Till We Meet Again Read online

  Susan had the impression that Julie had been a victim of abuse from men for her entire life. ‘No,’ she said, and smiled at the woman. ‘I didn’t have any murderous instincts in those days.’

  Julie grinned back, and Susan caught a glimpse of the very pretty girl she’d once been. ‘Why did you shoot those people?’ she asked.

  Susan had said nothing to anyone about herself up till now, and she had intended to keep her silence for ever. But now, after the incident in the dining room, she desperately needed a friend.

  ‘Because they were responsible for my daughter’s death,’ she said simply.

  She knew Julie loved her children, even if she was absent from them for long periods, and seeing the shock and sympathy on her face, Susan suddenly wanted to tell her the entire story.

  ‘But why didn’t you get them for it right after your kid died?’ Julie asked, when Susan had finished, wiping tears away from her eyes.

  ‘I was too stunned at first,’ Susan said. ‘I just wanted to die myself. I moved out of Bristol, I didn’t come back until two years later. Then one night I was walking to my cleaning job up on the Downs and I saw the doctor and that bitch of a receptionist. They were snogging in a car. That’s what really got me, they were both married with kids, and there they were carrying on like that. It was just like my father and his woman.’

  Julie smirked. ‘Good for you. Where’d you get the gun though?’

  ‘It was my father’s service revolver,’ Susan said, and told her how she’d been taught to shoot as a girl.

  ‘So you just went down to that surgery and blasted them out?’ Julie asked, her expression incredulous. ‘Why didn’t you track them down and do it somewhere secret? You’d never’ve been caught then.’

  ‘I suppose I wanted to be caught,’ Susan admitted. She suddenly saw the absurd side of that and began to laugh. ‘I must be mad,’ she said. ‘Why would anyone want to end up here?’

  ‘You going to plead insanity?’ Julie asked, and grinned when she saw the look of horror on Susan’s face. ‘It don’t mean you get locked away in a place full of loonies, not unless you’re really out of it still. They call it Diminished Responsibility, you just make the shrink see you couldn’t help what you done, like you was so upset that something pushed you into it. A mate of mine who killed her old man pleaded that. Didn’t even have to be tried, the lawyers just decided it between them. She only got five years.’

  ‘I don’t think the doctor’s wife and the husband of the woman I killed will be satisfied with me getting anything less than life,’ Susan said. She’d had time to think about them and their children now, and although she wasn’t exactly sorry for what she’d done, she did feel guilty about the children.

  ‘Huh,’ Julie snorted. ‘When they get told their other halves were ‘aving it off, they won’t feel quite so bad about you.’

  ‘I couldn’t bring that up!’ Susan exclaimed.

  Julie laughed. ‘You are a loony if you don’t. Just think, you’ll get your revenge every way up. You’ve done away with the people that let Annabel die, cut off all the sympathy for them, and what’s more you’ll be out of ’ere in a few years.’

  Susan had been absolutely certain she wanted to be put away for life when she was first arrested, but just nine days in here had already eroded away that certainty. By dismissing Beth she hadn’t had any further legal advice, and hearing Julie’s opinion was like finding she had a parachute strapped to her back as a plane went down.

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, of course I am,’ Julie said. ‘So no more arseing about, you tell your brief when he comes next that’s what you want. Lay it on thick about what a bad time you’ve ‘ad. All that stuff about yer dad, and anything else you can think of. Next thing you know you’ll be outta here.’

  Susan felt more cheerful then. ‘Do you think I can get some glasses while I’m in here?’ she asked tentatively. ‘I can’t see well enough to read any more.’

  ‘Yeah, just ask to see the doctor,’ Julie said. ‘While you’re there, you start tellin’ him stuff about yourself. He’s a nosy bastard, likes to think of himself as a shrink. Tell ‘im you’re depressed an’ all while yer at it, and he’ll give you some pills. It helps to have something to take the edge off the day.’

  By lights out that same day, Susan felt just a little better. She guessed Julie must have passed on at least some of what she’d told her, for there had been sympathetic smiles from several women at tea-time, and she’d been saved a chair by the television during the evening’s association time. While it was impossible to concentrate on the programme because of the noise all around her, it was preferable to being excluded.

  Julie had asked her earlier about Annabel’s father, and her question came back to Susan as she lay there hoping that tonight she’d be able to sleep. So much had happened to her since that she’d virtually shut Liam out of her mind.

  She could see his face so clearly tonight, his dark eyes always creased up with laughter, snub nose, curly dark hair tumbling over bronzed shoulders as he worked in the garden. Her father called him a ‘Didicoy’, his word for someone lower even than a gypsy. But Liam wasn’t a gypsy, he was well educated, he’d even been to college. He was just a free spirit who moved from town to town, sleeping in his old camper van, doing whatever gardening or odd jobs he could get.

  He had knocked on the door one day in early March 1985. He said he’d been doing some tree-felling for one of their neighbours and he’d been told they had some dead trees that needed cutting down too.

  Any new face at the door was a welcome distraction to Susan. She even welcomed canvassers when the local elections were on, for any company was better than her own. She’d been stuck in that house for nineteen years, seeing no one but the district nurse or the odd neighbour. The highlight of her week was going to the supermarket. Sometimes she felt she would go mad with the sheer monotony of her life.

  She would have invited Liam in even if there hadn’t been three dead fruit trees in the back garden needing attention, just because she hoped he’d stay for a while and chat. But she was very glad she had a good excuse, because she certainly wouldn’t have wanted him to realize how desperate she was for company.

  He sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and chatted to her mother. Susan was touched by how patient he was with her poor speech, how he seemed instinctively to know that she still had a sharp mind and needed to communicate with new people.

  She could remember standing with her back warm against the Aga, just watching him as he talked about gardening. She was thirty-four then, and she guessed he was around the same age. He was about five feet nine and slim, but judging by the way his thighs filled up his worn jeans he was very muscular. Yet although he was very attractive in a rugged sort of way, it was his passion for gardening that appealed to her most that day.

  Gardens and nature were about the only subjects aside from household chores that Susan could really talk about with any confidence. She felt she was dull, she knew she looked old-fashioned because the clothes she bought had to be practical, and until that day she hadn’t really cared.

  ‘Take Liam to see trees,’ Mother said with difficulty. ‘Father never has time for anything.’

  ‘Was that a note of bitterness I heard in your mother’s voice?’ Liam asked as they walked down the garden together. ‘Sorry if I’m being nosy.’

  Susan thought he was very intuitive to pick up on something like that when her mother’s speech was so impaired. She didn’t find it nosy, just caring.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ she admitted. ‘My father doesn’t spend much time here with us, though to be fair to him he’s getting a bit past cutting down trees.’

  Susan had never thought of her father as old, for he had remained the way she remembered when she was small, straight-backed and slender, and even if his hair had turned white, it made him look more distinguished still. He didn’t retire until he was seventy, and even now at seventy-six he wa
s still out almost every day either shooting or playing golf. Not to mention seeing Gerda.

  ‘So do you look after your mother full-time?’ Liam asked, looking curiously at Susan.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was sixteen when she had her stroke and my father asked me to look after her.’

  ‘That’s no life for a young woman,’ he exclaimed in horror. ‘Your father must have a few bob to live in such a big house, can’t he get a nurse for her?’

  ‘He’s got other things to spend his money on,’ Susan said lightly. She didn’t want to sound bitter too. ‘I’ve only got myself to blame, I should have put my foot down a long time ago.’

  She showed him the dead trees and they talked for a while about the work involved and what could be planted in their place.

  ‘A magnolia would be nice in place of the one by the house, and I think a willow down by the river,’ he said. ‘Or will your dad object to spending his money on trees too?’

  There was a delightful note of impudence in his voice, and Susan had a feeling he’d already worked out a great deal more about her family than he’d been told.

  ‘I shall make sure he coughs up,’ she said, giggling a little. ‘So just tell me how much it will cost, along with pruning and generally tidying up. I do my best to look after it, but it’s too much for me alone.’

  He perched on a stone bench and rolled up a cigarette, all the while looking around him thoughtfully. ‘It’s a lovely garden,’ he said at length, his dark eyes sweeping over the swathes of daffodils just coming into flower. ‘It will be a pleasure to work in it, so let’s say fifteen quid a day. I could do two days a week until September. Your dad will get his money’s worth.’

  Father was apoplectic when Susan told him that she’d hired Liam. He was warming his backside at the fire in the sitting room, having arrived home at nine when the dinner Susan had saved for him was nearly dried up.

  ‘How dare you agree to such a thing without asking me!’ he raged. ‘As though I care if there’s a couple of dead trees in the garden. I’ve got better things to do with my money than waste it on a garden.’

  Susan looked at him coldly. He might still be a handsome man, but over the years he’d lost what she had once loved about him, his sense of humour and his caring nature.

  ‘Like spending it on keeping that woman I suppose?’ she said, surprised at herself for being so brave. ‘Don’t deny it. I know it’s Gerda.’

  He took a step towards her, his hand raised.

  ‘Don’t you dare hit me or I’ll leave right now,’ she said quickly. ‘You wouldn’t want to have to look after Mother yourself, would you? Or pay for her to go in a nursing home?’

  ‘How dare you speak to your father like that!’ he roared at her.

  ‘Because you’ve ruined my life by compelling me to stay here and take on your responsibilities,’ she snapped back, so angry now she didn’t care what she said. ‘What kind of a father would ask a sixteen-year-old to nurse a stroke victim? If it wasn’t for you and the moral blackmail you’ve kept me here with, I might have been married with a home of my own and children by now. Seeing as I have to be here, the least you can do is pay for Liam to do the garden. It’s the one bit of pleasure Mother and I get.’

  He stalked off then, stamping up the stairs to his room, not even going in to see Mother and say goodnight. After that he stayed out more than ever, sometimes not coming home at all. Susan often found Mother crying about it, and that hurt worse than anything, for she too was a blackmail victim – she knew where she’d end up if she made a fuss. All Susan could do to get back at her father was to stop saving him meals, but that didn’t seem to bother him. He did leave money for Liam, though, and Liam came twice a week from then on to work in the garden.

  All through that spring and summer Susan found herself living for the days Liam was there. While her mother took her naps in the afternoons, she would go out into the garden and work alongside him, and she told him things she’d never told anyone before. Like the two brief relationships she’d had with men. The first was when she was twenty-three, with a builder who’d come to retile the roof. The second, when she was thirty, was with someone from an organization that helped elderly housebound people.

  ‘I thought I was in love with both of them,’ she admitted shyly. ‘But I suppose it was just the excitement of doing something I shouldn’t be doing. It didn’t amount to much anyway, just kissing and cuddling, but then I didn’t get any opportunity for anything more.’

  ‘Your father’s a selfish old bugger keeping you tucked away like this,’ he said with feeling. ‘You’re a pretty woman, Suzie, and it’s terrible you’ve seen nothing of the world, and had no fun. You should make a break from it, tell him you can’t do it any more.’

  ‘How can I do that, Liam?’ she shrugged. ‘He’ll put Mother in a home, probably move the other woman in here. I couldn’t do that to Mother, I love her.’

  ‘But she’s selfish too,’ he argued. ‘She’s got a keen mind, Suzie. She knows it isn’t right to keep you here forever. Christ, she could live to be ninety and how old will you be then?’

  ‘Over fifty,’ she said glumly.

  ‘Too old to have babies then,’ he said, and he patted her cheek. ‘And that sweet face will be lined with bitterness too. Get out now while you can change things for yourself.’

  Liam’s work finished in September and he kissed her tenderly on his last day. ‘I’ll be back to see how you are in December,’ he said, holding her tightly as if aware she was quivering all over. ‘If you feel brave enough to take a chance on a new life then, I’ll help you to do it.’

  He held her face between his two rough hands and just looked at her, his dark eyes smouldering. ‘You’re like a budding rose,’ he said eventually. ‘I’d like to see those petals open, to share your sweetness and beauty.’

  She stood in front of her mirror that night and looked long and hard at herself and for the first time in her life she did see a pretty woman looking back at her. Maybe she was a bit plump, but her complexion glowed, her eyes sparkled and her hair shone. She wanted to run off with Liam, she wanted more of his kisses, to lie naked in his arms and discover all the mysteries of sex. She didn’t care if he didn’t want to marry her and settle down in one place, just to be with him would be enough.

  Her mother died on the last day of September, just three weeks after Liam had left. She was sitting in her wheelchair by the Aga as Susan washed up the lunch things, and when Susan turned around her mother had fallen asleep.

  About half an hour passed, and Susan noticed Mother’s nose was running, and she went over to wipe it. It was then that she suspected she was dead, for she didn’t move irritably, and when Susan felt for her pulse there was none.

  Of course Susan cried, yet it didn’t feel so very terrible – after all, she’d died in her sleep, her daughter right there with her. She couldn’t have felt even the slightest pain or she would have made some sound.

  It was odd that her father came back early that afternoon. The doctor had not long left, saying it was a heart attack, and there would be no need for a post mortem as he’d seen her several times in the past weeks. Susan had been mentally debating whether or not to call her father at the number she’d found some two or three years earlier in his diary. She was very glad that hadn’t proved necessary.

  He looked stunned when Susan told him, and disbelieving too when he saw his wife was still in the wheelchair, though Susan had wheeled her into her bedroom. Perhaps he felt guilty then for all the years he’d been so callous to her, for he stayed in the bedroom with her, right up until the undertaker called to take his wife away.

  Susan began to wonder a week or two after her mother’s funeral if the reason her father came home so early that day was because his relationship with Gerda had ended – he hadn’t gone out again. At first she thought this was a mark of respect, but as the days passed, he still stayed in. The only time he left the house was to go to the bank or to drive Susan to the sup
ermarket. He got up at his usual time, washed, shaved and dressed just as carefully as he always had, ate the food she put in front of him, but hardly spoke. Yet it didn’t seem as if he was angry about something Susan had done or said, he was just withdrawn and nothing broke through it.

  It turned cold in mid-October, and he took to lighting the fire in Mother’s room, that had once been his study, and staying in there, sitting in the big leather armchair, staring at the fire.

  In her own way Susan was every bit as confused about the future as her father appeared to be. She had gone from being constantly rushed off her feet to finding time hanging on her hands. She was free in one respect, to go off with Liam if he did come back for her, or to get a job, but each time she looked at her father she wondered how he would manage if she wasn’t there, the way she always had been.

  One evening she tried to make him talk to her. She planned to tell him she wanted to get a job, and if he didn’t get alarmed about that, maybe she could suggest he sold the house and moved somewhere smaller. But as she felt unable to launch into that straightaway, she asked him what was wrong and if he was cross with her about something.

  He looked up at her blankly. ‘Why would I be cross with you?’ he asked.

  ‘I thought maybe about me getting Liam to do the garden,’ she said. ‘And the things we said to one another that day.’

  He just sighed in a dismissive way. ‘We had her mother here for all those years, spoiling our lives,’ he said. ‘Martin cleared off because of her, and then I thought everything was going to be good again once Granny died. But Margaret turned into her mother before we even had a chance. It wasn’t fair.’

  Susan just sat there, the only sound in the room the crackling of the fire. Her initial reaction to that strange explanation, if that was what it was supposed to be, was acute disappointment that her father couldn’t have found it in him to thank her for all she’d done to ease his burden over the years. Yet despite her disappointment, she saw he was quite right – her mother had become like Granny. Maybe not really difficult or demented, but the presence and the problems were much the same.