Page 90 of Oleander

“To think that all I know of her is her collection of tawdry romance novels,” he said in a tone I couldn’t place.

I gently slid the copy of Lady Chatterley back in and turned to him. “Gideon never talks about her?”

“Oh, incessantly. But I’d never believe anything he says about her.” He had finished eating and was lying out on the sofa withhis head propped up against one end. “I rarely believe anything he says about anything.”

“What happened to her?” I ventured.

His eyes turned to me sharp and cold, and I immediately regretted it.

“Shall we trade?” he said icily. “How did your parents die?”

“Car accident. They were hit from behind by a truck.” There was nothing glamourous or mysterious about it. It happened every day all over the world. Seraphina Deveraux’s story, from what I’d gathered, was far more exotic. Something more like a story from one of those novels she’d loved so much.

“Did the person who killed them die too?” said Caspien.

I shook my head. “No. He went to prison for three years and got banned from driving for two.” He hadn’t been drunk or under the influence, just tired and overworked, apparently.

He stared at me. “Fucking tragic. The law in this country is a joke. Manslaughter is what it is, and he used a three-ton weapon to do it. Are you angry?” His own voice sizzled with anger, and I felt a weird sense of gratitude to him for it.

“Not really,” I replied. “Not anymore.”

Ihadbeen angry. For a few years after it happened, I was mainly sad, but then, when I turned fourteen, I couldn’t remember feeling anything but anger. I’d been old enough then to understand that someone’s carelessness had destroyed my entire world.

But one day, I woke up and realised I didn’t feel that same anger anymore. I could still find it inside if I looked, packed away under other memories and feelings I’d grown out of. Sometimes, I’d pull it out and shake it off, holding it against me to see if it still fit.

Cas was quiet for a long time. Then, he said, “She killed herself.”

There was absolutely no emotion in his voice. It wasn’t cold or anything like it, just entirely indifferent. I went toward him and sat on the opposite couch.

“You can wipe that look off your face, too,” he snapped. “I don’t want your pity, Judith. It’s no worse a tragedy than yours. In fact, it’s less so.”

He avoided my eyes, and I knew why. Hewasangry. I imagined having a parent kill themselves would be a far harder kind of anger to shelve away. To know that not even you, their own child, was enough to keep them tethered to life.

“Do you know why? I mean, was she sick or...”

“Gideon says she was depressed her entire life, that part of it was an affinity with melodrama and morbidity. They were both sad creatures by all accounts. I don’t know if it was that their parents – my grandparents – didn’t believe in mental illness or if it was that she never asked them for help. Sounds like her father doted on her most of her life.” His voice had turned languid with what sounded like longing. “When she got pregnant, it was a scandal apparently as he was some local boy ‘without money or good breeding’. When her parents found out they locked her up here, then forced her to birth me.”

I sat forward, horrified. “Gideon told you this?”

“This, I found out from her diary,” he said. “I’d never have believed it had he said it. I needed to read it with my own eyes. But yes, she rather hated me by the sounds of it; from the moment she was aware of my existence, she loathed me.” He looked straight at me. “She jumped from the cliffs at Sorel Point. ”

I was slack-jawed, unable to comprehend having to live knowing your mother hated you, and had killed herself. No wonder he hated the world.

I hadn’t a clue what I was supposed to say, so I sat silent and still for a long time. I wanted to refute it, tell him it couldn’t possibly be true. That there must be some other interpretation to be taken from a depressed woman’s diary that wasn’t this. Though there seemed to be no words I could summon that could go anywhere close to trying to comfort him, and though I’m certain he didn’t want it, I still tried.

“She was ill. I’m sure that’s not how she felt at all, not really.”

His eyes turned hard and cold as a frozen planet. “And you know the inner workings of my dead mother’s mind; how exactly?”

I looked away from him to my hands, then back up at him. “What about your father? Did she talk about him?”

“Daddy dearest. Ah yes, she talked about him at length. She loved him with as much ferocity as she hated me. I think she blamed me for his leaving her. Gideon says he doesn’t know who he is, but naturally, I think he’s lying. He’s always had a rather aberrant relationship with the truth.”

I remembered something then. The afternoon I’d come here after Caspien had blackmailed me to sit for him. Gideon had been acting strangely.Christ, every day you look more and more like him,he’d said, looking at Caspien. Had he meant Caspien’s father? A shiver trilled down my spine. Hewaslying.

Carefully, I said, “Would you want to know? If Gideonwaslying and he did know? Would you want him to tell you?”

His gaze turned sharp, and I wondered if he suspected something. Though I didn’t know how he would. “No,” he said after a moment. “What would I do with that? What do I need with a father at this age? As a child with those kinds ofinclinations, yes, perhaps it would have been novel, but now I have no need of him.”