“No.”
“My mum was asking after your friend, the lady who was lost on the moor that morning.”
“Ruth is fine.” Jayne weighs up how much to tell him and decides that for once she’ll just be honest. That feels okay because he was a part of it. She’s starting to understand the connection he says he feels. She feels as if something in her brain is warming up.
“It wasn’t your dad’s fault that Ruth was out there,” she tells him. “She went out because she was drunk, and the letter spooked her terribly. She’s an alcoholic. And she had some personal problems at the time that exacerbated things. But she recovered well from the accident, and she’s been sober for a while now.”
A familiar stab of jealousy needles at her. How is it that Ruth, who was delusional about Toby, who fantasized that he was a pedophile, that he was encouraging young women to commit suicide, who pushed her husband about as far away from her as possible, got him back when Emily lost Paul, and Jayne can only wish that she was a widow?
She remembers a night when Toby came round, shortly after he left hospital. He explained it all. How he’d been working with Ruth’s mum and they were racked with guilt that they’d let Ruth’s drinking get so out of control before intervening.
I thought the weekend at the barn might help her, he said. That getting away from home and from the demands of the baby might ease her paranoia. It was supposed to be a new start, until it all went wrong.
He didn’t mention Mark’s name, or the letter, or the messages Mark had sent on other people’s behalf, the ones which persuadedthe men to stay behind that Friday night. Toby had got one from “Paul.” Paul had got one from “Edie.” But, of course, Mark had sent them all. Like a puppeteer.
And it was hard for Jayne to witness Toby’s upset. Her situation was so much worse. Toby knew. He’s tried to reach out to her repeatedly over the past year, but she doesn’t want to see them.
“Ruth has a little boy, a toddler,” Jayne tells William Elliott. “So, it’s a relief to all of us that she’s doing so well now.”
“Fantastic,” William says. “I’ll pass that on to my mum.”
She has a sudden urge to inform him more about her own situation, about how Mark isn’t getting better. Whenever Jayne visits him, he harangues her, asking when Imogen is coming to see him, requesting that Jayne arrange a visit from her. He refers to Imogen as “his daughter.” He lectures Jayne, in a tone so teachery and with such hollow authority that she wants to throttle him, that DNA tests aren’t always reliable and sometimes he asks her to collect a sample from Imogen, so he can arrange another test.
He talks about the plan he had, how clever it was, how he’d set things up so that it looked as if Edie had run off with Paul by killing them both but leaving a trail of text messages from their cloned phones.
He repeats himself, his outrage that he was caught and his toxic self-congratulation on a loop.
And she wants to scream at him, every single time, that his plan was terrible. It was preposterous, utterly deluded, the fantasy of someone who had lost his mind so completely that he had become almost inhuman, and he will never, thank God, ever, bring a child into this world, or look after one.
Jayne wonders, sometimes, who Imogen’s real father is. She believes Mark’s claim that he saw proof that Rob was sterile, and she sometimes speculates that Edie may have slept with Toby and Paul, too, if she slept with Mark, with the intention of getting pregnant.
But Jayne won’t mention her suspicions about this to Imogen. What good would it do?
If Paul is Imogen’s real father, it’ll be another bereavement for her to cope with. And if it’s Toby? He hasn’t bonded with his own son, and he has his hands full with Ruth. It’s kinder, Jayne believes, to leave Imogen in peace, to try to rebuild her life, so she will not be the one to raise this, ever, because it would rob Imogen of her identity and change her perception of her mother. Imogen doesn’t need to know any of it.
The only intervention Jayne has made is to reassure Imogen that Mark is mad and that any claims he made to be her father were grounded in insanity. Imogen had wonderful parents and she should cherish their memory and the years she had with them.
“And what about the other friend?” William asks. “The one who hurt her ankle?”
Suddenly, she’s finding his questions intrusive, and it occurs to her that this could be a setup, that he could in fact have been persuaded by a journalist to call her and try to wheedle information from her.
“I don’t know,” Jayne says. This is true because Emily sold her house and moved on, too, though Jayne’s unsure where she went. Emily hasn’t kept in touch with Ruth or Jayne and Jayne can’t blame her for it.
William catches her tone and senses that she wants the conversation to end. “Thanks for calling,” he says. “I’ll pass on what you said to Mum.”
And now she doesn’t want him to go because she’s changed her mind and she thinks he sounds entirely sincere, and she regrets her suspicion of his motives, but she doesn’t know what to say to keep the conversation going. She’s so out of practice. She’s so lonely.
“Okay,” she says.
“Well,” he says, “keep in touch.”
“I’ll do that,” she says but she’s not sure she will.
She hangs up.
He didn’t ask about Imogen. He’ll have learned that she existed, no doubt, from the papers, but otherwise she won’t be real to him. Jayne thinks about her all the time.
She knows that Imogen went to live with her friend Jemma and her family and Jayne thought she saw them both in the city center, once, and she wanted to apologize to Imogen, but knew it was best to duck out of the way and let them walk on by. Mark has done enough damage to that girl.
