Chapter 14
The Funeral He Never Told Me About
The grave had settled by Thursday.
She went up to it alone at first light, with a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums from the market wrapped in newspaper and her father's old black umbrella, walking the long wet gravel road between the yews while the town below her was still shut in sleep. The mist lay in the valley like milk in a saucer. The rooftops floated in it, and the spire of St. Aldhelm's, and the cranes of the sand quarry across the river, and a thin white sun was coming up behind them all, rinsed of color, without heat. Her breath smoked. A blackbird was singing in the hedge, a loud full liquid phrase, over and over, as if it had not been told.
The mound was a long low rectangle of raw yellow clay. They had taken away the green plastic sheet and the planks, and the wreaths had been piled to one side and were beginning to wilt, their ribbons dark with wet. Somebody had stuck a small wooden cross into the head of it, with a printed card in a plastic sleeve. DANIEL HALE. 1962–2006. Beloved husband. It was already beginning to run.
She stood in front of it with the flowers in her hand.
"I don't know what to say to you," she said.
It was quiet. The blackbird had stopped. A drop of water gathered on the edge of the umbrella and fell with a small clear tick onto the clay.
"I've been to Harcourt Square. I've been to the bank. I've read your letters. I know about the money, and the old man with the pigeons, and a boy called Kit." Her voice shook, and steadied. "I know you weren't who I thought. I know you carried it for eight years and never said. I'd give a great deal to be angry. I keep trying. I keep reaching for it and it keeps going out, like a match in the wind."
She bent and laid the flowers on the earth. Their yellow heads shone against the clay like small lamps.
"Tell me what I'm supposed to do," said Amara. "Just tell me. You always knew."
The silence went on. Beneath the mist the whole world went on without her, a dog barking, a bus, the long far moan of a train. And then, as she straightened up, wiping her eyes, she saw it.
It lay on the clay at the head of the grave, directly under the little wooden cross, so neatly placed that she thought at first it was a piece of the earth itself. A stone. It was flat, and smooth, and slate-gray, with a thin white seam through the middle of it like a vein. And on the side nearest her there was a notch.
It had not been there when she arrived. She was certain of it. She had stood there for ten minutes. And the clay around it was damp, and unmarked, and there was no footprint in it, no print at all, except a single clean narrow ridged one, a boot's, set a little to one side of the grave.
She did not turn. She went absolutely still.
He's here.
She could not have said how she knew. It came up through the soles of her feet. It was the same cold, drawn, prickling awareness that had come over her on the quay at Dunmarrow, a hand laid between the shoulder blades and lifted away. She stood with her back to the lych-gate, among the dripping graves, and listened, with every nerve in her body, to the silence of the cemetery. A twig snapped. Water ran in a gutter. And behind her, softly, a stone shifted on gravel.
She whirled.
He was standing among the headstones, forty yards away, beside the Pettit family vault, in a gray parka with the hood forward and his hands in his pockets.
He had not been hiding. That was the strange thing. He was perfectly visible, on the wet gray path, in the thin white light of the sun, as still as one of the stone angels. He was looking at her. And for the space of three or four long heartbeats the two of them stood facing each other across the dripping graves, in the mist, with the blackbird silent in the hedge.
"Kit," said Amara.
She had not meant to say it. It came out of her small and cracked and carried farther than she intended, across the stones. The hooded head jerked. And then, in a single fluid movement, without a sound, he turned on his heel and walked away.
He did not run. He walked, quickly, with his head down, along the path toward the lower gate, and Amara ran after him.
She did not decide to. It was something the body did. She plunged down the slope through the wet grass with the umbrella flapping from her wrist and her bag banging at her hip and her good black shoes sliding on the mud, between the headstones, past the angels and the urns and the crumbling Victorian crosses, with the cold air tearing at her lungs. The figure ahead moved lightly, without apparent effort, flickering in and out of the great black trunks of the yews like a bat through a barn. He was a good deal faster than she was. And he did not look back.
"Kit! Please! I'm not, I'm Amara, I'm, wait!"
He reached the wall. It was a low thing, flint and mortar, four feet high and capped with moss. He went over it in one smooth movement, with a hand on the coping, like water over a weir. And she, behind him, hurling herself at the same gap with her coat flying, caught her foot in the tilted kerb of an old child's grave, felt the ground go from under her, and came down with her whole weight on both hands.
It was a long fall. She was aware of the particulars: the wet iron smell of the earth, a white marble lamb with a broken ear, the flints of the kerb coming up to meet her palms. Then a flash of pure bright astonished pain, and a silence, and she was lying on her face on the cold ground with her cheek against the wet grass, and her hands were burning as if she had put them into a fire.
She rolled over. She sat up. She held her hands in front of her.
They were red. They were open from the heel to the base of the fingers, a long ragged diagonal gash in each, packed with grit and bright with blood, and the blood was running down her wrists and into the cuffs of her good navy coat in long warm threads. She stared at them. She thought, with absurd clarity, I'll never get that out of the wool.
"Don't move."
He was kneeling beside her. He had come back over the wall. She had not heard him. He had put back the hood, and she saw him at last: a boy of nineteen, thin and brown and unshaven, with a thatch of dark hair standing up at the crown in a cowlick that no water would ever flatten. He had gray eyes, ringed with exhaustion. They were Daniel's eyes. They had Daniel's trick, in the morning, of being the color of rain.
"Let me see." His voice was low and hoarse and very young. He took her wrists, not roughly, and turned her hands over. "They're not deep. You'll want stitches. They're dirty. Here."
He pulled something from his neck. It was a long frayed woolen scarf, the color of weak tea, and he tore it in two with his teeth and began, with quick careful fingers, to bind her palms. He did not look at her face. His hands were shaking. She could feel it through the wool, a small fine fast tremor like a small bird, and she watched the top of his bent head, the tangle of dark hair, the long pale nape, and felt her whole body go quiet.
"You came back," she said.
"You fell."
"You could've left."
"I couldn't." He tied the knot. He sat back on his heels, with his wrists on his knees, breathing hard, and his eyes went to the line of her jaw and her hair and her mouth and then away, as if he were afraid of wearing the sight of her out. "I've, I never meant you to see me. He said you'd be, he said you were very clever. I thought I'd leave the stone. I wanted you to know someone was, I wanted to say he's not on his own."
"You're Kit."
"Yes."
"I read your e-mails." It came out of her in a whisper. "Last night. I'm sorry. I had no right. I wanted to know."
He looked at her then. For a moment he said nothing. His face did something complicated: it broke, and set, and was a boy's face again, taut and white and fierce. "Did he say anything about me?" he said. "In them. In his."
"He said you'd love Mara. He said I'd love you."
A sound came out of him. It was not a word. He put the back of his wrist against his mouth, hard, and turned his head away, and she saw the long line of his throat working, and she reached out with her two bandaged hands, without thinking, and laid them on either side of his face, and held it, as one holds a bowl that is full to the brim.
He let her. He knelt there in the wet grass with his eyes shut, among the dead, trembling.
"Come home with me," she said.
"I can't."
"Why?"
"There's a man in the lane." His eyes opened. "He's been there since six. In a car. He's a big man and he's got a green Volvo. He's not one of Crane's. He's, I don't, I've watched him three times. He sits outside your house and he doesn't get out. I don't like him." He took a breath. "Go home by the river path. Don't go by the road."
She went cold from her scalp to her heels.
"A green Volvo," she said.
"With a dent in the bumper."
Martin. She thought it in a calm flat voice. Martin is sitting in the lane outside my house at seven in the morning. He didn't say he was coming.
"I'll find you," said Kit. He was getting up. "I've got to go. They're watching me too. There's a man, he's got a scar behind his ear. I think he's Crane's. I've seen him twice at the flat and again at the funeral." He stood over her, thin and straight, with the pale dawn behind him. "He was good to me. He gave me a, he gave me this. At the, my mother's. On the day." He fumbled in his pocket and put something into her bound palm, closing her fingers round it. "I want you to have it."
"Kit."
"Look at the date."
He was gone. He went over the wall in a blur of gray, and was among the trees, and she heard his feet on the gravel of the lane for a few seconds, running, and then not.
She sat for a long time in the wet. She opened her bandaged hand.
It was a small card. It was cream and black-edged, creased in four, soft with handling. A funeral order of service, the kind that a crematorium prints on a single sheet, with a photograph on the front of a tired smiling woman of about fifty, in a blue cardigan, with a cigarette, and under it the printed words: In loving memory of ROSALIND MARY LYLE, 1955–2004. Cremated Friday 12th March, 2004, at Dunmarrow Crematorium, 2.30 p.m. "I will lift up mine eyes."
Friday 12th March, 2004.
She did not move. She looked at the date. And she looked at it until it was only a pattern of black marks, like a wound, a number she had been told twice, in two different rooms, by two different mouths. The mother of her husband's son. A woman in a blue cardigan with a cigarette, and a boy who had stood at her coffin. And on the back of the card, in a boy's cramped pencil, there was a single line, small, as one writes a note to oneself.
He came. He left a stone.
Dera met her in the casualty department of Wexcombe Infirmary at half past eight, in the same green parka, with a plastic carrier of flapjacks, and said nothing at all for nearly forty minutes.
It was the longest silence of her life. Dera sat in a plastic chair with her arms folded and her chin sunk on her chest, and watched a young doctor pick flints out of her sister's palms with a pair of tweezers, and wince, and swab, and stitch. Eleven in the left. Nine in the right. They were neat blue stitches, tiny, regular, like a seam on a collar. The doctor, who was no more than twenty-six and who thought she was being brave, said she had been very lucky and that she should keep them dry for ten days. Dera said, "She'll be fine," in the voice she used on bad nights in the ward, and took her by the elbow, and marched her out through the swing doors into the car park, where it had begun to rain.
She put her into the passenger seat of her rattling little Nissan. She got in and shut the door. She sat with her hands on the wheel.
"Right," said Dera. "Now."
Amara told her.
She told her everything. It took an hour and ten minutes, in a car park, in the rain, with the windscreen steaming up and the wipers off and a thin gray dribble of water running down the glass. She started at the beginning, with the phone call on the Wednesday and the green ledger and the man with the pigeons. She told her about the key. She told her about Silas Rook and a bank manager on the fourteenth floor, and a lawyer with a whiteboard, and a small cruel house in Marsh Lane with a signature on it that was not her own. And last, with her voice going, she told her about Kit. About a letter. About nineteen years. About four hundred pounds on the first of every month, for seven years, and then for two.
When she had finished there was a long silence.
"You've been alone with this for a week," said Dera.
"Yes."
"You went to a gangster."
"Yes."
"On your own." Her sister's voice cracked. "In a car. You didn't tell anyone. You left me a text that said going to see a man. I thought you'd, I thought you'd gone off with a, I thought it was a lover."
"Dera."
"I thought, she's finally done something for herself, God bless her, and then you come back with stitches and a, a stepson, and a man who wants six hundred thousand pounds." Dera wiped her face with the heel of her hand. She was laughing, a little wildly. She was also, quite openly, weeping. "I'm so angry, Mara. I'm so angry I could kick the door in. I've never been so angry in my whole life."
"I know."
"Don't you dare do that again."
"I won't."
"You will. You're a Hale." Dera put her forehead on the wheel. "God. God, he'd have loved you being a Hale. He'd be insufferable."
She sat there. After a while, without lifting her head, she reached across with one hand and found her sister's, in its swaddle of white bandage, and took it in hers, and held it carefully, like something that might spill.
"Where's the green Volvo?" she said, in a flat small voice.
"What?"
"Kit said there was a green Volvo in the lane. With a dent. Is that Martin?"
"I don't know."
"Have you asked him?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Amara looked out at the rain. "Because I don't want him to lie," she said. "And I think he would."
They drove to Dunmarrow that afternoon. It was Dera's idea. She said she would rather be in a car doing something stupid than in a kitchen doing nothing, and she took the toll road at ninety, singing along to the radio, her wet braids tied up in a scarf. The sky had cleared. It was a bright cold afternoon with a high pale sun. They stopped at a petrol station on the ring road and Amara read the order of service again, the soft black-edged card with the woman in the blue cardigan, and found, on the inside, in the printed list of readings and hymns, the name of the chief mourner.
Christopher.
And beneath it, in italics: Rosalind leaves a son. She is also remembered by an old friend.
"Fenner Road," said Dera, looking at the map. "Number nine. That's near the docks. Is that where they lived?"
"It's where she's buried. In a way." Amara closed the card. "It's where she did."
It was a terrace of tall narrow Edwardian houses on a hill above the harbor, with bay windows and front gardens the size of tablecloths. The paint was peeling. The pavements were cracked. A boy in a hooded top was kicking a football against a wall, and in the street's whole length there was not one tree. Number nine had a green door with a brass number and a pink geranium in a pot on the step, dead. A curtain moved in the downstairs window of number seven.
The woman who opened the door of number seven was perhaps seventy, small, brown, in a headscarf and a quilted housecoat, with a face like a walnut and bright black eyes. She looked at the two of them for a moment, up and down. Then she said, in a high sharp Jamaican voice, "You're the wife."
"I'm sorry?"
"The wife. I knew you'd come. He said you'd come." She stepped back. "Come in out of the cold. Mind the cat."
Her name was Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss, no relation, she said, a coincidence of the name, though she had always thought it a nice one. She had lived next door to Rosalind Lyle for twenty-two years. She had held her hand in Dunmarrow General when she died. She sat the two of them down in a front room full of lace and plastic flowers, with a gas fire and a canary in a cage, and brought tea in a pot with a cozy shaped like a hen, and then, with the air of a woman making a speech she had been rehearsing for a month, she said:
"He came, you know. To the funeral. Your husband."
Amara put down her cup.
"I never saw him before. And I never saw him after, only the once. Tall man. Gray coat. Looking like he'd been dug up." Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss folded her hands on her knees. "He stood at the very back, by the door, and he never sat. He had a big white handkerchief and he held it in both hands the whole time like a child with a flag. And at the end, when the curtains closed, he made a sound, I can't tell you. I've buried a husband and two sons and I never heard a sound like that. And then he went out."
"Did he speak to anyone?"
"He spoke to the boy. Kit. He went across the car park to him, and they stood by the hearse, the two of them, not touching. I couldn't hear it. But I saw the boy's face." Her black eyes shone. "And when he went away the boy went on standing there with something in his hand. He's been, I don't know. He's kept it. He was only sixteen."
"The twelfth of March," said Amara, in a very small voice. "It was a Friday."
"It was a Friday, I remember. It rained." The old woman looked at her shrewdly. "You were somewhere else that day, weren't you, love?"
"Yes."
"Africa."
"Nigeria. My aunt's funeral."
"Mm." Mrs. Lyle-Bayliss nodded, very slowly, as if a long sum had at last come out. "Then it's a funny thing," she said, "that he got to come to this one."
Number nine was empty. They did not break in. The neighbor had a key, which she fetched from a drawer in a biscuit tin, and put into Amara's bandaged hand with the grave gravity of a woman handing over a relic.
The door stuck. They pushed it. There was a hall with a brown carpet, and a smell of cold ash and old cigarettes and a damp that was almost sweet, and a staircase, and a kitchen with a Formica table and a single plate in the rack. Everything was clean. It was the kind of clean that comes of one person, living alone, every day, as if there might be an inspection. A calendar hung on the wall: October, with a photograph of a fishing boat, and on the sixth, in thick blue biro, a circle, and inside it a single word. DAD.
She stood in front of it for a long time.
Upstairs there were two bedrooms. One had been a woman's, with a double bed made hospital-flat, and a dressing table with a mirror and a hairbrush still holding a few gray strands. The other was his. It was small, with a single bed under a sloping ceiling and a poster on the wall of a football team she did not know, and on the windowsill, in a row, gray and flat and smooth, fifteen river stones.
She did not count them. She knew it would be fifteen.
On top of the wardrobe, pushed to the back against the wall, she found the tin. It was an old Quality Street tin, the big purple kind, with a dented lid, and she took it down and sat on the narrow bed with it in her lap and prised it open with her thumbs.
It was full of money.
It was in notes. Twenties and tens, a little worn, folded in neat bundles with rubber bands, and each bundle labeled on a scrap of paper in a thin quick adolescent hand. Oct 04. Nov 04. Dec 04. She counted, with her bandaged fingers, as she counted everything. There were twenty-four. Twenty-four bundles of four hundred pounds. Nine thousand six hundred pounds in all, untouched, kept in the dark, every month, for two years. And on top of them, folded small, an estimate on the printed letterhead of a stonemason in Dunmarrow.
To supply and erect one memorial headstone, grey granite, with inscription. £1,850.
And under it, in the same quick hand:
When I've got enough. For Mum. Then I'll spend the rest.
She put the lid back on. She did it very gently. She sat for a long while in the little room with the tin on her knees and the sun going down behind the roofs of the harbor, and Dera, who had come to stand in the doorway, did not say anything either.
He had nine thousand pounds, she thought. In two years. And the old woman said, he'd have been sixteen. And he never spent a penny.
"Mara," said Dera at last, in a low voice. "You'll take him in."
"If he'll come."
"He'll come." Her sister looked out of the window, at the long gray crescent of the harbor in the sunset. "He's a Hale."
And somewhere on the quay, as they stood there in the failing light, a lighthouse began, with its slow white sweep, to turn.