“And the coroner believed this? That someone with no history whatsoever of taking drugs, had voluntarily taken a powerful hallucinogenic? He didn’t even question that?”
“No. In fact he told me that she…” DS Finborough broke off, thinking better of it.
“Told you what? What exactly did he say about my sister?”
DS Finborough was silent.
“Don’t you think I have a right to know?”
“Yes, you do. He said that Tess was a student, an art student, living in London and that he’d have been more surprised if she’d been…”
He trailed off and I filled the word in for him, “Clean?”
“Something to that effect, yes.”
So you were unclean, with all the dirty baggage the word still carries with it into the twenty-first century. I got the phone bill out of its envelope.
“You were wrong about Tess’s not telling me when her baby died. She tried to—over and over and over again, but she couldn’t. Even if you see these phone calls as ‘cries for help,’ they were cries to me. Because we were close. I did know her. And she wouldn’t have taken drugs. And she wouldn’t have killed herself.”
He was silent.
“She turned to me and I let her down. But she did turn to me.”
“Yes, she did.”
I thought I saw a flicker of emotion on his face that wasn’t simply compassion.
12
An hour and a half after DS Finborough had left, Todd dropped Mum off at the flat. The heating seemed to have given up completely and she didn’t take her coat off.
Her breath was visible in the freezing sitting room. “Right, then, let’s make a start on her things. I’ve brought Bubble Wrap and packing materials.” Maybe she hoped her brisk sense of purpose would fool us into thinking we could sort out the chaos your death had left in its wake. Though to be fair, death does leave a daunting array of practical tasks: all those possessions that you were forced to leave behind had to be sorted and packed and redistributed in the living world. It made me think of an empty airport and one luggage carousel turning, with your clothes and paintings and books and contact lenses and Granny’s clock, round and round, with only Mum and me to claim them.
Mum started cutting lengths of Bubble Wrap, her voice accusatory. “Todd said you’d asked DS Finborough to see you again?”
“Yes.” I hesitated before going on. “There were some drugs found in her body.”
“Todd told me that already. We all knew she wasn’t herself, Beatrice. And heaven knows, she had enough she wanted to escape from.”
Not giving me the opportunity to argue with her, she went into the sitting room, to “make some headway before lunch.”
I got out the nudes Emilio had painted of you and hurriedly wrapped them. Partly because I didn’t want Mum to see them, but also because I didn’t want to look at them. Yes, I am a prude, but that wasn’t the reason. I just couldn’t bear to see the living color of your painted body when your face in the morgue was so palely vivid. As I wrapped them, I thought that Emilio had the most obvious motive for murdering you. Because of you, he could have lost his career and his wife. Yes, she already knew about your affair, but he didn’t know that and might have predicted a different response. But your pregnancy would have given him away so I couldn’t understand why—if he killed you to protect his marriage and career—he would have waited until after your baby was born.
I’d finished covering the nudes and begun wrapping one of your own paintings in Bubble Wrap, not looking at the picture and its singing colors, but remembering your four-year-old glee as you squeezed a bubble of Bubble Wrap between tiny thumb and finger: POP!
Mum came in and looked at the stacks of your canvases. “What on earth did she think she was going to do with all of these?”
“I’m not sure, but the art college wants to exhibit them at their show. It’s in three weeks and they want Tess to have a special display.”
They’d phoned me a couple of days earlier and I’d readily agreed.
“They’re not going to pay for them though, are they?” asked Mum. “I mean, what did she think the point of all of this was, exactly?”
“She wanted to be a painter.”
“You mean like a decorator?” asked Mum, astonished.
“No, it’s the word they use for artist now.”
“It’s the PC thing to call it,” you said, teasing me for my outdated vocabulary. “Pop stars are artists, artists are painters, and painters are decorators.”
“Painting pictures all day is what children do at playgroup,” Mum continued. “I didn’t mind her doing it as a subject at school. I thought it was nice for her to have a break from real subjects. But to call it further education is ridiculous.”
“She was just pursuing her talent.”
Yes, I know. It was a little weak.
“It was infantile,” snapped Mum. “A waste of all her academic achievements.”
She was so angry with you for dying.
I hadn’t told Mum about my arrangements for Xavier to be buried with you, fearful of the confrontation, but I couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Mum, I really think that she’d want Xavier—”
Mum interrupted. “Xavier?”
“Her baby, she would want—”
“She used Leo’s name?”
Her voice was horrified. I’m sorry.
She went back into the sitting room and started shoving clothes into a black bin liner.
“Tess wouldn’t want it all just thrown away, Mum; she recycled everything.”
“These aren’t fit for anyone.”
“She mentioned a textile recycling place once; I’ll see—” But Mum had turned away and was pulling out the drawer at the bottom of the wardrobe. She took a tiny cashmere cardigan out of its tissue paper. She turned to me, her voice soft. “It’s beautiful.”
I remembered my astonishment too when I first arrived at finding such exquisite baby things among the poverty of the rest of your flat.
“Who gave them to her?” Mum asked.
“I don’t know. Amias just said she had a spree.”
“But with what? Did the father give her money?”
I braced myself; she had a right to this information. “He’s married.”
“I know.”
Mum must have seen my confusion; the softness in her voice had gone. “You asked me if I wanted to ‘put an A on her coffin for good measure.’ Tess wasn’t married so the scarlet letter, the badge of adultery, could only mean that the father was.” Her voice tensed further as she noted my surprise. “You didn’t think I understood the reference, did you?”
“I’m sorry. And it was a cruel thing to say.”
“You girls thought that once you got to A levels you’d left me behind. That all I ever thought about was the menu for a dull supper party three weeks away.”
“I’ve just never seen you read, that’s all.”
She was still holding Xavier’s tiny cardigan, her fingers stroking it as she spoke. “I used to. I’d stay up with my bedside light on while your father wanted to go to sleep. It irritated him but I couldn’t stop. It was like a compulsion. Then Leo was ill. I didn’t have the time anymore. Anyway, I’d realized that books were full of trivia and tripe. Who cares about someone else’s love affair, what a sunrise looks like for page after page? Who cares?”
She put down the tiny cardigan and resumed shoving your clothes into a bin liner. She hadn’t taken off the wire hangers, and the hooks tore the flimsy black plastic. As I watched her clumsily anguished movements I thought of the kiln at school and our trayload of soft clay pots being put inside. They would bake harder and harder until the ones that were imperfectly thrown would break into pieces. Your death had thrown Mum way off center and I knew, as I watched her tie the bin liner into a knot, that when she finally faced your death, grief was a kiln that would shatter her.