Why hadn’t his brother put Jock’s ashes in there? Come to that, why West Hampstead at all? So far as she knew, Jock had never lived there, never even been there. The answer must be that the brother did. The flowers she’d bought were Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod, there wasn’t so much of a selection at this time of the year. It wouldn’t be long before the leaves began to fall. She could feel a nip in the air. On the green she stood under a tree and looked about her, wondering where the ashes had fallen. She squatted down and examined the ground, not actually touching it because that would have dirtied her hands, but just peering about her, searching. A woman passing with a dog stopped and asked her if she’d lost something. Minty shook her head fiercely, though it was true, she had lost something, or someone, and she was looking for what was left of him.
Her scrutiny eventually rewarded her with the sight of something pale sprinkled over a patch of bare earth where for some reason the grass didn’t grow. A cigarette had been stubbed out close by. This she kicked out of the way with the toe of her shoe. She put the bowl precisely where the grayish powder lay most thickly, poured in the water, and arranged the flowers. They looked very nice. She could almost fancy she heard his voice say, “Thanks, Polo. You’re a good girl.” It was only her imagination, the result of her thinking what he might say, not his actual voice speaking. She put the bottle along with the wrapping from the flowers into a litter bin and walked back down the hill to West Hampstead station.
Matthew was opening his letters. His post increased almost daily. Fifteen had come that morning, some sent on by BBC Television, others from the agent he’d been obliged to engage. A lot of them were straightforward fan letters, some included questions about health and eating habits their writers expected him to answer, some-a very few-were abusive, asking him who he thought cared about a man too stupid to eat wholesome food when half the world was starving or wanting to know where he found “the obscene freaks” who appeared on his program. There was an invitation from the Eating Disorders Association asking him to become one of their patrons. He answered all his letters except the abusive ones and these he threw away quickly lest their contents prey on his mind.
Today there were no nasty letters. He almost wished there had been, for a few insults might have temporarily taken his mind off Michelle’s health or its reverse. Twice he typed in her name instead of that of the recipient and once, instead of cancel-this to a man wanting to know if he should keep going his subscription to a slimmer’s magazine-he wrote cancer. Before pressing the back space, he looked at the word and shuddered. Using the euphemism he despised when others uttered it, he asked himself what he’d do “if anything happened” to her. The bald term he couldn’t use, not even in his thoughts. And as he excised the letter which made all the difference, the r that changed an innocuous word into one of foreboding and dread, he spoke her name in a whisper and then more loudly. “Michelle,” he said. “Michelle.”
She answered him. She’d just that moment let herself in by the front door. “I’m here, darling.”
Her face was flushed and she looked excited. “I’ve something to tell you. It’s good news-can’t you tell? Well, I think you’ll say it’s good. I did the test at home, I did it a month ago but I still didn’t believe. I thought my hormones were all confused, I thought maybe it didn’t work on someone of my age, but the doctor says yes and I’m fine. I should be fine, there’s no reason why not…”
He’d gone as white as in the worst days of his starvation. “What are you saying?”
She stood in front of him and he got to his feet. He put out his arms and she moved slowly into them. “Matthew, he or she will be born in March. You are pleased, aren’t you? You are glad?”
He held her and kissed her. “When I can truly believe it, this will be the happiest day of my life.”
Chapter 35
THE CROWD OF people were invisible but they were there in force. They thronged through her head, their voices audible as soon as she was alone and sometimes when she wasn’t. Jock wasn’t there. Minty hadn’t heard him since she put those flowers on his ashes. The last time was when he came walking down the stairs, but she heard his voice, clearer and louder than the others. These were people she knew and people she had never met or even heard of. Not Auntie, never her, and not Mrs. Lewis anymore, but Bert, who’d married Auntie, and Jock’s brother’s wife, Auntie’s sisters, Edna and Kathleen, and their husbands, and more whose names she didn’t know. Yet.
She hadn’t known Jock’s sister-in-law’s name until Bert told Kathleen. “This is Jock’s sister-in-law, Mary, Kathleen,” he’d said and Auntie’s sister said she was pleased to meet her.
Then it was Edna’s turn to meet this Mary. At least Auntie’s voice wasn’t among theirs and Minty knew this was because of the praying and the flowers on her grave. Jock’s wasn’t, for the same reason. She couldn’t do those things for the others, she couldn’t spend her life hunting for graves of dead people, which might be anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. Their invisibility was only temporary. After a while they began to take shape and form, Bert first, thin and insubstantial, not much more than a darkness that shouldn’t have been there. How did she know it was Bert? She’d never seen him, never heard his voice, she wasn’t even born when he came into Auntie’s life and went out of it, but she knew.
Kathleen and Edna were weak and transparent, and sometimes she saw them as shadows only. Mary too, another inhabitant of her life she’d never seen and one she’d never even heard mentioned. The daughter-in-law Mrs. Lewis loved and welcomed when she came to join her. Sunlight had penetrated the gap between the half-closed curtains and onto its brightness their three shadows fell, but without bodies to cast them.
The evening she went to the cinema with Laf and Sonovia-their first visit for a long time-all the ghost voices stayed at home or went away to wherever they lived when they weren’t bothering her and all the ghost shapes were swallowed up by the night and the bright lights. It might be because she was with real living people that they left her alone. On the other hand she’d seen Kathleen several times while she was with the Wilsons and there was the time when Jock had actually followed her into Sonovia’s bedroom when she’d tried on the blue dress. It was hard to know. Most of the time she was confused and bewildered.
She had other worries to plague her. Josephine had started talking about giving up the shop and being a full-time housewife and mother, though there was no sign as yet of motherhood. Ken had been offered a partnership in the Lotus Dragon and had accepted it. There was no real need for her to work. Minty wasn’t to trouble her head about it. Whoever took over would be bound to keep her on. “No one can iron shirts the way you do, Minty,” said Josephine. “They’d be mad to let you go.”
That word “mad” always made Minty nervous. Someone had said it to her on the bus when she’d told the voice that was hissing and whispering at her to go away. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to ignore Mary Lewis, who had her ghost lips to her ear and was saying she’d have to have computer skills and business qualifications for them to keep her on. Being skilled at ironing wasn’t enough these days. “I don’t know. Suppose they give up the shirt service? Suppose they just do dry-cleaning?”