It turned him to drink even more, because he thought alcohol made him witty.” She paused in reflection. “I always felt rather sorry for him. He’d have been much happier with a country bumpkin and two strapping sons who liked driving tractors.”

I wondered why she was telling me this story. “What happened to them? Are they still together? Still in Zimbabwe?”

“Reggie and Geraldine? They went to South Africa. The last I heard, Reggie wasn’t very well. I had a Christmas letter from Geraldine which said he’d been in and out of hospital most of last year. I wrote back but I haven’t had a reply yet.” She returned to the point. “The thing is, Geraldine drove me mad when she first arrived. She saw me and your father as the antidote to Reggie, and she plagued us with visits because she was so discontented. In the end, I had to be quite firm with her and tell her she wasn’t welcome. It was all rather difficult, and she took it very badly.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing too shocking. I received an unsigned letter about a week later, telling me how cruel I was, and one or two strange phone calls. I didn’t see her again for two years…by which time her first baby had arrived and she’d managed to come to terms with her frustrations. Poor woman. We found ourselves at the same party in Bulawayo and she was terribly embarrassed…apologized profusely for being a nuisance and even owned up to the poison-pen letter and the phone calls.”

“What did you say to her?”

“That it was I who should apologize for being unkind. I felt far worse about rebuffing her attempts at friendship-even if they were annoying-than she could ever have felt about her letter. Geraldine was so thrilled to be back on speaking terms that she took to plaguing us again…and this time we had to put up with it. But you know, darling, she turned out to be the best friend we had. The Barretts and Fortescues-people we’d grown up with-wouldn’t come near us when your father was accused of profiteering, but Geraldine and Reggie drove over immediately and stayed throughout the siege. It was very brave of them.”

I was out of Zimbabwe when this happened, but I’d kept in close touch via telephone. It was in the early days of Mugabe’s push to evict white farmers, and a local Zanu-PF apparatchik laid trumped-up charges of tax evasion and profiteering against my father in a bid to stir up trouble. He had no chance of succeeding in the courts because my father kept scrupulous accounts, but the accusation was enough to incite anger among Mugabe’s war veterans. For a week, a gang of over fifty camped on our lawn and threatened to overrun the house, and it was only the courage of Dad’s own workers, who mounted a permanent picket in front of the veterans and refused to let them pass, that brought the siege to an end.