Death Comes First

by Hilary Bonner

  It was the same at home. Though Henry had been a good, caring father and she had never been given cause to doubt his love for his family, Joyce couldn’t help but think of him as a benevolent despot. Growing up, she’d always known he would give her anything she asked for – except the thing she came to desire most: her freedom.

  She had pinned her hopes on university as the means of achieving her escape from the confines of Tarrant Park. Predictably, Henry had been opposed to the idea. It had taken Felicity’s subtle and patient intervention to bring him round, but even then he’d insisted that Joyce should apply only to West Country universities, making Bristol her first choice, and Bath her second. Playing the dutiful daughter, Joyce assured him that she was happy to remain in the West of England. Privately, unlike her elder son many years later, she was determined not to spend the next three years of her life commuting between campus and home. So she ignored Bristol and Bath in favour of Exeter. The old Devon county town was only an hour and a half’s drive from Tarrant Park. Henry gave his approval on condition that she would return home every weekend, and that he or his driver would chauffeur her.

  Joyce had accepted the terms with alacrity. In the Tanner household that was a result.

  Regardless of the restrictions imposed upon her, she’d felt she was well on her way to achieving her greatest goal: to be free to live her life in her own way. But the reality was that, apart from one fleeting exploratory fling, she ended up spending most of her first year buried in her studies – she was reading history, which had captivated her from early childhood – and in sport, at which she was rather good. She played tennis for the university and golf during her weekends at home, which remained rigidly implemented. Joyce didn’t mind. Not to begin with anyway. It was as if she needed to learn how to deal with freedom. Though she would never have admitted it, she welcomed her weekly break from her new world. It suited her to return to the closet at regular intervals.

  And then everything changed.

  It was the beginning of her second year at university. The new intake were gathered in the central hall. It was the usual meet-and-greet session with the principal and other members of staff. Joyce happened to be passing in the corridor outside. Nosily she sneaked a look through a glass-panelled door.

  Across the room she saw Charlie. He seemed to stand out from the others, like a character in an arthouse movie, projected in vibrant colour whilst everyone else was in black and white. Charlie was standing by a window, side-on to Joyce, the light silhouetting his profile so that she could not see his face properly. It was clear that he was tall and gangly, with long limbs that seemed to have outgrown the rest of him. And he had unruly fair hair that skimmed the shoulders of his crumpled blue denim shirt.

  She found herself staring at him. Then he turned and looked straight at her. Had he felt her eyes upon him? Neither of them had ever been sure.

  He was far too thin for her taste. He had a long bony face and a crooked nose that looked as if it had once been broken. The signs of a nasty outbreak of teenage acne still lurked around his chin. He was by no means the best-looking man she’d ever seen. But when his eyes, surprisingly dark for one so fair, met hers, Joyce had felt a shiver run down her spine. And it had been a very pleasant sensation.

  Then he had smiled. A small, uncertain smile. And she’d smiled back. Much the same way.

  Charlie always said it had been love at first sight. And even though the sensible half of Joyce did not believe in such a notion, she supposed it must have been that. Or something damned near to it.

  At the time she merely told herself to get a grip, and hurried off for her afternoon’s lecture.

  When she emerged two hours later Charlie was waiting outside the lecture hall. She couldn’t understand how he had known where she would be.

  ‘Sixth sense,’ he’d said, beaming at her.

  Long afterwards he confessed that he’d noticed she was carrying a copy of H. A. L. Fisher’s History of Europe, and upon making enquiries had discovered that there was only one history lecture taking place that afternoon.

  Whilst their relationship had begun almost at once, it was several weeks before they slept together. Charlie and Joyce, perhaps unusually amongst students, became very much an item in every other way before embarking on the physical. Sex came second. They began to go everywhere together, do everything together, and were rarely seen apart. Around the campus they became known simply as JC. They were a unit. Everything they did, they did as one. Charlie was studying politics and liked to draw and paint in his free time; Joyce began to do so too, while Charlie took to reading Joyce’s history books when he had a spare moment.

  Charlie’s political beliefs were far left and idealistic. In 1989, the year he arrived at Exeter, he was still a committed member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, even though communism was in steep decline throughout Europe. Joyce, whose interest in politics had hitherto been purely academic, found Charlie’s conviction magnetic. She joined the Party too, allowing herself to be swept along on the tidal wave of his philosophy, determined to embrace his grand vision.

  As a committed Marxist, Charlie was never quite sure if he wanted to change the world or hide away from it in a garret somewhere with his easel. Joyce dutifully – like a good Tanner woman, she later reflected – went along with his whims, regularly attending Party meetings with him, although she didn’t share his conviction. She could see no harm in it; after all, communism in the West was over, whether or not Charlie was prepared to admit it.

  The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, two months after Charlie’s arrival at Exeter and his fateful meeting with Joyce. But Charlie seemed to be the only person in the world oblivious to the significance. Looking back, Joyce could see that Charlie had behaved like an ostrich, blocking out this epic event because it didn’t suit his notion of how the world should be. At the time, Joyce hadn’t minded; in fact, she’d been vaguely amused. But that was before she discovered that Charlie would display a life-long predilection for denying the existence of anything which did not fit into his own scheme of things.

  Charlie lived off campus on an old wooden sailing boat, the Shirley Anne, which had been left to him by his grandfather. Or the nearest thing he had to a grandfather. His parents, about whom he seemed to know very little, had been killed in a car crash when Charlie was three, and he’d been fostered by a childless North Devon couple who later adopted him. Their family became his family, Charlie always said.

  The legacy from his adoptive grandfather had included an extremely convenient River Exe estuary mooring at Topsham, just outside Exeter. Charlie made the daily commute to campus aboard a rickety Lambretta motor scooter. It wasn’t long before Joyce moved in with him, keeping her new living arrangements from Henry and Felicity.

  She continued to travel home at weekends. But not every weekend. And by train, having managed to persuade her parents that this was the swiftest and easiest form of travel between Exeter and Bristol, thus avoiding any inspection of her living arrangements by Henry or his driver.

  With or without Joyce, Charlie spent his weekends scraping and patching the old boat, in order, he told her, to make it seaworthy for a voyage around the world. Joyce joined in, when she could. She met Charlie’s adoptive parents, Bill and Joan Mildmay, when they came to visit, bringing a picnic and wine. They seemed easy-going and totally accepting of her. She wondered if she would ever have the courage to introduce Charlie to her parents. She would have to, sooner or later, that was for certain. Because Charlie had already told her that, whatever he ended up doing with his life, he wanted to share it with her. And she felt the same.

  Of an evening they would sit planning a gap-year odyssey aboard the Shirley Anne. They would allow the winds to take them where they willed, said Charlie one night as they sat on deck, oblivious to the cold, sharing a spliff.

  Joyce thought it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard.

  Since Charlie was a year younger than her and a year behind in hi
s studies, Joyce intended to extend her time at university either by studying for an MA, if her grades were good enough, or a teaching qualification. That way they would leave Exeter at the same time and take off on their travels, roaming the oceans like the free spirits they were.

  Living on the Shirley Anne was not easy. They had to contend with a cantankerous gas water-heater, which would provide hot water for the one sink only when it suited it. There was no shower, let alone a bath. Thankfully the university locker rooms provided those facilities. The boat was connected to mains electricity, in a Heath Robinson sort of way. If you overloaded it by plugging in more than one device at a time, the entire system was liable to blow. So the sole electric heater which warmed the old vessel had to be used with extreme care. On top of that the place reeked of damp, and mildew was rife. All Joyce’s shoes turned vaguely green with a persistent mould at which she resolutely scrubbed each time she wore them, although it never seemed to make much difference.

  Their first winter in the leaky aft cabin was a cold and wet one. Joyce had never known what it was to be cold, and it amazed her that Charlie didn’t seem to feel it or be affected by it. She shivered and coughed and spluttered her way through until spring, but it didn’t faze her. Only one thing mattered: she was with the man she loved, living his dream.

  Charlie was unlike anyone she’d ever met. With hindsight she wondered whether that was why she’d been drawn to him. He couldn’t have been more different to her father. In those days, anyway. To his daughter, Henry Tanner seemed an utterly conventional man, to the point of being boring. Whereas Charlie was wild and free, bursting with dreams, like a throwback to the sixties, when young people had been obliged to rebel, in their dress and appearance if nothing else. Joyce’s father had been a teenager during that era. She’d seen photographs of him, resolutely suited and booted in his classic style. He’d allowed his hair to grow a fashionable inch or so longer, but that was the extent of his rebellion. Even as a teenager, he’d refused to bend his ideas or principles to fit the times.

  Charlie, on the other hand, declared that rules were made to be broken. He had an unruly nature to match his unruly hair. He loved and lived exactly as he pleased, and he carried Joyce along with him on a jet stream of youthful enthusiasm.

  Joyce had known from the start that Charlie was unlikely to meet with the approval of her parents. Particularly Henry. Nevertheless a meeting was arranged. And the head-over-heels-in-love Joyce took her beau home to meet Henry and Felicity. Henry’s offer to send his car and chauffeur was, of course, spurned by the free-spirited pair. And since Charlie said he couldn’t afford train fares and wasn’t going to take charity from anyone, they ended up trundling their way to Bristol aboard Charlie’s Lambretta.

  While it was obvious to Joyce that Henry Tanner did not share her enthusiasm for Charlie, he behaved with courtesy and was a warm and generous host. But during the course of the evening, when Charlie needed to use the bathroom and Joyce showed him where it was, she returned in time to hear her parents, unaware that she was in earshot, discussing her romance.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, dear,’ her mother reassured her father. ‘She’s so young. He’s her first serious boyfriend – they’re sure to grow out of each other.’

  Joyce knew better. And her mother’s remarks incensed her. She burst into the sitting room, bristling with indignation.

  ‘Little do you bloody know,’ she began, pointing a forefinger at Felicity.

  ‘Don’t swear at your mother,’ said Henry.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Joyce. ‘I’m swearing at both of you. How can you be so bloody stupid? Don’t you know the difference between casual sex and proper love? You should do – you’ve been married long enough.’

  Henry looked poleaxed. Felicity blushed. Sex was never mentioned in the Tanner household. Joyce sometimes thought her parents hoped that she and her brother believed there had been a double immaculate conception.

  ‘There’s no need for that sort of talk, dear,’ said her mother.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ said Joyce, as a bewildered Charlie re-entered the room. ‘Look, you two met each other when you were younger than either of us, and you’re still together. Anyway, you may as well get used to it. Charlie and I are going to be together for the rest of our lives, aren’t we, sweetheart?’

  It was Charlie’s turn to blush.

  Joyce nudged him in the ribs with her elbow. ‘Aren’t we, sweetheart?’ she repeated, a tad edgily.

  ‘W-well, yes, of course,’ stumbled Charlie. ‘Of course we are, darling. I just don’t want to upset your parents, that’s all.’

  ‘Do you know what,’ said Joyce, finding a courage she didn’t know she had. ‘I don’t give a damn whether they’re upset or not.’

  And with that, leaving her parents dumb with shock, she led a spluttering Charlie from the room, out of the house and aboard the Lambretta.

  Naturally, she telephoned to apologize. Throughout her life she seemed to have been torn between wanting her freedom and being afraid to grasp it. But she wasn’t about to give up Charlie for anyone.

  Joyce’s mother later told her that she and her father had remained convinced the relationship would not last. One thing came out of the otherwise disastrous meeting, however. Having seen the Lambretta his beloved only daughter was travelling about on, Henry Tanner presented her with a new Mini Cooper. Just as he ultimately would his eldest grandson.

  Charlie muttered something virtually incomprehensible about the moral dilemma of accepting lavish gifts from wealthy parents, particularly if you were a paid-up member of the Communist Party. But, for once, Joyce ignored him. And his conscience did not prevent him from spurning his rusting scooter in favour of riding with Joyce in her shiny new Mini at every opportunity. Particularly when it was raining.

  If she hadn’t been head over heels in love she might have noticed the ease with which Charlie abandoned his principles, she thought, as she sat at her kitchen table so many years later, with that letter before her, desperately seeking to make sense of the senseless. But she’d been blind to such things back then.

  Immersed in her new life, she’d continued to spend the occasional weekend at Tarrant Park, but her visits were nowhere near as frequent as Henry and Felicity would have liked. They raised no objection though, perhaps because they were still getting over the shock of Joyce’s ‘sex’ outburst. The Cooper made the journey to and fro both easy and fun, and more often than not Charlie accompanied her. While unfailingly polite in Charlie’s presence, Henry would invariably find some pressing reason to spend much of the weekend in his city-centre office or tucked away in his study at home, emerging only for meals. And Felicity would try, usually without success, to lure her away to the golf course or on a shopping trip, in order to spend time with her apart from Charlie. But her parents soon learned that if you wanted Joyce you had to take Charlie. They were, after all, JC.

  If Joyce had thought about it at the time, which again she didn’t, she would have realized that her father was trying to drive a wedge between her and Charlie. He knew better than to confront his daughter directly, so instead he attempted to bribe her with solo treats such as a session with a top tennis coach in Spain, or getaways with one or other of her parents to London, Paris or New York. She turned down all his offers: no Charlie meant no Joyce.

  Then, at the beginning of Joyce’s third year at Exeter and just as her parents were reconciling themselves to the idea of JC, tragedy struck. Her brother William was killed by a hit-and-run driver as he crossed Bristol’s busy Victoria Road right outside the Tanner-Max office.

  The whole family was devastated. After the funeral Henry went into deep mourning and shut himself away for a month. The running of the business was left to his father, Edward, who came out of retirement to hold things together. Although well into his eighties, he was not the sort of man to sit in a fireside armchair while the business he’d created descended into terminal collapse through neglect.

  Aft
er that month Henry re-emerged and once more took over the reins, conducting himself as if it were business as usual at Tanner-Max. But if anyone presumed to express their sympathy over William’s sudden death, or if William’s name cropped up in conversation, Henry Tanner simply purported not to hear.

  Joyce was perplexed by his reaction. Felicity at least made no attempt to hide how devastated she was at the death of their only son. Every time Joyce saw her she seemed to be either in tears or red-eyed as if she’d been crying. But both parents seemed indifferent to getting justice for William. Their response to Joyce’s demands to know what the police were doing about finding her brother’s killer left her dumbfounded and dismayed.

  ‘I’m sure the police will let us know if they find out anything,’ they told her. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? It won’t bring him back.’

  It mattered a lot to Joyce. She wanted to see her brother’s killer brought to justice. It became, for a time, her foremost motivation in life. She badgered the police on a daily basis, and at one point even attempted to conduct her own investigation.

  In the end her father took her to one side.

  ‘You know, sweetheart, the longer this goes on the more upset your mother is going to get,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid she may be heading for a breakdown. Her only hope is to move on. William is dead and nothing can change that. If you persist in what you are doing you are only going to bring her more grief. Every time you talk about it you open the wound, just when it’s starting to heal. Let it go, sweetheart, let it go, for your mother’s sake.’