Human Remains

this.
    But, as hard as he tried to act normally, things were not really the same. Leonard hid himself away for hours at a time, working on possible lines of defence. Late in the evening I would hear him weeping after I’d gone to bed. Despite his efforts, reading over legal documents the solicitor brought, to give him something to do, his demeanour faltered and it felt as though he’d given up already.
    I hadn’t given up, not by a long shot.
     
     
    The trial changed everything. It was not quite a year since that Tuesday morning that they’d come and arrested him. We were all prepared for it, briefed by the solicitor as to what to expect, but even so the boys suffered terribly. Seeing Adrian and Diane and my grandson Joshy who was five by then and quite a handful… it was so good in many ways but so bad in others. Diane stayed for a week with us and then when the trial started she took Joshy to stay with her parents in Scotland. Adrian stayed with Stephen and me.
    I was there every day, apart from the second day of the trial when they showed the images that they’d found on his computer. They had been well hidden, which made me feel convinced that someone had put them there without Leonard’s knowledge. He was an executive of one of the largest computer hardware firms in the world, but he had no idea of how these things actually worked. He bought and sold assets, he dealt with the shareholders and organised trade; he didn’t know how to encrypt a hard drive, or whatever it was they said he’d done.
    In any case, I had no wish to see them.
    But Stephen did, and Adrian did. Even Janet was there. In her younger days she’d worked at a centre for abused women, so she claimed she was unshockable; there was little she’d not already had to deal with. But it seemed this wasn’t quite true.
    They came home that day quiet. I’d made them a big joint of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, parsnip, spring cabbage, carrots, gravy, even home-made horseradish sauce. All of this was mainly to keep myself occupied for the hours that the house was empty. But when they got home, none of them wanted to eat. The three of them sat at the kitchen table talking, trying to make sense of it, while I carved and dished up. It was as though someone had turned their positivity off at the mains. They were no longer talking about what they could do to help the legal team that Leonard had put together. They were talking about how they could come to terms with what they’d seen.
    I tried to understand them. I tried to buoy them up again, tell them that this moping around wasn’t going to do Leonard any good. I tried to tell them that they should eat something, that it would help, it would make them all feel better.
    Stephen shouted something at me, something about how I couldn’t make it alright, not this. That a roast dinner wasn’t going to suddenly make everything better.
    Janet’s husband came to collect her. He was supposed to be coming for dinner, but they both left straight away and went home. The boys sat in the kitchen and I sat in the dining room on my own, at the table laid for six (I laid Leonard’s place at the head of the table every day, whether he was here to eat or not). The beef was cooked to perfection and every mouthful tasted of anger. Fury at their failure to support their father in his hour of greatest need; resentment at their refusal to eat the meal I’d spent the whole day cooking for them.
    When I’d finished I went back through to the kitchen. They’d been talking, but they fell silent when I came in.
    ‘What about pudding?’ I said, as cheerily as I could manage. ‘I made a trifle, would you like some of that?’
    Stephen stood up abruptly, his chair scraping noisily against the terracotta tiles. He pushed past without even looking at me and left the room.
    ‘What about you, Adrian? Could you manage some trifle?’
    ‘No, Mum,’ he said.
    I sat down next to him and put my hand over his. There were tears running down his cheeks. The sight of my grown son in tears affected me more than any of it.
    ‘It’s alright,’ I said, moving my hand to his shoulder. ‘It’ll be alright, my darling! They’ll see that it’s all been a horrible mistake and then they’ll let him come home. And we can all get back to how we were.’
    ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Those pictures…’
    ‘I know, I know. They must have been dreadful for you to see. But they were hidden on his