Fireside Gothic

by Andrew Taylor

  So you might say that I had everything I wanted. But somehow it turned out to be not quite what I wanted after all.

  I never went back. What would have been the point? My parents came home a year later. When we met again, they didn’t talk about what happened and nor did I, though once, years later, my mother made some reference to my stay at the vicarage – ‘after you were ill’.

  But I wasn’t ill. It was Faraday who was ill, not me.

  I never saw Faraday again, though there was a time in the 1920s when I wished I could have talked to him about all this: he would have been the one person who might have understood, who might have known more. But Faraday went missing in action at the Third Battle of Ypres in September 1917. His body was never found.

  I am quite aware that everything that happened that night is explicable in a perfectly straightforward way. Two silly schoolboys went into the Cathedral by night for a prank and climbed part of the way up the west tower before compounding their folly by plunging themselves into darkness. The elderly gentleman whose hospitality they had abused came to rescue them. He was not in the best of health. Climbing the tower stairs in a state of acute anxiety brought on a heart attack, which led him to fall – though the doctor was not able to tell whether it was the heart attack or the fall that actually killed him. The younger boy was running a fever at the time, which may have been some excuse for his irresponsible behaviour. But there was no excuse for the behaviour of the older boy.

  All this is true. But it leaves out so much. We went up the west tower because of the story of Mr Goldsworthy: because of his anthem for the bells that were never rung, and because of his dying fall from the ringing chamber.

  La-la-la-la. We went up the tower because of lost notes that only Faraday heard.

  Was Mordred in the Cathedral that night? Was it he who brushed against me on the tower stairs and left the south porch when I did? Did Faraday see something when we were climbing the stairs and, later, just before Mr Ratcliffe had his seizure? After the ratting at Angel Farm, did I really glimpse a man in the arcade passageway when we came through the Cathedral?

  Finally, can I trust my own memory?

  La-la-la-la.

  Lost notes and broken melodies. Sometimes, when I wake up suddenly, I am full of happiness. I know that I have heard in a dream I can no longer remember those notes that Faraday heard and tried to sing to me in his cracked voice. But I don’t understand music. And I never remember my dreams.

  THE LEPER HOUSE

  1

  Somewhere along the way, Mary mislaid her religion. The funeral was a humanist affair in a chapel, or whatever they call it, attached to a crematorium. There must have been nearly two hundred mourners. She had been only thirty-eight when she died, which is why her death touched so many lives – and why there was a sense of outrage in the air, rather than resignation.

  Alan himself acted as master of ceremonies. He was used to public speaking and chairing meetings – he was the headmaster of a school about fifteen miles from Norwich. He kept his emotions as firmly in check as the timing.

  ‘How brave,’ whispered one of my neighbours.

  ‘He’s bearing up wonderfully,’ said a friend. ‘Especially when you think—’

  ‘He has to be brave for the children.’

  The friend nodded. ‘At least her poor parents are dead.’

  The coffin was at the end of the room. It was one of those environmentally friendly ones, designed to make a posthumous statement of faith in the possibility of a greener world to come, as it slid towards its complete destruction in the furnace. It had nothing to do with the Mary I remembered most vividly: the sideways glances, the grazed knees and the shrill giggles.

  Alan took us through Mary’s life at a brisk pace – we had a time slot at the crematorium, and death waits for no one. He described our parents – a nurse and an estate agent, respectively – and the loving upbringing they had given her. He talked about her pet rabbit, Matilda, and our old dog, who recognized her step even when he was old and blind. (Alan did not mention the dog’s incontinence and appallingly bad breath.) He talked about their meeting at university, the rocky road of their romance and the happy years of their marriage. He waxed lyrical about the dedication she had brought to her career as a primary teacher and the devotion her pupils gave her in return. Finally, by way of peroration, he talked of their children, Matthew and Alice, as the crowning joys of her life.

  The children were sitting in the front row. I had caught a glimpse of them as they came in. They both looked like Alan, poor kids, all long nose and small chin; there was not a trace of Mary. Maybe that was no bad thing.

  What else? We had two readings, one by a teacher colleague of Mary’s (something vaguely uplifting from Kahlil Gibran) and another by an old boyfriend whose face was faintly familiar (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways …’). We sang, or mouthed, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, on the tacit understanding that it had somehow been purged of its religious connotations. Then the curtains parted and the coffin slid away into the industrial processing of death.

  At no point did Alan mention me. Nor did he meet my eyes. I had been erased from the story of Mary’s life. I was invisible.

  There was an order of service, a little booklet with the verses of ‘Jerusalem’ and the texts of the readings. On the front was a vignetted photograph of Mary, which I looked at while the coffin slid between the curtains to the accompaniment of Robbie Williams’s ‘Angels’.

  The picture must have been taken a year or so earlier. She was smiling at the camera. The light caught the angles of her face – the high cheekbones, the dark eyebrows, the full lower lip; my features as well. Her hair covered most of her forehead, so I couldn’t see the scar. Something about the photo suggested that she had been one of a group – a birthday celebration, perhaps, or a reunion. She looked older than she was in my memory. Happier, too.

  Everyone, Alan said just before we left, was welcome to join the family for a cup of tea and a sandwich in the village hall, which was two miles away.

  We filed out. There was an unspoken etiquette about this – the family went first, for they were at the top of the hierarchy of grief. Then came the close friends, I guessed, then the colleagues from work. Finally, the people in the back rows went outside. People who hadn’t known her well. People who were merely curious. People like me, the ghosts from Mary’s past.

  It was still raining. The wind had risen and the trees between the chapel and the car park were swaying and rustling. The mourners of the next cremation were already arriving and the car park was crowded. Two or three of us paused, waiting to let a car go by.

  ‘I wonder who they’ve got to do the sandwiches,’ said a woman at my elbow, one of the pair who had been sitting in the row in front of me. ‘I hope it’s Harrell’s.’

  ‘Or Thurston’s.’ Her friend lowered her voice. ‘You wouldn’t have guessed, would you?’

  ‘That it was …?’

  ‘Of course, they couldn’t be sure, so they said it was an accident. For the family’s sake. You can’t blame them, can you?’

  They moved away. I hesitated near the exit road. A queue of cars inched towards the main road. A silver Renault paused a few feet away. I glanced at the driver’s window and saw Alan looking up at me. The girl was beside him in the front, the boy was in the back.

  Alan didn’t lower the window. His face was perfectly blank. I raised my hand in a tentative salute. His head turned away. Perhaps I really was invisible. The queue rolled forward.

  I went back to my own car, sat behind the wheel and stared at the blurred windscreen. What had I expected? A quiet reconciliation over Mary’s body? A tacit agreement that her death must bring us all together?

  I became aware that I had something in my hands. I looked down at my lap. I was still holding the order of service. Quite unconsciously, I had rolled it into a cylinder and squeezed it out of shape.

  I unrolled the booklet and s
moothed it out on my thigh. As it happened, it was face down. There was another photograph on the back, a sort of companion piece to the one on the front.

  This one was also a vignette taken from a larger image. It was in black and white and better quality than the one on the front. It showed the Mary I remembered best, her hair scraped back in a ponytail from her forehead. If you’d seen her from the front in those days, you’d have thought she was a boy.

  Behind her was part of a wall and the sill of a sash window. I knew with the sharp certainty of childhood memory that she had been standing outside the dining room window, where my father often took photographs of us.

  Mary was grinning. There was a lot of detail in the photograph. I could even make out the scar on her forehead, a squarish indentation, paler than the surrounding skin. She had gashed her head when she fell off the roof of the garden shed.

  That hadn’t been an accident. Nor, it seemed, had her death.

  2

  I hadn’t seen Mary for thirteen years – not since our mother’s final illness and the aftermath of her death. In the ten years before that, she and I had met perhaps half a dozen times, and always in some way because of our parents. Even on that subject, if it was possible for us to disagree, we generally found a way, whether it was the best retirement flat, the best form of medical treatment or even how much milk to put in Mother’s tea.

  Both of us knew that the real problem lay far deeper than this, in our shared childhood. Mary was more than four years younger than me. She said once that I’d resented her from the moment she was born, purely because she drained our parents’ attention away from me. Quite simply, she said, I was jealous.

  It’s true that four years is a big age gap between children. When we were young, Mary never seemed quite real to me – more like an animated toy I had no desire to play with. A toy that was forever too young for me. Forever unwanted.

  There is no doubt that I was unkind to her, on occasions cruel. I did the things that older brothers do to their sisters. I put a spider in her breakfast cereal and a frog in her bed. I hid one of her school shoes, which made her late for assembly and caused her to get a detention. And I pushed her off the shed roof. That’s what caused the little scar on her forehead. She had hit her head on a nail that protruded slightly from the post that supported the washing line.

  ‘I’ll get you!’ she wailed, blood dripping down her face. ‘One day when I’m bigger, I swear it! I hate you!’

  It must have been a month or two after that my father took the photograph.

  I had learned that Mary was dying about three weeks earlier. Neither she nor Alan told me. It was my aunt, my mother’s younger sister, who had married a sergeant in the USAAF and gone to live in Phoenix, Arizona. Mary had emailed her with the news.

  My aunt knew of the rift between us, but, even so, she assumed I would have heard about something so momentous. She mentioned it when we were talking on Skype.

  ‘Pancreatic cancer,’ she said. ‘There are secondaries all over the place – there’s nothing they can do. It could be any time, Alan said.’

  She began to cry and I saw the tears trickling down her cheek four thousand miles away.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, and blew her nose. ‘I’m better now.’

  I phoned them. First I talked to Mary’s boy, my nephew, Matthew, who appeared not to know who I was. Perhaps he didn’t. He fetched his father.

  ‘Yes,’ Alan said. ‘She is dying. No, she doesn’t want to see you and, to be honest, nor do the rest of us. She says you’ve done enough harm.’

  He cut the connection. I went online immediately and googled the hospitals within a twenty-mile radius of her home. I tried them all, but none of them had Mary among their patients.

  The next day I widened the search, concentrating on the big hospitals. I found Mary at last in Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. I telephoned the ward and, when I said I was her brother, they put me through to the room, telling me not to talk for long and not to tire her.

  But Alan picked up the phone.

  ‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Can’t you leave her in peace?’

  What happened after Mother died was not my fault. Her estate consisted of the bungalow in Norwich, about £50,000 in savings and a motley collection of shares inherited from my father and an uncle with a taste for dabbling on the stock exchange.

  Alan wanted the bungalow for his own father, who was coming down to live with them. The valuation of the shares and the savings was roughly equivalent to that of the bungalow and its contents, so it seemed obvious that I should have the money and Mary the house.

  The last time I saw Mary was when we met to discuss the division of the estate. It wasn’t a cordial meeting – we were never comfortable together – but it was perfectly amicable and businesslike.

  Four months after the distribution of the estate, a small, almost moribund confectionery company in the Midlands was taken over by a multinational conglomerate that wanted two of its products for their own. I had inherited a block of shares in the confectionery company. The sale made their worth rocket to five or six times their previous value.

  Mary and Alan were convinced I had masterminded the whole thing, that I had had advance knowledge of the company sale. I offered them half of the profit, although I had no obligation to do so. They turned it down.

  It wasn’t rational. Mary preferred to believe a lie and to be out of pocket because of it. But of course, it wasn’t about the money at all. It was about the spider in her cereal and the frog in her bed. It was about the shed roof and the nail.

  I didn’t see Mary again. But I did hear from her. Four days after my abortive attempt to phone her at Addenbrooke’s, my mobile bleeped.

  I was alone in the house – Beth, my wife, was in New York. When the text arrived, I was chopping broccoli on the kitchen counter and half-listening to a resolutely unfunny comedy programme on the radio.

  Knife in hand, I glanced at the phone, which was by the chopping board. The screen had lit up and there was a message from a mobile number I didn’t recognize:

  Go away. I hate you.

  3

  By the time I left the crematorium, everyone else had gone and the cars for someone else’s funeral had refilled the car park.

  I had no desire to join them in the village hall, so I set off for home – or rather, towards Ipswich, where I had booked a room in a Travelodge for the night. I had an appointment nearby with a client first thing in the morning, and afterwards I planned to drive back to London.

  That was the idea. But the journey went wrong from the start. There were roadworks and I took several wrong turns. My mind was on Mary, not navigation, and I managed to get myself thoroughly lost.

  By now it was the provincial equivalent of rush hour. I joined a line of traffic crawling behind a mechanical digger a hundred yards ahead. Darkness fell, the light leaching slowly from the pale grey dome of the East Anglian sky. The rain grew steadily heavier. After nearly an hour we passed a junction with another main road and the digger turned aside. But afterwards the traffic moved almost as slowly as ever.

  It was seven o’clock before I found myself on the A12, which runs roughly parallel with the coast down to Ipswich. I was miles out of my way. How I had got there, I have no idea. I soon discovered that the A12 is not a fast road. You are at the mercy of whatever lies ahead of you.

  A sign loomed up by the side of the road: Put British Pork on Your Fork.

  The headlights of passing vehicles swept over the field beside the sign. The beams revealed hundreds of arcs made of corrugated iron standing in a sea of mud.

  It was a pig farm. I had seen several of them on the drive up to Norwich in the morning. It looked like a prison camp, but perhaps, compared to the solitude and confinement of a traditional sty, it was a porcine paradise.

  On the other hand, some or possibly all of the pigs had broken out of paradise. The headlights ahead picked out at least half a dozen of them in the middle of the road and others rootli
ng on the grass verges. The stream of cars was slowing. Then it stopped.

  For a minute or two I sat there, watching the wipers slapping to and fro across the windscreen. No traffic was coming from the opposite direction. When she was very small, Mary had had a thing about pigs. She had pigs on her wallpaper, pigs on her duvet, pigs on her favourite mug. I used to call her ‘Piggy’ and make grunting noises, which enraged her – partly, I think now, because she liked pigs so much that she almost wanted to be one.

  Two drivers in the queue ahead had left their cars and were discussing the hold-up. I grabbed my umbrella and went to join them.

  ‘It’s at least half a mile solid up there,’ one of them told me with gloomy pride. ‘Them bloody pigs are all over the shop. They made an artic jackknife right across the road. That’s why nothing’s bloody getting through.’

  The other one was looking ahead, peering through the rain. ‘They’re turning off up there.’

  He was right. Ahead of us, cars were peeling away one by one from the main road and turning left.

  ‘Seawick Road,’ said the first one. ‘You can cut through that way – work your way back to the A12 a mile or two south.’

  A car overtook us, followed by a second and a third. They all turned left. Other drivers had had the same idea.

  The second man said, ‘Could be hours before they clear this lot. Where are the police when you want them?’

  ‘I ain’t waiting around for them. I’m late for tea already and it’s my eldest’s birthday.’

  They went back to their cars, and so did I. When they pulled out of the line, I joined them. There’s nothing so tedious as waiting in a queue. The first man was a local and clearly knew the way. All I had to do was follow. Besides, I had a satnav program on my phone, so, if the worst came to the worst, I could always find my own way back to the A12.