Summertime Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SUMMERTIME

  Praise for Summertime:

  ‘… A complex, suspenseful novel and one that will thrill and engage you from beginning to end’ The Review

  ‘A highly superior murder thriller, this is much more than a whodunnit’ iVenus.com

  Praise for Total Eclipse:

  ‘Gripping, creepy, moving and suspenseful… This one-of-a-kind book is a comedy of manners, a sexually charged romance, a science problem, a detective story, a courtroom thriller – and one heck of an impressive debut’ Wall Street Journal

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Liz Rigbey lives in Italy. Summertime is her second novel. Her first, Total Eclipse received huge acclaim and was shortlisted for W. H. Smith’s Thumping Good Read Award.

  Summertime

  LIZ RIGBEY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  Published by Michael Joseph 2003

  Published in Penguin 2004

  4

  Copyright © Liz Rigbey, 2003

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195419-6

  For Mark

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My special thanks go to my editor, Louise Moore, whose support and patience during this book’s long gestation were beyond the call of duty. I owe similar debts to my agents, the inestimable Mark Lucas and Nicki Kennedy.

  I was also lucky enough to receive advice or help from many others and I thank them all for their generosity. They include Tom Lourie, Cheryl Everett, Lucinda Pilbrow, Annie Lee, Felicity Cave, Hugh Miller, Juozas A. Kazlas, Carl Swanson, Annick Deslandes, Sally Osmond, David Miller, Christine Fletcher, Helen Meeson, Philip Meeson, Caroline Simpson, Alison Wheatcroft and Stephen Wheatcroft.

  1

  My mother told my sister and me this story many times. How it took days for the train to cross Russia and how, by the time they reached the border, it was clear that the baby was dead.

  The father had known for some time. His three daughters, one by one, understood. The other passengers told each other with silent, shocked looks. Only the mother seemed incapable of comprehending what had happened to the child locked into her arms.

  From the moment they boarded the train it cried. Not the babbling, gasping repetition of a newborn but the full, insistent cry of a six-month-old. When the Andreyev family arrived with their extensive baggage, their surly father and their screaming baby, everyone already in the car checked their tickets, hoping that they were in the wrong seats. When they found that they were indeed destined to travel west with the Andreyevs, they told themselves that the baby would soon stop crying and, anyway, the three girls took up little space. Each car was oversubscribed and each passenger wore a thick coat, hat, scarf and gloves. And the baggage! Bags, boxes, baskets, suitcases, piled high over the heads of the travellers, on the floor, on laps.

  When, far later than expected and after an alarming series of shudders, the train finally pulled out of the station, the other passengers confidently awaited the silence that must come as soon as the child felt the lulling rhythm of great metal wheels on great metal rails.

  But the silence did not come.

  The train cut its way out of the city in a straight line like mighty scissors, past factories and apartment blocks and squares of snow and mud where children played. The passengers sat unhappily listening to the endless circle of cries. Those tiny gaps of silence when the baby drew breath were all too slender and each was followed by a roar of such misery that it seemed the child was voicing the sadness and regrets of everyone present. In other cars, passengers tried to lift their mood by introducing themselves, sharing bread and occasionally pork-fat, producing bottles, telling stories. But in the Andreyev car all relationships were stunted by the baby’s screams.

  As Moscow retreated behind the train the travellers were at first glad to see the countryside. It was good to peer, through the human bulk, the baggage and the dirt which obscured the window, at the snowy landscape. They soon tired of it. Mile upon mile – and for the travellers that meant hour upon hour – of dark pine forest, hour upon hour of flat land, unbroken by trees or roads or hedges, any variation in its colour or crop or camber obscured by the cover of snow. When forests came they were disappointing, dark slabs of uniform conifers. It was like travelling through a giant black and white jigsaw. And still, as night gathered outside the train and wrapped itself around the massive, endless expanse of snow that is Russia, the baby cried.

  ‘Can’t you stop it, for God’s sake?’ someone yelled at last. The speaker was a man, young, with cold blue eyes and red cheeks. But his exasperation was masked by the baby’s yells and all the mother could do was shrug and shake her head.

  The father ignored the child and his wife but sat still, thin-faced, hard-mouthed, his eyes busily running over the faces of the passengers in a way that suggested a certain professionalism. Four, yes four children, and the family well-dressed too, with each of the girls carrying a small leather travelling-case on her lap. It was clear to all that Andreyev had done well. His menacing air of officialdom prevented many a protest at the baby’s cries.

  After the first few hours the train stopped. There was no station, no light, no apparent reason. Some of the train’s own staff, perhaps including the driver, were seen standing down by the rails smoking and a few brave passengers jumped out of the train and then a few more. The Andreyev car was soon empty except for the mother, the three girls and the shrieking baby.

  Only when the first pearly light fell on the grey faces of the travellers did the train shudder into motion. And still the baby cried.

  But then, hours after everyone had given up any hope that the noise would stop, ever, the gaps between the baby’s cries grew gradually longer and the angry edge to the child’s roars began to disintegrate. Passengers exchanged hopeful looks. Several prayed. They peered at the scarlet-faced bundle in the mother’s arms. It was scarcely whimpering now. The monster seemed to be shrinking before them. The baby was falling asleep.

  When at last silence fell, satisfaction stole around each passenger as though some special gas had seeped under the door. Everyone, except the mother, who still held her baby, fell asleep. Some slept a long time. The cramped conditions brought others this relief only in snatches. From time to time those who were awake glanced at the baby and a suspicion gradually became a conviction. It was white now, very white. And no matter for how long people watched it, they detected no movement at all. The baby was dead. The three girls watched horror register on the faces of the passengers. No on
e spoke of it, no one spoke at all. The woman continued to cradle the unmoving bundle in her arms, holding it to her as though to warm it.

  As soon as he opened the door of the Andreyev car, the guard detected that something was wrong. It was too silent for a start. Then the way everyone looked up at him was wrong too. They seemed to be waiting for him to notice something. Only one person did not watch him, a tired woman with a sleeping baby.

  He looked at the woman and at the bundle lying across her lap. He reached out to the child’s small, white face. Cold. Colder than metal, colder than stone, cold as the grave. He lifted the baby’s hand and tried to bend the fingers but they would not move. The baby had been dead for hours, more than a few.

  The guard said: ‘You will have to give the baby to me. It is dead and can travel no further.’

  ‘No!’ cried the mother. ‘No, no, he’s asleep.’

  The woman was sobbing now.

  ‘No! No!’

  The father stood up suddenly.

  ‘Give him to me,’ he ordered, and the woman allowed the stiff bundle to be removed at once from her arms. Watched by the large eyes of his three daughters, he handed the baby to the waiting guard who took it gingerly.

  The woman clutched at the guard’s shabby uniform. ‘Please, please, please, promise me that my child will be given a proper burial!’

  The man looked at her. He could give no such assurance, indeed, he was even now wondering how to dispose of this unwanted, inanimate baby in as swift and trouble-free a manner as he could and the possibilities did not include hours of pickaxing at the frozen ground.

  He left the car carrying the baby and was heard descending from the train. The mother cried silently and ceaselessly for the rest of the journey.

  My mother knew this story well because she was the youngest of the three daughters on the train and the sobbing woman was my grandmother. It was a story I heard all through my childhood but when, in my teens, my mother moved into a clinic for the mentally ill, it slid from my mind along with her other stories like a shoal of small fish sliding through a crack in the rocks. Only when I gave birth to a son myself did the fish dart back again, flashing silver at me when, almost elastic with love, I held my baby in my arms. When he died and was taken away by a thickset woman in dark clothes that might have been a uniform, I sat in our house in California and it seemed that the woman who had sobbed in the train in the snow in eastern Europe more than sixty years ago was me and I was her.

  2

  It’s a spring day, cold, but each time I cross a street the sun appears at the end of it like some advertising gimmick which glimmers from every billboard. I cut through the park. I watch the babies sitting inside their buggies, their bodies passive, their faces uninhabited like people on the subway. It’s a full three years since I held a baby. It’s almost exactly three years.

  Click, clack. Click, clack. My new shoes on the sidewalk, scraping a little against my heel. Occasionally, when there’s one of those strange gaps in the noise of Manhattan, when there are no sirens and the traffic hushes unexpectedly, it seems to me that my left foot hits the pavement harder than my right. I try to balance my weight but your walk’s like your mother or some other relative you didn’t choose and can’t change. Click, clack.

  The lobby of our building embraces you. It is a towering, glassy atrium and the bushes grow here as though in some hot, outdoor place. Some of them are like the trees my father grows in his yard back in California, only here their shape is more perfect, their flowers bigger, brighter, sweeter smelling. The elevator doors close and there is that light-headed feeling as it ascends. When Daddy stayed with me in New York, just that once, I brought him into the office on a Saturday morning. It was before the atrium, when we had the dark lobby with the wine red carpet. It must have been more than two years ago. As soon as the elevator started to catapult us up the building, Daddy was so shocked by its suddenness and power that he staggered backwards. I reached out to steady him but by then he had turned his face into the caricature of a grimace and pinned his body to the wall in a comic shape of mock-horror. I smiled, maybe a little relieved. We don’t acknowledge Daddy’s age and if he shows signs of frailty we ignore them. He isn’t allowed to grow old or get ill.

  I move fast along the hallway, checking for that click clack but the rug’s too thick here.

  ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi.’ ‘Hi.’

  I’m usually first in but today there are a couple of other heads bobbing around the screens in our office. They register my presence with a deference which acknowledges that it’s a big deal day and the deal’s mine. It’s only three months since Gregory Hifeld appeared at my desk fingering the lapels on a suit which was made of some fabric so solid, from Scotland probably, or Ireland, that he might have worn it for the last forty years without it creasing or fraying. He told me about his son. George has three divorces, a drink problem and no known business sense. A man unlikely to take over Thinking Toys from his father, not now or ever.

  ‘You’re sixty-eight, that’s not so old. And you look strong and fit to me,’ I told Gregory. Not so strong and fit as Daddy but then, nobody is. ‘Why do you need to do anything about the business right now?’

  He bowed his head and for a moment I thought he was going to cry. I looked away. ‘I’m tired and my wife is ill. We’d like to enjoy the time we have left together.’

  Soon, there was George Hifeld sitting across my desk right where his father had sat, yellow fingers and the tremor of a guy who needs a cigarette but thinks it might start all the fire alarms and a panic on eighty-three storeys. And finally, Mittex. Keen to buy Thinking Toys but trying not to show it. Dark suits, nodding white heads like vultures. Their CEO-in-waiting, Jay Kent, asking questions, slicing through figures and long-range projections as professional and precise as a chef slicing onions. Today, they’ll all sit at the boardroom table together for the first time and maybe, just maybe, by the end of the day, we’ll know whether Mittex will buy Thinking Toys.

  When the boss arrives, I have my fingers wrapped around my second cup of coffee. The cups are paper but they feel sort of good to touch, soft, like petting a dog.

  Jim Finnigan is bald. He’s obese. When I first started working here he was just fat but he takes the train in and a guy sells hot cinnamon buns, dripping with butter, right there at the station. Jim has three every morning. He tells his wife, June, that he only has one. He feels badly about lying to her and telling the truth to me but in our job, with its long hours in a room high in the sky, your family back home can seem sort of unreal. So if you’re going to lie to someone it’s going to be them. We’re mostly truthful with each other.

  ‘Jeez,’ says Jim, pulling up a chair and putting his feet on my desk. ‘Jeez, you’re going to have a tough time in the boardroom this afternoon. I was thinking about it at the station and I had to have an extra cinnamon.’

  The total has been creeping up over the years.

  ‘The first time you ate four?’ I ask.

  He shuffles his feet on my desktop.

  ‘Well… actually five.’

  ‘Ji-im. You’ve been eating four every day?’

  He nods miserably.

  ‘Only for a month or two. Or three.’

  He’s sheepish. He’s really apologizing to June.

  ‘It started when I was so damn cold one morning and the train was late… the guy gets them ready as soon as he sees me coming. And he says: “Delay today, sir, take another cinnamon bun to keep you from losing too much heat.” And I let him put another one in a napkin for me. I mean, for Chrissake, to keep me from losing too much heat, for Chrissake. But I stand and watch while he does it. Then I pay him, then I take it. Oh, and then I eat it.’

  ‘Oh, Jim.’

  ‘Don’t let me eat anything more today. Nothing. Okay? Nothing.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And don’t tell June.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Jim looks at me twinkly-eyed. He says: ‘So how you planning to
handle Kent up in the boardroom?’

  ‘He isn’t my client, Jim. The Hifelds are my clients.’

  ‘Precisely. So how are you going to handle Kent?’

  Jay Kent, not tall but with the slimness and quickness of some metallic weapon.

  ‘He wants you, Lucy,’ says Jim and his words make me start a little because they’re just the words Jay Kent used, sitting straight-backed in the Michigan restaurant.

  Jim lifts his immense, ankleless legs off the desk, an operation which requires two hands, and manoeuvres his feet carefully into their favourite place on the garbage bin.

  ‘Has anything happened between you two?’ he asks. I can hear the exertion in his voice. ‘And don’t you try foolin’ Uncle Jim.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Nothing?’ asks Jim, searching my face.

  ‘Nothing physical, is that what you mean?’

  Jim pulls his face in two different directions at the same time so it looks like a face in a distorting mirror. ‘Lucy, you know what I mean.’

  ‘We talk a lot. On the phone.’

  ‘Like, pillow talk without the pillows?’

  ‘Friend talk.’ Mostly Kent talks and I listen. He doesn’t know a lot about me and I like that.

  Jim studies me for signs of insincerity then he says: ‘June thinks…’ June, a dark bulk misshapen by clinging children, leaves romantic novels damp at the bathside and is reliably tearful when TV comedies dissolve into syrup. ‘June thinks you only get yourself into relationships where you can’t have a real relationship, for example with a guy like Kent who’s married and has a small kid.’

  I imagine Kent’s kid, a wriggling blade of a baby, surrounded by plastic, blaring Mittex toys.

  ‘The kind of relationship I have with Kent is limited for professional reasons.’ I sound brisk because I wish June would stop talking like the studio audience in an afternoon show.

  Jim doesn’t seem to hear me. As he gets up he asks: ‘What did you do this weekend?’

  ‘Oh, just visited friends.’