We exited the car park, rumbled over speed bumps, joined slip roads, gradually eased onto dual carriageways. Nick turned the radio on. An art critic was pontificating about the Turner Prize shortlist.
‘Pretentious bollocks,’ Nick muttered, reaching out to change the channel, before remembering himself.
‘Unless…?’
I shrugged indifferently and he flicked to an easy listening channel instead. A caller was explaining to a DJ why ‘Kiss Me’ by Sixpence None the Richer would always be special to her and her boyfriend. As she came to the end of her story the chorus of the song swelled behind her voice and then took over.
‘Kiss me down by the broken tree-house
Swing me upon its hanging tyre…’
‘Christ,’ Nick rolled his eyes but he didn’t switch it off, instead gripping the steering wheel with both hands and after a few moments, throwing me a brief, tight-lipped smile. A faint buzzing noise came from the back seat. I glanced over my shoulder, recognizing it as my ringtone, but just the thought of unfastening my seatbelt and reaching back into the depths of my holdall exhausted me, so I let it ring.
I must have dozed off after that. When I woke up again, we were driving towards our hamlet. In the few days of my absence, the drab taupe of early autumn had given way to a riot of russet and yellow, pink and gold. Burnished by a low autumn sun, the valley was ablaze.
Nick noticed me noticing and patted my thigh. ‘Not bad eh?’ he said as if he had laid on the show himself. ‘And to think we used to get excited about a few crappy Japanese maples in Clissold Park…’
I smiled wanly. The only recollection I had of Clissold Park was his shouting at Ethan for walking in dog shit.
‘I was serious, you know,’ he added, after a pause. ‘About giving up work. I’ve done a few sums and if I sell my shares in the company, we can manage pretty well, even after I’ve sorted Ethan for his deposit.’
‘What does Ethan need a deposit for?’
‘Promise you won’t get mad?’ Nick threw me a tentative glance. ‘He’s jacking in his course. Going in on a basement flat in Rivington with Sal.’
Sal? It was Sal now? And me not getting mad? That was rich. And deposits on basement flats? Subbed by a father who less than a week ago had suspected Ethan of drug dealing, GBH and God knows what else…
He must have caught the expression on my face.
‘Well,’ he said, and he seemed, for the first time in twenty years to have successfully read my mind, ‘if you will marry an immature prick who doesn’t know what’s important until fate gives him a fucking big kick up the arse.’
As we descended into the hamlet, Nick announced our return with a celebratory volley of toots on his horn and disturbed a crow, which had been perched on the gate of Prospect Cottage. It squawked indignantly and took off, revealing its iridescent under-wing as it swooped across the windscreen and soared away.
28
‘There you go,’ he said, applying the hand brake decisively. The car lurched back, making my empty stomach heave.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He nodded meaningfully out of the window, and I noticed a makeshift banner hoist above the gate.
‘WELCOME HOME, KAREN,’ it said, in blue poster paint, the letters surrounded by multicoloured hearts and flowers.
‘That’s sweet of you.’
‘Team effort,’ Nick said. ‘My idea, Cath’s handiwork. Min and Ray supplied the paints. This is what you get when you live in a proper community. Can you imagine anyone bothering in London?’
I climbed down gingerly from the passenger seat and Nick hurried round to assist me as if I were royalty.
‘Can I carry you over the threshold?’ Nick said. ‘Go on, let me carry you over the threshold.’
‘I might just walk if it’s OK with you.’
He installed me on the couch with a blanket over my knees and pointed out the three bouquets I’d been sent – none of them, this time, anonymous.
‘Right, I’ll put Madam’s washing on,’ he said, brandishing the holdall. I smiled at him.
‘Oh, Nick…’ I remembered, ‘my phone’s in there…’
He scrabbled in the bag and handed it to me.
‘You’re not to start doing stuff on it,’ he said sternly. He flicked on the TV.
‘There you go – Netflix.’ He handed me the remote.
When I thought he was safely out of the way, I picked the phone up and scanned the screen. Three missed calls all from the same London number. My thumb hovered over the playback button.
‘Er…’ He popped his head round the kitchen door, jokily admonishing.
I grinned, put the phone down and picked up the remote again.
‘The Gaineses send their love,’ Nick called above the sound of water thundering into the kettle. ‘Frieda’s recovering well you’ll be pleased to know…’
Frieda? Frieda…? I couldn’t think who… oh yes, the blessed dog.
‘Cath said she’d drop round later. She and Min are helping Jean’s daughter with the funeral arrangements.’
‘Mmmm?’ I said vaguely. It didn’t sink in at first. I was too busy scrutinizing Ethan’s card.
‘Whose funeral arrangements? Nick?’ I threw off the blanket and started towards the kitchen, panic rising in me; desperate to be told I’d got it wrong, but the cold feeling of dread in my stomach told me I hadn’t. I remembered the pale bruise on Jean’s cadaverous face, the way she had cringed in fear as Gordon and Nick had marched her back towards the cottage. She may or may not have met a violent death but my allowing her to be returned to that morgue, that benighted prison of a house, to which even her own children had long since stopped coming, had been an act of betrayal.
‘Nick…?’ I said again, but he had his back to me, fishing in the teabag jar and I was no longer in the kitchen; I was back on the lane and it was no longer the squeal of a boiling kettle, but the sound of Jean’s keening.
‘Karen!’
My body jerked like a marionette as he caught me under the arms, one of my fists thwacking the doorframe as I passed out.
‘Now stay put,’ he said with pretend sternness when he’d laid me in the bed, and pulled up the duvet around me. ‘I’ll bring your tea up in a minute. And how about a nice bit of toast?’
He looked at me, then shook his head in self-reproach. ‘I knew I should have carried you.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ I protested, ‘it was what you said about the funer—’
He raised his hand.
‘Don’t even go there. It’s not for you to be worrying about. If you’re better, fine, but if not… we hardly knew them and there’s plenty of people rallying round… the daughter’s here and the son’s flying in from Dubai.’
He paused for a moment, and, resting his hand on the door handle, added wistfully, ‘You’d hope your kids’d visit before you popped your clogs, really, wouldn’t you?’
Then he left the room.
I was probably still a bit unhinged. I was certainly light-headed and Nick was right, I needed something to eat, but the thought of Jean’s death tormented me. I kept thinking back to the hunted look on her face when we had found her wandering in the lane, her resistance to being led back to the cottage. No wonder. No wonder…
Nick brought the toast, cut into four dainty triangles and watched me force down two of them. I handed him the plate and he narrowed his eyes and took it away with a grudging smile. Later he brought home-made broth and fed it to me, spoon by spoon, laughing when the vermicelli noodles slithered down my front and making a game of retrieving them with the spoon. I must have slept after that. When I woke, the room was grey with dawn and I could see him, cheek propped on palm, face silhouetted above me, eyes grave with concern.
I finished the course of antibiotics, but my body was rebelling by the end. Food was passing straight through me and the one time I attempted to make it to the bathroom by myself, I collapsed and Nick got mad at me for ‘trying to be a hero’. But it was that o
r feel mollycoddled – claustrophobic. He’d bought a smoothie maker, on the basis that I was finding solids tricky, and kept appearing by my bedside with large unappetising glasses of gloop, one time with a stick of celery for a swizzle stick. It was touching, I suppose, but it wasn’t really helping. In fact, with each day that passed, I found Nick’s devotion a little more irksome. Perverse, perhaps, considering I had spent the twenty years of our marriage yearning for such behaviour.
Suddenly, I was flavour of the month. He couldn’t get enough of me. He perched on the bed, pretending to lose at Scrabble while he told me about his plans for a family Christmas and a winter holiday – maybe Spain again for the art. He planned kohlrabi in the veggie patch come spring, he told me, and a Trivial Pursuit night with the pub quiz team when I was properly better, just to limber up, so we didn’t get trounced a second time. He plumped my pillows and laid his cool palm across my forehead and looked at me as though he were seeing me for the very first time.
Once, I woke late in the evening to hear the familiar burr of Cath’s voice downstairs. I sat up in bed and called her name, but my sleepy croak couldn’t compete with Newsnight on the telly and Nick holding forth and I was halfway out of bed when he caught me.
‘Hey, young lady, where d’you think you’re going?’
‘Cath’s here!’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed,’ taking my elbow and steering me back to bed again, ‘and she’d be mortified if she thought she’d disturbed you. She just called in because she’s got nothing to wear for the funeral tomorrow and she wondered if we had anything she could borrow.’
‘She can have my grey pashmina,’ I said, breaking free of him and struggling with the catch on the wardrobe door. ‘It’s got sequins round the edge, but I don’t think that’ll…’
‘Not a problem, hen,’ Cath’s voice called up the stairs. ‘Your man’s lent me a very smart fedora. Just the job. Now, you get some rest and don’t be showing your face tomorrow unless you’re a hundred per cent, you hear?’
Before I could get near the landing, her footsteps were receding, the front door pulled shut behind her.
29
It was a nothing sort of day, neither indecently sunny nor portentously gloomy; the sky was white, the trees drooped under yellowing, but still fairly substantial leaf cover and the birds tweeted blithely as if to signal their indifference to the occasion. Black-clad figures milled about on the lane, their faces turning expectantly our way as Nick led me down the path. He was wearing his good suit, its cut so sharp, his shirt so white, his tie so immaculately knotted, that it was just as well he had lent his black fedora to Cath, or he would have looked like a Mafioso; meanwhile I was sweating unbecomingly in my grey linen dress and an old Hobbs coat, wishing that the only un-laddered tights I’d been able to find had been less than eighty denier. Nick opened the garden gate for me with exaggerated courtesy, flinging aside my welcome home banner, which had come adrift and snagged on the garden wall so that only the legend ‘ME KAREN’ was visible.
Cath was chatting to a woman I didn’t recognize. Seeing me, she squeezed the woman’s arm apologetically and hurried over to give me a consoling hug. I succumbed briefly, but then, feeling my composure start to wobble, stepped back. Cath seemed about to say something, but before she could, Ray descended, resplendent in an Edwardian-style frock coat.
‘Bloody hell, young Karen, you scared the life out of us.’
‘Ray,’ Min chastised him, with an apologetic glance over her shoulder at the other mourners.
‘You did, though,’ she confirmed quietly, giving my arm a friendly squeeze. ‘Lying there on that drip like a poor little ghost…’ She shuddered. I mumbled something vaguely apologetic and then tried to find a way to steer the conversation back to the circumstances of Jean’s demise, but before I’d got very far at all, the funeral cortege was spotted making its way along the main road towards the hamlet. Everyone turned and conversations trailed off, as the shiny black roofs of the hearse and an accompanying limo flickered in the distance. An awkward hush fell, followed, once people realized that it would be another five minutes before it reached the hamlet, by a shuffling of feet and a renewed outbreak of sombre platitudinizing. Imogen and Douglas had by now emerged from Walford House and taking this as our signal, as surely as if they had still been the Lord and Lady of the Manor, we turned and started moving as one down the lane.
Heads swivelled and hats were doffed as we passed Prospect Cottage, but the house was blank, not so much as a flicker of its closed curtains betraying the presence within of the funeral party. It would, I supposed, be a tight-lipped little gathering anyway, in view of what Jean had told me about the strained relations between Gordon and his children. Always assuming they had come at all; I hoped for Jean’s sake that they had.
Rounding the corner, we met the cortege head-on and shrunk back into the hedgerow to let it pass. The casket was an old-fashioned mahogany monstrosity, ornately carved and adorned with a single cross of white carnations. It looked so unsuited both in its bulk and grandiosity, either to Jean’s physical frailty or her mercurial persona as to seem an insult to her memory. As others bowed their heads or crossed themselves, I looked away, fighting a rising sense of indignation, of fury really, on behalf of the old woman.
As we reached the junction with the main road and forked right into the village, it occurred to me how little the walk there from the hamlet must have changed in Jean’s lifetime. The scene must have varied more according to the season than the decade. Had she and Gordon married in the little sandstone church? I wondered. Had their children been christened here? How many times must she have walked beneath this same arch of trees, past these same cottages, gone by the school house and the pub and then through the lychgate and up the winding path through the churchyard where she was now to be buried? Had she been a churchgoer? I didn’t know, any more than I knew which star sign she’d been born under or which way (if any) she had voted, what books she’d read or whether she liked dogs or cats or neither, had had a best friend, or an unrequited love. I didn’t know and now I never would and my ignorance felt both a loss and a betrayal.
The vicar stood outside the church porch, greeting the mourners with sad benevolence.
‘Hello, welcome to St Aloysius. Good morning and welcome…’
Next to him, a female funeral attendant in a top hat was handing out orders of service. Nick took one and we went inside, pausing for a moment for our eyes to adjust to the dim interior. It was a small plain church with whitewashed walls. A single aisle led between rows of dark wood pews to a simple altar beneath a triptych of stained-glass windows. As mere acquaintances of the deceased, I had expected to squeeze in inconspicuously at the back, and was surprised to find the church barely a third full, and to be ushered forward, along with the other residents of the hamlet, to fill up the gaps in the foremost pews. Catching Cath’s eye I gave her a puzzled look and she shrugged back, a little insouciantly it seemed to me, but before I had a chance to comment to Nick on the poor turnout, the organ’s mournful tootling had come to an abrupt halt and the meagre congregation had risen to its feet.
There was a brief expectant silence, some shuffling and coughing at the back of the church and then a gusty off-key organ note heralded the start of the funeral march. It was almost too pathetic to bear, the half-empty church, the generic lugubrious music, the sombre faces of the hired pall-bearers, who though advancing now with downcast eyes, would be laughing and joking in their civvies in an hour or two. Surely Jean’s life had been worth more than this?
As the coffin was lowered onto the aluminium bier, and the chief mourners drew level with our pew, I took a surreptitious sidelong glance at them. There was a plumpish woman of about my age, wearing a navy mac and a bouffant hair-do, whom I took to be the estranged daughter, and a suntanned man in a flash double-breasted suit, looking every inch Dubai. But between them, where I would have expected to see Gordon, tall and prideful, keeping his upper lip characteristical
ly stiff, there was only a smallish elderly figure – a female relative, I assumed, although the daughter’s bulk prevented me from seeing her clearly. I nudged Nick, jerked my head towards them and furrowed my brow, enquiringly, but he didn’t seem to catch my drift.
I was staring up at the stained-glass window, thinking back to the strange premonition I had had about Jean when we first met and wondering if something other than my own self-absorption had prevented me from acting on it, when the vicar stepped forward, pink sausage fingers clasped piously in front of his cassock and began to intone with the sing-song, counter-intuitive cadences beloved of the clergy, ‘We are gathered here today to say farewell to Gordon Victor Anthony Naylor and to commit him into the hands of God.’
The service had long finished and the mourners were mingling in the churchyard before the scale of my misapprehension had even begun to sink in. I sat on a bench and stared nonplussed at the order of service – an A5 pamphlet, the cover bearing a silver crucifix, beneath which was printed:
A SERVICE OF THANKSGIVING
FOR THE LIFE OF
GORDON VICTOR ANTHONY NAYLOR
The Move Page 24
