Hush

by Sara Marshall-Ball

  ‘They only put the stone up a couple of weeks ago,’ Connie said. She brushed the top of it with gloved fingers, feeling the cold deadness of the stone through the wool.

  ‘It looks nice,’ Richard offered, when Lily said nothing. ‘Did you choose it?’

  ‘“Choose” isn’t really the right word for it,’ Connie said dismissively. ‘Mama was pretty specific about what she wanted.’

  Lily crouched down in front of the stone, uncomfortably aware that she was standing directly on top of what was left of her mother. She took her glove off and traced the letters of her name with a finger, surprised at the smoothness, the perfection of the carving. ‘She was young, really, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She got to a good age, considering,’ Connie said bluntly. Lily nodded, but didn’t reply. She stood up after a moment, her knees cracking in protest. ‘Shall we find Dad?’

  ‘Okay, then.’ It was only as they began to move away that Lily realised they should have brought flowers, or something to show that they’d been here. She looked around, searching for something suitable. There was a holly bush at the edge of the churchyard, and she pulled off a sprig of holly, adorned with a vibrant red berry, and placed that on the stone. Richard, watching from a distance, nodded his approval. Connie had already vanished into the maze of stones.

  Because the graves were in no particular order, it took them a while to find Marcus’s. As she searched, Lily caught glimpses of names she recognised, like familiar faces in a crowd: the names of old neighbours, people who had attended her father’s funeral, now gone themselves. It made her feel odd: sad, to think that many of the people she remembered from her childhood had not moved on but had simply been laid to rest in her absence; and glad, that they were here, together, all in the same place.

  ‘Hey, Lily.’

  She looked up. Connie was invisible for a second, crouched down to look at something, and then she stood up and waved. ‘Over here.’

  ‘Have you found him?’

  ‘No.’ She beckoned again, and Lily picked her way across the churchyard towards her sister. She looked around for Richard but couldn’t see him; he must have gone round the side of the building.

  Connie was crouched next to a tiny headstone, about half the size of the others, and she beckoned for Lily to crouch down next to her. The words on the neighbouring headstones had been somewhat obscured by the passing of time, by lichen smothering the stone, but this stone looked brand new. William Edward Thompson, 1974–1985. Beloved son.

  ‘It was twenty-five years ago,’ Lily whispered, reaching out a hand to touch his name, then pulling it back, almost afraid.

  ‘Makes you feel old, huh?’ Connie smiled, but it was a sad smile, and there were tears in the corners of her eyes. They crouched there together, not saying anything, until Richard came upon them a minute later.

  ‘I’ve found your dad,’ he said, peering over the headstone behind them. ‘Who have you found?’

  ‘Oh, just an old friend,’ Connie said, standing up and brushing non-existent dirt from her jeans. ‘Where’s Dad?’

  Richard led them to the grave, which was near a wall at the back of the churchyard. It was under a covering of trees, so that it felt dark and gloomy, the thin light offered by the grey sky obscured by a cluster of leafless branches. The stones under the trees were more heavily marked than those out in the open, and Marcus’s headstone was almost illegible under a coating of dirt and lichen.

  ‘It’s so dirty,’ Connie murmured, brushing at it with her fingers and knocking off dark clumps of filth. ‘Didn’t Mama ever think to get it cleaned?’

  Lily didn’t reply, thinking of the day of his funeral.

  ‘It doesn’t look as though she came down here much,’ Richard volunteered, his voice quiet and solemn.

  The three of them stood in silence for a while. Richard thought of the man he’d never met, who had had such an influence on the woman he loved. He’d never asked Connie about him. Never bothered to find out if they’d been close. But he knew from rare conversations with Lily that the only stability the two of them had had in their childhood had come from him.

  After five minutes, Lily turned and walked away, back to the place where they’d jumped over the wall. Richard stayed with Connie, standing silently behind, until she drew herself out of her thoughts and realised that he was there and that Lily was gone.

  ‘I’ve never bothered,’ she said, and her voice was quiet and rough with tears. ‘I just thought – well, graves aren’t really relevant, are they? This isn’t him.’

  ‘No,’ Richard agreed. ‘It’s not him. But it’s a representation of him.’

  ‘It’s a terrible representation.’

  ‘Well, it’s dead, and he was alive. So that’s hardly surprising. But it’s supposed to signify the everlasting spirit, you know? The fact that, even though he’s gone, he still made a mark on the world that was permanent and irremovable.’

  ‘It’s not much of a mark.’ Connie gestured vaguely around them. ‘It’s the same as everyone else’s.’

  ‘It’s the only one that has his name on it.’

  Connie shrugged. ‘What’s in a name?’ There was a pause, and then they both laughed. ‘Sorry. I’ll stop it now. I just feel guilty, I guess. Because I’ve never done anything to show how much he meant to me. I never even went to his funeral.’

  Richard was surprised. ‘Really? How come?’

  ‘Lily never said?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Connie looked up, to where her sister was perched on the wall, swinging her feet and kicking the concrete lightly with her heels. ‘I was away when Dad died. I was in Germany.’

  ‘Oh.’ Richard did some quick maths, figured out how old she would have been. ‘School trip? They could have waited until you got back, couldn’t they?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t a school trip. I ran away.’ Her eyes were still on Lily, though they seemed to be focused on something else entirely.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Maybe eleven months, a year? I meant to ring, but I kept putting it off and putting it off… You assume the world is just carrying on in the same old way, when you’re wrapped up in yourself like that. Never occurs to you that things might change. When I finally got round to coming back, he was long dead and Lily had gone back to our grandparents’ house and I… Well.’

  The sentence hung between them, uncomfortably. ‘What did you do?’ Richard asked eventually.

  ‘Oh, you know. This and that. My grandparents helped me get somewhere to live. I visited Lily fairly often. And when she went to uni I moved nearby, met Nathan, and, well, the rest is history.’

  ‘Do you regret running away?’

  ‘Yes.’ Connie took a last look at her father’s headstone, and then started to walk back towards Lily. ‘Come on. The kids will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

  Lily had been looking at her feet, but she looked up when she heard them coming, and smiled. The three of them linked arms once they were on the other side of the wall, and walked home in a line, not saying a word, completely unaware that, from the corner of the churchyard, their movements were being watched.

  then

  Lily awoke on the day of her father’s funeral to find the house silent, the sky dark, the world muted and strange. It had been two weeks since the police had delivered the news, and Lily had been numb silence alongside her mother’s hysteria, a grieving shadow that blended into the darkness of the surrounding world and left her mother to it.

  The police had tried to find Connie, to no avail. The letters had included no addresses. Through the postmark they managed to trace her back to a hostel, which she had left on Boxing Day morning with no forwarding address. They had promised to keep trying, but Lily didn’t hold out much hope. Connie would be in touch when she felt like it.

  Despite that, Lily spent her time at home waiting for the phone to ring. Making silent bargains with it, as though it were a living being
that could locate Connie for her, bring her home and make everything the way it should have been. Please, she whispered, as she curled herself up in her blankets and waited for sleep to come. Please come home. Please don’t leave me here like this.

  A week earlier, Lily had gone with her mother to the funeral director’s to choose the flowers, the coffin, to set the date. Her mother had pointed at the things she wanted through her tears, and told lies about how happy they had been together. Lily had swallowed her sickness and her grief along with lukewarm tap water, and watched blurred shapes walk past the window. ‘He would have liked this one, wouldn’t he, Lils?’ her mother had said, again and again, and Lily had nodded, not seeing, not believing.

  ‘She doesn’t talk much,’ her mother had said at one point, confidingly, to the kindly woman who was handling the arrangements. ‘Not for years. She’s had a difficult childhood.’

  The woman had nodded sagely, and treated Lily with extra delicacy after that.

  When they got home there was no confiding, no sense that they were in it together, as there had been in the funeral director’s. Instead Anna retreated to her room and sobbed herself to sleep, while Lily sat in her room nearby and worried about becoming an orphan.

  Her grandparents turned up two days before the funeral. They said little, but they created a cocoon of normality around Lily. They cooked meals, insisted on washing at appropriate times and changing clothes every day. They urged her to do schoolwork and made her mother get out of bed.

  The day, when it came, felt as if it had arrived too soon, as if no time at all had passed since her father had been at home making Christmas dinner and confiding that he wasn’t happy in his marriage. Lily couldn’t quite believe they would go through with it, when a third of their remaining family was hundreds of miles away and didn’t even know what was happening, but her mother was determined to get it over with and thought that Lily was being ridiculous.

  ‘You don’t just cancel a funeral because someone can’t make it, Lily,’ she said, her voice stern and impenetrable, like it had been when Lily was very young. ‘It’s got to go ahead, whatever happens. Your father needs to be laid to rest.’

  Lily was fairly certain her father wouldn’t mind an extra couple of weeks in the mortuary, if it meant both his daughters attending his funeral, but she said nothing, her grandparents said nothing, and the day went ahead as planned.

  It was a quiet affair: only a handful of people, mostly old neighbours and work colleagues. Marcus had spent too much time at home or at work in recent years, and his circle of friends had narrowed accordingly. The service was held in the church in the old village – because, although he had never been particularly religious, he had known the reverend and would have liked to have him presiding over the service – and a cluster of people Lily hadn’t seen for years came to pay their respects. She was surprised to recognise Billy’s father, in the back row, though he didn’t look at her and she didn’t try to catch his attention. He had never shown them any warmth, since everything had happened; Lily assumed it was because he blamed them for his son’s death. She wondered if he was there because he was sorry about her father, or because he wanted the satisfaction of seeing him in the ground.

  The service lasted fifteen minutes, and was accompanied all the way through by the muffled sobbing of her mother. When they picked up the coffin to carry it outside, Anna looked as though she might faint with grief; but she collected herself in time to be the first to walk behind it. Lily followed at a slower pace, delaying seeing the grave.

  It was deep, and somehow undignified: a shovel still sat to one side, next to a tree. The coffin was lowered at angles, first one side, then the other, the bearers glaring at each other from each side of the grave as they tried and failed to get their timing right. The gleaming wooden box hit the ground right side first, and Lily imagined Marcus being jostled from side to side, his elbows bouncing off the wood as his arms were clasped over his stomach, and she wanted to howl against the indignity of it, an indignity that her father of all people did not deserve.

  She and her mother stood in front of everyone, and she followed her mother’s movements as she threw dirt on the coffin, stepped away, made room for the gravediggers to start filling in the grave. It was a cold day, and it began to rain as they stood there. She heard one of the gravediggers mumble something about getting this over with before the rain really hit, and she felt sick with shame. She knew, then, that her mother had truly never loved her father; if she had loved him, she would have given him a better end than this.

  All day, Lily watched out of the corner of her eye for Connie to appear, expecting her to show up like a long-lost heroine in a film, breezing in at the last minute and saving the day. But she never came, and when Marcus’s parents went home later that evening, leaving Lily and her mother exhausted with each other and with everything else, there was no one to break the silence and make the day feel as though it had been worth something.

  now

  Richard didn’t go back to work until the fifth of January. The pub was always quiet over Christmas, Rosa had assured him – even on New Year’s Eve they barely had more than their usual Saturday night crowd – and he had taken the time gratefully, without argument. It had been less than a month since Lily had come home from the hospital, and she still didn’t seem quite right, sleeping for long periods of time and spending days on end sitting up in her old bedroom. She had briefly seemed to brighten over Christmas, but the second everyone had left she had retreated back into herself, and Richard felt as if he was unable to reach her.

  He’d considered not going back to work, but Lily had insisted, in her quiet way: she was fine, and there was no point him sitting around all day babysitting someone who was fine. So here he was, propping up the bar, half-heartedly skimming the newspapers while he watched two of the oldest regulars playing darts.

  ‘Richard?’ Rosa’s voice carried down the stairs, along with the faint thumping of the radio. ‘Can you come up here a sec?’

  Richard set aside his newspaper and made his way upstairs. Rosa sat on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. The contents of the kitchen cupboards were piled around her, and she was holding a notepad, apparently checking items off a list. She glanced up when he appeared in the doorway. ‘Is it busy downstairs?’

  ‘Horrendously.’ He grinned. ‘John and Jim have got me run ragged.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Can you do me a favour?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Ed was supposed to be bringing over some veg out of his garden for me, but he hasn’t turned up and he’s not picking up the phone – could you nip over and see if he’s there?’

  Richard shrugged. ‘Sure. But, if he’s in, wouldn’t he pick up the phone?’

  Rosa laughed. ‘Unlikely. He turns the ringer off most of the time so that he doesn’t get disturbed.’

  ‘Sensible man.’ Richard grinned. ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘It’s just a few minutes up the road. Right by your place, actually. Are you sure you don’t mind? We can leave the old boys in charge for a few minutes.’

  ‘Of course. That’s fine.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a lifesaver.’ She scribbled something on the notepad, then ripped it off and held it out to him. ‘That’s the address. He should be in – he’s always about at this time of day.’

  Richard left, with a nod to ‘the old boys’, who were left in charge often enough that they knew what to do. It was a relief to step outside. The inside of the pub was always dim, but outside all was bright and clear; there had been rain earlier, but the clouds had dispersed and the winter sun was dazzlingly reflective on the watery ground.

  He walked slowly through the village, knowing Rosa wouldn’t mind him taking his time. Considered dropping in on Lily, but he didn’t want to crowd her. And a part of him was worried that he might find her back in the cellar. Searching for something that had nothing to do with him.

  Ed’s house was only two s
treets from theirs, his garden backing on to the same woods, at the end of a narrow, circular close where all the houses looked the same. There was no one around. Richard walked down the front path, eyes on the darkened windows, hoping to see Ed’s face appear behind the glass. He could feel eyes on him, twitching curtains, but could see no one.

  He rang the doorbell, and heard a shrill, high-pitched ringing on the other side of the door. There was no answering thunder of footsteps down the stairs, or blurry features in the glass panel. He rang again, holding it for longer. Still no answer.

  He was about to leave when he noticed that the gate at the side of the house was open: a passageway led round the back. Presumably if Ed was in the garden he’d be out of range of the doorbell. It couldn’t hurt to take a look.

  He walked down the passage. He realised he was tiptoeing, and forced himself to place his feet normally on the ground, feeling ridiculous. Something about the absence of noise, of people, was making him feel jumpy and strange. But that was no reason to start acting like a burglar.

  The garden was much smaller than theirs, the woodland fenced off behind it, but it was still large by Richard’s city-bred standards. There were piles of logs to one side, poking out from beneath a tarpaulin. A small stretch of lawn was occupied by a plastic garden chair, spotted with raindrops. The rest of the garden seemed to be one large vegetable patch.

  There was a shed at the far end, with its door ajar. If Ed was around, that was presumably where he’d be. Richard picked his way through the vegetable patch on the narrow dirt pathway and knocked lightly on the open door.

  ‘Yep?’ Ed didn’t sound even slightly surprised that someone would be knocking on the door of his shed. Richard walked in.

  It was larger than it looked from the outside, and mostly taken up with tools that hung from every available bit of wall space. But there was an armchair, and that was where Ed sat, sifting through a tub of seeds.

  ‘Ah, Richard. Good to see you. How’s it going?’