Worst Fears Page 8

  Hamish went to bed at ten o’clock. He was tired, as he said, both physically and emotionally. Ned had been his only brother. Alexandra and Sascha were now his only family. His own had disintegrated. He was, he said, a typical product of the times: living alone, along with 28 percent of the population. He liked statistics.

  It took Hamish an hour to get to bed. To wash, to think, to have a bath, to find soap; he borrowed Ned’s pyjamas, which Ned never wore. She could understand that. She’d been wearing one of Ned’s shirts all day. That would have to stop, she supposed. Hamish asked for a glass of water. She provided it. He had tucked himself up like a little boy. He looked after her pathetically, as if wanting a bedtime story.

  When he had finally settled—worse than Sascha—Alexandra looked through Jenny’s address book. She found the address of an “L. Peacock,” in Clifton, Bristol. She looked up Peacock in the directory and found

  “Peacock, Leah,” and called the number. She counted the rings. Eight.

  Good. The woman was in bed.

  “Hello?” enquired a soft, good natured voice, though sleepy.

  “It’s Jenny,” said Alexandra, using Jenny’s voice. “I’m so unhappy.”

  “Jenny,” said Leah, “don’t do this to me. I can bear some of your unhappiness, but not all of it.”

  “I loved him so much,” said Alexandra/Jenny. “But he wasn’t mine to love.”

  “It’s the Whispering Guilt again, Jenny,” said Leah. “Don’t listen to it. It means to fill your mind with poison. How many times have we talked about that? I want you to go to sleep. Now what is our sleep word?”

  Alexandra put the phone down. She found a “Dave” in the address book, but he turned out to be a plumber, annoyed at being disturbed. She used Jenny’s voice, gave Jenny’s address, and asked him to come round in the morning to fix a leak. Early if possible. She called Jenny Linden.

  It was some time before she answered. Good, again.

  “Who is it?”

  “This is Ned,” Alexandra whispered. “From the other side.”

  She called the second Dave in the book and got an answerphone. Dave Linden, Theatrical Lighting, freelance. He answered half-way through the message.

  “Hi,” said Alexandra brightly. “This is Alexandra Ludd. I think we met once or twice, at parties. You’ve been up to The Cottage once or twice. And I think we once met at Lyme Regis.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s rather late. Do we have to talk now?”

  “Yes,” she said. “We do. I understand your wife suffers from unrequited love for my husband, now dead. That she’s been stalking him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by unrequited,” he said. “What was unrequited about it? Why do you think she and I aren’t together? I don’t want to talk about it. I’m sorry for you, but I don’t want you saying bad things about Jenny. She looked up to that bastard you married. He could talk her into anything. She believed everything he told her. I should have gone over and killed him myself; I always wanted to. She wouldn’t let me. How could you stand him, a woman like you?”

  “I loved him,” said Alexandra.

  “And I love Jenny,” he said.

  He wept. Alexandra felt mystified. How could a man seriously be in love with dumpy little Jenny Linden?

  “I don’t want you to do anything nasty to her,” said Dave. “You’re a powerful woman. You could crush her, just like that. I’m not sorry your husband’s dead. I’m glad. He ruined my marriage.”

  “You don’t think,” Alexandra asked, “that it’s all in your wife’s head? That she’s deluded? Obsessed? That what she tells you simply isn’t true? I don’t know what she’s told you but my impression is it’s all fantasy. I was calling you to ask her, for God’s sake, to lay off. My husband has just died. I can’t cope with your wife’s insanity as well. I want you to control her, keep her out of my way. People might even believe the dreadful things she’s saying. That Ned and she were having an affair.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” asked Dave Linden. “It’s really warped. Why are you pretending you didn’t know what was going on?”

  “Nothing was going on except what went on in your wife’s head,” said Alexandra. “You’ve got to get her on some kind of medication and out of my hair.”

  “But they’d grope each other in front of you,” said Dave Linden. “I saw them. You aren’t blind. You must have known. That was what turned them on. You and me having to watch them, having to imagine them together. She said it was her way of getting over it, I wasn’t to stop her. It made things worse. But why did you put up with it? Are you sick in the head or something?”

  “I never saw them grope each other,” said Alexandra. “Ned always put his arms around women. He was just being affectionate.”

  “Then they’d dance together,” said Dave Linden, “and laugh together and look at you and me out of the corners of their eyes and their hands would be everywhere. And you were the one who sent our invitation out. ‘Dear Dave and Jenny, do come. Ned and I…’ Through the letter box, down on to the mat: more torture. She’d agree you were a bitch to do it. I’d refuse to go; she’d put the pressure on: ‘Oh, Dave, oh, Dave, I love him so, let me get it out of my system. Then we’ll be together again.’ So we’d go, and I’d see you watching—”

  “Ned always danced close to women,” said Alexandra. “I never minded. I can’t even remember him dancing with Jenny. I’m sure you’re right and he did but I don’t remember. All this is in your head, Dave. She’s told you so many lies.”

  “Jenny doesn’t lie,” said Dave. “Jenny never lies. You’re the one who’s mad, not Jenny. You’d go up to London knowing they’d be together. The moment you’d walk out the door she’d walk in. He died fucking her. He died fucking my wife. Too much excitement. Now leave me alone.”

  He put the phone down. Alexandra went to bed. She slept in Sascha’s room. She wanted the smell of his soft child’s skin in her nostrils: next best thing to having his real presence. Abbie hadn’t washed the sheets on Sascha’s bed, thank God. It wasn’t so much a sleep as a passing-out, unconsciousness forced on her mind.

  She woke with the phrase in her head “When you walked out she walked in.” Madness. Cold crept round the edges of Sascha’s small quilt. She went back to her own bed, and for a moment thought she could feel Ned’s warm presence, but it was only Diamond, who had somehow got upstairs again. She did not push him off the bed. Anything warm and alive would do.

  10

  IN THE MORNING, ALEXANDRA called Abbie, and asked Abbie exactly where the body had lain when she found it. She’d assumed it was between the table and the window, but on no real grounds, she could now see. Abbie said Alexandra should try to forget this kind of detail: wasn’t it better to be vague about the matter, especially since presumably Alexandra would go on living in The Cottage with Sascha and there was no question of selling? Though, if Alexandra did, Abbie and Arthur would be interested in buying: they might sell Elder House and give up the language school altogether: if she, Abbie, turned her back for a moment all hell broke loose. But Alexandra must not, must not, believe Abbie grudged Alexandra a moment of her, Abbie’s, stay at The Cottage after Ned’s death, it was the least she could do for her friend. She shouldn’t even have mentioned “grudge”: of course it wasn’t in her head. Consider that last unsaid, cancel, cancel. Only five days since the death but it seemed like years.

  “Why should someone die of a heart attack?” asked Alexandra. “Just like that? Wouldn’t something have to happen to set it off?” Abbie said she didn’t know. There was hardly anything death-inducing in the first ten minutes of Casablanca. She repeated that Alexandra should stop brooding over the detail, forget the past, and get on with living. Had she had any more trouble with Jenny Linden? Alexandra said she hadn’t. Abbie said she thought Alexandra should return the address book and diary: otherwise Jenny Linden might get yet more obsessive and send in the police. What, as a matter of interest, was in the book
s?

  “Nothing much,” said Alexandra. “What you would expect from someone with such a little life.”

  There was a short silence and then Abbie said, “You shouldn’t talk about people like that, Alexandra. As if you were something special but they were nothing. I can see people could get infuriated.”

  Alexandra was hurt. She supposed that if you didn’t have a husband to add a kind of veracity to your life, to bolster up your opinions—well, opinions that you and your husband shared; a general world-outlook, as it were, acquired over time—you might well find yourself under attack. She and Ned together were entitled to a general superiority, an assumption of centrality in relation to those around, but on her own it was a different matter.

  “I just mean,” said Abbie, “that Jenny could cause a lot of trouble, so please go carefully. Don’t stir things up, Alexandra, if you can help it.”

  “What sort of trouble?” asked Alexandra. “Who’s going to believe her?”

  “You know what people are,” said Abbie.

  “I’m beginning to,” said Alexandra, and Abbie had to go because one of the students had spilled calligraphy ink over the tablecloth. The student had been making her, Abbie, a Happy Cherry Blossom card to demonstrate the tender customs of the Japanese in their home country as compared to the brutality of other nations abroad. It was just a pity she was doing it on a white tablecloth.

  Alexandra called Vilna.

  “Vilna,” she said. “I think I’m being given the run-around by Abbie.”

  Vilna said if that was the case it was only for Alexandra’s good. Abbie adored Alexandra. Alexandra asked Vilna where exactly in the dining room the body had been when she arrived at The Cottage and Vilna said Alexandra should think about the future not the past and start life again. Abbie had put a blanket over the corpse; she, Vilna, had never seen a dead body: that’s why she’d had to go down to the morgue to see it without its blanket.

  “I hope you enjoyed the sight,” said Alexandra, and slammed down the phone. Then she had to call Vilna back to apologise. A friend was a friend. Vilna said it was okay: the English had such a funny view of death it kept surprising her but she was adjusting to it. Would Alexandra like to use her house for the party?

  “Party?” asked Alexandra.

  “After the funeral,” said Vilna. “I think you call it a wake.”

  Alexandra accepted the offer.

  11

  IN THE MORNING ALEXANDRA took Jenny’s small blue address book and diary into the little stationer’s in Eddon Gurney. The shop was two doors down from the morgue. She could feel Ned lying there, but could not picture his appearance. She too had never seen a dead body. Her father had died in America: her mother had not encouraged her to go to the funeral.

  “You’ll only upset his widow,” Irene had said. It was clear that serial marriage made a mockery of funerals. The divorced spouse, denied the partner in life, was also denied any conventional solace that related to the death. With the death of the distant parent, the forgotten and unacknowledged child finds himself, herself, with even less substance than before: with even fewer rights to any existence at all. The ghosts of the departed wave to others but not to us; those who are rejected in life are rejected in death, and there is no healing it. Ned had not turned to look back at Alexandra as he went into the forest.

  “So sorry,” Angela Paddle was saying to Alexandra. She and her husband Reg Paddle ran the stationer’s shop. Reg had left the Army and used his money to set up the business. His belief was that every small town and village in the country these days needed its communication centre, and riches would come to those prescient enough to provide a copier, a fax, and a computer-plus-modem to the community. But few in Eddon Gurney had much interest in the outside world, other than those in what Mr. Lightfoot called “the Bohemian Belt.” Angela Paddle wore a scratchy beige sweater with no blouse beneath. She seemed not to understand comfort, but her face was kind. “So sorry. A great shock.”

  “A great shock,” said Alexandra. “Could you do me copies of these?” and she handed over her trophies. She could see how unlikely it seemed that they were hers. These were not the personal records of anyone with many friends, or a great deal of occupation. She did not even want them thought of as hers. “My brother-in-law is up at The Cottage putting Ned’s affairs in order. We need these addresses and so forth for the funeral invitations.” Her voice faltered. Why was she explaining? Never apologise, never explain, Ned would advise. Which was, she supposed, just as well. He was certainly now in no position to do either.

  Angela Paddle looked both reluctant and doubtful. This was her custom when anyone asked her to use the new technology. “We don’t usually do anything bound,” she said. “But you must be upset. I’ll do my best. Funny to think of your husband lying on that slab just a couple of doors down.”

  “Very funny,” said Alexandra.

  “I’ll pop in and see him later,” said Angela Paddle.

  “You do that,” said Alexandra.

  “Better to see it for real than think about it. Mrs. Linden’s just been to see him for the third time,” said Angela Paddle. “Doing her best for him. The living need to watch by the dead. Strange how times change. When I had my baby it was unheard of to have a man around at the birth. Now it’s all but compulsory. Same with the dead. Once they kept bodies out of the way, tried not to think about them. Now everyone wants to see.” She broke into a hymn:

  Be there at our closing

  And give us we pray

  Your peace in our hearts, Lord

  At the end of the day.

  “Yes, give us peace,” said Alexandra, and thought this strange and dreadful woman might yet be the one to make her cry.

  “Mr. Lightfoot’s a good man,” said Angela Paddle. “I wouldn’t want to do a job like that, for all everyone treats it like nothing.”

  “No, you just stick to faxes,” said Alexandra. “So Jenny Linden was in, was she? She’s not a very close friend of ours.”

  “She said she was,” said Angela Paddle. “And a colleague of Mr. Ludd’s, and there when he died. What a shock for the poor woman.”

  “Jenny Linden is obviously very upset,” said Alexandra, “and very imaginative at the best of times. I don’t think you should take too much notice of what she says. My husband was alone when he died.”

  “That’s right,” said Angela Paddle. “He died in the night, didn’t he, and you were in London in that play of yours about the doll. I couldn’t make too much sense of Mrs. Linden. You know how some women get: all over the place, gulping and sobbing. I just thought it was good of her to sit by the body so much.”

  “Of course it is,” said Alexandra. “The more the merrier. I might go and sit myself. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, for the copies.”

  “It won’t be cheap,” said Angela Paddle.

  “I bet it won’t be,” said Alexandra cheerfully.

  Alexandra called in down the road to see Mr. Lightfoot. She didn’t have to re-park the car, the morgue was so close. He took her to view the body. Fortunately, there was no one else there doing the same thing. He asked her what she wanted Ned to wear for the cremation. He’d had a phone-call from the deceased’s brother, suggesting a cremation. Now he wanted to confirm with the widow that Mr. Hamish Ludd was the proper person for him to deal with. Mrs. Linden had been in, wanting to know whether there would be an interment. A burial, that was.

  “What has Mrs. Linden to do with it?” asked Alexandra.

  “The poor lady’s very upset,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “A little bit unbalanced, the way people get. I take no notice. You’re the widow, that’s the main thing.”

  Alexandra stared at Ned’s body and could see that she must take charge of the situation. She had never held “truth” in much regard: it seemed to her a thing which shifted with the times, unreliable as any kind of fixed goal. She was an actor: she would find the truth of a role one night, and a wholly different truth the next. Both would work. Sh
e understood the slipperiness of words. She knew that those who protested often protested too much. She knew that definitions limited rather than explained: that once you had onion-peeled away opinion and thought you had arrived at a firm layer of truth, that layer went too, to reveal mere sponginess underneath. In the end you didn’t want truth, you just needed to know what had happened.

  “Mr. Lightfoot,” she asked finally, directly, “where exactly was the body when you arrived?”

  “On the floor,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “With a blanket over it.”

  “I know,” said Alexandra. “But where on the floor?”

  “Oh well,” said Mr. Lightfoot, “truth’s truth. At the top of the stairs.”

  Alexandra took this in.

  “Why did my friends say it was in the dining room?”

  “Artistic people have their own habits,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “How do I know? All this breaking through, making one room out of two. The front parlour’s a thing of the past, as I know to my cost.”

  “Ned fell down at the top of the stairs?”

  “He died in his own bed,” said Mr. Lightfoot, “as a man should. Then your friend from the language school tried to carry him downstairs for reasons of her own, but a warm body’s hard to move, as she soon found out. So she left him at the top of the stairs covered with a blanket.”

  “Who was in the house when you arrived?” asked Alexandra.

  “Why don’t you think about the future, Mrs. Ludd? Put the past behind you? It’s what I always recommend.”

  “Was Jenny Linden there?”

  “I’ll say she was! Rushing round naked like a headless chicken. Throwing herself all over the body as we tried to get it out. Women will do that, of course, in these circumstances. And the dog barking and barking as the dawn comes up. No one had thought to take him for a walk. I found a nightie and put it on her, to make her decent.”