by Unknown
Thirty
I had been ready for half an hour when the car horn sounded outside the house. It was snowing, beautiful snow that wafted down in large flakes, settled like feathers on trees and houses and parked cars. In the half-light, London looked pure and serene, and I sat by the window smoking and thinking. Rusting vans, dustbins, empty milk bottles had become clean white shapes. All sounds were softened. Even the security screens on the house across the road were a sparkling grid. Tonight it would be muddy slush. Tonight, Martha would be lying beside her only daughter. I was glad she was dead.
I put on the coat I had bought before going to kiss Caspar in Highgate Cemetery. I pulled on a brown felt hat and brown leather gloves, and went out to meet Claud. He had insisted on driving all the way down to fetch me. In this weather. He said he wanted to make sure I came.
We were silent at first. I smoked and watched London turn to countryside. He fiddled with tapes and drove at a steady seventy up the MI. The windscreen wipers methodically pushed snow into compacted lines of grime.
‘Well?’ I said, finally.
‘Well, what?’
‘You know.’
Claud frowned.
‘Alan has been ensconced up in his study the whole time I’ve been at the Stead. And when he’s not there, the door is firmly locked.’
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘Don’t worry, Jane, together we can sort out something.’
I just grunted in assent, watched Birmingham with its sprawled blocks of flats pass by. Tried not to think about cigarettes. I hadn’t thought what I was going to say to Alan. I hadn’t even prepared myself for the sight of him. I fumbled in my bag and found a comb which I dragged through my hair before rearranging the felt hat. Claud glanced sideways at me.
‘Nervous?’
It occurred to me that Claud was the only member of the Martello family with whom I could now sit like this.
‘You’ve been good over all this,’ I said.
He stared ahead.
‘I hope so,’ he replied.
Under the thin spread of snow, Natalie’s grave still looked neat and new. There were spring flowers – snowdrops, aconites – pushed into the holes of a stone vase. I wondered if anyone would come to tend it now. Beside it was an ugly clay hole, agape. The last bitter snow fell into it like spittle.
A small crowd of mourners in dark clothes stood and watched as Martha’s four sons carried her coffin towards us. They looked sombrely handsome under their burden, generic grieving sons carrying the remains of their beloved mother. A man in front of me took off his hat, and I recognised him suddenly as Jim Weston, an improbability in a long dark coat. I’d last seen him at the side of another grave. Sort of grave. I took off my hat, too. Snow drizzled onto my hair. I placed myself right at the edge of the crowd of mourners to avoid any chance of encountering Alan. Later, he’d want to give me a long hard hug and mutter intimately into my ear about his loss. All that could wait. I felt a nudge beside me and turned. It was Helen Auster.
‘I just wanted to show my face,’ she said with a little smile.
I gave her a quick hug while the familiar words were being intoned once more.
I heard Alan before I saw him. As Martha’s coffin was lowered into the waiting pit, a howl ripped the air. All heads moved forward. Suddenly, through a gap, the scene became clear. Alan was leant over the coffin, roaring into it or at it. His greasy grey hair was whipped back in the wind; in spite of the chill, he was wearing no coat, and his black suit was grubby and unbuttoned. Tears cascaded down his blotchy face unchecked and he lifted up his cane and shook it in the air like an unrehearsed King Lear.
‘Martha!’ he yelled. ‘Martha!’
The four sons closed in on him; they stood tall and straight around their fat, wild father, who was addled with grief and drink. Alan put his hands over his face; tears streamed through them as he groaned and wept. The rest of us remained silent. This was a one-man show.
‘Forgive me,’ he yelled. ‘I’m sorry.’
Claud put his arm around Alan, who leant against him and mumbled and wept. A woman next to me whom I’d never seen before started crying quietly into her demure hanky. Erica, standing back from the scene with Paul and Dad beside her, blew her nose noisily and gave a single hiccuping wail. For my part, I felt clear-headed and as cold as the day. I had already said my last goodbye to Martha. Now I was about to defy her last request to me. Look after Alan.
Cold pebbles of soil splattered onto the coffin. Martha and Natalie lay side by side, and Alan wept noisily on.
Helen put her arm through mine and we peeled away from the group, stepping off the path and among the gravestones.
‘You don’t look well,’ she said.
‘I haven’t been well. I think I’m better now, though. How are you doing?’
She smiled.
‘I wanted to tell you. We’ve found a use for one of our lists. We’re going to make an announcement on Monday. We’re asking every male person who was present in the environs of the Stead on the twenty-seventh of July, the day after the party, the day when Natalie was last seen, to give a blood sample for DNA fingerprinting.’
‘To find the father?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And the murderer?’
‘It wouldn’t be proof in itself.’
‘Still, it sounds a positive step.’
‘We think so.’
We walked along for a few more moments in silence. The graveyard was empty now except for us. I forced myself to speak:
‘But how are you, Helen?’
‘Me?’
She was obviously thrown.
‘You know, of course?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
Helen stopped and sat on the edge of a plinth bearing a stone urn half covered with a stone cloth. She looked up at me, almost a supplicant.
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘Helen, I’m not looking for some sort of justification from you. My only concern is how you are.’
‘Me? I’m totally confused. My life has been turned upside-down.’ She took a tissue from her pocket, clumsily unfolding it in the cold, and blew her nose. ‘I’m behaving unprofessionally. I’m breaking my marriage up. I promise you I’ve never done anything like this before and I feel I’ll have to tell Barry – that’s my husband – about this soon. And it sounds awful, but I feel happy and excited as well. Of course, I needn’t tell you. You of all people know what Theo is like.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m suddenly thinking about things differently, seeing new possibilities. I feel a bit drunk with it all.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I keep planning different things. What will probably happen is that we’ll wait until this inquiry is over and then I’ll tell my husband and move out and then we’ll move in together.’
‘Is that what Theo has said?’
‘Yes.’ She glanced up at me again. ‘You don’t look as if you approve.’
‘It’s not a matter of approval.’ I sat down, very uncomfortably, on the edge of the plinth, next to Helen. ‘Look, I don’t want to give advice and you may be completely right in what you say will happen. I just think you ought to be wary of the Martello family. They’re fascinating and seductive and they draw people in and I think they can be deceptive.’
‘But you’re a member of the Martello family.’
‘Yes, I know, and all Cretans are liars.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. I don’t know what I’m saying. Don’t go up without a parachute, something like that.’
‘But you loved Theo, didn’t you?’
‘How do you know?’
She was silent.
‘Just be careful about smashing up your life and career,’ I said.
She turned to me with an expression that reminded me unbearably of a sad small child.
‘I thought you would just say congratulations or good luck.’
Then she broke down and cried as
I held her.
‘It’s so stupid and embarrassing I can hardly admit it,’ she said. ‘I had this fantasy of us being friends and being brought closer by this.’
‘But look, look,’ I said, holding her damp face, ‘it has brought us closer.’
‘No, I meant more than that. Almost like sisters.’
I hugged her.
‘I need a friend more than I need a sister,’ I whispered to the back of her head.
I need not have worried about how to meet Alan; he didn’t want to meet me, or anyone else. By the time I arrived back at the house, he had scuttled, like a giant crab with its old shell cracked, up to his study. ‘To write,’ he had said.
The kitchen and the living room were crowded with mourners; some I recognised and others I had never seen before. I thought I glimpsed the beaky nose and high cheekbones of Luke, but what would he be doing here? Jim Weston shuffled up, looking ill at ease in his tight wide-lapelled brown suit. It could almost have been his demob suit. He clutched my sleeve and murmured something, but I didn’t catch it. Conversations hummed around me, meaningless sounds. I saw mouths open and close. People were wiping their eyes. Laughing. Pushing sandwiches down their throats. Lifting delicate cups of tea between forefinger and thumb. Bodies jostled against me.
I was hot; my legs itched in their tights; my hands were sweaty; there was a nervous tic pulsing invisibly under my left eye. Pain flowered in my head. Theo was standing in front of me, frowning. Paul was holding me by the shoulder, saying something in my ear about Dad, and needing to leave soon. The vicar – a young man with an Adam’s apple jiggling nervously above his dog collar – shook my sweaty hand with his sweaty hand and spoke vaguely about peace at last. Luke – it was Luke – asked if I was all right and someone passed me a glass of water. Peggy was in grey and Erica was in navy blue. Dad sat in a chair near the patio door and occasionally a hat would bob down to his level and then come back to its own. He looked old and miserable and aggrieved.
I put my coat back on and walked briskly around the garden. I smoked the rest of my packet of cigarettes and returned to the house only when I saw people starting their cars and driving away.
We were a strange, temporary household, lacking our usual sense of common purpose. Paul and Erica drove back to London almost straight away. The next morning Jonah and his family left, and Theo drove Frances to the station. Fred and a worried-looking Lynn stayed on. And Claud, of course. What were we all doing there? The material remnants of Martha’s life didn’t need ordering. On the morning of the funeral we looked through her drawers and wardrobes. Every item of clothing had been cleaned, folded and stowed. Some were in cardboard boxes with destinations marked in her clear, assertive handwriting. Her workroom seemed empty but that was because it had been given a terminal organisation. I knew that she had completed her last book a couple of months before she’d died and she had used her last months systematically. Notes and many of her old papers had been thrown away. A couple of drawers opened at random showed that every file, every stapler was in its place. This was Martha’s last great gesture. There was not a corner of the house where we could catch her ghost unawares, in dishabille. Before she had departed, she had left everything signed, sealed and as she wanted it. The realisation of it was the only thing that made me smile that day.
The brothers had nothing to do there. They didn’t talk much – Fred was scarcely more sober than his father – but I believed that the three of them could not imagine the idea of leaving Alan alone in that house. As it turned out, they never would.
Lunch was a dismal affair. Bread, cheese, wine and some weirdly bright conversation, with even Alan joining in occasionally. This wasn’t the real world. We were teetering along a ledge between existences. The acknowledged old life organised by Martha had not been relinquished, and what the new life might be, nobody spoke of or imagined. Did they think we could all just go and leave Alan to run this house alone?
When we were finished, Claud almost physically prevailed on Alan to stay downstairs.
‘You and me and Jane are going for a quick walk,’ he said.
Alan looked at the two of us with a start, and I was scarcely less surprised.
‘Are we?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it’s a bracing day,’ Claud said cheerily.
I looked out of the window and saw lowering clouds.
‘Let’s all get our coats on,’ he continued.
He helped Alan on with his waterproof, his hat, scarf and boots, and put his old stick in his fist. We pulled on old coats that we found hanging there (with a shiver I realised that I was wearing one of Martha’s) and Alan was firmly led out between us. As we made our way across the lawn, Claud talked about the walk he had taken the day before, how he thought he had seen an owl’s nest in an ash by the drive and he thought we might take a look at it. Suddenly, he slapped his forehead.
‘Bloody hell, I forgot the binoculars. Nip back and get them will you, Janey?’
We were married again, it seemed.
‘Where are they?’
‘In the boot room. Which I locked, of course.’
‘What on earth for?’ asked Alan.
‘Hang on, I’ll give you my keys,’ Claud said, pushing into his various pockets. ‘No, sorry, I must have put them somewhere. Dad, could you give Janey your keys?’
Alan took a large bunch of keys from his pocket and gave them to Claud, who passed them over to me without any traceable expression except for a possible flicker of irritation at his own forgetfulness. They say doctors have to be actors as well.
‘See you in a minute,’ I said and turned and ran back up the lawn.
∗
Hall, first floor, up the steep stairs that led to the large attic. My legs were trembling so much I thought I might fall and I gripped the handrail tightly. I tried several keys until one fitted and I pushed the door open and stepped into Alan’s space. It was sacrosanct and indeed it oddly resembled a church nave, lodged as it was under the roof. There were skylights on each incline and they diffused a grey light through the space that gently illuminated it, even before I switched the light on. I had been in here only a few times in my life. This was where Alan wrote and pretended to write. If it had been empty it would have seemed large. As it was, it was cramped and almost impassable. The daily bills, receipts, letters from publishers and universities, junk mail, pamphlets, requests from students who were studying him, old newspapers, postcards from his sons, invitations, many letters that had not even been opened. I checked a postmark at random: 1993. I stared around at the piles of books higgledy-piggledy on the floor, the scrunched-up tissues in the corner, the line of coffee cups growing mould, the nearly empty whisky bottle on the window ledge.
Alan’s desk was the one clear space in the room. His ancient heavy German typewriter squatted like a tank at its centre. Next to it was a beaker full of pens and pencils and a blank memo pad. On the shelf above were dozens of copies of The Town Drain in a Babel of languages. It had always been a difficult title to translate. I pulled open some drawers. Notebooks with fragmented jottings, unused postcards, typewriter ribbons, drawing pins, a stapler, old batteries and a few entirely incomprehensible objects. I looked around the room. There was a grey metal filing cabinet against one wall, and right along another wall was a row of low cupboards. You don’t keep diaries in a filing cabinet. I opened cupboard doors. The first contained large cardboard boxes piled on top of each other. I could return to them later, if necessary. The next contained piles of old files arranged on shelves. The next had only a large box file on which was written: Arthur’s Bosom (provisional title). I peeped inside and found just a few pieces of paper, covered in Alan’s thick scrawl. Snatches of dialogue, unconnected sentences, descriptions trailing away. This was the great novel, Alan’s long-awaited comeback, the master-work he climbed the stairs so regularly to attend to. In spite of myself, I felt a spasm of pity for him. What a life.
The next cupboard was crammed with magazines and newspap
ers, probably old reviews and interviews. The next was what I was looking for. Piled along the shelves were dozens of hard-backed notebooks. I pulled one out at random. On its cover was written 1970. was close. I thumbed through the pages, all of which were densely filled in with the events of a day. I picked another volume and then another. They were all the same. At least he had kept up one form of writing. From far down in the house I could hear voices, the chink of china. Nobody was coming up here.
I quickly found the volume I was looking for. I opened it and a piece of paper fluttered out and landed at my feet. I hurriedly flicked through the volume but when I reached July I found something I hadn’t expected, the stubs of pages which had been ripped from the book. From the beginning of July until September there was nothing. Then the entries resumed as before. I felt stymied. Almost as a reflex, I bent down to pick up the slip of paper that had fallen from the book. It was a yellowing piece of lined paper, full size, folded in half. I opened it out. It looked as if it had been hastily torn from a notebook because it was ripped jaggedly across the top. I instantly recognised the blue-biro handwriting as Natalie’s. I still knew her handwriting as well as I knew my own. It read:
I don’t know what the point is of avoiding me. We’re in the same house! You know what you’ve done to me. You know what’s happening. Do you think you can do nothing? Do you think you can get away with this? Okay, don’t talk to me. So long as you know that I’m going to do what I have to even if it brings the whole family down. I’ll tell everything and I don’t care then if I have to kill myself. I still can’t believe it. I thought families were about protection.
Natalie
I felt entirely calm now. I refolded Natalie’s note, and slipped it back inside the diary volume. I turned and saw Alan standing in the doorway. He was still wearing his large coat and the rubber boots which had masked his footsteps on the stair carpet. He was breathing heavily from his climb.
‘I think you’d be more likely to find the binoculars downstairs.’
‘I wasn’t looking for the binoculars. Where’s Claud?’
