As she grew older the fiction was it fiction? grew more elaborate.
Once upon a time there was a family. An ordinary family. The Winters. A mother and father and a son and daughter. They lived in a pleasant house on the outskirts of York in a street with trees on the pavement. In spring the trees were pink with blossom and in autumn the leaves were gold. Robert, the father, was an architect. Mary, the mother, worked part time in the university library. Emma and Christopher went to the school at the end of the street. They wore a uniform with a maroon blazer and a grey tie.
And repeating the story in her head now, Emma saw the garden in the York house. A red brick wall with sunflowers in a row against it, the colours so vivid that they almost hurt her eyes. Christopher was squatting next to a terra cotta pot with lavender growing in it, a butterfly trapped between his cupped hands. She could smell the lavender and there was sound too, the bubbling notes of a flute from an open window, played by the teenage girl who came occasionally to babysit.
I’ll never be so happy again. The thought came unbidden into her head, but she couldn’t allow that to be part of the narrative. It was too painful. So she continued the story as it was always told…
Then Robert discovered Jesus and everything changed. He said he couldn’t be an architect any more. He left his old office with the long windows and went to university to become a probation officer.
“Why not a vicar?” Emma had asked. By now they had started going regularly to church. She’d thought he’d be a good vicar.
“Because I don’t feel the calling,” Robert had said.
He couldn’t be a probation officer in York. He wasn’t called to stay and anyway there wasn’t enough money to keep the big house in the quiet street. Instead they’d moved east to Elvet, where the land was flat and they needed probation officers. Mary had left the university and took a job in a tiny public library. If she’d missed the students she hadn’t said. She’d gone to the church in the village with Robert every Sunday and sang the hymns as loudly as he did. What she’d thought about their new life in the draughty house, the bean fields and the mud, Emma hadn’t been able to tell.
But of course that wasn’t the complete story. Even aged fifteen Emma had known it couldn’t be. Robert wouldn’t just have discovered Jesus in a flash of lightning and a crashing of cymbals. Something had led up to it. Something had made him change. In the books she read, every action had a cause. How unsatisfactory if events came out of the blue, at random, unexplained. There had been some trauma in Robert’s life, some depression. He had never discussed it, so she was free to create her own explanation, her own fiction.
It was Sunday, and on Sunday the whole family went together to family Communion in the church on the other side of the square. After Matthew had been born Emma had been allowed a few weeks off, but a month after the birth Robert had called at the house. It had been mid morning, a week day, and she’d been surprised to see him.
“Shouldn’t you be at work?” she’d said.
“I’m on my way to Spinney Fen. Plenty of time for a coffee and a look at my new grandson.”
Spinney Fen was the women’s prison with the high concrete walls on the cliff next to the gas terminal. He had clients there, offenders he’d been supervising in the community and others about to be released on licence. Emma hated driving past Spinney Fen. Often it seemed shrouded in sea mist, so the concrete walls seemed to go up for ever into the clouds. When they’d first moved to Elvet she’d had nightmares about his going in through the narrow metal gate and never being allowed out.
She had made him coffee and let him hold
Matthew, but all the time she’d wondered what he was really doing in her home. On his way out he’d paused on the doorstep.
“Will we be seeing you at church on Sunday? Don’t worry about the baby. You can always take him out if he cries.”
And of course on the following Sunday she’d been there, because since the death of Abigail Mantel, she hadn’t had the will to stand up to him. To stand up to anyone. And he still had a way of making her feel guilty. Part of her felt that if she hadn’t disobeyed him that Sunday, ten years before, history might have been different. If she hadn’t been there to find the body, Abigail might not have died.
Robert and Mary always arrived at the church, St. Mary Magdalene, before Emma and James. Robert was churchwarden and dressed up in a white robe himself, when it was time, and served wine from the big silver chalice. Emma was not quite sure what he did in the half hour before the service began. He disappeared into the vestry. Perhaps there were practical tasks; perhaps he was praying. Mary always went into the small kitchen in the hall to switch on the urn and set out the cups for coffee afterwards. Then she went back into church and stood by the door to hand out hymn books and service sheets. When Emma had still been living at home she had been expected to help.
James hadn’t been at all religious when Emma first met him. She had brought the matter up on their first date just to check. Even now, she thought, he didn’t actually believe in God, or in fact in any of the things he claimed to believe, when he was reciting the creed. He was the most rational man she had ever met. He laughed at the superstitions of the foreign sailors he met at’ work. He liked going to church for the same reason that he liked living in the Captain’s House. It represented tradition, a solid respectability. He had no family of his own and that too had been a major attraction. Often Emma felt he was closer to Robert and Mary than she was, certainly he was more comfortable in their company.
They were late arriving at church. The story of Jeanie’s suicide had been on the front page of the newspaper, which was always delivered on Sunday. Her staring face had looked up from the doormat at Emma, stopping her in her tracks. Then there had been a last-minute flap because Matthew threw up over his clothes just as they were leaving the house. In the end they scuttled over the square like fractious children late for school. There was a sudden squall and Emma tucked the baby under her coat to protect him from the rain. She realized it made her look pregnant again. A group of reporters who were standing, smoking outside the church, ran for their cars.
The first hymn had already begun and they followed the vicar and the three old ladies who made up the choir up the aisle, forming an undignified tail to an already shambling procession. Mary moved up to let them into their usual places near the front. Emma tripped over the fat patchwork bag that her mother always carried and which had been left on the floor.
Only after she’d knelt for a moment of breath-catching, which passed as prayer, and was on her feet to sing the last verse, did she notice that the church was busier than normal. The pews were usually only this full for a baptism, when, as her father scathingly put it, ‘the pagans’ were in. But today there was no baptism and, besides, most of the faces were familiar. It was not that the church was full of strangers, rather, it seemed everyone had made the effort to turn out. In Elvet bad news always generated excitement. If Jeanie Long’s suicide could be considered bad news.
The arthritic organist was coming to a close with a trembling chord when the door opened again. The wind must have got behind it because it closed with a bang and the congregation turned in disapproval. Dan Greenwood was standing at the back of the church next to a large, formidably ugly woman. Although Emma felt the usual thrill of excitement at his presence, she was disappointed to find Dan there. She had never seen him in church and thought he despised it. He’d made no concession in his dress, however, and was still wearing the jeans and smock from the night before. The woman was in a shapeless Crimplene dress covered with small purple flowers and a fluffy purple cardigan. Despite the cold, on her feet she wore flat leather sandals. There was something portentous about the way they stood there and for a moment Emma expected an announcement, a demand that the church be cleared because of a fire in the vicinity or a bomb threat. Even the vicar hesitated for a moment and looked at them.