Chapter 8
Whispers at the Wake
A funeral tea is a peculiar kind of theater. Nobody has rehearsed it, and everybody knows their part.
By two o'clock the house on Marsh Lane held eighty people, and every one of them was talking in the same low, shuffling, apologetic murmur, like the sound of a large animal breathing in its sleep. The front room was a forest of black legs. Plates of egg sandwiches went round on trays. Somebody had found the good china and somebody else had found the sherry. In the kitchen the kettle boiled and was refilled and boiled again, and Mrs. Patek and Mrs. Gethin, who had not exchanged a civil word since a dispute over a hedge in 1999, stood side by side at the sink buttering bread in a perfect efficient silence, shoulder to shoulder, like generals.
Amara stood by the window with a cup of tea she did not drink and let it wash over her.
So young. Such a good man. Nobody knew he was unwell. She heard it all, in pieces, from three directions at once. A woman from the archive was telling someone how Daniel had once fixed the reading-room radiator with a coat hanger. A man in a gray suit by the bookcase was saying, in a low voice, that the police had been at the yard all week, going through the files, and that nobody would say why. Two women by the fireplace were discussing Amara's hair.
And under all of it, too soft to quite be heard, the other thing. The thing that is said at every funeral, and never to the widow's face.
They say it wasn't natural.
Didn't they find him on the floor? In some flat?
What was he doing in Dunmarrow?
She turned her head, very slightly. A pair of women in black hats had their backs to her, close together, bent over their sandwiches. One of them said, and not a family member in sight. Not one. Don't you think that's odd? Fifteen years and never a brother, never a cousin. And the other said, Oh, she'd know. She'd know if there was anything. And the first, softly: Would she?
Amara put down her tea. She went on standing there, and looking at nothing, and the gleam of rain on the glass.
"Eat something," said Dera. She had appeared at her elbow with a plate. "I'm not asking."
"I'm not hungry."
"You've not eaten since Wednesday."
"I had toast."
"You had a corner of toast. I saw it. You carried it round the kitchen for an hour like a hymn book." Dera pushed the plate into her hands. It held a triangle of cheese-and-pickle on white, a sausage roll, and a single trembling wedge of pineapple on a stick. "There's an old woman in the hall who says her husband died in nineteen ninety-four and she's never been the same since. She's been telling me about his gallbladder. Please eat something so I can tell her you're resting."
"Dera."
"What?"
"Did you hear what they were saying?"
"I've heard fifteen different versions of what everybody's saying." Dera's face was tired and pinched under the pinned braids. She lowered her voice. "Mama thinks it's the evil eye. Mrs. Gethin thinks it was his heart. Mr. Patek told me it was most likely a brain aneurysm, because his cousin's neighbor had one, and the cousin's neighbor was a runner." She took a bite of the sausage roll. "I told him I was a nurse and it wasn't a brain aneurysm, because Dr. Khalid would have found a brain aneurysm. He said I should show respect to the bereaved."
"What did you say?"
"That I was the bereaved."
Amara laughed. It came out of her like a cough, short and harsh and entirely involuntary, and then it turned into something else, and she put her face against her sister's shoulder and stood there with the plate tilting in her hand.
"I know," said Dera, quietly. "I know. Come on. Eat the pineapple."
She went upstairs to be alone, and found the bathroom door ajar.
It was a small tiled room at the top of the stairs, with a sloping ceiling and a window of frosted glass, and she had not meant to go in. She had meant only to lean her forehead for a minute against the cold wall of the landing. But the light was on, and the door stood open by an inch, and through the gap, in the pale hard white of the bathroom bulb, she saw a man's back.
It was Martin. He was standing at the basin with his coat off and his head bowed. He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of the door, and he was bent over the sink, running the cold tap, and in his right hand, held low against his stomach, he had a small gray pen. She watched him unscrew the cap. She watched him, with the unconscious practiced economy of a man who has done it ten thousand times, lift the hem of his white shirt on the left and press the tip of the pen to the pale flesh of his belly. He held it there. His lips moved. He was counting.
She turned away, instinctively, as one does. It was the same gesture her whole family had made at her father's elbow every morning for nineteen years: the swift averting of the eyes, the courteous blindness. It was a form of love. She was already moving back along the landing when she heard him make a small sound, a hiss of breath, and the pen clatter into the sink.
"Damn," said Martin, softly. "Damn it."
She went back. She pushed the door.
He swung round. He had been drying his hands, and he held a white towel crumpled in one fist, and his face, for a moment, was naked with shock, white and set, the eyes dark and enormous. He had pushed up his shirtsleeves to wash. And on the inside of his left forearm, from the wrist almost to the elbow, ran four long thin parallel scabs, dark red, half-healed, each the length of her finger, as neat and regular as the teeth of a comb.
She stared at them. He saw her stare. In one quick fluid movement, almost too quick to follow, he dropped the towel over his arm and pulled down the cuff.
"Amara. I'm sorry. I thought the door was shut."
"Your arm."
"What?"
"You've hurt your arm."
"Oh. That." He laughed. It was a small, strained, unlovely sound. "Jo's roses. The climbing one at the back, you know the one. It had me on Sunday. I'm a martyr to it. I've told her it'll be the death of me." He bent and picked the pen out of the sink and turned it over in his fingers, dripping. "I dropped this. I'm all thumbs today. You mustn't mind me."
"I don't mind."
"Blood sugar's through the floor. I've not eaten since Thursday." He gave her a rueful lopsided smile. "Not a thing to be proud of."
"Thursday," said Amara.
"The day before, I mean. The day, before." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "God. I don't know what day it is."
"It's Friday."
"Is it?" Martin looked at her. Behind the thick lenses of his glasses, the whites of his eyes were threaded with red, and she saw that he had not slept, truly, in a very long time. "Yes. Yes, of course. I'm sorry. I'll go down. They'll be wondering where I've got to."
He edged past her in the narrow doorway, with his jacket over his arm, smelling of soap and sweat and the clean sharp medicinal smell of the pen. She stood in the white light, listening to his tread go heavily down the stairs, and she looked at the little sink, at the small pink swirl of water draining out of it, and at the open black case lying on the shelf beside the toothbrush mugs, its neat rows of cartridges lined up like cigarettes.
Roses, she thought.
The scratches were too straight. They were too regular, too deep. Roses did not scratch in comb-teeth. Fingernails did.
She did not think it. Not quite. She let the thought come as far as the edge of her mind and stand there, still, like a deer at the edge of a wood, and then she looked away from it. It was Martin. It was dear solid Martin, who had held her father's hand. It was simply not a thought she could have.
"Amara. A word."
She had been waiting for it. She had seen him watching her through the afternoon, across the crowded room, with the same fixed, anxious, rehearsing look, and when at four o'clock the crowd began to thin and the coats came off the pegs, Martin detached himself from a group by the piano and touched her elbow in the kitchen doorway. He did not say where. He took her down the passage to Daniel's study and shut the door behind them, and the noise of the house fell away like a tide going out.
He did not sit. He stood in front of the green-shaded lamp, big and gray and creased in his funeral suit, with his black gloves in his hand, and for a while he looked at the shelf of river stones as if he would rather speak to them.
"I should have told you a month ago," he said. "I should have told you years ago. I tried. I want you to know I tried."
"Told me what?"
"That Dan owed money." He said it very quietly. "A great deal of money. And not to a bank."
The room did not change. The clock in the hall went on. She felt her own face going still, the way it did at the archive when a reader brought her something she had hoped never to see.
"How much?"
"I'll come to that. Sit down, love."
"How much, Martin?"
He breathed out. "In the autumn of ninety-eight the firm went under. You remember. The box on the kitchen table. Well, it didn't go under, in the end, because a man lent him two hundred and sixty thousand pounds. Cash. No questions. A man called Victor Crane." He let the name lie there. "Crane owns half the scrap and salvage on the Dunmarrow waterfront. He owns, I should say, a great deal more than anyone could prove. He lends to people the banks have turned away. It's a kind of business. You'd know if you'd been in the docks as long as I have."
"A loan shark."
"I don't like the word. Victor's an old-fashioned man. He thinks of it as a partnership." His mouth twisted. "Dan thought he could pay it back in two years. Then three. The interest ran. Then there were other things. Favours. Cargoes that were, shall we say, not strictly on the manifest. Dan wasn't a fool. He knew what they were. He did them, and the debt went down a little, and then it went up. It always goes up, Amara. That's how it's built."
"Smuggling."
"Cigarettes, mostly. Some other things." He did not look at her. "I begged him to stop. I told him I'd cover the figures, I'd help, that we'd go to the police together. He said that was the one thing he couldn't do. He said Crane had people everywhere. That there'd be no police, only a funeral." He gave a dreadful, helpless laugh. "I thought he was being melodramatic."
She stood against the door. She had the odd, detached sensation of watching two people in a room from a point somewhere high in the corner, one of them in a black dress.
"The man at the grave," she said. "The tall one."
"Silas Rook. Crane's, well, call him Crane's accountant. He collects." He wet his lips. "They'll write to you. They'll want what's owed. Amara, the figure, I've been through the books for three days, I've been up every night. Six hundred and twelve thousand, four hundred and eighteen pounds."
It was not a number. It was a sound. It rolled through the quiet room and struck the walls and did not seem to come to an end. She thought of fourteen thousand three hundred, and a ballpoint pen pressed through paper.
"That's not possible."
"It's what the ledger says."
"It's the price of nine houses."
"It's the price of this one, and the yard, and the lorries, and a little more. That's why I wanted to tell you before the post does." He stepped toward her at last, and she saw that his eyes were wet. "There's a worse thing. You're a guarantor. You signed a charge on this house in March of oh-four, to secure the whole of it. A deed of second charge. Don't you remember? Dan said you knew."
"I didn't sign anything."
"Love, your name is on it."
"I was in Enugu," said Amara. "On the twelfth of March. I was at my aunt's burial. I was thirty hours away."
She watched his face. She was watching it with the part of her that read old paper for a living, the cold small clerkly part that had never in twenty years let a smudge go by. And what she saw, in the half second before he composed it, was not surprise. It was a flinch, a flicker, a man stepping smoothly over a hole he had known was there.
"Then Dan signed it," said Martin, slowly. "Oh, God. Oh, Dan. He must have done it himself. He must have thought, if he told you, you'd..." He sat down heavily on the arm of the old chair, with a kind of groan. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I thought you'd agreed. He told me you'd agreed."
"He wouldn't forge my name."
"He wasn't himself, those last years. You didn't see it. I did." He put his hand over his eyes. "The man was drowning, Amara. A drowning man will do anything."
She did not answer. She stood with her back against the door and her hands flat behind her on the wood, and she said to herself, carefully, as one repeats a sum, he said Dan told him she'd agreed. But Dan told Martin nothing. Dan never told Martin a thing. And she did not know where the thought had come from, because it was not a thought she had ever had about Martin, not once in seventeen years; and she put it away, quickly, like a hot dish, to look at later.
"What do they want?" she said.
"They want paying. The house, to start with. Marsh Lane's worth a hundred and ninety; the yard, with the lease, about three. There's the insurance. We'd be short, but I think Victor would take it as settled if you gave him the shape of a gesture." He looked up. "I can talk to them. They like me. I can get you terms. But you'd have to sell, Amara. Quickly. Before the thirty days are out."
"Thirty days."
"It's the custom. From the burial."
"I want to see the ledger."
"You'll see it."
"When?"
"When I've put it in order. It's rather a mess." He rose. He picked up his gloves. "You've buried your husband today. Don't think of it now. Only, if Dan left anything, papers, notebooks, any private record he kept, will you bring it to me first? Before anyone else sees it. It would be so much safer."
She did not answer at once. It was a small thing, the way he said it, first, before anyone else, and she filed it without knowing why. "Of course," she said.
"Good girl." His relief was almost painful to see. He put a gloved hand on her shoulder and left it there. "We'll get you through it. I promise you. I'm not going to leave you to face them alone."
He went out. She heard him in the hall, saying something gentle to Jo. She stood for a long time in the study in the lamplight with her back against the door, looking at a row of gray stones in a wooden tray, each with its small neat tag. Dover, 1991. Lyme, 1994. Dunmarrow, 1998. Dunmarrow, 2001.
She had never noticed before how many of them said Dunmarrow.
They were gone by six.
She stood in the hall as the last of them went, and shook each hand, and said thank you for coming until the words lost all meaning in her mouth. Mrs. Gethin kissed her wetly on both cheeks. The vicar blessed her. A girl from the archive, weeping, pressed a card into her fingers. At the very end, when the door had closed on the last pair of dark coats and the sound of footsteps had died away down Marsh Lane, there was only the family left, her mother in the green chair, Dera asleep in an armchair with her shoes off, Jo Ashby gently rinsing cups at the kitchen sink. Martin had gone to fetch the car. He had said he would come back in the morning.
Her mother had not moved. She sat with her hands in her lap and her rosary hanging from her fingers, and she was looking at the wedding photograph on the mantel.
"Mama," said Amara. "You should go to bed."
"I'm not tired."
"You haven't slept for a week."
"I've slept all my life. I have a good long time to sleep when I'm dead." Ngozi did not take her eyes from the picture. "Come and sit."
She sat on the arm of the chair. The rain had started again outside, soft and steady, ticking at the window like a patient finger. The room was warm and shabby and smelled of cold tea and furniture polish and the crushed petals of the lilies that had been carried in from the church.
"I want to tell you something," said her mother. "I have never told anyone."
"What?"
"The first time he came to our house. Do you remember? You brought him to Sunday lunch. You were so nervous that you burned the rice." Ngozi's mouth moved, very slightly. "He sat at my table, very straight, in a blue shirt, with his hands on his knees like a boy at the dentist. And I asked him, as I ask every young man. I said, tell me about your people. And he told me. His mother, his father, the aunt in Bristol. He said it very well. He said it like a thing he had learned."
"Mama—"
"I'm not saying he was lying. I'm saying he said it like a thing he'd learned. And then I asked what his mother's name was. Because it is what I ask. And he said, Margaret." She turned her head. Her eyes, in the lamplight, were bright and hard and very old. "And then he did something. He put down his fork, and he looked at his plate, and I saw his eyes fill. In front of all of us. A man of twenty-seven. I thought, he is crying for his mother. And I felt shame, because I had asked. And I felt, how shall I say it, that he was a man who had never been asked."
Amara said nothing.
"I never forgot it," said Ngozi. "I thought, this man is carrying something heavy. And I thought, if he carries it alone, it will break him. I thought you would be the one to help him put it down." She closed her hand on the rosary. "I think now that I was wrong. I think that he never put it down. I think he carried it to the end."
"What do you think it was?"
"I do not know, nne." Her mother's voice was very quiet. "But I know the look of a man who has done something, or had it done to him, that he cannot say. I saw it on your father's brother, after the war. I saw it on men in my own village. It is not a sin, always. Sometimes it is only a wound that has not been allowed to close." She looked at Amara. "Find out what it was. Not for him. For you. You cannot grieve what you do not know."
The doorbell rang at half past nine.
She was alone in the hall. She had sent them all to bed, her mother and her sister and Jo, with a firmness she had not known she possessed, and she had been standing for a long time with her forehead against the cold glass of the front door, watching the rain run down it in long crooked tracks. When the bell shrilled she jumped as if she had been shot.
There was no one on the step.
She opened the door on the chain and looked out. The lamp at the corner threw its wet orange cone onto the pavement. The street was empty. A car swished by at the end of the lane. And on the doormat, set precisely in the center, with its edges squared to the brush bristles, lay a small gray stone.
She picked it up. It was smooth and cold and damp. It was flat, and no bigger than her palm, with a thin white seam through it like a vein. There was a notch cut into the edge. And beneath it, folded small, so that she had not seen it at first against the dark coir, was a slip of white paper.
She unfolded it with fingers that shook.
Block capitals, in black ink. No signature. Six words.
THE BOOK. BEFORE ANYONE ELSE.
She read it three times. She looked up the street, and down it, and across at the black windows of the houses opposite, and there was nothing, nobody, only the rain falling through the lamplight in its thousand silver threads. She bent, and in the thin dim glare from the hallway she saw, in the wet dust beside the doormat, the clear print of a narrow boot with a ridged sole, a young man's, still wet at the edges.
She was still staring at it when a van pulled up at the curb.
It was a plain white police van, with a yellow and blue checkered stripe. A young constable climbed out of the driver's seat with a cardboard box in his arms and a clipboard under his chin, and came up the path at a trot with his head down against the rain. "Mrs. Hale? Sorry. Sorry to call so late. DI Quill said to drop this by tonight, she said you'd want it as soon as, as it was released." He thrust the box at her. It was a plain brown evidence carton, taped shut, with a printed label and a signature line. "Your husband's effects. From the flat. The rest of them. If you could just sign there."
She signed. She did not know what she wrote.
The constable touched his helmet. He went away down the path. And Amara stood in the doorway with the box in her arms, and a stone in her hand, and a message in her pocket, and beyond her in the empty hall the green leather chair and the gray machine and the red light, patient, unwinking, steadily blinking in the dark.
The book.
Before anyone else.
She had heard those very words that afternoon, in the lamplight of her husband's study, in Martin's gentle voice.