The Feast of All Souls

by Simon Bestwick

  All the same, an infant in a cot was a lot easier to manage than a seven-year-old with fully-developed motor skills, boundless energy and demands of her own. “Oh come on, Mummy,” Emily said. “We’ve been here all day.”

  “Well go and play in the garden, then.”

  “Bo-ring.”

  Alice took a deep breath, and then the phone rang. Probably for the best; she didn’t want a row with Emily right now. “Hello?”

  “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “Hey, babe.”

  “Hiya daddy!”

  “Say hello to the little monster for me.”

  “Daddy says hello.”

  Emily waved, then climbed up onto one of the kitchen chairs. “What can I do you for?” Alice said.

  “Well, thought you might like to know. It’s about Teddy.”

  She felt cold. “What about him?”

  “It’s his last day today.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, he gave in his notice a while b –”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “You haven’t seen him in ages.”

  Alice felt a pang of guilt. “I know, but... anyway, never mind that. Why’s he going?”

  “Early retirement. Seems he’s put a lot of money away for his old age, and – well, he had some bad news. You know, health-wise.”

  “Oh God. Oh no.”

  “Alice, it’s okay. It was the ‘if you hang up your boots now you should be fine’ kind rather than the ‘six months to live’ sort, if you know what I mean. But him and Stefan are moving abroad. Flying out to Spain in a week.”

  “Next week? God.” She hardly saw Teddy these days, but the news still came as a blow. Even before Andrew, Teddy had been her friend – the first one she’d made when she’d moved down here, the first crack in the armour she’d built to keep out the world after John Revell. His humour and his kindness had meant a lot to her. If he hadn’t befriended her and started to winkle her out of her shell, she wasn’t sure if she’d have said yes to Andrew or not.

  “Yeah, I know. I’m gonna bloody miss him. We both are. Anyway, listen – that’s not what I’m calling about.”

  “What’s up, then?”

  “Well, we’re going to need a new chief researcher. You know we’ve got a lot on at the moment – there’s that big MOD contract for a start – so I really need to start looking for a replacement for him. It’ll need someone with a solid background in physics, and experience in that kind of work, of course – but if I could also get someone who’s worked at Amberson’s before and knows all the drills and procedures, that would be really handy.”

  In the moment following that, Alice was sure she felt the kitchen perform a single slow, graceful rotation around her. She looked at Emily, who sat, arms folded, at the table, pouting. Sulking because mummy wouldn’t come out and play.

  “Alice?” said Andrew. “You still there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. Me? Is that it? You asking me to come back?”

  “Have to go through the interview procedure, of course, but I think you’d walk it.” He hesitated. “It’d mean some changes, of course.”

  “Yeah, it would, wouldn’t it? No more working from home.”

  Emily looked up at her sharply.

  “You need some time to think on it?” Andrew asked.

  “Yeah. Maybe. Yeah.”

  “Okay, well, we’ll talk about it some more this evening. I’d better go.”

  “Okay. Speak to you later.”

  “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  Alice put the phone down. Across the kitchen table, Emily glowered at her – despite which, she still managed to look adorable. Who could leave all this? Alice sighed and managed a smile. “Let’s go to the park,” she said.

  IT WAS THE right thing to do anyway; by the time they got there the headache was gone. Emily stayed quiet when Alice helped put her blue trainers on, quiet as they walked into the village, but there were children she knew at the playground and she ran off to join them.

  Alice relaxed on an unoccupied bench. Not that she had anything against the other local mothers – well, apart from the fact that a distressing number of them were small-minded cows who thought that immigration was responsible for everything wrong with the country – but right now, like Garbo, she just wanted to be alone. There was a decision to be made, after all.

  It was like a crystal that changed colour depending on how the light struck it: on the one hand, here was a chance to resurrect the glittering career she’d been mourning only seconds before Andrew’s phone call. On the other, how much of Emily’s growing would she now miss? How many little triumphs and tragedies, that in the normal run of things she’d witness, would now be seen instead by a childminder or a crêche supervisor? By some stranger, working for pay, because Alice couldn’t be bothered to –

  Oh, for Christ’s sake. If the shoe was on the other foot – if it was Andrew contemplating a return to his old job after years juggling childcare and working from home – no-one would bat an eyelid. No-one would accuse him of neglect or of selfishly putting career before child. But if you were a woman, it was different.

  That said, it still came down to whether Emily would spend most of her days with at least one of her parents or with somebody else. How would the girl feel? Just the hint of it before and her face had fallen. Would she feel abandoned, unloved?

  She’d get over it. Kids got over worse all the time. Alice had.

  But Emily wasn’t ‘other kids’, anymore than she was Alice: she was herself, with her own personal strengths and vulnerabilities. She might cope, adapt and shrug it off, or the abandonment might fester in her, bear some horrible fruit of neurosis or depression in later years.

  Or maybe Alice was worrying too much. It was a stone-cold fact that if you worried over every possible thing that could go wrong, every potential negative consequence, you’d never make a choice or a decision again, go through life paralysed by what-ifs.

  Well, if you’re so concerned, ask her then. Ask her how she feels.

  But wouldn’t Emily automatically want her mother to stay? Wouldn’t she instinctively fight the change?

  Maybe not. But what if she did? You’re still an adult, Alice – you still have a life, a mind, of your own.

  Yes, she did: one that came with responsibilities attached.

  So you have to consult your seven-year-old daughter before any life decision?

  Emily would be affected by any decision she made.

  Doesn’t mean she’s best equipped to judge for the best. Would Andrew ask her first if he had a choice like this?

  He might. Emily was his little girl, after all.

  Emily screamed. Alice blinked out of her reverie, looked around. What’s happened? Where is she? Oh God – what will I tell Andrew – I looked away for a second and –

  But, no – there was the flash of the red T-shirt her daughter was wearing, a blur as the roundabout whirled round and round, and yes, there was Emily, shrieking and giggling with laughter as she clung to the ever-faster-spinning roundabout. Alice settled back.

  She’s stronger than you know.

  Alice nodded as if in answer to the thought. Emily was stronger: now and again the fact of her daughter hit Alice anew and dizzied her with wonder. Here was this tiny person, so herself, showing a glimmer of Alice or Andrew here and there – a mannerism, a gesture – and yet neither of them; complete in herself. With the talent for drawing and the sweet tuneful singing voice: her daughter. My daughter. My child.

  “Come on,” she said at last.

  Emily bounded over – but flush-faced, sweat-damp, grass-stains on the knees of her jeans and her brimming reserves of energy lessened just a little – grinning, with all bad humour gone. “Where now?” she said.

  “How about the village?” said Alice. “I think I know a little girl who’d like some ice-cream.”

  “Yeah!”

  They started walking, along the footpath on the river embankment. Em
ily grabbed safety rails as she passed, swung on them, leaned on the top rail to peer over at the rushing brown foamy water of the Cuckmere.

  “Get down from there,” Alice said. “You’ll fall in.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “Emily. Get down.”

  “Okay.”

  Alice chuckled and shook her head, fumbling in her handbag for her phone.

  “Mummy, look, it’s a lizard!”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” There it was; she flicked it open, cued Andrew’s number up and pressed CALL.

  She looked out over the river for just a second as it rang. Just a second to take in the view of the river, the village, in the afternoon, of the stay-at-home mums whose ranks she was about to leave, before turning back towards Emily. She was halfway through the turn when Andrew’s voice sounded in her ear – “Hello?” – and, in the same moment, the screaming started.

  “What –?” she said, and “What?” said Andrew’s voice, puzzled, but the screaming went on. It was from the other side of the river, from a woman with a pushchair, and the woman was pointing across the river at – at Alice? No, not at Alice, but just ahead of her, at –

  “Emily!”

  It was a scream torn out of her gut. It came because she completed the turn she’d been making to look at Emily, to where the screaming woman was pointing – and there was nothing there. Nothing but a gap in the railings, the prints of trainers in the soft earth beyond them – look, Mummy, a lizard – and then a sudden skid-mark gouged in the earth. That, and when she ran to the railing and looked frantically down, the telltale flash of a red T-shirt in the brown and foaming water, whirling faster and faster as it was swept away.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Things Fall Apart

  August 2014

  ALICE HAD NEVER learned to swim, and so all she’d been able to do was run along the embankment, screaming – my baby, my little girl, Emily, Emily – as she tried to keep that little red scrap in sight and pray, pray that Emily was fighting to keep her head above water. Mummy couldn’t swim but Emily could: she’d had lessons at the baths in Hastings, she’d be all right, wouldn’t she?

  Unless she was stunned or winded by the fall. Hadn’t Alice read somewhere that women floated face-down in water when unconscious – when they didn’t have any control over it – and men face-up? Or was it the other way around?

  “Emily!”

  She kept running – but oh, God, it had been too long since she’d visited the gym and she was already out of breath, the rhythm of her run failing and breaking up, and Emily spun away from her, the little red scrap shrinking and shrinking, and then up ahead she saw it – the weir. And she screamed, but a scream could do nothing, a scream couldn’t change the laws of physics, couldn’t stop a body in motion, driven by water pressure.

  And Emily hit the lip of the weir. And there was white foam in the water. And Emily was gone. And Alice finally registered Andrew’s voice, shouting her name, over and over, from the phone. And she ended the call, switched him off, because she couldn’t tell him, not yet, couldn’t tell him because she knew that this was the end of them, of their life together, the life that had seemed so perfect two minutes ago, and she couldn’t tell him what she had to tell him, not now. And she dialled the emergency services and put the phone to her ear and said police, said ambulance, said things she could never remember later in a ragged sobbing voice just an inch away from screaming. And then when it was done she dropped the phone to clatter on the ground and sank to her knees as people ran towards her, and she ignored it when it began to ring again because it was Andrew and she still couldn’t tell him. And then at last she screamed again, screamed across the thundering water, screamed her child’s name.

  THE POLICE CAME, and they were kind; the paramedics came too, and so were they. There was a hot drink and a blanket round her shoulders. There were questions from them and monosyllabic answers from her that she had no conscious part in making. About her and about Emily, and about her husband: about how his name was Andrew Villiers and how he worked at Amberson’s and how they could reach him on this number.

  And there was the hospital, where doctors and nurses shone lights in her eyes and tested her reflexes. And at long last there was Andrew, and she couldn’t look at him, and at the same time she couldn’t refuse to look at him, because it hurt her to do so, but she deserved to hurt, deserved to feel pain, deserved to suffer. You took your eyes off our daughter and she went in the river and now she’s dead. Drowned. Lost. Gone. All your fault. All your fault. He didn’t say any of that, of course. Perhaps he didn’t even think it, but she doubted that. How could he not, for Christ’s sake? Emily was dead because of her.

  “It’s all right,” he told her. “It’s all right.”

  “It isn’t,” she said, “it isn’t.” And of course he couldn’t answer that.

  “It’s my fault,” she said.

  “Don’t say that,” he told her. “Don’t blame yourself. I don’t blame you. I don’t. It was an accident.”

  But accidents don’t happen, they are caused. That was what Dad had always said. And what had caused this? Emily climbing through a gap in the railings to try and catch a lizard; slipping, falling. And why had she climbed through, why had she slipped and fallen? Because someone hadn’t been looking, someone had been thinking about her career instead of her child and look what had happened.

  “I don’t blame you,” Andrew said again, whispering, holding her, whispering in her hair.

  But something in how he held her felt wrong. As if he didn’t really want to hold her; as if, despite their physical closeness, he was withdrawing from her. Even in his arms, she felt alone.

  THEY WENT HOME. At some point they had a pizza delivered. Didn’t seem right to be hungry after what had happened; everything should have stopped with Emily going into the water. The growling of her stomach seemed to say well, fuck it, life goes on – and of course it did, went rattling blindly along, indifferent to the deaths of good men and bad, good women and bad, of children, of the old, the crippled and the whole, the black and the white and all other colours in between. But it shouldn’t. Not with Emily gone.

  Nonetheless, they were hungry and they ate. They went to bed but didn’t sleep. Didn’t speak either. She heard Andrew draw breath a couple of times, as if to say something, but then he’d breathe out again and whatever he’d meant to utter was forgotten. Perhaps he knew – how could he not know? – that virtually anything he might say was certain to trigger the end of everything between them.

  And the bedside clock ticked and the night went by and still she couldn’t sleep and nor could he and still they waited. And Alice wanted the phone to ring and wanted it never to ring, because if it rang then at least she’d know, one way or the other, but while it didn’t ring, while she was still waiting, it meant there was at least a chance, at least some tiny sliver of hope of Emily washing up on a riverbank bedraggled and cold and crying and scared, hurt and hypothermic and ill, needing hospital time, yes, very sick for a while, yes, but alive. That sliver was all she had to cling to, that thousands to one chance; it was her marriage’s only chance of survival, perhaps hers as well.

  And then finally the phone rang. Not the mobile phone; the landline. It rang several times in the dead silence of the house with neither of them moving – Andrew must be hoping she’d get up and take the call, just as she was willing him to. Alice was lying on her side, her back to him, staring at the wall. The figures on the digital clock on her bedside table glowed blood-red in the darkness: 2.07 am. And she lay on her side, breathed in and out, nice and regular, as if she was sleeping through it.

  “Alice,” Andrew said. “Alice?”

  She didn’t answer. Did he know? He must know. The phone continued to ring. At last he muttered something under his breath and got up. She felt the bed creak and shift. His footsteps padded away.

  Abruptly the phone stopped ringing. A beat of silence. Had the caller given up? But then she heard
Andrew say, “Hello?”

  More silence. Could she hear, if she listened closely, the faint sound of the voice on the other end of the phone?

  “I see,” said Andrew. More silence. “No, it’s okay. I can meet you at the, I can meet you there.” Meet you at the what? What word had he just stopped himself using? But of course she knew. “Where is it? Right. Okay. We’ll be there in half an hour.”

  We? No. No. She didn’t want to see what had happened. But at the same time, having failed her daughter so profoundly, how could Alice refuse to look on her one last time?

  “Thank you,” said Andrew. Thank you for what? For calling with that news? She tried to tell herself that maybe it wasn’t that news. It might be good. They might have found Emily alive. But if that was true, why was Andrew’s voice so dull and flat, so empty and so drained?

  After that, a silence. Then the click of a phone going down.

  The house seemed to wait and breathe. A moment or an hour later, she couldn’t tell which, she heard Andrew’s footsteps, creaking on the floorboard, coming back to the bedroom door.

  No. No. Stay away. Don’t come in. But of course he did, and turned the bedroom light on. His face was grey – he looked drowned. He looked dead.

  “No,” she heard herself say. She didn’t want to hear it. But he was going to say it; of course he was going to. She wanted to shout, scream, drown him out, shout him down, but nothing would come beyond that tired little whimper of sound.

  “They’ve found her,” he said.

  Please say more, she silently begged. Say she’s in a bad way – hypothermia, broken bones, anything, but clinging on. Say it’s touch and go and she might not make it because then at least there’ll still be hope, still a chance it might not be –

  “They want us to go and identify her,” he said.