After the Funeral

by Gillian Poucher

  ‘Sorry I can’t stay, Julia,’ he said coldly. ‘I’ll call again some time.’

  But he never did. That was the last time Julia saw him. In fact she hadn’t spared him a thought until finding his details in her mother’s address book on another snowy afternoon over forty years later.

  She traced a diamond in the window with her forefinger. Outside the snow was falling thicker and faster. It was beginning to settle. What little daylight there had been was already fading. It was only three o’clock, but she would need to go soon to avoid difficulties on the cliff road. She should at least empty the desk before setting out.

  She crossed back to the desk, chewing on her thumbnail. What was it William Prescott had done which had made Emily so furious? And what would her mother have said if Julia hadn’t interrupted? Reaching under the desk to switch on the antique brass lamp, she jumped as the bulb popped, and banged her head against the wood. ‘Damn!’

  She went through to the kitchen. The fuse box was in the cupboard below the kettle. She groped cautiously behind an assortment of packets, tins and jars, hoping she could reach the trip switch without emptying the cupboard. Or, much worse, encountering anything furry. A mouse had taken up residence in the cottage two years ago. She shuddered at the thought.

  Then she gave another start, banging her hand against a can. The phone, which hadn’t yet been disconnected, was ringing through the silent house.

  She went back into the sitting room and picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ There was no response. ‘Hello?’ Silence. A click. The caller had rung off. She tutted to herself. Probably a wrong number, but she wished the person had at least spoken.

  Julia shivered. The fire had done little to warm the room and now that it had failed with the circuit tripping, the temperature was dropping rapidly. She was on her way back into the kitchen when a knock at the front door made her jump again. ‘For goodness’ sake!’

  Edith was standing on the doorstep, shrunken against the snow inside a grey coat.

  ‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘about that woman. Your mum kept a diary, didn’t she?’

  ‘Did she?’ Julia had forgotten or not known this. The now familiar self-reproach, that perhaps she hadn’t paid as much attention to her mother as she might have, assailed her again.

  ‘Yes. She used to tell me she wrote in it every day, nothing in particular, she said. I wondered if maybe there’ll be something about her, this Linda woman, in there.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s a good idea, Edith. I don’t suppose you know where Mother kept her diary, do you?’

  ‘In her desk. That’s where she kept everything important, isn’t it?’ Edith raised a pencilled eyebrow, surprised that Julia didn’t know this, adding to the younger woman’s sense of guilt. ‘You’re on your way, are you? Turned the lights off?’

  Julia sighed. ‘They’ve fused. The desk lamp’s blown. I was just trying to fix it. But I’ll leave after I’ve done that, I don’t want to get caught on the cliff road in the snow.’

  ‘No, you should be going, duck,’ said the old woman solicitously. ‘And next time, if you want a cup of tea…’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll do that.’ Edith had been kind to her mother in her last months, fetching essential groceries between Julia’s and James’s visits. ‘Now you take care on the path, it’s getting slippery.’

  ‘Will do. Bye, duck.’ Edith turned and shuffled slowly back to her house.

  Julia waited until she saw her white head disappear into the porch before going back to the narrow kitchen, shadowy now in the gathering dusk. Reaching inside the cupboard, she felt along the switches until she found the one which had tripped. As she flicked it up, causing light from the sitting room to spill into the kitchen, her mother’s long ago words to William Prescott came back to her. With a sudden burst of clarity, she knew how Emily would have completed her sentence if she hadn’t interrupted her, ‘And your sense of duty killed him.’

  –  CHAPTER 8  –

  ‘And your sense of duty killed him.’ The words echoed in Julia’s mind as she returned to the sitting room. She had never seen her mother so shocked or angry as she was that afternoon. The scene had long been buried in her subconscious, reawakened on this snowy January afternoon four decades later by a forgotten name in her mother’s address book. William Prescott. Was he still alive? Was there a connection between what Linda knew and her mother’s accusation towards the man?

  The questions tumbled around her mind as she pulled open the drawers in her grandfather’s desk, searching for her mother’s diary. Maybe the diary would shed some light on Linda’s sudden appearance as Edith had suggested. But even as she rifled through the mixture of stationery, correspondence and packets of photographs, another question drowned out the others: Do I really want to know?

  Finally, in the third drawer down on the left side of the desk, she discovered an assortment of notebooks. Some were leather, some hardback, others spiralbound with patterned fabric covers. Opening one at random, her fingers trembling, Julia saw pages covered with her mother’s rounded script, interspersed with dates from five years ago. Dipping into them, Julia smiled despite her agitation. Invariably Emily mentioned the weather, a topic never omitted in her conversations. Emily also wrote about places she had been to, people she had seen, visitors who had called. The simple details of an older person’s increasingly circumscribed world, Julia thought with a pang. The entries included visits to the single remaining village shop, encounters with Edith and other neighbours.

  She flicked through the diaries, checking the dates. The oldest went back to 1987, fifteen years ago. She piled them up in chronological order. The last one she opened began in December 2000. Turning the pages through the early months of the previous year, 2001, her heart began to beat faster. April, May, June, July, August… It was August when Edith said Linda had made her first visit. Her mother’s handwriting became increasingly shaky as the months passed. Julia caught her breath when she skimmed the entry for the 8th of August: ‘Julia called. She told me Greg has left. I haven’t seen her so lost and uncertain since Leonard died.’

  Julia’s eyes swam with tears as she turned the page. She had reached the end of the cream notebook. The last entry was dated 14th of August. Was this the final entry her mother had ever made? Or was there a later diary which she had kept somewhere else?

  Glancing towards the window, Julia saw that a good inch of snow had settled on the sill. She should leave. But it was frustrating to think that there might be another diary offering a clue about the family secret Linda had alluded to. Or was it better left hidden? Again she heard her mother’s low, furious voice to William Prescott nearly half a century earlier: ‘And your sense of duty killed him.’

  She shuddered, shoving the diaries into the carrier bag. She had had enough for one afternoon. Switching off the fire and light, she tried to convince herself that it was the combination of the empty cottage, the hostile January afternoon, and the scene with Greg that morning, which had filled her with foreboding.

  But as she locked the door and made her way up the white path, she found she couldn’t dispel the image of her mother, hand raised to strike William Prescott, shouting her accusation at him. It seemed impossible that her gentle, rather passive mother, could ever have acted in such a way. There again, Julia reminded herself grimly, she had never believed herself capable of the slightest violence until she had launched herself at Greg that morning.

  There was never much traffic around the village green as the road petered out into fields beyond it. In the gathering gloom of the snowy evening no one was around. She followed the tracks of another vehicle up the steep lane to the cliff road. A surprising amount of snow had already accumulated. Even the usually busy road towards Lincoln was almost deserted, and she regretted not setting out sooner. She turned on the radio, tuned in as usual to Classic FM. Allegri’s Miserere was playing. It was one of Julia’s favourite pieces. But the haunting tones did nothing to allay the sense of unease
which had settled on her as deeply as the snow which lay in the surrounding fields. She switched to Lincs FM. The chirpy-voiced presenter was providing a traffic update, urging people not to travel unless absolutely necessary. Heavy snow was forecast well into the evening.

  She relaxed after she had made her way up the sharp incline from the village of Scampton where her grandfather had been vicar. But as she approached the traffic lights at the final village before the city and Celine Dion launched into ‘My Heart Will Go On’, Julia’s eyes flooded with tears again. She and Greg had been to see Titanic together. He had sung the song to her, badly, after they had made love that night.

  At the time she had believed the sentiment of the song, that she and Greg were soulmates, whose love would last for ever. Now she never wanted to hear the maudlin ballad again. She took her left hand off the steering wheel and reached over to switch off the radio.

  Too late, she registered the lights turning from amber to red. She hit the brake hard. Too hard. The Mondeo skidded onwards in the snow. She drove into the skid to correct her trajectory. A vehicle was mounting the hill to make the right turn in front of her and her car was sliding directly towards it. The driver honked. Panicking, she over-corrected. Her front wheels slewed to the left. She closed her eyes, preparing for the crash into the stone wall which ran alongside the road.

  The crash didn’t come. When she opened her eyes again, she saw that she had stopped inches short of the wall. She took some steadying breaths, resting her head on the steering wheel.

  For the third time that day, she was startled by knocking, this time on the driver’s window. Jerking upright, she turned her head. Someone was opening the door. Her heart pounded.

  ‘Hey, are you OK? What the hell… Julia?’

  Julia recognised Pete, the reflexologist, staring at her wide-eyed beneath a black beanie.

  ‘It was Celine Dion… I didn’t see… I skidded…’ Incoherent, in shock, relieved to see a familiar face, she began to cry again.

  Pete hesitated, then moved round to the passenger door. He climbed in beside her and placed his gloved hand gently on her left arm. Julia leaned towards him, resting her head against his shoulder as she continued to weep. She was grateful that he didn’t speak. The windscreen was covered in snow by the time her sobs subsided. She moved away from him, suddenly self-conscious.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said.

  ‘No. I’m sorry,’ said Julia.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well… getting into this state. Where did you come from?’

  ‘I was the driver turning when you spun across the road. I parked up to see if you needed help.’

  ‘How embarrassing!’

  ‘Don’t worry about it. But you must have come through a red light, you know. And I’d have had you down as a cautious driver.’

  ‘I am. I didn’t see it till too late. I…’ She swallowed hard and turned her face away.

  There was a pause before Pete, with a sensitivity which surprised her, turned into practical mode. ‘Not a problem,’ he said. ‘No harm done. Are you OK to drive home? You should be able to reverse off the verge. But we’d better make a move soon.’ Thick snowflakes, driven by the wind which had risen during her short journey, were beginning to cover the windows.

  ‘I’ll be fine now. Thanks.’ Julia wished her voice wouldn’t wobble. She scrabbled in her pocket for another tissue.

  Pete detected her uncertainty. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘shall I follow you home, make sure you get back safely?’

  ‘You don’t need to do that.’ She blew her nose.

  ‘I don’t need to. I’d like to.’

  ‘I don’t want to intrude on your Saturday evening. Won’t Xanthe be expecting you?’

  Another silence. ‘Xanthe left last summer,’ said Pete.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said again. ‘You had your trauma with Greg at the time.’

  ‘Yes, but you listened to me about Greg.’ Julia remembered how kind Pete had been when he dropped into her office begging milk the day after Greg left and found her crying. She had spilled out the story to him and he had listened patiently, without interrupting.

  ‘You didn’t need my troubles as well.’ He hesitated. ‘It was my fault anyway.’

  ‘That Xanthe left?’

  ‘Yep.’ Pete took a deep breath, staring in front of him. He ran his hand over the door to the glove compartment, leaving a watery trail. ‘The thing is, there’s someone else.’

  ‘There always is, isn’t there?’ She bit her lip as soon as the words were out.

  ‘Excuse me?’ He turned towards her.

  ‘Someone else,’ she said. ‘Sorry. It’s none of my business. Anyway, aren’t you planning to see her tonight?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The “someone else.”’

  Pete faced forward again. He spoke slowly, seeming to choose his words carefully. ‘Actually, I don’t have plans to see her. And for the record, I wasn’t unfaithful to Xanthe.’

  Julia was grateful for the twilight which hid her blush. ‘No, I… It’s just… Greg called earlier for his stuff and…’ She gulped and then blurted out, ‘His girlfriend’s seven months’ pregnant.’

  He jerked round in his seat, knocking his right knee against the gear lever.

  ‘Seven months? But that means…?’

  ‘Yes. She was pregnant when he left me.’

  ‘Shit, Jules, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then Pete said, ‘The offer still stands. I’d be more than happy to follow you home.’

  ‘OK.’ She hesitated. The prospect of her empty cottage on the hostile winter’s night wasn’t appealing. Besides, Pete had been very kind. ‘Would you like to stay for dinner?’

  ‘That’d be great!’

  Julia smiled at his enthusiasm. They’d both occupied offices in the old school for five years without ever socialising. In fact apart from that time last summer when she had poured out her heart about Greg, they’d had few meaningful conversations.

  Pete opened the passenger door, brushing snow from the window. A flurry of snowflakes blew onto the dashboard. ‘Have you got a scraper? You might damage the wipers if you try and shift the snow with them.’

  ‘I think it’s in the boot.’ Shivering in the icy blast, she unclipped her seat belt.

  ‘I’ll get it.’ He vanished before she could protest. She heard a soft thud as snow fell from the boot. He rustled among the carrier bags from her mother’s house. ‘You’ve got a lot of stuff in here,’ he called.

  ‘From Mum’s.’ Thinking of the diaries, her recovered memory of her mother’s confrontation with William Prescott, Julia was overcome with a sudden weariness. She closed her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Pete continued to rummage around. ‘Found it!’ He slammed down the boot lid. A moment later his face loomed at her through the cleared windscreen. He scraped the snow from her side window before reoccupying the passenger seat. ‘You won’t have a problem getting off the verge. Just make sure you stop for the red light this time, will you?’

  ‘Ha, ha.’ She switched on the engine and edged cautiously back into the road. A hundred yards on she pulled in so Pete could pick up his Fiesta. He followed her as she drove slowly back towards the city, taking extra care on the mini-roundabouts as she approached her house tucked behind the cathedral. As she climbed out of the Mondeo on to the slippery pavement the bell chimed seven.

  ‘Great place, Jules. Bags of character.’ Pete glanced round her hall, taking in the beams and oak flooring, the walnut bookcase and grandmother clock, matching pieces to the desk in Emily’s sitting room. He took his beanie off and ran his hand over his newly-shaved head. Stepping out of his brown suede boots, he placed them beside her discarded ankle boots on the doormat.

  ‘Thanks. Sorry it’s so cold. I’ll put the heating on.’ Julia went through to the kitchen and flicked the s
witch on the boiler. She didn’t hear Pete padding in behind her in his socks as it fired up. She started when he spoke again.

  ‘How long have you been here? Hey – you’re a bit jumpy, aren’t you?’ He moved back to stand in the doorway as Greg had done that morning. She turned away, not wanting to recall the earlier scene, and reached for two crystal wine glasses from the cupboard.

  ‘Still a bit shocked from the skid, I expect.’ She contemplated telling him about Linda and her memory of the scene between her mother and William Prescott, how she had felt spooked in Emily’s cottage earlier. But in the reassuring surroundings of her kitchen it sounded melodramatic in her own mind.

  ‘I’ve been here six years,’ she said. ‘Not for much longer though.’

  Her stomach fluttered as she remembered the letter from the bank. She had forgotten about it during the afternoon. It still lay on the counter beside the fridge freezer.

  ‘Oh?’ Pete looked at her questioningly. ‘Making a new start, now that Greg’s gone?’

  ‘No. Not that. He’s the one making the new start.’ She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘We arranged it so that he paid the mortgage, I paid everything else. Only he didn’t pay the mortgage the last few months he was here. Something else he didn’t bother to tell me. So this morning I got this.’ She handed him the letter and went across to the well-stocked wine rack. ‘White or red?’

  ‘Red please.’ Pete reached inside the pocket of his insulated jacket. Julia was surprised to see that he needed reading glasses. She hadn’t thought he was old enough. She’d always assumed the creases in his forehead, the lines etched around his eyes and mouth, were the usual symptoms of skin ageing prematurely associated with smoking. Maybe he was closer to her age than she’d thought.

  The gold stud in his left ear lobe gleamed under the spotlight as he raised his head from the letter. ‘Shit, Jules, I’m sorry,’ he said, for the second time that evening.

  Again the abbreviation of her name. ‘Please don’t say that,’ she said.