In the roomy warehouse of the vineyard shop, Jim was leaning on the counter by the till, informing the young girl manning it that a palate for wine was something that could be learned, like all things.
‘Take Nicholas here, he said,’ swinging out an arm as Nick approached. ‘This man is a skilled doctor – a dermatologist who understands human skin like no other – and yet he refuses to learn how to ride a horse. I have tried to persuade him, but he won’t budge. He says it’s too late to learn, but it’s not.’ Jim smacked the counter with his palm, barking his sharp confident laugh. ‘We shall see who wins, shan’t we?’ The azure eyes glinted, telling Nick, as they always did, that far more was being discussed than the subject in hand. ‘I’ll leave you in the capable hands of this young lady then, Nick. I am going to take a natural break, then find Dean for a word.’ He winked at the girl and wandered off in the direction of the Gents.
Nick chose four bottles from the selection served with their meal and paid with his credit card. The girl at the till had very bad skin, he noticed, which she had smothered inexpertly in make-up that would only exacerbate the condition. Nick smiled kindly at her. A better diet, a course of antibiotics would work wonders. It occurred to him suddenly that Jim had made reference to his dermatological specialty without any thought for the possibility of causing embarrassment to the girl. But then his father-in-law never factored in other people’s feelings. He was a bully. Like his daughter.
The truth of this hit Nick as if for the first time. He was married to a woman who used physical assault as part of a formidable arsenal which she liked nonetheless to describe, when challenged, as a protest connected to love and trust. What sort of love and trust could ever allow for violence?
‘Sir, your card?’
He had left it in the machine. Nick hurried back to retrieve it. ‘Thanks. I’ll pick the wine up when we leave, if that’s okay. Won’t do it any good to sit in a hot car.’
Outside, the mid-afternoon sun was already dropping, taking some of its intensity with it. A skittish breeze bowled up the path, stirring flurries of dust and flower petals. Nick walked briskly back towards the restaurant terrace, but then, spotting Lindy and his mother-in-law sitting alone at the table, veered off past a sign that said ‘Deliveries only’. He found himself following a path that ran behind the kitchens, past bins and a skip of masonry, and ending at a loosely slatted wooden door set into a high stoned wall. Nick peered through the slats, making out what was clearly some kind of kitchen garden. Closest to him was a large ground box of what looked like herbs: lavender and sage were the only ones he recognised. He widened the slats to get a better look, more to delay going back to the lunch table than because he was genuinely curious. The view broadened to include a sprinkler trained on a bed of low green bushes. Rainbows flashed through its wet haze. Two people were walking behind it. Donna and Mike. His wife and Mike Scammell. Nick blinked. There was nothing untoward. They were side by side, a foot apart at least, pointing out plants as they went. Mike bent nearer to say something and Donna laughed her soft easy laugh.
Nick could feel the hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Donna and Mike were just walking and talking, yet there was an air of familiarity between them that he had either never noticed before or not been in a position to acknowledge. Intimacy. Yes, that was it. They were two people who knew each other. As he watched, Donna stopped suddenly and turned to Mike, offering her face up towards his. Nick braced himself. But it appeared his wife had something in her eye. Nick watched, transfixed, as their burly neighbour cupped Donna’s left cheekbone with one hand and tugged gently at the offending eyelid with the other, peering and frowning and shaking his head. When he released his hold, it seemed to be with an air of reluctance. Nick squinted, wondering if he was imagining things.
It was time to go. Donna and Mike were clearly leaving too, having made their way to a crumbling section of wall that Nick hadn’t at first noticed, right on the periphery of his frame of vision. He was on the point of turning away when they kissed. A snatched brushing of mouths. An instant later, they were both ducking to get through the hole. Donna went first. Mike followed, placing a light, proprietorial hand over the curve of her right buttock. Then there was just the piece of broken wall and the heavy afternoon air, and a flash of blue from a swooping dragonfly.
‘Mike and I found where they grow the veg,’ Donna reported, once they were all seated back round the lunch table, draining the dregs of lukewarm coffee and picking at a saucer of melting mint chocolates. ‘It’s like this secret garden. We felt like trespassers, kept expecting to be shouted at or have a guard dog set on us.’
‘Oh, I wish you’d told us,’ cried Lindy. There was a pile of menthol cigarette stubs in the small clay ashtray next to her saucer, their white cork tips smudged with pink lipstick. ‘Lauren and I thought you were just going to the toilets.’
‘We were, but then we took a wrong turn and decided to have a bit of an explore. Didn’t we, Mike?’
There was a beat of a pause before Mike agreed that they had indeed taken a wrong turn, before quickly reassuring his wife that it hadn’t been that big a deal. ‘It’s kind of run-down, to be honest, like seeing behind the scenes at a theatre.’
‘Hey, good analogy, Mike,’ Nick blurted, clumsy in his desire to appear normal. He felt numb more than anything. It would wear off. And he must be prepared for that, he told himself. It was like the shock of any injury – the first rush of natural anaesthesia before the pain kicked in. It was one thing not to love one’s wife. It was quite another to realise one had been made a complete fool of. For years, Nick guessed. Years. Not only bullied but blind. Deflected always by Donna’s jealousy. It was worthy of fiction. But this was far, far worse because it was real life. His life.
He stared across the table at Donna with something like wonderment. She had her hand on Lindy’s and was reeling off ingredients for a recipe, ignoring her mother as usual. Mint ice cream, using fresh herbs, she instructed, pronouncing it erb in that affected faux American accent she liked to use sometimes, a reminder to all that, courtesy of her father’s deep pocket, she had once spent a year studying in New York. Or, rather, a term, because she hadn’t liked the course. She had landed in London soon after, another chapter in her life sponsored by Jim and his connections. The silver bangles on her slim, tanned arms tinkled. One of them, the biggest, was engraved with the words: Darling Donna, with all my love, Nick. It had a circle of tiny diamonds set round its middle. He had given it to her a couple of Christmases before, telling himself the cost was worth the look of pleasure on her face, the affectionate gratitude it would ensure came his way, for a week or so at least.
Nick stole a glance at Lindy’s face, thinking how bound they in fact were and how little she knew it. Lindy was looking flushed and tired and his heart went out to her; but then it had been a long meal and they were all running out of steam.
22
2013- Sussex
As the funeral started, it began to snow. The shadowy flurries dancing behind the stained-glass windows lent an impression of movement to the bright gowned figures they depicted, as if they were frames on a reel of film. The Bible was just stories after all, Eleanor reflected bleakly.
The pews of Fairfield’s airy church were packed with people whom she did not know. Processing in behind Howard and the children, Vincent being wheeled beside her by a burly assistant from the care home, she had avoided eye contact with anything except the rich black of Howard’s spruce, tailored city coat, trying to erase from her mind the argument they had had that morning. The subject, ridiculously, had been her father, whom she had suggested they collect from The Bressingham themselves, rather than having him fetched and delivered like a parcel.
‘I think I’ve got enough on my plate today as it is.’
‘I know, but if I am happy to do it…’
‘Stop interfering. The arrangements are all in place.’
It was very early in the morning. The children were sti
ll asleep and the pair of them were in the cellar, rooting out the wines Howard wanted to serve at the wake. He was picking out bottles from the various wine racks lined up along the wall and handing them to Eleanor to put into boxes for carrying upstairs.
‘How can I be interfering,’ Eleanor ventured in a small, tight voice, ‘when we are discussing Kat and my father?’
Howard examined a label and rammed a bottle back into its slot. ‘Never mind.’
‘I do mind.’
‘To be honest, I don’t even see why he needs to be there. You went over and did the business of telling him. For which you know I was grateful.’
‘You cannot mean what you are saying,’ Eleanor interjected fiercely. Seeing through the task of visiting her father, the depressing certainty that her terrible news fell on deaf ears, had added another dimension to the already extreme distress of the week. ‘You just can’t.’
‘I do. It will be a hassle for us and be of no significance to him.’ Howard plucked out two more bottles and dropped them noisily into a fresh box.
‘A hassle?’ Eleanor laughed incredulously. ‘A hassle? Well, hassle or not, it is only right that Dad should be there. Kat would have thought so too,’ she added, close to tears, partly because of the turn the conversation had taken and partly because in her new sister-less state, eruptions of sadness were only ever a pinprick away from the surface. ‘And surely that’s all that matters.’
In one swift movement, Howard had swung round from the wine racks and raised a warning finger at her, his eyes bright with emotion and hostility. ‘Do not,’ he hissed, ‘ever presume to tell me what my wife would or would not have wanted. Is that clear?’
Eleanor had turned and fled up the cellar steps, too distraught, too fragile herself to manage any further defence. He had found her in the kitchen a few minutes later and apologised, mumbling about being stressed out, saying he would prefer to keep the Vincent arrangements as they were, if she didn’t mind, and Eleanor had agreed.
Eleanor glanced down at her father now. The carer had parked the wheelchair at an angle beside her in the aisle before tactfully withdrawing to the back of the church. Her father’s poor big head with its pitiful gauze of snowy hair flopped onto his chest, directing his blank-eyed gaze permanently somewhere in the region of his knees. Eleanor reached out and laid a comforting hand on the back of his neck, wondering if pity could turn to love, hoping with all her heart that it could. For all the distance between them, he was all she had left.
At the other end of the pew, Howard was staring resolutely at Kat’s coffin, parked on trestles in front of the altar. On top was a single heart-shaped wreath of scarlet roses and a large framed photo of the entire family, Kat radiant at its centre.
Between her and Howard, the children were seated like Russian dolls, in ascending order of height, Evie at her side and Luke next to his father, Sophie in the middle. Since the rescue from the school toilets, there had been a faint sense of a bond between Eleanor and her youngest niece, an invisible guy-rope. Nothing had been said, but Eleanor had been aware of the child hovering nearby from time to time, as if she wished at least to be noticed if not addressed. Since sliding into the pew next to Eleanor for the service, Evie had been swinging her short legs rhythmically, looking straight ahead. When the vicar embarked on his introductions, about the gathering being an act of celebration rather than mourning, she rolled the service booklet into a cylinder and began alternately sucking one end of it and raising the other to her eyes like a telescope. While the rest of the congregation struggled through the first hymn, she continued to look through it, training her gaze round the church, making no attempt to sing herself.
After the hymn, it was time for the tributes. With Howard’s encouragement each of the children had prepared a brief list of what they had most treasured about their mother. As they filed out and took their places in front of the coffin, he buckled visibly, crossing his arms and gripping his ribcage. From the congregation there arose a soft collective intake of breath followed by a tender, expectant silence, a cushion of support it felt like, as if to catch all three of them, should they fall. Luke’s paper shook, his thin face twitching as he read out brief, gruff descriptions of Kat’s sense of humour and inability to understand the rules of cricket. There was an eloquence to some of the phrases that suggested a painfully adult attempt to process the occasion. It made Eleanor want to put her fingers in her ears. Sophie was more natural, reading too fast about having all her party dresses made for her and the special French plait into which Kat had often tied her hair.
‘Hannah does it now,’ she muttered by way of a conclusion, self-consciously tweaking the thick braid, and nudging her little sister to take her turn.
Evie spoke in the clear ringing voice of a creature who hasn’t begun processing anything. ‘Mummy made nice cakes,’ she said. ‘And I liked it when Mummy hugged me.’ There were stifled groans from her audience. Collective pain. Evie stared back at them, her green eyes wide and inscrutable. She lowered her piece of paper. ‘She couldn’t find my rabbit Choccy and we think it died.’
Both her siblings looked startled. Sophie nudged her again, this time to indicate a move back to the pew. Howard was pressing his face into his hands.
‘And now Mummy might see Choccy again,’ Evie continued, ‘but I am not sure because after this we are going to burn Mummy’s body and we didn’t burn Choccy’s. Mummy said she wanted to be burnt because it will turn her into a cloud. And clouds are part of heaven. But I think God is mean,’ she concluded stoutly, ‘to take Mummy when we still need her.’
The silence in the church had stretched tight and thin, as delicate as blown glass. Even Vincent seemed to tremble in his chair. Only Evie appeared oblivious. She led her siblings in the return to the front pew, stomping in her smart patent leather shoes and dodging Howard’s outstretched arms. She did not look at Eleanor as she sat down but resumed her leg-swinging, more frantically. Eleanor edged closer, so her arm was pressed against her niece’s, aiming to offer comfort but also needing to feel the heat of the small angry body against hers.
Outside afterwards, it was snowing lightly, the flakes too wet to settle. The Bressingham nurse was waiting with the back of his van open and the ramp down, ready for the journey to the crematorium. Eleanor kissed the top of Vincent’s head as she handed him over. Twenty-four hours, she told herself. Twenty-four hours and she would be back in London and it would all be done with.
‘I am going to get drunk,’ Howard announced later that night, emerging from the cellar as Eleanor stepped from the kitchen into the hall. The food caterers were long gone, the house tidy as a shop. Kat’s ashes had been scattered, all of them taking a turn, under the tree by the swing. The children had been mute by then, drained, like the rest of them. All three had fallen asleep in front of the telly in the den, and Howard had carried each to their beds in turn, even Luke, who was as long and unwieldy as a plank. Howard held up the bottle he was carrying to show Eleanor. It looked old and special, covered in dust, its label half torn. His hands and fingers were visibly dirty. His once crisp white funeral shirt was open and askew, hanging forlornly out of his smart black trousers. ‘I am going to drink this. Then some whisky. A lot of whisky. And I would prefer to do it on my own. If you don’t mind.’
Eleanor shrugged, nodding. Her head was throbbing. She couldn’t wait to be on her own, to close her eyes, even though she knew she wouldn’t sleep.
‘But thank you, Eleanor.’ He dipped his head in a brief formal bow. ‘All these months. All you have done. Thank you. Kat and I asked you to be here and you came. That was good of you. Setting aside your work. Dealing with her. Dealing with me. None of it can have been easy. I want you to know I am grateful.’ His voice was clipped and polite. ‘I have ordered you a taxi at nine-thirty on my account for your morning train. Hannah’s coming at eight. I shall be up too of course. Say a proper farewell.’ He hesitated, frowning. ‘That was one thing with Kat, at least. We had time. To say our goodby
es. Not that it makes a fucking difference now.’ He spun on his heel and trudged towards his study, cradling the bottle to his chest like a new-born.
Eleanor went upstairs and lay on her bed. The snow had resumed, blowing with soft thuds against the windowpane. Somehow she dozed, dreaming of trains, screeches and whistles, but then suddenly she was wide awake and desolate. She listened for Howard, but all downstairs was quiet. She hadn’t drawn the curtains and could see that the snow had stopped again. The sky was black, blacker than she had ever seen it. And starless. She needed tea. Whisky. Something.
In the kitchen, the heat coming off the Aga was comforting, like sliding under a warm bath. Eleanor moved slowly, filling the kettle, setting it to hiss on a back ring, picking a mug off one of the hooks along the dresser. She was unscrewing the tea caddy when Howard appeared in the doorway, maintaining his balance with the visible effort of the seriously inebriated.
‘Tea?’
‘Nope.’ He swayed and then steadied himself.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ Eleanor picked out a teabag and screwed the lid back on the caddy. She felt nothing but compassion for Howard. She would have drunk herself stupid too, if she had thought it would help.
‘He touched her, you know.’
Eleanor paused, holding the caddy. ‘Who touched who?’
‘Your father. Touched your sister. Nothing too mind-bending. Just enough to fuck her up.’
‘Howard, you are very drunk.’ Eleanor spoke evenly, continuing with the business of putting the caddy back on its shelf but finding that it seemed imperative suddenly to set the tin in exact equidistance from its counterparts bearing the labels ‘Coffee’ and ‘Sugar’.
‘She made me swear never to tell you.’
‘I think you should get yourself to bed.’ Eleanor kept her back to him, the row of tins blurring before her eyes. Her heart had started fluttering oddly against her ribcage, like a trapped bird. ‘It’s been a long day—’
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