Twelve Drummers Drumming

by C. C. Benison

  But now—at this moment—it was being reawakened by the presence of a coffin containing a young woman who, like Lisbeth, had been taken suddenly and for no apparent reason. He recalled the disquieting sensation in Bristol of having fallen out of love with God and, worse, the sensation that God had fallen out of love with him, and wanting desperately to rekindle the romance. He had learned since then in prayer and contemplation that faith is always only a reaching towards, an approximation.

  “Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart.” Canon Holdsworth had quoted Rilke in a letter to him sent in the days after Lisbeth’s death. “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

  As he spoke the final words of the passage from John 14, he glanced at Colm Parry, who was—as he had been since Revelation Choir had sung the first hymn, “Be Still, My Soul,” with such sweet gentleness—weeping profusely, swabbing his tears in a handkerchief as large as a dinner napkin. As Julia played the first notes of “I Surrender,” Tom fought back his own tears.

  At least, he thought, desperate to distract himself once again, the choir had been an inspired choice, and he let himself sway softly to its rhythms. How Lisbeth, a stalwart of the Cambridge Chorale, would have loved to hear these powerful, resonant voices. And how delicious she would have found this nontraditional music filling an old Norman church in the heart of the West Country. His congregation was captured by the spectacle. No one was fidgeting, though he suspected some were ruminating darkly on unorthodoxy. Only Oona remained utterly impassive, even as the organ’s final note faded. As he began the words to Psalm 23, he felt his throat catch, as a wave of empathy seemed to wash over the assembled and surge towards him. He steadied himself by glancing again at her and permitting himself a new thought: What we have here is the Madame Tussaud’s version of Oona Blanc, waxen and surely imperfect.

  “Surely goodness and loving mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” he ended, and signalled to Mitsuko to come to the lectern to read another passage from the Gospels.

  Though tribute to the deceased would normally be made after the opening prayer, Tom had decided to weave his remarks into the sermon. He had completed it only hours before, scribbling in a pad in bed, as Madrun was thrashing away at her typewriter with her daily letter to her mother, then transferring his notes to the computer downstairs in his study, as the rising sun cast new bars of light over the red Holbein carpet. If Sybella had been unknown to him, he would have woven a narrative based solely on the remarks of others, not always a satisfying exercise, as he felt at times like a mere synthesiser of information. But he had come to know Sybella a little. It saddened him profoundly that his first thoughts were not as kind as he wished they might be. She was a little cunning—was she not? She had a history of provocations, among them humiliating the naïve Charlie Pike, pestering the reclusive Sebastian John, and goading the incendiary Liam Drewe. Had there been others, here or in London? Her flirtation with Tom two months ago at the Waterside had been childish, and when he had seen her in the village afterwards, and more lately when she’d started coming to church, her response to his cheery hello was invariably a kind of smirk, as if exchanging greetings with the vicar was utterly uncool or too too ironic. She was a spikey little fish out of water, landed on Thornford’s banks with tabloid headlines trailing after her, an object of curiosity that soon settled into indifference. But someone, for some reason, had harboured hostility—murderous hostility—towards her.

  Or was her death, as the police reckoned with Lisbeth, the triteness of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

  Tom had paused here in his ruminations, stroking Powell, who had landed on his bed, mercifully without an offering of some dead rodent. It was the same unanswered question that plagued him about Lisbeth: Had someone harboured so deep a hostility towards her—or towards both of them—that he decided to take her life in the very place, the church, to which Tom dedicated long hours? Or was it, after all, as the trail grew cold and scraps of evidence proved elusive, a tragic conjunction of events: Lisbeth stumbling into a drug deal in progress; Lisbeth accosted by some crazed individual, desperate for what money she had in her purse, grabbing, too, the doll which was to be Miranda’s birthday present. Would he ever know?

  He had flicked a glance at the bedside clock next to the curate’s egg when Madrun began her descent to the kitchen, and refocused on Sybella. Cunning she might have been, but at heart he knew she was really little more than a celebrity edition of that universal creature—the troubled teenager. How many wealthy households with warring, extravagant, narcissistic parents produced children of becoming modesty and fixed life-purpose? Few, he expected. Sybella was more casualty than cause. Her life had been mostly prologue. There was a first-chapter glimmer of the woman she might have become, and this is what he would present to the congregated mourners: that Sybella appeared to have—no, had—put much of her old life behind her, with the help of her father, who himself had banished his demons and found health and peace in Thornford. Tom had paused, imagining Sybella’s mother’s reaction to this. Oona, by all accounts, was quite attached to her demons, so praise for Colm’s victory might need tempering. Yet it was Colm—who had battled first for custody; then, when Sybella had passed into legal adulthood, had fought to get her into treatment; then had beseeched her to live with him in the countryside—who had helped straighten out his daughter’s zigzag path. In Thornford, she had met Mitsuko, who had helped her discover her talent as an artist.

  What could he say about Oona’s influence, especially when she would be there in a front pew?

  Now, as Mitsuko reached the last verse of the Gospel, he looked over at Oona. Her companion held the funeral leaflet open for both of them, but Oona appeared oblivious, transfixed by some pattern in the rood screen, inasmuch as one could tell what she was looking at through black lenses. Though she had curled to her feet with the rest of the congregation at the appropriate moments, she made no movement—no calf stretch, no nose twitch. Well, of course! Her nerve endings were likely becalmed with some cocktail of the finer pharmacological distillations (which his own quack had dangled before him in Bristol) judiciously leavened with something amusing from the street. He asked himself, as he’d asked his doctor: What happens when the drugs wear off? In Oona’s case, given her history, he had an inkling.

  As he mounted the pulpit, aware of the delicacy of the duty before him, the words of his text, Psalm 46—God is our refuge and our strength—implanted in his mind, he recalled the anchors to his remarks: that courageous adults are sometimes born of reckless teenagers and that finer natures are sometimes revealed in small acts. Miranda’s tale of Sybella taking Emily to Westways for Alastair to patch up her bee sting had been central to this. Of these things he would speak, but he would not praise Thornford’s role in Sybella’s healing, for he had to face the brutal truth that no matter how perfidious her mother’s influence had been, if Sybella had stayed in bad old London, she’d be alive, wouldn’t she?

  The bells of St. Nicholas’s began their dolorous peal as six young men carried Sybella’s flower-draped casket through the cool shadow of the south porch into the blazing noon sun of the churchyard. Tom felt the light blast his eyes, and for a feverish moment the grass and trees flared a sickly cellophane lime and the near-cloudless sky retreated into an inky blue. The feeling of discombobulation, of time being out of joint, did not leave him as he preceded the coffin past the ancient markers along the path and down the steps to the bottom terrace to the plot beside Ned Skynner’s. He wondered if he was coming down with something, perhaps a bug picked up in that soup of infection, the hospital, during his visit to Colonel Northmore. Or perhaps it was having musical accompaniment at a committal t
hat lent the scene a faintly surreal quality: Revelation Choir followed behind the coffin, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” majestic and mournful, drifting in and out of the tombstones and rising to startle the rooks in the trees. Or perhaps it was the memory of having followed this path barely two days before, on the heels of Fred Pike, to witness the horror of Peter Kinsey’s hand, like a dead fish, flopped out of the red soil. He noted with dismay as he took his place at the foot of the grave that the police—or Fred—had left things in less than pristine condition. Having been reopened then resealed, Ned’s grave looked like a lumpy misshapen loaf of earth. Tom was surprised Fred hadn’t shaped and smoothed it, and he would have to have him do so before Karla caught sight. He glanced about to see if she had inserted herself into the procession. She had. Indeed, quite a number of the congregation followed, though family and friends only was the custom at a committal. Villagers, visitors—mourners many, curious some—dispersed themselves among the gravestones, seeking purchase on thin strips of grass and along the high stone wall that enclosed the churchyard. Most moved almost reflexively to flank the Parrys on one side of the grave, leaving Oona and her companion solitary figures on the other, their shadows foreshortened in the midday sun.

  The pallbearers brought Sybella’s coffin to the lip of the grave at the moment the choir, as if by a miracle of timing, drew out the last bittersweet note. The silence that followed seemed naked, raw. Only a swan, beating its wings against the waters of the millpond, preparing to soar in short flight, broke the preternatural calm. Tom inhaled the pungent miasma of the damp earth. Then he began the familiar words:

  “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy …” As he spoke he sensed a sudden motion to his left. Oona was removing her sunglasses, though if there was any time for eye protection, it was now, in the blazing sun. “Slow to anger and of great goodness,” he continued, lifting his eyes from his text to glance her way, momentarily stunned at the sight of her eyes. They were not, as he might have expected, red-rimmed with the effect of weeping, but empurpled like bruised fruit. More arresting than this were her pupils, needle sharp and dangerous. “Slow to anger and of great goodness,” he repeated, hastily seeking the comfort of the page, yet aware of his skin prickling, as if he could feel a storm rising on the edge of the moors. “As a father is tender towards his children, so is the Lord tender to those—”

  But he was stopped by a sudden cry. Her spike heels had embedded themselves in the grass, and Oona pitched dangerously towards the grave. Her companion lunged to right her, and did so—to the collective gasp of the assembled—but she instead thrashed against his grip with a miraculous strength for one so thin, which sent him stumbling backwards towards the base of the beech tree. “Cara!” he shouted, as he tumbled over an exposed root. But his exit was nothing compared to the sight of Oona, shoeless, her imprisoning skirt hiked up to her hips, stalking the perimeter of the grave, scattering startled mourners, a blazing stare directed at Colm, whose face quickly went through a panoply of emotions—surprise, concern, denial, then anger—as he turned in a goalkeeper’s stance to shield Celia and Declan.

  “Father tender towards his children!” Oona spat as she advanced, and everyone waited with suspended breath for Colm to defend against the rain of blows made famous in Oona Blanc vs. various assistants tallied by tabloid press court reporters.

  But Tom’s attention was diverted from the impending brawl by another commotion. Some man, young, lithe, exceptionally tall, encumbered by a leather bag strapped to his shoulder, was cutting a swath through the mourners, camera at the ready, sending people spinning out of his way. One of the choir members snatched at the cameraman’s bag, growling deeply, but without success. Unthinkingly, Tom snapped shut his prayer book and dashed towards Colm, unsure whether he intended to block the stranger from his intrusive mission or intercede with the flailing Oona. But it was too late. As the camera flashed in a staccato of mechanical shrieks and the crowd gasped in astonishment, Oona swung an open hand—a left hand—against her former husband, who had unwisely raised the wrong arm in defence. But in the melee that followed, it wasn’t Oona or Colm, Celia or the nameless Italian, or even Declan, who was even more aggressive than he’d been in the village hall, that remained seared in Tom’s memory. It was something glimpsed through an opening in the flailing limbs, and it was immediately teasing and troubling. Tom didn’t believe in such things. In fact, he held out firmly against necromancy in all its forms. But, really, he couldn’t help it: He felt as though he had seen a ghost.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Dora is Thornford’s funeral fairy,” Venice Daintrey confided, sidling next to Tom, who was hesitating over a casserole dish of considerable proportions, the grey gelatinous surface of its offering punctuated by gobs of some darker material, possibly meat. “Although I can’t think how that got on the table. I daresay someone’s made a mistake in the kitchen.”

  Tom surveyed the expanse of white linen, down which he’d trundled, stopping at the stations of the nosh, adding cold ham, pasta salad, and the inevitable sausage rolls to his plate, mindful of restraint in his helpings (gusto being unseemly at a funeral reception), though he couldn’t help noting that Venice had heaped her plate as if fuelling for battle. The food—hot and cold, savoury and sweet—was lavish and faultless. So, too, was the presentation. It was a pageant of white china, crystal, and silver, set on a three-pedestal dining table in an exquisitely proportioned room designed by Nash in the early nineteenth century and respectfully updated in the early twenty-first as a paean to harmony and serenity. Dora Speke’s casserole dish, the green shade of mushy peas garlanded with a mimsy pattern of orange and yellow flowers, stood out like a blister.

  “Be brave, Vicar,” Florence Daintrey murmured throatily, leaning around her sister-in-law to address him.

  Tom lifted a scalloped serving spoon and pierced the casserole’s shiny skin, the first guest to do so, though he had hardly been the first at the queue. He was familiar with funeral fairies, women aroused to action by the news of death, no matter how remote the acquaintance. Their contribution usually arrived in the form of a casserole; their motive (he recognised this thought as uncharitable, if nonetheless true) often id-ridden eagerness to share the spotlight.

  “Perhaps you should have Dr. Hennis look at that eye,” Florence added.

  “It’s nothing.” Tom dabbed at the tender flesh with his free hand, careful not to stick his fork into his eye, adding injury to insult. “It’ll go away.”

  “She ought to be arrested.”

  “It really wasn’t Oona’s fault.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I got in the way of her elbow.”

  Florence shot him a withering glance.

  “I’m not making excuses. I was trying to stop Oona pitching into the grave when her elbow—”

  “Oh.” Venice cut him off with a disappointed frown. “Flo and I were rather speculating in the car coming up. None of us could see properly in the churchyard, being at the back.”

  Tom watched a forkful of salad pass Venice’s lips. “I expect there’ll be pictures in the papers—at least one of the papers.”

  “I suppose he was a paparazzi, then.”

  “A paparazzo, I think, Ven.”

  “There’ll be a run on the newsagents tomorrow morning,” Venice continued, ignoring her sister-in-law, her eyes scanning the room. “Perhaps I should get an order in with Karla. I wonder if she’s thought to order extra copies. You wouldn’t happen to know which paper he was with, would you, Vicar?”

  “No, I would not,” Tom replied dryly. One doesn’t stop to question a freight train when it’s barrelling towards you. The photographer had only a few seconds of weaving and bobbing around Colm and Oona as the latter released a farrago of post-slap invective against her ex-husband for dragging their daughter to this godforsaken village before the choir’s basso profundo, as big as Lenny Henry, charged up and grabbed his camera arm with a meaty hand. This spun Oona towards the grave ed
ge. Tom lunged to stop her fall, but as she struggled to right herself, flapping her arms like a startled pigeon, her right elbow smacked into Tom’s left eye. Only the Italian, who had scrambled back to his feet, managed to catch Oona before she tumbled onto the coffin. She spun into his arms and released a howl of grief so unrestrained everyone scattered among the gravestones was stunned into embarrassed silence. It was between the duck and the lunge, before the poke in the eye, through the arabesque of twisting arms, that Tom’s vision was gripped by a phantom presence. He could put a name to it now, but it was absolutely bloody ridiculous to do so. Sybella was in a coffin; she wasn’t wandering spectrally about the churchyard witnessing her own undignified committal. If he’d had this hallucination after Oona’s elbow met his eyeball, he’d have credited it to retinal shock. But as it happened before …

  “Never mind.” Venice interrupted his thoughts, waving a fork in the general direction of a knot of people visible in the next room gathered by a white grand piano. “I’ve spotted Karla. I shall go have a word with her.”

  Tom watched her waddle across the Aubusson and reflected on Colm’s munificence in having the whole village—well, nearly—up to his home, to mingle among family—a number seemed to share Colm’s sloped nose—and London friends. At the gate to Thornridge House, some minder Colm had hired had vetted the out-of-town crowd, and PCSO White and some constable Tom had never seen before vetted the locals, to ensure no unwelcome intrusions as there had been in the churchyard. He suspected many villagers had never been inside Thornridge House. They were deferential and doleful, as would be expected at a funeral reception at the Big House, but they were also avid with curiosity. He could see it in the roving eyes, sidelong glances, and fingers slinking out to stroke some bit of fabric. He spotted Julia, framed in the French windows, looking at him with some intensity over the rim of a glass of sherry. He had a prickly sensation that she had been doing so for some time. He excused himself to Florence and went over.