When the voices had been with her for a week and Jock had said all the things to her that he used to say-Adam and Eve and Pinch Me, you’re an old-fashioned girl, Polo, it’s only April Fools’ Day till twelve and after that it’s Tailpike Day, only two thousand, Minty, it’s our future that’s at stake-she went into the cemetery by her usual gate, stopping on the way to buy flowers from the man with the stall. It was a Saturday but there was hardly anyone about. This time she’d brought a bottle of water, cold from the kitchen tap, to refill the vase. She bought pale yellow chrysanthemums, the kind that have short petals in their centers and long, thin ones on their rims, and white gypsophila like snowflakes and alstro-somethings that she couldn’t pronounce.
Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life on December 15th, 1897, aged 53. Asleep in the arms of Jesus. Auntie’s grandmother. Minty had told herself this so often that now she believed it. She pulled out the dead flowers and poured away the smelly green water that had petals and a dead snail floating in it. There was enough fresh water to rinse the vase out before filling it. When the yellow and white and peach-colored flowers were arranged, she knelt down on Maisie Chepstow’s grave and did something she hadn’t done for a long time. She prayed to Auntie to take away Jock’s voice and the voices of the crowd that accompanied him wherever he was.
A bath when she got home. Laf didn’t come in with the paper until quite late in the afternoon. She hadn’t heard the voices since she offered up that prayer, but she was still going to ask. “How can you find out where someone’s grave is?”
“You’d have to know where they died. Maybe you could get the death certificate. People don’t have graves much these days, Minty. They get cremated so they’d be ashes. Why do you want to know?”
That business about the death certificate confused her. She knew she’d never be able to do those things, go to the right place, talk to the right people. Perhaps Laf would do it for her. “It’s Jock’s grave I want to find.” She wasn’t going to mention his mother. Not yet, anyway.
“Oh, right.” Laf was embarrassed.
“D’you think you could?”
“I’ll see,” he said. “It might not be possible.” He was moved by pity for her. “Minty, wouldn’t it be a good idea to-well-put the past behind you? Try and forget him? You’re young, you’ve got your whole future before you. Can’t you forget the past?”
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said and, in a burst of frankness, “I keep hearing his voice talking to me.”
Saying he’d see what he could do, Laf went home. Daniel was there. He’d been visiting a bed-bound patient in First Avenue and had called in for tea.
“I suppose it’s time someone told her the truth,” Sonovia said.
“I don’t think so, Mum. I wouldn’t.”
“She could go right over the edge.” Laf cut himself a slice of a very sticky banoffee pie. “I mean, what’s best? To believe your boyfriend loved you and met his death in a train crash? Or that he deceived you rotten and is still alive and kicking somewhere, living off some other woman?”
“You checked up, did you, Dad?”
“I was always more or less certain. That letter she had was an obvious con. Then I checked when the inquiry into the crash was on back in May. Thirty-one people died. They thought at first it was hundreds but it was only thirty-one. I say ‘only,’ that was bad enough, my goodness.”
“And there was no Jock Lewis among them?”
“You should think of your heart before you eat that stuff, Lafcadio Wilson.”
“Who put it on the table, I’d like to know?”
“It was meant for me, Dad. No Jock Lewis?”
“No Jock or John Lewis. And what’s more, no man not accounted for. Every man on that list had a name and an address and age and dependents or whatever, and not one of them could have fitted him. And now she wants me to find his grave.”
“Just say you can’t, Laf. Pass it off. She’ll soon forget about it.”
“What does she want his grave for?”
“What d’you think, Dan? To put flowers on like she does on her auntie’s faithfully every week.”
Mrs. Lewis had only sent her half what she owed her. Or Jock’s brother had. If she’d had his address she’d have written to him and asked for the rest. Still, she’d got enough for what she really wanted, the only thing she wanted when you came to think of it. The man hadn’t come yet but Laf said she’d easily have it done for a thousand pounds and he’d picked up some brochures for her from a builder’s merchant in Ladbroke Grove. Looking at the pictures, she could see she’d never afford a separate shower cabinet, the kind you walked into. Laf had been wrong there. Still, having one put in over the bath and a glass wall with hinges built to keep the water off the floor, that would be just as good. Better, really, because a cabinet meant one more thing to clean every day. So long as there wasn’t a messy shower curtain that would get splashes of dried soap all over it.
The voices crowded in on her while she was studying the one she’d have installed. Jock and Mrs. Lewis and another that must be Jock’s dad. It couldn’t be his brother. His brother was still alive. He must have been to send her the money. Maybe the ex-wife was dead too and the brother’s wife. Were they all there because she’d never visited Jock’s grave?
They never answered but she asked just the same. “Where’s he buried? Where have they put Jock?”
Silence. It wasn’t a reply, more a piece of knowledge that suddenly appeared inside her head. No one said it, for the voices had once more gone away. The thought, the fact, came in and she knew absolutely that it was true. He’s in the one by Chelsea football ground. As if she hadn’t understood, it came again. The one by Chelsea football ground.
Edna had lived down there. When she was a little girl and Edna was still alive, had another ten years to live, Auntie used to take her over there to Edna’s for tea. She had a little gray house, one of a long, flat-fronted row, with a door opening on to the pavement.
Minty went over there in the evening after work, and she took a knife with her, one of the smaller ones from the drawer. She went by bus, or rather a series of buses, ending up on the 11, which took her to Fulham Broadway.
It was years since she’d been there, twenty-five years. Even then, the football hooligans used to break the place up if their team got beaten by Chelsea. Auntie had pointed out smashed shop fronts to her and turned the demonstration into a lesson on the wickedness of destroying property. No smashed windows now, none of the old shops. The place had been smartened up. She went to look at Edna’s house. It was as bright and fresh now as the Wilsons’, with a red front door and carriage lamps, frilly curtains inside the windows, and boxes full of flowers outside them. All the houses were like that, only the flowers were of different kinds and the doors blue or yellow. Edna always wore a crossover overall and slippers, and a turban like she had on the production line during the war. Most of the time Uncle Wilfred was in his darkroom developing his photographs. He wanted Minty to go in there with him but usually Auntie wouldn’t let her, not unless the door was left open, which it obviously couldn’t be in a darkroom. She didn’t know why it was forbidden, hadn’t then and didn’t now, though she could still remember the meaningful glances Auntie and Edna exchanged when Uncle Wilfred shrugged and turned away.
She entered the cemetery from the Old Brompton Road end. Although she had often gazed at it from Edna’s windows-there was little else to do-she’d never been in before. And she found it frightening in a way Kensal Green never was. This had something to do with the eight-sided chapel and curving colonnades you had to pass by or between, something perhaps with the gloom of the evening, a typical London summer evening of heavy cloud and excluded sun and windless, thick air, though it was still a long way off twilight. There was a tomb with a lion on it like the lions in Trafalgar Square and another piled with black cannonballs. As she walked she was sure she would meet her ghosts, or some of them, or one. Jock himself frightened her more than the others. With old women, even with their shades, she could cope. But she sensed in Jock a violence she had never known from him in life. It was as if, in death, he was slowly realizing his full potential of savagery and malice.