Chapter 5
A House That Still Smelled of Him
Her mother was already in the kitchen when they got home.
Amara saw her through the glass of the back door as she came down the side passage in the dusk, a small straight figure in a black headscarf and her good navy coat, standing at the stove with her back to the window. She was stirring the pepper soup. She had found the container in the fridge and tipped it into the big pot and lit the gas beneath it, and she was stirring in long steady strokes, with the wooden spoon, in the slow bowed rhythm of a woman who has buried a husband and a mother and two brothers and who understands that the pot must not be allowed to catch.
The back door was unlocked. Amara stood on the step. She could not make her hand go to the handle.
"Go in," said Dera, behind her. "Go on. It's only Mama."
"I know."
"She's been here two hours. She's already told Mrs. Gethin that God has a plan."
"That's not helping."
"I'm trying to make you laugh." Dera's voice shook. "I'm not good at this."
She went in.
Ngozi Okeke did not turn around at once. She finished the stroke. She laid the spoon across the rim of the pot, and wiped her hands slowly on a tea towel, and turned. She was sixty-eight, a narrow, upright woman with a dark lined face as finely cut as a cameo and eyes that had never in Amara's memory shown anything she did not intend them to. They showed it now. They were red to the rims. She stood quite still in the steam, with the towel hanging from her hands, and looked at her elder daughter for a long, searching, terrible moment.
Then she held out her arms, and Amara, forty-one years old, crossed the kitchen floor in two steps and fell into them like a child.
"Nne," said her mother, into her hair. "Nne m. Ndo. Ndo."
Sorry. Sorry. It was the word for what you say to someone who has stumbled, and also for what you say to someone who has been struck, and it did for both. Amara felt the thin strong arms close around her ribs and the smell of camphor and cooking and old church hymnals fill her nose, and she wept, finally, loud and ugly and helpless, with her face in her mother's coat, while the soup bubbled quietly on the stove and the rain ran down the windows and the old clock over the door went on measuring out the seconds in its small dry voice.
They came all evening.
She did not understand, until it started, how it worked: that grief in a street like Marsh Lane had its own machinery, silent and old and efficient, which no one had set in motion and everybody obeyed. By six o'clock the doorbell had rung eleven times. Mrs. Gethin from across the road came in a flowered housecoat with a Pyrex dish of shepherd's pie wrapped in a tea towel. The Pateks from number twelve brought a tray of samosas and a card. A woman Amara had spoken to perhaps twice in fifteen years, from the end of the terrace, stood on the step and held out a loaf of banana bread, and could not speak, and simply wept, and gave her the bread and left. The fridge filled. The kitchen table disappeared under foil. Somebody had put the kettle on and it had not been taken off.
Father Ikenna came at seven, with his stole in his pocket and his long thin sorrowful face, and prayed in the front room with the curtains drawn and a candle burning on the mantel beside the wedding photograph. They stood in a circle. Her mother's lips moved. Dera's hand was a hot damp vise around Amara's, and Amara looked at the picture on the mantel, at Daniel in his hired gray morning coat on the steps of St. Aldhelm's, laughing with his whole long face, a spray of confetti caught in his hair, and she did not pray. She tried. She opened her mouth and it was like trying to push a door that someone had nailed shut.
Why? she thought. It was not a prayer. It was a flat bare accusation, thrown at a ceiling. You took the one who was good.
"The Lord gives," said Father Ikenna, softly, "and the Lord takes away."
"No," said Ngozi, in a clear low voice. "No, Father. Not this time. Not like this." The priest looked at her. "A man doesn't fall down dead on a floor in a strange town with nobody to say why. That's not the Lord. That's something else."
Nobody said anything. The candle guttered. In the quiet, for an instant, Amara looked at her mother's face and saw something in it she had never seen there before: a hard, fierce, unreasoning watchfulness, like a woman standing in a doorway with her arms spread.
"Mama," said Dera, gently.
"I'm only saying."
"We know."
"He was a good man," Ngozi said. She was looking at the photograph. "I never said so. I was slow. When you brought him home, I said, who are his people? You said, he has none. And I thought, a man without people, what is he? A boat without a rope." She closed her eyes. "I was wrong. He was the best rope I ever saw."
Martin left at nine.
He had been there on and off through the evening, in the way of people who are most useful when they are doing nothing: sitting at the kitchen table with his big hands round a cup of tea, answering the telephone, taking the coats of visitors, saying little. Once Amara had come into the kitchen and found him standing with his back to the room, at the sink, looking out into the black garden. His shoulders were rising and falling. She had stood there for a moment in the doorway, not knowing what to say, and then he had straightened, and run the cold tap, and bent to splash his face, and turned round with a wet red smile.
"Hay fever," he had said. It was October. She had let it go.
Now he stood in the hallway in his long charcoal coat, with his gloves back on, and Jo's car keys in one fist. Jo had come at eight and wept in her arms and gone to sit with Ngozi, and was in the front room now, a small round freckled woman in a green cardigan with a tissue clutched in her hand, saying something low and steady to the candle.
"I'll ring in the morning," said Martin. "I'll speak to Gail at the office. You're not to think about work. Nothing at all. Anything they need, anything with the paperwork, I'll handle it. You're not to sign a thing."
"Martin. It's all right."
"It isn't." He said it fiercely. "You don't know these people. They'll be at you by Monday with forms. Life insurance, the pension, the company car. The bank, the yard, the lot. You leave it to me." He hesitated. His eyes went past her, to the telephone table, to the green chair, the gray machine with its blinking light. "You'll get the lot back, you know. His effects. The police said. The phone, the folder. Whatever they've, whatever they find."
"They said the phone wasn't there."
"Did they?" He blinked. "No. No, of course. You told me. It's, I'm not myself, I'm sorry." He touched his forehead with two fingers. His hand, in the black glove, was visibly trembling. "I haven't slept. You'll forgive me."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"Yes, there is. There's a great deal." And he leaned down, in a sudden helpless rush, and kissed her on the forehead, dry and clumsy and hard, and said into her skin, "He loved you more than anything on earth. You know that. Whatever else. You must never doubt that."
She drew back and looked at him. "What do you mean, whatever else?"
"Nothing. I mean, whatever's happened. Whatever anyone says." His face had gone dark red and then white. "I'm no good at this. I'm sorry. Is the spare key still under the blue pot? In case you need someone to let themselves in?"
"The blue pot by the shed. Yes. Why?"
"Just so I know." He tried to smile. "Ring me. At any hour. I'll be up."
The front door closed behind him. She heard him go down the path in the rain, slowly, and the bleep of the car, and the engine, and the long wet hiss of tires receding. And she stood in the hall and looked at the place where he had been, and thought, without any particular alarm, He was shaking so. And then, with the small cold exactness of a woman who spends her days among documents: He didn't ask what I meant. About the phone.
She dismissed it. It was a night for dismissing things.
By midnight the house was quiet.
Her mother slept in the spare room under the eaves, with her rosary wound round her fingers and the radio murmuring a Pentecostal hymn. Dera had taken the sofa, with a hot-water bottle and the television on mute, and had fallen asleep in the first ten minutes, her mouth open, her arm hanging over the edge. The visitors had gone. The dishes were washed. Somebody had turned off all the lights but the one in the hall, and that one, she saw, they had left on for him. Nobody had said so. Nobody had needed to.
Amara stood in the kitchen in the semi-dark with her hands on the edge of the table, and looked at it.
It was a scarred pine table, bought at a house sale in the first spring of their marriage for forty pounds, and it had borne, in its time, the full weight of their lives. She could have read it like a page. The ring in the corner where Daniel had set down a hot pan. The pale tideline from the autumn the cellar flooded. The dent from the iron. And in the middle, scored faintly into the grain, under forty coats of wax, the shape of a number she had written there with a ballpoint on a night in the winter of 1998, pressing so hard that it went through the paper.
Fourteen thousand three hundred.
That was what they had owed. She remembered it as one remembers an illness. The firm had gone under in the autumn, Hale Marine Freight, the three-man outfit he had built from nothing on the Dunmarrow docks, and he had come home on a Tuesday with a cardboard box in his arms and an extraordinary calm. He had put the box on this table. He had said, I'll find something. And for five months he had worked nights stacking pallets in a freezer warehouse in Harleigh, with his hands cracked and bleeding and a woolen balaclava stuffed into his coat pocket, coming home at six in the morning smelling of cold cardboard. He had never once complained. He had sat at this table in the mornings, gray with tiredness, and eaten the burned toast she no longer made for him, and read the Wexcombe Gazette aloud, in funny voices, to make her laugh.
And on the night she had cried, the night of the number, when she had put her head down on her arms and said that she could not do it, that she was tired, that she had thought marriage would be easier than this, he had not told her it would be all right. He had sat down across from her. He had put his big cracked hand flat on the table and said, in an even, rather formal voice: Mara. Listen to me. There's nothing in this world that frightens me less than being poor with you. I have been, I have been in places a great deal worse than this. And I want to tell you something I have never told anyone.
She had looked up.
I've never been so happy, said Daniel. In my whole life. Not once. Not before you. I need you to know that.
She had laughed through her tears, because it was absurd, a man stacking frozen pallets saying such a thing, and he had laughed too, and put his forehead down against her hand. She had thought he was only being kind. It had not occurred to her to ask: Worse than this? Where? When? Nor, when a backer turned up in the March, an old acquaintance from the docks who believed in him, and the firm rose out of its cardboard box in a month with a new lease on a yard and two lorries and a loan she never saw the paperwork for, had it occurred to her to ask the man's name.
Now, standing in the dark kitchen with her palms flat against the wood, Amara felt the question arrive. It came from a long way off, slow and quiet and entire, like a bell rung in a deep well.
In places a great deal worse than this.
She breathed. She made herself breathe.
He was talking about his aunt, she told herself. About being a boy. About being an orphan. About a cold house in Bristol. But she did not believe it. And she did not know why she did not.
She went into the hall at one o'clock and stood in front of the telephone.
It had the look of a thing that is being patient. The gray machine sat on its little table beside the green chair with its single red light blinking in the dim, regular as a heartbeat, slow and soft and unhurried, throwing a faint wavering crimson on the wallpaper behind it. She stood looking at it for a long time, with her arms folded across her chest and her bare feet on the cold boards.
The last time anyone rang this number, she thought, was a Thursday.
She did not know why she thought it. She had never worked it out, afterward. It was one of those thoughts that arrive fully formed and with a certain weight, like a letter dropped through a door. She had been at the stove on Thursday night. She had been, she thought, in the bath. She had left the machine switched on, as she always did, with its volume turned to nothing. She had not heard it ring.
She reached out. Her finger touched the button.
PLAY, it said, in tiny worn capitals. She pressed it.
The machine whirred. It clicked. A thin mechanical voice, androgynous and polite, said, You have fourteen messages. And the first of them began, in a high bright professional voice she knew at once, saying that this was Wexcombe Dental Practice calling to remind Mrs. Hale of her check-up on the second of September.
She listened to the whole of it.
She listened to the second, from her aunt in Enugu, in Igbo, a long cheerful rambling wish for the harvest. She listened to the third, from the council, about a missed bin collection. And then she stopped, with her finger hovering over the button, because she had understood something. The machine played them oldest first. There were eleven more. She would have to listen to all of them, in order, one after another, the dentist and the aunt and the bin collection and the double glazing salesman, before she reached the last. And at the end of them, if there was a last, if she was right, if it was there, it would be the last thing in the world that anyone would say to her in that voice for the first time.
She took her finger away.
It was a foolish thing and she knew it. It was the stubborn, private, magical thinking of the bereaved, which she had read about in the archive in the dry clinical language of old case notes and had never expected to feel. She knew that she should listen. She knew that it might be nothing, a wrong number, a recorded voice about solar panels. But she had decided, there in the dark hall with the red light on her face, that for as long as one message remained unplayed, Daniel Hale still had one thing left to say to her.
She switched the machine off at the wall.
"Tomorrow," she said, to the hallway.
The hallway, as ever, said nothing.
She did not go to bed. She went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed with the lamp off, in the dark, her knees drawn up, and looked through the gap in the curtains at the street below. Rain was still falling, fine and thin, through the yellow cone of the streetlamp at the corner. A cat crossed the road. A light went out in an upstairs window of the Pateks'. Somewhere a long way off a train was going through the cutting on the Harleigh line, and she could feel it in the soles of her feet, a faint low drumming, like a heart under a floor.
There was somebody under the lamp.
She did not see them arrive. They were simply there, on the pavement across the road, in the cold orange light beside Mrs. Gethin's wall. A slight figure in a gray parka, standing quite still, with the hood up and both hands pushed deep into the pockets. In the sodium glow the hood threw its face into shadow, and then, as the figure turned its head toward the house, she saw the pale blur of a chin, a young one, narrow and unshaven.
Amara did not move.
It was a young man. She was almost sure of it: something in the narrow shoulders, the stillness, the way the weight rested on one hip, like a boy waiting outside a school. She was looking at the house. Not at the street, not at the lit window of the Pateks', not at the sky. At the narrow red front door with its polished brass letterbox, at the dark windows of the bedroom, at the glass of the window where Amara sat. It was a long, quiet, measuring look, patient and unhurried. It was not a look of malice. It was the look of someone checking that a thing is still there.
She got up. She did it slowly. She went to the head of the stairs and down them, stepping over the third, in her bare feet, and past the sleeping shape of her sister on the sofa, and along the hall to the front door. The chain rattled. She slid it back. The latch turned.
The cold hit her in the face. The street lay wide and wet and empty in front of her.
There was nobody under the lamp.
She walked to the gate in her nightdress. The rain soaked through to her shoulders in a minute. She stood at the gatepost, looking up the lane and down it, at the black wall, the shut doors, the empty bus shelter at the corner glowing like a small lit box, and there was no sign of anyone, anywhere, at all. Only, in the gutter at her feet, in the thin brown run of rainwater, a single crumpled scrap of something that glinted in the lamplight. She bent. She picked it up.
It was a bit of wet silver foil, the kind that wraps a sweet. And beneath it, in the wet cracks between the paving stones, still faintly warm, as if it had been held in a hand and put down only a moment before, lay a small gray stone.
She did not pick that up. She stood with her wet hair plastered to her neck and her heart slamming against her ribs and looked at it. It was flat, and smooth, and the size of a thumb. There was a thin white seam through it like a vein. And on the side nearest her, so small she might not have noticed it if the lamp had not lit it from above, there was a notch, a tiny deliberate nick cut with a knife into the edge of the stone.
She had never seen it before. But she knew, with a clear cold certainty that went through her like a blade, exactly what it meant.
Somebody out there knew about the stones.