He had more questions, which we answered. Yes, Mr Brookes had kindly brought them down here from Sally’s house that morning. His mood? Difficult to say, as we had not met him before, but he had seemed a quiet sort of man, pleased to see Charlie but in a muted sort of way. Perhaps a little preoccupied. You might think, Steph said hesitatingly, and she hoped it didn’t sound cheeky, you might think that vicars would be happier than other people, believing in Jesus and all that. The policeman said he supposed vicars had their fair share of problems like everybody else, and in fact several members of Mr Brookes’s parish reported that he had been a changed man in the months since his wife passed away. We paused at this point for long sympathetic murmurs, which for myself were quite sincere. Yes, the police officer said, quite chatty now, Mr Brookes was always known to have been a workaholic, but had lately been driving himself even harder, throwing himself into things. We told him that Mr Brookes had left here at some time between twelve and half-past, after refusing an invitation to lunch. Yes, the policeman said, the man who ran the shop in the village believed he might have seen his car. That must have been quite soon after. The policeman pulled the rubber band back over his notebook and thanked us.
Seeing him to the door, I said, meaning it in a way that I truly don’t understand, that I hoped poor Mr Brookes was all right. The policeman said (and this was unofficial) that if you asked him the poor man had done away with himself, possibly from the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Left the car somewhere in the vicinity, from where it was later nicked, and driven by joyriders, most probably, straight up the M5 and into Wales. A lot of that went on, joyriding over the Severn Bridge, but could you get the Bridge Authorities to co-operate in a clamp down? You could not. And Mr Brookes wouldn’t be the first, it drew suicides like a magnet, that place, and if you asked him they should shut off pedestrian access to the Clifton Bridge, full stop. People were always tipping themselves off it, often at night; he wouldn’t be the first, poor devil- on average it was about ten a year. And it was notorious, the Bristol Channel. The tides could wash a body up and down the estuary for weeks and months before they had finished with it. I do hope you’re wrong, I said. So do I, he said, so do I. They were keeping an open mind. But if that was what had happened, and he wasn’t saying it had, mind, then it would all ‘tie in’.
August
When the telephone rang it was just after one o’clock in the morning. Jean woke at the sound of it, her heart pounding.
‘Hello?’ She could hear a rushing noise, and piped music. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’ It was Michael, fractured and afraid.
‘Oh, my goodness! Michael! Michael, are you all right? Where are you?’
‘I’m in one of those service stations. I want to come home. Is it all right? Is it all right to come home? Is everything all right?’
‘Yes! Yes, come at once! Come home, come straightaway. Where are you?’
‘In a service area, I’m not sure, on the M6, no, the M5, I’m near Birmingham.’
Jean said, ‘Oh! Oh, that’s miles, I thought you meant you’d be- Oh, you’ll be hours still. Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can. Don’t stay up, I just wanted to check it was okay- it is okay, is it? There hasn’t been any trouble with- you know, anything?’
‘No! No, everything’s fine. We just want you home. Oh, hurry, won’t you- I mean, no- don’t, don’t hurry, drive safely. Be very careful. Oh, Michael!’
He arrived at three o’clock. Jean had got dressed again and was lying awake listening for the car, and as soon as she heard it she got up. Steph was downstairs before her and was already leading Michael into the kitchen. He was crying with tiredness, and was visibly thinner. They put him in a chair by the Aga. He seemed to have forgotten how to breathe; he sucked in air and held it in the top of his chest and swallowed, as if fearful of letting it go. When he did breathe out, he sank physically as the air left his body and waited, it seemed for long minutes, before gulping in another chestful. It was painful to watch. Jean made tea and fussed, to conceal the fear she felt for him. Had he been eating? He was so thin, he must be starving! Michael shook his head.
‘No appetite,’ he said. His voice was rusty from lack of use. ‘I had no appetite. I was too scared. But now I’m here I am quite hungry. In fact, I really am hungry. I’m starving.’
Jean smiled. ‘Oh well, I can fix that. What would you like? A bacon sandwich? Scrambled eggs?’
Michael looked at her as if he were struggling to understand what she was saying. But the tea was already beginning to calm him. ‘No,’ he said, ‘not bacon. I really couldn’t eat anything salty.’
‘Something sweet, then? What about something sweet?’
‘Maybe. I- I think first I want a bath, if that’s all right.’
Steph went ahead to run the water. When he came down again he looked even more tired. Jean had made a mound of toast and another pot of tea, at which Michael managed a smile, a little like one of his old ones. He sat down. But when he lifted the lid of the pot next to the butter, peered in and smelled the strawberry jam, he had to get up quickly, unbolt the back door and dash outside to be sick.
You read about such things in the papers, don’t you? Head in suitcase, torso in canal, that kind of thing, you think, how on earth has that come about? And you picture some monster getting up to all sorts, enjoying himself, and phrases like pure evil pop into your head. I know better, now. I know that the blackest deeds are not necessarily done by those with the blackest hearts. I know that in the first place we did not want to kill Mr Brookes; we had to. Second, we most certainly did not want to deny him a proper burial. Even less did we want to plant bits of him all over the country. But it was the only way to deal with the situation we found ourselves in, and he was dead anyway after all, it’s not as if we were doing any worse to him than had already happened.
But I fretted and cried after him. I tried to think, if there is a God, He knows all about it already. If He is there and serving any purpose, doesn’t He know everything anyway? So He’ll take care of poor, blameless Mr Brookes’s soul without the need for the coffin and prayers, surely. It would be a little trite of God, I thought, to insist on the coffin and the prayers in the circumstances. I prayed, yes, literally I prayed as if God might still be listening to me, that He would be above all that and see His way to dispensing with the niceties in Mr Brookes’s case. It worried me. Actually, it began to lose meaning, this connection we cling to, between the person lost and the stuff in the coffin. They’re not the same. Let’s be grateful they’re not the same. Let’s not burden ourselves with talk of souls, but let’s just separate the man from the meat; regret the passing of the man, even if only to shield ourselves from the fact that the meat has been jointed, carved, and distributed all over the place. We wish it could have been otherwise.
And if there is no God, well, what then? Then we’re all in it together, we’re all the same, there’s no escaping it. If there’s no God, then no one of us can be closer to him than the next person, so that dispenses with the religious haves and have-nots, and what a relief that is. When it comes to our deeds, I am not without conscience, but I think we all do what we have to, according to who we are and where we find ourselves. We cannot preserve the delusion that we are not mere creatures of clay, or that some of us are at heart any better or any worse than anyone else. Unless you believe in monsters, which on the whole, I do not. The point is, the whole Mr Brookes episode is as horrifying to us as if we had read it in the paper ourselves and shaken our heads in pity and disbelief. We are not monsters.