by Nicci French
I stole a banana from the fruit bowl and escaped outside again with my coffee. The mist was dispersing in the hollows. The sky was blue now and it was barely eight o’clock. It was going to be a bright day, though very cold, and my overalls weren’t quite warm enough.
I suppose that most of us have a landscape of the mind, the one that we see when we close our eyes, and this rolling patchwork of fields and woods was mine. Every tree, every path, every fence had associations which blended together in a mulch of memories from long summer weeks, and briefer weekends of snow or bare trees or new flowers, in which different years, even decades, were now indistinguishable.
The Stead was far from being an ancient house – the stone over the front door bore the inscription ‘1909-P.R.F. de Beer’, which was the name of the man who had had the house built – but it had always seemed old to us. The front door, though we never thought of it as that, was round the other side of the house and the drive led from it to the B8372 which went to Wales if you turned left and Birmingham if you turned right. But from where I was now standing, in front of Pullam Wood, I was looking across a small depression to the real front of the house, the doors that led to the living room and to the kitchen, and above them, the windows of Alan’s and Martha’s bedrooms and of the spare bedrooms, and above them, on a floor of its own, Alan’s workroom, his sanctum, with its absurd little wooden spire on top. It was a large house, yet it seemed intimate; it was solid, yet the wooden floors were rickety and the walls thin as paper.
I reached the fringes of the wood – which I never go into – and turned to the right, away from Pullam Farm, and made my way around and down to where the men were tinkering with the digger. I heard a car arrive, Paul’s unmistakable top-of-the-range Saab, splendid but not so excessively as to be too much of a betrayal of some political principle or other. Dad gingerly got out of the far side. He didn’t notice me and shuffled over to the house. Then Erica appeared, also from the far side. She must have been sitting in the back seat and she was carrying little Rosie, asleep in an almost theatrical slumber. She bustled quickly inside. Paul caught sight of me and we waved at each other. There was no one left to wait for.
At ten o’clock not very sharp everybody gathered on the lawn for the great mushroom expedition, the inviolable tradition of the Martello autumn. The gathering of the extended family was so large that with a few pink coats and a pack of dogs, it would have looked like the local hunt. All those brothers and their families, and in the case of my brother, Paul, previous family and current family. I thought of one of those unreadable chapters of the Old Testament. Alan begat Theo and Claud and Jonah and Fred. And Chris begat Paul and Jane. I counted twenty people, not including me or Jim’s workers, bustling around and chatting and not looking as if they were going anywhere. The group was held up by the non-appearance of some of the younger generation, most notably Paul’s three daughters by Peggy, his first wife. At about ten past, they finally strolled out, nonchalant, big-booted, long-haired, all in black, wearing one sarcastic expression that seemed to have been stretched across their three lovely faces. Because I was staying behind to oversee the building work, I stood slightly apart and was able to take in the whole scene. Christ, what a family. Everyone else was a mess of jeans and old sweaters but Alan and Martha were properly dressed. This was their day. Alan was wearing some ridiculously correct long jacket that would have kept him dry if he’d been standing under Niagara Falls. There was always the hint of theatrical camp about him, of the person who had been sent down to the costume department with instructions that he be kitted out as an ageing writer living the life of a country squire. He even had a staff that looked like the sort of thing that Errol Flynn used to battle with on fallen trees across streams. Martha looked lovely though: snow-white hair, slim as her granddaughters, and wearing much the same sort of black clothes, but not the Doc Martens. She wore a jacket that had been weathered on real walks and she carried the right sort of wicker basket for laying out mushrooms without mixing or decay. Almost everyone else had plastic shopping bags. I had once tried to explain to Martha that, contrary to legend, plastic bags were a good idea if you were going to eat the mushrooms on the same day, as we always did, because they softened them, made them go high, like game. But she hadn’t listened.
Alan rapped his staff on the ground. I almost expected a peal of thunder.
‘Forward,’ he said.
It would have sounded ridiculous coming from anybody else.
It seemed to happen quickly after that. I went inside and sat at the kitchen table waiting to be needed again outside. I half read the paper and did a few clues in the crossword and there was a tap on the window and I looked up and saw Jim’s face through the glass of the kitchen door. I was going to shout some comment but his face was pale and alarmed. He just gestured me forward and I felt a moment’s reluctance, not wanting to go.
As I came out of the door, Jim shuffled back towards the hole and I saw it was almost completed and I wondered if this was just a pedantic way of telling me about it. The men were grouped around the digger. The small group parted as I approached.
‘We found something,’ said one of them, Jim’s nephew. He looked almost shifty.
I looked down at their feet. At first it didn’t seem as if there were all that much to see. Toffee-textured clay soil, some broken tiles. What were they? Oh, yes, that’s where the old barbecue must have been. That seemed a long time ago. And, shockingly white, there were some bones, jaggedly projecting from the soil. I looked at the men. Did they want me to take charge in some sort of way?
‘Could it be an animal?’ I said. Ridiculously. ‘A buried pet?’
Jim slowly shook his head and knelt down. I didn’t want to have to look.
‘There’s bits of clothes here,’ he said. ‘Little bits. And a buckle. It must be her, mustn’t it? It must be their little girl, Natalie.’
I had to look. I had seen one dead body in my life. I had sat holding my mother’s hand in the final moments of her years of pain. I had seen death wipe the expression from her face and her racked body had relaxed back into the bed. I had pressed my lips against her still-warm face. A day later I had touched it again in the funeral parlour, waxy and cold, her hair brushed, in her best clothes, with a small bag clutched pathetically in her left hand. And this was the body of Natalie, my dear, dear friend, after a quarter of a century, for ever sixteen. I knelt and made myself look closely at the bones. From the legs they must be, large and thick. There were traces of clothing, black, thickly grimed. I felt suddenly detached and curious. No flesh, of course. No sinews. The bones that had been detached from the ground were entirely separate. The soil in which they lay was darker than the rest. Would the hair have decayed? The skull was still buried. I remembered her lean body. Brown that summer. I remembered the mole on her right shoulder, and her long simian toes. How could I have forgotten her for so long?
‘Someone had better call the police.’
‘Yes, Jim, yes. I’ll do that now. I don’t suppose we ought to do any more digging. Is there a police station in Westbury?’
There wasn’t. I looked in the phone book and I had to phone the police all the way off in Kirklow. I felt rather foolish saying to someone I didn’t know that we’d found a body and that it was rather old, about twenty-five years, that I thought it was probably the body of Natalie Martello who had gone missing in the summer of 1969. But they took it seriously and in a short time two police cars arrived and then a civilian car and then later an ambulance, or rather a sort of ambulance that looked like an estate car. It seemed strange to have an ambulance to pick up bones that were so long dead they could have been put into a small cardboard box. One of the policemen asked me some halting questions on which I could hardly concentrate. The ambulance didn’t take the bones away immediately. A flimsy kind of miniature marquee was raised over most of the hole. There was a light rain falling.
I didn’t want to go and look at what they were doing but I couldn’t leave
the scene and I sat on a bank near the kitchen door and looked down at the tent and across at the wood beyond. I wondered if people would be coming back soon. I had my watch on but I couldn’t remember what time they had left and I couldn’t even remember how long mushroom hunts take as a rule, though I’d been on so many. I just sat on the bank and finally I saw a small group emerging from the trees. We always separated on these excursions and came back in our own time. They would be able to see the police cars and the incongruous tent but I couldn’t see if they were surprised. I stood up to make my way towards them to explain what had happened but my eyes were suddenly wet and I couldn’t see who they were. It could have been anybody.
Two
The knife slid through the spongy layers into the beige flesh. I peeled off some slimy skin, tossed an edible chunk of cep into a large bowl. Peggy came in with another bucket full of mushrooms; she smelt of the woods, the mulchy earth. Her khaki trousers were stained; she’d taken off her boots in the hall, and now padded in thick grey socks.
‘Here you are,’ she said.
With my fingertips, I gently lifted the yellow, gilled chanterelles lying like waxy flowers at the top, and sniffed at their curved trumpet shapes. Apricots.
‘Who found these?’ I asked.
‘Theo, of course. Are you all right, Jane?’
‘You mean about Claud?’
‘No, about today.’
‘I don’t know.’
In the bucket there were warty, bulbous puffballs, horse mushrooms with a faint whiff of aniseed about them, and delicate white ink caps, fraying around their skirts. The kitchen smelt damply fungoid; wormy parasol mushrooms blocked up the sink, tatters of woody stalks lay on the working surfaces. I wiped my hands, which were still trembling, down my apron and pushed back my hair. The kitchen was brightly lit, but nothing seemed quite real to me – not the horror in the garden, nor this parody of normality in the clutter of the Martello kitchen, heart of their large house. Were we all insane, a houseful of shocked people trapped in ritual? I was losing myself in activity.
‘You did well,’ I said to Paul, who was passing through the kitchen clutching dusty bottles of red wine to his chest.
‘You should have seen them all: we could have picked twice as many. Some of them are useless though.’
He glanced at Peggy furtively on his way out. He looked harassed. We were each of us alone with our thoughts and private alarms. He had the additional burden of being stuck in a house with his ex-wife, current wife, and a sister who was divorcing his best friend. There was a necessity not to think too much.
I started chopping the mushrooms into thin slivers; the flesh was spongily resilient. I turned them and cut them smoothly along the grain. Pots bubbled. The effort of coordination soothed me. I opened the door of the oven and touched the oily red peppers with a fork; their skins were blistering. I drew in a deep breath.
‘Jane? Claud told me to give you these.’ My father held out three plump garlic bulbs. Turning to go – back to the crossword by the fire, probably – he suddenly said, ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ and I saw that his eyes were puffy, as if he’d been weeping. I squeezed his shoulder.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, meaninglessly.
I peeled six garlic cloves and crushed them into a large pan on the stove. Peggy, who was stooped over the sink, patiently stripping the spongy layers off the remaining ceps, sung a snatch of song under her breath and then said abruptly, ‘I’m really sorry. It must have been horrible for you, finding it – her.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so. But no worse, really, than for everybody else.’
I didn’t want to talk. I was saving up my emotions, I didn’t want to expend them here, while making dinner. Not with Peggy, but she was unstoppable.
‘You were all very brave. It’s funny really: for the first time, I feel excluded from this family. You all know how to deal with each other.’
I turned to her and took her hand. ‘Peggy,’ I replied wearily, ‘that’s not true. You know that we never exclude anybody. We’re the great extended family that starts with Alan and Martha and doesn’t end anywhere.’
‘I know all that, maybe it’s just that I never knew Natalie.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Yes,’ said Peggy, ‘a part of the great legendary idyllic Martello childhood. You all share that, don’t you? It always reminds me…’ She stopped as she caught sight of something out of the window. ‘Look at them! I’ll kill them! Why can’t Paul deal with them? He is alleged to be their father.’
She hurtled from the room. Out of the window I could see her daughters standing conspiratorially behind a bush smoking cigarettes. They must have thought they were invisible. Peggy jogged noiselessly towards them, still shoeless. Jerome and Robert used to smoke in their bedroom, with the windows wide open, then come downstairs smelling of toothpaste, and I’d say nothing. I, too, was surreptitiously smoking, in the garden, late at night when I couldn’t sleep for pondering about my life. Later, they’d learnt to smoke in my presence, even to offer one to me. I’d been itching for a cigarette all day, fidgeting on the edge of the hole, wandering round the garden, waiting for everybody to get back and learn what I had learnt. I stirred the pale yellowing garlic around the pan. A little manageable span of time, a way of measuring out the evening ahead.
‘How are you doing, Mum? Do you mind being left to do all the cooking?’
Robert was standing over me, my tall, handsome son. His lank, dyed blond hair hung straight down over one pale eye. He was clothed in torn jeans, an old blue sweat-shirt that was worn almost grey and a checked shirt pulled roughly over it, cuffs unbuttoned, everything unbuttoned. His feet were bare. He looked good.
‘It’s all right. It helps me, in fact. Could you wash the lettuce?’
‘Not as such,’ said Robert, opening the fridge and peering inside. ‘Is there anything I can eat?’
‘No. What are all the others up to?’ I asked.
‘God, where shall I start.’ He started counting theatrically and sarcastically on his fingers. ‘Theo’s playing chess with Grandpa Chris; Dad’s basically co-ordinating the seating plan and delegating the laying of plates; Jonah and Alfred and Meredith have gone for a walk, probably to try to sneak a look into that tent thing; Hana and Jerry are in the bath, the same bath; and much, much more. I haven’t seen Granny and Grandpa. They must be up in their room.’
There was a pause. Robert looked expectant. I tipped the mushrooms into the hot oil. He was waiting for something.
‘Yes?’ I said.
My knees felt wobbly and my stomach suddenly lurched. He cupped his hands over his mouth and began to speak as if through a megaphone; his voice blared into the kitchen, bitter and angry. ‘Hello, hello, is there anybody out there? This is Rob Martello speaking, a visitor from the real world. I’d like to announce that a body has been found on the premises. The only daughter of Mr and Mrs Alan Martello has been buried outside, about three feet from the back door and about two inches deep, for the last twenty-five years. The management regrets that as a result of this discovery, dinner may be served a minute or two late. We trust this will not interfere with your evening.’
I gave a tired laugh, I couldn’t help it.
‘Robert!’ It was Claud. He had come in behind Robert but he was smiling too. ‘I know it’s awkward…’ Claud began, but Robert immediately interrupted him.
‘What? Awkward? The body of your sister dug up in the garden? Why should that be awkward? And anyway, it was a few hours ago now, wasn’t it? And the police have taken the bones away. Perhaps Alan should have asked them to fill the hole in before they left, while they were at it. The way it is now, there’s a chance that somebody may fall into it tomorrow morning and be reminded of it. On their way to another fucking mushroom hunt.’
Claud tried to look stern but failed and gave a resigned smile. ‘You’re right, Rob, we’re probably not handling this very well but…’
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��But appearances must be maintained. We don’t want something like a dead body to get in the way of a great Martello weekend. Or else something serious might go wrong. You know, like serving the wrong wine with the wrong mushroom.’
Claud turned serious. ‘Robert, stop this now. Natalie’s disappearance happened before you were born, it’s hard for you to understand. We gradually realised that Natalie was dead. Your grandmother – my mother – never really did. She always tried to believe that Natalie might have run away and that she would turn up one day.’ Claud put his arm round Robert. He was tall enough to be able to do it. ‘Today is bad for her – it’s bad for all of us but it’s especially bad for her – and we’ve all got to be strong and help her. If anything, it’s good that this happened when we were together. We can support each other. And above all support Martha. There’s lots to talk about, Robert. And not just about Natalie, about everything. And we will, I promise. But maybe today is just a time for us to be together. Remember that she hasn’t officially been identified yet.’
‘And isn’t it good for us to eat together?’ I said. ‘Come here, my darling.’ I pulled Robert to me and hugged him, hard. ‘I feel silly only coming up to your chin.’
‘So will you help me, Rob?’ asked Claud.
‘Yeah, yeah, Dad, all right,’ said Robert. ‘We can all be mature about this. Perhaps we should make a feature of the hole. Mum, could you redesign your cottage around the hole, the way you did with that tree once?’