You have this. I don’t think I require any more.
He didn’t think he required any more? Of course he didn’t – he was about to shoot his fucking brains out!
The selfish cunt. The selfish, serene-seeming, deceptive cunt. Why that night, at her party? Her birthday party? The selfish birthday-ruining cunt. She’d never be able to celebrate her birthday ever again. He was a grief-ruiner too, leaving his family to deal with the shameful stink of suicide.
Imagine he just stepped away from the coffin now, side-stepped away, allowing his corner to tip, to fall to the ground, spilling Jonathan’s body onto the grass, everyone screaming. Imagine that.
Another two magpies. Joy again.
The first funeral she’d ever attended was her grandmother’s, though she couldn’t remember it. Rather, she remembered the bit before the funeral, the waiting bit – the men sitting in the drawing room with wide-open legs, hung-down heads and glasses of amber-coloured booze clenched between both hands, a grim-grey silence hanging over everything like a thickly cobwebbed chandelier. She’d never seen men sit like that before, not gentlemen at any rate. Now, whenever Bettina thought of funerals, her mind would conjure up an image of grey men sitting with extra-long, wide-open spiderlegs, like an illustration from a macabre children’s book. It was funny, the way things came together in the mind.
They were at the reception supper now, trying to eat. Venetia smoked openly, inviting ambiguous glances. Lucille, in solidarity perhaps, took out her own cigarettes, and the pair of them puffed away in unison, their eyes extra-wrinkled and glassy. One surviving child left each. Snap. Venetia sat straight-backed and stiff-jawed, staring vapidly into the middle-distance for the most part (she’d been given sedatives). Monty pushed away his soup early on in the meal and stood up, apologising in a perplexed tone, before going off to the garden to stand, hands in pockets, under the giant oak – which had once held a swing, a child’s swing, that he’d pushed, higher, higher, higher, a pendulous blur of red hair, higher, higher.
Bettina had always known who his favourite was.
But there you go.
Bart, seated next to her, looked tired and angry. He was refusing alcohol and drank bitter lemon with his meal. Why was he even so cut up? He’d only ever made fun of Jonathan behind his back, pulling his arm through his sleeve to let it hang limply and affecting a jittery, high-chinned air, sometimes to the point of frothing at the mouth and invariably ending with a long, drawn-out fart. Right now, he had his elbows on the table, all decorum vanished, and was pulling his cheeks down with his hands, exhausted. She could see the slimy pink flesh beneath his eyeballs.
‘Do you know what my last words to him were?’ she said, pushing her unfinished food away.
He shook his head.
‘I said, “Blow your nose, would you?” Because he kept sniffing. And that’s… that’s…’ No. She wouldn’t cry. Not in front of everyone.
She felt his hand find hers under the table. ‘We have each other,’ he said, in a quiet voice. ‘You have me and I have you. We need to remember that, because it’s thinking that you’ve got no one that leads to – you know. We have each other.’
She nodded, going in her pocket for her hanky. ‘Now I’m the one sniffing!’
‘Look,’ he said, pointing out of the conservatory window. Monty was still out in the garden, standing under the tree, with this look on his face like he’d tasted something horrible, and Venetia had joined him. He’d taken his dress jacket off and loosened his tie, something he never did in public. The sun started setting behind them – a small blood orange, squeezing its juice all over the clouds. The ends of Monty’s curly hair acquired a fluorescent glow and their shadows grew out elongated and skinny from their feet. Venetia said something and he did a little nod, that horrible taste still pinching his mouth. He allowed her to fix his tie. She pressed a hand to his cheek and held it there and he closed his eyes, and they stood like that for at least two minutes, her velvet-gloved hand pressed to his face, neither of them moving, the sun sinking behind the grasping black hands of distant trees.
‘So when are you intending to start a family?’
Bettina rolled her eyes. ‘Mother, now is not the time.’
‘Now is exactly the time, darling,’ said Venetia. She held a glass of white wine – her third in the space of an hour. A little colour had returned to her cheeks. ‘You are twenty-three for God’s sake.’
‘I meant now is not the time to talk of this.’
Venetia puffed out air and sloshed her wine around in the glass. ‘I repeat – now is exactly the time. Our family is diminishing, dear. Don’t you want children?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well? Isn’t Bart up to the task?’
‘Mother!’
‘Don’t “Mother” me. It’s at times like these that we must learn to open our mouths and say what we mean. Silence is lethal. I’ve learned that much.’ She gripped Bettina’s wrist. ‘You are my last remaining child, darling. I want grandchildren.’ She stared glassy-eyed at Bettina, blinking once like the shutter of a camera. ‘Does that make me selfish? Well, of course it does. And I don’t care.’ Her chin twisted and wrinkled into a monkey-nut shell and her hand fluttered at her face. She glugged from her glass and lit a fresh cigarette. ‘Does he pull out, darling? Is that it? Like the Catholics? Before he—’
‘No!’
‘Then maybe you’re not doing it enough.’
‘I am!’ Tuna and her sisters glanced over nosily.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ said Bettina, in a low, measured voice, ‘I haven’t yet wanted to catch. I’ve not felt ready.’
‘You modern girls. Too much drinking, too much dancing.’ She waved a hand. ‘Oh, I’m happy that you’re having fun, darling. I wish I’d had the chance to have fun at your age. But you don’t want to wait too long. Best have them young, when you’ve more bang in your cannon.’
‘Do you think Jonathan would’ve had children? If he’d never…’
‘Oh, I’m certain he would have. Eventually. He had prospects, you know.’
‘Did he? He never told me that. He carried on like he was a social pariah. An undesirable.’
Venetia shook her head. ‘He wasn’t right in the head, darling. His lens was smudged. Bunty’s daughter was after him, you know.’
‘Catherine Kingsley? Really?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘But she’s absolutely gorgeous! She’s – all the men say so at any rate.’
‘Well, why not?’ said Venetia. ‘Jonathan was a handsome young man.’ She frowned. ‘This business of speaking of him in the past tense, it feels so unnatural! Was. Was. Bloody hell.’ She covered her eyes with one hand and her shoulders started shuddering. The wine glass dropped from her fingers, soaking the carpet but not breaking. Bettina wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Lucille came over and took the seat on her other side, draping her arm around the opposite shoulder so that hers and Bettina’s crossed over like the carved links of a Celtic spoon.
She found Bart sitting alone in the library. It was lit by electric lamps under green glass shades, although her father, stubborn as always, still used his candles when reading at his desk. The walnut floor was freshly waxed. Bettina abhorred the smell of floor wax – it reminded her of church. Bart was sitting with a slumped back but very straight, pressed-together legs, his bitter lemon resting on his knee. What was it about grief that made men want to sit differently?