She turned her head to look at him. ‘Promise me,’ she said hoarsely, ‘promise me, and promise Ellie that you’ll never never tell.’
Rob opened his mouth. A gum of thick saliva clogged his tongue. He shook his head again, not knowing what she meant.
‘No,’ she hissed, clutching his hand more tightly, ‘you must promise. You must.’
He looked at her eyes, they were fevered with fierce intention but he couldn’t discern it. He nodded dumbly and managed to rasp out the words, ‘I promise.’
‘And promise Ellie.’
He looked at Ellie. He thought he could see in her face just a glimmer of comprehension. The noise of the sirens was loud now and the strobe of the blue lights against the empty sky was like a meteor shower. ‘I promise,’ he mouthed. Both the girls nodded. Abruptly the noise ceased and Ellie turned her head over her shoulder to yell, ‘Help! Over here! Help!’ before turning back to Rachel. ‘They’re coming, Rachie. They’re coming.’
‘He never would have told, you know,’ Rachel said.
‘Yes, I know that now.’ Rachel’s grip on her hand - so tight only seconds before it had almost crushed her fingers - relaxed. Rachel herself seemed to sink back down into the ground. Her body, her flesh seemed to be ebbing away. But her eyes remained open, wide and lucid.
Ellie remembered running up the hill through the clammy fog with Rachel behind her, trying to keep pace. She had been breathless and panting, wittering on and on between laboured breaths about her secret and how sorry she was, and trying to explain how it had all slipped out, and how sorry she was. It had been such an annoyance in the midst of her concern over Rob and eventually she had stopped in the road and grabbed Rachel’s shoulders hard and shouted at her, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ But then the lights of her father’s car had come out of the mist, up the drive from the house, like crazed yellow eyes. She and Rachel, clutching each other, had leapt clear as one, and he had careered past them, the fog closing around him. Then from within its shroud they had heard anguished screeching of metal on metal, like robots fighting in the fog. And at that moment she remembered Rachel’s voice wheezing into her ear, ‘I’m trying to say that I’m sorry. For telling Rob your secret.’ And she remembered distinctly how at that moment she had stepped away from Rachel in disbelief; what could that matter now? Only seconds later the lights of her mother’s car had borne down on them. She and Rachel had been on opposite sides of the driveway, she on the right, Rachel on the left, caught like two rabbits in the beam. The narrowness of the drive, the sudden gulf which had opened up between them and the inexperience of the driver meant that the car could not avoid hitting one or other of them. And she remembered seeing Rob’s face at the wheel before the car had swung away from her and down the slope and he, the car and Rachel had all disappeared.
‘Help! Over here! Help!’ Rob yelled, his voice broken.
Rachel was still looking at her. There was the sound of many feet pounding towards them.
‘That’s good,’ Rachel said.
There was a crowd. Uniformed paramedics, police constables, Mitch, Belinda, June and James, roaring like a wounded lion, like his heart would break, and the sound of Rachel’s little voice speaking into the melee. ‘Oh daddy,’ she said, ‘I knew you’d come and rescue me.’
Then they were all kindly moved away as the paramedics got to work. She was obscured by their broad backs and cumbersome bags, such a small body overwhelmed by the unaccustomed attention.
And the last thing Rachel remembered was her daddy’s face and Rob’s broken voice saying her name over and over again.
✽✽✽
More people arrived from the house, unable to wait any longer for news. The crush of vehicles, the flashing lights, the crowd of busy, grim-faced officers served rather to increase than to allay their fears. The drive was like a traffic-jam. Elliot had been carried into the first ambulance but its exit was blocked by those behind and so he had been transferred to the last vehicle. It reversed up the drive and sped off into the night. Belinda had refused to get into it to accompany Elliot, clinging instead to her children and James. In the end Miriam had consented to go. James, start-eyed, almost incoherent, managed to explain to one of the paramedics that there was an elderly stroke-victim at the house who needed attention. In the revolving emergency lights he looked bloodless and blue. A team set off down the driveway. A third ambulance waited. People were busy in the back with tubes and needles and blood-soaked pads and frantic, futile activity.
A police constable began to make enquiries. His colleagues sealed off the area with yellow tape. He tried to establish a pattern of events - who owned the cars, who had been driving - but the family was too distressed to make any sense. A teenaged girl and her brother were inarticulate with grief; their father was seriously injured. A red-haired woman who had been treated for cuts and bruises, a passenger in one of the cars, was quite hysterical. A large-boned man, father of one of the victims, was clearly in shock. His wife was also beyond a comprehensible sentence. The rest of the family gathered in a closed, clannish, huddle and grasped each other as though physical contact could in some way reinforce the shattered structure of their family.
Mitch looked on from a position at a little distance from them. It was laid out before him; a corpse in its final throes, suffering from an assault so vicious, so pernicious, that it could never recover. James was white and overcome, eviscerated, his bulk melting into an insubstantial shadow. Only Belinda, at his side, a silent buttress, infused him with the warmth of her compassion. Ruth was hysterical, engorged with distress; one more ounce of it would destroy her. It took the combined efforts of Heather and Mary to hold her. She clung onto Rachel’s jumper – the paramedics had cut it from the poor, limp, impaled body and Ruth had snatched it up. Its bloody fibres smeared her hands and face. In fact blood was everywhere; oozing through the quickly applied bandage from the cut on the back of Simon’s head, soaking into the back of Jude’s t shirt. The blood on Ruth larded Mary and Heather. Jude and Simon had Elliot’s blood on them and, as he looked down at himself, he too was marked with it, like a sign. Rob, Ellie and James were all smeared with Rachel’s blood and Belinda too, as she stood amongst them with words which could never console. Mitch felt their agony - physically felt it. Their pain was his. What else, who else, had he?
He found that he could not separate himself from them. His precious family was bleeding to death and the truth would sever the last artery, spraying them all with the sanguineous consequences of the McKay way. The truth would stretch loyalties beyond endurance; they would putrefy and stink. There would be a terminal taking of sides, fatal unforgiveness and shame like a cancer - it would rankle and fester, fed by bitter recrimination. The truth now would pare flesh from bone, disconnect the living tissue and still the faltering pulse. It would mean the dividing of the ways, the end of the road.
Ellie and Rob clung together like conjoined twins, finally sharing the mutuality of sinew and marrow, each the others only hope. He knew at last what she needed from him – what they all needed, the thing which he and he alone could offer her that would be of any use. He suddenly saw the value of being the outsider.
He stepped forward, towards the police constable. ‘I was driving,’ he said.
✽✽✽
The practical ramifications of the incident were as unwieldy as the emotional ones but they gave the shattered family something to cling on to in the few hours which remained of the night. Discussing logistics over endless pots of tea – who would do what, how many each car could accommodate, who would drive whom and where to, how each member could most usefully be deployed – gave the family the bland comfort of the mundane. The details took up the hours - irrelevant really; just hooks to hang words on, excuses to speak, to meet eyes, to nod and agree. The words which could not be said, especially the questions which could not be asked outright, remained too intimidating and thorny.
Mitch had been taken away in a police car to answer
questions, stalling Jude’s shocked, confused attempts to intervene with a shake of his head. Why had Ellie clung to him before the guiding hand of the constable had ducked his head into the vehicle? What had Rob tried, and failed, to say? Events had piled up on one another in the darkness and the mist with all the chaotic, destructive power of a derailed train, leaving indecipherable carnage. The fog, the anger, hysteria and shock, the drink – they all clouded the facts. Unpicking it all would be like trying to unravel a piece of ancient lace. What purpose could it possibly serve? The truth was too terrible to pursue. Mary had been right; there was only so much truth a family could stand.
James slumbered fitfully in the easy chair by the Aga, Ben curled up on his knee. They had both cried themselves to sleep and been gently covered over with the crocheted throw. The lights of the kitchen were kept dim and people spoke in hushed voices. It had taken all their efforts to prevent James from accompanying Rachel’s poor ravaged body to the hospital. He had needed physical restraint, bellowing like a wounded bull until Belinda’s clear voice had arrested his maddened struggles and given him reason to stay. ‘If you go, James, who will tell Ben?’
Muriel had stepped into the hiatus while he had considered this. ‘I’ll go with her. May I? I’d like to. She and I were becoming such friends. I’d like to keep her company.’ She had taken his agonised silence as assent and quickly stepped into the rear of the ambulance. Mary had had to go with Robert of course, and Les had driven behind the cavalcade of ambulances and police vehicles with June who had insisted on being taken to casualty to have her injuries assessed. ‘Don’t think for one minute,’ she had been heard to say as the car door closed, ‘that you’re going to leave me here with them.’
Initially Ruth had been overcome, roaming in aimless, agonised distress from one room to another, clinging helplessly onto doors and furniture. Her legs were barely able to support her but she would not sit down. She threw herself one moment onto James and the next onto Simon or one of her sisters. She clasped Ben to her and then pushed him away again, wailing in paroxysms of inarticulate grief, tormented as though by a million demons. Presently Dr Gardner had arrived, his hair more dishevelled than ever, his clothes hastily put on over pyjamas which peeped with inappropriate and mischievous cheerfulness from his cuffs and hems. He had administered an injection and advised bed but Ruth had cried like a child and begged not to be left alone. Now she sat at the table with the rest of the family, close to Simon, leaning heavily against him, withdrawn and silent as the others made gentle, carefully worded suggestions as to how things had best be arranged. She seemed to have arrived at a state of shocked detachment, her face a white, paralysed mask of traumatised bewilderment, her body overtaken from time to time by involuntary fits of trembling and shaking which it seemed that nothing, not even the powerful sedative, could still.
After a while Rob and Ellie withdrew to the games room. They sat together on the smaller sofa. ‘Not the big one,’ Rob said, looking at it aghast, ‘I sat on that with her...’ They put their arms around each other. If they communicated it was without words; the speech of instinctive, psychic communion. Only at one point, did Rob turn his ashen face to his sister and begin, ‘Ellie, I was...’ but she shushed him with a frown and a shake of her head. ‘We promised her,’ Ellie said.
Later Belinda found them there, overcome by sleep. She put the tray of tea and sandwiches down on the low table and lowered herself into the opposite chair where she remained for a long time, just watching them, and wondering if it was too late.
Upstairs, in the boys’ attic room where Simon had with difficulty, induced them to go to sleep, Tansy, Todd and Toby slept. Starlight slumbered in Ben’s vacated bed, side by side with her new cousins. Below, Granny, oblivious, snored and muttered in her dreams.
Around 4am Les returned with Miriam and Muriel. Robert had had another stroke and would be kept in hospital for a few days until its extent could be assessed. Mary had remained by his side. June, her minor cuts and bruises treated, had called Sandra from the hospital and was waiting to be collected. ‘Nothing on earth,’ she had proclaimed, ‘could induce me to return to that house.’
Muriel sipped her tea and spoke Rachel’s name. ‘I left her lying very peacefully in the chapel,’ she said. ‘She looked lovely. All cleaned up and... tidy.’ The image made them all cry and they made no attempt to hide it. After a while Muriel withdrew from her pocket a clear plastic bag and laid it diffidently on the table in front of Ruth. ‘The hospital gave me this,’ she said, ‘personal effects.’ They all looked at it - the paltry, inadequate evidence of a life.
Then, into the quiet, because such things cannot be dwelt on for too long but must be handled in small amounts, Miriam told them about Elliot. The news was not good. He was being transferred to a bigger hospital in another county where the neurological facilities were better. However, the prognosis was serious.
‘I’ll drive you Belinda,’ Les offered, ‘be happy to.’
Belinda smiled and thanked him, pouring tea - endlessly pouring tea, innumerable cups, countless gallons - but shook her head. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said quietly, ‘I’ll go tomorrow, but my family needs me here now. There isn’t much I can do,’ she smiled wanly and nodded towards the tea pot, ‘but I can do this.’
Something permeated the fug of Ruth’s consciousness, a shred of possibility, a glimmer of future light. She had not given Elliot a second thought - her own loss was too pressing - but his absence created a practical vacancy which would need filling. The family would need someone to step into his shoes, or rather into her father’s shoes which Elliot had inadequately occupied. She glanced across at James in the chair, and Ben curled upon him in his place of refuge. As Belinda said, there wasn’t much she could do, but she could do this. With an enormous inner effort she turned from the welcoming arms of the abyss she had been sinking gratefully into and roused herself, her eyes clearing, her colour warming slightly. She must make an effort - for James’ and Ben’s sake, and for the family - not to be overwhelmed. With hesitant hands she drew the bag towards her and emptied out the contents. A pink Disney character watch, a single, woollen sock and a small, tissue-wrapped parcel with a neatly written label. ‘A very happy un-birthday,’ she read, in a wondering voice.
At last the dawn broke, heartlessly bright and blue. Countless hundreds of birds, released from the blinding fog of the previous day, perhaps disturbed from their habitual nesting places by the disruptions of the night, careered and swooped around the roofs of the house like exuberant children released to play. The family roused itself and at last put in train the courses of action they had planned in the dark hours of the night.
Ruth surprised them all by taking tender control, offering guidance and making suggestions, reminding them of the plan. With calm and orderly efficiency, like a well-rehearsed team, the concerted organs and bones and sinew and flesh of one body, the family vacated Hunting Manor. Food was boxed and distributed between car boots, clothes claimed and packed away. Books, games and CDs were collected, wellies identified and sorted. James, working like an automaton, each tiny movement a mechanical step into an un-faceable day, swept out all the hearths and cleared away the broken glass and smashed ornaments from the small sitting room. Ben, his shadow, waxen-skinned, looked soberly on. His hands, holding the dustpan of fragments, trembled. ‘Will we get into trouble?’ he asked. His father smiled and shook his head. Jude and Les stripped all the beds and put the games room to rights. Heather and Ruth cleaned all the bathrooms while Muriel and Belinda scoured the kitchen. Simon arranged for Belinda and Elliot’s wrecked cars to be towed away once the police had completed their investigations. Tansy played with Todd and Starlight while the grown-ups were busy, and kept an eye on Granny. Toby hunched over the toilet and retched and retched with nothing to bring up but acrid yellow bile. It took all of Ellie and Tansy’s courage to go back into their room and pack their clothes. They wept over Rachel’s new, unworn outfits, her collection of old toys. Bridget Jones
was unfinished, her pack of sanitary towels scarcely begun. Then James came into the room and packed them all silently away.
Gradually the men and women McKay withdrew from Hunting Manor. They lingered for a while on the gravel sweep, unwilling to depart, to separate. Then they took one last look at the silent house, climbed anyhow into cars – aunts and husbands, cousins and wives, brothers and sisters and uncles all randomly distributed amongst the available vehicles. It didn’t seem to matter, after all their endless talk of it, who sat where. They drove in solemn convoy up the drive, leaving the house to the birds and the ghosts.
Epilogue – May 2005
The old parish church was packed with mourners and those who could not find a seat inside gathered under the laden blossom trees in the church yard. Neighbours, employees, representatives from the masonic lodge rubbed shoulders with beneficiaries from the various McKay charitable interests, local dignitaries, professional and commercial associates. Some who couldn’t claim any direct connection at all with the family - other than the fact that they lived in the same town - swelled the numbers. They had all gathered to pay their respects, to bear witness, to observe or to be observed. They liked a good funeral; the familiar protocol, the pomp and ceremony. They enjoyed scrutinising the tightly reigned-in emotions of the bereaved and taking the opportunity to speak of the dead with effusive praise or with thinly veiled criticism. A funeral meant a day or, at the very least, a half-day off work, a good feed and free sherry at the local hotel. They could impress each other with claims of connection, ‘Of course I worked with him for years,’. ‘I knew him before he was anybody, you know,’. ‘Our daughters attended the same Brownie pack. A quiet sort of man.’ Someone else’s death was comforting; it made them feel secure in their comparative permanence. Being there - included at a big funeral like this one - made them feel important and, importantly, alive. The McKays were a big family locally, influential. Everyone wanted to be a part of the occasion.
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