“Yeah,” Trevor said, then sighed.
He seemed the less embarrassed of the two. He had humiliated himself, and that gave him a kind of edge. As for Billy, he was keenly aware of the need to be delicate. He knew too much — more, he suspected, than Trevor had intended to tell him — and he had to imagine, for the time being, that what he’d heard was just a story. Certainly he had to forget how he had held Trevor in his arms while Trevor cried himself to sleep. They were two old friends who had run into each other by chance, and they’d had too much to drink, as old friends often do. That was all there was to it. Should they ever run into each other again, there would be nothing to say. They would probably act as if they hadn’t seen each other. What had happened the night before could never be repeated, or referred to, or even remembered — not out loud, anyway.
Billy moved towards the door. One hand on the handle, he turned and looked back into the room. Trevor was opening his briefcase. Billy watched as Trevor took out a sheet of paper and frowned at it. He had the distinct impression that Trevor was only pretending to be busy, and that, as soon as he was alone, he would sit down on the bed and simply stare into space.
“Maybe see you at breakfast,” Billy said.
Trevor looked round quickly, as if he had forgotten Billy was there. “What?” he said. “Oh, sure. OK.”
But Trevor would have finished his breakfast before Billy appeared in the food barn. Trevor would make certain of that. He might even skip the meal altogether. Just get in the car and drive.
“Take care,” Billy said.
They both knew they would never see each other again.
Everything was silent in the mortuary. Billy realised that the answer-machine was no longer beeping; someone must have listened to the message while he was on his break. In the distance, on the very threshold of hearing, he thought he could detect the soothing hum of a floor-polisher — in hospitals, as in airports, cleaners nearly always worked at night — and he pictured a man with a blank look on his face guiding the machine from side to side, its brushes revolving briskly, smoothly, an endless series of tiny circles, each new circle covering a slightly different area from the last, but all the circles overlapping, and the floor becoming shinier and shinier until it existed only as a perfect reflection of what surrounded it.
25
Whenever Billy thought about Trevor, he was overtaken by an intense feeling of regret. He couldn’t help feeling there was more he could have done. He hadn’t asked for Trevor’s phone number, for instance, or his address — surely Trevor would’ve had business cards in that briefcase of his — nor, on returning home, had he tried to trace his old friend using the one piece of information that he’d picked up. After all, there couldn’t have been too many people called Lydgate in a small town like Stone…They had parted at the door of room number 8, and just as Billy had predicted, Trevor didn’t appear for breakfast. Their paths had crossed for the first time in thirty years, but they had chosen not to benefit from the coincidence.
Almost exactly a year later, in the autumn of 1999, a woman called Mary Betts left a message on Billy’s answer-machine at home. She had some news for him, she said. Though he didn’t recognise the name or the voice, he called her back that evening. She told him that she’d been a classmate of his at primary school. They hadn’t known each other very well, she reassured him, so he didn’t have to pretend he remembered her. He laughed.
“Before we go too far,” she said, “it’s not good news, I’m afraid. Trevor Lydgate’s dead.”
Standing in the lounge, next to the window, Billy thought of the brownish-pink grab-rails in Trevor’s hotel room. In their colour and their smoothness, in their curiously glossy quality, they had reminded him of something you might find inside a body. Organs of some kind. Intestines.
It’s no different, really.
“I just thought you might like to know,” Mary Betts said, “since you were once a friend of his.”
The funeral was in two days’ time, she said. She was sorry not to have given him more notice. He told her he would do his best to be there. Later that night, he phoned Maureen, his mother. She hadn’t seen Trevor since he was a little boy, she said, but she would try to attend the funeral, if only for Betty’s sake, her dear Betty Lydgate who had died some years before. At work the next day Billy applied for compassionate leave, claiming that he and Trevor had been cousins.
It was a four-hour drive from Suffolk, and he arrived at the church a few minutes late, but he was able to slip into a pew at the back without anybody noticing. The church was less than half-full. When the service ended, he remained in his seat, watching the mourners file past. There was Trevor’s wife, a big, dumpy woman with long hair and glasses, and there were the four children Trevor had talked about, at least three of them already in their teens. The church doors had been thrown open, and the faces of the bereaved were brutally exposed by the white autumn light. Billy could see shock and lack of sleep, but he could also see the strange, self-conscious, almost narcissistic sense of loss that often accompanies an unexpected death in the family. They walked down the aisle as if dragging heavy weights, and the youngest child, a boy, was looking from side to side, embarrassed by all the attention, but fascinated too. The man supporting the widow was much stockier than Trevor, and had more hair, including a closely trimmed beard and moustache, yet he was clearly recognisable as Trevor’s brother. These, then, were the other two bearers of the secret.
Outside, Billy caught up with his mother, who was searching in her handbag for a tissue.
“It’s a mercy Betty’s not here to see this,” Maureen said. “She would have been heartbroken. Heartbroken.”
The crematorium was only five minutes’ drive away, and this time Billy sat near the front, watching as Trevor’s coffin slid through a dark-blue curtain. The music played during its short and slightly jerky trip was a top-ten hit from the eighties:
Look at me standing
Here on my own again—
Billy remembered dancing to the song with Susie once, in a nightclub in Manchester, a slow shuffle of a dance during which they kissed non-stop. It had sounded oddly mournful even then, as though the singer was trying to convince people that he was happy when, actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. Now, in the context of a funeral, his plaintive voice seemed almost too much to bear, and Billy’s mother wasn’t the only person in tears.
No need to run, and hide
It’s a wonderful, wonderful life—
When the ceremony was over, the priest announced that refreshments were being served in a nearby hotel, and that everyone was welcome. Billy said goodbye to his mother outside the crematorium — she had to be getting home, she said, having always hated driving in the dark — and although he, too, had a long journey ahead of him, he decided to put in an appearance, if only to offer his condolences to Trevor’s wife.
The room they’d booked had green flock wallpaper and windows that gave on to a stagnant pond. There were plates of sandwiches and cups of tea laid out on trestle tables. There was a bar too. Billy bought himself a pint, then turned and looked for Mrs. Lydgate, but before he could single her out, the stocky man with the beard walked up to him.
“Billy Tyler?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re the policeman.”
“And you must be Trevor’s brother.”
“I’m Steve.”
After shaking hands, Steve Lydgate turned his eyes to the window, then took a deep breath and blew the air out loudly.