Carnforth's Creation (27 page)

A sticky midsummer day; overcast but dry. Rain would have been better, thought Paul; but perhaps only flooding would have made any difference to the numbers. As he and Eleanor walked towards the cemetery gates, they might have been on their way to a concert, rather than a funeral, so numerous were the fans. Indeed there would be music before the burial; but Paul had had nothing to do with the arrangements, and was dismayed that Exodus’s publicity folk seemed bent on using the event to rack up a final burst of sales, before Rory Craig joined the silent constellation of extinguished stars.

Within weeks, rather than months, the fuss would be over. The coroner’s inquest had come up with nothing new; and although Paul had been interviewed by the police a fortnight before the funeral, it had been a curiously anticlimatic occasion (his inquisitors’ main concern being to test the theory that Roy might have been abducted by underworld thugs in the pay of professional rivals). The few questions touching on Eleanor’s relations with Roy, had been put to him as an apologetic afterthought. If Bridget had confirmed his dates (as Paul was sure she must have done), he saw no reason why he should be questioned again. But, though relieved, Paul had other troubles – Eleanor’s alarming
depression
for one. Buoyed-up at first, and elated by the success of his strategems; now for no reason he could
understand
she seemed to view them with revulsion.

Within sight of the Graeco-Victorian pillars at the entrance to the memorial park, Eleanor hesitated, and then turned back. Tempted to do the same, Paul understood her feelings.
To be swept along in a crowd of weeping girls – many of them holding aloft photographs of ‘Rory Craig’, who had never existed – was painful and unnerving to anyone who had known Roy.

Not long after his wife’s departure, Paul caught sight of Gemma perched on the stone plinth of a funerary angel. He pushed towards her through the crowd, and clambered up behind. With Eleanor gone, who else better to be with? Gemma’s eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. She too would be burying memories. Remote from him now, yet close in this, she smiled as he grasped the angel’s other wing.

From this vantage point, Paul could see across the heads of the fans to the graveside. The surrounding area was
roped-off
and piled high with flowers: wreaths, sprays, posies; as if the entire stock of a florist’s shop had been dropped from the sky. Not far away were two hillocks clad in some synthetic green material; artificial grass, tactfully concealing earth. Next to them, a neat black hole, with a low dais at one end, and on it a solitary microphone, presumably to convey the minister’s words to the furthest corners of the cemetery.

Already a prey to inapposite thoughts, Paul imagined Roy lifting the lid of his coffin, reaching for the mike, and singing one last song. Callously flip or not, this image choked him with regret. Above all he felt fury that events should have made such nonsense of the mood he had Gemma had first set out in. What business had death to come blundering in? A cheap avant garde theatrical trick: making audiences laugh, the better to mock them when the play turned savage.

And now the glossy black hearse and attendant vehicles were inching through the press of spectators. As the cortège halted, from strategically placed amplifiers came music, without words. Paul wished he could not remember them.

Against a background of music and weeping, the
clergyman’s
voice: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord …’ Cameras poked forward obtrusively as the coffin was withdrawn from the hearse.

A bad moment near the end when several girls broke through the cordon and kissed the coffin; bad because Roy’s father tried to push them away and nearly fell. When Gemma moved away after an exchange of consolatory banalities, Paul did not follow. In the end what had they had to talk about? Only Roy – the same at every meeting for a year or more. At times in the ceremony, Paul had suffered the illusion that they were not so much burying Roy, as his own past.

Returning to the car afterwards, he left the path and took a short-cut between the graves, none of them more than a decade old in this part of the cemetery. He hardly noticed the green bath-salt chippings, and jam-jars holding dead flowers. Perhaps it was the idea of vanished lives that suggested it, but he found himself recalling something he’d told Matthew years ago: ‘If you want to find the real you, don’t waste time peering inside yourself. Ask how your friends see you.’ Matthew’s reply had seemed silly enough to stick. ‘What if you ever lost them?’

Without Paul noticing, the clouds had gone, and it had become glorious weather. Not an afternoon on which to bear black grudges, or hand out blame for a young man’s death. Wind blew through the car as they drove along tree-lined roads intersecting tidy suburbs. Behind her veil Eleanor remained coldly silent. ‘I suffer too,’ he would have like to tell her. ‘Even at the death of my wife’s lover, I suffer.’ But that would only have opened the floodgates of her
unhappiness
.

Yet as the miles rolled back, Paul sensed a new mood in her: not gaiety precisely, not happiness, but something light and confident. No longer a ravaged face and shadowy eyes. He smiled experimentally.

‘You look frightful,’ she told him, as though old Elly had come home after a long absence.

She looked at the passing fields and hedges, then
murmured
softly, ‘A strange thing happened when I was waiting – Matthew spotted me.’ She looked to him as if for
encouragement
. ‘He was incredibly abusive. Wished he’d never set eyes on you … said you’d wheedled Bridget into lying to the police. Asked point-blank if you’d had a hand in Roy’s death.’

Paul accelerated past a lorry. ‘What did you say?’

Eleanor smiled behind her veil. ‘That he shouldn’t be hard on you, because
I
did it, and you saved me.’

‘I’m not in a mood for jokes. I happen to know he’s in the States.’

‘Came back specially.’ Her face became serious. ‘So then I told him the truth; and can you guess? He wouldn’t believe that either; not a single solitary word.’ Her voice had risen to a pitch inviting laughter, but Paul did not laugh. ‘But darling,’ she told him, ‘you ought to be over the moon.’

‘You think so?’

‘Those wonderful ideas you had … life as fantasy. You finally made it, Paul.
I
don’t believe in you, your friends don’t either. Perhaps you made yourself up.’

Paul thought he detected slight hysteria beneath her levity. He said very gently, ‘I want us to start again … pick up at the point before Roy came in.’

Eleanor frowned; seemed to consider. Paul waited tensely. The scenery constantly changing: a wood, the sprawling outskirts of a town, corn-fields. He let her hand seek his as he changed down for a corner.

‘What is a person?’ she asked abruptly.

‘Dear God, Elly,’ he couldn’t help exploding.

‘A ragbag of memories?’ she suggested. ‘Or slightly more than that? The memories
and
the bag they’re in?’ She seemed anxious for his opinion. ‘Surely you know what I’m driving at?’

Paul said nothing, but thought he
did
know. Yes, memory. He pictured himself in a new and unfamiliar country. His old
friends all gone. New ones now. New experiences. It matters less and less that he recalls increasingly little of his past. But if he forgets entirely; loses all his memories? No; suppose (for this was surely Elly’s point), suppose nothing in the past can be relied upon?

‘Are you sure you saw Matthew?’ he asked, uneasily.

‘Absolutely,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘He was in a
brand-new
leather coat.’ She lifted her veil. ‘You’re not convinced?’ No answer. ‘Then nothing I can say will persuade you.’ She clapped impatiently. ‘Don’t you see yet? It’s all fantasy now … nothing else.’

Paul jabbed irritably at the horn, though no car was in sight. ‘You either saw him or you didn’t.’

‘Paul,’ she sighed, ‘what difference can it make to you? What’s certain is he wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Little things like truth or falsehood don’t concern us any more.’ Her eyes were sympathetic. ‘Don’t worry, it gets less scaring as you get used to it.’

‘Used to what?’ he whispered.

‘Choosing what happened to us,’ she said mildly, stating the obvious. ‘Like living back-to-front … planning the past instead of the future.’ A faint grin. ‘But everything’s the past sooner or later. Like Roy.’

He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Oh yes, we’re just shadows and inventions now.’ He drummed his hands on the wheel. Leave it; wait; of course she’d want to go on hurting him for a while after the funeral. But he still couldn’t dismiss it all as a needling word-game. She was too serious for that. Calmer and more lucid than at any time in recent months.

‘The great thing is,’ she reassured him, ‘we’ve got one of those chain things …’ she snapped her fingers. ‘What one pulls to stop a train.’

‘That’s nice,’ he said, easing the accelerator. A white speck had appeared in his mirror.

He glanced sideways and was troubled by her expression: self-absorbed, focussed upon some memory. She punched absently at the buttons on the radio and came up with
Image
Man
at the third try. Paul couldn’t help the kind of shiver
caused by outlandish coincidence (though, really, today was certain to be thick with his songs on all the ‘light music’ channels). Roy’s voice filled the car:

Paul switched off, and was glad she made no effort to turn it on again. Not long afterwards she began talking in a low insistent voice. Of course it’d been pure sentimentality to start with … keeping them. Keeping what? ‘Roy’s car keys,’ she whispered, as if unaware of his sharp intake of breath. ‘I know I should’ve dropped them down a drain, like you said. Silly perhaps … but later, when everything started working perfectly, just as you’d said it would, it used to comfort me to look at them sometimes … a kind of proof.’ As Paul listened, weakness seemed to enter him from every side. ‘Of course I thought about the risks when the police started to cast around. But I still didn’t want to let them go … So I put them in the one place nobody would ever guess.’ She smiled wanly. ‘In the bank. In the box my diamond heart usually lives in. That’s what’s on the receipt: ‘diamond brooch’. You know they never look before sealing things.’

Paul’s voice grated, ‘He must have had several sets.’

A little shrug. ‘Wouldn’t the police have found the others at his place?’

Whether it was deliberate or not, Paul could not tell, but as she moved, he saw the diamond heart glinting against her black silk shirt. Her coat slipped back over it.

He thought of the endless pains he had gone to on the night he had moved the body; immersing Roy one more time to remove any fibres left by the towels that had covered him; cleaning the soles of his shoes in case the soil at Delvaux had been different. A task four hours long, including the drive, and in its last phase more terrifying and exhausting than he would have thought possible.

And any day she chose, Eleanor could pull her chain. She was looking at him with concern.

‘Just a straw of reality, if we ever need it.’ She kissed his cheek. ‘Honestly sweet, do you think I’d want to be locked up as your accomplice?’ Suddenly she laughed and pointed. Unnoticed the white speck had grown larger. A police car sliding past.

‘Let’s see,’ she said playfully, tugging at the wheel. ‘
Fantasy
or reality?’ Paul dashed away her hand.

Five minutes later, passing through sunlit beech woods: a surprising change of mood. She seemed repentant; almost vulnerable. Paul was confused when she returned to the subject of the keys. ‘I made it all up, Paul.’

He was surprised to find her confession moving. ‘Why on earth?’ he murmured, thankful he could still believe her.

‘I thought I needed a bargaining counter. But I’ve changed my mind.’ No hint of apology as she turned to him again. ‘What would you say if I told you I was pregnant?’

His eyes remained fixed on the road, sad at first, but soon bright. ‘I’d say have it,’ he declared. Then very gently, ‘And to hell with what it looks like.’