by Rebecca Tope
‘Simmy – it’s so strange seeing you again now. It feels as if we’re both about ninety-nine years old, and we’ve lived through all kinds of hell since we knew each other as kids. You’re different and the same. I know you, but I don’t. It’s been haunting me ever since my mum’s funeral, how close we were on those family holidays, and then we just seemed to forget each other. How did that happen? Shouldn’t we have stayed together?’
‘Sit down,’ she said again, her heart thumping wildly. ‘I’m not sure I can cope with all this.’ She picked up the round tin containing the remnants of her pie, and wondered whether she could swallow the final segment. Regretfully, she decided not. ‘You’ve put me off my pie,’ she said.
He stared right at her, then, unblinking. ‘Have I?’
She made a sad little huff of laughter, and put the tin down again. ‘I’ve got some red wine. I think that might help,’ she said.
The next hour saw the bottle finished, and remarkably little conversation pursued. Simmy sat across the room from him, and tried to maintain control of her thoughts. Any expressions of feeling from him would have to be treated with scepticism, given the state he was in. She was afraid to encourage him into any disclosures concerning her, and tried instead to keep the focus on his family. ‘The main thing for now is your father, and who killed him,’ she insisted.
‘Well, yes. But I have no idea whatsoever. Isn’t it for the police to find that out? And … this might sound weird … I’m not in too much hurry for that to happen. I mean, I’m going to hate that person, aren’t I? Really detest and loathe his guts. I don’t want to carry that around all the time. It’s unhealthy.’
She smiled. Here was a more familiar Christopher, a latter-day hippy full of old-fashioned peace and love. ‘You sound like my mother,’ she said. Although Angie hadn’t been quite such a love child herself in recent times.
‘That’s probably where I got it from. She was always so full of stories about London in the sixties. She made it sound like a whole other world.’
‘She romanticised it. She didn’t even get to London until 1969. She missed most of the excitement.’
‘I don’t believe you. I think she was right in the heart of it. Don’t spoil my illusions.’
‘You’re right. I guess the sixties lasted quite a way into the seventies as well. It was more of a culture than a calendar-based thing. And it did sound rather wonderful,’ she sighed. ‘Pity it didn’t last. Just look at us now.’
‘What do you mean? You sell flowers. How sixties is that?’
‘And you could easily have a stall in the Portobello Road.’
‘I could. So that’s all right, isn’t it.’
They finished the wine in silence. It was getting late and very obviously Christopher was not going to drive back to Keswick. That went without saying. But a very big question was beginning to loom: which bed was he going to be sleeping in?
Chapter Seventeen
Simmy woke from a dream in the middle of the night, to find a man’s arm across her middle. She lay there enjoying his snug embrace, quite content not to move. But her thoughts were almost frantic. The dream had been an irrational mixture of past and present, where she was sixteen, but Christopher was thirty-eight. All his siblings were there, and both sets of parents, in a pandemonium of packing, or catching the tide, or both. They were all together in a huge unfurnished house that had stacks of lovely antiques piled on the front lawn.
She remembered it in every detail, trying to untangle anything from it that was a real memory, or a meaningful message for the present. That last year had been at Prestatyn. Although a favourite, it had not been their destination every year. They had tried Rhos-on-Sea, Colwyn Bay and Aberystwyth over the years. Prestatyn was fine if the weather was good; otherwise it was a disaster. A small Roman bathhouse took ten minutes to inspect, and the even smaller ruined castle took less time still. There were shops and an amusement arcade, which the Straws regarded as tawdry. Simmy was strongly discouraged from going there, and the Henderson children never had enough money to make it worth bothering. The presence of the Pontins holiday camp caused Angie in particular a degree of angst. When the company was sold up in the mid 1990s, she hoped it would all go away. Instead, the camp at Prestatyn was one of the few that survived to be modernised and embellished. But the lure of the huge beach, its rock pools and muddy swamps kept them going back. They found it quite easy to ignore the crowds on their package holidays, and find their own private areas.
Simmy recalled all this now, in the small dark hours of the night. How they had set up camp against the sea wall and repelled all invaders. Russell and Kit would have their own special chairs, which they carried back and forth every day. Everyone else would be loaded with towels, buckets, sandwiches, drinks, books and sometimes a radio.
An image from her dream came back to her. Fran, her face close to Angie’s, speaking in a low relentless monologue of complaint. Angie had been embarrassed, worried that the words were audible to others in the party. ‘He had his hand right down her front,’ Simmy heard. ‘And she can’t be more than twenty. Don’t you think I ought to do something?’
Angie had merely shaken her head, and flapped a hand. ‘We’ll talk about it later,’ she said.
‘What was all that about?’ Simmy asked Christopher, as they retreated to a handy sand dune.
‘Just my dad at his old games again. Take no notice.’
But Simmy had watched Kit more closely for the next day or two, seeing him brush against girls in bikinis when they went up to the town for ice cream, or make some flirtatious remark to a waitress over their evening meal. She remembered how she had been amazed at her own blindness to his behaviour until that moment. And the acute distress she felt on Fran’s behalf. But she never said anything more about it – not even to her mother or Christopher. Once the holiday was over, she forgot it completely.
They woke the next morning, reminding each other that it was Sunday and they didn’t have to be anywhere. The realisation that at thirty-eight years old they had nobody expecting them, no children or partners making demands on them, was both liberating and worrying. It also made them both acutely aware that they could solve the matter for each other with a startling simplicity.
‘This is nice,’ he said, stretching his arms towards the ceiling. ‘I like your little house.’
Simmy tried not to read too much into these words. The prospect of his moving in permanently was far too distant, surely, to be taken seriously. One shared night did not a marriage make. And yet, she could not avoid the idea that just such a huge change might be on its way. Just as women find themselves jumping ten or twenty years ahead within seconds of knowing they’re pregnant, she was mentally designing her wedding bouquet on the basis of waking in the same bed as a man.
‘Breakfast,’ she announced. ‘Coffee.’ She then realised that she had quite a bad headache. The wine from the previous evening, she supposed. And a degree of dehydration. And the implications of what had happened. Real life was going to intrude at any moment, bringing stress and confusion in its wake.
‘No hurry,’ said Christopher. ‘Stay here for a cuddle.’
It should have been easy and obvious, just lying there together, skin to skin. There should be no reservations, no intrusive thoughts. Five minutes earlier, it might have worked. ‘Sorry,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘I’ve got a blinding headache. I need a pill and something to drink.’
‘Not a morning-after pill?’ he laughed.
She rolled out of the bed – which was not really wide enough for two – and looked down on him. He had used a condom, which he’d said had been in his wallet for well over a year, but in the sleepy small hours, there had been a further coupling that she had drowsily enjoyed without giving a thought to contraception. ‘You didn’t – did you?’ she said.
‘I guess we both sort of forgot. It’ll be okay. I don’t think I’m very fertile.’
‘I don’t think I am, either. It took me and Tony
two years of trying for me to get pregnant.’ She forced a carefree laugh, which hurt her head. ‘But we’re not doing that again.’
‘That’s a shame. It was pretty darn enjoyable.’ He reached out for her hand, and held it tight.
‘It was,’ she agreed.
He laughed, suddenly buoyant. ‘I feel wonderfully free,’ he said. ‘Knowing my dad isn’t going to march in and start yelling at me.’
She pulled away from him. ‘What?’
‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but just about the only serious talk I ever had with him was about you. He told me to keep my hands off you until you were old enough to know your own mind. Said it was all very well having a holiday flirtation, but if he ever caught me taking things further, he’d skin me alive. Or words to that effect.’
‘And you believed him? Why should it matter to him what we did?’
‘Good question. He always seemed to have a thing about vulnerable young girls. It never made much sense to me.’
‘Well …’ she said doubtfully. ‘He probably meant well.’
‘He’s gone now, anyway. I can do what I like.’ He threw his arms in the air, and stretched. ‘At last.’
She took a few steps towards the door, unsure of how to react. Something felt awry, as if a discordant note had intruded into their elation and suggested it was misguided, even perhaps somehow dishonourable.
‘Funny old business, isn’t it. Death and sex – they say they go together.’
She was halfway down the stairs when he said this, and wasn’t sure she’d heard right. The living room was airless and stale, with the empty wine bottle and glasses giving it a tawdry look. She spent five minutes whisking away the debris, taking an aspirin, making coffee and toast, and wondering what would happen next.
Did Christopher take sugar in coffee? She had made it for him on Thursday morning, but couldn’t remember that detail. Better take some up, just in case. She unearthed a wooden tray from the dusty top of a high cupboard and took the minimal breakfast upstairs on it.
In the bedroom, he was exactly as she’d left him, looking young and peaceful under the duvet. Her heart swelled at the sight of him. He really was very sweet. How she had loved him, more than twenty years ago! Every time she thought back, the memories intensified. She had mooned over him, waiting for letters from him, following his school career and making passionate wishes that they would somehow end up going to the same university. They did not. In the event, neither of them did degree courses. Gradually, other people came into their lives and their teenage love faded into nothing more than a rosy memory. This man here with her now was a different person, who happened to have shared some of his childhood with her. If a relationship were to develop, it would have to be built from scratch, as adults with past experiences and revised expectations.
Then his phone played a jingle, somewhere amongst the pile of clothes he’d left on the floor. ‘Must be yours,’ she said. ‘I don’t know where mine is, but I’m pretty sure it’s switched off.’
He groaned gently, and reached a long arm towards the sound. ‘Can’t reach it,’ he said. ‘Let it ring.’
She kicked the heap closer to the bed, and then lowered the tray onto a corner of the dressing table, which was in fact just a chest of drawers with a mirror perched on top of it. Coffee slopped slightly. Her head was not feeling any better.
‘Oh, it’s Hannah,’ said Christopher, having finally laid hands on his phone. ‘She’s not going to go away until I answer it.’ He thumbed the screen and put the phone to his ear. ‘Sis,’ he said.
The love/hate/resent/depend complexities of sibling relationships would always be mysterious to Simmy. She had witnessed Christopher go through all these and more in his interactions with Eddie, George, Hannah and Lynn and learnt almost nothing in the process. The little word ‘Sis’ could mean a multitude of things, given the inevitable associations it must carry. ‘Mind your own business. Why should it matter to you?’ he was saying next. ‘It’s Sunday, for God’s sake. Yes … I know. So what? How should I know the answer to that? Do it yourself … We have to get on with our lives … Yes, yes …’ He rolled his eyes at Simmy, who had begun to wonder whether she should leave the room and let him speak in private. Then she turned mulish, remembering where they were. She should put on a dressing gown if she was going downstairs again. And she only possessed a very unflattering thing made of quilted nylon that would be old-fashioned on her mother, or even grandmother. Instead, she took coffee and a slice of buttered toast and climbed back into bed, squeezing up against Christopher and poking his shoulder.
‘I’ll call you about it tomorrow,’ he told his sister, and deactivated the call.
‘How mean of you,’ smiled Simmy. ‘What did she want?’
‘She wants to have a family meeting, but Eddie won’t co-operate and she hasn’t even asked George yet. She said I should speak to him. Pull rank as the eldest. She’s the bossy one, not me. And even she is dithering about calling George. She knows he won’t do anything she wants him to.’
‘What does she think it would achieve anyway?’
‘Lord knows. It’s probably something she’s seen in a film, and thinks it’s appropriate. She’s got no idea, really. I suppose it’s to do with deciding about the house, and the funeral, and all that stuff. Dad’s car is sitting there out in the garage, and there’ll be post to see to, and electricity and food in the freezer … nobody’s begun to think it all through.’ He was speaking slowly, the items coming to mind, one by one.
‘The police probably wouldn’t let you touch it for a bit, anyway. But Hannah didn’t say all that just now, did she?’
‘No – but it’s obvious, now I put my mind to it. Lucky there are no pets to make decisions about.’
‘Is there food going bad in the fridge as well?’ None of the implications of a house abruptly left empty had occurred to her before.
‘Probably. Nobody’s been taking a lead – until now.’
‘So there’s quite a lot of sense in Hannah’s suggestion after all. If each one of you takes one or two jobs, it’ll all get done without too much hassle. Once the police tell you it’s all clear, of course. You can’t have a funeral until they release the body.’
‘They told me that. I guess it’ll be this week sometime.’ He rubbed his face. ‘And there was me thinking I could just lie here all day and forget my troubles.’
‘There’ll be your mother’s things as well,’ Simmy realised. ‘Clothes and all those diaries and things that she kept.’
‘The police took some of the diaries. They thought it might help them work out who killed Dad.’
Simmy winced. ‘That’s not very nice,’ she said. ‘Makes me glad I don’t keep a diary. What do they think they’ll find?’
He said nothing, but his face revealed quite a lot. Worry, even dread, was evident.
‘What?’
‘It won’t impact on the murder investigation, but there’s sure to be stuff about the state of their marriage. It went through a very rocky patch a while ago. We all thought they’d split up. The girls were in a right old panic for a bit. They were still at school – or Lynn was, at least. I missed most of it, but Hannah kept me informed.’
‘But they patched things up?’ Simmy wondered how much her own mother knew of all this. ‘It must have been around that time that my mum and dad moved to Cumbria. That’s at least twelve years ago now.’
‘Right. They didn’t have much choice but to stay together. Dad wasn’t going anywhere and Mum could never have survived financially on her own. That’s what she thought, anyway. She’d have divorced him otherwise.’
‘But as you say, it can’t have any bearing on the murder.’
‘No.’
But they were both less than certain on that point, as became more apparent as they gave it some thought. ‘Your mum …’ Christopher began. ‘She was quite closely involved at one point, according to Hannah. Stirring things up and making it all worse.’
Simmy was tempted to defend her parent, despite a total lack of knowledge of the circumstances. ‘She probably meant well,’ was the best she could manage. ‘But I had a dream last night, which sort of carried on when I woke up. I remembered how depressed your mother often seemed, and how she complained about Kit such a lot. We all just carried on as if things were all right.’
‘That’s what kids do. Anything else would be too scary. We were just glad that Angie was there to be a dumping ground. She seemed to cope with it all right.’
‘I think she must have been pretty annoyed with Kit, though. She’s always been big on female solidarity. I wonder whether Fran’s suspicions were ever proved right – or wrong.’
He gave a little shrug. ‘We’ll never know just what went on. I for one refused to pay attention to any of it. I had my own life to lead, and I didn’t want to have to face the bad behaviour of my own father. I kept telling myself he deserved to be happy. There he was, in his fifties, keeping himself fit. He grew a beard and started going out more. Joined one or two clubs. Mum had her own friends and wasn’t interested in going with him – big mistake. He’d always been fond of the ladies, and suddenly there he was, all sparky and full of himself. I think it was a bit of a midlife crisis, actually. I have a feeling he really went off the rails.’
It fitted with much of what Simmy had been hearing about the man, although not very closely to her own experience of him. She couldn’t recall ever hearing him make a joke. And he certainly wouldn’t have seduced anyone with his affluence, given the modest salary he’d earned. ‘But it didn’t last long?’ she prompted.
‘Long enough. Things settled down a bit, because we all got used to it, and Mum worked around it as best she could. Now Hannah says the strain of it was what killed her.’