‘Peggy,’ Claud called after her retreating back, ‘remember we’re eating in an hour or so and there’ll be lots of wine.’
‘Claud!’ I hissed in rebuke but Peggy could take care of herself. I heard a snort that may have been a response as she thumped up the stairs. Claud turned back to me and said, very kindly, ‘Are you all right, Jane? Is there anything I can do for you?’
Erica gusted into the kitchen, all perfume and purple nails and copper curls.
‘Claud, there you are. Theo wants you to help him move some beds around upstairs. Jane, you angel, what can I do to help?’
She had already changed for dinner, her long slit skirt trailed the ground, her aubergine silk shirt swelled over her large breasts (well, bigger than mine), bangles clanked at her wrists and long ear-rings hung from emphatic lobes. She giggled and I remembered how much, in spite of everything, I liked Paul’s young wife, who flowered so exotically beside poor Peggy’s weary, ostentatious shabbiness.
‘I’ve just seen Peggy’s little girls sneaking into the outhouse. Oh, to be fifteen and smoking in a shed again. Christ, what a weird foul day. Poor Natalie. I mean I assume it is Natalie, and not some archaeological relic. I suppose it must be, and you’re all quite right to feel dreadful. My views about children dying have changed completely since Rosie, you know. Not that I was ever in favour of it, of course. I’d kill myself, I think. Frances was saying that she and Theo think it’s probably a relief for Martha, but I wonder if that’s true.’
She dipped her taloned fingers into a bowl of olives and popped a few absentmindedly into her avid red mouth.
Claud started methodically pulling corks from bottles, till eight of them stood in an open-mouthed row. I grated Parmesan cheese into the steaming pan of mushroom risotto and added a knob of soft unsalted butter, not from the fridge but from the larder, as butter ought to be. I’d always wanted a larder. Theo and his wife, Frances, walked past the window, tall and elegant. She was speaking animatedly, her eyes hard, but I couldn’t make out the words and I couldn’t see Theo’s face. Then my brother-in-law turned his head and looked straight into my eyes. The years reeled back. He gave an embarrassed half-smile but Frances said something else. He turned his face back towards her and they walked on.
When I’m at the Stead I stay in the room I’ve had since I was a child. More like sisters than best friends, Natalie and I used to fight over who would have the bed nearest the window, and she’d usually win. It was her house, her bedroom, her bed. After she disappeared, I couldn’t sleep where she had always slept. I would lie at the other side of the room, under the sloping roof, and hear the grandfather clock down the hall, and occasionally the hoot of the owls which nested in the woods. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and for a few seconds, until I had remembered all over again, I would see her shape under the blankets. Martha hadn’t got rid of any of her things; she’d always been waiting for her to return. So every year, when we came here for our holidays, I’d have to put my clothes among Natalie’s, mummified in polythene, which gradually became less and less familiar to me, until I realised they were the clothes of a young girl from whom I’d grown away without realising, into adulthood. One day they were gone.
Now I pulled back the curtains and looked out of the window at the garden, which was disappearing into night. Evening mist rose like smoke from the wet grass. The sky was nearly dark, but the horizon was pink. It’ll be a nice day tomorrow, I thought to myself, as I stared out. Heaps of leaves lay in strange shapes round the lawn, waiting to be burnt. Away to the right I could see another, lower shape, the police canopy. Is there a company somewhere that manufactures tents for erecting over places where dead bodies have been found? There must be. It was very quiet. Paul’s girls, down at the edge of the woods, sat in a conspiratorial triangle, now little more than a three-peaked shadow in the gloom. Voices floated up from downstairs, though I couldn’t catch what they said. A pipe gurgled, there was a splashing in a drain outside, footsteps passed by my door and I imagined Jerome and beautiful Hana, pink as a prawn, scuttling down the corridor wrapped in towels. I thought I heard a quiet sob.
I opened my suitcase and lifted out a Victorian jacket, high at the neck and tight at the wrists, sexy-severe. Wearing it made me feel a bit more in control. I dabbed perfume behind my ears, and put on my ear-rings. I thought of Natalie that last summer, trying on purple lipstick, staring at herself steadily in the mirror, like a cat, with her blue eyes like my blue eyes. I thought of the pathetic bits of bone I’d seen in the clay this morning. What was I doing in this house, with Claud whom I was divorcing, and his parents whom I was hurting, and his brother Theo, with whom I was exchanging knowing glances through the kitchen window, like a teenager?
‘Jane, Hana, Martha and Alan.’ It was Claud calling up the stairs. ‘Come on everyone. I’m about to open the champagne.’
Three
Martha and Alan made their entrance like important guests. Alan came in on a crest of conversation, broad hands gesturing, belly hanging generously over his belt, beard untrimmed and grey hair touching his rather worn collar. But the tie was fashionably garish and his tweed jacket was unexceptionable. Always the bohemian who didn’t care about clothes, but a rich bohemian. He hugged Frances, who happened to be standing near the door, and clapped Jerome heartily on the back. Jerome, his hair cut short in a Keanu Reeves crop, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, looked depressed and ill at ease. He was speaking only to Hana. She was also dressed entirely in black which emphasised her slavic features. Jerome glared at Alan who didn’t notice.
‘Here we all are then,’ Alan cried, ‘I’m dying for a drink.’
Beside him Martha looked pale, thinner than I’d remembered, her skin softening into old age. I could tell that she’d been crying steadily; she had that bright, fragile look about her. Jonah went and kissed her on the cheek: he was a beautiful man, I thought, dark-haired and blue-eyed. Why had I never found him or Fred attractive, the way I had Theo through that long hot summer? The summer. Perhaps each of them seemed one half of a man; I still thought of them as one word, Jonah-Fred, the twins. And I still found their identical appearances a bit comic, or absurd. Their hair was receding a bit now, their beauty had begun to crack. They wouldn’t age well, I thought. But even their separate wives, families, jobs, homes hadn’t been able to carve out their separate personalities. I wondered if they still played jokes on people.
Claud started easing off the first champagne cork, and everyone stood with their glasses held forward expectantly. There was a murmuring in my ear. Peggy was standing beside me.
‘I’m not sure that champagne is quite the thing in the circumstances,’ she said.
I gave a shrug in response that could have meant anything. There was a harsh clinking. We all looked around. Alan was rapping his cigarette lighter against his champagne glass. Once he had all of our attention, he stepped into the middle of the room. There was a long pause and he looked reflective. If I had not known Alan, I might have been alarmed or embarrassed by this excessive silence. But I was reminded of a television programme I had seen about another megalomanic showman, Adolf Hitler, who had always begun his own great speeches with these lengthy, diffident pauses in order to secure the complete attention of his audience. When Alan spoke, his voice was at first so quiet that we all had to lean forward to hear what he said.