Midland

by James Flint

  Furious with herself, she started the car and was pulling out of the parking space when she saw Toby walking down the street towards her, arm in arm with a woman. Before she had time to change her mind she turned off the engine, got out of the car, and crossed the street to intercept them at the entrance to the block.

  ‘Hello Toby,’ she said, as he paused to reach into his pocket for his keys.

  He jerked his head up, fringe swaying, face masked with surprise.

  ‘Cait … hi … er … what you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, you know. I was just passing.’

  Toby removed his arm from the waist of his companion and swapped his keys from hand to hand.

  ‘Er … this is Sophie. My wife. Soph – this is Cait. She works at Simple Eye.’

  Sophie smiled and stuck out her hand. ‘Hi. Do you live round here?’

  Caitlin nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah – just over there. Funny coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t know how you do it. It’s nice to visit, but I couldn’t live in London.’

  ‘Oh right. Where do you live?’

  ‘Down near Haslemere. Much more relaxing! But Toby wasn’t working and the kids are staying with some friends so I’m having a long-overdue night off.’

  ‘Nice.’ Caitlin looked back at Toby, who already had his key in the front door and was refusing to meet her gaze.

  ‘Well, we’d best go up. See you at work, Cait.’

  ‘Yeah. See you.’

  ‘Bye!’ said Sophie. ‘Nice to meet you!’

  Then they were inside and the heavy door had swung shut behind them and the lock had clicked back into place, and Caitlin was left on her own in a dark empty street in mid-January.

  She got back in her car and sat staring forwards at the vehicle parked in front, at the reflections of the streetlights on the windows, at the plane trees lining the street, at nothing. How long she sat she didn’t know, but at some point she became aware of a sound coming from her bag on the passenger seat. A buzzing. Her phone. She pulled it out and opened it.

  ‘Hello?’

  The call took a moment to connect.

  ‘Caitlin – is that you?’

  ‘Sean?’

  ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘She’s been trying to call you. We’ve got some really bad news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Dad. Cait – I don’t know how to say … Um. He died this morning. Heart attack.’

  Caitlin’s hands began to tremble and she fumbled for her cigarettes.

  ‘Cait?’

  ‘Wait … I can’t … I’m driving … I’m going to call Mum.’

  She pressed the red button to end the call and dialled her parents’ number. After one ring, Sheila picked up.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Caitlin – oh thank God. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.’

  ‘I was working late. We’ve been really busy.’

  Sheila was crying. ‘Did you speak to Sean?’

  ‘Yes. How did it happen?’

  ‘I went into his office to ask him if he’d be going to the golf club for lunch, and I found him collapsed on the floor. I called an ambulance. They said his heart had given out, and they took him away.’

  ‘Is Sean there?’

  ‘Not right now, but he’s been over. He’s coming back to spend the night. When do you think you can come home?’

  ‘I’m not sure. We’ve got so much on. I’ll come as soon as I can.’

  Her mother’s voice hardened. ‘There’s a lot to do. There’s the funeral to organise, everyone to tell. We’ll have the vigil here in the house. I could do with your help.’

  ‘I’ll be there for the vigil. When will it start?’

  ‘Wednesday, but I really …’

  ‘I’ll be back for that, I’ll make sure.’

  ‘Caitlin, you should know. Your father, he’d been ill for a while. We hadn’t told you and your brother—’

  ‘Mum, I really need to go now – I’m about to get on the Tube. I’ll call you tomorrow okay? Make sure you get some rest.’

  ‘But Caitlin …’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference now, does it? Tell me when you see me, okay?’

  She flipped the phone shut, lit a cigarette and smoked for a couple of minutes, staring not out of the window this time but at her left hand, resting before her on the steering wheel.

  Why had she not said something to Sophie?

  She didn’t know. And now it was too late.

  She could not bear this thought, and to burn it from her head she took the cigarette from her mouth, pointed its tip at the soft pad that joined her left thumb and forefinger, and pressed it into the offending flesh.

  —————

  Sheila had always teased Tony that he looked like Mario Lanza, but it was true; she’d thought it the first time she met him, and she thought it again when the coffin was brought into the house, placed on the dining table, and opened for her to inspect the work that had been done by the mortuary.

  Tony hadn’t had a bad tenor voice himself, though it wasn’t a patch on the star’s of course. But then Lanza had died at thirty-eight of a life too fully lived – one of the great tragedies of Sheila’s teenage years – so her husband had done rather better on that count. When he knew he’d upset her over some trifle or other Tony used to croon her a passable version of ‘My Wild Irish Rose’, and when they were younger that had often worked some magic, making her laugh and putting their tiff into perspective. But the older – or drunker – he’d got the less effective that had become, until it stoked their arguments more than it calmed them.

  But they hadn’t argued that often, really, not in the later years. Tony might have continued being a tyrant at work, but Sheila had drawn a line after Jamie had left, and let him know in no uncertain terms that there was no way she’d continue to tolerate him acting like that at home, not unless he wanted a second divorce.

  And he’d stopped. He’d changed. He’d listened and, if not mellowed, at least diverted whatever raging force it was that drove him. The tragedy was that he’d not been able to exercise similar limits on his smoking.

  Cigarettes. If Tony could have slung them across his chest in bandoliers he would have done. He fired them up at the onset of hostilities – which for him began at about 6.30 in the morning – and kept going until last thing at night, jabbing them in sync with the rat tat tat of his phone conversations, flicking them in the street like red-tipped bullets or stabbing them into ashtrays to emphasise points. He was a smoker. It was who he was.

  The oncologist had told them that Tony hadn’t become aware of the lung cancer until it was quite far advanced because he also had diabetes. He hadn’t known he had diabetes either, but apparently it was common in people of his age, people who’d spent a lifetime consuming foodstuffs filled with refined sugar and saturated fat. Late onset, they called it; there was a lot written about it in the magazines Sheila read and the lifestyle sections of the newspapers. But then Tony never looked at those: to his mind they were filled with trivia and aimed at people who didn’t have to work for a living, though he’d learned not to say that out loud in front of his wife.

  The cancer had caused a congestive heart failure for which Tony had been prescribed a drawer full of pills whose names Sheila could barely pronounce but which she’d had to organise and administer in order to keep her husband to his regimen: ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers and diuretics and digitalis and aspirin; at least she knew aspirin. The idea was to get the heart condition under control while they readied him for the removal of one of his lungs, which would be followed by courses of chemotherapy for his body and radiotherapy for his brain to stop the cancer from spreading, a development not unknown in cases like Tony’s.

  And then his heart gave out anyway, before they’d even started those courses, before they’d even steeled themselves to share the details of his condition with Caitlin and Sean, before they’d really absorb
ed the impact of any of this. It had only been a few weeks since he’d first felt the pains and gone in for the scans. A few short weeks. That’s all it had needed to take Sheila from contemplating all her long-nurtured plans for Tony’s retirement to contemplating this: a strangely kitsch mahogany casket perched on top of their oval mahogany dining table, the cost of these two things together equivalent to about five of the holidays they’d been planning to take.

  She hadn’t even liked that awful coffin. She’d regretted buying it as soon as she’d signed the order form at the funeral director’s. But she didn’t know what else to do. The oak had been nice, but she wasn’t sure Tony would have liked it, and she knew for certain he’d have hated the pine. And she could hardly let him be buried in one of the cardboard ones, could she, though the wicker caskets had been nice. When her own turn came, she thought she’d choose wicker. She’d tell Sean and Caitlin: that would do nicely for her. Because in any event wasn’t mahogany one of those rainforest trees they were supposed to have stopped chopping down?

  The doorbell rang. Dabbing at her eyes with one of the tissues she had permanently to hand, Sheila left the morticians to their work and went to answer it. A trim middle-aged woman stood there, tidily dressed in dark blue leggings, a roll-neck sweater, black ballet flats.

  ‘Mrs Nolan?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The flowers you ordered. Would you like me to start bringing them in?’

  ‘Oh! Yes, please.’

  Sheila propped the front door open with the little stone statuette of a slow loris that she and Tony had bought on a roadside stall in Malaysia after she’d fallen in love with its pleading, doleful eyes. Cold sharp air invaded the hallway and sliced deep into the house’s fug of warmth, making Sheila rub her hands as she stood in a corner and watched the florist and her assistant carry the long flat cartons of flowers, themselves rather like miniature coffins, in from their van. At the same time the morticians announced they were done and started to fold up their trolley and pack up their cases and shift everything out into the driveway.

  Suddenly the house was busy with activity, and for a moment Sheila felt a prickle of the kind of excitement that she used to experience during the preparations for one of her and Tony’s many parties. The silence that enveloped the place the last few days, that silver silence particular to winter in the English countryside, undiluted save for the cawing of a rook or two, had started to get to her. It had been too quiet, even, for her to be able to sleep.

  She asked the florists if they’d like coffee, but they politely declined, so she went to the kitchen to pour one for herself and carried it back to the dining room. The room had already been transformed: just the two big displays of lilies, placed intelligently on the sideboard by the florist in the vases she had left for the purpose, were enough to lift the whole scene. And there was so much more to come – the cartons lay open now and from them spilled great clumps of yellow gerbera, cream carnations, buttery St John’s wort, pale viburnums. And wads and wads of ivy, fern and moonseed, to buffer the colours with green.

  The hallway and living room had to be set with flowers too, so the three of them had their work cut out. Sheila soon found herself absorbed in the task, snipping and tying alongside the two women, who turned out to be mother and daughter. For the next couple of hours she almost forgot herself for the first time since she’d gone into the study and found Tony stretched out on the kilim in front of his desk. A birthday present that rug had been, six or seven years back, but she’d already put it out for the binmen to take. She’d liked it, but she’d never been quite sure that he had. And she couldn’t look at it now. Not after that.

  ‘You have beautiful children,’ the florist remarked while twining some strands of ivy around the pictures of Sean and Caitlin that were displayed on top of the Nolans’ large teak media centre. ‘Do they live local?’

  ‘Sean does,’ Sheila says. ‘Just down at Lower Spernall, by St Leonard’s chapel. Do you know it? He’s got a lovely little cottage down there. He’s been a great support, the last few days. Caitlin lives in London.’

  ‘Is she going to be able to come home for the funeral?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course. She’ll be here tonight.’

  ‘That’s good. We’ll be getting all the bouquets ready tomorrow so we can take them over to the church first thing Friday morning. We’ve not done a funeral in Wootton before. Is that where you’re from?’

  ‘No, not at all. Tony – my husband – he grew up in Walsall. And I’m from Sutton Coldfield.’

  ‘Are you? Denise’s boyfriend is from Sutton Coldfield, isn’t he Denise?’

  Denise looked up from the nest of cellophane, ribbon and trimmings in which she was kneeling and confirmed that yes, he was.

  They chatted about Sutton Coldfield for a while, then the conversation moved along and then they were gone and Sheila found herself alone once more. At least now that the flowers were in place the house felt like it had escaped the awful stasis of the last few days. She primped and tidied a little, changed one or two of the things the florists had done that she hadn’t much liked, and gradually worked her way back into the dining room. Still here, and so still, look at him, it didn’t look like Tony, she’d never seen him still. Even when he was sleeping he’d always seemed to be shifting and flowing, undulating like some ocean creature, a walrus maybe, or a whale. That coffin, Mario Lanza all right, look at the size of it. Those hands, now they’d always be still. They hadn’t been active, not like they once were, not for a long time.

  But no need to worry about them, now. Not any more. After Jamie had left, it had been better. Before then, sometimes she didn’t know how she’d kept it all from the children. Only really because he’d never gone for her face, apart from the night Jamie had gone, and then that was in front of them anyway, that time and that one time before. And perhaps just as well, because that’s when he’d at last been able to see himself, and once he’d seen himself, he was able to stop. He wasn’t a bad man. He just didn’t know.

  When.

  To.

  Stop.

  Rat tat tat.

  Sheila felt her heart leap in her chest, but it was just someone knocking at the window. She glanced up – it was Sean. Dear Sean. Gathering herself, she went round to the front door to greet him.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  ‘Hello darling. You made me jump!’

  ‘Oh – I didn’t mean to. I just saw you in the dining room as I passed. It looks great with all the flowers and stuff.’

  ‘Yes, it does. The ladies who did it were so lovely, and they’ve really done a nice job. They were from Sutton Coldfield.’

  Sean came into the hallway. ‘Looks splendid in here too. You have been busy.’

  ‘Well it doesn’t do to mope around.’

  ‘I agree. Much better just to get on with things.’ He paused, and smiled, not quite sure how to say the thing he needed to say next. ‘So he’s here then?’

  ‘Yes, he’s here.’

  ‘They got him in okay?’

  ‘Yes, but it was quite a job. They had this clever folding trolley they used to wheel him in on. I don’t know how they’d have done it otherwise. Do you want to go in and see?’

  ‘I think I’d better, don’t you? Just quickly. I just want to say hello.’

  That sounded funny to both of them, but what else did you say?

  ‘You take as long as you want. I think I’ll leave you to it if you don’t mind. I’ve got some things to sort out in the kitchen.’

  Sean. What would she do without him? It was just like him to come and talk about Tony like he was still a living, breathing person and make everything feel normal again. What would she have done without Sean to help her with the funeral arrangements, the vigil, with Tony’s estate? She’d no doubt have managed well enough with the first two, but she wouldn’t know where to start with the business, the assets, the probate. She wasn’t equipped to deal with his lawyers, his brothers, his management team; she neve
r had been. And how would she start that now, in the state she was in? She just thanked God for her son, who after all these years at NolCalc knew his way around that world, how to cope with all that. And would know how to cope with his sister, too, when she finally came.

  ‘So have you heard from Caitlin?’ Sean had reappeared in the kitchen and – apparently – had read her mind.

  Sheila did her best to keep her voice level. ‘Well, when I spoke to her on Friday she said she’d come up tonight.’

  ‘And she hasn’t called since then?’

  ‘She has not. Has she called you?’

  ‘Hmm. No. I hope she’s okay.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s just fine. No doubt she’s been busy with her many social engagements.’

  ‘I’m not so sure, Mum. I think she’ll be as upset as we are.’

  ‘She has a funny way of showing it.’

  Sheila started crying and pulled the tissue from her pocket to wipe her nose and eyes. A little awkwardly, Sean stepped up and gave her a hug.

  ‘Oh Mum.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘It’s just that it’s been so horrible, the last couple of months. I’ve felt so lonely. And we didn’t want to tell you because we didn’t want to worry you, but all that did was mean you didn’t get the chance to say goodbye.’

  Sean started to feel himself welling up now and lifted one hand from Sheila’s back to rub at his face.

  ‘It’s okay. It’s not your fault. It wouldn’t have changed anything, really, even if we’d known – it all happened so suddenly. And you know how Dad hated the thought of anyone pitying him. He probably would have preferred it this way.’

  Sheila sobbed and nodded and blew her nose and Sean dropped the embrace.

  ‘I know. You’re right. But I still feel wretched.’