by Weldon, Fay
‘I just mean,’ said Abbie, ‘that Lucy could cause a lot of trouble, so please go carefully. Don’t stir things up, Alexandra, if you can help it.’
‘What sort of trouble?’ asked Alexandra. ’Who’s going to believe her?’
‘You know what people are,’ said Abbie.
‘I’m beginning to,’ said Alexandra, and Abbie had to go because one of the students had spilled calligraphy ink over the tablecloth. The student had been making her, Abbie, a Happy Cherry Blossom card to demonstrate the tender customs of the Japanese in their home country as compared to the brutality of other nations abroad. It was just a pity she was doing it on a white tablecloth.
Alexandra called Vilna.
‘Vilna,’ she said. ‘I think I’m being given the run-around by Abbie.’
Vilna said if that was the case it was only for Alexandra’s good. Abbie adored Alexandra. Alexandra asked Vilna where exactly in the dining room the body had been when she arrived at The Cottage and Vilna said Alexandra should think about the future not the past and start life again. Abbie had put a blanket over the corpse; she, Vilna, had never seen a dead body: that’s why she’d had to go down to the morgue to see it without its blanket.
‘I hope you enjoyed the sight,’ said Alexandra, and slammed down the phone. Then she had to call Vilna back to apologise. A friend was a friend. Vilna said it was OK: the English had such a funny view of death it kept surprising her but she was adjusting to it. Would Alexandra like to use her house for the party?
‘Party?’ asked Alexandra.
‘After the funeral,’ said Vilna. ‘I think you call it a wake.’
Alexandra accepted the offer.
13
In the morning Alexandra took Lucy’s small blue address book and diary into the little stationer’s in Eddon Gurney. The shop was two doors down from the morgue. She could feel Ned lying there, but could not picture his appearance. She too had never seen a dead body. Her father had died in America: her mother had not encouraged her to go to the funeral.
‘You’ll only upset his widow,’ Irene had said. It was clear that serial marriage made a mockery of funerals. The divorced spouse, denied the partner in life, was also denied any conventional solace that related to the death. With the death of the distant parent, the forgotten and unacknowledged child finds himself, herself, with even less substance than before: with even fewer rights to any existence at all. The ghosts of the departed wave to others but not to us; those who are rejected in life are rejected in death, and there is no healing it. Ned had not turned to look back at Alexandra as he went into the forest.
‘So sorry,’ Angela Paddle was saying to Alexandra. She and her husband Reg Paddle ran the stationer’s shop. Reg had left the Army and used his money to set up the business. His belief was that every small town and village in the country these days needed its communication centre, and riches would come to those prescient enough to provide a copier, a fax, and a computer-plus-modem to the community. But few in EddonGurney had much interest in the outside world, other than those in what Mr Lightfoot called ‘the Bohemian Belt’. Angela Paddle wore a scratchy beige sweater with no blouse underneath. She seemed not to understand comfort, but her face was kind. ‘So sorry. A great shock.’
‘A great shock,’ said Alexandra. ‘Could you do me copies of these?’ and she handed over her trophies. She could see how unlikely it seemed that they were hers. These were not the personal records of anyone with many friends, or a great deal of occupation. She did not even want them thought of as hers. ‘My brother-in-law is up at The Cottage putting Ned’s affairs in order. We need these addresses and so forth for the funeral invitations.’ Her voice faltered. Why was she explaining? Never apologise, never explain, Ned would advise. Which was, she supposed, just as well. He was certainly now in no position to do either.
Angela Paddle looked both reluctant and doubtful. This was her custom when anyone asked her to use the new technology. ‘We don’t usually do anything bound,’ she said. ‘But you must be upset. I’ll do my best. Funny to think of your husband lying on that slab just a couple of doors down.’
‘Very funny,’ said Alexandra.
‘I’ll pop in and see him later,’ said Angela Paddle.
‘You do that,’ said Alexandra.
‘Better to see it for real than think about it. Mrs Lint’s just been to see him for the third time,’ said Angela Paddle. ‘Doing her best for him. The living need to watch by the dead. Strange how times change. When I had my baby it was unheard of to have a man around at the birth. Now it’s all but compulsory. Same with the dead. Once they kept bodies out of the way, tried not to think about them. Now everyone wants to see.’ She broke into a hymn:
‘Be there at our closing
And give us we pray
Your peace in our hearts, Lord
At the end of the day.’
‘Yes, give us peace,’ said Alexandra, and thought this strange and dreadful woman might yet be the one to make her cry.
‘Mr Lightfoot’s a good man,’ said Angela Paddle. ‘I wouldn’t want to do a job like that, for all everyone treats it like nothing.’
‘No, you just stick to faxes,’ said Alexandra. ‘So Lucy Lint was in, was she? She’s not a very close friend of ours.’
‘She said she was,’ said Angela Paddle. ‘And a colleague of Mr Ludd’s, and there when he died. What a shock for the poor woman.’
‘Lucy Lint is obviously very upset,’ said Alexandra, ‘and very imaginative at the best of times. I don’t think you should take too much notice of what she says. My husband was alone when he died.’
‘That’s right,’ said Angela Paddle. ‘He died in the night, didn’t he, and you were in London in that play of yours about the doll. I couldn’t make too much sense of Mrs Lint. You know how some women get: all over the place, gulping and sobbing. I just thought it was good of her to sit by the body so much.’
‘Of course it is,’ said Alexandra. ‘The more the merrier. I might go and sit myself. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, for the copies.’
‘It won’t be cheap,’ said Angela Paddle.
‘I bet it won’t be,’ said Alexandra cheerfully.
Alexandra called in down the road to see Mr Lightfoot. She didn’t have to repark the car, the morgue was so close. He took her to view the body. Fortunately, there was no one else there doing the same thing. He asked her what she wanted Ned to wear for the cremation. He’d had a phone call from the deceased’s brother, suggesting a cremation. Now he wanted to confirm with the widow that Mr Hamish Ludd was the proper person for him to deal with. Mrs Lint had been in, wanting to know whether there would be an interment. A burial, that was.
‘What has Mrs Lint to do with it?’ asked Alexandra.
‘The poor lady’s very upset,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘A little bit unbalanced, the way people get. I take no notice. You’re the widow, that’s the main thing.’
Alexandra stared at Ned’s body and could see that she must take charge of the situation. She had never held ‘truth’ in much regard: it seemed to her a thing which shifted with the times, unreliable as any kind of fixed goal. She was an actor: she would find the truth of a role one night, and a wholly different truth the next. Both would work. She understood the slipperiness of words. She knew that those who protested often protested too much. She knew that definitions limited rather than explained: that once you had onion-peeled away opinion and thought you had arrived at a firm layer of truth, that layer went too, to reveal mere sponginess underneath. In the end you didn’t want truth, you just needed to know what had happened.
‘Mr Lightfoot,’ she asked finally, directly, ‘where exactly was the body when you arrived?’
‘On the floor,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘With a blanket over it.’
‘I know,’ said Alexandra. ‘But where on the floor?’
‘Oh well,’ said Mr Lightfoot, ‘truth’s truth. At the top of thestairs.’
Alexandra took this in.
‘Why did my friends say it was in the dining room?’
‘Artistic people have their own habits,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘How do I know? All this breaking through, making one room out of two. The front parlour’s a thing of the past, as I know to my cost.’
‘Ned fell down at the top of the stairs?’
‘He died in his own bed,’ said Mr Lightfoot, ‘as a man should. Then your friend from the language school tried to carry him downstairs for reasons of her own, but a warm body’s hard to move, as she soon found out. So she left him at the top of the stairs covered with a blanket.’
‘Who was in the house when you arrived?’ asked Alexandra.
‘Why don’t you think about the future, Mrs Ludd? Put the past behind you? It’s what I always recommend.’
‘Was Lucy Lint there?’
‘I’ll say she was! Rushing round naked like a headless chicken. Throwing herself all over the body as we tried to get it out. Women will do that, of course, in these circumstances. And the dog barking and barking as the dawn comes up. No one had thought to take him for a walk. I found a nightie and put it on her, to make her decent.’
‘Ned was asleep in bed,’ said Alexandra. ‘He heard a noise; he turned on the light, sat up. And there was Lucy Lint in the room. Lucy Lint has been harassing and persecuting my husband, Mr Lightfoot. She’s quite mad. He tried to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. He lost his temper with her – and that’s when he had a heart attack.’
‘I expect that’s how it went,’ said Mr Lightfoot.
‘Don’t be tactful with me,’ shouted Alexandra. ‘That’s how it did go. Then she took off her clothes to make the most of it, to make everyone believe –’
Ned’s body seemed to be radiating a kind of cold blue light. But perhaps it was only the reflection of Mr Lightfoot’s neon lights off Ned’s now waxy skin. Did all the blood flow out during an autopsy? Or, deprived of life and movement, did the blood congeal, and shrink and harden? Alexandra tried not to look at the corpse too much: it seemed such a mockery of the real thing. An object offered in replacement: a fake, someone’s attempt to deceive. The real Ned had walked off into the forest; he had not looked behind. He had not even wanted her to go with him.
‘She killed him,’ said Alexandra. ‘That mad woman killed my husband.’
‘I didn’t hear that,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ‘You have to be careful what you say. There’s such a thing as slander. I’ve seen a lot in my time but I’ve never seen anyone as upset over a death as poor Mrs Lint.’
‘I’m the widow,’ said Alexandra.
‘You took your time acknowledging it,’ said Mr Lightfoot. ’Every time a body’s viewed something goes out of it, but that’s just my opinion. Now you’re finally here, I’ll leave you alone with your husband. What’s left of him.’
He sauntered off, gaunt and dusty in his badly-cut tweedy black trousers. Practice with the bereaved, competence overdeath, knowledge of what others would rather not contemplate, earned him a surface of worldly self-confidence, which he oiled with a veneer of spite. He was still an Untouchable, Alexandra consoled herself. People, recognising the undertaker or his wife, moved away in the supermarket, not wanting any suggestion of physical contact. Birds of ill-omen. Crows.
‘Ask Dr Moebius,’ said Mr Lightfoot, turning back. ‘He’s the one to ask, not me. I could tell it was a heart attack; short but violent; unmistakable. Why he wanted ail that business with the autopsy beats me.’
‘I expect he just wanted to keep standards up,’ said Alexandra.
‘Running bodies around here and there,’ Mr Lightfoot said. ’It isn’t right. Not much is right about death, these days. In some places they bury the coffins vertically, even though that adds to the digging costs.’
Alexandra sat on a hard chair by the body and stared into space. Ned kept her a kind of implacable company. She didn’t cry. There were two witnesses to the death. One was Ned and he was dead. The other was alive but unreliable. She would like to preserve what dignity she could for Ned, herself, and Sascha. She gave up and drifted into inorganic suspension until it was time to collect the documents from Angela Paddle. She was charged £20, which she thought exorbitant, but did not argue.
Alexandra returned the originals to Lucy Lint. She parked her car around the corner from Eddon Gurney prison. A homely little red car was parked outside Lucy’s house. Alexandra recognised it as Lucy’s: she’d seen it around often enough, here and there, even in The Cottage yard. She walked casually by the house, in the road, her face averted from the window. When she got to the car she dropped the documents on the ground, on the driver’s side. Lucy Lint would be puzzled to find them but would have to make up some story for herself which would solve the problem: they’d fallen out when she opened the door; they’d been there all the time. Whatever. If Lucy’s distress was as great as everyone said she wouldn’t be in a condition to give the matter too much attention. It wouldn’t occur to her that copies had been made, that Alexandra now had some undefined power which gave her access to Lucy’s world, as Lucy apparently had into her, Alexandra’s, world.
Alexandra got home to find Hamish worrying about the S to Z’s in Ned’s address book. Abbie had been dilatory; so had Alexandra; there were people yet to be contacted. Alexandra spent an hour or so on the phone going through these last pages, telling friends and strangers the date and time of the funeral. Some knew of Ned’s death, some didn’t. Some groped for consoling words to say to her. Some needed her consolation. It was exhausting. At the end she was no more convinced of Ned’s death than she had been at the beginning. She kept hearing his voice in her ear, and jumping. But it was Hamish’s voice, on the office phone, in another room. Muted, it had the same timbre as Ned’s.
As dusk fell the same bats came wheeling out of the old barn in the same way as they always had. Their world had not changed at all: why should it? Perhaps what one mourned for people was that they were no longer there to observe familiar things. Everyone died. It was a terrible system: to plant in the mind the possibility of permanence and then snatch it away.
Of course Ned had not been having an affair with Lucy – it was dreadful that the thought had been put into her head in the first place. Dave Lint had been driven mad by his wife: he had been fed false information, rendered wretched, and was stupid, stupid, stupid to begin with. Everyone knew that. All she had to face was that Lucy Lint had got as far as the bedroom and been the one to find the body. Which was bad enough.
Alexandra called Leah; again using Lucy Lint’s voice.
‘It’s me,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s me.’
‘Be strong and calm,’ recommended Leah. ‘I’ll be able to fit you in tomorrow. I’ve had a cancellation. Let the wife do the earthly part the way she wants: it’s nothing. So the body rots, or the body burns, what’s the difference? You and Ned continue on your spiritual path together.’
‘Can you give me a key phrase?’ begged Alexandra/Lucy. She remembered that from something Ned had once said. What was it?
‘Worst fears,’ murmured Leah. ‘Worst fears,’ and put the phone down.
Worst fears.
What did the woman mean by ‘worst fears’? Was the phrase some kind of therapeutic aide to a peaceful mind? In which the client was meant to envisage the worst that could happen, and because the present didn’t match up to that, feel better?
What would Lucy Lint’s worst fears be? If she, Alexandra, was acting Lucy in a play, what would it feel like? How would it go?
Alexandra took Diamond for a walk in the fields at the back of The Cottage. This is how it went.
Here am I, Lucy Lint, a woman in my mid-forties, my life passing by; loved by a husband who loves me whatever I do, therefore able to do whatever I like and not lose income. I have a little life. I sit in a little house, in a small town, reducing what is large to what is small. The future shrinks, along with the present. I love the theatre, as so many do who have an unsatisfactory life, or feel the need for its enrichment. I am b
y nature a fan: the extreme example of fan being the one who shot John Lennon; the only way to own his hero wholly being to cause his death. If I can obsessively worship, I can also obsessively destroy.
By chance I, Lucy Lint, have become the fan of one Ned Ludd, a minor celebrity in the outside world, but in the world in which all my yearnings are fixated, that of the theatre. I want him to take notice of me. I have no real view of myself, so it seems to me possible that, if I play my cards right, that my love for him, my obsession with him, will work some kind of magic so he will reciprocate.
I am eaten up with envy for his wife, who is beautiful, worldly, successful, has media attention and press cuttings to show for it. She is so confident I hate her. What does she have that I haven’t? I’ll show her. I will make myself useful to Ned: walk his dog, do his research for free, worm my way into his life; at his death grieve so hard and so publicly the world will believe that we were intimately related, the better to humiliate his widow. I will steal her happy memories: I will disturb and upset her, fill her mind with doubts. If I have no happy memories, neither will she.
Lucy Lint’s worst fears? Now Ned Ludd’s dead? That Alexandra will be revenged on me. That she will damage me, or mine. Stop my husband loving me: now Ned’s gone, I’ll need him. That she will somehow bring me to the realisation that Ned Ludd pitied me but scarcely thought of me, let alone loved me.
Worse, worse, worse. That even Alexandra Ludd can’t be bothered thinking about me; negates me by ignoring me.
Worst fears:
Mine, Alexandra Ludd’s worst fears.
Can I get to this? Be the actress impersonating me?
How would I see myself then?
My worst fear used to be that Ned would die and leave me alone to reinterpret a world so long and well interpreted through his eyes. Man and wife grow together, sop up each other’s natural juices, there is no avoiding it: if there is a child grown in her it is the joint essence of them both: the character and nature of the child infects the mother, and through the mother the father too. Thus the unit is sealed together, bonded without, suffusing within. This is why death or divorce is so shattering: wrench out a piece of the whole and what’s left is like a raw shank of beef hanging in the kitchen bleeding. The child feels it just as much. It’s the sharing of the bed does it, thought Alexandra. There should be more separate beds, separate bedrooms, coming untos –
