Wearing Purple ob-3

by Quintin Jardine

  He knew what I meant, at once. ‘That can wait until tomorrow, son.’

  ‘Oh no it can’t. You’re taking me to the Royal Infirmary, right now. The police can wait for ever for all I care, but I have to see Jan.’ I turned and stared at him, hard. ‘I have to see for myself, Dad, otherwise I won’t really believe it.’

  ‘I know, lad,’ he said. ‘I know.’

  Chapter 33

  ‘Why d’you have to do the bloody washing at six o’clock on a Saturday evening, love? Why the hell didn’t you leave it for me to do when I got back?’

  I tried to be angry with her, there in the room which the kind-hearted, sad-eyed attendants had prepared for us, but my heart just wasn’t in it. My childhood sweetheart, my wife, my soulmate, lay there on her bier, eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, not rising to my bait at all. I looked at the wall-clock and saw that just over twenty-four hours had passed since. . it. . had happened.

  Her skin was pale and translucent and her hair had lost its lustre: but she was still my Jan. For all the world she looked as she had less than three days earlier, when last I saw her asleep in the night. They had clothed her in a white gown, and her hands were folded across her chest. She still wore her wedding ring, and I promised her there that she always would.

  They had given me a chair, and had told me that I could stay for as long as I wished. Nice people: chosen well for their awful job. I sat for half an hour, weeping for most of the time, speaking to her between the tears; telling her that I loved her, telling her that she had been all the life I wanted, telling her that I wished it was I who lay there, not her. All of them useless, empty words, all of them vain wishes, but every one straight and true from my heart.

  At last, I had talked myself out. I sat there in the silence, all the more awful for its lack of the sound of Jan’s breathing, and the thing which had niggled at my mind when I had spoken to Dylan earlier that same day came rushing back to me.

  She had died, Mike had said, just before six. . or just before seven in Barcelona, the moment at which I had experienced that strange, unprecedented attack of dread and panic. ‘Was that it, Jan?’ I asked her. ‘Were you calling out to me? Was that your cry for help?’

  I felt my heart racing as I tried to deal with the possibility. I leaned back in my chair, let my head fall forwards and closed my eyes. I sat in that position for at least a couple of minutes. Gradually, my heartbeat slowed down, and as it did, I felt my mind clear, settling slowly like the surface of a pond after a rock has been tossed in, ripples gradually dying away.

  As it did, I felt a strange, light pressure across my forehead, just above my eyebrows, as if something tangible was passing into my brain. It lasted for ten seconds or so, and then it faded. I opened my eyes, and I smiled; I felt a strange, inexplicable easing within me, and a surge of a kind of contentment.

  I was full of a great certainty; that Jan had spoken to me, not to tell me that everything was all right, but that everything was as it was, and as it should be, and to tell me also that however lonely I might be through the rest of my life, I would not be alone.

  I stood, and I looked at her body once more, and I saw it for what it was; a remarkable vessel, designed for the containment of something miraculous. Already, her face seemed to have taken on a different aspect. A transition had taken place; Jan just wasn’t there any more. I thought of a term which had been in my mind earlier: soulmate. Now I knew, truly, what it meant.

  I left the makeshift chapel, thanked the attendants, signed a formal identification, and rejoined my father who was waiting in the corridor, outside.

  ‘Let’s go back to Fife for tonight,’ he suggested. ‘I’ll bring you back down in the morning.’

  ‘No, Dad. You go back and look after Mary; she needs you. I’ll stay at the flat tonight, do what I have to do tomorrow, then come across.’

  ‘Christ son, you can’t stay there,’ he protested.

  ‘Of course I can. It’s our home and I belong there. I’m not afraid of it.’

  He took me back there, but he wouldn’t come in. I understood that, so we said our farewells in the street. ‘Tell Mary I’ll be with her as soon as I can,’ I told him.

  I waved him off in his trusty, beloved Jaguar, and went inside. I was pleased to see that the police had made my front door secure after the Scottish Power breakin, and that my electricity supply had been restored.

  The hardest part was going into the kitchen. Our lethal washing machine, a German-made monster, had been taken away. I was glad about that, yet disappointed too, for I had been entertaining thoughts of taking my heavy hammer and reducing it to its component parts.

  I had eaten two aircraft meals, so I wasn’t hungry, but I made myself some tuna sandwiches and a coffee, just to be doing something, and opened the first of what I intended to be several lagers. I was halfway through my second, and the dishes were in the washer, when I phoned Susie Gantry’s number. The annoying BT woman answered, so I left a message asking Mike to call me.

  I was playing a Jacqueline du Pre CD, one of Jan’s favourites, when the phone rang. I assumed it would be Dylan, but in fact it was Prim.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked, sounding like a little mother hen.

  ‘I’m doing okay. I’m playing music, and getting slightly drunk. I’ve been to see Jan, and I feel better, in a way that I can’t explain to you. Did you do what I asked?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, quickly. ‘Jerry came through the surgery well. I spoke to the doctor who admitted him. He said that they removed a piece of metal, but that they were puzzled by it since it seemed to be covered in leather.

  ‘He’s suffered damage to the base of his right lung, but nothing that’s going to leave him disabled. He’ll probably even be able to wrestle again before the end of this year.’

  ‘Did your doctor say anything about the police being involved?’

  ‘The hospital didn’t call them in, so I don’t imagine that they are.’

  ‘That’s good. That means that Everett stays in control of the situation. Now that we’ve rumbled the guy Leonard, his crisis should be over.’

  There were a few seconds of expensive silence. ‘Where are you now?’ I asked her.

  ‘At home. I’ve got work tomorrow, so I’m having an early night. What do you have to do next?’

  ‘I’ll have to go and see the police tomorrow, then make funeral arrangements — if it’s okay with the Fiscal.’ As I spoke I heard a ‘call waiting’ bleep, but I decided to ignore it. ‘There’s a guy up in Fife, a patient of my dad’s. He’s a good man; I’ll ask him to take care of everything.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Prim murmured. ‘I think I’d prefer the personal touch too, at a time like this.’ I could sense her hesitating. ‘I saw Shirley Gash tonight, down at Miguel’s,’ she went on. ‘Out of the blue, she asked if I knew how you were doing, so I had to tell her what had happened. She was just appalled, as you’d expect.’ I knew Shirley well; she was a pal from my days in Spain.

  ‘She asked me to give you her deepest sympathy, and she said that once the funeral’s over, if you wanted to get away for a while, you can have her summer-house for as long as you like.’

  I smiled, as if she could see me. ‘Jesus, Prim, kind as it is of big Shirl, that summer-house is just about the last place on earth I’d want to stay.’

  ‘I thought you might say that,’ she said, ‘so here’s an alternative. Would you like to come out here, to the apartment? I wouldn’t be here, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘I’d bugger off for a couple of weeks, maybe back to Auchterarder to see my folks, or maybe to the States, to visit Dawn and Myles.’

  I closed my eyes and I was back on the beach below St Marti, lying on top of the old Greek wall. The idea of going back there should have been appalling, yet somehow, it wasn’t. It was comforting; it gave me a feeling of belonging. ‘I’ll have to think about that, Prim,’ I answered, slowly. ‘Let me get past the funeral, and see that the family’s okay, then I’ll think about it. I�
��ll have to consult, too,’ I added.

  ‘One thing I know already; every decision I make in my life from now on, everything I do, will depend on the answer to one question. “Would Jan approve?” That’s the way it’ll be.’

  ‘And quite right too,’ she said. ‘For now, just you carry on getting slightly drunk. I’m sure she would have approved of that.’

  Chapter 34

  As I expected, the ‘call waiting’ signal which had bleeped while I was talking to Prim had been triggered by Mike Dylan. Over the next few days, and weeks, I found out what a good friend that loud-suited, loose-mouthed imitation of a detective could really be.

  He picked me up next morning and took me straight to the Divisional police office in Baird Street, to meet the officers who were preparing the report on Jan’s death for submission to the Procurator Fiscal. He sat with me as I gave them a brief formal statement confirming that Jan had been in good health when I left for Spain, that we had lived in the flat for a few months and that we had never noticed any problems with the washing machine or with any other electrical appliance. They asked me for the address of the previous owner, which I couldn’t give them, so instead I pointed them in the direction of the selling solicitor.

  Next Mike drove me to the Fiscal’s Office, where he had a pal, a guy he had known in Edinburgh who had been posted to Glasgow, like him. The file on Jan’s death was still empty of everything but the medical examiner’s report and a copy of the death certificate. Since both said clearly and unequivocally that death had been caused by cardiac arrest due to electric shock, Mike’s friend agreed that a post mortem examination would not be necessary and wrote a note instructing the mortuary that Jan’s body could be released to the next-of-kin.

  Finally, he drove me to the District Registrar’s Office, and helped me through the unimaginably painful experience of registering my wife’s death. ‘Age?’ the assistant registrar asked. ‘Thirty,’ I said. In all my worst nightmares, in the most pessimistic of moments, not that I had many of either, I could never have dreamed up that scene.

  And that was it. All of the death-related business which I had to do in Glasgow, was transacted in two hours. I packed a case, tidied up the flat and cleaned the bathroom and the kitchen; something Jan would have done, but not necessarily Oz. I was about to leave, when the phone rang. I thought that it would be my dad, but it wasn’t. It was Greg McPhillips; Everett had called to tell him what had happened, but somehow he needed to hear it from me before it could become reality. The poor sod was so distressed that I wound up comforting him. I thought this was strange at the time, but I was to find out over the next few days that it was par for the course.

  I told Greg that I would be in touch with him after the funeral, said goodbye, and hung up. I was actually turning the door handle when the phone rang again. It wasn’t my dad this time either; instead it was a pushy, boyish-sounding reporter from a news agency, on the trail of a scoop. I confirmed that my wife had died in a domestic accident and told him that I had nothing more to say.

  He wasn’t the sort to be put off that easily. ‘I understand from the police that Mrs Blackstone was electrocuted by a washing machine,’ he wheedled.

  ‘Yes that’s correct,’ I agreed.

  ‘What make was it?’ he went on, hungrily. ‘This could be a story for Watchdog.’

  Suddenly I understood why Everett Davis was paranoid about the media. This bastard was excited by my wife’s death; he saw profit in it. Before my rage could overwhelm me, I hung up the phone and walked out of the door.

  I dreaded the thought of returning to Anstruther: I dreaded the thought of confronting Mary’s grief; I dreaded the thought of trying to explain death to Jonathan, my nine-year-old nephew; I dreaded the conversations with the undertaker and the Minister; and I dreaded most of all the prospect of being chief mourner, the man in black in the front pew at an obscenely premature funeral. I dreaded them all, but I did them nonetheless.

  I saw Mary and, with my dad, tried to show her — and numb-struck Ellie too, to whom Jan had been as a sister — that all we could do was to be good to each other, in her memory.

  I took Jonathan to St Andrews, bought him an ice-cream from Janetta’s, then walked him through the ruined cathedral and into the cemetery, where I tried to explain to him that each of the headstones there told the story of a life which had come to an end, as had that of his Auntie Jan, and that while this was sad, it was also natural and inevitable, and had to be seen as a passage to something else. He looked at me with his old eyes, ‘Is there a Jesus, Uncle Oz?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s as good a name as any, my man,’ I told him, and we left it at that. There was nothing I could have said to wee Colin that he would have understood, so I left the comforting of him to his mother.

  Jan’s funeral took place on the Friday following her death, in the Parish Church. The service was conducted by the Minister who had married us a few months before. Every pew was packed as our small family group filed in: me, in the lead, my dad and Mary next, Ellie and Allan Sinclair, her estranged husband, who had flown in from France the night before, and finally, Jan’s father and his second wife.

  Believe me, in these circumstances, one does not scan the congregation for faces; but some things you can’t miss. I was immensely gratified to see on the left of the church towards the rear an enormous black figure, and frankly astonished when, a few rows further forward, the light glinted on a heavy, ornate gold chain, around the neck of a thick-set man.

  The service was conventional, but rather than have Bible readings, my dad and I had decided that we would each read a poem. He chose ‘Remember’ by Christina Rossetti. My selection was Jan’s favourite; a much more obscure work, in which a woman contemplates the future by declaring that when she grows old, she will rebel in her way, by wearing purple.

  It’s about growing old together disgracefully, a prospect which had been far in the distance for Jan and me, yet which had been denied to her, and to us, by that bloody washing machine. Tears were blinding me by the time I reached the end, but I knew it by heart anyway. ‘Of course,’ I told the packed congregation after I had finished, ‘we all of us know that Jan had the courage to wear purple all her life.’

  The morning rain had cleared when we buried her — dressed in her finest and wearing her wedding ring and a gold necklet I had bought her — in the cemetery nearby, in the lair next to my mother, west-facing so that every night the sun would go down on them both. We lowered her into the ground, me at her head, my dad at her feet, and six others. I have difficulty now in picturing the scene, but with an effort I can recall that Allan Sinclair, Greg McPhillips, my pal Ali the demon grocer, Mike Dylan, Johnny Wilson, our best childhood friend, and the mountainous Everett Davis all helped us in our task.

  As the Minister spoke the words of the ritual, I took the red rose from my button-hole and dropped it into the grave. As I did, the rain began to fall again, lightly, onto the coffin and the brass plate with its inscription, ‘Janet Blackstone’.

  Chapter 35

  There was much that I had to ask my dad; much that I would ask him in time, about his thoughts, and his experiences, after my mother’s death. However we both knew it was too soon. So, after I had spent the weekend following the funeral answering as many letters of sympathy as I could, and after my brave sister had spent a day in Glasgow packing clothes and cosmetics — I’ve never asked her what she did with them — and taking them away in Jan’s Fiesta, which Mary had agreed with me she should have, I went back to my high tower flat to pick up my life.

  My first call was to Greg McPhillips, to check what work was awaiting me. There was plenty, but there were other things too; personal things that he had undertaken to handle for me. Jan hadn’t left a will — Hell’s teeth, she was only thirty — but her insurance policies were either joint life or in my name, and all our accounts, other than our separate business accounts, were joint. Claim forms had to be signed, mortgage lenders to be advised, bank details to
be changed, but none of it would be a problem. I told Greg that I would take care of all that the next time I was in his office, which would certainly be within the next two days, as a result of some of the work he had given me.

  ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘but there’s something else. I sort of assumed an instruction from you last week. I got the name of the manufacturers of your washing machine, plus its serial number, from the police. It’s a German company.

  ‘I wrote to them, on your behalf. I advised them of the accident and said that as your solicitor I would await their observations. I had a letter in Friday’s mail from their UK office. They said as the machine was well out of guarantee they had no liability or obligation in the matter. However in the circumstances, they are prepared to offer you a replacement as a gesture of goodwill.

  ‘What d’you think of that?’

  By now, you know I’m naive in certain respects. Although I’d shielded myself behind my anger in the period after the accident, it had never turned itself in the direction of the company which had made the lethal machine. That changed in an instant. Within me I could hear Jan’s voice, and when I spoke, it was for us both.

  ‘I think you should decline their offer,’ I told my friend, coldly and evenly, in that tone which I hadn’t owned ten days before. ‘I think also that you should advise them that we will be obtaining a copy of the police report on the machine, and that if it shows that my wife’s death was caused by a fault in its manufacture, then we will pursue every remedy open to us, both civil and criminal, in Scotland and in Germany.

  ‘How does that sound?’ I asked him.

  ‘It sounds like something a real hard-arsed lawyer like me would say. I’ve already asked the Fiscal’s office for a copy of the police report. I’ll let you know as soon as I get it. My guess is that the Germans will want to examine the machine themselves to confirm what the police say, but that very soon they’ll make you an offer of compensation.’