After the Funeral

by Gillian Poucher

  Julia’s heart was still hammering as she greeted her mother’s neighbour before stooping to pick up the key.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Edith stood in the porch doorway, craning to see over the six-foot-high panelled fence which separated the two properties.

  ‘Yes. I just dropped the key. How are you, Edith?’

  ‘Not bad, apart from my arthritis. Always worse in the cold.’ The old woman shivered dramatically. ‘Come over to check things, have you? You need to be careful with empty houses in this weather, always a risk of frozen pipes, isn’t there? I expect you’ll be wanting to make a start on clearing your mother’s things soon, won’t you?’

  Julia answered the last question. ‘Yes. That’s why I’m here this afternoon.’

  ‘Oh. Is your brother coming too?’

  ‘No. He couldn’t make it. Anyway, it’s nice to see you, but I mustn’t keep you out in this cold, Edith.’

  ‘Just wanted to see how you were, duck. I know it can’t be easy, with your boyfriend gone and now your mum. If ever you want a chat…’

  ‘Thank you, Edith.’ Julia turned away, inserting the key back in the lock.

  ‘By the way, I meant to ask… I know it’s none of my business, but…’

  Julia sighed as she pushed the heavy wooden door. The timber had swollen in the winter weather and she had to press against it with her shoulder.

  ‘It was just that woman who was round the other day, the one who started visiting your mum in summer, you did know she was here, didn’t you? I thought it must be all right seeing as she had a key. Still, I thought I should mention it when I saw you.’

  Julia stiffened. ‘Which woman, Edith?’

  ‘She came to talk to you at the funeral. A distant relation, isn’t she? I always find myself looking at her nails, really bright she has them, different colours.’ Edith wrinkled her nose.

  Linda. Julia had known as soon as Edith asked. She looked properly at the old woman for the first time in their exchange. ‘You said she was round the other day?’

  ‘Yes. She wasn’t long inside. Didn’t you know she was coming?’ Edith’s beady brown eyes scanned Julia’s face.

  She sidestepped the question with one of her own. ‘I don’t suppose you noticed if she brought anything out of the house, did you?’

  ‘No, not unless she put it in that bag she had with her. Ever so garish it was. She wouldn’t take anything she shouldn’t, would she? Shouldn’t she have been here?’

  Again Julia didn’t answer the barrage of questions. ‘And you saw her when she visited Mum in the summer?’

  ‘Yes. She first turned up one Tuesday afternoon in August. I remember because the bin men had been. I was wheeling my bin back in when I saw her standing at your mum’s gate. Just looking at the cottage, she was, not going up the path, so I asked if she needed help. I thought maybe she’d got the wrong house, seeing as I’d never seen her before. She asked if your mum lived there, so I told her she did. Then she went and knocked on the door and I came back in. She was often here after that, but we never had a proper chat. Your mum didn’t say much about her either, just that she was a relation. She didn’t seem to want to talk about her, and I didn’t press her. It was around then that she got diagnosed with her heart condition, wasn’t it? So I didn’t want to upset her by talking about the woman if she didn’t want to. But I was surprised when she turned up on her own on Wednesday. I did think of phoning you, but didn’t want to interfere. I hope I did right. Like I say, I thought if she had a key it must be all right for her to be here.’

  The old woman looked expectantly at Julia, who pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, thinking. ‘I see,’ she said slowly. ‘You got the impression Mum didn’t want to talk about Linda?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. It was just a feeling I had. She seemed to clam up when I asked about her the first time and after that, well, as I say, with her getting the bad news from the doctors, I thought it was best left.’

  ‘Yes, it was probably for the best.’ Julia looked up at the leaden sky. Her concern about Linda had mounted during the exchange. She’d thought it strange since first meeting the woman at the funeral that her mother had never mentioned her. Now here was Edith saying she had a key, which Emily must have given her. But surely Linda realised that she had no business at the cottage now Emily had died? And why would Emily have given her a key without mentioning it to her or James?

  ‘I did do right, didn’t I?’ Edith’s lined face creased further with anxiety.

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ Julia reassured her. ‘I’ll try and get in contact with her when I get home.’ She paused, realising she had no contact details for Linda. ‘If you see her here again, would you mind phoning me?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Edith. ‘I did think of it on Wednesday, as I said, but I didn’t want to interfere.’

  ‘No, I understand. Thanks, Edith. I’d better get on, and you really should get in, out of this cold.’

  ‘Yes, I’m surprised it’s not snowed yet.’ The old woman glanced up at the snow laden sky. ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she mused.

  ‘That it’s not snowed?’ asked Julia, one foot now over her mother’s threshold.

  ‘No, not that,’ said Edith. ‘Probably just coincidence, but when your mum started with her funny turns in summer, it struck me that it was around the time that this woman turned up. I always had the sense she upset your mum somehow.’ She shrugged, stepping back into her porch. ‘Just a feeling, probably nothing. Anyway, if I see her again, I’ll phone.’

  ‘Thanks, Edith. You take care now, won’t you?’

  Julia stepped inside the empty cottage, her mind churning with further questions about Linda. Had her appearance somehow precipitated Emily’s ill-health, even her death, as Edith implied? Why had she come back to the cottage after Emily’s death? If she had left something behind on a visit, surely she could have asked Julia about it at the gallery and handed back the key? Linda had never struck Julia as dishonest, but the fact was she scarcely knew the woman. She and James had removed a small amount of cash, their mother’s cheque book and financial statements from the cottage when Emily was taken into hospital on New Year’s Eve. There were no other valuables.

  But it wasn’t just the possibility that Linda might be a thief that was the problem, thought Julia switching on the electric fire in the cold sitting room. There was the fact that the older woman knew so much about her. Let alone that hint about a family secret on Wednesday evening…

  Crouching over the two orange bars of the fire, Julia shivered. What was it that Linda knew? And just why had her mother kept her visits a secret?

  –  CHAPTER 7  –

  No matter how much she told herself that the old woman was being melodramatic, Julia was troubled by Edith’s suspicion that Linda’s appearance had hastened Emily’s death. Climbing the narrow staircase to her mother’s bedroom, she regretted putting off meeting Linda earlier. Maybe she had planned to share whatever it was she knew about the family.

  Julia opened the teak wardrobe in her mother’s bedroom. One glance inside convinced her to wait for James’s help to empty it. Tears pricked the back of her eyes as she contemplated the pastel coloured blouses, skirts, dresses and cardigans. The faint fragrance of jasmine lingered. She ran back downstairs to begin the less emotional task of clearing the desk in the sitting room.

  The Edwardian walnut desk had belonged to Emily’s father, and matched the bookcase in Julia’s hall. It had been battered and scratched for as long as Julia could remember. She had never known her maternal grandfather who had died before her parent’s marriage. Emily had rarely spoken of him, although she had faithfully taken flowers to his grave on the anniversary of his death each year. He was buried in the churchyard of a nearby village. Even as a child Julia had been sensitive to the shadow which passed over her mother’s face when she asked, ‘Why do I only have one grandpa, Mummy? Susan and Jennifer have two.’

  ‘Your other grandpa died a long ti
me ago.’

  ‘Oh.’ Aged six, the closest Julia had come to death was when the cat was run over by an elderly neighbour. Watching her mother chop the onion for the cottage pie, she digested this new idea that people also died. ‘So is he in a box in the garden too, Mummy?’

  ‘No.’ Her mother paused. Emily had a gift for using a child’s frame of reference. ‘He’s in a box in a church garden not very far away.’

  ‘Oh.’ Julia chewed her thumb nail, thinking. ‘I wish he was still here, Mummy.’

  Emily sighed. ‘So do I, sweetheart, so do I.’ She brushed the back of her hand across her eyes. ‘These onions!’ she said.

  ‘Naughty onions, making Mummy cry!’ said Julia. But her mother didn’t smile as she usually would. Instead she turned her head away as she passed Julia on her way out of the kitchen. When she came back a few minutes later, her eyes were red-rimmed. She was holding a sepia photograph with curled edges. ‘This was your other grandpa.’

  Julia studied the photograph of the head and shoulders of a young man in army uniform. His hair was combed back from his forehead and parted in the middle. Julia could see he shared her mother’s fine features. His head was turned slightly to the left, and he seemed to be looking beyond the camera. ‘He looks all dreamy like you do sometimes, Mummy.’

  Emily smiled. ‘Do you think so, sweetheart?’

  ‘Yes. Was he always a soldier?’

  ‘No, just during a terrible war a long time ago. He was a vicar when he came back.’

  ‘A vicar?’ Julia thought of Reverend Lacey, the plump middle-aged vicar in the village. The young man who had been her grandfather looked very different. ‘Did he have a loud voice like Reverend Lacey?’

  Emily laughed. Julia beamed her gap-toothed smile, delighted to have cheered her mother up.

  ‘Reverend Lacey does boom a bit, doesn’t he? No, my father spoke softly most of the time. He was a quiet man, very kind.’ She raised her hand to her eyes again, before sending Julia out to the shed to fetch some potatoes. When the little girl returned, Emily didn’t say anything more about her grandfather. But the following November she took Julia to his grave for the first time.

  Running her hand over the desk’s scarred surface over forty years later, Julia shivered. It wasn’t only the empty house that was making her feel cold this January afternoon. Since Greg’s visit, she had been pushing aside the thought of the child she would never have. It had been niggling at the back of her mind since her mother’s death. Now the regret roared into her consciousness, like a nagging toothache suddenly overtaking her with the full force of pain. Even as she chided herself for self-pity, she regretted that there would be no one to remember her as she remembered her mother, or as her mother had remembered her grandfather. There would be no one to inherit this shabby old desk. Unless James and Clare had a child after all, if they were lucky with another IVF cycle.

  Julia swallowed hard as she pulled open the top middle drawer of the desk. It contained a stack of household bills bound by a bulldog clip. She drew them out, extracting the most recent. She hoped James had remembered to notify the utility companies of their mother’s death as he had promised. Placing the rest of the bills in a bag for recycling, she took her mother’s turquoise leather address book from the drawer. The younger Emily’s beautifully rounded handwriting brought a lump to her throat. It had become so shaky in recent years.

  Some of the names in the address book meant nothing to her. Others conjured up images of people she vaguely remembered from childhood: Arthur and Moira Anderson, Sybil and Nicholas Browning, Peter and Olive Duffy, Hazel and Timothy Fielding, Rodney and Vera Galbraith… She recalled that Reverend Lacey’s daughter Eileen had been a regular babysitter when her parents went out to evening functions with their friends. Emily had often been late, frequently changing her mind about her dress, shoes or jewellery. Julia remembered her father saying on numerous occasions, ‘You know I always think you look lovely, Em,’ as he steered her firmly towards the door. He had never been impatient with Emily’s dithering, for all his habitual concern for punctuality. To Julia that had been a sign of his love for her mother.

  She flicked through the alphabetical lists, thinking how some of her parents’ friends must have withdrawn after her father’s death. The discovery that couples with whom she and Greg had socialised were less forthcoming with invitations after their separation had been painful, and she wouldn’t allow herself to speculate whether some of their so-called friends had welcomed Lisa as Greg’s new partner as readily as they had welcomed her when Greg had left his wife.

  As a widow with a young daughter forty-one years ago, Julia suspected her mother would have been even more isolated. Not that she would have minded necessarily, she thought, her eyes running over entries under ‘M’ and ‘N.’ Emily had always been self-contained, which was another reason why the apparent frequency of Linda’s visits surprised Julia. Leonard had been the more sociable. With a distinguished naval career behind him, he had resumed work as a solicitor in the small legal practice on the northern edge of Lincoln after the war. His father had been a partner there before him. Leonard had been active in the village too, serving as churchwarden and on the Parish Council. Julia remembered how crowded the church had been for his funeral. She had clung tightly to her mother’s hand as they sat together on the front pew, staring straight ahead as Reverend Lacey rumbled on. She refused to look at the wooden box which four ex-naval officers had carried in from the horse-drawn hearse. A cross of lilies lay on top. She would hate their overpowering scent for ever after.

  One of the bearers was the same William Prescott whose name Julia came across now in her mother’s address book. The details were crossed through, so either he and Emily had long since lost touch or he had predeceased her. Tapping her thumb against the name, she carried the address book over to the small window. Outside the first snowflakes were beginning to fall. The last time she had seen William Prescott was on another snowy Saturday many years ago, the winter after her father died. Her mother had persuaded her to join the other children building a snowman on the village green.

  ‘But Mummy, I need to do my homework,’ Julia protested.

  ‘There’s plenty of time for that later,’ Emily replied. ‘Besides, I haven’t seen your school books since you came home yesterday. Leave the drying up, I can do that while you’re out.’

  ‘You know I like helping you.’

  ‘I know, sweetheart, and you’re a big help. But it’s important that you get some fresh air and spend some time with the other children.’

  ‘But I want to be with you, Mummy.’ Julia’s voice wobbled.

  Emily paused in scrubbing the casserole dish. She turned from the greasy enamel sink to look at her eight-year-old daughter. ‘I know, sweetheart,’ she said again. ‘And I’ll be right here when you get back, won’t I, just like I’m here when you come home from school?’

  Julia gazed back at her mistily without answering. Her heart beat faster with the knowledge that her mother did understand, after all.

  ‘I’ll be here when you get back, won’t I?’ Emily repeated, laying her left hand, reddened from the hot water, on Julia’s shoulder. Julia leaned her head against it, not minding the damp prickle of her red woollen jumper against her skin. Very softly, her mother said, ‘Your father wasn’t strong because of the war. We always knew that he might not have long.’ She let go of Julia’s shoulder, plunging her hand back into the water. ‘Now you wrap up well, and go and enjoy yourself with your friends.’

  An hour later, Julia slid home rosy-cheeked and breathless, dodging snowballs from Eddie Gibson and Frank Norris as she rounded the corner of the drive. She barely noticed an unfamiliar blue Ford Anglia parked outside and flung open the front door. ‘Mummy…’ she began, then stopped. Her mother was standing at the foot of the staircase which led from the hall. Her face was drained of colour. She was holding on to the lowest banister so tightly that her knuckles were white.

  Emily’s blue ey
es flickered towards Julia, then back to her left. For the first time Julia remembered, her mother’s face didn’t light up at the sight of her. It was as if she hadn’t seen her. The little girl followed the direction of her mother’s gaze. A slight ginger-haired man wearing a brown wool tweed overcoat was leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest. Julia recognised him as William Prescott, her father’s friend. She hadn’t seen him since the funeral.

  Then her mother spoke in a tone Julia had never heard before, a low moan which made Julia shudder. ‘You had no right,’ she said. And then, more loudly, ‘You had no right!’ Emily drew herself up, raising her heart-shaped chin. She advanced towards William Prescott, shouting the words now. ‘You had no right!’

  For one breathless moment Julia was certain her mother was going to strike the man. He must have had the same thought as he took a sideways step into the umbrella stand. It clattered to the floor, banging against his leg. But he ignored it. He didn’t take his eyes from Emily’s face as he said, a strange smile playing about his small mouth, ‘He was my friend. I judged it right to tell him. It was my duty.’

  ‘Duty!’ Emily spat the word. ‘And your sense of duty ki–’ She raised her right hand as Julia suddenly found her voice. ‘Mummy!’ she screamed.

  Emily’s hand fell to her side. She looked round to where Julia stood by the half-open front door, snow puddling on the tiles from her grey duffle coat. ‘Julia…’ Her voice trailed away and she took a breath. ‘Mr Prescott was just leaving.’

  Emily turned and began to move slowly towards the kitchen, her shoulders slumped beneath her blue-and-grey-checked handknitted cardigan. From the rear she looked like a much older woman. ‘Take off your wet things, sweetheart. I don’t want you catching cold,’ she added, without turning.

  ‘Yes, Mummy.’

  Julia glanced uncertainly at William Prescott. He managed a half-smile as he edged past her through the doorway, placing a hand briefly on her shoulder. She stiffened and the smile vanished.