I noted that Todd didn’t say “it’s a waste of time,” but that I was wasting somebody else’s time, somebody he didn’t even know. Todd is always conscious of when he’s being a nuisance. I used to be too.
“The day before she died, she called me every hour, and God knows how many more times on my mobile. That same day she asked Amias to look after her spare key because she was too afraid to leave it under the pot.”
“Maybe she’d just started bothering about basic security.”
“No, he told me it was after she’d got one of those calls. The day she was murdered, she phoned me at ten o’clock, which must be when she got home from her psychiatrist. And then every half hour until one-thirty, when she must have left to go to the post office and to meet Simon in Hyde Park.”
“Darling—”
“She told her psychiatrist she was afraid. And Simon said she wanted round-the-clock protection, that she was ‘terrified witless’ and that she saw someone following her into the park.”
“So she said, but she was suffering from puerperal—”
DS Finborough came on the line, interrupting us. I told him about your many calls to my office and apartment.
“That must make you feel pretty terrible. Responsible even.”
I was surprised by the kindness in his voice, though I don’t know why. He’d always been kind to me. “I’m sure this isn’t much consolation,” he continued, “but from what her psychiatrist has told us, I think that she would have gone ahead anyway, even if you had been able to talk to her on the phone.”
“Gone ahead?”
“I think that the phone calls were most likely cries for help. But that doesn’t mean anyone could have helped her, even her close family.”
“She needed help because she was being threatened.”
“She felt like that, certainly. But in the light of all the other facts, the phone calls don’t change our opinion that she committed suicide.”
“I would like to see a copy of the postmortem report.”
“Are you sure you want to put yourself through that? I have given you the basic findings and—”
“I have every right to read the report.”
“Of course. But I’m worried you’re going to find it very distressing.”
“That should be my decision, don’t you think?”
Besides, I had seen your body being taken out of a derelict toilets building in a body bag and after that experience I thought I would find “distressing” a relatively easy adjective to live with. Reluctantly, DS Finborough said he’d ask the coroner’s office to send me a copy.
As I put down the phone I saw Todd looking at me. “What exactly are you hoping to achieve here?” And in the words “exactly” and “here” I heard the pettiness of our relationship. We had been united by superficial tendrils of the small and the mundane, but the enormous fact of your death was ripping each fragile connection. I said I had to go to St. Anne’s, relieved to have an excuse to leave the flat and an argument I wasn’t yet ready to have.
Mr. Wright turns to a box file in front of him, one of many bulky files, all numbered with some code I have yet to crack, but marked in large scruffy handwriting “Beatrice Hemming.”
I like the personal touch of the scruffy writing alongside the numbers; it makes me think of all the people behind the scenes in the production of justice. Someone wrote my name on the files; maybe it’s the same person who will type up the tape that is whirring in the background somewhere like a massive mosquito.
“What did you think of DS Finborough at this point?” asks Mr. Wright.
“That he was intelligent and kind. And my frustration was that I could understand why Tess’s phone calls to me could be interpreted as ‘cries for help.’”
“You said you then went to St. Anne’s Hospital?”
“Yes. I wanted to arrange for her baby to be buried with her.”
I didn’t just owe you justice but also the funeral that you would want.
I’d phoned the hospital at 6:30 a.m. that morning and a sympathetic woman doctor had taken my call, unperturbed by how early it was. She suggested that I come in when they “opened for business” later that morning.
As I drove to the hospital, I put my phone onto hands-free and called Father Peter, Mum’s new parish priest, who would be conducting your funeral. I had vague memories from first communion classes of suicide being a sin (“Do not pass Go! Do not collect £200! Go straight to hell!”). I started off defensively aggressive. “Everyone thinks that Tess committed suicide. I don’t. But even if she had, she shouldn’t be judged for that.” I didn’t give Father Peter space for a comeback. “And her baby should be buried with her. There shouldn’t be any judgments made about her.”
“We don’t bury them at crossroads anymore, I promise you,” replied Father Peter. “And of course her baby should be with her.” Despite the gentleness in his voice I remained suspicious.
“Did Mum tell you that she wasn’t married?” I asked.
“Nor was Mary.”
I was totally thrown, unsure if it was a joke. “True,” I replied. “But she was, well, a virgin. And the mother of God.”
I heard him laughing. It was the first time someone had laughed at me since you’d died.
“My job isn’t to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.”
Before you died I’d have found his speech in poor taste; the Big Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturist style of conversation. Let’s strip it all down to what matters. Let’s have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.
“Do you want to talk through the service?” he asked.
“No. I’m leaving that up to Mum. She said she’d like to.”
Had she? Or had I just wanted to hear that when she said she’d do it?
“Anything you’d like to add?” he asked.
“The truth is I don’t really want her buried at all. Tess was a free spirit. I know that’s a cliché but I can’t think of another way of explaining her to you. I don’t mean that she was untrammeled by convention, although that’s true; it’s that when I think of her now, she’s up in the sky, soaring. Her element is air not earth. And I can’t bear the idea of putting her under the ground.”
It was the first time I’d talked about you like this with someone else. The words came from strata of thought many layers down from the surface thoughts that are usually scraped off and spoken. I suppose that’s what priests are privy to all the time, accessing the deep thoughts where faith, if it exists, can be found. Father Peter was silent but I knew he was listening, and driving past a Tesco local supermarket, I continued our incongruous conversation: “I hadn’t understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It’s ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that’s rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air.”
“I understand. We can’t offer you a pyre, I’m afraid. But maybe you and your mother should think about a cremation?” There was lightness in his tone that I liked. I supposed that death and burial were an everyday part of his job, and although not disrespectful, he wasn’t going to allow them to edit his conversational flow.
“I thought you weren’t allowed a cremation if you’re Catholic? Mum said the church thought it was pagan.”
“It did, once upon a time. But not anymore. As long as you still believe in the resurrection of the body.”
“I wish,” I said, hoping to sound light too, but instead I sounded desperate.
“Why don’t you think about it further? Ring me when you’ve decided, or even if you haven’t and just want to talk about it.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
As I parked the rental car in the
hospital’s underground car park, I thought about taking your ashes to Scotland, to a mountain with purple heather and yellow gorse, climbing up into the gray skies above the first level of cloud and in the cold, clean air scattering you to the winds. But I knew Mum would never allow a cremation.
I’d been to St. Anne’s before, but it had been refurbished beyond recognition with a shiny new foyer and vast art installations and a coffee bar. Unlike any hospital I’d been in, it felt like it was a part of the world outside it. Through the large glass doors I could see shoppers strolling past, and the foyer was flooded with natural light. It smelled of roasting coffee beans and brand-new dolls just opened from their boxes on Christmas Day (maybe the café’s new shiny chairs were made of the same plastic).
I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing. The shininess didn’t extend up that far, and the smell of coffee mixed with brand-new dolls was smothered by the usual hospital smell of disinfectant and fear. (Or is it only we who smell that because of Leo?) There were no windows, just strip lights glaring onto the linoleum beneath; no clocks, even the nurses’ watches, pinned to their uniforms, were upside down; and I was back in a hospital world with its own no-weather and no-time in which the aberrant crises of pain, illness and death were Kafkaesque turned ordinary. There was a sign demanding that I wash my hands using the gel provided and now the hospital smell was on my skin, dulling the diamond on my engagement ring. The buzzer on the locked ward door was answered by a woman in her forties, her frizzy red hair tied back with a bulldog clip, looking competent and exhausted.
“I phoned earlier. Beatrice Hemming?”
“Of course. I’m Cressida, the senior midwife. Dr. Saunders, one of the obstetricians, is expecting you.”
She escorted me into the ward. From side rooms came the sound of babies crying. I’d never heard hours-old babies cry before and one sounded desperate, as if he or she had been abandoned. The senior midwife led me into a relatives’ room; her voice was professionally caring. “I’m so sorry about your nephew.”
For a moment I didn’t know whom she was referring to. I’d never thought about our own relationship with each other. “I always call him Tess’s baby, not my nephew.”
“When is his funeral?”
“Next Thursday. It’s my sister’s too.”
The senior midwife’s voice was no longer professionally caring, but shocked. “I’m so sorry. I was just told that the baby had died.” I was thankful to the kind doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning for not turning your death into pass-the-day-away gossip. Though I suppose the subject of death in a hospital is more talking shop than gossip.
“I want her baby to be with her.”
“Yes, of course.”
“And I’d like to talk to whoever was with Tess when she gave birth. I was meant to be with her, you see, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even take her call.” I started to cry, but tears were completely normal here, even the room, with its washable sofa covers, was probably designed with weeping relatives in mind. The senior midwife put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll find out who was with her and ask them to come and talk to you. Excuse me a moment.”
She went into the corridor. Through the open doorway I saw a woman on a gurney with a just-born baby in her arms. Next to them a doctor put his arm around a man. “It’s customary for the baby to cry, not the dad.” The man laughed and the doctor smiled at him. “When you arrived this morning, you were a couple and now you’re a family. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The senior midwife shook her head at him. “As an obstetrician, Dr. Saunders, it shouldn’t really amaze you anymore.”
Dr. Saunders wheeled the mother and baby into a side ward and I watched him. Even from a distance I could see that his face was fine-featured with eyes that were lit from the inside, making him beautiful rather than harshly handsome.
He came out with the senior midwife. “Dr. Saunders, this is Beatrice Hemming.”
Dr. Saunders smiled at me, totally unselfconscious, and reminded me of you in the way he wore his beauty carelessly, as if unacknowledged by the owner.
“Of course, my colleague who spoke to you earlier this morning told me you were coming. Our hospital chaplain has made all the necessary arrangements with the undertakers, and they are going to come and get her baby this afternoon.”
His voice was noticeably unhurried in the bustle of the ward; someone who trusted people to listen to him.
“The chaplain had his body brought to the room of rest,” he continued. “We thought that a morgue is no place for him. I’m only sorry that he had to be there as long as he did.”
I should have thought about this earlier. About him. I shouldn’t have left him in the morgue.
“Would you like me to take you there?” he asked.
“Are you sure you have time?”
“Of course.”
Dr. Saunders escorted me down the corridor toward the lifts. I heard a woman screaming. The sound came from above, which I guessed to be the labor ward. Like the newborn baby’s cries, her screams were unlike anything I had ever heard, scraped raw with pain. There were nurses and another doctor in the lift, but they didn’t appear to notice the screams. I reasoned that they were used to it, working day in, day out in the Kafka hospital world.
The lift doors closed. Dr. Saunders and I were pressed lightly against each other. I noticed a thin gold wedding ring hanging on a chain just visible round the neck of his scrubs top. On the second floor everyone else got out and we were alone. He looked at me directly, giving me his full attention.
“I’m so sorry about Tess.”
“You knew her?”
“I may have, I’m not sure. I’m sorry, that must sound callous but…”
I filled in, “You see hundreds of patients?”
“Yes. Actually we have more than five thousand babies delivered here a year. When was her baby born?”
“January the twenty-first.”
He paused for a moment. “In that case, I wouldn’t have been here. Sorry. I was at a training course in Manchester that week.”
I wondered whether he was lying. Should I ask him for proof that he wasn’t around for the birth of your baby, and for your murder? I couldn’t hear your voice answering me, not even to tease me. Instead, I heard Todd telling me not to be so ridiculous. And he’d have a point. Was every male in the land guilty until one by one they could prove their innocence? And who said it had to be a man? Maybe I should be suspicious of women as well, the kind midwife, the doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning. And they thought you were paranoid. But doctors and nurses do have power over life and death and some of them have become addicted to it. Though with a hospital full of vulnerable people, what on earth would make a health-care professional choose a derelict toilets building in Hyde Park in which to release their psychopathic urge? At this point in my thoughts Dr. Saunders smiled at me, making me feel both embarrassed and a little ashamed.
“Our stop next.”
Still not able to hear your voice, I told myself, sternly, that being beautiful does not mean a man is a killer—just someone who would have rejected me in his single days without even being aware that he was doing it. Coming clean, I knew that this was why I was suspicious of him. I was just pegging my customary suspicion onto a different—and far more extreme—hook.
We reached the hospital mortuary, me still thinking about finding your killer rather than about Xavier. Dr. Saunders took me to the room they have for relatives to “view the deceased.” He asked me if I’d like him to come with me, but not really thinking first, I said I’d be fine on my own.
I went in. The room was done thoughtfully and tastefully, like someone’s sitting room, with printed curtains and a pile carpet and flowers (fake but the expensive silk kind). I’m trying to make it sound okay, nice even, but I don’t want to lie to you, and this living room for the dead was ghastly. Part of the carpet, the part nearest to the door, had almost worn through from
all the other people who had stood where I was standing, feeling the weight of grief pressing down on them, not wanting to go to the person they loved, knowing that when they got there they would know for sure that the person they loved was no longer there.
I went toward him.
I picked him up and wrapped him in the blue cashmere blanket you had bought for him.
I held him.
There are no more words.
Mr. Wright listened with focused compassion when I told him about Xavier, not interrupting or prompting, allowing me my silences. At one point, he must have handed me a Kleenex because I now have it, sodden, in my hand.
“And you decided at this point against a cremation?” he asks.
“Yes.”
A journalist in one of yesterday’s papers suggested that we didn’t “allow a cremation” because I was “making sure evidence wasn’t destroyed.” But that wasn’t the reason.
I must have been with Xavier for about three hours. And as I held him, I knew that the cold air above a gray mountain was no place for a baby, and therefore, as his mother, it was no place for you either. When I finally left, I phoned Father Peter.
“Can he be buried in Tess’s arms?” I asked, expecting to be told that it was impossible.
“Of course. I think that’s the right place for him,” replied Father Peter.
Mr. Wright doesn’t press me on the reason I chose a burial, and I’m grateful for his tact. I try to carry on, not letting emotion slip out, my words stilted.
“Then I went back to see the senior midwife, thinking I’d meet the person who’d been with Tess when she gave birth. But she hadn’t been able to find Tess’s notes so didn’t know who it was. She suggested I come back the following Tuesday, when she’d have had time to hunt for them.”
“Beatrice?”
I am running out of the office.
I make it to the ladies’ room just in time. I am violently sick. The nausea is uncontrollable. My body is shaking. I see a young secretary look in, then dart out again. I lie on the cold tiled floor, willing my body back into my control again.
Mr. Wright comes in and puts his arms around me, and gently helps me up. As he holds me, I realize that I like being taken care of, not in a patriarchal kind of way, but simply being treated with kindness. I don’t understand why I never realized this before, brushing away kindness before it was even offered.
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