At last, Diane reacted. ‘Leanne?’
‘Yes.’ Lily squatted on her haunches.
‘They’ve got a lot of lavatories,’ said the older woman. ‘Every one of them’s big so they can get the wheelchairs in. See, this place is for those who can’t get about properly.’
‘I know.’
‘And computers to play on while you wait, and a lovely cafeteria, and nice people . . . Oh, Leanne, I’m sorry. It was opened by Princess Anne.’
‘Right.’
‘Centre of Excellence. I never went to see you, did I? Just left you there, I did. So ashamed of myself. I was scared of seeing you in that other hospital where they put you, because—’
‘It’s all right, Mum.’
‘Because he killed my grandchild and he nearly killed you.’ Coming to terms with the real character of a much-loved son had not been an easy process; the deepening lines in her face were proof enough of that.
There was nothing she could say, Lily thought. How might she comfort the mother of a killer? How could anything be done for Diane Chalmers now? The poor woman looked as if she belonged nowhere, and Lily knew exactly how that felt, too.
‘I swear to God, Leanne, I didn’t know what the money was for. That man – Chas – his wife got hurt.’
‘Yes. Yes, she did.’
‘And it’s all my fault.’
‘No.’
Diane jumped up. ‘I raised him. I spoilt him. I let him explain everything away and sometimes I knew he wasn’t right, that he was up to no good—’
Lily stood up. ‘You did your best. No one can do more than that.’
Diane picked up the album. Inside, treasured photographs of her little boy preceded pictures of his wedding, of the honeymoon, of high days and holidays enjoyed by Clive and her daughter-in-law before the world had ended. She had lived for and through her son, had bragged about his cleverness, had boasted to neighbours about his wife in the fancy magazines and on the television. The album was all she had left.
A doctor appeared. ‘Mrs Chalmers?’
Both women turned to look at him. Old habits did die hard, decided Lily, because some part of her still responded to the old name. She noticed Chas, Eve and Mike in the corner with a uniformed man, possibly a prison guard. There was blue carpet on the floor. Leanne Chalmers would have chosen a different shade.
‘Is it done, all that scanning?’ the older Mrs Chalmers asked.
‘Yes. I’m sorry, but there’s no sign of improvement.’
Diane drew herself up to full height, achieving all of five feet and two inches when her spine was straightened. ‘Then we do what needs doing. I waited for my daughter-in-law, you see.’ She grasped Lily’s hand. ‘Come with me. Be with me when . . . when . . . They can’t use any of his stuff. There was something wrong with him – he wouldn’t have lived long anyway.’
The room moved. Lily remained completely still while the world shifted around her. Mike caught her just before she fell. But she hadn’t been falling, had she? ‘This is Diane,’ she managed before being pushed into a padded chair. Seated, she regained her equilibrium. Where was the joy? He wasn’t going to live, and all she felt was a terrible, cold sadness. Didn’t it say somewhere that Mike’s God suffered when a sparrow died? Clive had been a person – a terrible person, but . . . Poor Diane.
Mike knelt in front of the woman he adored. ‘Sweetheart,’ he began. ‘Clive’s had several tests and scans, and he’s not alive any more. Diane could have had the support turned off an hour ago, but she waited for you because she needs you to be here. Meanwhile she made them test again just to be sure there was no brain activity. Can you help her? Can you do this one last thing for her?’
The doctor hovered and expressed concern, but Lily shook her head. ‘It was just the shock,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m all right, no need to worry about me.’ He was gone. Clive had left the world, had been dying before the incident at the prison. ‘What was wrong with him?’ she asked the doctor.
‘He fell in jail,’ came the reply. ‘Probably because he had a heart condition that had somehow managed to remain undetected.’
‘So he wasn’t killed or pushed by another prisoner?’
‘There’s no evidence to suggest that he was. It was an accident, we believe.’ The medic looked at the two women and sent Chas for cups of tea. The patient’s mother was in shock, while the newly arrived ex-wife also seemed to be suffering. Clive Chalmers had given little to the world and had taken much out of it, including an unborn child. Even his organs were not usable, so he had died exactly as he had lived – without sympathy and without generosity. ‘I’ll be upstairs when you’re ready,’ he told Mike. ‘Give these two the time they need.’
Diane managed to drink some tea before finding some words for the woman she knew as Leanne. Clive had fallen down some stairs, and his back had been broken in two places. The hospital staff had now declared him to be brain-dead, but Diane, as the only living relative, had to give permission for life support to be withdrawn. ‘He looks like he’s breathing, but he’s not,’ she said sadly. ‘Such a good little boy, he was.’
‘I know,’ said Lily.
‘Drew pictures for me, brought me breakfast in bed, picked flowers and tried to help with jobs round the house.’ She smiled wanly. ‘Course, the flowers were probably stolen. What happened, Leanne? What went wrong?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘All that hatred. All that nastiness – where did it come from?’
Lily offered no reply.
‘Come with me,’ Diane begged.
Lily looked at her love. ‘You have to come, too,’ she told him. ‘He’s a priest,’ she advised Diane Chalmers. ‘He can say a prayer.’
They went up in a lift and walked along corridors that led to wards. Mike held Lily firmly, while she clung to Diane’s hand. Music was playing somewhere. It was soft, gentle music that reminded Lily of birdsong travelling on a summer breeze. The walls were cream. Machinery bleeped and stuttered. He was in a white bed. The nurse who had accompanied the group in the lift melted away into the background.
Lily looked at the man she had feared, and he was still beautiful. With no lines on his face, no hard eyes fixed on her, he was just an ordinary man with extraordinary good looks.
Diane pulled herself away from Lily and went to straighten her son’s hair. She placed on the bed a photograph of a small boy before nodding to the doctor. A switch was pushed, and the machinery grumbled until the classic flat line appeared on a screen. Mike walked to the bed and placed a hand on Clive’s forehead. He prayed for a man who had murdered a baby, who had almost killed the child’s mother, who had ordered the attack on Eve.
Diane turned to Lily. ‘I have to take him home.’
Lily brushed away a tear and hugged the little woman. ‘Not tonight,’ she said gently. ‘And not on your own. Mike and I will go with you to Taunton.’
The ex-priest followed the pair out of the room towards the lift that would return them to the ground floor. He knew why he loved Lily. She had a generosity of soul that was far more valuable than her obvious assets. Lily, or Leanne as she might now choose to be called, was a real woman, a good person who would always try to do the right thing.
As they drove back to Eagleton, he listened to the two women in the rear seat. Lily was telling Diane that she could stay with her in Eagleton, perhaps for a holiday, perhaps for ever. ‘Don’t decide now,’ she said. ‘But Lancashire worked for me.’
It occurred to Mike that there was irony in today’s situation, a grim sense of fairness about what had occurred. Clive had killed his son; Clive’s mother had turned off machines that had kept the man alive in the technical sense. The difference was, of course, that Diane’s actions had been born of kindness, whereas— He didn’t want to complete the thought. Sometimes, thinking was not a good idea.
Fifteen
She still sat upstairs for most of the day, though she had moved slightly to the right and was occupying a different
window. Enid had a lodger, and there had been a reboot on the bedroom front, but she was just one of the people who had endured change. In Eagleton, 2008 became known as the Year of the Shuffle, because people moved around like men on a chessboard, hither and yon, a few pauses for calculation, some stalemates and the knocking down of several walls.
But Enid remained in situ, as did the village stocks and a couple of Ice Age boulders around which fences had been erected. However, Enid’s place of residence was now above the re-named and re-located Lily’s Bloomers, and the Reading Room occupied two units, one of which had ceased to sell flowers, while the other no longer operated as Pour Les Dames. Fullers Walk currently housed the off-licence, a veterinary practice and a florist, while the extended Reading Room took up the last pair of shops.
Maurice and Paul, having reached the final of a national talent show, were currently working in Las Vegas, though Sally, mother of a newborn, had stayed in the village. She was happy, her marriage remained solid, and she waited patiently for her husband to return from cruises and tours all over the world. Blessed with a temperament that was placid and accepting, she carried on her life away from the glitz and noise that surrounded her talented partner. Wealth neither worried nor excited her, because she lived for her son and for the day when her man would come home from his latest tour.
The invasion of Eagleton had begun in the autumn of the previous year. Like Holmfirth in Yorkshire, the village became famous, though for different reasons. No Compo or Foggy had wandered its streets, yet hundreds had come, in the wake of Clive Chalmers’s exit from the world, to catch a glimpse of the Leanne they remembered from TV and magazines, the poor woman who had suffered greatly at the hands of a terrible husband.
She gave few interviews, wrote no book, accepted no payment from editors who wanted to hear ‘her side of the story’. Her ex-mother-in-law took over the flower shop, and she, too, developed a way of coping with intrusion – she simply closed the shop until questioners gave up and went home.
Diane Chalmers had been absorbed into Eagleton and was fast becoming one of its fixtures. There were two chairs at Enid’s bedroom window, and the pair of old women often looked down to watch the world and his wife (and his children) on the green below. Enid was frail, and she preferred to eat in her room. Diane coaxed her out as frequently as she could, but resistance was sometimes tiring, and the immigrant from Taunton was no spring chicken.
However, they got on like the proverbial burning house. They sat now side by side, cups of tea on small tables, biscuits spread on a plate, each leaning forward to study the Mothers’ Union as it assembled on the grass. Valda was there with her youngest son. She had named him Patrick, and he had a shock of red curls inherited – or so it was said – from a great-grandmother. Valda’s husband had been heard joking about the milkman or the window cleaner, but all remained well in the Turnbull house.
‘There’s your Philly,’ cried Diane.
Philly looked up and waved, turning the pram so that Dave’s mother could see Simon.
‘He’s a little belter.’ Enid smiled. ‘Pity I never loved his dad like I love him. I was a selfish, good-for-nothing, cruel young woman, Di.’
Diane patted her companion’s arm. ‘We were both useless, my lovely. You can love a child too much. You can love him too blindly. My son did more damage than yours ever would or could. They never did find out for sure whether his death was an accident. It doesn’t matter. What sort of mother can say that? It should matter.’
‘Oh, you’re all right, you are. Take my word for it – I know all about bad, because I was no better than a bloody prostitute.’ Enid shook her head sadly. ‘Till I got past it and became a Methodist instead.’
Unfortunately, Diane’s mouth was full of tea, and she almost choked on it when she heard that. Enid didn’t know how amusing she was; she took life too seriously and blamed herself for everyone’s ills these days. ‘God, I wish you wouldn’t do that, Enid.’
‘What?’
‘Make me laugh when I’m eating or drinking.’
Enid sniffed. ‘Come forth with that stargazey pie thing again, and there’ll be no more eating in this house. I don’t care about your Cornish mam and her recipes – I’ll never look another sardine in the eye as long as I live. Bloody heads poking out of the pie crust – whatever were you thinking of?’
‘Home.’
‘Do you miss it?’
‘No. I’m all right here, thanks all the same.’
‘Then shut up and fettle with yon teapot. See – there’s young Sally arrived now with little Jonathan. All boys, eh? Not a one of them with a little lass to dress up nice and pretty. Still. As long as they’re happy, eh?’
‘They’ll be happier still this afternoon, Enid.’
‘They will. And so will you, pet.’ In a rare gesture of true affection, Enid grasped her lodger’s hand. ‘Aye, by tonight, it’ll all be great. And if anyone deserves great, you do.’ The wetness in her eyes was because she had a cold, Enid told herself. Because she never wept . . .
People had flocked to see Lily/Leanne, but they continued to come in droves long after her tale melted into history, and Dave was due some of the credit for that. His double unit served several purposes, and he used both levels to maximum advantage. After long discussion with Health and Safety – most particularly with the fire service – he and his staff manned a ground-floor restaurant with permission for corkage and a menu that stretched as far as Philly’s imagination would allow. As mother of a tiny child, she functioned in a supervisory capacity only, working on recipes and doling out orders from her modest home.
Dave got the glory. The whole village felt that he deserved it, because he had worked like a dog since time immemorial. Then there was the actual dog. The eccentricities of Skippy, along with several other factors, meant that people continued to think of Eagleton as a place to be enjoyed. Bed and breakfasts sprang up out of nowhere and, in spite of financial recession, visitors continued to come. The scenery was magnificent, the village friendly and pleasant, so outsiders arrived all year round, and there was even talk of a Christmas meal in the Reading Room.
Dave’s cleverness meant that his Reading Room was always busy. Those who used the place as an Internet café grew younger, while those of the clientele who liked to eat out brought their own wine in the evening and enjoyed a decent meal, live music at weekends and good service at all times.
Until the dog got in. With the passage of time, Skippy developed skills that might have been admirable in a foreign diplomat, because she granted herself full immunity and nowhere was verboten. She went where she damn well pleased, was happily disobedient and extremely well fed. Her proper job was with Tim Mellor, and she was very serious about her chosen career in the area of veterinary science. But once the surgery was closed, Skippy entered a twilight zone created by and for herself, a dimension in which rules were no longer applicable. She could get through the smallest of holes, was not averse to creating and improving such apertures, and, as a result, attracted dog lovers from miles away. When she entered the restaurant, applause was sometimes deafening, and staff who had once chased the three-legged Labrador learned not to try, because Skippy’s public needed her.
The bookshop thrived. Even now, in a period of recession, folk wanted to buy The Story of Skippy, a hardback coffee-table book without which no home could be considered complete. The large, slender publication was filled with photographs, and each copy of the book was signed by the author, David Barker, and by the subject. Her signature was smudged, usually in purple, and no issue of the work could be regarded as complete without that paw mark. This was a dog whose life had been saved, who had gone on to save a human life before leading detectives to damning forensic evidence. She had been national news, and her fame continued to be impressive.
At the beginning of summer 2008, Skippy adopted a paper boy. His name was Mark, and he had a tendency to fall off his bike, so the bitch took him under her wing and went with him each morning
to take papers from bike to houses. As a result, Mark’s round was extended, since people seemed extra pleased when Skippy hopped her way to their doors with a Guardian or a Mail between her teeth.
But Dave’s true genius lay in his love for and his treatment of good literature. Twice a month, a book club met in the ground-floor shop. Authors came to read and sell their work, and when no writer was available Dave would do the reading. On alternate weeks, amateur critics gathered in the same place to discuss their homework, a book they had all read, or pieces they had written. Dave was over the moon. Anything that encouraged people to read and compose in an age filled by easier entertainments was worthwhile. His clientele grew, with people driving in from Manchester, Cheshire and even from Yorkshire. The Wars of the Roses were put to bed while reds and whites came together to read, criticize and write. It was a triumph.
Dave Barker stood with his dog in the doorway of his and Philly’s little empire. Philly was on the green with two other new mothers; visitors were walking up and down, some in footwear heavy enough to proclaim their intention to do some serious tramping over moorland. Life was almost perfect; by this afternoon, the picture would be complete. He nodded to himself. This was the day on which the jigsaw could be finished.
Diane nudged her companion. ‘Wake up,’ she admonished. ‘I think we’re under starter’s orders.’
After a small snore, Enid opened her eyes and sat up. ‘Look at the state of him,’ she said, pointing a finger at Mike Walsh. He was dashing from the church in his altarboy uniform, hair all over the place, legs going nineteen to the dozen. ‘To think he used to be the priest,’ she said, her head shaking. ‘He favours a man what nobody owns.’
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