Chapter 6
Choosing a Coffin for a Man Who Hated Fuss
Mr. Alder, of Alder & Sons, Funeral Directors, had the kind of voice that is manufactured, one imagines, over a lifetime, by sitting in front of strangers and saying little. It was dry and soft and slightly dusty, like a tablecloth taken out of a drawer. He sat on the edge of the sofa in the front room on Tuesday morning with a leather folder open on his knees and a fountain pen in his hand, and when he spoke, he spoke slowly, as one speaks to the old or the very frightened, and Amara, who was neither, and was both, wanted to put her hands over her ears.
"The coroner's office has been most helpful," he said. "I understand the, the body may be released by the eighteenth. That would allow us to proceed on Friday the twentieth. If that suits the family."
"It suits," said her mother, from the armchair.
"And the service. Would it be St. Aldhelm's?"
"Yes," said Amara.
"And the committal?"
"The hill. The Wexcombe cemetery. There's a plot." She heard her own voice, dry and precise, reciting. "We bought two. In 1999, when my father died. The one beside him. I thought, we'd both. We'd all be, we'd be together."
"Quite. That's very sensible." Mr. Alder inclined his head. He wrote it down. "And the order of service. Hymns. Readings. A eulogy, perhaps, if somebody wished to speak. Mr. Hale's, forgive me, I'm obliged to ask, Mr. Hale's relatives. Is there a family member who will act as chief mourner? Parents? Siblings?"
"No."
"I see."
"He didn't have any." She looked at the pen. "He was an only child. His parents died years ago. His aunt, too."
"I'm so sorry."
"Everyone is."
There was a short silence in the room. The clock ticked on the mantel. In the street outside a delivery van reversed, beeping, and a child laughed, and somebody slammed a car door. The ordinary world went on as if nothing had happened to it, and Amara, sitting very upright in her gray cardigan with her hands clasped between her knees, found that she hated it with a pure, clean, shaking hatred, the postman and the van and the child, every living thing that was not dead.
"He'll have us," said Dera, firmly. "He's got us. That's a lot of family. Mama counts as eight."
"Dera," said Ngozi.
"I'm only saying."
Mr. Alder smiled, faintly, sadly, as if at an old private joke between himself and the Almighty, and turned the page.
They did the coffin in twenty minutes.
It was not what she had expected. She had imagined something grave and tearful, a long solemn deliberation among velvet and brass. Instead there was a glossy brochure on the coffee table and a succession of photographs of boxes. Oak veneer, solid oak, mahogany, a pale willow wicker like a picnic hamper, a cardboard one printed with seagulls. She turned the pages with a faint horrified fascination.
"I don't think he'd want anything fussy," she said.
"No," said Dera.
"He'd hate the brass handles. He'd say they looked like a sideboard."
"He'd say a cardboard coffin was a good use of resources," said Dera, and made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. "And then he'd ask what the carbon footprint was."
"He would."
"He'd want the plain one."
They chose the plain one. It was a pale unvarnished English oak with rope handles and a lid that closed with a soft clean sound, and the price was printed in the corner of the page in small neat figures that Amara read and then did not read. Mr. Alder noted it. He said it was a good choice. He said that he often found that people who were very gentle in life wished to be very simply put away. It was a phrase she would turn over, afterwards, in the dark: put away. She thought it was the cruellest and the truest thing that had been said to her all week.
And then, when she thought it was over, he cleared his throat and looked up.
"There is one more thing. It may be, unpleasant. The suit."
"His suit."
"The clothes he will wear. Many families like to choose. If you could bring something to the chapel of rest, we will, we shall dress him with care. It is a privilege." He stopped. "Some people wish to do it themselves."
"I'll bring it," said Amara.
"Very good."
"The gray one. The one he wore to my father's funeral. And the green tie." Her voice cracked. "He hated the green tie. I gave it to him for his birthday, and he said it made him look like a Christmas cracker, and he wore it every year on the day. I want him buried in it."
"Of course," said Mr. Alder, and wrote it down.
The telephone rang as the front door closed behind him.
It was not the landline. That sat in the hall under its dust sheet of silence, switched off at the wall. It was her mobile, buzzing against the arm of the sofa, and the little screen said HALE MARINE (OFFICE), and she looked at it for three rings before she picked it up.
"Mrs. Hale?" It was a young woman's voice, brisk and fluttering, with the damp breathlessness of a person who has rehearsed something in a lift. "I'm so sorry to ring. It's Gail Dunstan. From the office, at the yard. We've met, at the Christmas thing, I was the one with the paper hat. I wanted to say how very, we're all devastated, honestly, Mr. Ashby told us on Saturday, and everyone adored him. He remembered my birthday. Nobody remembers my birthday."
"Thank you," said Amara. "That's kind."
"I'm so sorry. I'm babbling." Gail drew a breath. "It's just that there are some things I don't know who to ask. The diary, for a start. I've got his desk diary here and the week of the second is blank. Not a meeting. He'd told me he was taking a few days, I thought a few days with you, but I don't understand, the phones, there've been people ringing the yard asking for him, and I said he was away, and one of them said, Oh, I know where he's away, and put the phone down."
Amara sat still.
"He was on a business trip," she said. "He was in Dunmarrow. For the Brightwell contract."
"Oh." The voice faltered. "Oh, I'm sorry. Are you sure? It's only that I do his post and I've never seen the name. There's no Brightwell on the system. No quote, no booking, nothing. I thought perhaps it was something Mr. Ashby was handling."
"Mr. Ashby."
"He's been in and out all week. In Daniel's office, with the door shut." Gail's voice dropped. "And there were two men on Monday. In a long coat and a, a sort of bomber jacket. They didn't give a name. They said they'd wait. They waited an hour and a half, and then Mr. Ashby came out and walked them to their car."
"What sort of men?"
"Quiet," said Gail, after a moment. "Very quiet. Polite. I didn't like it."
"Thank you, Gail. I'll, I'll ring you."
She rang off. She sat with the phone in her lap and stared at the framed photograph of the Wex at sunset hanging crooked above the fireplace, and she thought, with the part of her that went on sorting and filing while the rest of her drowned: Personal business. Something he'd been meaning to do for a long time.
Brightwell, said Martin. The biggest contract of the year.
Dera, coming in with a tray of tea, stopped in the doorway. "What?"
"Nothing. The office. A form."
"What's the matter with your face?"
"Nothing," Amara said again. "It's a misunderstanding."
She rang Martin at one, from the garden, in the lee of the shed, with the rain dripping from the overhanging branches of the pear tree and the cold seeping through the thin soles of her slippers.
He answered at once. He always did. "Amara. How are you. Have you eaten?"
"Martin, Gail rang. From the yard. She says there's no Brightwell on the system."
"Ah." A short, dry, rustling pause, as of a hand passed over paper. "I'm sorry. I should have warned you. She's a good girl but she's new. They'll ring anybody."
"She says there were two men on Monday asking for Daniel."
There was a silence on the line. It went on for perhaps a second and a half. She could hear, behind him, the faint clack of a keyboard, a door, somebody laughing in a corridor. Then he said, with something that sounded very like relief, "Oh. Oh, those. Yes. God, Amara, I'm sorry. They're customs people. Routine. We get an audit every couple of years, a pair of them in raincoats, going through the manifests. It had nothing to do with Dan. And Brightwell, well, you'll forgive me, it was early days. Hush-hush. Dan didn't want it on the system till the thing was signed. You know how he was. He'd say nothing about a contract until the ink was dry. It was like pulling teeth."
"He told me about it."
"He told you. That's different." Martin laughed, softly. "He'd tell you the moon was cheese. He never could keep anything from you."
She stood with the wet branches brushing her hair. It sounded right. It sounded, she thought, entirely right, as right as every other plain domestic sentence he had ever said to her in seventeen years. She heard in it the same slightly aggrieved good nature with which he had once apologised for letting a Christmas turkey burn. She could not have said why, standing there in the dripping garden, a thin thread of ice ran down her spine.
"The landlord said he booked the flat himself," she said. "With his own card. As personal business."
"Well, that's Dan. He'd never wait for the company to reimburse. He was so conscientious it hurt."
"Yes."
"Don't, Amara. Don't turn it over. You'll make yourself ill." His voice had dropped to a murmur. "You've got enough. You've got more than enough. Leave this to me."
"All right."
"Promise me."
"I promise," said Amara, and closed her eyes. And as she stood in the cold, with her free hand gripping the damp splintering edge of the shed door, she knew, for the first time, with a small sick clarity that she could not have defended in any court, that she had just told a lie.
His study was at the back of the house, on the ground floor, a narrow room that had been built for a scullery and still had the old stone sink under the window. He had made it his own. There was a deal desk bought at a school auction, and a wall of cheap pine bookcases stuffed with paperbacks and shipping directories, and a green-shaded lamp, and an armchair with a hole in one arm, and a shelf by the window carrying a row of his river stones in a wooden tray, each with a small neat paper tag.
She had never gone through it. That, she thought, was the odd part. For fifteen years it had been his, as the kitchen was hers, by an unspoken treaty, and she had gone in only to dust, or to call him to supper, or, more rarely, to lie on the floor with her head on his foot while he did his accounts. She stood now in the doorway with a cardboard box in her hands.
Wills, said her mother's voice, in her head. Insurance. Passports. Birth certificates. You'll need them all. It's no good leaving it. It will not go away.
So she did it. She did it as she did everything, in order, beginning at the left. The top drawer: pens, paperclips, a stapler, three dead batteries, a pack of cough sweets. The second: bank statements in folders, a bundle of utility bills with an elastic band around them, tax returns for fourteen years in labeled envelopes. He was the most orderly man she had ever known. He had labeled the filing cabinet. She smiled, helplessly, at the sight of it. HOUSE. INSURANCE. CAR. A (HER STUFF DO NOT TOUCH).
The third drawer was locked.
She sat back on her heels, and frowned. She had never known him to lock anything. She tried the keys from the plastic bag from the hospital: house, car, desk. The third slid into the lock, turned, and with a small flat click the drawer rolled open.
There was a fire-proof document box inside, gray metal, with a carrying handle, the size of a bread bin. It was locked too, with a little brass padlock the width of her thumb, four wheels. She turned them to the day they met, to the day they married, to her birthday, to his. At the fifth try it opened on the day and month of their wedding: 0 6 0 9.
The box was full of folded paper.
She took them out one by one, on the floor, in the gray light from the window. The marriage certificate in its card folder, with the church's seal and the vicar's looped signature. Two passports, hers and his, both with the same slightly startled photograph. A bundle of letters, her own, written to him in the first year in green ink, tied in a blue ribbon. She did not open them.
Beneath them lay a stack of envelopes with windows, from the Northern Provincial Bank, and a thick legal document in a blue cover with a red ribbon.
She read the first letter standing up.
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Hale. Further to our previous correspondence, we write to advise you that the arrears on your mortgage account now stand at £11,240.16. Unless we receive payment in full within twenty-eight days, we shall have no alternative but to commence proceedings for possession of the property at 14 Marsh Lane. It was dated the fourteenth of September. There was another beneath it, dated August, and another, July, each shorter and colder than the last. Not one had been opened by her. She had never seen them. Their house was the only thing in the world she had thought entirely safe, and in a gray metal box in a locked drawer it was being quietly taken from her.
She turned the blue-covered document over with a shaking hand.
DEED OF SECOND CHARGE. Between (1) Daniel Hale and Amara Hale, and (2) Vantage Credit (Dunmarrow) Limited. The sum of £180,000. Dated the twelfth of March, 2004. And at the foot of the last page, over the printed words Signed as a deed by the said Amara Hale, was her name.
She looked at it for a long time.
It was a good copy. It was an excellent copy. The A with the long upstroke, the looped k in Okeke that she had made in a particular way since the age of nine, the little flourish at the end. A stranger would have taken it for hers. But she had read ten thousand signatures in her working life. She had learned to see the hesitation under a confident hand, the lift of the pen where a forger stops to think. The pen had lifted twice in the word Amara. The pressure was even, where hers always came down hard on the m. And the date, the twelfth of March, 2004, a Friday, was the day her father's sister had been buried, when she had been in Enugu, thirty hours by plane from Wexcombe, standing beside a grave with her mother's arm in hers.
She had not signed it. She had been in another country.
Witnessed by: R. T. Lucas, Clerk.
She did not move. She sat on the floor of her husband's study with the document across her knees, and heard, as if a long way off, the clock in the hall and the sound of the rain, and her mother's voice saying something to Dera in the kitchen, and the first thought that came to her was a small one, quite calm and reasonable, like a bead sliding along a wire. I'll ask Martin. Martin will know whose hand this is.
She folded the paper. She put it back in its blue cover, with the letters, in the gray box, and she shut the lid and spun the wheels. She did not mention it to Dera. She did not mention it to her mother, or Martin, or anyone. She carried the box upstairs and put it at the back of the wardrobe, behind her wedding dress, and for the rest of the afternoon she went about the house with a smile on her face and a hot drink in her hand, and a small dry coldness at the center of her, like a coin held under the tongue.
Personal business, she thought. Something he'd been meaning to do for a long time.
It was the second time that day she had heard those words. And she was beginning, though she could not have said it aloud, to understand what they might mean: not a secret, not a woman, not an illness, but a debt. A large debt. And in her whole life, with all the care she had taken in making her way through the world, she had never once been taught what to do when somebody else's debt came to the door.