Mosaic

by Caro Ramsay

  Trapped in this hellish paradise.

  No wonder Agatha killed herself.

  I found myself thinking that if Mum did appear at the funeral, I would get my freedom back. I was too young for all this. I should have had my life in front of me.

  It was a weird thing to look through my old wardrobe, past the everyday clothes to those occasional items that lie half hidden in the corner. I was looking for a black suit I knew I had somewhere. The Megan Melvick funeral suit, a jacket, a skirt and a small hat that went with it. It had been made for me when I stopped growing, one of the daft traditions of the family. If I looked at any picture of any family funeral over the years, all the members of the family are wearing the same clothes.

  It should have been in this wardrobe, protected in its plastic envelope. On a velvet coated hanger and may even have the dry-cleaning tag from the last time it was worn. That would have been Carla’s funeral, they tried to keep me away but I made a point of going, enjoying reiterating to my father all his talk about respect and duty. OK, she was not a member of the family, but I had lost somebody very special.

  I toyed with the idea of not bothering and wearing something else for Melissa’s funeral and saying to Dad that times move on and so should we.

  Yeah, as if I was going to say that to him now. I could never find the words to explain to him how this house was starting to feel toxic, squeezing the life out of anybody who lived within the walls. Oh and ask him at the same time, what’s the big secret?

  I reached my hand in, and felt the wall. The suit was not there. I moved through to one of the spare bedrooms which had two huge wardrobes, massive things in carved walnut that looked seaworthy, dating from 1845 or something, vast. If I hid in there for hide and seek I could be lost for a couple of generations.

  I opened the wardrobe doors both wide, looking at everything. The full expanse of clothes were laid open before my eyes, like a curtain coming up on a play. There they all were, the Melvick funeral fashion hanging up. Appropriate shoes underneath. We didn’t wear normal shoes at a funeral but highly polished court shoes with small polite heels, nothing zany, nothing outrageous, or fashion forward in case the empire collapsed at the sight of a stiletto.

  And then I saw it, wrapped in its polythene shroud. The green bridesmaid dress I had worn for Melissa’s wedding. The one with the headdress of twigs and flowers on our hair, I could hear Carla at my side, laughing. I pulled it from the rack, pushing the other clothes to the side as if they had no right to be intruding on its space, and I held it to my face, breathing in deep, thinking that I could see Carla in the dead space. I missed her so much.

  SIXTEEN

  Friday

  Megan

  Funerals are tense enough, more so I suppose when there has been a split in the family. I could sense the expectation in the air that my mum might put in an appearance. We were not here to celebrate the life of Melissa Melvick plus her middle names, we were here to see if my mother came back. The whole village was here to see that.

  Something ironic in the fact that Melissa was upstaged at her own funeral by somebody who wasn’t even there.

  It was very traditional, the organ was playing ‘Abide With Me’.

  I had already seen the order of service, now neatly placed on the seats, on the front was a beautiful hand-drawn pencil portrait of Melissa. It caught her wistful beauty perfectly, and the translucence of the image suggested that she was already slipping away.

  It was incredibly touching.

  I saw villagers looking at a few actors who had turned up, subtle selfies being taken to engineer a famous person in the background, I heard my dad swear under his breath and Jago told him to stay calm, it was the way of young people today. Jago glared at me. I glared back. He mouthed that he was sorry, Melissa was my sister long before she was his wife. I gave him a wistful smile, whatever, there was bigger stuff going on now.

  Today was for us.

  The hearse drew up pulled by Lorimer and Quest, people stood around, their ebony clothes at odds with the brightness of the sunshine. I swear that as soon as the back of the hearse opened, and the coffin was gracefully slid out, one single cloud drifted over the sun. Even in death she was in control.

  Ten light yellow roses, nothing vulgar and nothing like ‘Melissa’ or ‘daughter’ spelled out in dense petals.

  I felt Deborah’s hand on my back, comforting me. Then I noticed Dad standing to attention, doing the right thing.

  I noticed a car parked on the same side of the grass verge as our funeral car, Dad’s Rolls-Royce Phantom, the one that had taken Jago and Melissa as a married couple from this very church. It had been in the family from way before my sister or I were born, before Mum was born in fact. It was Dad’s favourite car and if it gave him some comfort on the day he said goodbye to his eldest child, then I had no quarrel with that.

  Jago went forward to help take the coffin on his shoulder, the crowd all moved, like a murmeration, to either side.

  Then there was a slight change to the sombre atmosphere, a tickle of excitement, a vehicle was drawing up pulling into the kerb, the mourners looked at it, then looked back at my dad.

  I watched him carefully, as he watched the strange car. The door opened, a foot appeared, a female foot in a low-heeled black patent shoe. It was exactly like the ones I had on my feet at that moment. The Melvick family shoe. Then the door opened further and a leg emerged, a black skirt. At that point, I felt my heart give a little stutter. Was it Mum coming back?

  I even opened my mouth, even took a step forward. I felt Deborah’s hand increase her pressure, warning me.

  Tears of sadness, replaced with tears of happiness. Mum was coming back.

  Then Heather’s auburn bob appeared as she rose from the passenger seat and looked at the crowd in the front of the church with a shy smile, a hand raised to apologize for being late. She dropped to say something to the driver and the car pulled away.

  The murmerers retracted, deflated.

  My father’s face retreated to its mask of calm passivity.

  I think my heart might have snapped at that moment.

  Carla

  And then of course, we were all waiting with bated breath to see if Beth would turn up at her daughter’s funeral. The whole village was pretending that they were there to pay their respects, but in reality, it was a day off work, a great bun fight and a swally, all wrapped up in the big will-she, won’t-she.

  She didn’t.

  There was a rumour that Big Barbara was running a book on it in the Oarsman. Malkie from the garage said that Babs had a vested interest, and insider information was she was shagging Ivan and the last thing he wanted was the first bloody wife showing up.

  There were rumours at the time that Ivan had done her in and buried her in the compost heap, or given her a necklace of breeze block and dumped her in a faerie pool. But he had paid to have that searched by divers, probably because he was unable to believe that any woman could have had the balls to walk out on him. We liked the angry husband theory, Ivan was so ruggedly handsome and charming, quietly in control, so I liked the idea of him going totally bonks and stabbing her with his gold-plated fountain pen. It was just my fucking luck that the one person who could say that was not so, was my own bloody mother. She was his alibi. Mum had seen Beth that morning and Ivan had been in the study with somebody called Alistair at the time. Or so he said. And so they said, ‘But money can buy an alibi as easy as it buys friends’. Mum saw her walk away, ‘As if’, she said, ‘she was going to meet somebody’.

  Heather saw her there as well, had exchanged a few words through the car window on the way in, had waved and driven past on the way out. I fancied the idea of Heather getting out with a mallet and battering Beth to death before stuffing her in the boot.

  Our minds were running riot behind Megan’s back, and sometimes to her front, as she could never hear us anyway, about her mum and sex parties and the druids in the pony club.

  But in the end, with
the passage of time, I guess some fancy man came along who decided he would take her away from this terrible weather.

  They kept things in the family, they liked their genes to be passed on and Beth had always felt she wasn’t quite up to the Melvick standard because she had not produced a son, or a daughter who wasn’t nuts.

  I wondered if my dad felt the same. I was his daughter, his family was complete, then he told me that Fishface was pregnant.

  I think he felt kind of bad about that.

  ‘So you are going to be a big sister,’ he said.

  ‘I have been that before,’ I replied.

  He nodded, sorry for his mistake and patted me on the head. He wasn’t a bad man and sometimes stuff just doesn’t pan out.

  So there was Beth Melvick, very smiley and pleasant, she wore sensible skirts and green quilted jackets. She smelled of vegetables and pony clubs, community halls and flower arranging. And there was Ivan Melvick, he was all waxed jackets and yachting, he was a tall and handsome man, getting more so as he got older. Looking back, he has been grey in all my memories. He was a bit of all right, a silver fox, with his slightly long straggling hair that he swept over his head with a very aristocratic wave of the hand, pinkie out of course. I would have shagged him myself if I had been older and if he didn’t have a bad hip. While he was kind of rugged and handsome, there was solidity about him, a sense that he could be depended on to do the right thing. I wished he’d been my dad.

  They were both good people, but like I said, sometimes stuff just doesn’t pan out.

  The real truth of it all, a truth that cannot be admitted, is that Beth was taken by the kelpies, those great mythical beasts with horses’ heads, and dragged into the Benbrae, drowned and scoffed. The Italian House had everything money could buy so why not a few monsters in the Tentor Wood as well? That was the chat in the Oarsman after hours when the home brew came out. Malkie from the garage and Minty Minto had even retraced Beth’s steps that night, away from the road and down by the side of the Benbrae. They had both ended up wet and half drowned but for different reasons.

  The kelpie theory had even appeared on a few websites.

  Even before all that, Beth’s disappearance had become a bit of a legend around here.

  What exactly did happen to her?

  Not that anybody talked to Megan or Ivan about it. Must have been tough that, knowing that your mum didn’t love you enough to hang around and wait until you grew up. At least it was my mum who tended to drag me with her when she legged it, away from whatever man was beating her up and stealing the money out her purse while she was out earning it. And there had been a lot of men. A lot of houses, spare rooms, step-dads, step-sisters, but there was nobody like Megan. I guess she was the one constant in my life by the end, trapped because there was nowhere else for her to go. She said that, more than once. She had grown up in the Italian House and had come to, well, hate it I suppose. Now Melissa had gone, she would be expected to stay here. Not grow up and get married, not leave and live another life outside the village.

  Yes, Megan now knew that her life was here, just as Beth, the incomer, had got stuck here. Beth had seen life outside that house, then arrived here as a young bride, full of hormones and delusions. Then the girls arrived and neither of them were exactly what she had hoped for.

  The only thing Beth must have worried about was which daughter was the bigger disaster. My money would be on Melissa.

  One thing was for sure though, I know because I saw it with my own eyes. As the Highland ponies pulled their sad carriage behind them into Kilaird Kirkyard, Ivan took one slow, last look up the street, his blue eyes closed slightly against the glare of the sun. He looked like an African hunter surveying the veld for a shy leopard, but we knew he was having a last look down the road, to see if his wife was going to turn up to bury their eldest daughter.

  Ivan had expected her to be there.

  Megan

  ‘The flowers are beautiful, Megan, just beautiful.’

  I knew it was Debs. Her little habit of giving me a soft tap on the upper arm, to let me know she was there and that she was going to say something. It gave me advance notice to turn around, so I didn’t miss the start of the conversation. She was thoughtful that way, Debs.

  ‘Was Melissa fond of yellow?’ she asked, her finger tentatively pointing at the pale yellow roses wound into a wreath, like the headbands we had on at her wedding, the same green threads weaving and wafting their way through the softly coloured petals. ‘It’s the same colour as her bedroom, so pretty.’

  I looked at the roses, then at Deb’s fingers, red and cold looking even in the heat. Then at her wrist, at the silver bracelet. I recognized the silver band, the complex clasp, the engraved thistles.

  ‘Your dad asked me to wear it,’ she said, seeing the look on my face. ‘I’m not sure what he meant but I didn’t want to refuse.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, hoping the shock didn’t show.

  ‘Can I give it back to you at the house, and you can put it back in the safe? I really don’t want it lying around.’

  ‘Yes, of course. What is my dad doing?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but he gave Heather a choice of pieces to wear. I thought he had told you.’

  ‘He never said.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We had been whispering, Debs and I but our caution had drawn some attention.

  ‘She was fond of colour full stop. But she did like the smell of these roses,’ I said, loudly.

  ‘Oh, are they the ones from the garden? I never noticed they were gone,’ answered Debs.

  ‘They are now. Cut, dying. Killed for their beauty. They will wither and fade now, just like Melissa. She faded with the colour of the flowers.’

  ‘Sometimes you worry me, Megan, why can’t you think like a normal person.’

  I could hear the amusement in her voice. Deep down, Debs thought I was the sane one of the family.

  ‘Shame I never knew Melissa, not well. Not when she was well, I mean,’ said Deborah, walking away from the flowers and the sad little tags. The throng of people who had gathered, I wondered what we looked like Debs and I, the sister and the hired help. ‘You should be over there with your father.’

  But I had already spotted Heather with her arm on Dad’s shoulder, as if he was an old man in need of care. She was guiding him, consoling him, looking as though she was making decisions for him, leading him this way and that, thinking she was protecting him. My dad was the strongest man on the face of this planet. He did not need the help of Heather and her empathetic smile.

  Or was I deluding myself.

  Suddenly I felt a huge rage against her, I wanted her gone.

  ‘Calm down.’ Debs must have noticed my reaction. ‘She’s very good at it, isn’t she, playing the lady of the manor.’

  ‘So she thinks,’ I answered.

  ‘I was a bit worried about him this morning, he seemed very stressed, even a little confused when I set the breakfast table. He asked me if we were having guests.’

  ‘Really?’ That chilled me, he knew we had a house full.

  ‘I don’t think he’s been sleeping.’ Debs watched as Heather took my dad’s elbow to guide him to speak to another mourner, navigating him through the crowd. ‘How does she think that looks behaving like that? He should be with you; she was your mum’s best friend.’

  ‘Maybe that’s why she thinks she can. Dad has no close relatives, neither had Mum, I guess she’s the closest we have to an aunt.’

  Carla

  Melissa’s send-off was beautifully orchestrated. The church was busy, there were even folk standing outside in the sunshine once it all got underway.

  When Baby Paul was buried, there was Mum, me and a social worker. That was it. Mum was upset afterwards but we went out for a fish tea and that cheered us up. At least we would get some sleep.

  Of course, there was a big hoo ha when the baby died. In the dirty bedsit with the knobbly wallpaper, and there was little P
aul in his cot in the corner, his face turning as blue as the paint on the skirting board. Looking back, now that I am older and have had the time and the experience of life and death to reflect, I know that they suspected Mum or me.

  After talking to Mum they just suspected me.

  There was a lot of sitting in rooms, my mum’s snot-filled face always red-eyed from crying. She appeared to be very upset. A nice woman, Joanne somebody, with glossy hair and big warm jumpers would sit beside me on the settee in the police station, asking me how much I liked Paul and did I kiss and cuddle him. Did I cuddle him hard, did I take him to bed with me and when I woke up was he cold? I answered that I didn’t like him that much as he was bloody noisy and woke me up when he cried. And that Mum cried a lot after he was born, and she cried herself to sleep at night. Some instinct of self-preservation must have clicked because I didn’t tell them that since Paul had died Mum was sleeping very soundly, she was almost content, even happy. Then they got Mum to talk to me, then Dad got involved and said, as he always did, that I wasn’t like that. Then a psychologist appeared from nowhere saying how did my dad know what I was like as he didn’t live with me? And how did we know Mum was telling the truth about me as she did live with me and would be biased?

  It went round and round, like a bluebottle at a window, busy buzzing but settling nowhere.

  And nobody was there when Paul died, nobody but me. But babies do fall asleep and some of them do not wake up.

  Round and round, going nowhere.

  Like the horses on the carousel.

  SEVENTEEN

  Megan

  After the funeral, there were a lot of people back at the house. It felt like an invasion. I knew I was now watching my father through different eyes. I headed out the back courtyard, round the corner to the wall where we used to grow the sunflowers, to what we called the orchard where there was an old swing standing amongst the cherry blossom, and the graves of our faithful dogs, still tended to, still cared for in death as they had been in life.

  And there was Deborah.