by Jonathan Coe
‘Of course I do. Of course. Don’t forget that something similar happened to me once, after all.’
She smiled, and her eyes gleamed with satisfaction. ‘Oh, come on – you’re not going to bring out that old story again, are you?’
‘It happened. I didn’t imagine it.’
‘But you were tiny. We were both just little kids. And you were half asleep at the time.’
I dropped the subject, having no serious desire to submit my memories to her mischievous scrutiny yet again. But after lunch, as I drove, alone, back up the hill to my parents’ house, I felt myself once more surrendering to recollection. I remembered the weekly visits we used to pay to Shropshire as children: the summer holidays, with their morning fishing trips and long afternoons sitting alone in the dining room, reading books and listening to the slow tick of the grandfather clock. I remembered the Christmas mornings, opening presents after breakfast and then being dragged out on walks across frost-hardened fields beneath a clear winter sky. And one Christmas I remembered above all.
That afternoon, when I took a ladder and climbed up to my parents’ loft, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking for, but allowed myself to be drawn towards a pile of cardboard boxes stacked beneath the eaves in the furthest and most shadowy corner. My torchlight picked out this jumble of rubbish and rested on it, bringing it into brilliant relief: my childhood. I approached it warily, crouching, avoiding the low beams, and then sat apprehensive for a few moments before brushing the dust off the first box and peering inside.
There was no time to do more than glance at the damp and wrinkled pages of old notepads and diaries, or to flick through the ancient scrapbooks into which I had once pasted, with manic diligence, hundreds of cuttings about my favourite footballers and pop stars. Before long I had come upon a small wooden box filled with Kodak slides, and this I seized eagerly, taking them out and holding them up to the torchlight one by one. Forgotten holidays, forgotten gardens, forgotten family cars, forgotten relatives. There I was on the beach at Llanbedrog with Aunt Ivy and Uncle Owen: I looked four or five years old and, unconscious of the camera, was caught in a relaxed pose, one hand stuck blissfully down the front of my swimming trunks. My great-aunt and -uncle sat on their beach towels and smiled the trusting, confident smiles of people who had survived a war, prospered in the years that followed, and were not yet touched by the new uncertainties of the 1960s. I could hear their voices again – his a deep and guttural drone; hers shrill and deliberate – mixed with the cries of children and the slow wash of water against the shingle. My past was full of voices: the continuous soundtrack of my family as they talked, gossiped, bickered. How quiet the village had seemed today, by comparison. I was glad we hadn’t driven up to Uncle Owen’s old farmhouse, now empty and shuttered.
But here was the farmhouse, on the very next slide. The whole family was sitting down to supper in the kitchen – apart from my father, who must have been taking the picture. There were eleven of us, in all, and we were raising our glasses, and smiling, and wearing Christmas party hats: mine was too big for me, and had slipped down over one eye. Only my grandmother, I noticed, scrutinizing the image more closely, seemed to be set apart from the general hilarity. She looked detached and pensive, leading me to believe that this was the very same Christmas I had been thinking of – the one just after her spell of jury service. For a while I stared wonderingly at this miniature tableau, which seemed to contain a world every bit as mysterious and implausible as an impossibly scratchy old film. And I was still staring, still trying to fathom its secret, when my torch – its battery clearly on its last legs – began to flicker, fade, and at last gave out, plunging me all at once into the inky blackness of memory.
In those days we used to travel to Shropshire every year to spend Christmas at my grandparents’ house. We would arrive early in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, and after a brief, energetic bout of unpacking, the grown-ups would sit down to drink sherry and exchange bits of news. The sitting room would be even brighter and more cheerful than usual: its long windows looked out over both the front and back gardens, and the last of the sunlight, sharpened by snow, would catch the baubles and trinkets hanging from my grandfather’s tree, winking back at us from the tinsel draped over its thick branches.
‘Well, Ma, you seem to have survived your ordeal,’ said my mother this time, as Gill and I helped ourselves from a plate of digestive biscuits and tried not to look restless.
‘Oh, it wasn’t too bad. I’m just glad it was over in time for Christmas. I haven’t got half the things done.’ She glanced severely at my grandfather. ‘Of course, Jim hasn’t been much help.’
He ignored the rebuke, choosing instead to mutter: ‘Pity you didn’t come to the right decision.’
‘Oh, Dad, don’t you start,’ said my mother, and then Gill managed to change the subject by asking if it was time to feed the horses yet.
My grandparents owned a few acres of land adjoining the house, and here they looked after two racehorses belonging to their neighbours, who kept an extensive stable. It was a favourite ritual to accompany my grandfather, still broad and muscular in his old age, as he carried bales of hay down to the paddock where the horses would be standing in patient anticipation, flank to flank. I felt sorry for them today, for the cold made my hands ache, even with gloves on. We ran on ahead, armed with sugar lumps to give them a treat.
‘What was Grandma’s ordeal?’ I asked Gill, who was, in my experience, a fount of knowledge.
‘You don’t know anything, do you?’ she said: which was true. ‘She’s been to court. A woman killed her husband, and she had to decide whether she was guilty or not. She was in the jury. Mum said it was in all the papers, but she wouldn’t let me see them.’
My grandfather had nearly caught us up, so she sank her voice to a whisper:
‘She did it with a knife. First of all he was going to stab her, but then she got hold of the knife and stabbed him: hundreds and hundreds of times. With a penknife – just like I’m going to get for Christmas.’
This explanation, although graphic, was far from satisfactory, but I had the edge over my elder sister in one respect: I knew where my grandparents kept the old newspapers – they were stacked up in Grandpa’s workshop, awaiting the next bonfire. I slipped in there before tea and spent a damp and chilly few minutes leafing through the pages of the Shropshire Star. The familiar smells of turps and wood shavings were tempered, today, by the sweet scent of satsumas: doubtless they were in their usual hiding place, but I was too preoccupied to filch one. As it turned out, I didn’t have far to look for my story: it was there on the front page of one of the most recent editions. ‘KNIFE WOMAN GETS FIVE YEARS’ was the headline in enormous letters, and underneath, slightly smaller, it said: ‘JURY FINDS HER NOT GUILTY OF MURDER.’
As I read the report, numerous fragments of adult conversation which had fallen my way over the last few months began at last to make sense. This was a case which had divided the local community, and indeed my family: for the couple in question had lived only a few miles away, and such sensational events were rare in this placid part of the world. The wife had been unfaithful to the husband; he had threatened to kill her, on several occasions; and one night, when he had finally seemed on the point of carrying out his threat, she had forestalled him by snatching the penknife from his hand and plunging it repeatedly into his chest. My family’s interest had risen to a pitch when my grandmother was asked to serve on the jury that would hear the case, and I imagine that she found it a deeply troubling experience. A quiet, unassumingly religious woman, she must have felt lost in this world of ferocious passions, and things can’t have been helped by strong hints from her more puritanical relatives – notably her sister – to the effect that the wife was nothing but a Jezebel and a harlot who deserved to be put away for life. In the end the jury had come to a different conclusion; and although the phrases they invoked – such as ‘unsound mind’ and ‘mitigating circumstances’ – carrie
d only a hazy meaning for me, I found myself very much in agreement when I saw the newspaper photograph of the murdered husband. ‘The face that will haunt her for ever,’ it said, and I could see why. He looked much more like a killer than she did, and even in that smudged, grainy reproduction, his sunken eyes – which seemed hollow and threatening at the same time – exerted a horrible fascination. They burned into me so powerfully, in fact, that when I heard the call for tea, out of some perverse and heedless impulse I quickly tore the picture out and carried it unseen up to our bedroom.
Supper on Christmas Eve was provided by my great-aunt and -uncle, round at their farmhouse, and it followed an obligatory game of charades, which gave Gill further scope to demonstrate her ingenuity. For this purpose, the family gathered in the drawing room, with its open fire and heavy, faded armchairs. Sending Gill out into the corridor, we would choose a television personality for her to identify, and she would return breathlessly eager to face our impersonations, which never had her beaten for more than three guesses. Tommy Cooper presented no problems at all; neither did Uncle Owen’s failed attempt to defy gravity by raising his arms and legs together, like a pair of scissors.
‘Harry Worth,’ said Gill, blushing with pleasure.
For supper we had cold meat, pork pies, beetroot, celery and jacket potatoes rolled in salt and pepper. This was another time for adult talk, while Gill and I had to be content with kicking each other excitedly under the table. If we made enough noise about it we could pretend not to be listening to the general conversation, which might then become agreeably uninhibited.
‘I should like to know,’ said Aunt Ivy, addressing her sister in her usual strident monotone (she was by then almost completely deaf), ‘why you decided to let that creature off scot-free.’
‘Give over, woman,’ said Uncle Owen. ‘You don’t know the facts. You only know what you read in the paper.’
My mother agreed. ‘She said it was in self-defence: and if you saw the picture of her husband in the newspaper, you’d believe her.’
‘It was a difficult choice,’ said my grandmother. ‘A very difficult choice. I never did make up my mind entirely, like some of the others. It seemed the Christian thing to do. People like that deserve pity. They’ve got God to answer to. All the same –’ she dabbed her lips with a beetroot-stained napkin, ‘– he never did attack her, as such. He only threatened her.’
‘Threatened her!’ said Uncle Owen. ‘I’ll say he did. Threatened to cut her throat, didn’t he?’
‘Ssh!’ said someone, while Gill, unobserved, performed a short pantomime for my benefit: she raised the breadknife and drew it slowly across her throat, smiling like a little demon. For a moment I had to fight back tears.
Then crackers were pulled, and hats distributed, and photographs taken; and despite the fact that my hat was too big, and I didn’t understand any of the riddles, and Gill got a compass while all I got was a whistle that didn’t blow, my spirits rallied considerably.
After supper, while the others took their coffee into the drawing room, we stayed behind to feed scraps to the three spaniel puppies, who had spent the last half-hour shut in a back parlour and scratching excitedly at the kitchen door. Partly to keep Gill off the subject of murder, I said something about her being good at charades, and asked if there was a secret to it: whereupon, much to my surprise, and with a pleased, confidential grin, she pulled a heavy key out of her pocket.
‘Come with me,’ she said, and led me into the hall, where a door beneath the oak staircase, normally kept locked, led down into the wine cellar. She explained that you could get right under the drawing room and hear every word that was said. ‘Didn’t you wonder why I was always out of breath?’
‘Can we try it now?’ I asked, very struck with the possibilities of this system.
‘OK.’ She unlocked the door. ‘You first.’
Of course the first thing I heard was the door slamming behind me, and the turn of the key in the lock. I pounded on the panels and shouted a bit, but I knew that Gill would want to make me wait. I was determined to try her trick, anyway, so once I had found the light switch I took a deep breath and headed bravely down the stairs, leaving her to listen in vain for my entreaties.
The cellar actually contained more fruit than wine, and more spiders’ webs than either. Further, less awestruck exploration in later years would reveal it to be quite compact, but that night it seemed labyrinthine and unending: there were different chambers leading off on both sides of a main passageway which itself took several unexpected turns, and I had to peep round each corner nervously before I dared move closer towards the voices that were becoming slowly more distinct above my head. Along the walls, where coarse brick showed beneath a thin layer of whitewash, I could see the silvery trails of slugs.
Once I was standing directly beneath the drawing room, the conversation would have been easy to hear even if the dominant voice had not been my aunt Ivy’s.
‘Are you not even a little scared, though?’ she was saying.
‘Oh, Ivy, will you stop mithering, for heaven’s sake.’
‘You know I don’t believe in any of that foolishness,’ said my grandmother. ‘The Christian religion is all I need to believe in, and I would have thought the same went for you, since I presume you’ll be reading in church tonight.’
‘Rather you than me, dear. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘Stop werreting, Ivy. A joke’s a joke.’
(‘Werreting’ was a favourite local word, more or less synonymous with ‘mithering’. Nobody ever explained to me what ‘mithering’ meant.)
‘Anyway,’ Ivy persisted, ‘you get ghosts in churches, too. That’s a proven fact.’
‘The Holy Ghost,’ suggested Uncle Owen wittily.
‘I’m talking about Chetwynd churchyard, outside Newport. Have you never seen the ghost of Madam Piggott, flitting about in her nightgown and combing her baby’s hair amongst the graves?’
‘Why, have you?’
‘Not personally, no. But I’ve sat in that churchyard, with the leaves rustling about my head, and the trees bending and moaning, and not a breath of wind in the air.’
My great-uncle, perhaps through daily contact with his pigs, had built up an expressive repertoire of grunts, and he now let out a particularly good one. I could hear the clink of Aunt Ivy’s coffee cup as she laid it down for emphasis.
‘All I’m saying is that this man, who was murdered by his wife in cold blood, is one man who’ll not be resting quiet in his grave tonight. I know what I’d be doing if I was him. I’d be paying a visit on those people who’d passed up the chance to avenge me. That’s what I’d do.’
And as I took in these words, only half comprehending, sudden fear caused me to turn. A huge human shadow was forming in the passageway, looming larger and larger, advancing towards me with a remorseless tread. Having nowhere to run, I could only shrink back into the wall, and feel my terror shade deliciously into relief as I saw Gill coming round the corner to tell me that my ordeal was over.
That Christmas, for the first time, it had been decided that we were old enough to attend midnight communion with the rest of the family. We drove to the village church in two cars: ever hungry for novelty, Gill and I had chosen to travel with our grandparents. We trembled with anticipation on the back seat, watching the headlamps throw patterns of light on the high, frosty hedgerows.
‘Ivy and her nonsense,’ said my grandmother, tutting. ‘Heaven only knows why they allow her to read in church at all. Everybody knows she’s the least religious person in the village.’
‘You know perfectly well why they let her read,’ said Grandpa. ‘It’s because her voice carries.’
I don’t remember much about the service, my first experience of Anglican ritual. I know that I listened out for references to the Holy Ghost, but they didn’t sound very frightening – not like the walk through the churchyard afterwards. It seemed a dismal and lonely place, despite the voices I could hear all ar
ound me, chattering and calling out goodbyes and wishing each other seasonal compliments. Even my grandfather, whose strong leathery hand engulfed my own, paused at one point to gaze at the scattered headstones, and I felt a shudder run through his body. Perhaps it was the cold, or perhaps the foreknowledge that he too would be lying there, in years to come, his grave chilled by an easterly wind.
Sharing a bedroom with Gill could often seem like a hardship, but tonight I was glad of the company. As usual, she was in no mood for sleep. Last year she had attempted to stay awake all night, hoping to discover more about the interesting process whereby two stockings came to be deposited at the foot of our beds, filled with sugar-coated sweets and chocolate pennies which were meant to serve as an appetizer for the main attractions downstairs. But this year, it seemed, she just wanted to talk.
‘This penknife’s going to be brilliant,’ she said. ‘I’m going to be the only girl at school who’s got one.’
Gill was being provocative, because she knew that I was all set to become wildly jealous of this gift; I had not had the enterprise to ask for anything so exciting, having written a note to Father Christmas suggesting a pair of football boots. (And I didn’t even really want those, but had done it to please my father, who was anxious for me to manifest some sporting inclinations.)
‘How do you know he’s going to bring you what you want?’ I asked.
