“It’s a lot of work,” Tom responded, surveying the expanse of plantings.
“Well, it keeps me off the sauce.”
Tom half expected a smile to follow this remark—Colm had been famously off the sauce for years; in the pub, he drank orange juice or Perrier—but no smile came. Colm took another swipe at the plant. “That should do,” he said, staring glassy-eyed at his handiwork.
“Shall we go in?” Tom asked.
“Oh … I doubt Celia’s back from her morning ride.” To Tom’s faint look of surprise he added, “I forgot to mention you were coming. Celia thinks it’s best if we all keep to our routines. I expect she’s right. I would be feeling a bit cooped-up inside.”
Tom glanced at Thornridge House through the almost imperceptible humid veil that softened its outlines. Certainly the largest coop in the village or vicinity by a long chalk, but he understood the sentiment. After Lisbeth’s death, when family had descended upon him and Miranda, he had walked and walked and walked all over Bristol.
“Bring your bike. We’ll go round to the pool garden. I don’t think you’ve seen the back of the house before. We should be able to hear Celia when she comes back.
“This was a tennis court in the Northmores’ day,” Colm continued when they’d emerged from the east gardens into an expanse of lawn that dipped below the pergola at the south façade of the house. Cut into the middle was an oblong of untroubled water dotted with white water lilies, its stone corners softened by mauve irises. On each of the long sides was an iron bench, simple in design, but with sufficient length to seat St. Nicholas’s choir, if need should ever be.
“It’s beautiful, serene,” Tom commented, leaning his bike against the grilled back of the nearest bench.
“Yes, I find it … comforting. At times like this.” Colm settled on the bench and dropped the shears on the grass at his feet. Tom flicked him a worried glance.
“I don’t think Phillip much approved,” Colm added, removing his hat and squinting at the sunlight glistening off the water.
“Of what?”
“Of taking out the tennis court.”
“I’m not surprised.” Tom smiled. Edwin Northmore, Phillip’s father, had sold Thornridge House for taxes in the 1950s, and though Phillip had had a successful postwar career in London as a bank director, he had not been successful enough to buy it back. Nonetheless, Phillip retained a proprietorial interest.
“He sort of harrumphed when I showed it to him. The old boy’s not much for change, is he? Speaking of which, how is he?”
“I haven’t heard. I’ll be going up to the hospital this afternoon.” Tom joined Colm on the bench. “More to the point, how are you?”
Colm raised his eyes to the sky. Tom followed his gaze. Above them a flight of swallows circled into a shimmer of white cloud. “Oh, stunned, I think,” he replied after a moment. “Deeply sad.” He glanced over at Tom, who could see that his eyes were rimmed with purplish shadows. “You would know, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes … although—”
“Time heals all wounds?”
“I was hoping not to be banal.” In the wake of Lisbeth’s death, every platitude had been fed into his ears, usually by the well-meaning, embarrassed to be proximate to one with such a loss. He could do nothing but accept their awkward kindnesses, but he had learned this: In grief so deep, sentimentality has no home. “I was going to say that the awful agony does subside, I’ve found—perhaps it’s a little like those half-lives we learned about in science class.”
“One day the residual half will be tiny.”
“Perhaps. Though I haven’t got there yet.”
“I doubt I shall.” Colm plucked absently at one of the strands of cotton taut across his knee. “And your parents, tragically, too, I recall.”
“I was only a baby. I have no recollection.”
Colm gave him an assessing gaze. “Of course. I remember it, though. I think I was about eight or nine. It was a little like when Diana died. The whole nation was caught unawares for a moment. Sorry, I shouldn’t go on about this.”
“That’s all right.” Tom shrugged. The grieving often preferred to talk of other things. “For me, it’s something in a press clipping, really.”
He thought back to the newspaper and magazine stories Dosh—his aunt, who became his second adoptive mother—saved for him in a scrapbook, which she presented to him when his child’s consciousness began to encompass the world beyond the garden gate. No, it wasn’t anything remotely like the emotional gale wind following the death of the Princess of Wales, but his young parents’ death in an airplane that plunged into the North Sea after takeoff from Stockholm, where his mother had won the Eurovision Song Contest, had captured the public imagination for a time. He himself had been a figure of sentimentality, the poor orphaned—twice orphaned!—Xmas (tabloid headlines were invariably truncated) Baby. He could recall from the scrapbook a particularly vivid picture of Dosh, her scolding face turned towards some news photographer, caught outside some shop in Gravesend. In her arms, a bundle of swaddling clothes. Him. Tom Livingston Christmas.
“I still have your mother’s winning single somewhere, ‘If Wishes.’ It was a good tune.” Colm’s head began swaying as if to an inner rhythm. “ ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride,’ ” he began, his voice, huskier yet sweeter in the decades since Top of the Pops, embracing the last note. “ ‘If time would turn back, I’d have you by my side …’ ” He faltered then; a beat passed. Tom opened his mouth to offer to allay the discomforting lyric, but Colm recovered, stronger: “ ‘All life’s trials and sorrows would never abide …’ ” He smiled at Tom in invitation.
“… ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.’ ” Tom drew out the last words in the voice that ensured his exclusion from any respectable choir.
“Yes, that’s right.” Amusement crinkled the corners of Colm’s eyes. “Your mother had a lovely, lyric voice. In your case, the apple seems to have fallen really quite far from the tree.”
Tom laughed. “But I was the adopted son of Iain Christmas and Mary Carroll—”
“I’d forgotten that.”
“—My natural parents probably had tin ears, as do I.”
“Well, you have a fine speaking voice, Vicar.”
“I expect the stage training didn’t hurt.”
“Eh?”
“My former life as The Great Krimboni.”
“Ah, yes—the magic act. Did you get called ‘Krimbo’ at school?”
“I still get ‘Krimbo’ if I’m in certain parts of the southeast.”
“I was christened ‘Malcolm.’ Dropped the ‘Mal’ as soon as I could.” Colm’s attention seemed to drift and they sat in silence in the soft air for a moment.
“I was thinking of a gospel choir for Sybella’s funeral.” Colm plucked again at the threads along his knee.
“I certainly don’t mind, Colm, if that’s what you wish.” Tom hesitated. “I wasn’t sure where you were planning to—”
“I want the funeral here and I want her to be buried in the churchyard. This is where I live. I want to be near to her—” His voice broke.
“I understand.” Tom shifted his eyes to the pool, observing a tiny water boatman rippling the reflection of cedar branches in the glassy surface of the water. He waited for the moment to pass.
“And Sybella’s mother?” he asked, after a time. “Is this her wish?”
“Oona can go to hell.”
“Is she objecting?”
“She’s being … hard to manage. As she has been her entire career and through our entire marriage. But I’ll sort her out.”
Tom gave a passing thought to the effects of a funeral of a young woman with celebrity (however faded) parents on the church and the village. He had had his own disagreeable experience with press intrusion—reporters idling on the street in front of their flat or the church in the days after Lisbeth’s murder. One of them had winkled Tom’s mobile number out of some uns
uspecting neighbour; then they all had it. He’d thrown his phone into the Avon.
“And do you know a gospel choir that can arrive on short notice?” Tom asked.
“I do. Revelation Choir. They did some backup on my second album and were around when Sybella was a baby. Happened I went to sixth-form college with Delroy Francis, who founded the choir and is still with it. We’ve always stayed in touch.”
“Perhaps it’s just as well Colonel Northmore is in hospital.”
A sly smile lit Colm’s face. “No chance of quick recovery?”
Tom returned the smile but shook his head. He had another thought: “Was Sybella particularly fond of gospel music? Mightn’t she have wanted something else?”
“I’m afraid neither of my children share my taste in music, but then I didn’t share my parents’ taste—at least at the time. Sybella seemed fond of a group called Demon Sexgang, I recall.”
Tom frowned. “I don’t detect a Christian attitude.”
“I didn’t detect a musical sensibility, but then I’m well past it. Besides, Sybella was growing out of this Goth nonsense. It was just a teenage thing. You know, being rebellious and so on and so forth just to get up your parents’ nose. We all did it. We just all did it in different ways. Celia says Sybella has an Electra complex—you know, hates Mummy so she acts up—though I can’t see how, since Oona seemed to encourage her bad behaviour. Revelation Choir and Sybella’s first months are linked in my mind in a happy way, so gospel it shall be.” Colm reached for his hat and rose abruptly from the bench. “Anyway, come up and see Sybella’s artworks. I think they’re quite good. You can leave your bike here.”
“I didn’t know she painted … or drew,” Tom remarked, catching up to Colm, who was striding purposefully across the new grass.
“It’s Mitsuko’s doing. She’d really taken Sybella under her wing. Saw a talent there.”
“It used to be the nursery,” Colm told him when they’d reached the top floor by the back staircase. “See, the light’s quite good. North light for drawing and painting. My music studio’s across the hall. That’s where I compose our anthems or scores for film or whatever comes along. I thought Declan might take an interest—you know, what with all the technical gear and such …”
“He evidently likes drumming,” Tom remarked, noting the broad drawing table, the shelves of art books, and the bank of large, flat drawers with sheets of drawing paper—surely a wealthy father’s overindulgent response to a child’s latest enthusiasm.
“I think Declan just likes bashing things, really.” Colm gestured to a scattering of papers and open sketchpads on the table. “What do you think? I was looking at them last night.”
Tom studied the artwork. The earliest drawings were faithful and somewhat fussy renderings of unremarkable objects—fruit, flowers—but soon the thick pencil or charcoal strokes became simpler and bolder, more confident. The subject matter shifted, too—the human face and form took primacy. He was surprised. He could make no claims to an understanding of art, but he felt he was capable of at least detecting if something was childishly amateur. This was not, and what a relief: He hadn’t relished soothing a grieving father by telling him that his dead daughter’s doodlings were Tate-worthy. He glanced at some more that were sellotaped to the wall and then a few that had landed atop the bank of drawers. He noted a certain recurring male figure.
“Yes,” Colm said, as if reading his mind, “Sybella had taken a fancy to sketching Sebastian—but then he’s here almost every day working with me in the garden, so …” He shrugged. “Even my wife finds opportunities to meander into the garden when Sebastian’s about, though she denies it. I suppose I should hire an ugly dwarf in his place, but he’s very good at what he does, and he’s oddly companionable.”
“Really.” Tom reflected that he didn’t find Sebastian uncompanionable, but the man had certainly honed circumspection to a fine degree. “Does he ever talk about himself?”
Colm shook his head. “That’s what makes him companionable. We just go about our business. We talk about plants and the weather. I don’t ask about his private life and he, in turn, doesn’t ask me what it was like to play at Live Aid—”
“Oh,” said Tom, who’d once considered asking Colm that very question.
“—and he showed no interest in Sybella, so no worries there.”
Although, Tom realised, Sebastian’s sudden materialisation in the village hall yesterday seemed to suggest otherwise. “Well,” he said, “these drawings look very … assured.”
“We’d been talking about an art college in the fall.” Colm picked up one of the sketchbooks and began flipping through it. “Perhaps the one in Bristol that Mitsuko went to. She’d be nearer home. Here, that is. Far enough away from London and Oona and her pernicious influence, ha!” He slammed the sketchbook down on the desk. “She was beginning to put together a portfolio. And now …”
He left the rest unsaid and looked vacantly around the room.
“Sybella spent many hours up here. And she wasn’t”—he turned to Tom, his eyes flecked with anger—“drugging, as apparently half the village thinks.”
“That was only the colonel being obtuse,” Tom responded, then thought guiltily of Madrun. And who else? he wondered. The darker thoughts at his breakfast table he pushed from his mind.
“Advertising people say that one voiced complaint represents hundreds,” Colm said.
“What a few in the village think isn’t important.”
“What did you think?”
“Colm, I’ve only been here a short while.”
“But you were in an inner-city ministry. You know how people Sybella’s age behave and act when … oh God, I’m sorry … your wife. I’d forgotten that they thought drugs were the reason for—”
“Have you been told nothing about … how … or why?”
Colm shook his head and moved to one of a pair of chintz-covered armchairs by the window. “Nothing,” he replied, slumping into the soft seat. “This not knowing. I can’t bear it. It wasn’t drugs. And she was healthy … and full of life. And she wasn’t … you know, depressed or the like.” His face crumpled. “I’ve lost my child.” He released a groan awful to hear and covered his face with his hands. Tom sank into the chair opposite, glanced at the dottings of lambkin clouds past the window’s frame, and felt his heart contract with a pity not untainted by the ache of his own loss and the horror, the absolute horror, of losing a child.
“It’s all right. I’m all right.” Colm abruptly lifted his hands from his face and snuffled. The light played cruelly along the fan of lines at the corners of his eyes, which were red-rimmed and drowning in salt water. He affected to smile.
“Shall we have a prayer?” Tom asked.
“Yes, please.”
“Ought we to wait for your wife?”
“I know Celia comes to church, but I think in her heart she really communes with Saint Sigmund, if you know what I mean.”
Tom did.
They closed their eyes.
“Thank you,” Colm said, opening his eyes and leaning back into the chair when Tom had finished his prayer. The atmosphere in the room had leavened, as though a kindly spirit had come and gone. After a moment’s comfortable silence, Colm took a deep breath. “Perhaps we should see if Celia’s back. She should be by now.”
They both rose. Tom took a final glance through the window, at the billowy contours of the South Downs, at the patchwork of emerald fields. Off to the east, through morning’s soft haze, he could make out the outline of St. Nicholas’s blunt tower. Then, his eyes alerted by movement, he glanced down onto the roof of a red Astra pulling up on the gravel apron in front of Thornridge House.
“When you said your wife had gone out for a ride, you meant on a horse, yes?”
“Of course,” Colm responded from the doorwell.
Who’s this then? Tom wondered. But he didn’t have to wonder long. As soon as he saw the vehicle doors open and noted the stout thighs of
the two about to exit he knew who the visitors were. A cold stone dropped onto his heart.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Vicar, you look the worse for wear.”
“I’ve been at the Parrys’.”
“Ah.” Eric whipped a bar towel around a pint glass, and then examined it in the Church House Inn’s muted light. “Grim, that. I’d go round the twist if something like that happened to one of my lot. Speaking of which”—he directed his attention somewhere below the bar—“you, out of there. You’re not supposed to be in here.”
“I wondered what that noise was,” Tom remarked, as he watched Jack Swan, Eric’s youngest, glued to his Game Boy, emerge from between two barrels.
“He hasn’t been without that thing since Christmas. Costing me a fortune in batteries. Jack—go out back. You’ll just be underfoot in the kitchen.” Eric grunted and placed the glass on an overhead rack. “I look forward to the end of half-term.”
Tom watched Jack disappear through the swing doors and out, presumably, to the rear of the Church House Inn. At least with Miranda, he had only one child to worry about. But now, since leaving the Parrys’, his worry had spread to all the village’s young people.
“What’ll it be?” Eric asked him. “Vicar’s Ruin?”
“I’ll manage a half.”
After a well-practised pull on the pump handle, Eric deposited the frothy glass in front of Tom, then moved down the bar to serve an unfamiliar elderly couple gawping at the chalkboard for the lunch specials. Tom turned to look into the crowded saloon. Perhaps some seniors’ coach tour had landed up in Thornford. He spotted Fred Pike by himself in the inglenook staring vacantly at the kippered ceiling. He was reminded of a cheerless task: to tell Fred to add grave digging to his week’s schedule.
“How are Colm and Celia coping?” Eric’s generous belly once more appeared in front of Tom.
Twelve Drummers Drumming Page 7