The Brimstone Wedding

by Barbara Vine

  When I'd blown out all the candles and turned out the wicks and the smell came stronger than ever the way it always does, I stood in the darkness with candle grease on my fingers. I wanted to howl aloud but I was ashamed to do that even though I was alone and the house stood there alone. The owl cried for me, screeching from a tree in the fen. When I opened the front door the cold air swept in and it was as if it mocked me. It made my eyes water or else I was crying. I stumbled out to the car.

  It was crusted all over with frost and I scrubbed at the windscreen with newspaper till my hands were numb with cold. I shouldn't have been driving really, not in the state I was in. I just wanted to get somewhere, anywhere, as fast as possible. It was lucky for me – that's one way of putting it – that because it hadn't rained for so long there was no ice on the roads, only the thick white glitter of frost. As I put my key into the front-door lock the phone started ringing. It made my hand shake, it made me fumble with the key and I was terrified it would stop before I got there. I knew it was Ned.

  It wasn't. The voice was Richard's.

  ‘I'm so sorry, Genevieve, I know it's an imposition to phone you at this hour. But my mother has asked for you. She's talked to us a little; she's perfectly clear in her mind but she's very weak.’ I remembered something I often forget, that he's a doctor. ‘She may have to have more morphia quite soon. It's as if she summoned up all the strength she has left to ask for you.’

  ‘I'll come now,’ I said.

  It was strange how that phone call brought me back to earth, to reality, and a realization that it's mad to pace a dark icy house at night, waiting for someone who obviously isn't coming because he can't come. It's crazy to work oneself up to howling point. I did what I should have done hours before, dialled his home number in Norwich. Phoning him at home is the last thing to worry me now. Isn't he already more mine than hers?

  I got his voice on the answerphone. It's the first time I've ever heard his voice giving that message and I don't like it. I put the receiver back before the beep sounded, I got back in the car and drove to Middleton Hall.

  The big heavy man who is Marianne's boyfriend was sitting in the lounge, smoking a cigar. Lena would have killed him if she'd known. I've read enough magazine psychology to wonder if Marianne picks the type her father belonged to.

  Stella's room was insufferably hot, about as great a contrast as you could get to the temperature of the house where I'd been. It smelt as if someone had dropped and broken the flask of White Linen so that the perfume vaporized into the air. Richard and Marianne were sitting one on either side of the bed. Stella was unconscious. She was breathing harshly, her mouth open, she'd reached the stage when you begin to count breaths, for each one may be the last.

  Marianne put out her hand, took mine and squeezed it. She got up and took me into the far corner of the room. ‘Oh, darling, I don't think she'll speak again. She asked me to tell you this. I wrote it down, I don't know what it means.’

  Nor do I. Marianne had written on a leaf torn from a block, There is nothing in the house or the garden.

  ‘Did you try to get hold of me earlier?’ I said.

  ‘Richard tried at seven and again at eight. But, darling, you've a right to go out, you couldn't be expected to stay in for this. Don‘t, please, feel you have to…’

  ‘No, I know.’

  There is nothing in the house or the garden. Why tell me? Why not one of her children?

  ‘I shouldn't stay,’ I said. ‘You'll want to be alone with her.’

  The sweat was streaming off me. Marianne had got hold of my hand again. In spite of being halfway to a witch, my nan reads the Bible a lot. The days of our age are threescore years and ten, she says, and then adds a bit of her own, think yourself lucky if you get a bonus. The days of Stella's age were threescore years and eleven. It doesn't seem very old these days. I said that aloud but as I spoke a sound came from the bed that's unmistakable if you've ever been at a deathbed. The rattle that's the body expelling its last breath. It's awesome, that sound. No matter how many times you've heard it, it still sends a shiver through you. The last breath rattled out of Stella's poor, fallen, shrunken mouth and she was still.

  Richard sighed. He looked at his mother, he nodded at me, and I nodded. Marianne put her head down on her arms and began weeping. I went up to Stella and touched her, felt the lifeless pulse, the waxen skin and under my breath I whispered goodbye. More than ever I wanted to kiss her then, but that was for the family to do first.

  I went out of the room to fetch someone. Stanley was at the desk in the hall. I told him and walked away, ignoring his questions. My own terror had come back, filling my head with frightful images, turning me cold in that hot stuffy place. I met Pauline going off duty, told her Stella was dead, and then I went into Lena's office to try and phone Ned again.

  PART FOUR

  20

  Being here is still strange, yet it's more like home than anywhere I've ever lived. Another thing is that I'm more alone than I've ever been. But that has to be, that is the only way I could bear what has happened and what it has done to me. It's only when you're alone that you can cry in the night without someone asking why.

  The drive to Middleton Hall takes fifteen minutes instead of five and it's further to the shops. I wonder sometimes what I'd have done without this place, how I'd have coped. Rented a room, I suppose, got myself somewhere in Diss, a bed-sit with breakfast and find your own evening meal. Because, after it was over and I knew there was no hope left, I couldn't have stayed with Mike. I couldn't have made the best of a bad job in that way. Philippa didn't see it like that.

  ‘It's just as well you never said a word to Mike,’ she said. ‘You can go on now just as if nothing had happened.’

  She meant well.

  Even as she spoke I was thinking of how that would be, living with a man I'd no feeling left for and hiding from him all the feelings I had still for the man I'd loved. I went to Mum first of all. That's what you do, isn't it, when your marriage breaks up? You go home to mother. She didn't want me, she said as much, but she said something else too, that I had to come to her, she understood that, because a daughter's home is always her home even when she's nearly reached her third of a century.

  I didn't know then where I'd go. I couldn't think of things, I couldn't make plans or do anything beyond going mechanically about my work. I'd been blasted, you see, shot to pieces. My young body felt old and broken and my mind floated free but full of him, nothing but him.

  *

  The day after Stella died was a Friday. So I was wrong about that too, with my clairvoyance and my wise-woman ways. Perhaps I made that forecast because it's well-known Fridays are unlucky, most accidents happen on Fridays, and it's not a day for starting any new enterprise. Old Mr Thorn that my late grandad worked for would never begin the harvest on Friday and the men went along with that. I used to feel that way myself though I've changed now, but that Friday when I woke up it was to an awful sense of dread and foreboding.

  Before I left for work I phoned Ned's home and the answerphone was still on. I'd never phoned him at work and the thought of doing it frightened me. I suppose I'd read too many books and too many pieces in magazines about the unhappy consequences of phoning one's married lover at his work-place. Besides, the way those people talk unnerves me. But fears of this sort matter less and less after a time, everything like that is overcome by the terrible anxiety and the need to know. I think then, that morning, I'd have forced my way into a private hospital and past security guards and pushed his family aside to get to his bedside. For that's what I thought it was by that time. I thought he was lying injured somewhere in hospital.

  I phoned the studios on Lena's office phone as soon as I got in. It was too early and they had their answerphone operating too. There was no point in leaving a message. What could I say and who would bother to call me back? As I passed across the hall on my way to the stairs the undertakers came down the passage with fat Stanley trotting afte
r them. They had a body covered up in black on a stretcher, Stella's body. I stood and watched them carry her away. If she'd still been alive I thought I'd have asked her what to do, I'd have asked her for help.

  By the time I'd got Gracie up and taken Lois down to the lounge in the wheelchair she's got now and read the business part of the paper to Arthur, it was after ten. The dogs were padding about but there was no sign of Lena. Sharon was in the office. She went away quite meekly when I said I wanted to make a private phone call. I'd lost the number and I was looking it up in the directory when I saw Richard go past the window on his way to his mother's room. I dialled the studios and asked for Ned.

  They wanted to know who it was. I hadn't thought they would or I'd have made up some important name. ‘Charmian Fry,’ I could have said, it would have been appropriate, for I was in her shoes, not knowing and afraid to know, but needing to know above all else.

  It was ages I waited while music played, that ‘Greensleeves’ tune we'd sung at school. ‘Alas, my love, you do me wrong To cast me off discourteously, For I have loved you, oh so long, Delighting in your company.’ Funny that I remembered the words after fifteen years. Another voice came on and said Ned Saraman wasn't in today. It was so cold and crisp, that female voice, that it paralysed me, it stopped me asserting myself. Could it take a message, it said, would I leave my name? I left my name but I didn't ask any more. I couldn't. At least I knew he wasn't lying injured somewhere – or did I know that?

  I tried his home again and again got the answerphone. I told myself I had to be strong, however hard that was, I had to think of a way of finding where he was. You must keep calm, I kept telling myself, sit down and take deep breaths and think. Think it through. Find somewhere to sit quietly for five minutes. I went down the passage to Stella's room. Richard was in there. He was standing by the window holding up a copy of The Times. I apologized, I said I'd go away.

  ‘No, don't. Please stay. I came to collect my mother's things.’

  All bedding had been stripped from the bed. A big suitcase lay open on the mattress.

  ‘Look, this is last Saturday's,’ Richard said. ‘She didn't finish the crossword.’

  ‘That was a sign,’ I said. ‘She always finished it. Would you like me to pack her clothes?’

  ‘That would be a great help.’

  The blue dress with the coin spots, the flowered dress and jacket, the cream wool coat… I folded them the way my nan folds things, laid face down, the left side turned in, then the right, the sleeves parallel and flat. I took a deep breath. I said,

  ‘May I ask you something?’

  As soon as I'd said it I knew he thought I was going to ask for something of hers to wear. As if I would. The clothes of the dead don't wear well, they rot as their owner rots…

  ‘Yes, of course. Anything. After all you did for my mother.’

  ‘It's nothing like that. If you wanted to find out where someone was, I mean how to get hold of him…’ I explained. I was discreet. I spoke, or I think I did, as if Ned was someone I slightly knew, someone who'd once rented a cottage in our village. It was important to speak to him. I made it sound as if for business reasons.

  ‘I'll do it for you,’ he said. He didn't ask if I'd like him to or if that would be all right. He just said he would, and he picked up the receiver on Stella's bedside phone.

  I didn't want to be there. I wanted to hide myself so that I couldn't hear and then come back and find all was well, Ned was on the other end of the line, Ned wanted to talk to me. I couldn't hide myself, I had to be there. But I could touch wood. I stood there while he dialled, holding on with both hands to the edge of Stella's walnut desk, feeling the wholesome grain of wood, the healer.

  Richard has a voice like Ned's. It's the kind that comes out of a public school and Oxbridge and say what you like it does impress people, it speaks to them of authority and know-how and control. Hearing him say Ned's name was the strangest thing, like being in a dream where people do things they'd never do in life and speak confidently to those they've never met.

  He asked for Ned and I could hear the music playing, not ‘Greensleeves’ this time but ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’. They can't know much about music, the people who arrange these things, if they only put on tunes that I recognize. I started to hold my breath, waiting for Ned's voice to take over from the music. But I couldn't hear any more. I could only hear Richard.

  ‘This is Richard Newland. Yes, Dr Newland.’

  Silence. Murmurings.

  ‘I'm not getting any response from his home.’ Murmurings. ‘Well, get me someone who does know, will you?’

  It was strange how my mind went empty then. I seemed to be suspended in nothingness, hanging on to the wood of the desk as if it supported me in space. I could see nothing but the white walls, the open case, and Richard's back, thin like a boy's, the shoulder blades standing out under his jacket. In the suitcase the blue dress was on top and the coin spots began to dance, waving and jumping before my eyes.

  Richard said, ‘Yes,’ and, ‘I see,’ and, ‘When will he be back?’

  The coin spots rushed and tumbled. I pulled away from the desk and leant on the bed, looking down into the red whorls on the pink mattress cover. The whorls shifted and twisted as if it was them doing the pounding in my head. Richard put the phone down and turned round. I made myself stand up.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘He's gone away on holiday,’ he said. ‘Skiing somewhere, they said. Innsbruck. No, Interlaken. Back on January the 3rd. Was it important to get hold of him?’

  I couldn't speak. I couldn't even shake my head more than an inch each way. I made myself walk round the bed – I walked stiffly, like a robot – and took another dress off the hanger. My heart felt as if it wasn't beating at all, just as I wasn't breathing.

  ‘Everything stops for Christmas for so long in this country,’ Richard said. ‘It's usually two weeks when in other places they have a couple of days. People here take it for granted the whole system shuts down for Christmas and no one's going to need them or try to contact them.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you for phoning.’

  I wrapped Stella's shoes up in the pages of The Times and put them in on top. The jewel box I tucked into a corner.

  Richard said, ‘She wanted you to have the dressing-gown Marianne gave her for her birthday. Please take it.’

  ‘She'd only worn it once,’ I said.

  He misunderstood me. ‘It's as good as new.

  I must have had a wild look about me. Or my eyes were blazing. Anyway, he took a step back.

  ‘Are you sure you're all right, Jenny?’

  ‘I'm fine,’ I said and I closed the lid of the suitcase.

  He picked up the tape player and the half-dozen tapes in the little plastic box Stella kept them in and thrust them into my arms. ‘She wanted you to have these. It was her wish. You mustn't say no. You did so much for her, you were much more than a carer, you were her friend. She loved you.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, and I went away, hugging the tape player and the patchwork dressing-gown because I couldn't talk any more.

  Hearing it like that was a shock. It stunned me. But you're never in that state for long, you have to start thinking again, and very soon I was thinking of reasons. By the afternoon I'd come to see what must have happened. He'd told Jane what he intended, that he was leaving her for me, and Jane had made a terrific scene. She'd insisted he come away with her and Hannah, probably that holiday for her and her daughter had been arranged for months, and she'd made such terrible threats that he'd no choice. For instance, if he didn't come she'd see to it he never saw Hannah again.

  There are a lot of holes in that theory but I didn't see them at the time. I didn't want to see them. I didn't want to ask myself how any of that could have stopped him phoning me. My theory depended on Jane being a monster, someone like Gilda Brent, though I'd no grounds for believing she was
.

  Mike came back in the evening and went straight to work on the conservatory. I phoned Ned's home number again but I'd have been surprised if I'd got anything but a recorded voice. I wasn't surprised. Drinking has never been the answer for me, or I thought it hadn't, but I've never been in a state like that before, as bad as that, so much in need of an answer. Once I'd have asked Mike to stop work and take me down the Legion but that was long ago, or seemed it. I went by myself.

  It was bitterly cold and a little snow was falling. It must have been falling all day, for there were drifts of it underfoot, only I hadn't noticed. If the flakes are sharp and there's a wind blowing, the snow stings your skin like needles. The Legion always looks cheerful on a winter's night, the lights orange behind the diamond panes and a big lamp up on the wall shining on the swinging sign of the Roman soldier.

  Mum was behind the bar and Janis with her, helping out. Mum was telling a man I'd never seen before how to get rid of mice. ‘Have you got a bit of paper? OK, now write this: I adjure all you mice to leave this place in a trice…’

  He started writing on the inside of his cheque book.

  ‘Go hence over the river and betake yourselves to the mill and there eat your fill. Now begone and let my house alone. Have you got that? You copy that out and pin it up on the wall and you'll never see another mouse.’

  Rhyming mice away wasn't new to me. It was what Mum always advised and the same for rats. It doesn't work, I don't know why I hadn't seen that before. Well, I had but it hadn't registered. I think that was the beginning of giving up on charms and omens for me, that evening, an end to superstition. Perhaps that was the real beginning of the end, that I could call it superstition, which was the word other people used.