“It wasn’t forgery! The pictures are by Charles Aubrey.”
“Yes. The lie you told the world wasn’t as big as the one you told me,” he said. Hannah pressed her lips together unhappily, but she did not say sorry.
“What did you do with his body? You never did say. Does Charles Aubrey have a true grave that I could go and see?” Zach asked. He had a sudden dark vision of an exhumation, of relocation to hallowed ground. Of soil caught in grinning teeth and insects hiding in bony eye sockets. Hannah had been fingering the fine bristles of a paintbrush standing in a jar on the desk. She dropped her hand guiltily, as though he’d slapped her wrist.
“No. There’s no grave.”
“But… Don’t tell me you… burned the body? Jesus Christ, Hannah…”
“No! Not that. You have to understand… Dimity was near hysterical when I got here. With grief and with fear. She was adamant that if people found out he’d been here all this time she’d be in some kind of awful trouble. She kept going on and on about secrets and bad things… she was hardly making sense. It wasn’t long after… after I lost Toby. I wasn’t in a clear and logical place myself… And he’d been dead a while, you understand. I think… I think she’d been in denial, or maybe she just wanted to be with him for as long as possible. But he was… he was starting to smell.” She broke off, swallowing hard at the memory. “It was nighttime and there was this dead body-my second dead body that year-and Mitzy was sobbing and chattering and going on and on, so I… I went along with what she suggested.” She looked up at him, still with those wide eyes; expectant now, ready for his reaction. On any day before that day he’d have been happy to see that vulnerability on her face.
“Which was?”
“We gave him to the sea.”
The night he died was blowy and dry, the breeze a restless whisper, like a song. Dimity’s back was aching from scrubbing the kitchen floor. For years she’d supported herself and Charles by cleaning houses; riding the bus to the homes of people outside Blacknowle, newcomers, people resettling after the war. People for whom the name Hatcher had no connotations. And as soon as she could draw her pension, she did so, stopping work and spending the whole of each day with Charles at The Watch. The cottage no longer felt like a prison but a home. A sanctuary. A place where she was happy and her heart was full. But that night her bones were aching, right through to the marrow, and after a while the hairs on the back of her neck began to prickle, and an awful, sick feeling gathered under her ribs. She hummed and she sang and she went about her chores, and made a dinner of lamb chops and mint sauce, but she put off taking it up to him for as long as she could. She knew; she knew. But she didn’t want to see, to have it proven. Each step of the stairs was a cliff face, each push of her muscles a marathon. She forced herself up to his room when the chops had long gone cold and the fat from them had congealed in a ring around the plate.
The room was in darkness and she put the tray carefully on the desk before crossing to the switch. The hand she raised to pull it was leaden; weighed more than all the rocks on the beach combined. And there he was, fully dressed but lying on the bed with his legs under the sheet, arms across his middle, tidy and organized. His head was nestled into the center of the pillow and his eyes were shut, but his mouth was not. It sagged open slightly, just enough for her to see his lower teeth, the swell of his tongue. A tongue that was no longer pink, but grayish pale. And then, in that second, the world stopped turning and everything seemed to fade to shadows; nothing was real or solid anymore. The air wasn’t fit to breathe, the light burned her eyes, and the ceiling pressed down on her until her knees buckled. The house, the world, and everything in it turned to ashes, and she tottered to the bedside, gasping at the pain. His skin was cold and dry, the flesh beneath it too firm, inhuman. The white wisps of his hair were soft and clean when she put trembling fingers up to touch them. The years had given him sunken cheeks and gaunt sinews to garland the length of his neck, but when she looked at him all she saw, all she had ever seen, was her Charles, her love. For a long time she lay crumpled there, with her cheek pressed to his still, silent chest.
New faces, new voices, came to fill the gray hollow where Charles had been. They were indistinct at first; they kept their distance. They were suggestions of movement, voices too quiet to hear. But then, almost a week after Charles had left, she caught a flash of blond hair in the hallway mirror as she passed it. Dyed yellow hair, long and coarse and split at the ends. Valentina. And then that evening a seizure gripped her, a shudder taking over her arms and shoulders that was not hers, but Celeste’s. The dead were drawn to their own, she knew, like wasps to a murdered comrade. Death was in the air at The Watch, the smell of it was spreading, getting stronger, tempting others to come and look, to come visiting. She ran up to his room in terror, and held his cold hands for comfort. They were soft again now, but in a wrong way. His whole body seemed to be sinking, settling lower into the mattress. His eyes had drawn back into his skull, his cheeks were even deeper and the strands of his neck even looser. The tongue nestling between his teeth had darkened, blackened. His skin was waxen and yellow. “Hawthorn,” she murmured to him in anguish, as the day got old and the sun went down. “You smell like May flowers, my love.”
When she had no other choice she went down to the farmhouse, and Delphine opened the door. For a moment Dimity accepted this, and then she was startled because it could not be. She had seen Delphine carried out, years before. It was not Delphine but the girl, the dark-haired one who had sometimes come knocking on the door of The Watch when she was small, to ask for sponsorship for Red Nose Day, or to sell raffle tickets for the Brownies. A small, angular thing with scraped elbows and knees, she had been, but now here she was, grave and solemn and lovely. Her breath was ripe with alcohol, her gaze scattered and bewildered. But Dimity took her hand and pulled her back to The Watch. She could not lift him by herself. The cottage was roaring with the voices of the dead, but Hannah didn’t seem to hear. They stirred Dimity into a frenzy of fear and desperation. They had to go, they all had to go, and take their secrets with them. Secrets that had to be kept; too many of them, and too grave, for even one to be spoken-the pebble that would start the landslide. No police, no undertaker, nobody else but the two women and the dead man. Hannah put her hand over her mouth as they went into Charles’s room, and gagged. Her eyes were darkly alight with horror.
Between them, they lifted him off the bed. Heavier than he looked; a tall man with good, strong bones. They carried him out of The Watch and down to the cliffs. Not above the beach, but behind the cottage, to where the land dropped vertically down into the inlet. The tide was high, Dimity knew. She knew it so well she didn’t even have to think to know; the currents, too, the tow that would pull him under and take him far out to sea. The wind was buffeting, lifting white crests to beat against the rocks. It carried away the smell of hawthorn blossom; it carried away the sound of her sobs. They swung him back and forth, once, twice. Released him on the third. And for a second, just for a second, Dimity almost followed him down. She wanted to keep hold of him, to go with him, for there seemed little point in staying on without him. But her body had other ideas, some gut instinct to live, and her hands let him go, and he flew into darkness. Swallowed by the surging water; gone. She stayed on the cliffs for a long time afterwards. The girl stayed with her; with her sweet, whiskey-scented breath, her hair fluttering, and the sure grip of her hands, as though she understood what Dimity might do otherwise. Where she might go. Then later she was back at The Watch, with no memory of moving, and the place was as dim and quiet as a grave.