Текст книги "Vows of Silence "
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
He didn’t know if he wanted to talk to the pastor or not but he couldn’t talk to God, and in any case, why should he need to, he knew his innermost heart, he knew what was wrong. He ought to do something to sort it, that was all, he ought to stop it happening. He couldn’t want this marriage, Helen Creedy to a militant, arrogant, atheist who sneered at Jesus and had once drawn a pair of spectacles on his image on one of Tom’s leaflets. His mother wasn’t reborn yet but she was a good person, he knew it was only a matter of time before she saw the light and welcomed Jesus into her life, but there wasn’t any hope for Phil Russell and if she married him c
No, you couldn’t say there wasn’t any hope. There was hope for everyone to turn to Jesus before it was too late. Only just now Tom couldn’t see how it would ever happen to Phil. Proud and stiff-necked, he thought. That was him. The Bible always had the right phrase somewhere.
The pastor banged shut the wooden box full of hymn books and paused.
“Tom, I have to go in ten.”
Tom got to his feet.
“You need to talk through something, give me a call. I’m back in later, you ring me, now? No fretting, OK?”
“OK. Thanks.”
“You on your motorbike? Frighten the pants off me those things.”
Tom laughed and followed him out. The bike was parked up in the schoolyard next door and when he had trundled it to the gate and buckled his helmet he sat for a moment looking down the street. He couldn’t have told the pastor but while he had been there on his own in the chapel, he had prayed for the last time to be told what to do and it had come into his head at once, shocking him, taking his breath away. But the voice had been clear. The words had been unmistakable. He didn’t under stand why this was what he should do because it was so off the wall, he’d never expected anything like it. But the more he thought about it now, sitting astride the machine in the evening dark, the more it seemed the right thing and clear. If nothing else, it would wake her, make her understand, show her the right way, this would. That was why he had to do it. It wasn’t for himself, it was for her. The sacrifice was for her. She might not see it straight away but she would see it pretty soon because that was what his answer had been and God’s answer could never be wrong.
He kicked the bike into a roar and turned out of the gate. Behind him, locking up, the pastor shook his head and said a word of prayer for the boy not to speed into an accident.
Sixty-five
“You’re happy with all of this, I take it?” Peter Wakelin asked again.
“It all seems fine.”
“I’m not very good at delegating, I’m afraid.”
Jane laughed. “That much I gathered. Honestly, Peter, the place will still be standing when you get back.” She got up and gathered the papers on the table into her folder. It was a mild morning with shafts of sun breaking through the inevitable Cambridge mist. She wondered how many more times the Dean would want to go through the arrangements and timetables for everything due to take place during his absence. Now she had her doctorate supervisor to see and an undergraduate to visit in the acute psychiatric ward, but as she reached the door, Peter Wakelin said, “Jane—are you busy later?”
“When later? I’m not free for the rest of the day now, I’m afraid.”
“I mean this evening. I wondered if you’d have dinner with me?”
She hesitated. Her plan was for a quick supper in hall and an evening of work. She didn’t especially want to change it. But as she glanced at him, she changed her mind. This man is lonely, she thought, and he can’t face either a convivial evening with the entire college or one alone. She knew how that felt. She liked her own company but there had been times over the last couple of years when she had wanted anything but.
“That would be nice,” she said.
Something she read as relief lightened his features.
“Shall we meet at the main gate? Seven thirty? I’ll bring the car round.”
“Can’t we walk?”
“Not where we’ll be going, no.”
“Fine. See you then.”
She went out to collect her mail from the lodge. She felt that she had somehow been put on the back foot, and had mis interpreted something without quite knowing what or why. It was a question in her mind as she drove out to the hospital to see the undergraduate who had been sectioned.
Jane did not know Polly Watson, as far as she could remember, but the girl, a second-year student, had asked to see her. Her academic record was impeccable, she had had no reported medical problems prior to this and seemed to have been generally invisible.
Jane had had little experience of visiting psychiatric patients. She had expected security in the wing but the reception clerk gave her an odd look and asked her to take a seat. Why, Jane wondered, do they always have them placed around the walls, in hospitals and waiting rooms everywhere, regimented and rather alarming? Chairs in groups changed the whole feel.
A number of people waited together, heads down, not speaking to one another. A woman alone flicked the pages of a magazine without reading anything. A man came in, gave his name, sat down, got straight up again. Left.
Several people came and went. Jane decided that fifteen minutes was a reasonable time to wait before returning to the desk.
Someone came out carrying two potted cyclamen, put them on the window ledge and went again, tapping a code into the security panel to open the door.
After ten minutes, a young woman in a dark trouser suit came over to her.
“Reverend Fitzroy? Dr Fison. Would you come through with me?”
They went down a corridor. Cream-painted. An institutional corridor. Voices in the distance. A smell of burning milk.
“Do sit down.”
An office. She had expected to be led to a ward.
“I’m sorry you had to wait but as you can imagine when this sort of thing happens there’s a bit of a procedure.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know Polly at all, but as she sent for me perhaps you can fill me in before I see her?”
A look of surprise. A frown. She put down her pen. “Oh Lord. They didn’t tell you.”
“Tell me?”
“Polly’s dead. She had a stash of medication and she also swallowed four razor blades. She was found in the toilet at five this morning. I’m so sorry, there’s clearly been a slip-up in communication.”
“Clearly.”
“We’ve been in touch with her family. Her parents are on their way from—” she glanced down at the papers—”York. So that’s that. You’ve had a wasted journey.”
“No,” Jane said. “Would it be possible for me to see her body?”
“Afraid not, unless you want to go to the mortuary. There’s got to be a PM of course.” She spoke coolly. She had not known Polly Watson either. One acute admission, one suicide, file closed.
“I will go to the mortuary, actually,” Jane said.
“As you wish. Do you know where it is?”
Handshake. The corridor again. “I’ll leave you here if that’s all right—busy day.”
Jane went out into the chilly grey morning. She felt bleak and helpless. She had failed someone without even knowing them. An unhappy girl with who knew what problems and in what distress, a girl who had studied here for a year and was barely known to any of them.
It shouldn’t happen, she thought.
It happens.
After she left the mortuary she realised what had been in her mind. Peter Wakelin had asked her to dinner. Dinner was different. She liked what little she knew of him but she also knew that she did not want to go. She was still finding her place and her feet after a bad two years. Calm and peace in which to get on with her doctorate and do her job well were what she needed now.
When she got back she wrote a note and left it in his pigeonhole.
Sixty-six
“If you’d just like to tell me what it’s about, sir c”
“I said, I’m not telling you what it’s about, I want to see the boss.”
“Not sure who you mean by that, sir, but I’m the duty sergeant.”
“I know that. I want to see the one in the suit that’s on the news.”
“That would be CID, sir. I can get someone from CID to talk to you if you’d tell me what—”
“No. Tell you what, I’m going to sit over there. Not been out of hospital long, so I get giddy, I’m going to sit over there and wait and you can fetch him and if he’s out I’ll still wait and if he comes through those doors I’ll see him. I don’t mind waiting, I got nothing better to do, and when I see him and when I tell him he’ll be very glad I did. So you fetch him. The one on the news. Not talking to anyone else.”
“If you mean DCS Serrailler, he’s out and he’ll be out all morning and he won’t talk to you without knowing what it’s about.”
“He’ll talk to me. I can wait.”
The man walked over to the bench against the wall and sat down. His movements were cautious and he held himself together as if he feared the onset of pain. The hair at the back of his head was shorter than the rest, as if it had been shaved. He was bristly, scruffy, pale. Neither old nor young. The sergeant watched him for a minute. He wasn’t familiar. Dosser? Nutter? Hard to say. Bit of both, he thought. The phone rang.
Half an hour later the man was still there, sitting, occasionally closing his eyes but alert every time the doors swung open, looking closely at whoever came and went.
“You’ll have a long wait, sir—why don’t you let me get someone down from CID? You can talk to them, then maybe if it’s important they’ll pass it on to the Super. Only as you may have heard we’ve got some big stuff going on—as you said, you’ve seen him on the television news, so you can guess he’s pretty busy c”
He wound down. The man heard him out, looking at him with out much interest. Then looked at the floor, not acknowledging anything that had been said.
Two hours later, he was still there. Two and a half hours. Three. In the end the desk sergeant went over.
“Listen, you can’t sit here all day and all night. He might not be back for hours. If you won’t talk to anyone else I’m going to have to ask you to leave. What’s it to be?”
“Cup of tea?”
“You’re pushing your luck. Right, here’s the deal—cup of tea, you talk to someone else or on your way.”
“Who will I have to talk to?”
“Someone from CID. Whoever’s available. If anyone is available, otherwise it’ll be someone from uniform.”
The man sat quiet for a long time, weighing it up. Then he nodded.
Ten minutes later, tea in front of him, he was sitting opposite DS Graham Whiteside in the small waiting room.
“Right. Name?” Whiteside looked bored.
The man put his hand to the back of his head but did not quite touch it. “In hospital couple of weeks,” he said. “Not good. Left me for dead.”
“What’s this all about then? Hit-and-run? Whatever, if it’s that long ago why didn’t you report it before?”
“Because I was in hospital, wasn’t I? Didn’t come round for the first four days.”
“Let’s get this organised. Name, I said.”
“Matty.”
“Oh, come on, give me a hand here, I’m bad at guesswork. Matty who?”
“Lowe.”
“Getting somewhere c and when was this?”
“When was what?”
“The hit-and-run or are we making the whole bloody thing up—sir?”
“I’m not making anything up. Why would I do that?”
“Oh, you’d be amazed. When are we looking at? Date and time. If you can manage that.”
“When it happened or when I saw him?”
Graham Whiteside passed a hand over his brow and mopped off imaginary drops of sweat.
“I saw him at the fair. He’d left me for dead, you know, and they say you don’t remember anything after you’ve taken a bash on the head but I do. Not everything, mind, but I remember a bit. Enough to know where I was and that someone blinded me with light and then clouted me on the back of the head here and left me for dead. I came round in hospital, splitting skull, load of bruises. All I remembered was being blinded. At first. Still don’t remember much more.”
“If you don’t remember anything you’re wasting my time, sunshine.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t remember everything. I was on the old airfield, in one of the hangars c I’ve been dossing a bit, lost my way. It’s all right out there. Better than shop doorways.”
Drugs? Probably. The sergeant tapped the side of his foot against the table leg. “Get on with it.”
The man sipped his tea. “Hospital got me a place, hostel on Biggins Road. You know it?”
“I know it.”
“Not bad. Could be worse. Could be better. So. So I got on my feet and walked a bit. Took me time. Skull splitting, leg aching. Two weeks is a long time, your muscles go. I could have walked ten miles before it happened. Often have done. But I got going. So I thought I’d have a wander out to that fair.”
“What’s the Jug Fair got to do with your hit-and-run?”
“Right. Nice night, got a quid or two. Thought I’d have a wander and I did, but the lights and the noise got to me, made my skull split again. I wasn’t as fit as I thought so I decided to make back.”
“I’m seeing stars, Matty, my head’s spinning.”
“Tell me about it.”
“When were you run over?”
“Didn’t say I was.”
“Listen up, you answer straight or I’ll have you for wasting the time of a senior officer.”
“You?”
“Me. Now, from the beginning.”
“I was in the hangar. I was having a sleep quiet like in a corner and he come over, shining the torch in my eyes, and I got up and he shone the torch about a bit and I turned round and he hit me. Got it?”
“So this was the accident.”
“Terrible that. Couple of weeks in hospital and it was all a bit hazy, then I was in the hostel and I thought I needed some air, you go mad cooped up in a place like that when you’ve been used to living outside. So there I am. Only the fair was packed, world and his wife, and it’s all flashing lights and noise, made my skull split even worse. Bad idea. So I thought, I’ll get back. But thinking I’d get back and getting back was two different things. Never seen anything like it. Couldn’t move. I was right at the far end of the thing. Push a bit here, push a bit there, worm your way in and out. My skull was splitting, I tell you. And it was then I saw him.”
“Saw?”
“Him. And there wasn’t any doubt. It was like a bit of a jigsaw slotting in, a bit more of the memory coming back. Like a light going on. When I saw him. The minute I saw him. Lots of it’s still not back, there’s like a black fuzzy edge all round, but that bit came up clear as clear.”
He was pushing his cup round and round and focusing intently, as if trying to see the picture again in his mind.
“I know I got a knock but I’m not seeing things. I know it was half dark but he had a torch and that was it! The torch. When I saw him again at the fair, there was a light from somewhere, one of them rides or stalls that have bulbs all round, he was standing by one. It was him.”
Matty Lowe looked at Whiteside in triumph.
“I need a name, I need a description. You could maybe come back in and look through some photographs, see if you recognise him.”
“Don’t need “em.”
“So you know him?”
“No, I don’t know him.”
“You know his name?”
“Nope. Only I can tell you what he is. When I saw him.”
Graham Whiteside sighed. “Get on with it then.”
Matty Lowe got on with it. It didn’t take long.
When he’d finished, Whiteside took his empty cup from him, chucked it in the bin, and saw him out of the station.
*
The DS went up the concrete stairs two at a time, grinning to himself. By the time he was back in CID he was laughing out loud. He needed a laugh around here just now. He was almost grateful to the dosser for having come in with his daft story. As if they didn’t have enough on.
Sixty-seven
“This is tough,” Judith said, “tough on you.”
Her crutches were leaning against the wall and her leg in its unwieldy plaster rested against the sink. She was peeling carrots, looking out of the window of the farmhouse onto the autumn leaves which were spinning down onto the drive. The beef was cut, the onions chopped, stock made. “Do you have any thyme and a bay leaf?”
“In the bed opposite the kitchen door. I’ll get it.”
“There is always a window of wonderful weather around now—quiet weather.” Judith took the bunch of thyme from Cat, and lifted her hand to smell its muskiness on the stalk. “If he wants to stay here at home, he should,” she said. “You know I’ll help you as much as I can. And Richard of course.”
“I couldn’t manage without you. It’s the children c”
“Don’t try and hide everything from them.”
“I know.”
“Sorry, Cat—that was patronising. Any parsley?”
“I’ll get it.”
Mephisto followed her, padding carefully between the rows and pushing his face against her outstretched hand.
“Having the nurses twice a day is brilliant, though they treat me like Chris’s GP not his wife. I don’t want to be his doctor, Judith. I want to talk to him as a husband and see him as a husband who is dying, not as a patient. I know I can do medical stuff if I have to, especially in the middle of the night, but I’m struggling to get them not to think of me as the doc.”
“He doesn’t though.”
“True. You’re very good at seeing things in perspective, did you know that?”
Judith laughed.
“You’re very good for Dad too.”
“Thanks,” Judith said, pleasantly but in a tone that Cat recognised as one barring further discussion. Well, that was fine. She wasn’t about to start probing. Judith was happy, the relationship seemed good, her father was less uptight. She didn’t need to know any more.
They stood for a few moments—Judith leaning awkwardly against the sink, Cat in the open doorway—looking at the spinning leaves as they caught the sun.
“I want this to be over,” Cat said. “I can say it to you. I want it to be over for Chris because it’s terrible but I want it to be over for me. I never understood this before—patients whose family said it. They couldn’t bear them to die and they couldn’t wait for them to die. I understand it now. The other thing is I can’t say any prayers about this—it’s what I’ve always done and suddenly I can’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. Let the rest of us do that for you. I think it’s probably quite normal.”
“I don’t know what you believe c It’s not something one asks, is it?”
“What, you mean is it isn’t PC?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m a Catholic. Not a very conscientious Catholic but I am one. I get a bit fed up with the Pope. Still, the Pope isn’t God, whatever he may believe to the contrary. Now, I need to finish this casserole.”
As Cat helped Judith to sit at the kitchen table, Chris was calling and Felix had woken from his sleep.
“Give me Felix, you go to Chris,” Judith said, covering the casserole against Mephisto.
As Cat went into the bedroom she knew. Chris was lying on his side facing her, his eyes closed, but when she touched him he opened them and said, “I’m so cold.”
She hesitated only for a second, then she lay down beside him and pulled the quilt over them both, and moved closer, to hold him to her as well as she could. He was shivering.
“I love you,” Cat said. “I love the children but I loved you first.”
He coughed suddenly and took several short, rapid breaths, coughed again. “Cold.”
“I know. It’s cold. Winter’s coming. Darling, Sam and Hannah will be back from school in a minute. Do you want them to come and see you?”
He muttered something she could not make out.
“Dad has gone to fetch them.”
His limbs began to jerk spasmodically. Then they were still again. He coughed several times. Stopped coughing.
“Chris?”
“Sam?”
“Yes. Judith has made their supper.”
“No.”
“I know. You’re not hungry.”
He moved his head and cried out.
“Let me check the pump.”
But he clutched on to her hard so that she did not move. His body was cold. His body was unbelievably thin. She could feel bone beneath skin. It seemed as if there were no flesh.
“Stay c here c”
“I will.”
From the kitchen she heard Felix’s chatter. Judith’s calm voice. Their sudden laughter.
Tears came.
“Sam,” he mumbled.
His legs jerked again. Were still. She lay holding him as the sky outside the window faded from bright to silver blue and then flared golden and red as the sun went down. Autumn, she thought. His last autumn.
They lay still together. The car came into the drive. The children ran into the house. Doors banged. Her father’s voice on the stairs calling her name. Then he entered into the room quietly. She had not put the lamp on. The wall opposite her was flushed rose red in the last of the sun. Richard came over and bent down to Chris, touched his forehead, lifted his wrist gently and felt his pulse. Cat turned her head to him. He nodded.
“I’ll help out downstairs,” he said and went out.
After a moment, Cat asked, “Would you like to see the children for just a second?”
But Chris’s arms jerked and then he was still again, his head turned away from her. Cat touched the back of his neck and then his head very gently.
“Poor old boy,” she said, “poor head.” She bent nearer and kissed it.
The sun slipped further down, off the wall. The sky darkened to violet and grey.
In the kitchen, Richard and Judith sat at the kitchen table with Sam and Hannah, tea, juice and toast.
“What’s for supper later?”
“Beef casserole and fruit crumble.”
“Can I have the crumble and not the fruit?”
“I’ll eat her fruit, she hates fruit and you should eat fruit, shouldn’t you, it makes you not get things. Illnesses and things.”
“Hannah likes some fruit, don’t you, Hanny?”
“Bananas.”
“See? That’s not enough, is it?”
“Bananas are OK, Sam. Do you want some more toast?”
But Sam got up and pushed back his chair. “I’m going to see Daddy.”
“I don’t want to see him in bed, I only want to see him when he’s better,” Hannah said.
“Oh, you are so stupid, stupid, stupid, he isn’t ever getting better, don’t you know that?”
Hannah dropped her toast on the plate and howled. Felix stared at her over the lid of his beaker. Sam went through the door like a shadow and fast up the stairs. Richard got up.
“Let him be,” Judith said. “Cat knows what to do.”
Richard frowned but then sat down again, and after a second, put his hand on Hannah’s arm.
Upstairs, as Cat lay beside her husband, Sam came quietly to the doorway, but sensing that it was different now, that there was something in the silence and the stillness that he had never known before, he stopped just inside the room.
“Sam?” She could hear him breathing. “Sam, do you want to come here? You don’t have to.”
“What’s happening?”
“Daddy just died. A few moments ago. He was sleeping and then sleeping more deeply. And then he wasn’t c he died.”
“Now?”
“A little while ago.”
“Should I tell them?”
“I think I’d better do that.”
“Can I look at him?”
“Of course you can. Do you want me to put the lamp on?”
“No.” Sam did not move. “Not yet, please.”
“Fine. There’s some light from the landing.”
Slowly, Sam came to the bed. Cat reached out her hand and he took it and squeezed it tightly. After a moment, he climbed up and reached over her, his hand hovering and then finally touching Chris.
Cat held her son closely and put her hand over his.
In the kitchen a few minutes later, Judith, putting the plates and cups onto a tray, paused and looked at Richard. He held her gaze. Hannah had gone to feed her hamster.
“There is,” Judith said, “a different kind of stillness in the house.”
Sixty-eight
“What I don’t understand is where people get guns from. And I don’t mean field sports.”
Phil shrugged. “A lot of them are adapted from guns built to shoot blanks, some come from Eastern Europe.”
“But that’s gangsters.”
“You’ve been watching too many B-movies.”
“Seriously c I can’t understand how kids get hold of guns, kids on the estates.”
“Why are you worrying about it?”
“Because it’s worrying of course. Aren’t you worried? Don’t you wonder if the kids you teach are going to get hold of guns? Maybe they already have, maybe this lunatic is one of them.”
“Unlikely.”
They had just watched the television news and what Phil had called a non-report from Lafferton about the gunman-on-the-loose.
“This guy doesn’t just have one gun—if it is a guy.”
“Oh, it couldn’t be a woman.”
“Why not?”
“It just couldn’t c no. It couldn’t.”
“And if it is just one man and not two. Or more.”
“I don’t think I want to have this conversation.”
“Want to talk about weddings instead?”
“Yes. No. I think I’m too tired.”
“We don’t have to wait until you’re well, you know. We can get married next week.”
“I can’t plan a wedding in a week!”
“What’s to plan?”
Tom moved silently away, across the hall and into the kitchen, closing the door with care. But they hadn’t heard him. They were too wrapped up in themselves to be bothered if he had heard.
He didn’t like himself for listening at the door. He hadn’t meant to do it, but as he had come downstairs, they had started to talk and he had, somehow, started to listen.
How do people get guns?
He sat down and fiddled with the salt and pepper, changing them round and round.
How do people get guns?
Lizzie was out with a gang from school. He should have been at a practice for the chapel song group but he’d had a sore throat and his voice sounded weird.
How do people get guns?
Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be at the chapel. There was stuff in his head he needed to deal with and it was muddled with the last time he had been there, his conversation with the pastor, the nightmares he kept having.
“ We can get married next week.”
They wouldn’t. They could. They might.
He pulled a small paring knife towards him and started to make a score mark in the wood of the table-top, a thin, mean little line, cutting it slowly.
How do people get guns?
Phil came banging in, whistling.
“Tom.”
Tom nodded. Did not look at him.
“How’s things?”
“OK.”
“Your mother wants a word.”
Even Philip Russell, Tom reminded himself as he went, has an immortal soul. He doesn’t know he has. But he has.
His mother looked pale. She’d almost died. She hadn’t died but if she had, what would Phil Russell have done then? He knew what he and Lizzie would have done, which would have been just carry on, because that’s what they knew you had to do, that is what they’d done when their father died. It helps to know.
“Hi.”
“Come and sit down.”
“I’m going out actually.”
“Two minutes. Where are you going?”
“Just out.” He sat on the arm of the sofa next to her. “In a bit. You OK?”
“I’m fine. Tired, that’s all. I wanted to ask you something.”
He waited. He could hear the kettle whistling.
“When we get married, I’d really like it if you would give me away, Tom.”
He knew what it meant now when it was said that someone went cold. You did. You did exactly that. You went cold.
“You don’t have to answer now. But there isn’t anyone else I’d like to do it.”
“Uncle Pete.”
“I never see him. How long is it—three years? Has to be.”
“He’d do it.”
“I expect he would but I don’t want him, I want you.”
He got up. Still cold. How could this have happened?
“I’m going out now.”
She didn’t say anything but he knew that she was watching him, looking after him, he knew what the look on her face was and how her eyes were and what she was thinking.
He went out. At first he was going to take the Yamaha but then he decided against that. At the gate he glanced back at the house. Something clicked inside him. Odd. He felt odd. He’d never felt so odd.
It was cold. He zipped up his fleece.
Odd.
Why should it matter? Being cold.
Sixty-nine
They reached the top of the Hill at last. It was steeper than she had remembered, took longer. After a while, no one had spoken. Simon got there first and put the cool bag down on the stone which had been there for thousands of years. Or since just after the last war, depending on who you believed.
It was, as always, the most amazing view.
“Three counties,” he said to Cat as she arrived. Hannah was with her, Sam, the best climber, walker, runner, swimmer, all-round athlete, trailed slowly up a long way behind.
“He’s all right,” Cat said, following her brother’s gaze. “Really. Quiet. But all right.”
“Can we have our picnic now?”
“Wait for Sam.”
“Why? I want a drink now, why do I have to wait for Sam before I can have a drink? That’s cruelty to children.”
They had left Felix at Hallam House with Richard and Judith. Simon unzipped the bag and handed Hannah a carton of apple juice.
“I wanted Ribena.”
“Hannah!”
“Please?” She sighed and sat down on the stone. Simon swapped the cartons.
The autumn sun struck warm on their faces, touched the flying angels on the four corners of the cathedral tower in the distance, and a white horse in a field.
“What have we come up here for?” Sam turned his back on them, looking down the grassy slopes.
“Because it was one of Daddy’s favourite places and I thought c we should just be here and c think about him.”
“I keep thinking about him all the time,” Hannah said, “every minute and even when I’m asleep I do.”
“You don’t think when you’re asleep, duh.”
“I do so, I think about Daddy.”
“You dream when you’re asleep.”
“I do that as well.”
“He’d like us to be up here.”
“Not without him he wouldn’t.”
“I’ll open the flask,” Simon said.
In the end, Sam and Hannah wandered off further down the slope and sat together on a tree trunk, not looking at one another, not speaking, but with their arms just touching.
“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not. Not a lot anyway. It’s good you could get a Friday afternoon for once.”
“I haven’t had a day off in weeks and then there’s tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to be at this wedding, do you?”
“Yes. If something goes wrong I don’t want my back to be turned.”
“It won’t be your fault.”
“I know, I know. The Chief’s going, every ARV in three counties will be in place, royal protection is doubled. All the same.”
“Nothing’s going to happen.”
“Oh, I know.”
“How near can the public get? There’s usually a big crowd for a society wedding.”
“Cordoned off on the other side of St Michael’s Street but they’ll get a view. The Lord Lieutenant was adamant. I left him to sort out RP.”
“Wonder what Camilla will wear?”
Simon looked blank. “Reader,” Cat said, “she married him.”
She sipped her tea. They had brought old china mugs.
“Have you decided what to do about the funeral?”
Cat sighed. Chris had always said he didn’t want any kind of service. If you were not religious, he said, then nothing was better than some made-up humanist event. But that had been long ago. During his illness he had said nothing about it at all and there was no mention in his short, straightforward will.
