For all that, although I don’t regret what I have done, I regret the way I’ve done it very much. I didn’t think things through and I miscalculated a lot of other things. I owe you an apology and also a recompense. lam moved to do this from the bottom of my heart because your coming here made me feel my loss of you keenly, and your behaviour demonstrated that I hadn’t tried to see things sufficiently from your point of view.
My proposal is this. That when my share of the proceeds from High Place comes through, you and I use it to buy a flat together, a two-bedroomed flat for us to live in until your education is finished and for you to have after that. I’d move out of this house, and find a lodger for my half of it to pay the mortgage. I’ve discussed this all with Tony and although he would be very sad, and he has no children, he accepts that you are my priority. I told you he was a nice man.
Ring me when you can. No-one ever seems to be at home these days and the answerphone is never on, either. But I gather that the Pughs had a survey done and the result was satisfactory. So we can begin to do something quite soon. Certainly in time for Christmas. And we can start looking at sixth-form colleges in London.
With my love as ever, Daddy
Sophy dropped the letter and the pages slid apart and scattered across the table. She stared at them, at the black words on the cream paper, and then she picked up the nearest sheet, and kissed it.
A little later, the envelope hidden between the mattress and the divan base of her bed on the side against the wall, Sophy changed into her waitress clothes and went round to The Bee House. She went in, as she always did, through the kitchen, which was oddly quiet except for cooking noises. Laurence was bent over something in a steel bowl and he glanced up only briefly to say, ‘Morning, Sophy,’ before going back to whatever it was with fierce concentration. Kevin and Steve, with elaborate grimaces, caught her eye to indicate that Laurence was in some fearful mood and was not to be spoken to. Sophy looked puzzled. Laurence was never in a fearful mood, he wasn’t that kind of man. She opened her mouth to say something but Kevin, flailing his arms like a windmill and then signalling a cut throat with his forefinger, silenced her. She shrugged, walked past them all and up the short flight of stairs outside the kitchen to the bar.
Hilary and Don were leaning one either side of the bar, over several computer-printed invoice sheets. Hilary looked much the same as normal, if tired, and was wearing her usual hotel uniform of straight navy-blue skirt and cream shirt, with a red belt and her red spectacles. Adam had said not long ago that she looked like an air hostess and she had said sharply that that was fine by her since her job was not in the least dissimilar, clearing up after adults behaving like wayward toddlers, in a confined space.
‘Hello, Sophy,’ Hilary said. She looked up from the invoice sheets. She did not appear, Sophy thought, to have slept very well. Perhaps she and Laurence had had one of their quarrels, the ones George had told her about.
‘Morning—’
‘You look cheerful,’ Don said to Sophy. He wore a green bow-tie patterned with yellow dinosaurs. ‘Makes a change round here.’
‘Thank you,’ Hilary said. She turned to Sophy. ‘I’d forgotten I’d put you on the rota for lunchtime.’
‘Oh,’ Sophy said. ‘Shall I—’
‘No. You stay.’ She paused a second and then she said, ‘How is Vi?’
‘Brave,’ Sophy said. ‘Very brave. She’s not a bit like she was when he was ill. She’s stopped wanting to blame everybody. She’s going to have all his favourite hymns at the funeral, all the ones about the sea.’
‘Good for her,’ Hilary said. Her voice wasn’t quite steady. ‘We’ll all come of course. Sophy—’
‘Yes?’
‘See if you can find Gus for me, would you? I’ve got a job for him. Then check the tables. I want them all laid, but only a third with lunch menus.’ She gave Sophy a sudden smile, a smile that much startled her since it was not the kind of smile one associated with Hilary but a smile of real sweetness, almost of affection. ‘You’re a good girl, Sophy,’ Hilary said.
Gus was not in the flat. Nobody was, except Lotte who was trying to subdue the chaos.
‘Truly, the way these people live, the way these boys are allowed to be so untidy. Look at these clothes. You can’t even walk the floor. When I was growing up, we had to clean our own bedrooms, my mother insisted on it, and of course we always wore slippers in the house because of the dirt. The dirt in Sweden stays outside houses, on outside shoes. Never inside, like here. Have you seen this bedroom, where you sleep sometimes? It is a disgrace. It looks as if ten people had a fight—’
‘Have you seen George?’ Sophy said.
‘He is working. He has gone to his new job at the garden centre. He said to me, “Lotte, would you—”’
‘Or Gus?’
‘He went out,’ Lotte said. She picked up a bucket of hot water from which fumes of disinfectant rose chokingly. ‘He is not supervised, Gus. At his age he should be in a summer camp, with other boys, like in Sweden.’
‘We don’t have them here. Where did he go?’
‘He said something about the garden. He said he might climb a tree. Climb a tree! At his age.’
‘His mother wants him—’
‘Now she does not look well, Mrs Wood. Nor Mr Wood. They are both quite exhausted.’ She turned towards the bathroom, holding the bucket and a sponge. ‘It is as well I have a steady Swedish temperament, the things I am asked to do.’
Sophy went back down the stairs to the ground floor, and out past Hilary’s office through the door to the garden. It was basically a pretty garden, an old, unpretentious, traditional garden of grass and rose beds with, at the far end, a wilder patch with apple trees and a swing and climbing frame for the children of hotel guests, with a slide and ladders. It all looked very neglected. The lawn hadn’t seen a mower recently, there were thick ruffs of groundsel under the roses and the roses themselves needed dead-heading. In the borders along the wall where the bee boles were, all the tall flowers like delphiniums and hollyhocks had faded and fallen over, like long corpses among the smaller things still struggling to live and bloom.
‘Gus?’ Sophy called. ‘Gus?’
There was no reply. She walked down the grass, past the tables and benches set out for summer drinks, to the apple trees. She peered up into the bigger ones.
‘Gus?’
Silence. She went through the trees to the very far end of the garden where another wall divided it from some neglected allotments and then the car-park to an office building and, hitching up her waitress skirt, hauled herself on to the top.
‘I’m here,’ he said.
She turned. He was astride the wall, at the far left-hand side, almost hidden under the stiff dark branches of an old yew tree that hung over it.
‘Why didn’t you come?’ Sophy said. ‘You heard me—’
‘I didn’t want to,’ Gus said. ‘I’m better here.’
‘Hilary wants you.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. A job, she said.’
Gus said, ‘I haven’t seen you for ages.’
Sophy swung herself on to the wall and edged towards him astride it.
‘Four days, I should think. Come on, Gus. She said to come—’
‘I can’t.’
‘What d’you mean, you can’t?’
‘I can’t go back in there.’
‘Oh Gus,’ Sophy said in exasperation, ‘don’t be so stupid. What’s the matter with you?’
Gus said nothing. Sophy couldn’t see his face, only his long thin legs in jeans with the carefully ripped knees, and the Russian-army belt George had found for him at a Birmingham flea market, and an inch or two of greyish-white T-shirt.
‘Come out,’ Sophy said. ‘Come out so I can see you.’ He didn’t move.
‘Well, I’m going then. I’ll tell Hilary you won’t budge.’
‘Wait—’
She leaned back along the wall, her hands behin
d her for support.
‘I haven’t got all day.’
Slowly, Gus emerged. He came towards her, dragging himself astride out of the whispering branches. His face was filthy, streaked with dark smears from the yew bark. When he was about a foot away, he stopped, and looked at her. Sophy saw that he’d been crying. She sat bolt upright.
‘Hey, Gus—’
He stared at her, as mournful as a chastised puppy.
‘Gus, what is it?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Know what?’
Gus sighed, a huge, shuddering sigh. He put up one grimy hand as if to hide his face and then he said from behind it, ‘Don’t you know that my father wants to leave my mother and marry your mother instead?’
Chapter Fourteen
THE CHURCH WAS a riot of flowers. Vi had done a deal with her flower-seller friend in Whittingbourne market and had come away with armfuls of dahlias and spray chrysanthemums. Vi loved dahlias. She loved the precision of them and their clear, strong, unabashed colours. The first flowers Dan had ever given her had been dahlias, grown on the allotment he then had at the back of The Bee House, where he grew them in a tidy row, just like his rows of peas and beans and carrots. He’d grown them to enter for the Whittingbourne Flower Show, in one of the pensioner classes, but had decided to give them to Vi instead. She could see them now, the huge, symmetrical, well-defined heads, scarlet and purple and orange and yellow, encased in a cone of newspaper, and behind them Dan’s face, quite a small, pale thing by comparison, full of anxious pleasure.
‘Lord,’ she had said. ‘What are you doing, Mr Bradshaw? It’ll be chocolates next.’
It was. A huge box of milk chocolate assortment, just left on her doorstep in a paper bag. Then some vegetables he’d grown, all scrubbed, and then a goldfish in a bowl that he said he’d won, quite by accident, when the fair came through Whittingbourne and camped in the main car-park for two days. The goldfish had been a great success, had broken the ice between them. Vi christened it Fluffy. It lived for two weeks and then suddenly died and Vi found it floating in its bowl, belly up, looking, she said, deader than anything she’d ever seen, even on a fishmonger’s slab. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t need the goldfish any more. They were off by then, and flying.
Vi didn’t really approve of church. She thought it stopped people thinking for themselves, and that God was some kind of cop-out, but Dan had thought differently. He seldom went to church, except at Christmas and Armistice Day when he wore his poppy and his two small replica wartime medals, but he watched Songs of Praise regularly on television and he didn’t like Vi to scoff at people who had religion. He said it was ignorant and unfeeling to do that. He said the Merchant Navy had taught him a lot about religion keeping people together.
‘Or apart,’ Vi said.
But she had accompanied him, once or twice, at Christmas and had liked the crowd and the candles and the singing. When Dan died, she had gone to the vicar of the same little church at the end of Orchard Street and asked rather diffidently about a funeral.
‘Of course,’ the vicar said. ‘I was expecting it. Mr Bradshaw was one of our parishioners.’
Vi was much amazed. It gave Dan a kind of local status somehow, it showed that other people besides her had noticed him. But then, he’d always looked so smart for church, his suit pressed, his shoes gleaming. And he stood up properly too, back straight, so that even though he was small he had a presence. Vi wished she’d admired him more, to his face. She wished she’d said that she was proud to be seen out with a man like that.
She was pleased with the look of the church. It was small and very old and rather dark, but the dahlias lit it up and there were candles everywhere, she’d asked for them especially. There were flowers beside the altar and either side of the chancel steps and on the font and every windowsill. She’d ordered one arrangement just from her, white and yellow, a long arrangement shaped like a narrow diamond, with lilies in it, and that was to go on top of his coffin when it was carried in. There would be no card with it. There was no need. Dan knew what she was thinking.
Hilary said she wanted to inspect her sons before the funeral. They had made a surprisingly conventional effort, even down to finding ties. Adam wore his at half-mast, but it was a dark tie and he had found a jacket and black shoes.
‘Well done,’ she said.
Adam tossed his hair. He ran a finger round inside his shirt collar as if it was choking him.
‘Dan was OK,’ he said.
George said to his mother, ‘Are you?’
She nodded. She was wearing a black suit none of them recognized and black high-heels. Adam privately thought she looked pretty good but decided not to say so. Looking too good didn’t seem quite right for a funeral; you just had to make sure you didn’t look weird. He smiled at her. She was great, carrying it all off like this. She hadn’t asked them what their father had said, hadn’t given them any hassle. Adam was grateful, grateful that she hadn’t been heavy about that or anything else. He never thought he would feel like this, nor that he could even contemplate speaking to his father again. But he could. He thought his father was acting in as bad a way as he could, but at the same time he had admired the way Laurence had spoken to them. Very calm, very steady, very sad.
‘I did not look for this to happen,’ Laurence had said. ‘I never contemplated it. I can honestly say that it fell upon me, like a thunderbolt, and once it had, I was different and so was everything else.’
They had listened to him, all three, in silence. Nobody asked him anything. Even Gus, who usually had no inhibitions about asking questions, said nothing. There was a palpable awkwardness in the air because no-one wanted Gina mentioned, no-one wanted the existence of that name admitted, no-one wanted even to think about the feelings it aroused. It was better, all round, just to consider Dad as Dad, and no more.
‘Have you nothing to ask me?’ Laurence said. ‘I’ll answer any question as truthfully as I can.’
George sighed. He leaned forward in his chair and put his elbows on his knees.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Don’t you even want to say anything?’
George said, staring at the floor, ‘Nothing you’d want to hear.’
Gus had his eyes shut. Adam knew he was just waiting for this interview to be over, counting the minutes. Was it worse if it was your father? Or if it had happened to Hilary, would they have felt even more outraged, even more that everything they’d been brought up to believe in had just been chucked out of the window? Just like that. And Dad wasn’t that kind of bloke, not the kind of bloke you associated with fancying women, going off the rails, talking about love like some third-rate movie. He was one of the most permanent kind of men Adam had ever come across. His friends had always been amazed that he was always there, always part of the family, always easy. There was something about Dad that was comforting. Or at least there had been, until now.
‘Vi will be really pleased you’re all coming,’ Hilary said.
They looked abashed. It was difficult to say that for some bizarre reason they quite wanted to go.
‘I don’t want to see Gina, though,’ Gus said.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘But she’ll be there—’
‘She’ll sit at the front. We’ll all be at the back. She’s got nothing to do with this. We’re going for Vi, boys. And Dan.’
‘And Sophy.’
‘Yes,’ Hilary said, smiling at Gus, ‘and Sophy.’
The church was more than half full. Everyone from Orchard Close was there, including Doug and Cath Barnett, also several cronies of Dan’s from all his years in the town, two representatives from the British Legion and a nurse from the hospital. The front pew was empty. Laurence, who would ordinarily have stood back to let his family file into a pew first, led the way and took a seat as far from the aisle as possible, under a small marble tablet commemorating the short life of a young Whittingbourne man, a soldier, who had lost his
life at the Battle of Omdurman. ‘A noble son,’ the tablet said. ‘A steadfast patriot’. Laurence knelt beneath it, acutely ill at ease, and stared fixedly ahead.
A few more people came in and settled themselves in the strange midday candle-lit gloom. Ahead of them all, Dan lay in his coffin, a short coffin of waxed wood with brass handles – ‘Only the best,’ Vi had said – under a dome of pale flowers. The organ was playing softly ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, and some people were whispering, leaning towards one another with their shoulders touching confidentially. Then there was a small hush. Vi came in, on Gina’s arm, dressed in deep purple. She walked very upright, her white hair waved under a little net arrangement. She paused by Hilary, and the pew full of Woods, and Laurence heard the hiss of her whisper. He held his own breath. Gina, in navy blue, was standing very upright and looking straight ahead.
‘Bless you, dear,’ Vi said, a little louder. She looked along the pew. ‘Bless you all for coming. Have you seen Sophy?’
They shook their heads.
‘She’ll be along,’ Vi said. ‘Poor dear. She’s so upset.’
Her smile travelled along their heads and lighted, at the end, on Laurence. He could feel it, like a little glow of warmth, full of the affection, at a time like this, of having known someone like him for thirty years. He was almost part of the family. He bent his head still further. I can’t bear it, he told himself, I can’t. Dear old Vi. She doesn’t know. Gina hasn’t told her yet, and she doesn’t know.
Sophy had High Place to herself. She had done this deliberately, saying she was going out to buy last-minute flowers for Dan and that she would follow them to the funeral. She had even dressed for the funeral, in a long black jersey pinafore dress over a dark-green T-shirt, and had put her hair up with a slide Dan had given her, shaped like a butterfly, made of dull silvery metal. He had been shy about giving it to her and she had never, while he was alive, liked it very much. Now, she felt violently fond of it. She also put on the bracelet that had been Fergus’s last birthday present to her, a twist of rough silver, like a rope. Then she said she was going out to get flowers for Dan.
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