The Sleeping and the Dead Read online

  Hannah’s mother didn’t like the idea of the allotment. She pretended it didn’t exist. She had been pretty as a girl and could have had her pick of the lads in the town, the ones who came back after the war. She had chosen Edward Meek over the plumbers and bricklayers because he worked in the bank. He wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. It put her on a par with other professional wives. Perhaps she imagined dinner parties and coffee mornings, but in fact she was awkward in company and if the invitations had ever come they soon dried up. When Hannah was a child Audrey Meek seemed to have no friends at all. She confided in her daughter, shared her loneliness and her disappointment with her. She had spent her life being disappointed.

  At first Hannah thought that this disappointment had been reason enough for her father’s suicide. She supposed he felt responsible for her mother’s unhappiness; he had never been able to live up to her expectations. Then Hannah learned it was much worse than that. By the time of his death he’d progressed to the post of assistant manager, and he’d been stealing. Perhaps he hoped to buy his wife’s approval with little luxuries for the house, but Hannah thought it was more that he felt the bank owed him what he took. It was his way of fighting back. Of course, he wasn’t very good at covering his tracks and he knew he would be caught. He couldn’t face it. But Hannah and her mother had to face it. They had to face the questions from the bank and the police, the prying neighbours, the dreadful sympathy. And Hannah had to come to terms with the fact that her father hadn’t loved her enough to stay alive. He had put her through this embarrassment to save himself the ordeal of it.

  Then it was September and time to go back to school. Hannah was dreading it. Her father’s face had been plastered all over the local paper. Even if the teachers were too sensitive to mention the suicide she’d be aware of their curiosity, and some of the kids, at least, would be merciless. Hannah wasn’t popular. She was known as a swat. Rock music was important then. Status was conferred by knowledge of obscure groups and Hannah couldn’t join in those discussions. There wasn’t even a record player in her house and anyway she wasn’t really interested. Over the holidays she’d avoided most of the people from school. She’d seen Sally a couple of times, but only in her home. She’d kept away from the pub and the parties.

  On the first day of term Michael Grey turned up. There weren’t many new kids at the school and he was immediately the centre of attention. For Hannah his appearance was a relief. It took the heat off her. While the rest of them were gathered around him at registration she slid into the room, dumped her stuff in her locker and slipped away to her first class. There was such a crowd around him that she didn’t even see his face. At the mid-morning break she wanted to hide again, but Sally dragged her to the common-room.

  ‘Look,’ Sally said. ‘You’ll have to face them sometime. Better now when they’ve got the beautiful Michael to distract them.’

  He always was Michael. Never Mike or Mick.

  The sixth-form common-room was a mobile classroom. It was square, flat roofed, freezing in the winter, but that September was hot, an Indian summer. Sixth formers didn’t have to wear uniform and they’d all chosen their clothes on that first day with care. It was a season of peasant fashion. The boys wore wide trousers and cheesecloth shirts. The girls, even Hannah, were in smocks and long flowery skirts. Michael stood with his back to the window so the light was behind him. That could have been deliberate. He had what Mr Westcott called a theatrical eye. He wore a pair of denim jeans which looked new, a black T-shirt, and desert boots with black leather laces. His hair was blond, almost white. He had a suntan. Foreign travel was unusual those days and it was hard to get a tan in her northern town, so that made him stand out too. There was something about him that made the others listen. It wasn’t just the novelty.

  Sally nudged Hannah in the ribs. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’s cocky,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s good looking but he knows it.’

  He can’t have heard what she said. There was music playing and everyone talked at once. But he looked over the heads of the others towards her as if he knew what she was thinking. He gave a self-deprecating little shrug. I know, he seemed to be saying. This is all bullshit. But it’s a game and I’ve got to go along with it.

  Later Hannah saw her first meeting with Michael as a turning point. After that she was seen differently within the school. She could face them all without embarrassment. It was possible that her memory played tricks – that there were unpleasant comments about her father, days when she wanted to stay at home. It was possible that her re-creation of her friendship with Michael was as great a fiction as the story he told about himself. But his arrival did make a difference. Some incidents remained clear and vivid. These, she was convinced, were true.

  There was the day he first invited her to the Brices, for example. Hannah remembered that as soon as she started talking to the detectives. Michael was placed in the same English group as her, and on the day of his arrival he chose the seat next to her, at one of the old-fashioned desks with the lift-up lids that you never see now. Despite her disdain, her sense that he was too cocky by half, there was a rush of excitement when she turned and saw him there. Through habit they kept the same seats all term. They were reading Middle-march. The rest of the group hated it. They found it tedious and Hannah suspected that most of them didn’t make it to the end. She loved it and so did Michael. There’d been this guy in the old place who’d been passionate about it, he said. Who’d done it as part of his Ph.D. and passed on his enthusiasm. Hannah presumed then that the ‘guy’ was a teacher, the ‘old place’ a school. Later she was to presume nothing. Michael said he had some notes at home. Perhaps she’d like to borrow them to help with an essay they’d been set? If she wasn’t in a hurry she could go back with him, have a cup of tea. The old folks would be thrilled to bits.

  Recreating the scene in her head, Hannah thought it had been the beginning of December. She could remember the cold. He must have been in the town for three months but still she had no idea that his family was different from anyone else’s. They hadn’t talked about it. She hadn’t told him about the drama with her father, though it was possible that the others had been whispering behind her back. At that age families weren’t as important as friends.

  ‘Old folks?’ she said. It seemed an odd way to talk about parents.

  ‘Sylvie and Steve. You’ll see.’

  ‘You call your mum and dad by their first names?’

  ‘No. They’re not my parents. My mother’s dead. My father . . .’ He seemed thrown for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t get to see much of him.’

  They walked slowly up the school drive to the house. It was almost dark by the time they arrived at the house, one of a small row, flat faced. As the light went the temperature plummeted. They stood for a moment on the pavement, looking in. There was a street lamp and they could see their breath as a white mist. The lights were on inside but the curtains had not been drawn. There was a fire in the grate and an elderly man sat on a leather armchair, with a cat on his knee, reading.

  ‘That’s Steve,’ Michael said with enormous affection. He took out a Yale key and let himself in.

  Inside there was a smell of fruit and spice. A small kitchen led straight from the hall and she’d seen Sylvie, red faced, turning a cake on to a wire tray. She looked slightly flustered. Her hair had come loose from her comb. Michael put his arm around her.

  ‘This is Hannah,’ he said. ‘She’s a George Eliot fan too. I’ve brought her home for tea. You don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course we don’t mind.’ She smiled at Hannah. ‘We haven’t met any of his friends before. I think he’s ashamed of us.’

  ‘How could I be?’ he said.

  Hannah didn’t know what to make of the relationship between Michael and the Brices. Usually she was jealous of other people’s home lives. Her own was so bleak. Her mother struggled on to keep the house as she wanted it. They hadn’t been forced to sell, though at one
time that had been a possibility. There was even less money than there had been before and Audrey hated the forced economies. She pretended not to mind the gossip and in fact seldom went out to hear it. Television had become her consolation. Hannah was grateful because it provided a safe topic of conversation. Without it they would have had little to say to each other. Later she thought that her mother had been depressed and had been brave to keep things as normal as she did. Then she longed to be a part of a different sort of family. That’s why she spent so much time with Sally. Her dream family would have been quite like Sally’s, but the parents would have been younger, interested perhaps in different things. There would be a brother as well as a sister and they would have shared meals together discussing ideas about books and plays. There would have been noise and laughter. At the time she didn’t consider Michael’s situation as ideal. It was too different from her dream. Everything was so quiet. There was discussion but it was calm and measured.

  There was one room which served as living- and dining-room. They sat at a round mahogany table and drank tea from translucent china cups, ate crumpets which Michael squatted by the fire to toast, and the cake Sylvie had baked. They talked about Stephen’s lecture on the Psalms. At one point Michael reached out and touched Sylvie’s hand.

  ‘Why don’t you go too?’ he said. ‘You know you’d enjoy it and I’ll be perfectly fine here on my own.’

  ‘I’m sure you would be.’ Her voice was serene. ‘But Stephen and I have had a lifetime together and I’ll have your company for such a short while. I’d prefer to stay and make the most of it.’

  Then she asked him the question about his having been abroad.

  Hannah had always been an observer. Even in her youth she could usually work out what was going on between people. But the situation in the Brices’ home confused her. She couldn’t make out at all where Michael fitted in.

  After tea the Brices refused the offer of help with the washing-up and Michael took Hannah to his bedroom to find her his notes. She was tidier than most of her friends but his room was almost Spartan in its lack of clutter. She wondered if he had planned to invite her back and had cleared it specially, but she went there on subsequent occasions and it was always the same. It reminded her of a cell.

  ‘Are they your grandparents?’ she asked.

  ‘No, we’re no relation. They’re just friends.’

  ‘Friends of your father’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, seeming grateful for an explanation that worked. ‘That’s right.’

  It was a small room but there was a big desk under the window, of the kind that you’d have found in offices everywhere. It had three drawers on each side of the knee-hole. It wasn’t well made. The varnish was scratched and the top was chipped. Michael seemed flustered when he couldn’t find the notes where he’d expected them to be, with others in the top drawer.

  ‘Sorry, I thought I’d brought everything with me. But obviously not.’

  ‘Couldn’t they be somewhere else?’ Hannah yanked open a bottom drawer which was wider than the others. When it came to school work she was competitive. She wanted the notes, a chance to shine in the essay. She hadn’t come along just for the chance to know Michael better. She had expected to find more files in the drawer, neatly labelled, but it was empty apart from a shoebox, the sort she had collected when she was young for use in Blue Peter projects. He must have had the box for a long time. It was too small to hold shoes of the size he wore then.

  Michael slammed the drawer shut with a ferocity which almost trapped her hand.

  ‘There’s nothing in there. I told you, I must have left them behind.’

  ‘Sorry.’ She looked at him, expecting an explanation. He said nothing.

  The incident seemed to have thrown him. Hannah thought he was angry about the invasion of his privacy and apologized more profusely. It was something she could understand. He hardly seemed to hear what she was saying and when she said that her mother would be expecting her he seemed relieved to see her go. When Hannah saw him at school the next day he greeted her as if nothing had happened.

  For several weeks she was haunted by the mystery of the small, blue shoebox. She imagined it contained answers to her questions about Michael.

  Just before Christmas she was invited back to the Brices for mince pies and mulled wine. She made an excuse to go upstairs, slipped into Michael’s room and opened the drawer. She hated herself for doing it. Her hands were sweating as she tried to turn the knob. She had kept the door open so she would hear if anyone was coming. But it was an anticlimax. The drawer was empty. When she returned to the others Michael looked at her as he had on his first morning in the common-room, as if he knew exactly what she’d been up to.

  Chapter Twelve

  Throughout the interview both Porteous and Stout went on about Michael having been Hannah’s special friend, as if they had been lovers from the start. But they were never lovers, not in the sense the detectives meant, and they didn’t even start going out with each other until after the lower-sixth exams. She tried to explain that to them. The detectives listened but she wasn’t sure they understood.

  The town itself had nothing to attract young people. The cinema had shut and the pubs were gloomy and unfriendly. In the summer at least, they were drawn to the lake. A couple of years before, the valley had been flooded to provide water for northern industrial towns and the biggest man-made lake in Europe was created. It was news at the time. Although it was surrounded by forestry plantations and was miles from everywhere, the novelty of the development and the scale and spectacle of it attracted tourists. An enterprising farmer opened a caravan site, then built a bar and a club, so it was more like a small holiday camp. It hardly provided a sophisticated night life but it was livelier than anything else the town had to offer and it drew the kids like a magnet.

  The Saturday after the end-of-year exams they gathered on the shore in the afternoon and collected dead wood to build a bonfire. Hannah had expected Michael to be there but he didn’t turn up. You could never guarantee his presence on these occasions, and he never offered explanations. They ate chocolate and crisps as a makeshift picnic and later moved on to the caravan park, to the bar where Sally’s boyfriend was DJ. It was only supposed to serve residents but no one asked questions when they all piled in. It was June, early in the season. No doubt the owners were glad of their money. The bar was a horrible place, furnished like a transport café with Formica tables and plastic chairs. Along one wall a row of one-armed bandits clacked and flashed. Hannah and her friends didn’t mind. There were no awkward questions about under-age drinking, and they took it over and made it theirs. When they arrived there were two residents, an overweight Brummie and his wife, leaning against the bar. Soon they shrank away and the Cranford Grammar brigade had it all to themselves.

  Hannah still found events like that evening daunting, but she began to enjoy herself. She thought she’d done well in the exams, better than she’d expected. And she’d arranged to spend the night with Sally, so for once she didn’t have to worry about her mother. Since Edward’s death, Audrey had become increasingly anxious, in an obsessive, unhealthy way. It seemed that anxiety was the only way she could express her concern or her love. When Hannah went out Audrey always waited up. She would be pacing up and down the dining-room, her face knotted with tension, although Hannah was always back before the agreed time. Later she was to understand something of what her mother had gone through – she could never sleep until Rosie was in – but then it had seemed an unnecessary intrusion.

  The evening of the party it was a relief to know there would be no prying questions to answer and she felt she could let herself go. She started drinking her usual halves of cider but later Sally’s boyfriend, Chris, bought all the girls vodka. He was always throwing his money about, trying to impress. They made him play the music very loud and they started to dance. At closing time, as she stumbled and giggled with the others down the sandy path to the shore, Hannah though
t this must be what it was like to be drunk. She had led a very sheltered life.

  The bonfire was already lit. They could see the flames from the path, reflected in the water beyond. Sparks from the burning wood shattered in the sky like fireworks. Michael had lit it and he was there, alone, tending it, throwing on more wood as soon as the flames subsided. While the others ran down the bank to join him, pretending to be angry because he’d started the fire without them, Hannah stood and watched him. He was absorbed in his watch over the flames and seemed not to notice the approaching crowd. Even when the others crowded round him, yelling and cheering, he didn’t look away.

  Of course, she fancied him like crazy. In the beginning she had thought him cocky, still did if it came to that, but that was part of the fascination. And perhaps he’d seen her resistance as a challenge, because he’d made an effort to win her over. No one else had bothered to do that. She wasn’t seen as much of a catch – skinny with no figure to speak of, black oily hair and the hint even then of dark down on her upper lip. He said she looked Mediterranean. Perhaps he had heard about her father and felt sorry for her, though if his friendship was prompted by pity he hid it well. She could usually pick up a reaction like that. It turned her spiky and moody. Perhaps their unusual homes in this conventional town of happy families gave them something in common. She thought he was happy in her company and for a while that was enough.

  After Hannah’s first visit to his home the relationship continued to revolve around the books they were reading, the essays they had to prepare. When school finished for the day they went to the library together. Not to the school library where the few recommended books of criticism were fought over but to the dark building in the town centre, a Victorian heap, with enormous polished tables and rows of reference books smelling of damp. Hannah never wanted to go home immediately to face her mother. The Brices placed no restrictions on Michael’s movements. That always surprised Hannah. She would have expected such elderly people to share her mother’s anxieties. He would have stayed with her all evening if she’d wanted. As a friend, of course. Not a lover. But she had her pride and sent him home at five o’clock in time for the tea Sylvie would have prepared. She knew that the pretty girls with the short skirts who lusted after him never felt jealous of the time they spent together. They didn’t consider Hannah as any sort of competition.