Death Comes First

by Hilary Bonner

  Then, one morning, feeling nauseous, a devastating thought struck her. She had been so caught up with trying to escape that she hadn’t paid her own body much attention. In that moment she knew: she was pregnant.

  They had decided not to have children for at least a year or two. At least, she thought they had. She confronted Charlie as soon as he came home from work that evening.

  ‘Have you been forgetting to use something in bed?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve always taken charge of the condoms. Maybe you haven’t been putting them on right or something.’

  He stared at her. Then he began to grin.

  ‘Oh my God, Joycey, do you think you’re pregnant? That’s wonderful.’

  She glowered at him. ‘Oh yes, you would think that, wouldn’t you? It would suit you down to the ground, wouldn’t it? You and Dad. Well, I’m not sure, but I might be.’

  The grin widened. ‘That’s the best news ever!’

  ‘For you maybe. It pretty much puts an end to any plans I might have though, doesn’t it? We’d agreed not to have a child yet, or at least I thought we had. Or maybe my opinion doesn’t count for anything any more.’

  ‘Of course it does, sweetheart. Don’t be silly. And I know what we agreed. But mistakes do happen. And this would be the happiest of mistakes, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Thing is, I’m wondering if this was a deliberate mistake on your part, Charlie.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that, Joycey, honestly I wouldn’t. But if you are pregnant, well, I can’t pretend to be anything other than deliriously happy.’

  Once it was confirmed that Joyce was pregnant she was left with little choice but to put all thoughts of further education out of her mind. She was bitter about it at first, but her natural maternal instincts slipped into place more swiftly than she had expected.

  She’d always wanted to have children. Just not yet. And neither had she intended to bring them up in the stifling atmosphere of Tarrant Park. However, she was aware that she was becoming seduced, in spite of herself, by her family, her parents, particularly her father, her husband, and, much to her annoyance, by the house. Perhaps in her heart of hearts she had known from the beginning that’s what would happen – maybe that was why she had kicked so hard against it, and hit out at Charlie the way she had.

  Her father, overjoyed at the news as was Joyce’s mother, insisted that Charlie should take Joyce back to their Maldivian honeymoon island, which they had so fallen in love with, before she was too pregnant either to fly or to enjoy the trip.

  ‘And before you’ve got a newborn screaming its head off,’ said her mother. ‘I only hope your baby sleeps better than you did,’ Felicity added with a chuckle. ‘You were a total nightmare, Joyce.’

  Joyce smiled. And she went on the holiday. To her annoyance, she had a wonderful time. Charlie was proving the most attentive and loving of husbands. He never retaliated when she snapped at him, venting her frustration. Instead he coaxed and cajoled her, telling her how happy he was and how his one aim in life was to make her happy too. Nevertheless, Joyce couldn’t shake off the feeling she was being manipulated, that her husband and father were trying to turn her into her mother.

  Charlie had protested that, much as he adored Felicity, the last thing he wished for was for Joyce to be transformed into her mother.

  Joyce flounced from the room, but returning a short time afterwards she overheard a snatch of phone conversation. Charlie, in the sitting room, was obviously talking to her father.

  ‘It’s all very well you telling me to walk away – you don’t have to live with it, Henry.’

  Then there was a pause.

  ‘Well, yes, you’re right. Things have improved. But it’s still not how it should be.’

  Another pause.

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll do as you say . . . Of course I knew what I was getting into, but . . . Yes, I’m sure everything will turn out fine – I don’t have any bloody choice do I? Not any more.’

  Then he said his goodbyes and ended the call. As he did so he glanced up and saw Joyce standing in the doorway.

  ‘Talking about me, I presume?’

  ‘What, dear?’ he stammered. ‘No, no. A work problem. A client who’s being a pain in the arse.’

  ‘You said, “You don’t have to live with it, Henry,”’ repeated Joyce coolly.

  ‘Oh, just a turn of phrase,’ said Charlie. ‘I wouldn’t talk about you like that, not to your father or anybody.’

  ‘Not much,’ muttered Joyce.

  Charlie was obviously lying. But by then Joyce was eight months pregnant. She did not have the energy to pursue the matter. In any case Charlie continued to be the model husband. And she was aware that she had the kind of life most pregnant women would sell their souls for.

  Mark was born exactly nine months to the day after their wedding night. It had been an easy pregnancy and his birth – at a private maternity clinic in Bristol – was a straightforward one. At the end of it, Joyce found herself with a healthy eight-pound bouncing boy in her arms. Indeed, Mark could have bounced for England. And yelled. And on top of that he hardly ever slept, or not at the right times anyway.

  Joyce would have gone barking mad were it not for the unfailing support of her family.

  Henry had given Charlie a month’s paternity leave, saying: ‘Well, it’s the modern thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Since when was there anything modern about you, Dad?’ Joyce asked, realizing as she said it that it was the first affectionate banter between them since she’d moved into the house in Tarrant Park.

  Charlie was besotted with his son, spending four nights a week in baby Mark’s room so that Joyce could get the sleep she so needed. In spite of all the help from her husband and mother, she was frequently exhausted. But it was a happy time, for all that, and so busy that she had no opportunity for introspection. Soon she was totally immersed in her baby and her family life. As her mother had been before her.

  Weeks turned into months. Charlie returned to work, though Henry insisted that he shorten his working day in order to continue helping Joyce with the baby.

  Eventually Mark began to settle. By the time he was five months old he was sleeping through the night, and gurgling through the days. He tuned out to be a happy and contented child. A joy to have around.

  Joyce found herself in love with motherhood. She gave up all thoughts of further education and abandoned the notion of putting her degree to any practical use in the field of employment. Instead her days were spent looking after her son, or meeting up with female friends at the tennis or golf club, or joining them for the occasional lunch or shopping trip. She could do so whenever she wished because her mother was always on hand and eager to babysit.

  She had a husband who loved and cherished her, an extended family who were wonderfully supportive, and a home that was the envy of her friends. Charlie, with the assistance of his father-in-law, had given her a BMW 325i estate car as a thank you for their son. Still a performance vehicle, but with plenty of room for a baby and all the resulting paraphernalia, said Charlie. Joyce had help with everything, including housework. If she didn’t feel like cooking, the family’s daily, Josie, whom she now shared with her parents, would prepare the evening meal. Sometimes Charlie cooked. And whenever she wished he would take her out for dinner.

  It was true that her marriage had not turned out the way she’d expected or hoped. It lacked the passion and excitement of her early days with Charlie; JC had made way for a couple who were considerate of one another but distant. While Joyce was now preoccupied with motherhood, Charlie was embroiled, physically and mentally, in a world he made no attempt to share with her.

  As the years passed, that distance grew. Charlie’s business trips, with and without her father, became so frequent that Joyce wondered if he were having an affair. When she confronted him he would deny it, and, for a while, would be more like the man she had married again. Once she even plucked up the courage to
ask Henry – who saw far more of her husband and seemed to be in his confidence in a way that Joyce was not – if there was another woman in Charlie’s life. He had told her not to be a silly girl, leaving her cursing herself for having asked. Henry’s stock response to matters of an emotional nature was to ignore them. Privileged and cosseted as she was, he expected her to know better than to delve into areas of her man’s life it would be far better not to know about.

  Even more disturbing than the spectre of infidelity were her husband’s mood swings. He would sink into regular periods of depression, unable to sleep, unwilling to communicate, resisting all pleas to confide in her. He had turned into a man every bit as secretive as her father.

  He did at least make an effort to hide his moods from the children, and she supported him in this. He would spend longer hours at the office, and his absences from home would increase during these periods. Sometimes, after the children had gone to bed, he would retreat to the garden shed, where, during the good times, and helped by Fred, he constructed model ships. It seemed to Joyce that he could not stand being within the same four walls as her. Once, when she woke in the wee small hours to find he was still out there in the shed, she had plucked up the courage to investigate. She found him smoking a joint; it was the first time she had seen him smoke marijuana since their student days. She had been surprised but not alarmed. If anything she’d hoped that the joint might help him attain the mellowness of the old Charlie, back in the days when they had smoked weed together. Trying to rekindle that old togetherness, she’d asked him to share the spliff with her, and he had done so, but only after protesting that she might find it too strong. The first couple of puffs had made her head swim, so much so that she’d had to hang on to Charlie as they walked back across the lawn to the house.

  She’d had no idea whether Charlie was regularly smoking marijuana again, or if this was a one-off. Either way, it did nothing to mellow him.

  Eventually she managed to persuade him to see the family doctor, Jim Grant. Grant was a GP of the old school; his solution to depression or mental problems was to write a prescription for Valium or Prozac and hope that would sort it out.

  The cocktail of prescription drugs seemed to ease Charlie’s mood swings for a while, but it wasn’t long before he fell back into the same old pattern. That was how it remained throughout the rest of their marriage.

  Concerned that the drugs were making matters worse, Joyce had broached the topic with Charlie.

  ‘How dare you suggest such a thing?’ he’d stormed at her. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

  His anger had taken her by surprise. She’d thought he was going to hit her. Although he didn’t, she never dared mention his reliance on prescription drugs again.

  Instead Joyce immersed herself in her children and in the gift-wrapped life she had never wanted. Charlie was not unkind or cruel. Or not deliberately so. As long as Joyce did not question or challenge him, he behaved reasonably most of the time. And he invariably made an effort when it came to special occasions. He saw to it that Christmas was always memorable for the children, and never forgot Joyce’s birthday or their wedding anniversary.

  His love of boats and the sea remained, and he continued to sail throughout their married life, but, it seemed to Joyce, that was all that remained of the Charlie she had fallen in love with. At the time he disappeared from his latest boat – the pristine and plastic 28-foot sloop Molly May, named after their daughter – Charlie had been going through a particularly bad patch. Ironically Joyce had been glad when he’d told her he was planning a solo voyage. Time at sea calmed and restored Charlie in a way his wife could not. So she had encouraged him to go. And when she realized that he was not coming home, her genuine grief – because she did still love her troubled Charlie, in spite of everything – was intensified by her concerns over the way in which he had died.

  Charlie was a capable and experienced sailor. He had set off on the fateful two-day voyage over the first weekend of November 2013, during an interlude of unseasonably good weather, saying it would be his last sail before winterizing the Molly May. It was believed that Charlie had fallen into the water whilst changing the rigging, and been swept out into the Atlantic. But Joyce found it hard to accept that he would have been foolhardy enough to sail alone without wearing a safety harness. Unless he had lost the desire to keep himself safe.

  ‘Do you think it’s possible Charlie might have taken his own life?’ she had asked her father.

  Henry’s response had been predictable.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling,’ he had said. ‘Charlie had everything to live for. Why on earth would he do such a thing?’

  ‘You must have noticed that he suffered from depression.’

  ‘Joyce darling, I am sure Charlie would never have left you and the kids. Besides, people who commit suicide leave notes, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s a myth,’ she said. ‘I looked it up online. The majority of suicide cases leave no note.’

  ‘Oh, darling, don’t torture yourself,’ her father responded. ‘Your husband loved you and the children to bits. Yes, he used to get a bit down sometimes, but not enough to think life wasn’t worth living. And he would never have done anything to cause you and the kids such pain.’

  Henry Tanner was at his most reassuring. But Joyce was sure she saw a flicker of doubt in his eyes.

  She didn’t pursue it though. Charlie’s death had to have been an accident. She reminded herself how absent-minded and accident prone he had become in the months leading up to his death. There had been a succession of incidents, some of which seemed to be at least partly his own fault, and some not. He had sprained his wrist aboard the Molly May when he slipped on spilt oil – and Charlie would normally keep the deck spotless. He’d narrowly avoided being hit by falling roof slates while walking past a Bristol building site. And then the brakes nearly failed on his car due to leaking fluid.

  Joyce had to believe that Charlie’s death was down to carelessness or bad luck. The last thing she wanted was to further distress her children by suggesting he committed suicide. It had taken weeks before the younger two could bring themselves to accept that their father was dead. Fred and Molly had been oblivious to the stresses and strains that had dogged their parents’ marriage. Joyce suspected that Mark knew things were not as they should be, but he never mentioned it – which was typical of the men in her family.

  Charlie kept the Molly May at Instow in North Devon. Forty-eight hours after he steered her from the Torridge Estuary out into the Atlantic she was spotted drifting off Hartland Point, driven there by the prevailing southwesterly. Appledore lifeboat was called and a rescue helicopter from Chivenor. The Molly May’s tender was still attached by a line and the yacht’s inflatable life raft remained on board. There was no sign of Charlie. An intensive helicopter search resulted in the discovery of a life jacket, bright yellow in grey waters, which was identified by its markings as having belonged to Charlie and the Molly May.

  A police investigation found no reason to suspect foul play. It was explained to Joyce by a helpful representative of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency that it was not uncommon for victims of accidents at sea to slip out of their life jackets when they hit water, particularly if they’d failed to fasten the strap which should be secured between their legs – a surprisingly frequent lapse in safety procedure. The absence of a body was not uncommon, she was told. The body of a drowned man would sink, rise after three to five days, sink again, then rise once more after eighteen to thirty days. If, however, the body was hit by a passing vessel or became entangled in an underwater obstruction, or if parts of it were eaten by sea creatures, the remains might never be recovered.

  Joyce spared her children the gruesome details, but she felt she had to give them a diluted version of what had befallen their father.

  Charlie was dead. How he had died would probably never be known. But there would be no miraculous rescue. And in the end even Molly and Fred came to ac
knowledge that.

  There had been no funeral, because there was no body, but the family arranged a memorial service. They were still awaiting the inquest, which they were assured would declare him dead ‘in absentia’ and allow a death certificate to be issued. In the meantime Joyce had set about trying to rebuild their lives, taking things day by day. It struck her that, with or without Charlie, that was the way her life had always been, and it was how she expected it always to remain.

  Until that letter from the dead had dropped through her letterbox.

  The letter which would change everything.

  Three

  Joyce had no idea how long she had been sitting at the kitchen table staring unseeingly through the window at the far end of the room. Outside, it had finally stopped raining and the sun, peeping out from behind a large cloud, filled the kitchen with white light.

  Her coffee had gone cold, like the previous cups. She poured it down the sink.

  There were so many unanswered questions. Perhaps her earlier misgivings had been correct. Was the letter, which still lay on the table, some kind of bizarre suicide note? Or did it indicate that Charlie believed he might be in danger from others? Had the police investigation missed something? Was it possible that a third party had been involved, that Charlie had been murdered?

  Joyce gave herself a mental shaking. She couldn’t allow herself to be stampeded into some desperate course of action by a letter which might turn out to be the product of paranoia brought on by the cocktail of prescription meds Charlie had been taking.

  Even if the danger to her children turned out to be genuine, there was no way she could do as Charlie had instructed. If would have been hard enough if they were babies, but it was inconceivable that she could persuade fifteen-year-old Molly and eleven-year-old Fred to leave behind their friends, their schools, their treasured possessions and run away with their mother – without a word to anyone. Just as it was inconceivable that she could ever abandon her first-born, no matter that he was now a young man of twenty-two.