Chapter 11: No Reason
“No reason.”
That was it.
Two words, in the yard, with one hand on the roof of the car and a hard hat under his arm.
Then he shut the door and went in through the boot room and left me standing on the gravel with my bag.
I stayed out there a while.
The gravel in that yard was pea shingle over hardcore, laid too thin, so it moved under the foot and you could hear anybody crossing it from inside the house.
I used to think of that as a security feature.
It is worth saying that it works in both directions.
Here is what is wrong with the answer, and I saw it standing in the yard, and then I put it down and did not pick it up again for eight months.
If there is no reason, you say a reason.
That is what people do. It is not even lying. It is politeness.
You say, because Mother finds it odd. You say, because the staff talk.
You say, because it looks like we can't staff the place ourselves.
Any of those would have taken two seconds and I would have believed any of them, and he knew that, because they were all available and he was not a stupid man.
A man who says no reason is a man who has looked at four perfectly good explanations and rejected all of them.
He rejected them because a false reason can be checked.
Give me a reason and I have something to hold.
No reason is smooth.
There is nothing on it to get a grip.
I have thought about grip a great deal in my life and I recognised it immediately, and then I explained it away, because that is what I did for three years about everything.
Here is how I explained it away.
Damon was ashamed of the homes.
That is what I decided, in the yard, in about ninety seconds, and it fitted so neatly that I never questioned it again.
He drove a car that cost more than his mother's.
He talked about the portfolio.
He wanted people to think he was in property.
And the actual business was forty-one beds of very old people and an agency rota and a limescale filter nobody changed, and the wife of his brother went in every Wednesday and pushed the chairs.
Of course he did not want it said at dinner parties.
Of course he was embarrassed.
I was so pleased with that explanation.
I want to record how pleased I was.
It let me be the generous one.
It let me feel a flicker of pity for him, and pity is very comfortable, and I had almost nothing else comfortable available.
I went in through the boot room and hung up my coat.
The house was warm. There was a smell of onions.
Mrs Bell had gone home and left a note about a fish delivery.
Julian came through the hall with his phone against his shoulder and put his hand flat on my back as he passed, which was the third thing he did instead of talking, and he was on the stairs before I had turned round.
I went up and put the badge back in the drawer of the dressing table, in the box with the passport and the paperback.
The badge had my name on it and a photograph taken from something else, some other document, at some other time, and slightly stretched.
I looked at it for a second longer than usual.
Then I put it away, and I went down, and I laid the table for five.
Two things I did not do that evening.
I did not mention the conversation to Julian.
Twelve years of geometry teaches you that the moment you report something, you have to be able to describe it, and there was nothing to describe.
A man drove me home in the rain, slowed for the horses, and used four words about a care home.
Try saying that out loud in a kitchen.
Try saying it in a witness box.
The second thing I did not do was ask Ruth.
I could have.
I was going to be back in that building in seven days and Ruth Okonjo had been there nineteen years and there is nothing about a place that a woman like that does not know.
I could have said, Damon told me not to tell people I come here, and does that mean anything to you.
And I did not, for the simple and stupid reason that I did not want to make trouble in the only building where anybody said thank you.
That was the cost of Wednesdays, and I did not know I was paying it.
I wrote nothing in the paperback.
There was no date, because nothing had happened.
It is the only conversation from those three years I can still hear in the actual voice.