The house was warmer than she’d expected; her father must have turned the central heating up in preparation for the house party.
“Dad?” she called, as they walked into the hall. She turned to Guy, uncertain.
“Shall we look upstairs, in case he’s asleep?” Guy asked. “Or would you prefer not to disturb him?”
“I’d prefer to find him.”
Could her father have wandered off, got lost, become confused? There had been no suggestion of that, ever. She started towards the stairs, awkward on her crutches in the confined space of the hall. She remembered the last time she’d been here, watching her father with his stick as she hauled her cases upstairs.
Guy followed her up to the first floor, along the landing to the bedroom at the front. Sarah knew her way around the house in the dark, but Guy lit a trail of lights behind her. As they crossed the threshold of her father’s bedroom he flicked the switch inside the door.
The bed was empty, tidily made.
“Could he have gone out shopping?” Guy suggested. “Some last minute Christmas presents?”
“I suppose he could have taken a taxi into Petersfield. But look.” On top of the chest of drawers was a stack of wrapped presents.
“Well,” said Guy. “Wine, or something. A sudden panic about playing host to all these people.”
“But I’m doing the catering.”
There was a petulant edge to Sarah’s voice. Guy put his hand on her shoulder; the first time he’d touched her since they’d got out of the car.
Sarah felt suddenly that they’d dawdled, failed to register the seriousness of the situation. Moving as fast as she could on the crutches, she swung herself back along the landing, leaving Guy to peer into the other rooms on that floor as he passed, and started down the stairs.
“Careful,” Guy called after her. “Don’t fall.”
Before she reached the bottom he was beside her again, turning on more lights, opening the door to the sitting room.
And there was her father, almost as Sarah had last seen him, sitting in the high-backed armchair by the fireplace. Except not as she’d last seen him, because Sarah knew almost in that first instant that he was dead.
Chapter 41
Despite the proliferation of carol singing on the radio and the decorations that festooned the city from early December onwards, Christmas crept up on Olivia almost without her noticing. Her own preparations weren’t as demanding as they used to be, now the boys’ presents consisted entirely of hard cash or pre-ordered electronic gadgets – and since their taste in food was equally unadventurous, she had long since given up any culinary creativity in honour of the season. If there were Christmas concerts at their schools, her sons didn’t feature in them. Instead of the melée of nativity plays and letters to the North Pole that had characterised Christmases past, there was a week or two of vague anticipation, then a furious rush to fill the fridge and post presents to godchildren and cousins, and suddenly it was December 23rd.
She and Robert had been invited to a few parties of a sedate but pleasant kind, but the boys’ social calendars – even Benjy’s – were much fuller. Olivia had made an attempt to keep track of their plans, noting the events she got to hear about on the communal planner in the kitchen that the boys laughed at and added jokey obscenities to, but after school term ended on the 19th she gave up. Tom’s whereabouts had been beyond her sphere of influence for some time, and now it seemed affable Alastair was moving out of range too. The younger two occasionally needed ferrying to some engagement or other, but more often they went by bike, shouting farewells from the hallway and slamming the front door cheerfully behind them.
“Should I be keeping closer tabs on them?” she asked Robert, when he came home from work on the evening of the 23rd to find her alone in the house. “We always said one of the nice things about living in Oxford was that the boys could be independent, but Benjy and Angus aren’t very old.”
“Don’t you know where they are?” Robert took a bottle of wine out of the fridge and held it up enquiringly.
“Yes, please. I do in theory. Benjy’s at Paul’s house and Angus said he was going to the cinema, but they just head off. I feel a bit ineffectual.”
“Don’t. Feel liberated instead. Cheers.”
Robert led the way through to the sitting room, in which an assymmetric Christmas tree had been installed at the weekend. The garden centre had almost run out of large trees by the time they got there, and they’d settled for one that had clearly been rejected by more discerning purchasers. Decorations charting the years of family life hung from its branches: a sequence of salt-dough stars made at playgroup; a set of kings and shepherds from the high-class crackers Olivia had bought one year, provoking a storm of protest about the absence of more desirable trinkets.
Robert settled into the sofa with a sigh.
“Good tree,” he said. “I like the wonkiness.”
“When’s your mother arriving?” Olivia asked, although she was fairly sure she had spoken to her last.
“After lunch tomorrow. She’s getting some horrendously early train.”
Robert’s mother almost always came to them for Christmas. Her other sons lived much nearer, so she had less need to catch up with their families. Olivia suspected there was also less justification for her to stay any length of time with them, and she liked to bed into the household for at least a week, to get what she called her penn’orth from the season. Olivia was happy to have her, anyway. She’d been a godsend at Christmas when the boys were little, and now they were older she was remarkably tolerant of their noise and arguing. Her own mother was staying in Italy for Christmas. She had an invitation, apparently, to stay with a colleague in Fiesole.
“We should have a family get-together next year, while we can still make the boys come,” Olivia said. “They haven’t seen their cousins for a couple of years.”
“Mmm. Speaking of which, have you heard any more from your friend Mr Shotter?”
“No.” Olivia paused, considered. Things had been easier, warmer, between her and Robert since the Southwold trip, but they hadn’t mentioned 1983 or its ramifications again since. She was conscious of the need not to ruffle the surface too much, just at the moment: she thought of something setting, or healing, or regrowing. She said lightly, “but I wrote to Eve today.”
“Ah!”
“I did what you suggested. I told her neither of us was more to blame than the other, and that we’d both paid our penance.”
“Good.” Robert raised his wine glass. “Good for you.”
“She can take it however she likes,” Olivia said. “You never know, with Eve. I don’t expect to hear anything from her, but who knows?”
“Who knows indeed.” He grinned, pleased with her. “How long are the boys out? Do we have time to slip out for supper somewhere?”
Olivia mimed temptation and regret. “I don’t know. I don’t suppose we’d get a table, anyway.”
“We could try.” Robert drained his glass. “They’ve got keys, haven’t they? It has to work both ways, this independence thing.”
“It doesn’t, though.” Olivia hesitated. “I suppose I could check in with Paul’s mother. We could take our mobiles.”
In the end they cycled to a pub near the river that had changed hands recently. Its reputation was growing fast, but apparently not fast enough to fill it two days before Christmas. The food was unexceptional, but the occasion wasn’t: it was a long time, Olivia thought, contemplating her husband in the candlelight, since she’d felt like the slip-of-a-girl he’d taken home to meet his mother. Lucky none of the children were there to see them sharing a chocolate soufflé, twining fingers under the table. Lucky them, to have this moment before Christmas descended in its full glory.
At ten o’clock Olivia phoned home and got Angus, safely returned from the cinema and indignant to find his parents absent.
“Where are the others?” he demanded.
“Paul’s mum’s dropping Benjy back in a
little while,” Olivia said. “We’ll be home soon.”
Angus hung up, and Olivia frowned.
“We should get back,” she said. “He’s only thirteen.”
“Nearly fourteen. Old enough to fend for himself for an hour or two.”
“Even so, if any of them are going to cause trouble, it’ll be Angus.”
“Darling, he’ll be plugged into the Xbox by now. How much trouble can a boy come to in virtual reality?”
Olivia accepted another glass of wine, but when the waitress passed again they ordered coffee and the bill.
Olivia would look back on that evening conscious of a number of ironies, the first of which was that – having cycled to the pub because they’d already had a glass of wine each, exploited that fact by consuming another bottle over dinner, then arrived home merry enough to take down the bottle of Laphroaig – both she and Robert were more drunk than they’d been for a while when the phone rang at eleven thirty.
“It’ll be one of the boys,” she said, as Robert got up to answer it. “Tell them to call a taxi. The number’s on the board.”
It was clear from Robert’s tone that it wasn’t one of his sons he was speaking to, but not immediately obvious that anything was wrong. Half-listening to his end of the conversation, Olivia admired the fact that at this hour of night, and after so much to drink, he could sound so measured and reasonable in what she took – absurdly – to be a business negotiation.
“When was this?” Robert said, and “who else is involved?” and “will there be any charges?” and Olivia dreamily remembered him as the young turk of the Leytonstone flat, speaking to investors in America late at night while she lay curled up in bed.
Then he said, “we’ll be there as soon as we can,” and she jerked upright as he put the phone down.
“Who?” she said. “What’s happened?”
“Alastair.” Robert came back to the table and put his hands on her shoulders. “He’s all right, unharmed, but he’s in a police cell. Caught in a raid on a pub in Jericho.”
Olivia relaxed slightly. “Drinking,” she said. “Silly boy.”
“Marijuana,” said Robert. “Not much, but he might be charged with possession. I’ll order a taxi.”
Olivia hadn’t been inside the police station in St Aldate’s since she’d accompanied a trip there six years before as part of the new citizenship curriculum, with – another irony – Alastair’s primary school class. After that visit, she reminded Robert on the way down, Alastair had expressed a firm intention of joining the police force.
“He still could,” Robert said. She couldn’t judge his mood: he’d hardly spoken since the cab arrived.
“I would never have guessed it would be him,” she said.
She knew from the brief squeeze of her hand that Robert understood what she meant; understood that she blamed herself, and that there was no point telling her this was a common enough predicament. Like a teenage version of head lice, she’d heard someone say, horrifying until you realise everyone’s in the same boat. But not everyone in the class was arrested at sixteen. She shut her eyes, conscious of a headache throbbing in her temples, a long night ahead of them. Conscious of the fact that it was unreasonable to be more disappointed by Alastair than she would have been by one of his brothers.
In fact the whole process, though bureaucratic and undignified, was blessedly quick. Olivia let Robert do the talking, sign the forms, be polite to the officer at the front desk and a succession of others whose role and rank she didn’t grasp.
“We might’ve kept him overnight if it wasn’t Christmas,” one of them said, and Olivia felt as though they’d slipped into an episode of a TV cop drama: the middle class boy arrested the night before Christmas Eve; the parents worse for wear after dinner at a gastro pub; the uniformed officers who’d seen it all before.
It wasn’t until Alastair was brought through to them that the twist in the episode became apparent. Olivia had been dimly aware that another couple, a little older, had arrived just after them, but she hadn’t made the connection with another son, a partner in crime of Alastair’s. But when Alastair appeared there was another boy beside him: a boy perhaps a couple of years older than him, with ginger hair, visible to Olivia for a few seconds through the open door before he was escorted to his own parents. A narrow face, a sharp chin, incongruously large eyes. A few seconds, and a different context, but Olivia recognised him immediately, was certain beyond reasonable doubt that he was the boy who had attacked her that day on the canal bridge.
Chapter 42
The thing that struck home was the silence. After the flurry of their entry, the clatter of crutches on flagstones, the exclamations of grief and shock, there was nothing to disturb the stillness of the scene. Deathly still, Sarah thought, kneeling beside her father, finding his limbs already stiff, his skin clammy despite the warmth of the room. A deathly hush. As she laid her head on his knee and waited for tears, even the usual small sounds of the house seemed quieted.
After a few moments Guy came and stood beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder, but he said nothing. Astonishing, how long he said nothing for, resisting the temptation to offer consolation, tea, phone calls. Sarah’s mind wasn’t working in its usual way, one thing following another, but spiralling downwards, backwards, inwards. She wasn’t capable, at first, of registering Guy’s restraint, or being grateful for it. But when the necessary observances were completed – when, slowly, slowly, there was a feeling like blood flowing back into a blanched limb – she was glad that he knew the silence mattered. She was glad, too, for the weight of his hand; that was also necessary, just then.
“What should we do?” she asked. “Are we supposed to call an ambulance?”
The memory of that other occasion was unavoidable. The terrible flurry of ambulance crews and police officers, the drama they had watched helplessly, hoping it might have a different ending.
“I don’t think so. No need for paramedics.”
“No one, then?”
“Perhaps his GP. The duty doctor.”
“His GP lives in the village,” Sarah said. Her father had been scrupulous about not exploiting this fact, but surely … “By the phone, there, in the red book. Ashworth.”
“Shall I ring, or you?”
“You.”
Her tears were flowing now; now that the moment of vigil was past, and the long stretch of death was beginning. Sarah reached for Guy’s hand as he moved away: a primitive instinct, to hold on to the living. He stopped, turned back to her.
“Did you find your mother?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Not in here, in the little sitting room.”
Guy waited a moment longer, then he squeezed her hand and released it.
“Dr Ashworth?” she heard him say. “I’m so sorry to disturb you. I’m Sarah Brewster’s fiancé.”
After that there wasn’t silence but noise and people, an impromptu wake, as the villagers came up the road in their Christmas coats to offer their respects and condolences and assistance. It was, Sarah thought afterwards, as though they’d slipped into an earlier century, when death was played out in cottage sitting rooms, flanked by hearth rugs and wing chairs, not in over-lit wards where there was no escape from clinical certainty. She imagined her father’s spirit lifted, given flight by the voices and bodies he had lived among. Old men close to his age pressed her hand and praised him; well-meaning women advised about the likelihood of a funeral before the New Year. It was a fiction, a drama, a rite of passage. Impossible not to see, already, how a natural death was part of the natural order. People knew what to do. Thank God, people knew what to do. Sarah couldn’t stop weeping, but not all the tears were for her father.
Guy found the Christmas cake among the boxes in the back of the car and passed it round on a tray. He made tea, produced bottles of sherry, with the same aplomb he might have shown at a village gathering in the Himalayan foothills.
“I saw him last week,” Gillian Ashworth
told Sarah, before the house had filled with their neighbours. “He’d had a bit of angina; his blood pressure was rather high. I started him on beta-blockers and arranged some tests for the week after Christmas.”
Sarah nodded. The words didn’t mean anything yet – they had the same deceptive feel as a logical explanation in a dream – but she saved them up in her mind. She would have to tell her brother.
Dr Ashworth put a hand on her arm. “At least there won’t have to be a post mortem,” she said. “I can sign the death certificate.”
Sheila Morrison, who had supplied Graziana the au pair, handed Sarah a glass of sherry. “You may not think so, but you need it,” she said. She made a noise between a laugh and a sigh. “Graziana’s gone home to Zagreb for Christmas, or she’d be weeping too. She adored him, you know. Spent hours here, much longer than he paid her for.”
The new vicar came, even though Jock Brewster had not been sympathetic to his evangelical leanings. He accepted a piece of cake and held it carefully in the palm of one hand.
“You’re about to get married, I understand,” he said.
Behind him on the grand piano the family portraits reflected back the bustle and strangeness, their frames polished for Christmas.
“We haven’t had a chance to discuss – “ Guy began, but Sarah interrupted him.
“Yes,” she said, “we’re getting married in a fortnight.”
Chapter 43
“Well,” said Robert. “It’s Christmas Eve.”
They were walking up St Aldate’s, passing Christchurch, the looming grace of Tom Tower rising above them. The city was quiet, but not deserted: knots of people passed them, most high-spirited, some rowdy, heading up towards Carfax or down towards the Abingdon Road. Lights in the shape of stars and crescent moons were strung across the street, their reflections glittering off the damp paving.
It was odd, Olivia thought, that amid the unfamiliar emotions, the awkward business of pitching a reaction that was responsible but not absurdly reactionary, there could be a sense of occasion. Was that what Robert was acknowledging, the strange festivity of this night-time walk, the two of them and their son alone in the streets of Oxford, or was his intention entirely ironic?
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