The Accomplice Read online

  “That sounds just like Valentina. She makes me feel old with her inexhaustible energy. When did you last see her? When did she go to America?”

  “It must be six years ago now that she left. I saw her about three years ago. She was in Germany and I went over for a weekend. The truth is, in spite of everyone saying that the world is getting smaller, California is still a very long way. And I can’t leave for long.”

  “How is Tom?” Rosie asked.

  “Fine, thank you.”

  Naomi stuck to the subject of Valentina. “Valentina hasn’t been back to Russia, has she, even since Gorbachev?”

  “No, you know what she was always like about Russians. She says things about them that even the fiercest cold war warriors in the fifties would never have said and she only gets away with it because she’s Russian herself. There’s been no sign that she regards them differently. She just complains more because there are so many of them in the West now.”

  “So strange that she doesn’t go back. You would think that she would see all the events in Eastern Europe and Russia in the last few years as a vindication.”

  “Valentina doesn’t think that she needs vindication. And she has never been very interested in politics.”

  “That’s true.” This was Marcus who had rejoined them. “Valentina has the sublime selfishness of genius. Life has arranged itself so that she could work and nothing else has ever counted.”

  Naomi’s train of thought took no account of these interventions. “When you think of the amazing things we have seen in the last few years. I wept when I saw the Wall coming down in, which year was it, Marcus? It was just after we got back from staying with the Cookes in Sicily. And in Russia: the dismantling of the Communist Party, the ending of the Soviet empire, the emptying of the camps. It seems almost perverse that Valentina doesn’t want to see it.”

  “Valentina has been heading west all her life,” Marcus stated. “Now she is installed in California she has got as far from Russia as she can go and I imagine that’s how she likes it. Wouldn’t you agree, Zita?”

  “Anyway, you must let me have her address, so we can ask her to dinner in London. I wouldn’t want to miss her while she is over here and time always rushes past.”

  “We are to have our own Russian visitor this summer,” Rosie remarked. “At least, she is to stay some of the time with Dad and Naomi and some of the time here with Granma.”

  “Oh yes.” Naomi took over the subject. “Have you heard about this from Jean, Zita? A Russian student is coming to stay. She claims to be some connexion of Jean’s, though Jean insists that she is an impostor. However, this seems to me to be quite irrelevant. Whether or not she is of the same family, she is a very enterprising girl. She wrote a charming letter to me to say that she would do any menial job that was available if she could have the chance of spending four months in England (the home of Shakespeare and Dickens, she called it), which she had always dreamed of visiting.”

  “One has to add,” Marcus put in, “that the conditions of her visa don’t permit her to take a job while she is in England. We have given our word to support her while she is here.”

  Naomi waved this aside. “That is bureaucratic nonsense, darling. She will do some baby-sitting and child-minding in Hampstead and when she comes here she will do for Jean what Lucia normally does. None of that counts as a job. It will give her some pocket money and some independence.”

  Lucia was Jean’s Swiss au pair who attended a language school in the town and did the shopping and other errands that the old woman’s lack of mobility made impossible for her. An au pair had been the first solution to the problem of Jean’s health and it had worked well. Lucia was the fourth in a succession of girls who recruited their own successors from among their friends in their Italian-speaking canton of Switzerland. She was going home for a month’s holiday in the summer, returning in the autumn.

  “The letter was wonderful. It was written in very correct English and so full of enthusiasm and reverence for English literature and culture, something from another century.”

  “It sounds phoney to me,” Rosie said. “What she thought you would like to hear, but hadn’t the skill to express more subtly.”

  “No, you’re quite wrong. It was certainly nothing that you or Ivo would have written at her age. Young people here are much too streetwise and cynical to write, or even think, such things. What she wrote rang true. It was perfectly genuine.”

  “It will be amusing to bring her face to face with Valentina,” Marcus said. “We must arrange it.”

  “Only if you think she is very tough, otherwise Valentina will eat her alive.” Zita rose. “I must get back to Tom,” she said.

  “You must come round the house and give me your advice about moving the kitchen,” Naomi objected. “And Ivo hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Zita said her goodbyes and began to walk back to the house; she found that Rosie was accompanying her.

  “I’m not really a good person to ask for advice on decoration,” Zita said as if to explain her decision to leave.

  “She doesn’t want advice,” Rosie replied. “It’s all pretty much decided. It’s been a game for years, driving back to London after Sunday lunch with Granma, what would we do with Asshe House to make it habitable. Though there was never any idea that they would get the chance to put the plans into action. I don’t think Ivo and I ever joined in because we thought it was perfection. I’m still hoping that Naomi will decide to leave my little room as it was and not turn it into yet another bathroom.”

  “Making a formal garden seems so unlikely in Naomi.”

  “Authenticity is the thing. Naomi might be all for unrestrained nature but it would be anachronistic with a Queen Anne house.”

  “Marcus says he might retire here. Will that be soon?”

  “Hard to say. Dad would like to eventually but Naomi might want to stay in Hampstead. More neurotic people and broken marriages there.” Naomi was a therapist and counsellor specializing in marriage guidance, with a lucrative practice in Hampstead where her skills and reputation were passed on by word of mouth; at the first hint of marital discord in any couple, concerned friends would telephone to recommend Naomi’s services, so she always had a waiting list for consultations.

  “Oh, we exist everywhere nowadays, don’t we?” Zita asked. Although her life was one long regret, she could not imagine that things would have been any different if she had subjected her problems to the probing silences of Naomi’s demanding common sense. They stood together for a moment on the top of the flight of semi-circular stone steps that descended into the front garden. For a second Zita had thought that Rosie was about to say something; then she had realized that the hesitation was due to pity. Zita turned abruptly away. She found it easier to be with people who did not know the details of her past, people for whom she would not always be “poor Zita”. It was, in part, to escape such reactions that she had come to Woodham in the first place. In theory, she could acknowledge that Rosie had been moved by sympathy; in practice, it was easier to deal with those whose egotism forgot the troubles of others, or with those who did not know of them at all.

  The square was now quiet, all the tourists and shoppers of the daytime hours had left. One side was occupied by the church, the others by a not disagreeable mixture of old buildings: several runs of Georgian terrace, in one of which Zita’s firm had its offices, a half-timbered pub, some early Victorian artisans’ cottages. One corner was occupied by the main post office, an isolated example of post-war building. Zita often wondered if they had deliberately pulled down an eighteenth-century house in order to include the twentieth century. She took one of the alleys that ran between the houses to reach her firm’s car park. As she manoeuvred the car into the one-way system that kept traffic out of the square, she glanced, as she always did on leaving work, at the dashboard clock. It was 7.50. She had told Lynne that she would be home at eight. She would make it easily. When she had come here six years ago she had chos
en her house in part because it had been specially built for an elderly couple and was therefore already adapted for a wheel chair; and in part because she could reach it from her office in ten minutes, even in the rush hour.

  She parked in the car port next to the minivan. Through the thin hedge she could see the bungalow into which Jean had just moved. In the kitchen all signs of Tom’s supper had been cleared away, though there was a pile of carrier bags on the kitchen table. She could hear the sound of the television in the little sitting room. Lynne was crouched on a low stool, her fingers in her mouth, watching her programme with total absorption. It was almost certainly a soap, although whether a new episode or an old one was impossible to know. Zita’s video machine was set to record every episode every evening. Lynne would watch them whenever a moment presented itself the following day and sometimes put on old ones to revise her extensive knowledge of these alternative worlds. Zita sometimes felt that the house was more Lynne’s than her own when she found Lynne’s shopping strewn on the kitchen table, her sweatshirt hanging over the back of the sofa, her video cassettes lying on the floor. Zita, who was fanatically orderly, had long ago learned to suppress her irritation at Lynne’s untidiness. She was far too conscious of her dependence on her.

  She had found Lynne in her first week in Woodham and had hired her as a cleaner for two mornings a week, for three hours a time. The rate in those days had been about three pounds an hour. Only after a year of disaster after disaster with Tom's nannies had Lynne turned herself into nanny, housekeeper, driver and nurse. The previous nannies, one a Norland, another a trained nurse, another a New Zealand treasure handed on from a friend, had each stayed a few months and then taken their leave, their declared love of babies rapidly blunted by the reality of Tom. Lynne had stayed and assumed an ever more important role in Zita’s life. It was she who normally drove the minivan with its electric lift to take Tom and his wheel chair to the Centre, to go to the supermarket, to drive herself home every evening. Only rarely did Lynne stay overnight; she lived three or four miles away with her brother and her detested sister-in-law. The feeling was reciprocated. The brother’s wife had said scornfully to Zita once, “Is it safe to leave your baby all day with Lynne? She’s not all there.” And indeed she was not. Zita was unaware of the correct definition of her employee’s mental state; once she would have been called slightly educationally subnormal. A strict village school had taught her to read and write and her devotion to Tom did the rest.

  “Had a good time?” Lynne asked. She removed her fingers from her mouth, her eyes never wavering from the screen. The sound was, as usual, very loud as she was slightly deaf.

  “Yes, thanks. How’s Tom-Tom?” Zita was changing her shoes in the hall, putting on a pair of velvet mules with turned up toes that she had bought years ago with Oliver in Istanbul.

  “He was worn out, so I gave him his shower and put him to bed. I took him swimming; that always makes him tired.”

  Zita left her bag and briefcase on a chair and went out into the hall at the far end of which was her son’s bedroom and bathroom. His curtains were drawn and behind them the blackout blinds were lowered so that the strong summer light did not penetrate. The night light, a small steady glow, was on. All these details, arranged for Tom’s comfort, had been devised by Lynne. She asserted that Tom did not like to go to sleep in summer when it was still light and that was why he tossed and screamed until midnight and that he needed a night light to comfort him if he awoke in the dark. How she knew these things Zita could not imagine; she accepted the empirical proof, his peaceful sleep, that Lynne’s interpretations of Tom’s desires were correct.

  Quietly, she approached the centre of her life. Tom, now seven, slept in a sort of cot, an old wooden bed with balustraded sides, which she had found long ago in a junk shop. Even in sleep his contorted limbs did not relax. He was firmly tucked in, lying on his back like a crusader on his tomb, his face half-hidden, only the top of his head showing. The pucker between his brows, which she was convinced he had been born with, was not eased. He ground his teeth and his arm jerked. She ran her hand over his silky blond head and pulled the cover straight. A bald rabbit, its button eyes glinting dimly in the half light, was lying between his arm and his chest, held in place, as was Tom himself, by the tight embrace of the sheet.

  Lynne’s programme had finished and an advertisement filled the screen. She was still watching, although she had risen from the stool and was picking up her sweatshirt.

  “Oh, your mum rang,” she said, not moving her eyes from the television.

  Zita halted on her route back into the kitchen. “Yes?”

  “She said she was arriving tomorrow and she would phone you from Oxford. Is that right?”

  “Yes, it would be.”

  “American is she, your mum?” Lynne and Valentina had never met because Valentina had never visited her daughter in Woodham.

  “No, not American. She was Russian originally. She’s lived in America for some years now.”

  Lynne pondered the combination of Russian and American connexions in Zita’s parent and then said, “Well, that accounts for her accent then.”

  “Did she have anything else to say?”

  Lynne sniggered. She turned the television off now that real life offered more interest. “When I said you were out, she said, ‘What time is it with you?’ and when I told her, she said, ‘No hope it’s a man?’ and I said, ‘Fat chance.’”

  “Thanks, Lynne.”

  “I’ll see you Monday then. Doing anything nice tomorrow?”

  “Oh, just the usual. Goodbye, Lynne.”

  “Goodbye, Zita.”

  3

  When Naomi rang on Wednesday morning, Zita was in her office. Her desk was placed across the corner of the room farthest from the door and if she looked over her left shoulder through the tall windows she could see the balanced face of Asshe House beyond the corner of the churchyard. She was looking abstractedly in that direction when her telephone buzzed.

  Zita Daunsey seated at her desk gave an impression of competence and authority. Size had something to do with it: she was large, the legacy of her Russian genes, and her solidity engendered confidence. No flightiness here. Fat people make excellent confidants, too; at least, that is what others think. Zita had found that she had often been told more than she needed to know about the details of her clients’ cases and their lives. She never protested, just listened, for sometimes an odd detail is important. Her age (thirty-two) was difficult to estimate; she had never been thought too young to handle their business by middle-aged men or elderly women.

  The phone recalled her thoughts from her mother’s imminent arrival. She looked back at her computer screen and picked up the receiver at the same time.

  Naomi’s rather high, normally reassuring tones sounded anxious. “Zita, I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m sure you’re frightfully busy, but we need your help. It’s nothing to do with Jean; it’s, well, it may be professional help.”

  “Yes?”

  “Look, well.” Naomi’s calm grasp of affairs had slipped. “I don’t know quite how to put this. Could you go across to Asshe House. I mean right now. It’s quite urgent, I think. I’ve just had a call from the builders…”

  Zita had long ago written Naomi down as a ruthless exploiter of friends and contacts, but this was going too far. Surely the architect was the professional to call in when the builders had a problem. She was preparing to give a crisp answer to whatever small service of “nipping” or “popping” across was going to be requested.

  “They say… I couldn’t get a very clear statement from him, Mr Wilson, that is… I know it sounds incredible. They say they’ve found a body.”

  Zita adjusted her response. “A body?”

  “Yes, he says he’s called the police, so I expect you’ll find them there too.”

  “What is it? What sort of body? And where? Did he say?”

  “No. He said it was all a ‘bit of a shock, like’ and I
know what he means. He didn’t find it himself. It was his two workmen who are digging. You know, the pool I told you about. I think they phoned him and he phoned me. He was rather indignant, as though I had deliberately let him in for all kinds of problems he hadn’t expected.” Naomi was now more relaxed and her customary fluency returned. “Such a cheek, when you think normally builders ring you up to tell you with great satisfaction that they’ve found new and expensive problems.”

  “I’ll go over at once and see what’s happening.”

  “Would you? It would be so kind. I hope it’s nothing. Perhaps it’s a pets’ graveyard or something like that.”

  “I’ll phone you later.”

  The two young workmen who had made the discovery were squatting, naked to the waist, on the pile of rubble that they had just excavated, Coke cans in their fists. The pit itself was about twelve feet long and six feet wide and occupied the end of the garden with only a few feet between its edge and the steps descending from the summer-house. She recalled standing on that spot, between the roses, only four days earlier. Now there was a void. She stepped forward to the brink of the hole, cut as precisely as a surgeon cuts flesh, to reveal the layer of top soil, like subcutaneous fat, rich and black. Below, in the muscular belts of the subsoil, the colour of the earth faded to paler brown, streaked with chalky white stones marking the layers of the years, like tree rings, counting down the past. Out of the sheer edges of the trench roots projected, thick veins showing their white pith where they had been sliced open. The bottom of the pit where the men had been digging with pick and shovel was stepped. Standing in there, four feet down, was Mr Wilson. Legs straddled, hands on knees, he was peering at what Zita recognized instantly as a human skull. Whatever else, the men had not revealed a pets’ graveyard. No more of the body, if there were more, was visible beneath its earth covering. The head was tipped forward and the curve of the cranium was smooth, stained brown by the soil, the seams of the fontanelle strongly marked, as if sewn in place with a darker thread. Then she saw the place where the skull was broken, behind, just below the crown, and she understood that he had been placed like that, tenderly, with his head up so that he should not rest on the damaged place and lie in pain. Something in the bed-like shape of the pit made Zita imagine lying there herself, face to the sky, soil filling her eye sockets, yet still able to see the tendrils of roots thickening as they receded into the matting of the grass, out of which legs, stems, trunks thrust upwards into the light.