Dr. Moyse, who’d been lurking about since he’d arrived and making himself scarce at what he considered the necessary moments, latched on to me again with his unnecessary comforting as I went upstairs. I suspected he and Clive had agreed not to leave me alone in case I collapsed beneath the weight of my grief, which they hadn’t realized was eluding me. At times I could hear Vivi’s voice from the study, puncturing the silent aftermath, sometimes strained and sometimes angry, and then her bursting into tears. I presumed Clive was informing her of his rushed retirement plans and her reaction, as expected, was a little more explosive than mine.
I didn’t get to see Vivi at all during her visit, which lasted well into the night and early morning in discussions with Clive. The last thing I overheard before I finally fell asleep was an argument, not between Vivi and Clive, but between her and Dr. Moyse. They were in the hall and Moyse, who had been discharged from his duties, was at the front door, about to leave. I think it must have been lack of sensitivity on his part, but I heard him say something like, “Even your mother would have understood, Vivien.” At that, she hit the roof. I’ve never heard her yell so loudly and I was scared.
“Don’t you presume to come in here and tell me what my mother would have wanted. She damn well wouldn’t!” she screamed.
By the time I got up the next morning, Vivi had gone. And that, I can tell you now, was the last time she ever set foot in this house until yesterday.
The following morning, a Saturday, Clive carried out his itinerary to the letter and by nightfall, just a day after Maud’s accident, Vivi and I had acquired our parents’ entire estate, along with its outstanding debt.
I spent the next three days from dawn to dusk scrubbing the house, closing and locking the rooms that, on my own now, I wouldn’t need. I’d left lots of messages for Vivi. I wanted to see her desperately but Arthur had said she was too shaken to come. Finally, on Tuesday, she phoned and said she’d gone to see Clive at the Anchorage but she still wasn’t coming to the house.
On Wednesday morning I got in the car and drove through the high-hedged lanes, up Bulburrow hill and down again to Crewkerne. I parked outside Gateway and walked the short distance to the cobbled square, where the town hall stood in the center with a huge bronze statue of the man who had founded the town’s first paper factory. According to the inscription, Titus Sorrell turned round Crewkerne’s ailing economy in the mid-nineteenth century. I’d arranged to meet Clive there, on the bench outside The George. When I sat down an elderly man joined me, planting himself at the opposite end. I looked at the clock tower. Eleven-thirty exactly. Titus surveyed his empire smugly while pigeons fought to perch on his shoulders, desecrating him front and back.
At 11:33 Clive arrived. He sat down next to me and we both looked ahead at Titus and his pigeons for a while. Finally he said, “I’ve been thinking that if you could find a way to tag other species radioactively you could make some great progress with migratory patterns. There’s been so little research in that area, Ginny. The society might like that.”
I didn’t reply. At that moment I didn’t care what the society might like and I could hardly believe that he could.
“Yup,” said the man at the end of the bench eagerly, and for a few seconds I thought, perhaps, that I’d walked into someone else’s conversation. The man and I exchanged a pleasant look. Perhaps he’d only worried it was his conversation because no one else had replied. I glanced at Clive, who stared distantly at the cobbled square and the statue. He seemed altogether older—a real old man—and something else had changed about him too. It was as if Maud’s death had shaken the character out of him, his enthusiasm for life and everything that made him who he was, turning him limp.
“What did Vivien say?” he asked after a while.
“I haven’t seen her. She won’t come to the house.”
There was a long silence.
“You’ll tell her I love her, won’t you?” he said at last, and, although that should have been a happy tribute, there was something too absolute and eternal about it, and I couldn’t help feeling a little sorrow spill from my heart.
Two men bailed out of The George, shouting at each other and scaring the pigeons to the safety of the clock tower. When they had passed, the bravest of the birds flew down to reclaim Titus’s head.
“I’m pregnant,” I said, in a moment of unnecessary candidness. It was true, but I wasn’t so much telling him because he should know it, but because I wanted to tell him something happy, or perhaps to shock him—anything, in fact, to get a recognizable reaction from him. All he said was, “Very good.”
“Congratulations,” followed the old man on the far end of the bench.
“Thank you,” I said to both of them.
After a short silence the other man said, “Are you eating broad beans?” I found it impossible to know if he was now talking to me, or to Clive, or to the pigeons we were all looking at, or to some imaginary person, and I didn’t know whether to reply or to ignore him. I ignored him.
“You must eat broad beans,” he ordered firmly, “if you don’t want a spastic.”
“Thank you,” I told him, now understanding it was directed at me, and that he must surely have lost his marbles.
“Every day,” he said.
“Every day,” I repeated.
“Then you won’t have a spastic. Nobody wants a spastic,” he observed finally. There was a silence.
The old man leaned forward on his stick in a posture suggesting that he’d had his say and now he was finished.
Clive looked at his watch.
“You’ll be all right,” he said, and again I thought it might have been to either of us. “Well, I must be going now. I have flower-pressing class in ten minutes.”
And he went.
When I got home Arthur had let himself into the house. He was in the kitchen, waiting for me. It was lovely to see him and he gave me the first hug, a great big, long, silent one, that anyone had offered me since Maud’s death.
“I was worried about you on your own,” he said, letting me go.
“I’m fine. How’s Vivi?”
“Not good, I’m afraid. She says she’ll never come back.”
“Oh no.” I sighed, and felt the pain of my entire family crashing down round me. I wanted to find a way to bring them back, to hold them close.
“I think she feels it was…preventable,” he said.
I thought of the cold steep cellar steps and the darkness of the stairwell. I thought of how the two doors stood side by side, like twins—the same moldings, the same handles—but one with a deadly drop on the other side. I thought I was perhaps the only person who knew quite how drunk she would have been, how perfectly preventable it might have been, had she not been drunk.
“She won’t even talk to me about it. All I know is that she’d been quarreling a lot with Maud.”
Had she? It must have been on the telephone because Vivi hadn’t been home for months.
“Didn’t you know?” he said, as if it was impossible for me not to.
“No. What was it about?”
He didn’t answer for a while.
“I think she was worried about everything,” he said vaguely. “You know how Vivi always worries about everything,” but I had no idea what sort of everything he meant.
Just then the phone rang. There was silence when I answered it and I knew it was her. “Vivi?” I asked. “Is that you?”