Death in Summer

After the funeral the hiatus that tragedy brought takes a different form. The suddenness of the death has gone, irrelevant now. Thaddeus has stood and knelt in the church of St Nicholas, has heard his wife called good, the word he himself gave to a clergyman he has known all his life. People were present in the church who were strangers to him, who afterwards, in the house, introduced themselves as a few of Letitia’s friends from the time before he knew her. ‘And where is Letitia now?’ an undertaker a week ago inquired, confusing Thaddeus, who for a moment wondered if the man knew why he had been summoned. ‘It’s Letitia who has died,’ he said, and answered, when the man explained, that Letitia was in the mortuary, where she’d been taken.

All that is over now, and yet is coldly there in the first moment of waking every day: the coffin, the flowers laid out, the bright white surplice of the clergyman, dust to dust, and that seeming an insensitive expression at the time. There is Letitia’s mother in the graveyard, and some cousin, and a chubby woman whose bed was next but one to Letitia’s in a school dormitory more than twenty years ago. And there are all the others: local people, and colleagues from the music library, the postman who retired two years ago and was particularly fond of Letitia, the twins who come to clean the windows. There are the tears on Zenobia’s plump
cheeks, and Maidment gaunt and appalled. The day the heatwave began it was, that funeral afternoon, the empty blue of the sky touched upon in the clergyman’s brief eulogy. For as long as he lives, Thaddeus Davenant believes those funeral images will be there in the first moment of his waking.

He is a spare, handsome man in his mid-forties, with pale brown eyes beneath hair that almost matches them. Inheritor of a property set in the flatlands of Essex, he has been solitary even in marriage, this the legacy of an unusual childhood, compounded by his choosing to eke out a livelihood selling the produce of his garden rather than seeking to discover a vocation or otherwise claiming a profession.

Quincunx House, once more remote than it is now, was built by a tallow merchant, John Percival Davenant, in 1896, its name deriving from the five wild cherry trees he ordered to be planted, one at each corner of his high-walled garden, one at its centre. Many years later this garden became Thaddeus’s greatest pleasure. In it, he still saves his own seeds, and cultivates hellebores people would come to see if they knew about them. He has replaced decaying heathers with growth from their own new shoots. He has teased a vine back to life in his conservatory. He has been successful with blue poppies and the most difficult penstemons.

Among the memories that linger after the funeral there is Letitia learning the secrets of the garden – how to prune the wistaria, when to trim the yew, cosseting the ceanothus when frost threatened. There is Letitia resting beneath the catalpa tree, pregnant with the child she has left behind. Six years ago Thaddeus brought her here, Letitia Iveson, a person of almost wayward generosity, although she never
saw herself in such a light: plainness was what Letitia had seen and sighed over since adolescence and before. Thaddeus did not so harshly judge, finding in her features a tranquillity that challenged beauty with a distinction of its own: a Piero della Francesca face, he insisted with only a little exaggeration.

Before becoming a wife Letitia had lived with her mother in the spacious flat near Regent’s Park where she had passed her childhood, the relationship between the two bonded to some degree by the perpetual confinement of Mr Iveson in medical care. At his decree, while he still retained his senses, the Iveson family means had been divided into three: equal shares for the two women and for his nursing home. Twice a year, wife and daughter took a train to Bath, where this home — St Bee’s — spread through two houses in a crescent. Five times a week Letitia walked to the music library in Marylebone, her services at the disposal of musicologists and biographers, the reading-room her particular province. An ageing virgin, she considered herself then, and did not think much about marriage, since there had never been a reason to until Thaddeus came into her life.

In fact, though certainly ageing, Letitia became a younger wife. Her wealth restored the derelict state of Quincunx House, allowed the employment of a couple as cook and houseman, and dispensed with the necessity for Thaddeus to sell the garden’s fruit and vegetables. With difficulty, and after several disappointments, a daughter, Georgina, was born.

It had been Letitia’s wish, not Thaddeus’s, that there should be a child but, while wondering at the time what it was going to be like to have a baby about the place, he did
not demur, and soon after Georgina’s birth was surprised to find his feelings quite startlingly transformed. Marriage had changed everything in Letitia’s life. The birth of Georgina changed, in part, Thaddeus. Wizened and blotched, as tiny as a doll, she was Letitia’s object: Thaddeus imagined that would always be so and did not expect otherwise. But within a fortnight he found himself claiming his daughter, possessed by an affection he had been unable to feel for anyone since his own infancy.

All that is memory, too: images and moments that join the details of the funeral occasion, the lowered tones of the clergyman, a silence asked for. But most of all – remembered also by the households couple – is the last afternoon of Letitia’s life. Because of her disposition and Thaddeus’s practice in his marriage of saying too little rather than too much – her natural inclination to amity, his to mild prevarication – there was not often a disagreement between the two. But a drizzling Thursday in June had been affected since early morning by unusual inquietude: in passing a letter across the breakfast table, Thaddeus had blundered. Better, he later realized, to have slipped it into a pocket, as occasionally he did with awkward correspondence at breakfast-time. That morning he was careless, allowing himself to sigh over Mrs Ferry’s missive, and Letitia had smiled in sympathy and asked him what it was. He should have shaken his head and been evasive. Instead, he thought he might as well confess this continuing nuisance. ‘Haven’t I mentioned Mrs Ferry before?’ he asked, knowing he hadn’t but feeling that such an introduction was necessary. Letitia’s denial allowed him a description, which he lightly gave while the letter’s contents were read. But he
knew when the single sheet of violet-coloured writing–paper was handed back across the table that he’d been foolish.

He knew it even more certainly when the matter was raised again in the afternoon. At breakfast, about to crumple the letter into a ball, muddling it with the junk mail that had come, he changed his mind. He returned Mrs Ferry’s communication to its envelope and placed it beside him on the tablecloth, the gesture implying that he intended to sit down and compose a reply, and to send what Mrs Ferry was after, which was a cheque for fifty pounds.

‘You’ve done it?’ Letitia pressed in the afternoon.

‘This evening. I promise.’

The french windows of the drawing-room were misted with tiny droplets that did not merge to run down the glass: Thaddeus remembers that afterwards. He remembers the agitation in Letitia’s voice, and a pale tinge coming into the flesh of her round face – not brought about by jealousy of Mrs Ferry, for that would be ridiculous, but by her concern for a woman she did not know, who clearly had been on her mind all day, a woman he himself hadn’t laid eyes on for all of seventeen years.

‘Please, Thaddeus. She’s far from well.’

‘I doubt it’s true, you know, much of what she says about not being well.’

‘Why shouldn’t it be true? Poor creature, why shouldn’t she be alone and ill?’

In the dining-room, registering the exchanges through the door that is common to both rooms, Maidment learnt that Mrs Ferry’s plea for assistance was also a reminder that she had repeatedly written before and not once received an
answer. The poor woman was wretched with stomach ulcers and related suffering, came a further rebuke through the door panels. She called herself a charity case: afterwards Maidment particularly remembers that being said.

‘But, Letty, she would call herself anything to get money.’

‘And you have given her none? In all the years she mentions?’

‘I could not give Mrs Ferry your money, which is what it would amount to. I could not do that, and I had none to spare before.’

‘Please give her something now.’

‘If you would like me to I shall.’

‘Please.’

In the dining-room Maidment nodded to himself. His perusal of Mrs Ferry’s previous letters had not been confessed to his wife, whose disapproval could be biting when she put it into words. Eavesdropping Zenobia accepted, as conversation unavoidably overheard; the investigation of private correspondence, and poking about in drawers, she preferred to believe did not occur. So Maidment had kept to himself what he had long ago pieced together: that the woman who wrote the begging letters was guilty of the sin of profitable nostalgia; of resurrecting one or two good moments so that, in the circumstances as they were now, the past might be honoured with a cheque. The woman’s handwriting sprawled wildly, decorated with exclamation marks and underlining, Maidment recalled, listening again to the voices in the drawing-room.