by Hilary Boyd
“Here you go, boy.” Karen put the dish down on the tiles and gave the dog a stroke, digging her fingers into his soft coat.
*
The farm shop was busy. Karen wandered down the vegetable aisle, scanning the boxes of fat, shiny leeks and carrots with their green, feathery tops still attached. She had no appetite, and had been surviving for the past few weeks on scrambled eggs and tomato soup, those being the easiest and quickest things to prepare. But now she had run out of even these, and Sophie would be arriving the following day. Not merely “arriving,” Karen thought gloomily, as she pulled a brown paper bag from the string hanging beside the potatoes and began to fill it with parsnips, so much as “moving in.” Her previous notion that it would be good to have someone else in the house had quickly waned. It had been two weeks since her stepdaughter had left for London, and Karen still hadn’t fully come to terms with the fact that from tomorrow she would have to live side by side with Harry’s daughter, find some sort of harmony with the difficult girl.
Her basket now contained carrots and parsnips and a savoy cabbage, vegetables that she selected because they were virtually the only ones that Harry—not the most enthusiastic vegetable consumer—had tolerated. For years she had reached for them without thinking.
“Karen?” She looked round to see Janey Haskell smiling tentatively at her.
“Hi,” Karen said, thinking, not for the first time, that the vicar’s wife was straight from Central Casting: neat, sweet, unassuming, yet with a steely determination that you ignored at your peril. Janey’s success, for instance, at bludgeoning the village into handing over money for Children in Need was astonishing—twice as much as was raised in previous years. She was impossible to refuse.
“How are things?” Janey asked. She had an odd way of not moving about very much, as if she were trying to balance a book on her freshly washed dark hair, blunt cut to her shoulders.
“Umm, yeah . . . you know . . . getting there.”
The vicar’s wife nodded sympathetically. “It’ll take time.”
Karen gritted her teeth. If one more person said that to her she would surely stab them. Did they think that she was a complete idiot? Did they think she expected the death of a husband could be overcome in an instant? Did they really think that?
“I suppose,” she replied, trying hard to smile.
Janey just looked at her, as if she were waiting for her to confess her innermost torment. She must have learned the technique from her husband.
“Will was trying to get hold of you earlier. In fact, he tried yesterday too.”
“Really?” Karen’s voice squeaked guiltily. She’d received three messages from Reverend Haskell on her mobile and had ignored them all.
“Yes, he wanted to talk to you about the headstone.”
Karen raised her eyebrows.
“You asked him for the name of a stonemason?” Janey was clearly beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with Karen’s lack of responsiveness, because she was nervously nibbling her top lip with her small bottom teeth.
“I’ll give him a call when I get home,” she said, unrepentant. Just because my husband has died, doesn’t make it open season on sharing, she thought crossly.
Janey began to move off. “If there’s anything either of us can do, Karen,” she said, laying a gentle hand on Karen’s arm, “you know you can ring us . . . or come round . . . at any time.”
The words seemed sincere, and Karen felt mean.
“Thanks, Janey. That’s good to know.”
And she was rewarded by a relieved smile from the vicar’s wife.
*
Karen kept William in the kitchen this time. She didn’t want him to get too cozy.
“You didn’t have to come over,” she said, when she’d plunked a cup of tea down in front of him. “I know you’re busy, you could have told me over the phone.”
Will smiled. “It can be an emotive subject, the headstone.”
“Right. Well, all I wanted was a name. I can deal with them myself.”
For a minute he didn’t look at her, then he brought his gaze up to hers, his eyes suddenly very intense.
“I know you’re avoiding me, Karen, and I’m not remotely offended. But I wish you’d just let me be your friend, without being so aware of this collar here.” He touched the white dog collar he wore, almost apologetically.
“It’s not that I’m avoiding you . . .” She picked at a small splinter on the wooden table.
“Look, what you’re going through must be hard. I have no idea how hard. But bottling it all up, in my experience, makes it harder.” His tone was tough, almost businesslike. “I’m not trying to force you to tell me how you’re feeling, but I hope there’s someone you can talk to . . . Maggie, for instance?”
He burbled on, about death and bereavement, anger, regret . . . she wasn’t really taking it in. But the sound was rhythmic and oddly soothing, like the beat of a distant drum. She was so tired. Continuing to avoid his gaze, both hands around her warm mug of tea, she felt her breathing gradually slow from the shallow, snatched breaths that had become normal over the past weeks. And in her chest there was a sensation like a trip switch going, as if something taut and strung out had finally snapped. Her cold body flushed with heat and for a moment she luxuriated in the feeling, which was like a warm, peaceful blanket being wrapped around her soul.
“Karen?”
She looked up and met his eyes, not sure what he was asking. “Sorry . . .”
“Are you alright? You look quite . . . flushed.”
There was a heavy silence.
“Do I?” Then she felt her face crumple, her eyes flood with hot, stinging tears.
William, sitting opposite her, let her cry. He did nothing, made no attempt to reach over and touch her, and his inaction seemed to be giving her permission to weep, to take her time and let everything go.
After a while, she wanted badly to speak. “I let him die,” she said. “He called and called and I didn’t go to him. If I had, he might still be alive today.”
The vicar just nodded.
“Did you hear what I said? I killed my husband. I left him there . . . the stupid drunken sod. Come and get me if you want me, I thought, and I went to bed. WENT TO BED when my husband was in pain and dying downstairs.” She stared at him through her tears. “What sort of a person does that make me? Eh?”
“Human,” was his quiet reply.
“No, NO, that’s not ‘human.’ Any normal human being would have gone to him, been there when he needed me.”
“Did you want him to die?”
The question shocked her. “No, of course not.”
He met her gaze, waiting for her to go on.
“I wanted him to stop drinking,” she said, but the other words, the ones she knew she had to say, stuck in her throat. William wasn’t helping her out. “He was such a nightmare when he was drunk. Which was most of the time recently. I didn’t know what to do, how to stop him. He even hit me a few weeks ago . . . I don’t think he meant it, but still . . .”
“I’m so sorry. It must have been hell for you both.”
The word “both” brought Karen up short. Was it hell for Harry too?
“If it was such hell for him, then why didn’t he make even the tiniest effort to stop?”
William shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“And why didn’t anyone say anything? You all knew, but you didn’t do a blind thing. Those friends of his at the club, watching him drink himself unconscious week after week? Why didn’t anyone help him . . . help me?” She was almost shouting now. “Why didn’t you?”
“I understand what you’re saying, but I never really saw him drunk. I knew he drank—other people said it, and his flushed face and the smell of alcohol, even at the morning service, was a bit of a giveaway. But I didn’t feel I knew him well enough to say anything yet.”
Karen slumped, her head bowed, her arms resting on the table. The anger had drained away. “So
rry, I didn’t mean to attack you. I feel so guilty . . . and I suppose I want to blame everyone else.”
Silence fell on the warm room. There was just the sound of the boiler chunnering away in the utility room next door.
“Did you know he was ill?”
She shook her head. “His blood pressure was high, but he was on beta blockers, had been for years. He always said Tom had given him a clean bill of health whenever he went for a checkup. I don’t know if that was true—”
“So you couldn’t have known he was at risk.”
“Well, no. But anyone with half a brain knows that a seventy-five-year-old who puts away a bottle of whisky a day—minimum—is going to end up with health problems.”
“Was it a heart attack?”
“So the post mortem said.”
Another silence.
William’s ability to be absolutely still and thereby make silence seem alright was almost as if he were stopping time. Maybe it was the archery discipline, she thought, the need to be completely focused in order to take aim. Whatever it was, she found it calming, not feeling the need to speak. She felt they could have sat there all night.
“I’m glad you were able to talk to me about it.”
“You won’t tell anyone else about me leaving him and going to bed? Please. They’d be so shocked.”
“You haven’t done anything wrong, Karen. How could you know that he was about to die? But no, of course I won’t tell anyone.”
“Not even Janey?”
“Not even Janey.”
She sighed. “Thanks.”
William got up, took his mug to the sink and tipped the dregs of his tea away, rinsed it out and placed the mug on the draining board.
Karen got up too. “Listen . . . thanks . . . thanks for being so . . . for not judging me.”
He smiled. “Nothing to judge. Why don’t we meet again soon. I’m around.”
When he’d gone out into the cold February evening, Karen sat back down at the table. It had been such a relief to speak of her guilt to another human being. But although she felt calmer than she had in days, William’s insistence that she had done nothing wrong did not ring true. Not that she didn’t believe him to be sincere. She absolutely did. But he only knew what she’d chosen to tell him, he hadn’t been there. Because she finally admitted to herself, as she trawled through the events yet again, minute by minute, of Harry Stewart’s last night on earth, that part of her had known, right from the start, that there was something wrong. His cry was not that of someone just wanting attention, but a cry of real distress.
I didn’t think he would die, she told herself now. I honestly didn’t. But there had been times in the past, she knew, when the thought had crossed her mind that it would be easier if he did. Not in a serious way, she hadn’t followed it through. It had been more of an exhausted, end-of-the-road, no-other-options-left-to-her sort of thought when he was being particularly difficult. And it was quickly dismissed and accompanied by immediate shame. Shame at the thought itself and also at her own cowardice in not being able to just pack a bag and leave him.
She hadn’t told the vicar that, had she? Hadn’t told him of the burning resentment she felt each time he threatened her, or belittled her, or ordered her about in his drunken state. Nor had she mentioned that she was on the brink of leaving Harry.
What would the Reverend Haskell have thought if he knew the unedited version of the truth? she wondered. No doubt booked me a place in hell.
Chapter Five
“Can you at least put your stuff in the dishwasher when you’ve finished eating? And the food back in the fridge.”
It was three weeks into Sophie’s residency and Karen was sick to death of coming into the kitchen and finding the place covered with layers of her stepdaughter’s mess.
Sophie looked up from her phone, raised her eyebrows in mock alarm. “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to contravene house rules.”
Karen felt the familiar, now almost permanent knot of tension in her stomach. It was like having a hostile teenager to stay; Sophie seemed so much younger than her years, almost as if she refused to grow up.
“I don’t see why I should run around picking up after you,” Karen snapped.
With a theatrical sigh and a brief eye-roll, Sophie said, “Yeah, well, you don’t have to. I’ll do it eventually.”
They seldom ate together. Sophie kept strange hours, often not emerging before the evening, then staying up till late, curled up in her father’s red leather recliner in the den and watching film after film on the wide screen—horror her favored genre, judging by the tinny screams that filtered through to Karen’s bedroom. She had also adopted a diet since Harry’s death that seemed to consist only of great mounds of raw, indigestible vegetables. “You should try it,” Sophie had said, having primly refused the offer of some parsnip soup that Karen had made, on the grounds that it was cooked. “Raw food is pure energy,” she added, as if quoting from a book. “And a total detox. You’d feel so much lighter if you stopped clogging up your system with all that bread and stuff.”
“So you can’t eat chocolate. That’s cooked, isn’t it?” Karen was being provocative—she knew Sophie adored chocolate of any sort.
But Sophie just grinned triumphantly. “Chocolate doesn’t have to be cooked. Raw chocolate is a superfood, actually. It’s higher in antioxidants than green tea and has over three hundred nutrients. So I can eat as much as I like.”
That had shut Karen up.
But the girl seemed worryingly over-zealous about her diet. OK, she had weight she could lose, but Karen hoped this wasn’t some bizarre reaction to her father’s death that would end up making her ill.
*
Johnny harrumphed at the other end of the phone. “Why didn’t you just tell her she couldn’t move in? It’s not your fault Harry finally saw sense and cut her off without a penny . . . or at least not enough pennies.”
“Maybe not, but she thinks it is. And this house is big, I don’t see how I could have refused.”
“You don’t? Well, it goes like this: ‘Sorry, Sophie, you’re an annoying brat and I don’t want you living in my house.’”
Karen laughed. “Sounds good when you say it. Could you pop over and do it for me?”
“You do take prizes.” Her brother’s tone held a familiar frustration. “You let Harry walk all over you, even hit you for fuck’s sake, and you do nothing. Then no sooner are you shot of him—God rest his soul—than you let your bloody stepdaughter railroad you instead. I give up. I totally give up.”
“Yeah, well, things are never as black and white as you make out. She’s not in a good way . . . she’s eating a weird diet and not getting up till teatime. And however bratty she is, she did love her dad.”
“So you can be incredibly sympathetic. You just don’t have to let her live with you, Karen. Really, you don’t.”
“No, OK, OK, I hear you. It’ll only be for a short time, I’m sure. She’ll get bored to death down here, away from all her friends.”
“And where is she going to live, now she’s rented out her flat?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure she’ll find someone to look after her, she usually does.” Now it was Karen’s turn to be irritated with Johnny’s relentless practicality. She didn’t want to hear that she might be stuck with Sophie permanently.
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“You know you’d be very welcome to come over and stay with us for a while. Have a bit of a breather. I’d love that and so would Briana.”
“Thanks . . . nice idea. I’ll see how it goes.” She was grateful for the suggestion, but Johnny and Briana’s household was frenetic, high-octane, run within an inch of its life. All three boys, in their teens now, played at least one musical instrument; Mason, their eldest, was an ice hockey star; Blake a potential Olympic swimmer; Jakey academically two years ahead at school. Added to which, the kids had to do an onerous amount of chores around the house—marked out on a strict
weekly rota. Briana, who called herself a “homemaker,” also made it a matter of pride to schedule what she called “Fun Time,” which was as mandatory as the chores and the schoolwork and the various practice times. But the “fun” was always improving in some way and never included chilling in front of the television. So the poor boys—as Karen saw them—barely had time to breathe, let alone slob about being grumpy teenagers or hanging out with their mates.
“Seriously, think about it . . .” He paused. “But aside from the stepdaughter issue, you’re OK, are you? Not too depressed.”
“I’m not great, if I’m honest . . .” She hadn’t told her brother about what had happened with Harry, and didn’t intend to. She knew he’d be judgmental about her husband, as usual—and worse, he’d try to solve the problem. She didn’t need a solution, she needed to stop feeling guilty, or at least come to terms with her guilt. That was why she had given in so easily to Sophie’s blackmailing. Guilt. “And please, don’t tell me it’ll ‘take time,’” she added.
“I wasn’t going to.” She heard him chuckle. “Although I’m sure it will.”
“Shut up.”
“But hey, bright side, sis . . . you were going to leave him and now you don’t have to. You’ve got money to live on and a house, once you’ve got rid of you-know-who. You can begin to have the life you want at last.”
“I know. It’s good.”
“It is good,” he echoed, resolutely ignoring her gloomy tone.
“OK . . . well, I’d better go, I suppose. I’m meeting the vicar for a walk.”
“The vicar? Gracious, don’t tell me Harry’s death has brought about a miraculous conversion.”
“Ha. Definitely not. But he’s been kind. We talk and it helps.”
They said goodbye, Johnny now fixated on Karen coming over to Toronto to stay with the family.
*
“Shall we sit for a minute?” William asked, indicating a bench along the path that offered a peaceful vista across the high downland, toward the distant hills. This was the fourth walk they’d had together since that talk at her kitchen table a few weeks ago, and Karen had really begun to look forward to seeing him. As they strode side by side through the Sussex countryside, they talked about Harry a lot, and Karen’s guilt, but also about wider issues around relationships and addiction, about loneliness and loss. William seemed so easy to talk to, she felt she could tell him anything and not be judged.
