I turned to Dr. Massingbird and said, “Thank you.” It was the best I could come up with. He offered his hand and I shook it.
Then he held it out to Martha. Her eyes filled with tears, and she did something really strange, even for Martha: she raised his hand to her lips and kissed it. “Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. There was a little lump in my throat. It felt like the end of an era, like the last day of the summer holidays.
The nurse was standing by the door, holding it open for us. Martha was almost out of the room when she suddenly turned back to Dr. Massingbird and waved a finger at him. “You should research your family history,” she said. “Those Suffolk Massingbirds are more interesting than you know.” Then she followed the nurse out with halting steps.
I presume the majority of people leave hospitals alive, so I felt we were rather privileged to be seeing a side of one that few have the chance to see. Going to the chapel of rest felt like being taken backstage in a theater. We must have seemed a bedraggled trio as we trailed the nurse along the corridor. I imagined that we looked rather like the shell-shocked survivors of a train crash.
Eventually, we found ourselves in the lift going down to the ground floor, the same lift I’d been in earlier that afternoon. The doors parted and we came out into the lobby. “Not much further,” the nurse said. “It’s just down here through the double doors.”
As we turned away from the lobby, I saw Claude at the other end, sitting where I had been sitting, by the entrance. He got to his feet slowly and came across the lobby to where we were standing. Rachel was so knocked out by whatever the doctor had given her that she appeared scarcely to recognize him.
“He died, Claude,” I said. I didn’t know how else to handle it. He looked horrified. I hadn’t realized how embarrassing death could be. We stood there for a moment while Claude tried to think of something to say. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.
Once he did start to speak, though, he seemed unable to stop. “This is a tragedy, oh, it’s just unbelievable. I had no idea, I thought it was a broken—Damian will be so—”
Martha put a finger over her lips to indicate that she wanted him to stop talking. “Just look after Rachel,” she said, and propelled her into Claude’s arms. In order to put them round her, he had to place the black bag he was holding on the ground. On it, in white lettering, it said, “KCIF Modesto—A Smoother Sound.”
“Claude,” I said, “where did you get that?”
“What?” he said.
“The bag, the black bag.”
“Oh, that? Some woman I was talking to. She asked me to keep an eye on it while she went to get something to eat.”
At that moment, the double doors opened and a woman came through them. She was short, probably Rachel’s height, but huge. She seemed to be wearing a black tent over her trousers. As soon as she saw us she stopped dead and stared at us warily, like a wild animal we had strayed across in the woods. Her eyes were taking everything in, darting from me to Rachel to Claude to Martha and back again. We had been studying this in Biology but I had never seen it in action before: neural receptors passing information to the brain for it to be processed so that—according to my class book—a hypothesis can be made based on the available evidence.
Martha, Rachel, and I were the available evidence, and the processing was quick: “He’s passed on, hasn’t he?” the woman said. “He’s gone.”
Martha’s eyes were wide with astonishment. She must have been completely confused. I wasn’t—I had seen inside the black bag with the white lettering. For a second, I thought the woman was going to flee, but then her body sagged as if some pressure had been released. The blood rushed to her face and her mouth opened in a great silent cry and she rocked back and forth as tears rolled down her red cheeks.
I had seen people cry, of course I had, but not like this. Her grief seemed totally naked. When we had cried, Martha and Rachel and I, I knew we had really been crying for ourselves, everything overlaid with our own fear. This woman was crying like a child, grief so focused and concentrated it was shockingly pure. And just as you would have stopped and comforted a strange child you found weeping alone in the street, Martha, almost as a reflex, opened her arms and the woman stumbled into them.
When we were younger Rachel and I used to call them “The Rhymes.” It had been our secret name for Martha and Arthur, useful for talking about them in front of other people—or, indeed, in front of them—without anyone knowing. Now we were older it had fallen into disuse: too implicitly affectionate to generate the appropriate level of parental hostility required by angry adolescents. But I thought of it as we stood round Arthur’s body. It would be the last time I saw him and Martha together. Now that he was gone, there was no one for her to rhyme with: we could hardly make it singular and just call her “The Rhyme.”
I don’t suppose there are rules that say only the immediate family are allowed to see the body of the deceased, but you might wonder why we had brought Laurie and Claude with us to the chapel of rest. If Rachel had been capable of speech, she would have argued that Claude was the next best thing to family, and as for Laurie, well, it would have been cruel to exclude her after she had wept on Martha’s shoulder and spluttered out her story.
As she told it, it did pass through my mind that Arthur’s death would have been marginally easier if Laurie had not muddied the waters with the business of the so-called broken leg, but I suppose that if there was ever a time to be forgiving, this was it. In her own way she had done the best she could—and at least someone was dripping hot salt tears for Arthur Hayman onto the scuffed linoleum floor of the Royal Waterloo Hospital. Without Laurie, we would have seemed like a group of zombies. She was like our official mourner. In Anthropology, the special class Adam and I had chosen because Mrs. Farrell, the teacher, was reputed not to wear any knickers, we had learned that in ancient Tahitian culture the designated mourner would parade through the dead person’s settlement, carrying a weapon edged with shark’s teeth that he would use against anyone who got in his way—not an inappropriate metaphor for Laurie, as it turned out.
As we were led into the chapel, I was so nervous that I thought I was going to be sick, but as soon as I saw Arthur I felt curiously calm. He was lying on a kind of plinth, with a blanket covering all of him except his head. Under the cover, you could see the shape of his body and I wondered if those really were his legs that I could see outlined, or whether they were so crushed that they had put rolled-up blankets in their place so his body wouldn’t appear damaged. The curious thing was how normal he looked, except for one thing: he was unmistakably dead. It didn’t seem to me that he was in limbo. His time probably had come.
It’s difficult to know what to do in these circumstances. Rachel and Martha were by his feet clinging to each other. Claude stood at his head and Laurie and I were opposite one another on either side of him. Whatever Rachel had been given by the doctor was wearing off and her eyes were brimming with tears. Martha was shaking her head. Laurie had a curious lost look on her face. The room was very silent. It was as if we were playing that game in which the first person to make a noise loses a life.
Martha was the first to break. She made a strange kind of gurgling sound in her throat, which seemed to release some of the pressure that had built up in the room. Rachel began to cry in earnest, with squeaky noises like a rusty hinge. Claude seemed slightly desperate, as if he knew he was meant to do something but wasn’t sure what. I wished I could be in the room on my own: they were all cramping my style. Left to myself I would have reached out and touched Arthur, maybe to hold his hand or move the thin wisps of hair off his forehead, but I wasn’t going to do it with them there.
After a while Martha caught Claude’s eye and gestured with her head towards the door. Glad to have something to do, he went over and opened it. Martha propelled Rachel out, and I followed them into the waiting room reluctantly: I wasn’t convinced we had done the things we were meant to do in the chapel of
rest, but we were new to this, and there was nobody to give us instructions. The door shut behind us. We stood for a moment, unsure what to do next.
“What about … What is her name?” Martha said, pointing towards the chapel where Laurie still was. Her voice was croaky.
“Laurie,” said Claude.
“How do you think it’s spelled?”
“I don’t know. With ie at the end? I mean, not like the lorry you drive.”
“Well, she’s the size of one,” Martha said. “Isn’t that an odd name for a woman?”
Rachel suddenly gave a gulping sob and laid her head on Claude’s shoulder. Martha put her arms round both of them so they made a small circle. “The boy …” Rachel began, but she was crying so much she couldn’t get any more out. Now, in the face of Rachel’s inarticulate grief, the rest of us unraveled. Even Claude’s face crumpled, and he had to remove his little round spectacles so he could wipe his eyes. Rachel drew in several shuddering gasps of air, but every time she opened her mouth to speak she stumbled at the last fence. She had one last go: she moved her head from side to side as if summoning strength. “The boy in Little Women is called Laurie,” she whispered.
Tears were trickling down Claude’s face now. “Isn’t that one of the sisters?”
Rachel shook her head. She looked as if her heart would break. “No, there’s Amy and Meg and …”
Now I understood how Martha had felt when she had screamed, “Can’t we just get on?” earlier in the afternoon. Their sobs mingled and, with their arms still round each other, they began to sway in the middle of the room. I turned away from them—they looked so silly.
“I’ll get Laurie,” I said, but either they couldn’t hear or they weren’t listening. I eased open the door of the chapel. For a moment, I thought she had vanished, but then I saw she was kneeling by the side of Arthur’s plinth, her head resting on his chest, just under his chin, and her hand was stroking his cheek. She was so engrossed that she didn’t see me. Finally she looked up. She wasn’t crying now. “Such a fine man,” she said. “You could tell, you could just feel it. The goodness came off of him.” It was an epitaph from a greetings card, but it was better than nothing.
Once I had accepted that Arthur was dead nothing else could seem very surprising, so the fact that Laurie appeared to be coming home with us, was wedged into the back of Claude’s grandfather’s ancient Daimler between Rachel and me, felt oddly natural.
Maybe we all thought that one of the others had asked her to come. Maybe we were too exhausted to care. Apart from the hum of the engine as we drove down the motorway and the light sound of Martha snoring in the front, it was as silent as a tomb: nobody had spoken since we got into the car. I kept nodding off to sleep, then waking with a start. I could feel great waves of heat coming from Laurie’s body, and she gave off a sweet, fermented smell. It had been so hot all day and now it had turned cool. I felt we were flying to the moon.
Suddenly Laurie cleared her throat. “London’s a big place,” she said.
“We’re not in London,” I said, rather surprised. The fact was, we had left London behind about an hour ago and were on the way to Dorset. The flat we had in London was tiny and, besides, we had all wanted to go to Linton. Arthur would be buried there. We had discussed how we might get there in the hospital canteen while we had something to eat and a cup of tea, but I couldn’t remember whether Laurie had been with us then or not. Anyway, she might have missed it: there had been a lot of distractions—nurses and doctors coming and going, people bringing forms to be signed and asking about burial arrangements, and finally, as we were leaving, the spookiest thing of all, someone handing Martha a cardboard box containing Arthur’s “effects,” the stuff he had had in his pockets at the time of the accident. None of us could face opening it. Finally, Claude had offered to drive us to Linton—subject to Damian, who had been due to have the car that evening, agreeing—and had spent five minutes at the pay phone in the corner of the canteen clearly having a difficult negotiation.
“We’re heading to the country,” I said to Laurie. “Is that all right?”
“Sure.” She sounded quite calm about driving to an unknown destination with a bunch of strangers.
“That’s where we live most of the time.”
“Oh.”
“In Dorset. In the West Country.”
“The West Country,” she repeated. Then she said something quite unexpected: “Where Camelot is.” She spoke so softly I couldn’t tell whether she was telling or asking me.
“Well, not exactly,” I said. “I don’t think Camelot’s anywhere, really. Isn’t it, like … mythical?”
“No, it’s real. It’s a real place. They had a round table. Maybe people just can’t find it. It could be real close to your house and you don’t know it.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, and I told her the story of our house, how Arthur had grown up there and how our family had moved in after his father had died. When Arthur, Martha, and the baby, Rachel, had got there, it had taken a year to do it up. The top floors were uninhabitable, so they had lived in three rooms on the ground floor, which was scarcely more inviting—Martha said that one day they had found a rat in Rachel’s cot—but at least mushrooms weren’t growing out of the walls like upstairs. There was no heating, other than coal fires, and in the cold winter of 1963, Martha told us, Rachel’s milk froze in the bottle beside her cot.
Over the years, Martha had done quite a bit of research on the house and she believed it had been built on the site of a Roman settlement. Shards of pottery were occasionally found in the garden, but we never located the real prize: the Roman burial ground that Martha said was almost certainly located nearby. When we were children, we had imagined it would be like Pompeii and that, despite the absence of a local volcano, we would find the perfectly preserved bodies of people in the exact poses they had been caught as the lava overtook them.
The house, though not in itself that attractive, had a pretty setting, nestled at the bottom of a hill beside several hundred acres of woodland, which Arthur had inaccurately metamorphosed into the Darkwood of the Hayseed books. Rachel and I knew them like the backs of our hands, and they seemed to us a place full of light. In fact, we spent most of our time there. We much preferred them to the house, which seemed to us, as children, rather forbidding. I’m not going to give you architectural descriptions of everything. All you really need to know about it is this: it was big; it was old; it was rambling; it was dark. Our parents slept in one bit, and we—after we’d stopped being frightened in the night—slept in another. To get from our bit to theirs, you went down two flights of stairs, across a hall and up four flights of stairs. You could also get over to the other side via the roof, but we hadn’t done that for some time. Anyway, the point is that we did not live, as Martha had pointed out to Dr. Massingbird, in a bungalow.
I almost jumped when the car turned into the drive and the tires crackled on the gravel. Up till then, the journey had seemed like a long, low hum. As Claude drove up to the front of the house, the headlights passed briefly across it, then stopped in a still beam that flooded the garden with light. He turned off the engine and for a moment we sat in darkness and silence.
“We’re here,” he said softly, and opened his door. The car was filled with the smell of new-mown grass. Rachel groaned. She must have just woken up. We all began getting out. I was stiff, my legs and back ached, and I was almost unable to move. I felt like one of those Pompeiians caught in an awkward position by the lava. Laurie was last: she had to maneuver herself along the back seat until she got to the door and then used the frame to ease herself out.
Rachel seemed much calmer. “I can’t believe Daddy’s not here,” she whispered sadly. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, except that she had called him “Daddy,” which she almost never did.
“This is just lovely,” Laurie said brightly, a curious remark that hung in the air because it was pitch dark and you could see only the vaguest sil
houette of the house, which actually looked rather menacing.
“It’s lovelier when you can see it,” Rachel snapped.
I went round the house to the side door we always used and unlocked it. I stood in the hall as they trooped in. “Let’s have a drink. Will you get us one, baby?” Martha said. She headed into the sitting room, and Laurie followed nervously.
Rachel was still standing by the open door as if she didn’t want to come in. “I have no idea why that woman’s here,” she said. “I mean, why has she come with us?”
“Didn’t Martha ask her?” I whispered.
“I didn’t hear her.” Rachel didn’t lower her voice. “It’s your fault, Claude. You met her first.”
Claude was outraged. “She was sitting by me while I was waiting for you in the hospital. I was bored.” He looked accusingly at Rachel. “You’d been gone so long. I didn’t know what was happening. I began talking to her.”
“Drink!” Martha shouted, from the sitting room. “And an ashtray.”
I went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the cupboard. When I came back into the hall, Claude was trying to calm Rachel. “You can’t just tell her to go. It’s the middle of the night.”
“She’s American, she’s got credit cards—they’re incapable of going anywhere without them,” Rachel said. “Anyway, why didn’t she tell you about sitting with Daddy after the accident?”
“She didn’t know I was with you. She just asked if I would look after her bag while she went to get some chocolate. She said she was called Laurie and she was visiting somebody.”
“So she lied!”
“Well, I suppose she was visiting someone. In a way.”
“How can you visit someone you don’t even know?”
“You’re not being rational.”
Mr Toppit Page 9
