by Rebecca Tope
Walking back to the village, I remembered Stella. Hadn’t I told her I’d call in and tell her the full story of what had happened on Sunday? Since then, I had heard nothing from her and given her scarcely a thought.
* * *
There were times when I wanted Stella with a passion that transcended everything. I revelled in her calm good humour, her self-effacing listening, where I could talk for hours and she would never interrupt with her own stuff. I had wondered for a long time what drew her to me. I saw myself as a very unlikely friend for somebody so professional and focused. Then she said something that explained it.
‘Hardly anybody feels comfortable around an undertaker,’ she’d sighed. ‘They always look at my hands. But not you. You seem to forget what I do, most of the time.’
It was true. And when I did remember her line of work, it was with a small thrill. What Stella did was real. It was like when we slaughtered Gregory. Stella saw through the veils of delusion that wrap around almost everybody, and I liked that a lot.
It was Friday, one of the most popular days for funerals. People want to attach the ceremony to a weekend, so they can stay over with the family and do their emotional debriefing. Mondays are the top favourite, using the weekend for preparation as well as obsessive retellings of how the death had happened, what was left unsaid, whether ‘Abide With Me’ was really a good choice for the hymn. Distant brothers and sons materialise, white-faced and red-eyed, appalled at their own ungovernable emotions, when they’d barely given their sister or mother a thought for years. Stella would describe them with relish, how they literally choked on their own guilt at times, gagging at the enormity of what they hadn’t done.
All of which meant Stella was likely to be under-occupied in the office, this being a Friday. The men would be rushing around in the hearses and limousines, florists would be making frantic calls about forgotten wreaths, but hardly anybody would be needing Stella’s attentions, unless there was an unavoidable doubling up of funerals, where she had to be the Conductor. This was not a job for a woman in many people’s eyes, and although she had done it numerous times, it was always with some anxiety. Personally, I doubted whether the mourners really registered who was conducting the proceedings anyway. The better it was done, the more invisible the individual became.
Stella was in fact loved by a lot of people, despite her dearth of intimate friends. Many of her admirers were aged widowers, profoundly grateful for her gentle treatment during the horrors of burying their wives. They would come back to discuss the headstone or payment or where to strew the ashes, finding a succession of pretexts until they would understand that she would welcome them anyway, just for a little chat and progress report. Anthony Brown, the joint proprietor of the business, had been relaxed about this, having experienced some of the same dependency himself, but gradually it became clear that Stella was almost too much of a good thing. It made him uneasy, the way she gave them cups of tea and let them sit in her office, where members of the public were not really permitted. They might see confidential death certificates or copies of people’s funeral accounts. So, reluctantly, she had become less welcoming, slowly disentangling herself from some of the most needy clients.
I had been delighted at the news of the opening of the Northleach office, where Anthony couldn’t supervise her visitors. She would generally try to be there on Fridays, ostensibly to catch up with paperwork and make phonecalls.
Taking the risk that she’d be there and available, I drove to the quietly fortunate little town. Northleach is quiet because it has a bypass and traffic doesn’t clog its streets. A rare feature, which has made it famous. The result is a village atmosphere where people notice each other and can call across the street expecting to be heard – unlike Painswick, with its stream of vehicles, constant engine sound and oily fumes. Anthony Brown’s impertinence in opening a branch of an undertaking business had not gone uncriticised. Some people had been astute enough to see it as a move to exclude competitors, rather than the genuine provision of a service. All the same, Northleach Church was popular for funerals and it was convenient sometimes to have the coffin waiting in the main street, processing in traditional fashion up to the church.
Stella was at her handsome oak desk, playing Solitaire on the computer, when I walked in. The bell fixed to the door alerted her enough to turn away from the machine, shielding it with her body, but I knew the routine.
‘Bored?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Just taking a bit of a break.’
‘Soon be lunchtime,’ I noted. ‘Shall I get sandwiches?’ She wouldn’t allow herself to leave her post for more than five minutes, which I often suggested was against employment law, but she never seemed to get the joke.
‘I’ve got some,’ she said. ‘You can share mine.’
The premises had originally been two shops, knocked together before planning permission to wreak such changes became impossible. A tiny ‘chapel of rest’ had been created at the back, with space for one coffin. Next to it was a kitchen area, with sink and kettle and microwave oven. Stella went through to make us some coffee, and I followed as far as the door.
‘No customers?’ I asked.
‘Actually, yes. There’s somebody in the chapel. We’ve got a funeral here at four. Some relatives are meant to be arriving from Canada any minute now for a last viewing. It’s all a bit tense, wondering whether they’ll be here in time.’
A strange urge gripped me to go and look at the body, completely counter to what I’d have expected. After Gaynor, you’d think I would never want to see death again. ‘Who is it?’ I asked. ‘Man or woman.’
‘Woman. Sixty-six. Motor neurone disease. The husband told me all about it. Dreadful business.’
‘Can I see her?’
Stella stared at me. ‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘Don’t ask me why. Laying a ghost, or something. I’ll hide if the people show up.’
‘Go on, then. Through there. Don’t mess her up, will you?’
I ventured into the minute room, as if entering a shrine. It was completely plain: white walls, vinyl flooring. A vase of mixed flowers stood on a small square table in a corner. The pale yellowish coffin was on trestles, a piece of white fabric like net curtaining spread over it. The top end was folded back, like a bedsheet, and open to view was a square of white satin, covering the dead face. With shaking fingers, I lifted it off, fixing my eyes on the cold flesh thus revealed.
It was, I supposed, a human face, with hair and the top few inches of a neat cotton blouse visible. The eyes were closed, and the lips tightly together. But it was not really human at all, but was like something manmade, an artefact. It was deader than wood, or even stone. I thought, crazily, that I would rather it had been crawling with maggots, disintegrating back into its constituent parts, than this nothingness. It was something manmade, in a way, cleaned up, the natural processes arrested by embalming.
I stood there for what felt like ages, striving to capture the woman it had been. There were lines etched in the thin face, the cheekbones prominent, the eye sockets sunken. She had obviously been horribly ill before she died. But the overwhelming message for me was that none of that mattered any more. It had all passed away, blown to the heavens and forgotten. One of our pagan tenets is that the inevitable fact of death should make us prize life all the more. Seize the moment, celebrate the warmth and movement that will soon be gone. Standing over this dead woman, I wondered if we had it right. Didn’t death render everything futile? If we were all going to finish up like this, then where was the point of anything?
I remembered my ghost, the fleeting image of something from a different reality. Why, I wondered, had I not given it more serious thought before this, as a sort of consolation for the death of Gaynor? Because it offered no consolation, I realised. It was utterly irrelevant, an inexplicable anomaly that had come unbidden, and was not amenable to anything I might want or demand. Ghosts which appeared in your bedroom on the night of
their passing could perhaps serve a useful purpose. Dead husbands who came up the stairs as you were craving their return in the wee small hours were too transparently wish-fulfilment to be credible. I didn’t want Gaynor back enough to conjure her by my own extreme feeling. This thing in front of me was death and it was terrible.
I covered up the face and left the room. Stella was waiting for me. ‘Well?’ she said, giving me a very intense look.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She isn’t like Gaynor was.’
‘Is that what this is about?’
‘I guess so. I don’t really know. I’m in a bit of a mess, I think.’ I took the coffee mug in an unsteady hand and went back into the main office.
Stella’s manner was not what anybody would immediately think of as sympathetic. She kept very still, but not in a tense way. She just waited for things to settle down, perfectly non-judgmental, happy to let the emotion do whatever it needed to do. It made me feel safe and unhurried.
I didn’t cry, although it came very close to that. I sat with the mug between my hands, not drinking it, letting images of death fill my head. I wanted to arrive at some tidy consoling aphorism that would sum it all up, once and for all, and explain what it was about death that made everything so impossible. One or two candidates shaped themselves on my tongue, only to be dismissed as fatuous. Stella had once ranted to me about the ubiquitous passage that people read at funerals, by a bloke called Henry Scott Holland. Everybody knows it, I suppose. I am not dead, but just in the next room or some such rubbish. At first I couldn’t see why Stella hated it so much, until I thought about my Gran. She was actually dead. There was no ‘next room’. It was all a big stupid lie, on a par with stories about gooseberry bushes to deflect children’s questions about babies and birth.
And now Gaynor had vanished in the same permanent, total fashion. As had the woman in the chapel of rest. When a body stops pulsing, the eyes stop focusing, the lungs stop inflating, there isn’t anything left.
My thoughts came to a full stop, and I lifted my head. ‘Murder,’ I muttered. ‘Killing somebody deliberately. It’s beyond words, isn’t it? Robbing them of life. It’s a huge thing to do.’
Stella lifted her shoulders briefly, as if I was stating the blindingly obvious. Which I suppose I was.
‘You’d think they’d stand out,’ I went on incoherently. ‘You know – have some sort of dark halo around them, or a cloud of smoke or a smell. You’d think they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves – like Lady Macbeth trying to wash herself away. How can they look anybody in the eye ever again?’
Stella smiled patiently.
Something inside me came into sharp focus. ‘I have to know,’ I realised. ‘I absolutely must find out who did it. For Gaynor’s sake.’
‘It doesn’t matter to Gaynor,’ she said gently. ‘Nothing matters to Gaynor any more.’
It was a horrible thought. ‘Well, I think it does,’ I insisted. Jumbled thoughts about time began to take over. If we weren’t so fixated on linear time, with a clear past, present and future, then it somehow mattered to Gaynor’s life, all of it, that the identity of her killer should be known. It mattered retrospectively, if that made any sense.
‘So talk me through it,’ Stella invited, with a swift glance at the clock on the wall.
I recollected myself, and where I was. Another new thought hit me. ‘Hey!’ I said. ‘It’ll probably be me who has to organise her funeral. I can’t think of anybody else who’d do it. So you can have the business.’ I grinned at her, aware of how important this would be. ‘How about that?’
‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she sighed, before grinning back.
Instantly my status changed. From a needy friend, taking up illicit working time I became a valued customer, perfectly justified in staying as long as I liked. The minor detail of Gaynor’s body still being in police custody, with no suggestion yet of a date for a funeral, hardly mattered.
So I told Stella everything I could think of about Oliver Grover, the pagan group, Phil Hollis and his new squeeze. ‘Squeeze?’ Stella echoed. ‘Is that what they call it now?’
‘I think it might already be out of fashion,’ I conceded. ‘But I like it.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Nice. Pretty. Clever and unflappable. She’s got a dog.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Stella tolerantly. ‘You’ve got a pig.’ She had always found Arabella a step too far. To her mind, keeping a pig was uncomfortably eccentric.
‘And she’s involved in the murder investigation, is she?’
‘Who, Arabella?’ The quip was a signal to both of us that my dark interlude was over, at least for the time being.
Stella waited unsmilingly for a sensible reply.
‘She’s very interested, yes. To be honest, there’s not much else for her to do except sort through Helen’s things, and she seems to have rather given up on that. Phil goes off all day, when they were supposed to be having a lovely romantic holiday with log fires and oil lamps. She’s only got me to talk to.’
‘Did she meet Gaynor?’
I had to think. ‘No,’ I concluded. ‘Neither did Phil.’
‘And nobody stands out for you, no dark haloes or nasty smells?’
A recently described image coalesced before my eyes. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But it did for Daphne – sort of.’
‘The one with the Freemason husband?’
‘Eddie. She saw him at the Horse Fair, quite unexpectedly, and she said it was as if a spotlight was on him. He was so vivid to her, it shocked her.’
Stella shook her head. ‘That doesn’t count,’ she opined. ‘He was her husband for umpteen years. He’s bound to leap out of a crowd for her.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. Then I told her about the Masonic stuff in Helen’s attic, purely because of the association of ideas.
‘What’s that got to do with Gaynor?’ Stella asked.
‘Probably nothing. Almost certainly nothing. But it was very strange.’
She gave it careful consideration. ‘A message for Hollis is my bet,’ she decided. ‘Somebody who knew he was coming, and decided it would have a special significance for him.’
‘I can’t imagine who,’ I said. ‘Or why. He didn’t look as if he was getting the message, either, if that’s what was going on. Plus, he might easily never have gone into the attic all week.’
‘So if it was some sort of advance confession to Gaynor’s murder, it wasn’t clear enough for him to understand it.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I told her, annoyed that she should turn the whole thing into a bit of jokey nonsense.
‘I know. Sorry,’ she said.
I didn’t stay long after that. She took a few basic details about Gaynor’s funeral – a burial in a recently opened natural cemetery that she knew about. ‘It’s run by a nice couple, Drew and Karen Slocombe. They’ve expanded onto a second site not far from Stroud, having got one up and running in Somerset. They’re popular with pagans, I gather.’
I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of them. But Gaynor wasn’t a pagan. It’s just that she’d have liked the atmosphere.’ I rode the wave of pain that came without warning. How did I know where Gaynor would have liked to be buried? The subject had never arisen between us.
‘Right,’ said Stella carelessly. ‘Whatever.’
I drove home full of determination to discover who’d killed my friend. There were unresolved niggles in my mind concerning Ursula and Verona, primarily. Ursula always had an edge to her, clever and frustrated as she was. There often seemed to be something on the tip of her tongue, some sharp remark that she was biting back. She had an air of knowing a great deal more than she revealed. Sometimes at a moot she would sigh theatrically and roll her eyes, implying that she saw us all as her intellectual inferiors, but was too polite to set us straight.
And yet she was only a geography teacher. Even when I was at school, there had been little respect for that particular subject. Everybody knew t
hat maths teachers were cruel monsters; English teachers wise and wonderful; games teachers dim-witted obsessives and geography teachers were just pathetic. It’s a game I’ve played a lot at parties and other gatherings, and it almost always works. The stereotypes persist across all schools and all generations.
But Ursula didn’t fit. I’d never seen her in action in the classroom, but I suspected she stood no nonsense, and made the subject at least slightly more interesting than most of her colleagues managed to do. She was, after all, exceptional in that she had actually travelled across the world, using every summer holiday to gather up her wide-bottomed daughter and trek across some of the deserts I presumed she made her pupils describe in their homework.
So why would she have any disagreement with Gaynor?
I tried to recall everything she’d said at my house, the evening before Gaynor was killed. She had defended Gaynor’s request for some piece of magic that might attract Oliver to her. She had disagreed with the current ideas about sexual orientation. Not much to go on there, except that she had at least been listening. She had given some attention to my friend and her emotional state. Which was more than Leslie or Verona had done, I realised. They had seemed to ignore the whole topic, as far as I had noticed.
Verona was essentially mysterious. I never fully understood her motives for doing what she did. She was an unlikely pagan for a start. She loved money and influence and always wanted to be the best. But Verona as the killer seemed unlikely. I could not imagine any scenario whereby Gaynor was in her way, or presented any kind of threat.
I had believed I knew these people, what they wanted from life, where they stood on important issues. I also believed I knew how things stood between them – who was miffed with whom, and why. And I did not believe that any one of them had any issues around my friend Gaynor. Most of them scarcely even knew her.
Although, I reminded myself, I was learning that there were other things going on in Gaynor’s life that she hadn’t told me about. I realised I’d imagined her steadily knitting, hour after hour, during most of her days. She could read at the same time, and sometimes told me about novels she’d consumed, as well as programmes she’d watched on TV. But I never visualised her outside, meeting people, riding around in Oliver’s car or gossiping about his clients. I tried to recreate her mood and manner the last time I’d seen her, wishing I’d paid more attention. Was I inventing the restlessness, and air of uncharacteristic decisiveness? A feeling that she was poised with gritted teeth on the brink of some new venture. I thought not. I thought I had been right in sensing a change in her – and it seemed reasonable to assume that this change had something to do with her death.