by John Grant
It was a while before she realized she was not the only one here: although she couldn't see anything out of her single upturned eye except the lurid fire, sometimes shadows moved at the extreme periphery of her vision. Once she'd observed a few of these she realized that she'd always known there were others of her kind. She was of the Wardrobe Folk, as were they; and it was the doom of the Wardrobe Folk to dwell in this arid misery forever.
Unless ...
Unless the Girl-Child LoChi could come among them.
But Joanna, in her dream, didn't know who the Girl-Child LoChi was, and didn't know how she could find out. Lacking that knowledge, she was sapping the strength of her people in their attempts to bring the Girl-Child LoChi to their aid. She was at fault – every extra second that she and the other flat creatures like herself spent here was partly her responsibility.
Guilt. Too much of it for her mind to stay here.
She woke screaming in a tangle of bedclothes to find light pouring in through the bedroom window. She screamed at that, too, until she realized it was only the morning sunshine, and that she was in her own bedroom in Ashburton-by-the-Moor.
A few minutes later she was giggling unconvincedly. Just a nightmare. The Wardrobe Folk – next it would be the Pantry People or the Cupboard Under The Stairs Collective.
But the cold sweat all over her and the sheets and the blankets didn't go away just because her rational mind was taking over its rightful functions once more.
She pulled herself out of bed.
Later she'd tell Aunt Jill all about this, and the two of them would laugh together at the silliness.
~
Later, though, when she went to wake up Aunt Jill with a cup of tea, she discovered Aunt Jill was dead.
3: Farewells, Welcomes
There was a wind up today, coming from the sea to the south, and it was blowing away most of what the Reverend James Daker was saying.
Which was, in Joanna's opinion, an unquestionably good thing. Her aunt had never had much time for ceremonies or for what she called "po-faced eulogies", and the Reverend Daker's utterances would have had her cringing. She was "a pillar of the community" and a "stalwart on the side of virtue" and all sorts of other things he'd never made much reference to when she'd been alive and trying to mount petitions about the Bloody Bells.
Joanna looked glumly across the open wound of the grave. She wasn't certain whether or not Aunt Jill had ever attended services at St Leonard's, and she guessed that the Reverend Daker wasn't, either. Still, these formalities had to be gone through, Joanna concluded. Viewed as formalities, they didn't seem too bad; viewed as anything else, the Reverend Daker's overblown testimonials were somehow poisonous, as if Aunt Jill's spirit were not to be allowed to ascend into the hereafter without taking with it its due quota of earthly hypocrisy.
There was a scattering of other mourners. Jas had shut the Blue Horse for the occasion, and he was standing opposite her, his eyes downcast. Out from behind the shield of his bar, he looked even less substantial than he had the other day. She willed him to look up at her, but he obstinately refused. Rupert was there, too, his eyes betraying whatever private wake he'd held for himself the night before. He, too, didn't seem to want to look at her. And there was Greta, and the woman from the post office, and even the chap who organized the Bloody Bell-ringing sessions – probably telling himself that the Christian humility he was showing in coming to the funeral of his old enemy would serve him well in the life to come, or maybe he was just here to gloat – and a dozen or so others. All of them elderly people, around Aunt Jill's kind of age or older; Joanna was the only person there under fifty.
The fresh spring wind made their clothes flap. Joanna was reminded of a different season – of autumn trees. Come winter, would this leaping breeze be a gale, and would all of the trees be able to withstand it?
She straightened her shoulders and told herself to stop being morbid. The Reverend Daker seemed to be coming to the end of his oration – or, at least, he was pausing for breath – and she must brace herself to receive the sympathies of the others. On second thoughts, cemeteries were about the one place in the world it was perfectly permissible to be morbid. And why should she don a cloak of false happiness?
They took turns tossing earth down onto the coffin-lid. Joanna wiped off her hands on the sides of her skirt. Surely that was about all they had to do; surely they could all pack off home now, herself included. She'd decided against holding one of those glacial funeral teas people seemed to go in for; there weren't any relations, and the only residents of Ashburton whom Aunt Jill had known at all well were gathered here and looking about as uninterested in protracting proceedings as Joanna herself. She had a bottle of scotch back at the flat – her flat, now – and proposed to spend the rest of the afternoon getting as much of it into herself as possible before she passed out. From the look of Rupert, his intentions were very similar.
As if at a signal, the rest of the party moved off, leaving her alone at the graveside for a moment with the sexton.
"She was a nice woman, your aunt," he said, bending to pick up the first spadeful of earth. "She'll be missed around here."
It was a better funeral oration than the Reverend Daker had been able to compose.
~
The level of whisky in the bottle had gone down by about a third, and she'd given up bothering to mix it with water. The light coming in through the drawing-room window was a golden mellow colour, a paler variation on the liquid in the bottle: in an hour or so it would be sunset. She knew she was really quite a lot drunk, although still not drunk enough.
Something had wasted Aunt Jill away, something that had grown inside her, devouring her. In other circumstances Joanna might have guessed cancer, but there hadn't been that funny smell cancer victims usually give off, and Dr Grasmere had sworn to her that her aunt had been in perfect health.
"She just died," he'd said. "She was old, you know."
"She wasn't yet sixty-five," Joanna had said, and she said it again now, raising her tumbler to the whisky bottle in some sort of tribute. "She shouldn't have died. She wasn't old enough to die. She didn't ..." No: saying that people didn't deserve to die was stupid, and somehow uncharitable. No one deserved to die except those who wanted to, and Aunt Jill hadn't wanted to.
Well. Maybe not. It was hard to tell what the frail old grandmother who called herself Aunt Jill had actually wanted, or not wanted. Joanna wished she'd come down here to Ashburton more often, or at least more recently. She wished she hadn't spent part of that last evening down in the Blue Horse chatting with Steve and Tony Gilmour. She wished ...
Right at this moment, she discovered, she wished more than anything else that she didn't have to go and pee. The stairs up to the loo suddenly seemed a challenge. Maybe it was stupid of her to have got this plastered.
The irony was that she'd driven down from London intending to ask Aunt Jill if it would be possible for her to come to Ashburton to live for a while. Her redundancy money from Rolfe and Baldwin wasn't going to last forever, not at London rents; and there weren't any very appealing jobs around right now, and ... Well, now the flat was hers. She could come and live here any time she wanted – and probably would. She'd wait a week or so, and then she'd go up to London and give in notice to her landlord. The few possessions she really wanted to keep, apart from the books, could probably all be jammed into the Mini. Mike – good-old-faithful-spaniel-Mike – Mike would bring the books down in the back of his van some time.
If she asked him nicely.
The loo, woman! Not a second more!
She was coming back down the stairs, taking them one at a time and gripping the banister so tightly that her hand would hardly slide, when the doorbell rang.
"Shit!" she muttered. "Bloody well-wishers. Bloody vultures."
But instead she found Steve and Tony at the door.
"Hi. Come in. I'm pissed."
Steve laughed, his arm round his sister's shoulders. "Then this is a fine time fo
r us to join you." He moved forward, not exactly pushing her but at the same time giving her no opportunity to refuse admission. "We thought you might be drinking, Tony and I, and we thought you might like some company. Miserable occasions, funerals – more miserable than the deaths themselves, in some ways."
"You have a great experience of deaths, I suppose?" said Joanna, trying to put some acidity into her voice. The result sounded to her as if she were speaking through cotton wool.
"More than you might think," he said lightly. He was past her by now, standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking upwards. He wrinkled his nose. "Aunt Jill rather let things go to pieces towards the end, didn't she?"
For a moment Joanna couldn't think of anything to say. The effrontery of him! The other evening in the pub she'd found his male vitality, his assuredness, immensely attractive. That had been before she'd seen this oafish, arrogant intruder.
"Aunt Jill was my aunt," she said deliberately. "Not yours."
"I'm sorry," said Tony quietly beside her. "Would you really rather we went away and let you be?"
"No," said Joanna automatically. "No – no, it's kind of you to come. I'm sure I ..."
"She told us to call her Aunt Jill," Steve was saying. "Over the last few months she and my mother were seeing a lot of each other, and so it seemed only natural we should come to call her Aunt Jill."
"She never told me anything of this," said Joanna thickly as she followed him up the stairs – her stairs. "I think she would have mentioned ..."
"It's quite true," said Tony. "Steve exaggerates about a lot of things, but he's telling you the truth about this. Your aunt and our mother did seem to be ... very taken with each other, is how your aunt put it. Afternoon tea the two of them would be over here, morning coffee at our house."
"And lunch every day at the Crafts Centre," boomed Steve, looking almost proprietarily around the drawing-room. He'd smuggled in a bottle of scotch somehow, and had placed it on the coffee table beside Joanna's. "That was, until your aunt's health began to get so low. Probably's Greta's wholefoods, I should imagine."
He cut another chuckle off short. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. What did Aunt Jill die of, by the way? Did that old quack from up the hill tell you?"
"Old age, Dr Grasmere said."
Joanna crossed and sat down in Aunt Jill's armchair. It must have been obvious to Tony that this wasn't where Joanna had been sitting before, because she said: "Look, are you sure you don't mind us two storming in here? We honestly won't mind if you tell us to go away again."
"You're here now," Joanna said with an effort at grandness. "Settle yourselves down. No doubt you know where the glasses are kept." She indicated the kitchen, and Tony slipped quietly out of the room.
"I'm surprised my aunt never mentioned your mother to me," said Joanna again, worrying away at the problem. "Even though I didn't see her as often as I should have, we spoke on the telephone most weekends, and she was always filling me in on events in the village. I'd have thought she would have said something about ..."
"It's a mystery," said Steve with finality, landing with a thump in the chair she'd not long vacated. "That's all. You can ask mother about it when you meet her, which I hope won't be long. Oh, yes, that's right – I almost forgot. That's one of the main reasons we came across here, Tony and I. My parents would like you to come to dinner one evening soon. In fact, mother was mad keen you should come tonight, but I guess that's ... not possible."
She saw her dishevelment reflected in his gaze and laughed. It was the first genuine laugh she'd uttered since finding Aunt Jill dead in her bed.
"I've got the glasses," said Tony.
She appeared around the wing of the armchair carrying a tray with a couple of mismatched glasses and the aluminium milk-jug. "Water," Tony explained.
Steve leapt to his feet and poured for both of them; at the same time he topped up Joanna's tumbler. She waved away his offer of water from the aluminium jug.
"I'd like to accept your parents' kind invitation to dinner," said Joanna, forming the words carefully. "Not tonight – not so soon after my aunt's funeral. But tomorrow, if that would be convenient."
"Perfect!" said Steve. "Tuesday evening it shall be. I shall call for you, ma'am, at eight o'clock precisely. We shall have drinks on the veranda beforehand and ..."
He talked on, and Joanna let the words wash over her. She became much more conscious of Tony, sitting demurely on a chair's edge to her left. It was obvious from the way the girl – Joanna found it hard to think of anyone younger than herself as a woman – had her denimed knees so tightly pressed together that she was still nervous about being here, still wishing that her brother would shut up so the two of them could make their polite escapes. It's funny, thought Joanna, the way I was so wrong about both of these two when we met. Tony seemed all haughty and aloof, as if she wouldn't wipe her feet on me, and Steve seemed like the answer to a maiden's dream. Hmmf! Some maiden: some dream.
"How old are you?" Joanna suddenly asked the Gilmour girl, cutting Steve's witterings off mid-flow.
"I'm ... uh ... I'm nineteen. And Steve – Steve's twenty-four."
"I guessed you about right," Joanna said. "But I thought Steve would be older – more like thirty."
Steve brayed with good humour. "I don't know whether to be complimented or ..." he began, but Joanna ignored him.
"And yet sometimes," she said to Tony, "when I look at you more carefully, or when the sun catches your face just so, you seem much older than your brother."
Tony flushed under her pale-tea skin, and looked down to where her hands were toying with her whisky glass. "I guess that's a way of looking at it," she mumbled, glancing up suddenly at her brother.
Joanna sensed that there was something here she ought to know more about, but her mind, slowed by the whisky, wasn't capable of framing the next question. Instead she said: "Where did you live before you came here?"
"Oh," answered Steve airily before his sister could say anything, "here and there, you know. The way one does."
"Here and there?" said Joanna.
"Round and about. We're sort of like gypsies, our family – we never stop in any one place too long. And you?"
"I live – used to live, I suppose I should say – in London, in a bit of London called West Hampstead. Pandora Road. Number 48. It's about seven minutes from the tube station. I rent a place. The landlord calls it a flat, but really it's just a glorified bedsit, with its own bathroom. I pay ..."
And the words kept on tumbling out of her. To her horror she discovered she was pouring out in front of these almost total strangers every detail of her life, of her work at Rolfe and Baldwin and of how that had come to such an abrupt end, of her relationships with Mike and Peter, of the baby that never was – she remembered to call it a baby, at least, because if she called it just a fetus people might think she was a bit cold-blooded, or something – and of how it had been Mike's kid when at first she'd thought it was Peter's because she'd got mixed up with her months because being with Peter made for such a lot of turbulence in her life and ...
All of it. Some bits she'd never properly told herself before, let alone other people. Once or twice during the flood of words she tried to bite her tongue, anything to stop herself blabbing her innermost secrets, but it swivelled easily out of the reach of her teeth.
There was darkness outside the window when finally she ground to a halt. She'd lost count of the number of times Steve had quietly leaned forwards and topped up her glass. There was nothing left now of the bottle she'd started on her own, and the level in the second was half-way down the label, and yet she didn't feel nearly as drunk as she had been earlier. Perhaps the adrenalin of confession had burnt away the alcohol, or something.
"I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I shouldn't have burdened you with all that. I had no right."
"You had every right in the world," said Steve boisterously. "That's what friends are for, isn't it, Tony?"
Sl
owly Joanna turned her head to look at the girl. The frame of black hair was lost in the shadows of that corner of the room; through the gloom she could see pale smudges that were Tony's hands and face. Yet she could see enough to know that the girl was profoundly uneasy.
"I'm sorry," Joanna repeated in Tony's direction.
"No. Nothing to be sorry about. But Steve and I must leave you now. At once. Come on, Steve."
Her brother half-rose, then settled back again. "Are you sure you'll be all right?" he said with heavy solicitude. "Have you eaten anything today?"
"I'll be OK." Joanna shook her head. She felt angry with him for having been there to hear everything she'd told him, and now all she wanted was for him and his sister to be out of her sight. "Tony's right. Please do go. I don't mean to be rude, but ... but I need some time on my own, right now. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll be over this by then. But could you ...?"
"Come on, Steve," Tony said tightly.
"Of course, of course," said Steve, and this time, to Joanna's relief, when he got to his feet he stayed there. "Maybe it was wrong of us to come blundering in here but ..."
"No, but ..." said Joanna.
Somehow, in a blizzard of apologies from all of them, she got the two Gilmours out the front door. Leaning against the cool wall at the foot of the stairs, she heard them whispering to each other as they tip-tapped down the steps outside. She might have been able to hear what they were saying if she'd strained her ears, but she found she wasn't interested enough.
In fact, all she really wanted was some more scotch, a hot bath and bed. Maybe it'd be wiser to alter the order of proceedings a bit: a hot bath while she was still enough in control of herself not to fall asleep or trip and bang her head, then bed with the remains of the scotch to make sure she slept soundly.
And, she hoped, for the first time this week to sleep dreamlessly.
4: Not the Munsters
Her hangover had largely ebbed by the following evening. She'd slipped guiltily down to the strangely subdued Blue Horse at lunchtime to feed it a couple of pints of Royal Oak, keeping her fingers crossed that the two Gilmours wouldn't come stumbling in and catch her in the act. She'd meant to have only the one pint, but Jas had refused to accept any payment for it, so she'd asked for another to settle up the score, as it were, but then he'd refused to take her money for that one, either. She'd have felt better about it if he'd shown her any signs of friendship, but instead he'd made both refusals with a sort of glum resignation that told her he was merely doing his duty.