Isabel reached into her purse and pull a handful of coins out of its dusty depths. “Here,” she said, as if to say, It’s all you’re worth, you stupid, fouled-up slut. “If you want to go, go—to hell if you want to—but if this goes wrong, just don’t try to blame me. And take your medication.” Long before she arrived at the last sentence she had reached across Anna to open the passenger door, so that she could mark her final full stop with one of those dismissive pushes that Anna remembered all too well.
Anna submitted to the push and got out of the car, even though she was only vaguely aware of where she was. She waited until Isabel had driven off before she asked for directions to Clapham Common. It was a long way, but not too far to walk even for someone in her debilitated condition. The value of the coins was just adequate to buy a Travelcard.
She wondered if things might have been different if she’d had a real sister, but she decided that they probably wouldn’t have been.
It wasn’t difficult to find the church from Pinner tube station. It was larger than she had expected. She was glad that the funeral announcement in the Guardian had given both time and place; so many didn’t, because the people who placed them were afraid of being burgled while they were at the ceremony. She waited until everyone else was inside before she sidled in, but she didn’t escape notice. Several people turned around, and whispers were exchanged.
When the service was over and the pallbearers carried the coffin out Anna moved behind a pillar, but the people who filed out behind the dead man knew perfectly well that she was there. She didn’t go to the graveside; she stayed in the shadow of an old horse chestnut tree, watching from thirty yards away. She couldn’t hear what the vicar was saying, but that didn’t matter. She could have improvised her own service if she’d wanted to, complete with appropriate psalms. Every bedside locker on the ward had a Bible in the top drawer, and boredom had made her dip into hers more frequently than she liked to think. She knew that according to The Book of Ecclesiastes it was better to go to the House of Mourning than the House of Feasting, but she wasn’t sure that Ecclesiastes had been in a position to make a scrupulous comparison, and he hadn’t mentioned the House of the Rising Sun at all, although it would have made a better play on words if he had. Ecclesiastes had also offered the judgment that a good name was better than precious ointment, but Alan certainly wouldn’t have agreed with him on that point.
Anna had no difficulty picking out Alan’s wife, although she’d never seen a photograph. She was a good-looking woman, in a middle-class Home Counties sort of way. Her name was Christine, but Alan had usually referred to her as Kitty. Anna was mildly surprised that Kitty wasn’t wearing a veil. Weren’t widows supposed to wear veils, to hide their tears? Not that the woman was weeping; grim forbearance seemed to be more her style. Anna judged her—on the basis of an admittedly superficial inspection—to be a kind of upmarket Isabel, who probably did believe, with all her heart, that a good name was infinitely to be preferred to any kind of balm that cunning cosmetic engineers could devise.
In the grip of a sudden surge of anguish, Anna wished that Isabel hadn’t been so tight-fisted. If Isabel had given her a hundred pounds, or even fifty, she’d have been able to bring a wreath to add to the memorials heaped about the grave. So far as she could judge at this distance most of the mourners had gone for natural blooms, but she would have selected the most exotic products of genetic engineering she could afford, to symbolize herself and the crucial contribution she had made to Alan’s life—and, presumably, his death.
Anna had no doubt that the accident hadn’t been entirely accidental; even if it hadn’t been a straightforward deceptive suicide, it must have been a case of gross and calculated negligence.
When the ceremony was over and done with, the crowd around the grave broke up, its members drifting away in all directions as though the emotion of the occasion had temporarily suppressed their sense of purpose. When the widow turned toward her, and shook off someone’s restraining hand, Anna knew that the confrontation she had half feared and half craved was about to take place. She wasn’t in the least tempted to turn and run, and she knew before the woman paused to look her up and down that this was what she had come for, and that all the sentimental rubbish about wanting to say good-bye was just an excuse.
“I know who you are,” the widow said, in a cut glass voice which suggested that she took no pride in her perspicacity.
“I know who you are, too,” Anna replied. The two of them were being watched, and Anna was conscious of the fact that the dissipating crowd had been reunited by a common urge to observe, even though no evident ripple of communication had passed through it.
“I thought you were in hospital, out of your mind.” The widow’s voice was carefully neutral, but had an edge to it which suggested that it might break out of confinement at any moment.
“I am,” Anna told her. “But the doctors are beginning to figure things out, and they can keep me stable, most of the time. They’re learning a lot about brain chemistry thanks to people like me.” She didn’t add and people like Alan.
“So you’ll soon be back on the streets, will you?” the widow enquired, cuttingly.
“I haven’t worked the streets since I was sixteen,” Anna said, equably. “I was in a Licensed House when Alan met me. I can’t go back there, of course—there’s no way they’d let me have my license back after what happened, even if they could normalize my body chemistry. I suppose I might go back to the street, when I’m released. There are men who like spoiled girls, believe it or not.”
“You ought to be quarantined,” the widow said, her voice easing into a spiteful hiss. “You and all your rancid kind ought to be locked up forever.”
“Maybe so,” Anna admitted. “But it was the good trips that got Alan hooked, and it was the withdrawal symptoms that hurt him, not the mutant proteins.”
A man had joined the widow now: the fascinated crowd’s appointed mediator. He put a protective arm around the widow’s shoulder. He was too old to be one of her sons and too dignified to be a suitor ambitious to step into the dead man’s shoes; perhaps he was her brother—or even Alan’s brother.
“Go back to the car now, Kitty,” the man said. “Let me take care of this.”
Kitty seemed to be glad of the opportunity to retreat. Whatever she’d hoped to get out of the confrontation, she hadn’t found it. She turned away and went back to the black-clad flock which was waiting to gather her in.
Anna expected a more combative approach from the man, whoever he might be, but all he said was, “If you’re who I think you are, you shouldn’t have come here. It’s not fair to the family.”
Another Isabel, Anna thought. You’d think someone like him would know better. By “someone like him” she meant doctor, lawyer, or banker. Something professional in the nonironic sense of the word. Alan had been a stockbroker, careful overseer of a thousand personal equity plans. She’d often wondered if any of his clients had shares in the company which owned the House. Like everything else in today’s complicated world, it had been part of some diverse conglomerate; the parent organization’s share price was quoted every day in the Guardian’s financial pages, under the heading “Leisure and Entertainment.”