The Cuckoo's Calling(142)

“Do you know how much Lula managed to find out about her birth family?”

“No, I don’t, I’m afraid. I think she knew how much it upset me. She didn’t tell me a great deal. I know that she found the mother, of course, because there was all the dreadful publicity. She was exactly what Tony had predicted. She hadn’t ever wanted Lula. An awful, awful woman,” whispered Lady Bristow. “But Lula kept seeing her. I was having chemotherapy all through that time. I lost my hair…”

Her voice trailed away. Strike felt, as perhaps she meant him to, like a brute as he pressed on:

“What about her biological father? Did she ever tell you she’d found out anything about him?”

“No,” said Lady Bristow weakly. “I didn’t ask. I had the impression that she had given up on the whole business once she found that horrible mother. I didn’t want to discuss it, any of it. It was too distressing. I think she realized that.”

“She didn’t mention her biological father the last time you saw her?” Strike pressed on.

“Oh no,” she said, in her soft voice. “No. That was not a very long visit, you know. She told me, the moment she arrived, I remember, that she could not stay long. She had to meet her friend Ciara Porter.”

Her sense of ill-usage wafted gently towards him like the smell of the bedridden she exuded: a little fusty, a little overripe. Something about her recalled Rochelle; although they were as different as two women could be, both gave off the resentment of those who feel shortchanged and neglected.

“Can you remember what you and Lula talked about that day?”

“Well, I had been given so many painkillers, you understand. I had had a very serious operation. I can’t remember every detail.”

“But you remember Lula coming to see you?” asked Strike.

“Oh yes,” she said. “She woke me up, I had been sleeping.”

“Can you remember what you talked about?”

“My operation, of course,” she said, with just a touch of asperity. “And then, a little bit, about her big brother.”

“Her big…?”

“Charlie,” said Lady Bristow, pitifully. “I told her about the day he died. I had never really talked to her about it before. The worst, the very worst day of my life.”

Strike could imagine her, prostrate and a little groggy, but no less resentful for all that, holding her unwilling daughter there at her side by talking about her pain, and her dead son.

“How could I have known that that would be the last time I would ever see her?” breathed Lady Bristow. “I didn’t realize that I was about to lose a second child.”

Her bloodshot eyes filled. She blinked, and two fat tears fell down on to her hollow cheeks.

“Could you please look in that drawer,” she whispered, pointing a withered finger at the bedside table, “and get me out my pills?”

Strike slid it open and saw many white boxes inside, of varying types and with various labels upon them.

“Which…?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re all the same,” she said.

He took one out; it was clearly labeled Valium. She had enough in there to overdose ten times.

“If you could pop a couple out for me?” she said. “I’ll take them with some tea, if it’s cool enough.”

He handed her her pills and the cup; her hands trembled; he had to support the saucer and he thought, inappropriately, of a priest offering communion.

“Thank you,” she murmured, relaxing back on to her pillows as he replaced her tea on the table, and fixing him with her plaintive eyes. “Didn’t John tell me you knew Charlie?”

“Yes, I did,” said Strike. “I’ve never forgotten him.”

“No, of course not. He was a most lovable child. Everyone always said so. The sweetest boy, the very sweetest I have ever known. I miss him every single day.”

Outside the window, the children shrieked, and the plane trees rustled, and Strike thought of how the room would have looked on a winter morning months ago, when the trees must have been barelimbed, when Lula Landry had sat where he was sitting, with her beautiful eyes perhaps fixed on the picture of dead Charlie while her groggy mother told the horrible story.

“I had never really talked to Lula about it before. The boys had gone out on their bikes. We heard John screaming, and then Tony shouting, shouting…”

Strike’s pen had not made contact with paper yet. He watched the dying woman’s face as she talked.

“Alec wouldn’t let me look, wouldn’t let me anywhere near the quarry. When he told me what had happened, I fainted. I thought I would die. I wanted to die. I could not understand how God could have let it happen.

“But since then, I’ve come to think that perhaps I have deserved all of it,” said Lady Bristow distantly, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. “I’ve wondered whether I’m being punished. Because I loved them too much. I spoiled them. I couldn’t say no. Charlie, Alec and Lula. I think it must be punishment, because otherwise it would be too unspeakably cruel, wouldn’t it? To make me go through it again, and again, and again.”

Strike had no answer to give. She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.