Chapter 7
The Sound of Earth on Oak
They buried him on the hill on a Friday, in rain so fine and cold that it did not seem to fall so much as hang in the air, a gray suspended breath that beaded on every coat and clung to every eyelash and turned the whole of Wexcombe into the inside of a pearl.
Amara woke at five. She lay for a long time in the dark with her eyes open and her hands folded on her breastbone, like a figure on a tomb, listening to the house. Somebody was running water in the bathroom. Somebody was moving, softly and carefully, in the kitchen below, with the clink of a cup. It was her mother. Ngozi had not slept in the spare room for five days. She had been sleeping, in so far as she slept, in the green chair in the hall with a blanket over her knees, as if she had decided that if anyone was going to come through that door, they would come through her.
At six she got up, and bathed, and put on the black dress.
It was a plain black wool dress with long sleeves, bought for her father's funeral and never worn since, and it fitted her differently now. It hung. She stood in front of the wardrobe mirror and looked at the woman in it, a thin dark figure with hollowed cheeks and eyes like two bruises, and did not recognize her. She pinned up her hair. She put on the small pearl earrings Daniel had given her on their fifth anniversary, and then, after a moment, she took out her mother's old black lace scarf, and lifted it over her head and shoulders as she had done at nine years old in the church at Enugu, and was astonished at how steady her hands were.
"You look like your grandmother," said Dera from the doorway.
"I feel like her."
"She'd have had the whole parish in tears by now." Dera came in, in a black suit that pulled across the shoulders, her braids pinned in a tight coil. She did not say anything else. She came and stood behind Amara at the mirror and put both hands on her shoulders, and the two of them looked at their own reflections side by side, the long and the short, the quiet and the loud, and for a moment neither of them looked away.
The hearse came at ten.
It was a long black car with its windows banked in flowers, and it moved down Marsh Lane at the pace of a walking man, with the driver in his top hat and gloves and Mr. Alder, stooped and silent, pacing before it in his black coat, carrying a cane. Every door on the street stood open. The neighbors had come out and stood on their steps in dark coats, in twos and threes, with their heads bowed and their hands folded, and as the long car came level with each of them, one by one, the men took off their hats.
She watched it through the front window. She saw the flowers. Lilies. Chrysanthemums. A wreath in the shape of an anchor sent by the staff at the yard, enormous, stiff, expensive, which she had not wanted. Somebody's blue and yellow spray with a card. And in the middle of the glass, under the lid, small and pale and unadorned, the plain oak box on its bier, with a single white rose lying on top, and under the rose, a gray stone.
She had put it there herself. She had stood in the chapel of rest the evening before, in the cold smell of lilies and floor polish, with the lid still off. She had put the green tie into his hand. She had touched his hair. She had said, quietly, in the empty room, I don't know who you were. But I know who you were to me. And then she had set the river stone from his windowsill on his breast and closed his fingers over it, and kissed his cold hand, and walked out without looking back.
"Ready?" said Dera.
"No."
"No," said Dera. "Nor me. Come on."
St. Aldhelm's was a gray stone church with a squat Norman tower and a roof that had leaked for as long as anyone could remember, and it was full.
She had not expected that. She stood in the porch with her mother on her left and Dera on her right, and looked at the pews, and saw them filled to the walls. There were faces she knew, the neighbors and the archive staff, her old headmistress, the woman who ran the café on the quay. And there were faces she did not know, rows and rows of them, in dark coats, men and women of all ages, who had come in from the yard and the docks and the bank and from the football club where Daniel had played on Sundays with the middle-aged men's team and had never once scored a goal. They turned as one when she came in. The sound they made was like wind in a wheatfield.
She walked the length of the nave with her head up. Her heels rang on the flags. She could feel it in her teeth, the cold of the church, the damp stone breath, the smell of candle wax and wet wool and old hymn books. At the front the coffin stood on its trestles before the altar, in a slant of watery light from the east window, and the pallbearers had already taken their seats in the front pew, six men in black suits and black ties with their hands on their knees.
Martin was among them. He sat at the end nearest the aisle. He had shaved, badly. His broad face was gray, and his eyes had a bright glazed fixity, and as she passed he looked up at her, and tried to smile, and could not. His left hand, resting on his knee, in a black glove, was shaking so violently that he put his right hand over it.
At the back of the church, in the last pew by the font, two men sat a little apart from everyone else. One was old, white-haired, very upright, in a camel overcoat, with both hands folded on the crook of a silver-topped cane; the other was perhaps thirty-five, tall and long-jawed, in a black coat buttoned to the throat, quite still. They did not sing. As she passed they looked at her, not with grief and not with curiosity, but with a grave and level courtesy, the look of men watching a ledger being carried into a room.
She sat down in the first pew. The organ began.
She did not remember most of the service.
She remembered the opening hymn, The Lord's My Shepherd, in its slow Scottish tune, and the sound of three hundred voices rising and failing in the cold air. She remembered Father Ikenna's thin sad voice in the pulpit. She remembered Dera reading the passage from Ecclesiastes, a time to be born and a time to die, her voice cracking on a time to weep. She remembered the vicar, who had married them, and who said Daniel had been, he said, a man who loved the quiet places of the world. She remembered Martin standing at the lectern with a sheet of paper that quivered in his hand like a leaf, trying three times to begin.
"I met Daniel Hale in 1989," he said, finally. "In a dark office with bad coffee, on the worst day of a very long audit. I didn't like him. I thought he was too tall. I thought he was too quiet." A ripple of laughter. "He said maybe six words that week. And on the Friday, when I was, when I had messed up something rather badly, and I thought my career was over, he came into my room and put a cup of tea on my desk. And he didn't say a thing. He just sat down. And he stayed until I'd fixed it."
He stopped. His throat worked.
"That was how he was. He sat down. He stayed. For seventeen years he was the best friend a man could have, and I'd like to say that I deserved it. I don't think that I did." His voice broke. "I'd like to say I'm sorry, Dan. For all of it. I'm so sorry."
He stumbled off the lectern. She watched him go back to his seat, with Jo's hand reaching out for him, and the whole church holding its breath. A strange cold small thought crossed her mind, like a shadow across a wall: For all of what?
Then the organ was playing again. And they lifted him.
The cemetery lay on the hill above the town, behind a low stone wall, among yews so old and dark that they seemed to be made of the same stuff as the rain. It was a long climb. The cortège went up the winding gravel road in the gray light at a walking pace, and the mourners followed on foot in a long black line, their umbrellas open and bobbing like a flock of strange birds. Below them the roofs of Wexcombe fell away in steps, slate and chimney and spire, and the river lay along the valley floor like a strip of dull pewter. A tractor was working somewhere in the far fields. A crow rose from a gravestone and flapped heavily away.
She had walked this road seven years before behind her father's coffin, with Daniel's arm around her. She remembered it with extraordinary clarity. He had held her upright all the way. He had held her mother, too, on his other side, and her mother, who had never in thirty years said an unnecessary word of praise to him, had leaned on his arm like a child. He had taken charge of everything, the flowers and the cars and the priest and the endless awful sandwiches, with a quiet unhurried competence that she had thought, at the time, was kindness and nothing more. He had stood at the graveside with his face absolutely still, and when the first earth fell, she had felt him flinch.
She felt it now, in her own body. The recollection of that small movement, that shudder along his arm, went through her like an electric current. And she thought, He knew what it was. He knew exactly what it was to put someone in the ground.
Where did he learn?
It was a ridiculous thing to ask. But she heard the question come, again, quietly, as she followed the plain oak box up the hill between the dripping yews.
The grave was open beside her father's.
It was a neat black slot in the wet grass, six feet deep, its sides cut clean as a cake, with a green plastic sheet draped over the heap of yellow clay at its head so as not to offend. The bearers set the coffin on the straps across the opening. Father Ikenna stood at the head of it in his black cope, with his book open and a small silver bottle in his hand, and the rain beaded on the cloth. Amara stood at the foot. She was not aware of having moved there. She was aware of her mother's hand like a claw on her elbow, and the cold, and a smell of turned earth and crushed grass and iron that rose from the bottom of the hole, rank and sweet and unbearably alive.
The flowers had been laid round the grave in a wet bright ring. She looked at them, because it was impossible to look at the box. Lilies. Chrysanthemums. A cushion of red carnations from the football club. A wreath that read BROTHER in white letters, from the Ashbys. And at the very edge of the ring, a little apart from the rest, a small round wreath of white blooms with no ribbon and no label, laid directly on the grass. She counted them without meaning to. It was an old habit, a trick she had of fixing on small things. White chrysanthemums, each the size of a fist. One, two, three. They were bound very simply in a circle with green wire. Seven, eight, nine, ten.
There were nineteen.
There was a card. It was tucked into the green wire, a small plain white card, and the writing on it was done in black ink in a hand she did not know, upright and a little cramped. For D., it said. Sorry I was late. K.
K, she thought. Who is K?
"Earth to earth," said Father Ikenna, and bent, and took a handful of damp yellow clay in his thin brown fingers.
"No," whispered Amara.
She did not know that she had said it. She felt Dera's arm tighten round her. She heard the priest's voice go on, calm and low and implacable, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and she heard, from far away, the long creak of the straps as the bearers, one by one, began to pay them out. The oak box sank. It went down slowly, level, with the tiny shuddering lurches of a lift, into the black slot of the earth, and the white rose slid on its lid, and slid, and fell.
Something in her went quiet.
It was not grief. It was not even despair. It was a thing she had no name for, a vast white silence that rose through her and filled her skull and stopped her ears. She saw the rain falling on the polished lid. She saw Martin's face across the grave, naked, soaked, contorted, his mouth open, his gloved hand pressed to it. She saw the old man in the camel coat standing straight under the yews, with both hands on his cane and his eyes fixed on the box, as one looks at a thing one has paid for. She saw her mother, who did not weep in public, with the tears running down her face and over her chin into her collar and not a muscle moving.
"Amara," said Father Ikenna, gently. "Will you?"
He held out a handful of earth.
She took it. It was cold and sticky and heavy, like wet flour, and it left a smear of yellow on her black glove. She stood at the lip of the grave, in the fine cold rain, and looked down at the box, so small, so far below, and at the tiny dark shape of the stone on the lid where it had rolled to the edge. I don't know who you were, she thought. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.
She opened her hand.
It made a sound she would hear for the rest of her life. It was a soft dull thudding patter, like the first fat drops of a storm on a tin roof, and it was followed by a hush, and then a rattle, a tiny hollow rattle, as small stones skittered over oak. It was not the sound of the earth covering a coffin. It was the sound of a door closing, a long way off, in a house she was no longer allowed to enter.
Her knees went. Dera caught her. She did not fall. She stood in her sister's arms with her mouth open, silently, wrenched and doubled, and above her the rain fell and fell and fell.
They came forward after that, one by one, as people do, the neighbors and the archive staff and the men from the yard, each stooping for a pinch of the yellow clay and letting it go with a small dry patter and a murmured word. She stood with her head against Dera's shoulder and watched them like a woman watching a film in a language she did not speak.
The tall man in the black coat came last.
He did not stoop for earth. He walked to the edge of the grave with his hands in his pockets and stood looking down, and the others, without being asked, made room for him. He took something from inside his coat. It was a single sheet of white paper, folded twice, thin and crisp, and he held it out over the open ground for a moment as a man holds a hymn sheet, and let it go.
It fell slowly. It turned once in the rain. It landed on the lid of the coffin, beside the scattering of earth, and lay there, a small square of pale in the wet black.
Nobody spoke. Father Ikenna's mouth had opened. A woman at the back gave a small shocked cough, and a man said, Here, what's he, and was hushed. The tall man did not look at any of them. He looked across the grave at Amara, with eyes that were pale and calm and entirely without hurry, and he inclined his head, a quarter of an inch.
"Mrs. Hale," he said. His voice was quiet and gentle, with the soft flat vowels of the docks. "A friend of your husband's sends his sympathy. He'll be writing to you."
Then he turned and walked away between the yews, unhurried, with his hands in his pockets, and the rain closed behind him like a curtain.
"I'm so sorry for your loss."
"Terrible. Terrible. So young."
"Forty-four. I said to Pat, forty-four."
"Do they know what it was?"
"Not yet. Something about the police."
"No family at all, you know. Not a soul."
"Poor Amara."
"She's so strong."
"She's not strong. She's in shock."
They moved around her like water around a stone. Under the dripping lych-gate, where the mourners gathered to shake hands and murmur and put on their gloves, they came up to her one by one with their wet cold hands and their faces full of a helpless embarrassment. She said, thank you, she said, thank you for coming, she said it two hundred times, in the same level voice, like a woman reciting a catalog. Gail Dunstan from HR wept noisily on her shoulder. A man from the bank pressed an envelope into her hand. A man from the bank pressed an envelope into her hand and murmured that Mr. Pym would be in touch, that there was no hurry, no hurry at all, and he did not look at her face when he said it. She thought: Everyone is being so careful with me. It was the gentleness one shows to the sick, or to a house with something wrong in the foundations.
She was looking for the tall man's black coat among the umbrellas when a hand closed hard on her arm.
"Leave it," said Martin.
He was standing at her shoulder. She had not heard him come. His face was the color of wet paper, and his black gloved hand was gripping her above the elbow hard enough to hurt.
"Who was that?" she said. "The man at the grave. What did he drop?"
"I've no idea. Some, some funeral-crasher. A crank. They turn up." He was breathing quickly. "They get strange ideas at funerals, Amara. Come away. Come out of the rain. Jo's got the car."
"He said a friend of Daniel's."
"Did he? Daniel had a great many friends. It's a funeral." But she saw it, very clearly, in the instant before he turned his head: the swift, sick, calculating look he cast down the path after the vanishing black back. It lasted less than a second. It was the look of a man counting the distance between two doors.
She let him lead her. She let him take her through the gate, past the long line of black cars, and put her in the back of the Ashbys' Volvo with a rug across her knees. Dera got in beside her. Jo got into the front, red-eyed, murmuring. The engine started. The wipers began, slow and soft and steady, to sweep.
And through the streaming rear window, as they drew away from the lych-gate, Amara looked back up the hill at the black rectangle of the open grave in the wet green grass, where two gravediggers in yellow capes were already leaning on their spades. Beyond them, at the farthest edge of the cemetery, under the lowest of the old yews, a slight figure stood alone in a gray parka with the hood pulled forward over the face, quite motionless, with something small and pale held down against one leg.
It was too far to see what. But when the car turned the corner by the lych-gate and the hillside swung out of sight, she knew with an odd and certain dread that it had not been looking at the grave. It had been looking at her.