After the Funeral

by Gillian Poucher

  Julia shook her head, trying to dispel the disturbing dream. The events of the day rushed back into her mind as she tried to focus her attention on the cookery programme that had followed the soap opera. She shuddered when the chef set light to his banana flambé and reached for the remote to turn off the TV. It was only nine o’clock but a hot bath and an early night beckoned after her traumatic day.

  –  CHAPTER 2  –

  When Julia returned to work the following Wednesday, the board in the lobby indicated that only two of the other three tenants were in. She unlocked her mailbox. Most of the post that had accumulated during her three weeks’ absence was junk mail. Two envelopes carried the logo of professional organisations, and she recognised the landlord’s sprawling handwriting on a brown envelope.

  Her footsteps echoed in the tiled passage as she made her way to her office. It was difficult to imagine that the Victorian building, a former school, had once been filled with children’s voices. One of the fluorescent strip lights was unlit. Judging from the dust and muddy footprints along the floor, the cleaners hadn’t been in since Christmas. The dimly lit corridor did nothing to lift her spirits.

  Pete, the reflexologist, popped his shaved blonde head out of his door. ‘Hi, Julia, how are you?’

  ‘OK thanks.’ She smiled at Pete and suppressed a yawn. The two of them were the only remaining original tenants. They were on friendly terms, but Julia wouldn’t be confiding in him about her broken nights of sleep and the bouts of crying which seemed to come from nowhere.

  ‘Glad you’re back, it’s been as quiet as the grave. I’m so sorry!’ He clapped a hand to his mouth.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She forced another smile and changed the subject quickly. ‘Any new tenants yet?’

  ‘No. That’s one of the things I wanted to mention. You’ll have a letter there,’ Pete nodded towards Julia’s mail. ‘Not good news. The landlord’s decided he can’t afford to keep the place on with those four offices empty for the last six months. He’s planning to move in himself, convert to residential use. We’ll have to find new offices. Hey, you sure you’re OK?’

  ‘Yes,’ Julia gulped and wiped her right eye. ‘New contact lenses,’ she lied. She turned her head away.

  There was a pause before Pete spoke again, weighing his words carefully. ‘We’ve always got on well, you and me, haven’t we Jules? Maybe we could look for somewhere together, set up a kind of complementary therapy centre?’

  ‘Maybe. Sorry, Pete. Must go and sort out this lens. We’ll talk again.’ She hurried along to her room three doors along. Pete might be hurt by her non-committal response to his suggestion that they share premises, but her first priority was to compose herself before her new client arrived. Plus his casual abbreviation of her name always irritated her. She didn’t mind close friends and family calling her ‘Jules’, but she didn’t count Pete in that circle.

  The office was cold after her time away. She turned on the electric fire and opened the blind. The bottom slat had been hanging at an angle since the summer and she hadn’t attempted to repair it. Looking round the room after her break it struck Julia how dingy it looked. She hadn’t redecorated since moving in. The arms of the beech Ikea chairs were scuffed and their beige cushions sagged. The edges of the cork noticeboard were thick with dust and she was shocked to see how out-of-date some of the publicity was. When had she last refreshed it? The smoking cessation classes had long since moved venue, the leisure centre timetable was from two years ago, and the drug addiction advisory service had closed down due to lack of funds. The poinsettia which a grateful client had given her before Christmas had shed its shrivelled leaves on the window sill.

  Fingering the bereft leggy stem of the neglected poinsettia, recalling its vibrant red and green colouring, it occurred to Julia that the plant was a metaphor for how her life had been when she set up as a counsellor five years ago, compared to the present. After long years of training through evening classes and weekend courses, she had made the career change from teaching the year after she had bought the cottage, soon after Greg moved in. It had been a time of new beginnings. What a contrast to now! Tears pricked her eyes again. She took a tissue from the box placed strategically on the side table by the client’s chair and wiped her eyes.

  Pushing aside the question of whether she was fit to be counselling today, Julia went across to the filing cabinet to extract her form for new clients. The blind rattled as the wind whistled around the window, carrying the faint sound of the cathedral clock striking ten miles away across the city. On cue, the intercom buzzed. The new client spoke quietly.

  ‘Hello. It’s Grace, Grace Hutton. I have an appointment.’

  ‘Hello, Grace. I’ll buzz you through and meet you outside my office. Turn to the right through the lobby.’

  As her client came into view, Julia saw that she was older than she had expected from her rather high-pitched voice; somewhere in her early thirties. She was very slim with large blue eyes beneath finely arched brows. She glanced at Julia shyly as she advanced towards her, adjusting her heavy strawberry blonde plait over her right shoulder.

  Julia greeted Grace with the reassuring smile which Greg used to call her ‘counselling smile.’ In the early days of their relationship he had teased her about it. But in an argument shortly before they separated he had said, ‘Don’t try your patronising smile on me, Julia. I’m not one of your clients who needs fixing.’ The words had stung at the time, and as the recollection came to her now her smile faded. She hoped Grace didn’t notice. Even here, after only half an hour back at work, she felt haunted by memories just as she had been during her leave. Greg and her mother flashed through her waking mind frequently. Both inhabited her dreams. She had found herself dwelling too on the encounter at the funeral with Linda. There was something unsettling about the woman, and she wasn’t sure she had made the right decision in agreeing to attend her exhibition later that evening.

  Ushering Grace into her office, Julia closed her eyes briefly, telling herself to focus on setting aside her own difficulties and put her new client at ease. She invited Grace to sit down and began to take the standard personal details.

  The younger woman provided concise responses to the preliminary questions, rarely lifting her gaze from the clipboard on which Julia was writing. She remained perched on the edge of her seat, making no move to unbutton her grey and white checked tweed coat, although the heat from the radiator had permeated through the chill of the room. Having completed her form, Julia placed the clipboard on the table and invited Grace to say more about what had led her to contact her.

  ‘Well…’ Grace coiled the end of her plait around her long fingers.

  ‘You mentioned on the phone that you lost your father recently?’ Julia prompted gently.

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’ Grace took a breath. She crossed her legs, their length accentuated by her skinny jeans, and tapped her left foot on the floor. She fixed her eyes on the worn grey carpet beneath Julia’s chair.

  Julia waited, knowing it was important for Grace to tell her story at her own pace.

  The younger woman didn’t look up. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know if I can do this,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m not sure why I’m here, except that the doctor thought it might be a good idea.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have thought of coming yourself?’

  ‘No. Counselling isn’t something my family believe in.’

  ‘So you feel you’re letting your family down by being here? Perhaps your father in particular?’ Julia hazarded.

  Grace looked at her directly for the first time since entering the room. ‘I suppose so. Yes, that’s exactly what it feels like. I can’t help thinking that Dad would have disapproved. The rest of the family, well…’ she shrugged, suggesting to Julia that their opinion didn’t matter.

  ‘His good opinion meant a lot to you, then?’ Julia glanced at the form she had completed, and calculated that Grace was thirty-three. Age, she knew, didn’t n
ecessarily lessen parental influence.

  ‘Yes.’ Grace bowed her head. She uncrossed her legs and traced a circle with the pointed toe of her right boot on the carpet. ‘You see, it was just me and him for a while, when I was a little girl. And after what had happened, with my mother –’ She broke off, before rushing on, ‘It was seven years later that he met Frances, my step-mother. They married quickly, and then Suzanne was born.’ She paused again.

  ‘A lot of change for a little girl.’

  ‘You could say that.’ The right corner of Grace’s full mouth curled.

  ‘It must have been difficult for you to suddenly find yourself with a new mother and baby sister after so long alone with your father.’

  ‘It was very difficult.’ Grace spoke so softly that Julia barely heard her. There was another interval. Again Julia waited.

  ‘Frances never liked me,’ the younger woman burst out suddenly. ‘Sometimes I think she hated me, she still does. She tried to turn my father against me. It was even worse after Suzanne was born. Frances made sure that they took all his attention, and she wouldn’t even let me play with the baby, with Suzanne. It was like –’ Grace broke off, searching for the right phrase. ‘Like I might contaminate her.’

  ‘Contaminate her?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace stifled a sob and reached for a tissue from the box on the side table. ‘As I grew older, I began to wonder if Frances was worried I might turn out like my mother.’

  ‘You mentioned your mother before without telling me what happened to her,’ Julia prompted.

  ‘She nearly killed me,’ Grace said bluntly. ‘When I was a baby, just a few months old. She set fire to our house one night when Dad was out. He came back just in time. My mother was certified and taken into psychiatric care. My father divorced her. We left Norfolk and came here to Lincolnshire. He changed our names. I never saw my mother again.’ Her eyes were haunted as she concluded in a whisper, ‘I don’t know whether she’s dead or alive.’

  Julia exhaled slowly. She realised she had been holding her breath since Grace mentioned the fire. She had almost forgotten the nightmare from the evening of her mother’s funeral. Now it flooded her mind. She saw again the woman at the first floor window, the flames leaping into the night sky, she heard the baby screaming in the background. No more than a strange coincidence she told herself, shuddering all the same. She struggled to find an adequate response. When she murmured, ‘How terrible for you, Grace,’ the words sounded hollow.

  She tried to recover the thread of her client’s earlier narrative. ‘So when you say you wondered if Frances was worried you might turn out like your mother, you mean your step-mother was anxious in case you manifested symptoms of mental illness, might even harm the baby?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace sat back in her chair, unbuttoning her coat, relaxing now she had told Julia the tragedy of her early life. ‘I don’t think Frances understood that my mother’s condition might have been triggered by my birth. From the little Dad told me, I think she might have been suffering from postpartum psychosis. But Frances is a born-again Christian, and she’s always been reluctant to accept psychiatric explanations. Dad converted as well when he met Frances. I mean, he’d been a Catholic before, but he became quite fundamentalist when he met Frances.’ She smiled briefly, a wry smile which didn’t reach her cornflower eyes. ‘Frances is much more likely to attribute psychiatric illnesses to demons,’ she went on. ‘And although Dad didn’t agree with her on that, he did believe that any problems can be sorted out by prayer, that it’s a kind of weakness to look for help away from God.’

  ‘I see.’ Julia recalled Grace’s earlier words, ‘Counselling isn’t something my family believe in,’ and her sense that her step-mother feared that she might ‘contaminate’ her half-sister. ‘So am I right in thinking that your hesitation about counselling has come from growing up in this atmosphere? I’m wondering whether, as an impressionable young girl when your father remarried, you might have absorbed some of these beliefs? Maybe it seems a weakness to you to be here?’

  There was a long pause as Grace considered Julia’s suggestion. ‘I think so, yes.’ She balled up the tissue in her hand. ‘I know how strange it sounds,’ she went on, ‘but when you’ve grown up like that, thinking you’re somehow…’ she groped for the word, ‘tainted, because of your mother’s illness, because of something she couldn’t help, you begin to believe it might be true. And with Dad becoming so absorbed with Frances and Suzanne, I suppose I felt…’

  ‘You did feel “tainted”?’ Julia asked as Grace wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  Grace swallowed and nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose so. And I always hoped that when I grew up, Dad and I would be close again, like when I was little. But it didn’t happen. He didn’t seem interested in me, didn’t even bother to come to my Masters graduation last year. I thought he might be interested in what I was studying, the psychohistory of the Reformation. That’s what I’m researching now, in more depth, for my PhD. It related to his faith journey in some ways, from Catholic to Protestant. But no, it was all Suzanne this, Suzanne that.’ She took a deep breath, looking up at Julia with a half-smile. ‘I’m sorry. I sound like a jealous child, don’t I?’

  Julia allowed a beat to pass. Then she suggested softly, ‘Or perhaps a girl who misses her father very much, and has missed him for a long time?’

  Grace gazed at Julia in silence, her lips slightly parted. She seemed to be drinking in Julia’s words, like parched land soaking up the first raindrops after a drought. She bent her head as a ray of weak January sunlight filtered through the blind, setting her strawberry blonde hair alight. Julia shivered, the image of the burning house with the woman framed at the window reignited in her mind.

  After a few moments Grace looked up. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears, but there was a new calmness about her. Julia glanced up at the clock on the wall behind her head. It was nearly time to end the session, but her client’s reference to her research had attracted her attention. James was a history lecturer at the university and she should make an effort to avoid any potential conflict of interest in accordance with professional guidelines.

  ‘You mentioned earlier that you were still studying after finishing your Masters last year. Are you working towards your PhD now?’

  ‘Yes.’ Grace’s lip curled into her ironic half-smile again. ‘You might think my background has contributed to the topic for my thesis. I’m still pursuing a psychohistorical study during the Reformation, but this time I’m concentrating on the relationship between Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I. Half-sisters, as you probably know.’

  ‘I can see how you might find that interesting.’ Julia smiled back. ‘I’m guessing it might be tricky to supervise, since it crosses disciplines?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Grace laughed, her face shining with enthusiasm. ‘The university couldn’t decide whether to appoint a psychology or history lecturer as lead supervisor to begin with, but eventually they settled on Professor Evershed from the Psychology Department. He’s done a little psychohistorical work around the First World War. I’ll have a few tutorials with the Tudor History lecturer as well, but Professor Evershed will supervise. And of course at PhD level, most of the research is self-directed.’

  ‘I see.’ James was a mediaeval specialist. He often described himself as knowing nothing after the battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 when Henry Tudor had killed Richard III.

  Buoyed by the inner glow which came when she sensed an instant connection with a new client, Julia decided not to pursue the question of a potential conflict of interest further. ‘We’re nearly out of time today, Grace,’ she said gently. ‘How would you feel about coming back again at the same time next week?’

  Her client didn’t hesitate before replying. ‘Yes, please,’ she said. ‘I’d like that very much.’

  –  CHAPTER 3  –

  The cathedral clock was striking seven when Julia arrived at Linda’s exhibition that evening. The whitewashed gallery was loc
ated in the renovated crypt of a disused church on the hill which linked the cathedral quarter with the city’s main shopping area. She had passed it many times without venturing inside. Now she picked her way carefully down the uneven stone steps from the pavement, shaking the rain from her black umbrella before pushing open the heavy oak door.

  Glancing around as she unbuttoned her coat, Julia estimated that there were around thirty people in the gallery. She spotted Linda chatting with a middle-aged couple to her right. The artist was wearing a purple and green striped dress, a lilac wrap around her shoulders. Her back was turned to Julia who sighed with relief, registering how little she had been looking forward to seeing the new family member again.

  Taking a glass of white wine from a tray by the door, Julia slipped through an archway opposite the entrance. She decided to spend a few minutes in the quiet inner area before saying a few words to Linda and making her escape. She would then have fulfilled her rash commitment to her newly-discovered relative. Commitment. Duty. Obligation. Principles she lived her life by, as Greg had pointed out during one of the arguments which she later identified as marking the beginning of the end of their relationship.

  Julia glanced unseeingly at the pictures in the inner gallery, trying to dispel the image which rose before her. Greg had been chopping vegetables for ratatouille, spitting the words at her: ‘Commitment. Duty. Obligation. Those are your rules. Your code, not mine. I’m not going to James and Clare’s for dinner, whatever you agreed, because I can’t stand another bloody night listening to her going on and on about IVF and you doing your counsellor thing with her. I’m staying here and watching the football. End of.’