Again he did not speak, just looked at her with panic in his eyes.
She led him to a chair which he half-fell into. Maude stepped back from him and stood, ramrod straight, looking down at him.
‘Just remember you are a Davey,’ she told him. A truly weird thing to say at such a time, anyone who did not know the family might think, but from her it seemed perfectly natural, and her voice was gentler than her words.
Robin reached up and grasped her hand tightly. In common with Julia in the hospital the day it happened, he didn’t sound a bit like himself when he eventually began to talk.
‘If only James had lived instead of me,’ he whispered, forcing the words out.
His mother stroked his hair as if he were a child. ‘You mustn’t say that, darling boy,’ she said. ‘You really mustn’t.’
‘It’s true, it’s my fault, all those deaths, mother, they’re all my fault,’ he said. ‘I’m to blame.’
‘No, no, Robin,’ she admonished him, everything about her still wonderfully calm and controlled, her voice almost hypnotic. ‘No-one’s to blame. There hadn’t been that number of people on the island since your first wedding, and that was over twenty years ago. Perhaps it was just too many. We just don’t know, do we? But nobody could ever have predicted such a thing, Robin, luv. It’s nobody’s fault.’
I didn’t know how she could be so logical and so articulate right then. Robin remained crumpled. Certainly he didn’t look convinced. I could understand that well enough. If you throw a wedding party for 300-odd people and around half of them end up dead or injured you are bound to feel responsible, aren’t you? I jolly well knew that, I did.
My nephew Luke, my godson, was also not found alive. It took almost a week to recover all the bodies, and poor little Luke was one of the last to be discovered. I had loved him dearly and I was devastated. Although once again we had all known, I suppose, that he really must be dead, that there could be no hope, the dreadful limbo period had added to the nightmare. And when we finally got the bad news, I found myself wishing that my mother — who had been one of the few to survive from inside the church, escaping only with a broken wrist — had died instead of Luke. Then, of course, I was overwhelmed with guilt for allowing myself to think such a thing.
In all forty-four people died that terrible day and ninety-four were injured. Also among the dead were two of the band, The Dave Morgan Five, and thirteen residents of Abri. None of my police colleagues were killed although two were among the injured.
Luke’s death was the worst of all for me — the horror of it heightened by the long wait before his body was recovered. Naturally Clem took it very badly. Nothing else could have been expected. I wanted to visit her, in fact I had wanted to be with her all week, but my brother-in-law had counselled against it. Clem would not even come to the phone to speak to me.
‘Look Rose, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but she seems to blame you for what has happened to Luke,’ Brian told me haltingly over the telephone.
‘It makes sense to me...’ I said. ‘You see, I blame myself too.’
My mother had gone to stay with Clem and Brian, which I thought was all they probably needed, but even she wouldn’t speak to me. Normally I couldn’t have cared less about my mother’s whims and moods, but I needed all the comfort I could get right then. And there wasn’t a lot of it about.
I called Peter Mellor to ask him if he thought it had been Luke whom he had tried to save. He had never even met my nephew, and didn’t have a clue one way or the other. I don’t know why I even bothered to ask, but I think maybe it was a question of trying to keep Luke alive inside my head. And somehow I would always believe that it was Luke whom Peter Mellor reached out for.
I only went to two of the funerals. Luke’s and James’ — that was all I could cope with — and even that in spite of receiving a curt note from my sister telling me she did not want me there when she buried Luke. But I could not stay away. I arrived as late as I could and sat at the back of the church. Julia — who had gone straight back to work after the disaster, maybe trying to deny that it had all really happened — drove down from London to be with me, but Robin was not there. He only went to one funeral, his brother’s.
Little Luke was laid to rest on a wet and windy April day amid scenes which will haunt me for the rest of my life. It seemed like thousands of people lined the streets of Weston-super-Mare as the funeral cortege drove by. My brother-in-law carried Luke’s tiny white coffin in his arms and that image will remain with me always.
Julia kept her left hand permanently under my right elbow and somehow we got through it. When we came out of the church I wanted to go to the graveside, but saw Clem looking at me with undisguised hatred through tears which seemed to be born as much of rage as of grief.
I didn’t know what to do but Julia steered me firmly away. We walked slowly through the churchyard, I think I was still reluctant to leave, and suddenly I was surprised to find my brother-in-law Brian by our side, having broken away briefly from the main funeral party.
‘If it’s any consolation, Rose, she blames me too,’ he said.
I could only stare at him. I didn’t understand.
‘I was there, you see. I was with our son. I survived, and he didn’t. I doubt she will ever forgive me.’
His pain was written in the lines of anguish on his face that had not been there three weeks earlier. I touched his hand. He half-smiled. My legs felt shaky. I do not think I would have been able to carry on walking without Julia’s firm grip under my elbow. So often I was staggered by her strength, and couldn’t quite comprehend where she got it from. She too had been through a terrible ordeal, and the way she coped not only with her own nightmares but also with mine, was little short of magnificent.
She also managed to keep the bulk of press attention away from me yet I knew she must be walking a tightrope in her own office — showbusiness editor or not. After all, she had been at the wedding, she was the bride’s best mate, she would be expected to get the big story. Whatever the big story was. I felt for her. I knew exactly what it was like to be in that kind of situation. She must have been under terrific strain but she did not show it. She was such a good friend and support.
Robin was far too shocked to be supportive of me. I had to support him. That I could understand, but I was a little surprised — maybe because I had grown to regard him as some kind of superman.
Maude continued to be the most magnificent of all. She never spoke of her own grief, never seemed to consider her own pain. Her concern was entirely for Robin and for me and the families of all the other victims. She seemed to regard everyone else as being worse off than her.
I was coming to love Maude more with every passing day, and it was no surprise that she struck up an instant bond with Julia, who stayed with us all at Northgate for several days while the funerals were going on. Often it seemed that only Maude and Julia were holding the rest of us together.
Even before the Abri Island dead were buried, speculation about what had caused the disaster was rife. It seemed quite extraordinary that the entire structure of the island had caved in the way it did. It had been, as Eddie Brown had at once described it, like an earthquake. But earthquakes of that magnitude were not known in the British Isles, not in modern times, anyway — although I couldn’t help remembering those giant chasms which the locals all believed to have been caused by a quake some time around the seventeenth century.