by Roger Curtis
The line of cars drawn up outside Laurel Cottage caught her by surprise. She’d expected a few ageing relatives and Albert Potter had had a couple of brothers and a sister she’d not seen for a decade. To her knowledge none of them drove a Mercedes or a BMW. She pulled in behind the last of the vehicles, put on her hat, got out and cautiously approached the house. The group of men around her mother opened up to absorb her like a predatory crustacean claw. No one smiled. One continued talking, ignoring her. Another looked pointedly at his wristwatch. ‘You’ll be going in the car with your mother,’ he told her, ‘and we’ll all follow.’ What right had he… but she kept her peace. She had never seen him before.
But some she did know, because from time to time they’d come to the house. She knew them as voices behind her father’s closed study door – deep sullen voices habitually used to being held low. A few were local, like Tom Sharp, the butcher, and Julie’s father from the shop; a couple were churchwardens, as her father had been before cancer of the throat took hold.
Thankfully, Jonathan was nowhere to be seen.
From time to time during the service she took her mother’s hand and squeezed it. Each time the returned grasp was exaggerated, then limply forgotten. But suddenly, as the coffin was borne up, they were joined by a sparking filament of mutual understanding. The word burst from Betty Potter as a bolus of anguish from deep within. ‘Elizabeth!’ she whispered. Had her mother only just realised the connection?
For Sarah, her dead sister’s presence was everywhere, like a vast tender glove holding the church and all it contained. She half-closed her eyes until the departing coffin was just a shadow passing by. The years peeled away. Tears pricked at her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as they had then, when her father had barred her way in the aisle with an expression telling her to pull herself together and not make a fool of herself. That was when she began to question the circumstances of her sister’s death, caused by a never-to-be-found hit-and-run driver as she emerged onto the Oxford road on her bicycle. With her father dead, how could those questions now be answered?
An usher took Betty Potter’s arm to lead her into the aisle. Sarah followed, in time to see the coffin depart the church into the wan April light. Of the six bearers, two she had seen at the undertakers, and Tom Sharp she knew. ‘Who are the others?’ she asked her mother.
‘Your father’s friends,’ came the reply.
‘Do you know them?’
‘Not really.’
Sarah watched the bobbing heads of the bearers, puzzled. Instead of turning right, as she expected, they took the left-hand path beside the chancel. Linking her mother’s arm with hers and patting her hand she led her down towards the flower-speckled patchwork of recent graves. There, already, the dark-suited mourners were impatiently gathered. The newly dug pit came into view from behind an excavated pile of chalky earth. ‘But this is where we agreed,’ she said, confused.
‘That’s right, Sarah, alongside Edina’s.’
‘Who on earth is Edina?’
‘His foster mother.’
‘You never told me.’
‘You never asked.’
Resentment – this sense of exclusion – welled up against her mother. She felt an intense urge to race to her sister’s grave, as if events might be happening there as in a parallel universe. All week, since her father’s death, she had felt in control. Now her thoughts became confused. She looked down into the valley, towards the stone bridge, portal to a more secure existence, now crisp and beckoning in the shifting light. What was this place she was in? Who were these people, who seemed to be conspiring against her?
The vicar’s drone was lost to her until it hit a final cadence. A gentle unseen push from behind propelled her towards the heap of earth. Against her will she found herself grasping some and tossing it into the grave, hearing it clatter onto the wooden coffin. Someone took her shoulders and eased her back, as if she could not cope with the presumed emotion. Take that, you bastard, had been the reality.
The violence of the thought shocked her into realising she was neglecting her mother, who was standing inert, staring down at the coffin. Not in grief, Sarah knew, but simply because she did not know what to do next. She put her arms around her mother’s shoulders. ‘It’ll be alright, Mum, look at all the friends you have here. They’ll look after you.’ Betty Potter turned towards her. ‘But will you, Sarah?’ she replied. Sarah looked down into the black void, unable to speak, admitting to herself the accusation implicit in what her mother had said.
‘We’ll take Betty back, if you’d like to stay awhile, Sarah.’ She recognised the vicar’s wife, a friend.
‘Thank you. I think I will for a minute or two, if that doesn’t sound neglectful.’
‘We all understand.’
The mourners eased away from the grave, taking paths of least resistance between the tombstones. They reminded her of oil finding its way over paving stones to a sump hole that was the lych-gate to the road. From somewhere amongst them her mother’s voice carried back in clear untroubled tones. She thought she heard the words ‘time for lunch.’
Men with shovels began to attack the earth pile. Standing back, she tripped as her heels struck the low granite surround of the adjacent grave. Spinning round to save herself she came face to face with Edina’s headstone, rising barely two feet from the ground. In small red letters under the deceased’s name someone had written with a felt pen: Find ASAAW. A clue in an ill-conceived treasure hunt, perhaps? It must have been there all the time; curious, then, that no-one else had noticed.
The church had never attracted her as a place of refuge. When she was at primary school the family had come here every Sunday morning. She had watched her sister become absorbed into its ways, then confirmed into the faith. But what had started for Elizabeth as innocent exploration turned into an obsession. By the time of her death at seventeen the relationship with the church had become intense, as if an unrelenting need had to be satisfied. It was something Sarah could not begin to understand. It represented, bar one other, the only barrier that ever existed between the two sisters. That it was not breached could be laid squarely at Sarah’s intransigence; that she knew.
Without people to warm it, the interior of the church had again assumed the same cloying dampness that Sarah had found repellent from an early age. She shivered as the massive door swung to behind her. Taking the nearest pew she sat and looked about her, sensing nothing that others so readily recognised as spiritual. The rituals had never attracted her as they had her sister. Perhaps the difference between them lay in their genetic make-up, and she lacked whatever gene it was that her sister had. Was that what had set Elizabeth on an altruistic path towards medicine while she, Sarah, was alive only to the wonders of the physical world? Surely that was all too simplistic.
And where had her father fitted in? As a parish councillor and churchman, would he have been embarrassed by a younger daughter’s pig-headedness scorned within the community? It was possible, though hardly likely to be significant given his forceful personality and ability to brush aside adversities far greater than this. Moreover, would Elizabeth’s adherence to the church have explained his favouritism, to Sarah’s detriment? Even in early childhood Sarah had considered herself the plainer of the two sisters. In some twisted way was he ashamed that it was she who seemed to attract boys while Elizabeth, the favoured one, always kept herself distant? There were occasions when this became the focus of her father’s wrath. Once, finding Sarah curled up with a boy on the sofa – no more than that – he had called her a precocious bitch and Elizabeth, fearing violence, had fought to draw him away. There were other examples. She reflected that at the beginning, besides her sister, it was only within these relationships with boys that she could open her heart to someone. The problem was that it was always a trade-off; when things became only physical, as they always did, so she became resentful. By
the time she entered medical school she had come to accept that you got nothing from men in return, and should expect nothing.
A spear of sunlight through the medieval glass of St Michael the Archangel pierced the gloom and as quickly faded. She needed to return home, but there was one more duty to perform: to visit her sister’s grave, as she sometimes did when things got difficult. No-one knew this: how, just before nightfall, she would drive to the village not via the stone bridge but through the lanes from the direction of the city, parking well away and entering the graveyard using the path through the undergrowth skirting Beacon Hill – the same path, no longer used, that once led through the trees behind the buildings along the street. As young children the sisters had come to this spot from time to time to escape family conflict; but in the months before Elizabeth’s death the visits had become more frequent. After her death and with hindsight the significance of the place seemed to intensify, as if in life Elizabeth had been trying to impart something she could never quite articulate. Gradually, during Sarah’s years of study, such dark thoughts brought on a feeling that in some obscure way Elizabeth had engineered her own death. That was nonsense, of course. She looked at her watch. But wouldn’t it be better to come back later, when all was quiet at home?
She raised her hand to lift the latch of the door, then froze. Pinned there, at eye height, was a card bearing the letters she had seen at Edina’s grave. There was no reason to think it was intended for her but she knew it was. There could be only one meaningful destination.
The footprints on the sodden path didn’t surprise her. She saw it as soon as she rounded the corner of the tower, on the gravestone, in red, as before, but this time in an irreverent scrawl. Beneath her sister’s name she read:
A SISTER AND A WHORE
She looked around, her mind in turmoil, sensing eyes watching her, but seeing nothing.
She had to expunge the obscenity. Somewhere inside the church there must be cleaning materials. She found a brush and a bottle of kitchen cleaner in the vestry. Using water from a butt against the tower wall she rubbed until the letters were illegible. Then she scraped away the surrounding lichens so that there was no ghost left by the brushed stone. Angry now, with filthy hands, she returned the materials to the vestry.
Beside the sink lay a clean towel and a bar of soap. She did not remember seeing them there before.
It began to rain again. Sarah sheltered in the church porch and put the card that had been pinned to the door into her coat pocket. She needed to think, but the refuge of her car was a quarter of a mile away in Tippett’s Lane. That removed the possibility of her getting away from the village, if only for a while. The only option was to walk back to Laurel Cottage. They would be scoffing sandwiches for a while yet; to delay her return would only attract more attention.
It was a not unfamiliar predicament: to perceive herself to be the target of the malice of others unknown. She thought back to beyond the grey years of her grammar school days. It was the worst of her memories there, when the children would surround her in the playground, chanting, ‘We know something you don’t know.’ Miss Jenks, her teacher, would smile at her, insisting that they knew nothing, but Sarah never believed her. The worst thing was that the insinuations were never substantiated; they drifted away in the wind – until it occurred to the children that she might once again be fair game. Did the fault lie in her imagination – or with real issues she knew nothing about? The pain was in not knowing which. She shivered to think that back in Laurel Cottage some of those same children, adults now, might be waiting for her still, just to see how she might react. She resolved not to give them that pleasure.
As she walked the ambiguity of the defaced stone grew in her mind. At first it had seemed just an insult to herself: she was the sister in question. There were certainly aggrieved boys in the village, now men, who might once have had some justification for thinking themselves hard done by. But that was long ago and surely just part of the rough and tumble of teenage life. Or was it a reference to Elizabeth, written in the sure knowledge it would hurt her. That seemed more likely. Then came a third possibility – that it referred respectively to both Sarah and her saintly sister. She found she had stopped walking. It was as if a damp restraining hand had been placed on her forehead.
When she reached the post office Julie opened the door. Was she waiting for her to pass by?
‘Sarah, your lovely hat’s getting all wet. It’ll be ruined.’
‘Then it’s a good thing fathers only die once, isn’t it.’
‘You’ve still got your mother to think of.’
‘By then, I’ll be able to afford a new one.’
She had allowed herself to be drawn. She told herself there would be no further skirmishes, and walked on.
To her surprise, many of the cars – the more prestigious ones – had gone. Unaccountably, she felt disappointed. Moffat, the family’s ageing Jack Russell terrier, trotted up wagging his trail. ‘Why do you think that is?’ she asked him. I don’t know either, the bright eyes seemed to say.
The rain stopped as she approached her car. She tossed her wet hat onto the rear seat, removed the card from her pocket, took off her coat and adjusted her hair in the mirror. Then she got out, breathed in deeply and walked up the drive with the dog padding at her heels.
Betty Potter spotted her first and stepped forward. ‘I’m so glad you could come, Sarah, but the funeral’s over.’
‘Mother, I’ve…’
Dr Hislop, Betty’s doctor, stepped in briskly. ‘Your mother’s had a trying day, Sarah. We’re a bit tired, aren’t we Betty?’
‘I don’t know what I’d do without him, Sarah. Look, there are cup-cakes over there, the ones you like.’
At the food table there was no alternative but to engage with Jonathan, who obviously had similar tastes. Crumbs were already nestling in the fork of his lapels. She didn’t wait for him to swallow what he had in his mouth.
She held his gaze as she produced the card with the cryptic letters, watching for his reaction.
‘I wouldn’t let it worry you, Sarah. I really wouldn’t. It’s just that some people round here have long memories.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Now, I must fly – unless, of course, you feel like a bit of fresh air.’
‘Why would I want that?’
His eyes drifted down to the card, then re-united with hers.
‘Okay, then,’ she said.
The house had been named with good reason. Laurels enclosed the garden, as if planted densely to exclude prying eyes. In winter dreary, in spring the two acres became transformed as the herbaceous beds came alive, creating a network of walkways. It was a natural place to exchange confidences.
‘With your father gone, your mother will struggle.’
‘You’re offering to help?’
‘Only if I thought…’
‘There was some mileage in it with me?’
‘For God’s sake!’
Sarah bit her lip. ‘Sorry.’
He seemed amused. ‘I gave up that idea a long time ago.’
She had initiated that separation, but his words were still uncomfortable to hear. She produced the card. ‘And this?’
‘No idea.’
‘Then why…’
‘In this village odd things happen, Sarah. My advice is, take no notice. Now, I really must go.’
‘If ever you’re in town…’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I would be safe enough there. Goodbye, Sarah.’
Back in the living room, her mother said, ‘Such a nice young man.’
‘I don’t think he’s quite got over you, Sarah.’ It was Pauline, Tom Sharp’s wife, who had overheard and stepped beside them. ‘You need to be tactful.’ She was one of those women who, on first acquaintance, brought to mind the word ‘mouse.’ For her, fashion was an ir
relevance, gardening clothes the norm; her rimless glasses did nothing to enhance an undeservedly plain face. Yet behind that façade Sarah had found integrity and kindness unique in the village. The possible exception was the vicar’s wife, but Sarah’s atheistic credentials had blocked that particular conduit. The odd thing about Pauline was her choice of a husband brash and loud. It had sometimes crossed Sarah’s mind to enquire how their marriage had come about. The surprising thing was that it seemed to work, outwardly at least.
‘I don’t see Tom around, Pauline.’
‘He had to rush off after the interment. Apparently sausages were missing from this morning’s delivery and he went to the wholesalers. When we lost you we thought you might have gone with him.’
‘You’re not serious?’
Pauline’s hyphen mouth widened into a mischievous grin. ‘Actually no. But I live in hope. Listen, I think I hear our car.’
Through the window they saw Tom’s white MG Magnette draw up close to the door just as Jonathan was leaving. The sturdy figure eased itself carefully onto the gravel. With dark suit and carefully knotted tie, hair smoothed and parted, the butcher in him had given way to a creature of the city, or big business. It struck Sarah – probably, she realised, for the first time – that he was not uncomfortable with this image. He glanced towards her, then looked away without apparent recognition. For a few seconds she struggled to divine his motive, before realising that he might not even have seen her. He and Jonathan spoke together, moving further and further from the house, onto the lawn, out of earshot. After a couple of minutes Tom came in and joined their group. It seemed a cue for the half-dozen remaining mourners to put down their plates and leave.
‘All sweetness and light, are we?’ Tom said, to no-one in particular.
‘Meaning me, I suppose?’ Sarah pinched herself for having taken the bait.
