Burial of Ghosts Page 4

  I was rescued by a round man in a brocade waistcoat. He gave a few words of explanation to the widow, then walked towards me. His legs were short and he moved with a peculiar bobbing action, like a child’s mechanical toy. Something fat. A pig perhaps.

  ‘Elizabeth Bartholomew?’ He eyed me from head to toe. ‘I’m Stuart Howdon.’ He smiled unpleasantly.

  ‘Lizzie,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not what I was expecting.’

  I wanted to know what he was expecting, how Philip had described me, but he went on, ‘I’ve told Joanna you work for me and you wanted to pay your respects. It seemed best.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Stick with me.’ An order. As if left to myself I might cause mayhem. Then he smiled again, an inappropriate grin, the result perhaps of nerves. Maybe he thought it made him appear attractive.

  Girls, younger than me, dressed in black frocks and little white aprons, came out through double doors onto the terrace. They carried heavy wooden trays and began collecting glasses. The whole set-up seemed very old-fashioned, like a period drama on the television. I imagined them living in bleak cells in the attic. Mr Howdon saw me look at them.

  ‘A catering firm from Alnwick,’ he said. ‘It’s cost Joanna an arm and a leg, this funeral.’

  Again, I wondered if he considered I was to blame.

  The crowd spluttered to a silence. The hearse was moving slowly down the drive towards us. There were no flowers on the coffin. The car stopped outside the house and we formed a ragged group behind it, with Joanna and her children in the front. It pulled off at walking pace and we followed.

  Once perhaps the church had been for the use of the house and the estate, but now it was clear it belonged to the village. There were notices about Beavers and Rainbows in the porch, a poster left over from last year’s harvest festival. I have a fondness for old and neglected churches. Hardly surprising, perhaps. Inside there was a fine stained-glass window. Full sunlight shone through it and I was reminded again of the colours of Morocco, of bougainvillaea and jacaranda. The vibration of the organ music made me feel dizzy. I sat on the polished pew and bowed my head. Not an attempt to pray but to stop myself from fainting.

  The vicar was white-haired, rather unsteady on his feet. At first I suspected he might be drunk, but I think he’d suffered from a stroke. He had very long canine teeth, so he reminded me of a vampire. I wondered if the children had seen the likeness, even in their grief. I hoped they had and they’d feel able to share a joke about it. I imagined them looking at each other, pulling monkey faces and rolling their eyes. They were sitting on the front row, so no one would see them except the vicar, and he didn’t count. He must be used to small children taking the piss. We stood and sang ‘Jerusalem’, which seemed a peculiar choice for the occasion. There were very few satanic mills in this part of the country and even the mines and factories further south had all gone.

  It was from the white-haired vicar that I heard how Philip had died. Cancer, he said solemnly in his introduction. Of course. That explained the skinhead look, his lack of appetite, his tendency to fall asleep suddenly. I had thought him very fit and a fussy eater and all the time he’d been struggling to stay alive. I learned too that he’d been a magistrate and a church warden. A stalwart member of the community, as I’d predicted. There was no mention of how he’d earned his living. Perhaps he’d been on the sick for so long that no one remembered. As with me.

  The next hymn took me back to my first year in secondary school. It had been a favourite of Miss Wallace, who taught us RE. Miss Wallace had taken me under her wing, kept me back after class occasionally to ask how I was. I fell in love with her in a way. Once I’d said to her in a joking, self-protective voice, ‘Ever thought of fostering, Miss?’ I’d known of course that adoption was too much to hope for. There’d been a look of panic in her eyes and I don’t think she answered. Her kindness had been professional, like all the others’.

  There’s something moving about singing with a big crowd. I joined in. ‘Not for ever in green pastures / Would we ask our way to be.’ Sometimes Mr Howdon shot me odd looks, as if I was making too much sound or hitting a wrong note, but I took no notice. He was just moving his lips, like someone miming badly on a pop video, so he was in no position to criticize.

  When the service was over we went outside. Joanna was standing at the door shaking hands, but I slipped past. The sun seemed very hot. Perhaps the breeze had dropped, or perhaps I felt it more coming out of the cool of the church. The graveyard sloped towards the pine plantation and was reached through a narrow gate. I wondered how the pall-bearers would get the coffin through, but they managed without difficulty. They were six very brawny men with scalped heads. It occurred to me that they might have had treatment for cancer too, that they were there as a symbol of hope, but I overheard someone say that they belonged to a rugby club in Alnwick. Apparently when Philip was fit, he’d been a member too. We filed through the gate after them and past the old headstones to the grave. There seemed to be no recent stones and I thought no one had been buried here in years.

  A hole had already been dug and we stood in last year’s leaf mould until the ceremony was over. It was completed much more quickly than I’d expected, though when the vicar dismissed us the hole still hadn’t been filled in. A mound of earth, as dark as soot, still stood there. I wished they’d use it to cover up the coffin. I’m not sure why the bare planks made me feel so uneasy, but I felt embarrassed, as if an unclothed body was lying there, and as soon as the vicar had stopped speaking I turned away. I expected everyone to wander away then. I hoped at last to discover why I was there. But no one moved. They waited as if they knew something else was about to happen. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the rooks cackling in a deciduous tree near to the church.

  Joanna stepped forward. She spoke quietly, so we had to strain to hear her, but that was what she wanted. She had the range to carry her voice right back to the house if she’d put her mind to it.

  ‘This is where Philip wanted to be buried,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘He was always something of a pagan. He worshipped in church every Sunday, but I’m not sure what he was worshipping. I rather suspect it was all this.’ She made a dramatic gesture with her arm which took in the spinney of Scots pine and the sky. ‘We’ve been growing an oak sapling from an acorn. Flora and Dickon watered it while Philip was away on his travels. He wanted us to plant it for him close to his grave. Perhaps you’ll allow us time to do that on our own. Please go back to the house. We’ll join you there shortly.’

  She paused for a moment, like an actor waiting for applause, then gave a quick lopsided smile and took her children’s hands. The boy held out his reluctantly. He still looked close to tears. Flora gazed out at us with a clear-eyed stare.

  The audience muttered sympathetically and walked slowly back to the church gate. I lingered and looked back once. The spade and the sapling must have been waiting, because Joanna was already digging with great energy. She had hitched up her long, tight skirt and was pressing hard on the blade with her Victorian shoe. In Morocco I’d pictured someone very different for Philip’s wife – a repressed and reined-in creature. This woman wasn’t the conventional wifey I’d imagined. She pulled out the spade and thrust it in again at a slightly different spot. It cut through the earth like a sword.

  Chapter Six

  The wide front doors to the terrace were thrown open and tables had been set in the hall inside, long trestles covered in white cloths and piled with food. A central staircase led upstairs. It was a tantalizing invitation to explore, but one of the tables blocked the way. There were elaborate arrangements of white flowers in stands. I thought it was more like a wedding than a funeral, though how would I know? Without relatives you seldom get invited to either.

  The lunch was one of those affairs where you have to balance a plate, a glass and a napkin in one hand and continue to make polite conversation at the same time as eating. Not my sort of eve
nt, even though the little waitresses were out in force again and it wouldn’t have been hard to get seriously pissed. Stuart Howdon seemed to have disappeared. I sat outside on a stone step, looking towards the church, listening to the conversation going on behind me, trying to discover more about Philip. It was what this was about, wasn’t it? An opportunity to share our memories. Except mine I would hug to myself.

  ‘Did you see that piece about Philip in the Sunday Times magazine?’ The voice was educated female, elderly. An aunt of Joanna’s, I decided. ‘A couple of months ago. He was ill by then, although it wasn’t mentioned. Perhaps nobody knew but the family. It was about a garden he’d done in Cornwall. There were pictures. It was very green.’ A pause. ‘I’m not sure I could have lived with it. I do like order in a garden. Some sense of restraint.’

  ‘Is that why Joanna never let him loose here?’ Another female speaker, a little younger, jolly.

  ‘This is Joanna’s house.’ The older woman’s voice was slightly disapproving. ‘And Philip always said he loved it as it is. Who needs a garden in a landscape like this? It would only detract.’

  ‘I rather thought they had landscape in Cornwall.’

  The tone was mischievous, but the elderly lady ignored the interruption. ‘Besides, I suppose there was the question of money. He might have had to turn down a commission to devote time here, and I’m not sure they could afford to do that.’

  ‘I dare say there’ll be insurance,’ the jolly woman said.

  ‘I dare say there will.’

  I turned round at that point to see who was speaking, but they’d already merged back into the crowd.

  The rugby players spilled out onto the terrace behind me. From somewhere they’d obtained cans of Theakston’s. Perhaps they’d brought their own supply. I’d only been offered wine. They drank by tipping back their heads and pouring the liquid in a steady stream into their mouths. They seemed to have conquered the need to swallow. Already they looked slightly dishevelled. Ties were loosened, jackets had been discarded.

  ‘Where’s Joanna, then?’ The can was empty. The speaker crunched it with his fist, resisted the temptation to see how far he could kick it and stared at it morosely. ‘She must have finished in the churchyard by now.’

  ‘A nice gesture though, the tree. Loving.’ The speaker stopped short, embarrassed by his own sentimentality.

  ‘They were a loving couple, weren’t they?’ The rugby player holding the crushed beer can had drunk too much to worry about an excess of sentiment. ‘I mean, they had the best bloody marriage in the world. Jo’s a lovely woman. Philip was a lucky man . . .’

  ‘Until the cancer . . .’

  ‘Of course. Until then.’ He yanked back the ring pull on another can and began to drink.

  Selfish, I know, but I didn’t want to hear any more about Philip’s idyllic marriage. I stood up and walked back to the house. I needed another drink too. I was trying to catch the eye of a waitress when Stuart Howdon appeared from a corridor at the back of the hall. The tables were almost empty now, littered with discarded napkins and stale ends of French bread. He seemed flustered. He noticed me standing there and came towards me, the mechanical walk even more awkward than before.

  ‘Miss Bartholomew, I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. There was something rather urgent which needed my immediate attention. Could I ask you to be patient a little longer? I can be with you in about an hour.’

  He was almost apologetic, but I’d had enough of this place. He must have sensed my hostility because he added, ‘It is important that I speak to you. Rather, it was very important to Philip.’ Then came the same insinuating grin.

  So I had to agree, as graciously as I could manage. ‘An hour, then. I’ll go for a walk.’ It would be easier to remember Philip alone.

  I slipped away from the crowd still gathered on the terrace. No one seemed to notice my going. In my white dress I felt invisible. I took the path towards the church, but instead of turning in through the gate followed a sandy track. It led to the spinney of Scots pine, the trees widely spaced, and on towards the coast. I could hear the sea. Not loud, because it was such a calm day, but there all the same. I couldn’t see it until I’d climbed one of the sand hills in the strip of dune which separated the trees from the beach. Then I stood, surrounded by spiky marram grass, looking down on a bay between two low headlands. The tide was out. There was a wreck of bladderwort, driftwood and frayed blue rope on the tide line, then an expanse of ridged wet sand, reflecting the blinding afternoon sun, then the shimmering water. The beach was empty but someone had been there before me. A line of footsteps led towards the sea. I took off my sandals and followed them until they disappeared into the squelchy, shifting sand at the water’s edge and my toes were covered by a wave.

  The boy stood ahead of me, knee deep in water. His shoes were slung by their tied laces around his neck, socks stuffed inside each one. He had made an attempt to roll up his trousers but the bottoms were already wet. He seemed to be floating on the diamanté light. I caught my skirt of my dress in one hand and waded out to him.

  ‘Hi!’ I prefer boys to girls, find them easier to get on with. Little girls like to pose. They care what you think of them. Boys are more straightforward.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I turned round and started back to the beach. He hadn’t been expecting that. A shocked response at the language perhaps or an attempt at sympathy, but not an immediate response to his demand.

  ‘Wait. Who are you?’

  ‘Lizzie Bartholomew. Who are you?’

  ‘Dickon Samson.’

  ‘How old are you, Dickon?’

  He paused and I thought he was going to tell me it was none of my business. ‘Nearly nine.’ Then he glared at me. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to your father’s funeral.’

  I had let my dress go and the waves sucked the thin cotton of the skirt backwards and forwards round my legs, pushed the sand in piles beside my feet.

  ‘How did you know him?’

  ‘I didn’t very well. I met him once, on a bus in Morocco.’

  ‘Yeah? He said that was his best holiday ever. He made me promise to go there one day.’

  ‘I expect you will, then.’

  A cormorant dived off a rock. Somewhere above me in the glare of the sun, gulls were calling.

  ‘How far were you meaning to go?’ I asked. ‘Coquet? The Farnes?’ Islands, invisible now in the heat haze.

  ‘I’m not stupid. I wasn’t going anywhere. It was hot.’

  ‘A good way to cool down,’ I agreed. He sensed the condescension and shut up, turning his back to me. ‘Did your dad like the sea?’

  ‘He taught me to swim.’

  ‘Here?’

  He faced me again and nodded. Tears started to roll down his cheeks. ‘It was April. Fucking cold.’

  ‘I’m going out now,’ I said. He wouldn’t want me gawping at him. ‘I’ve got a meeting soon. I should try and dry off my dress.’

  I turned and plodged out towards the shore. I could hear him following but I didn’t look round. I wrung out my dress, then sat on a flat boulder and spread it out to dry. His shadow appeared and I looked up. His hair had a hint of red and there were freckles on his nose.

  ‘I’ll be the only person in my class without a dad.’

  I could have told him he was lucky, that I’d never even known my father, but I didn’t. He deserved his own time of self-pity.

  ‘Bummer,’ I said.

  ‘Fucking bummer.’ He sat beside me and put his head in his hands. I pretended not to notice and threw pieces of shingle at a target rock a little way off. I was a crap shot. He hit it first time.

  ‘Who’s your meeting with?’

  ‘Mr Howdon.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘Work probably.’ It could have been true.

  ‘Oh yeah, you work with him, don’t you?’

  I didn’t answer and he didn’t seem to find any contradiction
between that story and my account of having met his father in Morocco.

  ‘What work did your father do?’ I wasn’t daft. I’d worked it out from the eavesdropped conversation, but I wanted to hear the details.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ He couldn’t believe my ignorance.

  I shook my head.

  ‘He had his own programme on the television. Only BBC 2, but still . . .’

  ‘I don’t watch much telly.’

  ‘He designed gardens for rich people,’ Dickon said. ‘He didn’t do the digging or the weeding. Just the fun bits. That’s what he told me. He went all over the world. That’s why he wasn’t here much until he got ill.’ He chucked a piece of shingle with full force onto the rock. ‘I was pleased when he was ill. At first. He had more time for me. When he had to stay in bed we played Jenga.’

  The tide was coming in quickly now, seeping under the twisted strands of footprints, flattening them from below. I looked at my watch.

  ‘I’d better go. Mr Howdon will be cross if I’m late.’

  ‘I hate Mr Howdon,’ Dickon said. Quietly. Not showing off and demanding attention like with the other comments.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I think he’s horrible to my mum.’

  I didn’t pry. It was none of my business. He’d tell me if he wanted. He didn’t.

  ‘Will you show me the quickest way back to the house?’