Robert Goddard - Borrowed Time

“It was just a hunch, but when I checked with directory enquiries and phoned the place, it turned out to be right. Atascadero is a café in Covent Garden. The one where Mummy met Paul to give him his marching orders.”

“So this corroborates his confession.”

“Yes. I suppose I shall have to bring it to the attention of the police. But there’s something else. Something much more significant to my mind, though I doubt they’ll agree.”

“What?”

“Turn to the week of her death.”

I leafed through to the week containing 17 July. There was only one entry. An Air France flight number and departure time for the morning of Monday 16 July. Nothing else. But why should there be? By 18 July, she was dead. “What of it?” I said.

“Turn on.”

I did so. But there were only blank weeks, their days and dates printed on empty uncreased pages. No trips. No appointments. No aides-mémoires . Nothing.

“Don’t you see? There should be something. I don’t know. A dental check-up. A hotel booking. Some trivial commitment. But there isn’t a single one. It’s as if-”

“She knew she was going to die.”

“I remember Rowena saying that. I remember telling her not to be so absurd. And now there it is, in Mummy’s handwriting. A full stop. An end. A void.”

“That she chose to step into.”

“But she can’t have done, can she? I mean, it doesn’t make any sense.”

“It could simply have been a precaution,” I suggested. “She might have refrained from putting her plans for the rest of the summer down on paper in case your father got hold of the diary and deduced from the entries that she was planning to leave him.”

“Wouldn’t a total blank look even more suspicious?”

“I suppose it might, but… what other explanation can there be?” I gazed across at Sarah and saw my own incomprehension reflected in her face. There was never going to be an answer. There never could be. Rowena had known as much without the need of a diary to prove it. Her mother’s life had reached a turning point. And become her death.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to analyse my own behaviour as well as other people’s. I’ve come to understand that just as every mood is temporary, so is every triumph and every disappointment. It isn’t much of a consolation, but it’s an effective antidote to despair. One day, I suppose, it’ll make even death seem an acceptable trade-off with reality.

Meanwhile, as November advanced, there were surrenders to be negotiated and escape routes plotted. On the third, I drove up to Worcester and made my promised statement to Inspector Joyce, admitting Louise Paxton could well have been actively seeking male company when I met her during the evening of 17 July 1990. On the fourth, I attended the last board meeting of Timariot & Small as an independent company, made an impassioned speech urging Simon and Jennifer to change their minds, then lost the vote by a slim-but for Adrian expensive-margin. Uncle Larry entered a plea for family unity; Adrian tried and failed to be more gracious in victory than he’d been in defeat; Simon burbled contentedly; and Jennifer twittered about completion dates. None of which prevented me minuting a formal protest at what they’d done and resigning with immediate effect.

My strategy was clear in my mind. And though I gave my fellow directors no hint of it, the future I’d mapped out for myself was in many ways preferable to leading a long struggle for commercial survival at Timariot & Small. More or less by default, I’d been granted another twelve-month extension to my congé de convenance personelle . So, until November 1994 at the earliest, I was a free and unfettered man. I was also about to become a moderately wealthy one, thanks to Bushranger Sports. And since it was wealth I’d tried hard to resist acquiring, I’d decided I might as well enjoy disposing of it.

For a variety of reasons, I didn’t walk out there and then, despite implying I meant to. It took several weeks for the sale to be finalized and I eventually agreed to stay on until a Bushranger apparatchik could be flown in from Sydney to take over my duties. I tried to reassure the staff about the new régime, but felt rather like Kerensky explaining how wonderful life was going to be under Lenin. Nobody believed me, any more than I believed myself. And they all knew I had something they didn’t. A way out.

It wasn’t just a way out of the barbarization of Timariot & Small, though. What sweetened the pill for me was knowing I could be beachcombing on some South Sea island by the time the news broke of Shaun Naylor’s innocence and Paul Bryant’s guilt. The press hadn’t got wind of the story yet and until they did an eerie calm seemed likely to prevail. Files and reports shuttled back and forth between the police and the Crown Prosecution Service, between Sarwate and the Criminal Appeal Office, between the servants of the law and its dispensers. Shaun Naylor counted the days in his cell at Albany Prison. Paul Bryant read the Bible in his house beside the water. And we all waited.

But some weren’t prepared to wait. It was the last Saturday in November when Jennifer telephoned me in considerable excitement to report an encounter with Bella during a Christmas shopping trip to Farnham. “She’s left her husband, Robin. Told me so quite bluntly over a cup of coffee. Back here for good and contemplating divorce. I didn’t know what to say. I mean, they’ve only been married a couple of years. But she doesn’t seem to have any compunction about it at all. As for sympathy, forget it. She doesn’t need any. Do you know what she said when I asked, as tactfully as I could, why it had come to this? ‘You wouldn’t understand, my dear.’ How patronizing can you get?”

I thought I understood perfectly well, of course. As I made clear when I called at The Hurdles the following morning, to find Bella reluctantly reacquainting herself with the dullness of an English Sunday. “I didn’t think you’d move as quickly as this, Bella. Aren’t you in danger of jumping the gun?”

“Not at all. Keith’s solicitor has been monitoring developments on our behalf and reckons Naylor will be released on bail before Christmas. The police have caved in, apparently, and the prosecution won’t be offering any evidence when the case comes to appeal. So, I’ve been left with no choice in the matter.”

“You could have chosen to stand by your husband.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew how he’s been behaving lately.”

“I imagine he’s been under a lot of strain.”

“ I’ve been under a lot, as well.”

“Of course. But-”

“You wait and see, Robin,” she said with sudden intensity, stabbing out her cigarette in an ashtray littered with the broken-backed corpses of several others. “When all this comes out, you won’t think so badly of me.” But that I found hard to believe.

As family ruptures go, ours was a pretty cordial affair. There didn’t seem much point bearing grudges now everything was settled. And the wanderlust that grew in me as the final break approached drained the event, if not the experience, of much of its bitterness. Merv Gibson, my successor, turned out to be a milder and more sensitive soul than any I’d thought could thrive in Harvey McGraw’s empire. It was almost possible to persuade myself nothing much was going to change at Frenchman’s Road under the Bushranger umbrella. Almost, but not quite. The fact was that however dexterously appearances were managed, an era had ended.

At least I didn’t have to stay and watch the start of a new one, though. Timariot & Small and I came to the parting of the ways on Friday the seventeenth of December. The staff gave me a more rousing send-off than a mere three years as works director really justified. I think they were saying goodbye to their past along with mine, as their farewell gift to me-a watercolour of Broadhalfpenny Down commissioned from a competent local artist-tended to confirm.