Mary looked terrible, that was the first thing everyone noticed. As she followed Josh’s coffin and its bearers up the lane towards the new graveyard, she looked like someone else. She’d lost weight and dark circles had sunk her eyes into her skull. She was crying, not discreetly, but openly and with sobs that shook her entire body.
Josh’s mother, a tiny Korean woman in a dark coat and gloves despite the heat, had one arm around Mary, trying to console her. Kate O’Mally trailed a couple of paces behind her sobbing daughter, looking out of place in a blue skirt and jacket. When she caught Kit watching her daughter, Kate’s eyes filled with something very dark indeed.
Mrs. Treece, however, simply nodded to Kit, and handed Mary to her mother, as if entrusting the woman with something infinitely fragile, while the pall bearers fiddled with canvas straps and the priest shuffled through an open prayer book, finding his place.
“You’re Christopher Newton,” she said.
Kit nodded.
“I remember. You were in Josh’s band with Mary…” Which was one way of putting it. “So you know Mary well?”
Another nod.
“She’s going to need her friends,” said Mrs. Treece. “It’s strange,” she added. “All the things that matter until something like this happens. Josh wanted to stay here with Mary, you know. His father insisted he go with us to Paris. Now all David can remember is the argument.”
David had to be the Colonel.
“Such a waste,” Mrs. Treece said, before returning to the graveside. As Kit watched, the Colonel tried to wrap an arm around his wife’s shoulder. She shook him off without even noticing what she’d done.
It had taken Josh a week after his return from Paris to track Kit down and thirty seconds and a handful of words to make him go away, there being nothing like the truth for fucking best friends over.
Mary turned up the day after the funeral. Hammering on the door of the cottage in Wintersprint until Kit’s father let her in. When Kit got down to the kitchen he found Mary stood with her back to the sink, clutching a barely touched cup of Brooke Bond and kicking her heel against the cupboard.
Kit’s father walked out as Kit came in.
“We need to talk…”
“Sure,” said Kit, nodding towards the stairs.
“No,” said Mary. “Not here.”
“Where then?” he asked.
“The church,” she said. “But I want to put flowers on Josh’s grave first.” There was no vase for the wild flowers Mary had picked along the way, so she just put them at the top of the mound, below the mock-marble headstone. Then she turned and looked round the silent graveyard, nodding slowly to herself.
“What?” asked Kit.
“Just remembering.”
He followed her down to the church in silence.
“It looks so empty,” she said, her voice echoing from bare walls and a hammer beam ceiling. Someone had tidied away yesterday’s kneelers and removed the wreaths and fresh flowers, although the table at the back where the book of condolences rested was still there.
Mary’s offering had been simple.
A single word.
Sorry.
“You want some time to yourself?”
Mary shook her head, almost crossly. “I told you,” she said. “We need to talk. Somewhere private.”
The door to the tower was open and a spiral of stone steps led to the belfry, with a simple wooden ladder leading to a flat roof above. Kit went first, both up the spiral of steps and the ladder. Either the medieval tower was higher than he’d imagined or the hills were lower, because Middle Morton looked smaller than expected.
Slumping down, he put his back to a stone parapet and watched Mary try to work out where to sit. Okay, he thought, if she sits next to me, that means…if she stays standing… She sat exactly opposite, and Kit tried to tell himself that meant nothing at all.
“You want to talk about Josh?”
“No,” said Mary. “I want to talk about us.” She shifted restlessly and for a moment Kit thought she was about to stand up again, but all she did was twist her head and run one hand across her face. “We may have a problem.”
“Josh’s death?”
Mary sighed. “Just listen,” she said. “I’m late…”
Late for what? Kit almost asked. And then he realised.
“Shit…”
“Yeah,” she said. “Shit and fuck and anything else you want to say. But it’s still true.”
“But we used condoms,” said Kit, sounding like someone else. “You can’t be pregnant.”
“Not that first time,” said Mary. “When my parents were away. You remember?” She said this as if daring him to contradict her.
“But I…” He could recall the stickiness on his fingers and her stomach, where he’d withdrawn before it was too late. “I pulled out, remember?”
“Listen,” said Mary, “I’m late. End of story.”
“How late?”
“Late enough…”
“Oh fuck,” said Kit. “Are you sure it’s me?”
Mary stared at him. She raised her head, opened her eyes against the sunlight reflecting from the lead roof on which they both sat, and glared at Kit, harder than he’d have thought it possible for anyone to glare.
“I’m just asking,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s you.”
“You and Josh…?”
“Me and Josh nothing,” said Mary, crossly. “Forget Josh. We need to talk about what we’re going to do.”
“Who have you told?”
“Christ,” said Mary. “I’ve told no one. Who do you think I’ve told?”
Kit took a deep breath. “I’ve got £450 in my savings.” He thought about it. “That should be enough.”
“For what?”
“You know,” said Kit.
“No,” Mary said. “I don’t know. Tell me. Enough for what?”
“To sort things out.”
Mary repeated his words back to herself. She knew exactly what he meant, Kit was sure of that. All the same, she kept repeating his words, until they sounded like an echo of an echo, soiling the air around them.
“I’ve got to go,” Mary said, climbing to her feet.
“No, wait…” Kit caught her arm, harder than he intended. All the same, the speed with which she turned to wrench herself free shocked both of them.
“Stay here,” she said, from the top of the ladder. “Give me five minutes. I mean, we wouldn’t want to start rumours.”
Her text message arrived next morning. She thanked him for coming to put flowers on Josh’s grave, apologised if she’d been bad company, and told him not to worry about the other thing. It had been a false alarm. He should have known from its politeness that she lied.
“Look,” said Kit. He wanted to say he was sorry, wanted to say half a dozen things but the words stuck in his throat, so he shuffled his heels on the path and bowed his head to the dead flowers at his feet.
A yew tree had been planted near the gate, a sop to tradition for those still angry that the original site next to St. Peter’s was no longer used for burials. In fifty years the tree would look as if it belonged. For now it looked what it was, a stripling planted ten years earlier to counter complaints from everyone in the village who thought such things mattered.
None of the graves on the hillside dated much before the mid-1980s. Even then, Josh’s parents had to fight to get a plot near the gate and have a plaque commemorating his brief life added to the wall of the Treece family chapel inside the church.
It was late, the wind warm and smelling of summer. Kit had the graveyard to himself, an arbitrary patch of hillside consecrated above St. Peter’s. Wreaths from three days earlier hid recently turned earth and a temporary headstone, rag-rolled with grey paint on cheap wood had been painted over with Joshua’s full name and brief dates. A tiny bunch of wild flowers rotted just below the headstone.