Hush (31 page)

‘He actually fell
through
the table?’ Richard sounded mildly impressed.

‘Yeah, well, the table was one of those long ones with lots of separate sections that you join together. They’re pretty badly designed, actually. So he fell into the middle and the whole thing just sort of collapsed in on itself.’ Nathan grinned. ‘I like to think he ended up with a trifle on his head, but I’m pretty sure that’s just wishful thinking.’

‘Well, it makes a better story, and, seeing as none of us was there, we might as well go with it,’ Richard said, reaching for the wine bottle and topping up their glasses.

There was definite movement outside now: not just the flickerings of her imagination, nor the reflections of their movements. Connie noticed her squinting at the window.

‘What’s up with you tonight?’ she asked, downing half of her wine in one mouthful. ‘You keep looking at the doors as though someone’s about to burst through them.’

Lily shrugged. ‘I saw something.’

‘Something like a person? Or something like a reflection?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Want me to go and have a look?’ Richard was on his feet without waiting for an answer, and Nathan was a second behind him. Connie rolled her eyes at Lily, but didn’t try to stop them.

The key hung on a hook next to the fridge. Richard unlocked the door and pulled it open, letting in a blast of cold air as he did so. ‘God, that’s
freezing
,’ Connie muttered, just a bit too quiet for them to hear.

Both men stepped out into the garden and vanished from view. The open door was like a hole of pure darkness in the reflected light of the glass. After a moment of glaring at it, Connie got up and slammed it shut behind them, muttering darkly about men being born in barns.

‘Should we go out there?’ Lily felt uneasy, the closed door like a barrier.

‘Oh, leave them to it. They like nothing better than being manly and protective. And anyway, my coat’s by the front door and I can’t be bothered to get it.’ Connie sat back down and took another long gulp of her wine. ‘What did you think you saw, anyway?’

Lily shrugged. ‘A person, maybe?’

‘Have you seen things out there before? When it’s just been you and Richard?’

Lily looked at her, weighing up her answer. ‘I don’t come in here much,’ she admitted after a moment.

‘Because of what happened?’

Lily shrugged again. She was toying with the stem of her wine glass, seeing how far she could tilt the glass without it being in danger of tipping over. In her head, it overbalanced, spitting wine across the table in all directions; in reality it stayed upright, resting in a tidy ring of its own dribbled contents.

‘How can you stand living here?’ Connie asked, softly, which made Lily look up at her.

‘You did.’

‘I didn’t have a choice. I was a child. And I left as soon as I could… You can go anywhere you want.’

Lily thought for a moment. ‘We haven’t got the money.’

‘They’re still paying you, aren’t they? I’m sure you could survive for a while on your salary.’

‘But Richard doesn’t want to. And he thinks…’ She looked at the door, as if he was going to come bursting through it. ‘He doesn’t know, okay? About Billy. He thinks being here will be good for me. That I’ll get over whatever issues I have with our parents and lay old ghosts to rest, or something.’

It had been a lifetime since Connie had heard her utter so many words in one go. ‘Why haven’t you told him?’

Lily shrugged.

‘Does he know about the institute? About you not talking at all?’

Lily nodded, looking back down at the wine glass. A single drop of red wine worked its way down the outside of the glass, and was almost at the bottom when she caught it with the tip of her finger and lifted it to her lips.

‘So why does he think you went there?’

Lily shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. Stuff to do with Mama, maybe.’

‘You told him about Mama?’

Lily nodded.

‘I haven’t told Nathan much about it,’ Connie admitted after a minute. ‘He knows about her being ill, obviously, because he knew I went to visit her. But I didn’t go into details.’

‘Does he know about Billy?’

‘No.’

They looked at each other, a new awareness springing up between them. This was it, then. Just the two of them.

The door burst open, bringing in a flurry of cold air and movement. ‘Nothing out there,’ Nathan announced cheerfully, stamping the cold out of his shoes and pulling his coat off. ‘It was probably just our reflections in the glass.’

Lily nodded, and Connie said, ‘That’s what we were thinking. Thanks for checking, though.’

Richard and Nathan rejoined the table, the cold from outside clinging to their clothes with the ferocity of cigarette smoke. Richard slipped a hand under the table and found Lily’s fist, clenched in her lap, and enclosed it with his fingers. ‘Feel better?’ he asked, softly.

She nodded. ‘Thanks.’ She looked up, and for a brief moment her eyes met Connie’s across the table, and she was surprised by what she saw there: no accusation, no judgement; nothing, really, except compassion. Then they both looked away, and Lily kept her gaze fixed on the table for the rest of the night, the eyes in the glass behind her pricking at the hairs on the back of her neck.

Marcus was shaking as he got into the car. All the good cheer he had been carefully cultivating throughout the day slipped out of his grasp and he was left, raging and impotent, wishing for a life that had taken a different course. The things Anna had said boiled in his brain and fizzed beneath his skin, retorts flashing redundantly in his brain now, far too late. Perhaps he would write them down for use in a later argument. It would be a shame to waste them.

He slammed the car door and thought fleetingly of Lily, upstairs, hiding out of their way: would she be okay, left with her mother? Was Anna in such a fragile state that she would hurt Lily? He dismissed the thought immediately. She could be a danger to herself, perhaps, but never to her children.

He felt guilty, though. Leaving on Christmas Day. And when things had been going so well… He would have to make it up to Lily later.

He started the car and pulled out, too quickly, not concentrating on where he was going. He realised that it wasn’t just blood fizzing in his veins, and took a moment to steady himself. No point getting arrested just because he was angry. It certainly wouldn’t put him in a better mood; in theory they could keep him in the cells overnight if they caught him drink-driving, and he would struggle to hold on to his licence.

He drove carefully through the residential areas, despite the fact that there was no one around. As soon as he got to the
outskirts of town he sped up, and registered the release, the sense of exhausted satisfaction as he floored the accelerator and felt the car rumble beneath him. The needle climbed from thirty to sixty, seventy, eighty. He pulled on to a long, straight stretch of country road and got up to ninety-five before forcing himself to ease up and drop back down to the speed limit.

There was a certain amount of satisfaction in acting like an idiot. Doing things that he knew Anna would disapprove of. He had spent so much of his married life being the sensible one, making sure he was together for his children, supporting his basket case of a wife. Putting up with her acting however she wanted, whenever she wanted, without sparing a thought for him. He was sick of it. Connie had known: he was sure that was why she’d gone. She’d finally woken up to the fact that her parents were hopeless, her entire family a sham, and had got out the only way she knew how.

He almost wished she’d taken him with her.

Thinking of Connie, he felt a pull of regret that was so close to being physical pain as to be indistinguishable. If only he’d done something to help. Something to make her realise that she wasn’t alone, that she could talk to him, that he would support her and let her be whoever she really was. He had never been frank enough with his daughters, he realised. Never let them know that they could tell him about anything, that he would never judge them the way their mother did.

He’d been too wrapped up in just trying to make sure everyone stayed alive.

He came to a village, and dropped down to twenty. Felt the drop in speed as if it were his own power falling away, rather than the car’s. Crawled through empty streets, feeling hemmed in by the slowness, longing to push back up to a speed that felt in tune with his mood.

The wine he’d drunk earlier had exacerbated his rage, and the speed had added to it; now both had faded and he felt
drained, dullness seeping in around the edges. He clawed for his anger, wanting it back, but it had been replaced by a numb sense of realisation, a feeling of stuckness. No matter how fast he drove he would not leave behind his reality. He would never be like his daughters, free to escape, to go wherever they chose. He would be forever stuck in a life that he had once viewed as his choice.

A rabbit darted out in front of his car, and he swerved, too violently, almost slamming himself into a tree. He pulled over immediately, his tiredness obliterated by the adrenaline suddenly coursing through his veins. He forced himself to breathe deeply, evenly. Held his hands out in front of his face, and noted the fact that they were shaking uncontrollably.
Close call
, he thought, his breath shuddering in his chest.

He leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes.

He must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes again it was dark, and he felt disorientated. The road he was on was just outside a village, and there were no streetlights. The dark on the other side of the windows seemed thick, syrupy, and full of movement. The green numbers on the dashboard flashed the time at him: 17:02. He had missed dinner, then.

Stiffly, reluctantly, he switched the engine back on, and tried to get himself into a driving frame of mind.

He flicked the lights on, illuminating the road in front of him and further deepening the darkness of the trees on either side. He was struck by the stupidity of falling asleep in a darkened car at the side of an unlit road: if anyone had come down here without paying close attention they would have careered straight into the side of him, and he would have been crushed. Thankfully there was no traffic on the road, but if it had been any other day he wouldn’t have been so lucky.

He pulled out into the road, driving cautiously now, as if to counteract his earlier behaviour. He turned around as soon
as he could and began heading back home, driving within the speed limit, trying not to let exhaustion get the better of him. In his post-sleep stiffness he felt bone-weary and emptied; his eyes flickered across the road, taking in nothing, while he strained to keep them open.

It was probably the fact that he was driving slowly that killed him, the coroner said later. At the side of the road, tied to a tree, was what looked like a man in a Father Christmas outfit. It had been hung in such a way that, when the wind blew, it drifted out into the road. Had Marcus been going faster, he would never have noticed it; or at least he wouldn’t have seen it clearly enough to think it was a man.

It blew outwards, and for the second time that evening, Marcus swerved to avoid something in his path; only this time he forgot to brake, and the front of his car crunched itself around the trunk of a tree on the other side of the road.

The Father Christmas – a collection of balloons, wrapped in red crêpe paper, and decorated with a Santa hat – floated back towards the other side of the road, undamaged.

The air was freezing as they stepped outside the house, breath encasing faces in vaporous clouds. Lily and Connie were dressed virtually identically, in blue jeans, black boots, large black coats. Only their hair was different: Lily had pulled hers back into a ponytail, whereas Connie had hers down, flowing around her face. Richard surveyed them while locking up the house, and realised they could almost be twins: only the tiny creases at the corner of Connie’s eyes hinted at the fact that she was older.

The three of them stomped their way down the lane, their voices unnaturally loud in the Boxing Day stillness. Lily stopped often to admire plants at the side of the road, and every time she did so Connie stood impatiently, pointedly not joining in, wanting to be on her way. ‘You don’t have to look at them all
now
,’ she said, when Lily stopped for the fourth time. ‘Why can’t you look on the way home?’

Lily shrugged, and resumed walking, just a beat behind her sister. They grew silent, and their pace slowed, as they approached the church. It was a small, unimpressive building, on the corner of a lane, surrounded by a low brick wall with a domed top. There was no one around – they were too late for morning service, and the little gate which led to the churchyard was locked. Connie pushed at it a couple of times, frustrated, making Lily laugh.

‘What?’ Connie asked, indignant. ‘I don’t want to have to come back tomorrow.’

Lily gave her a mock-scornful look, and leapt over the wall in a single movement, turning to face them from the other side with her arms held out triumphantly. ‘Ta-da!’

‘All right,’ Connie muttered, following suit in a less acrobatic manner. ‘Show-off.’

Richard grinned, and followed them both. Frost-coated leaves crunched on the grass on the other side of the wall, and the ground was uneven, strewn with slanted headstones.

‘Do you know where it is?’ Lily’s voice was hushed, as if instinctually not wishing to disturb the slumber of the dead.

‘You were at her funeral too,’ Connie replied, her voice equally quiet. ‘It was round here somewhere, wasn’t it?’

They picked their way through the headstones to a less crowded patch of grass, trying not to walk on graves where possible. The headstones here were newer, the marble and limestone gleaming in contrast to the weathered stones nearer the entrance. The lettering was clearly visible, etched deep into the stone: names and dates that meant little to any of them.

‘Why didn’t we get her buried next to Dad?’ Lily asked.

‘There was no room,’ Connie replied, her voice vague as her eyes skated over the lettering on the headstones.

‘But why didn’t she buy a double grave? When he died?’

‘I don’t know.’ Connie shrugged. ‘I guess she didn’t want to spend eternity sleeping next to him. Hardly surprising, is it?’

‘But she never remarried.’ Lily’s voice was puzzled, as if she’d never really thought about it before.

‘What’s your point?’

‘I don’t know.’

They carried on searching in silence, splitting off in different directions, and after a minute Richard called out to them both. They gathered around a small headstone in a pale, yellowish stone. The lettering was brief and to the point.
Anna Emmett, 1943–2010. Rest in peace.

‘They only put the stone up a couple of weeks ago,’ Connie said. She brushed the top of it with gloved fingers, feeling the cold deadness of the stone through the wool.

‘It looks nice,’ Richard offered, when Lily said nothing. ‘Did you choose it?’

‘“Choose” isn’t really the right word for it,’ Connie said dismissively. ‘Mama was pretty specific about what she wanted.’

Lily crouched down in front of the stone, uncomfortably aware that she was standing directly on top of what was left of her mother. She took her glove off and traced the letters of her name with a finger, surprised at the smoothness, the perfection of the carving. ‘She was young, really, wasn’t she?’

‘She got to a good age, considering,’ Connie said bluntly. Lily nodded, but didn’t reply. She stood up after a moment, her knees cracking in protest. ‘Shall we find Dad?’

‘Okay, then.’ It was only as they began to move away that Lily realised they should have brought flowers, or something to show that they’d been here. She looked around, searching for something suitable. There was a holly bush at the edge of the churchyard, and she pulled off a sprig of holly, adorned with a vibrant red berry, and placed that on the stone. Richard, watching from a distance, nodded his approval. Connie had already vanished into the maze of stones.

Because the graves were in no particular order, it took them a while to find Marcus’s. As she searched, Lily caught glimpses of names she recognised, like familiar faces in a crowd: the names of old neighbours, people who had attended her father’s funeral, now gone themselves. It made her feel odd: sad, to think that many of the people she remembered from her childhood had not moved on but had simply been laid to rest in her absence; and glad, that they were here, together, all in the same place.

‘Hey, Lily.’

She looked up. Connie was invisible for a second, crouched down to look at something, and then she stood up and waved. ‘Over here.’

‘Have you found him?’

‘No.’ She beckoned again, and Lily picked her way across the churchyard towards her sister. She looked around for Richard but couldn’t see him; he must have gone round the side of the building.

Connie was crouched next to a tiny headstone, about half the size of the others, and she beckoned for Lily to crouch down next to her. The words on the neighbouring headstones had been somewhat obscured by the passing of time, by lichen smothering the stone, but this stone looked brand new.
William Edward Thompson, 1974–1985. Beloved son.

‘It was twenty-five years ago,’ Lily whispered, reaching out a hand to touch his name, then pulling it back, almost afraid.

‘Makes you feel old, huh?’ Connie smiled, but it was a sad smile, and there were tears in the corners of her eyes. They crouched there together, not saying anything, until Richard came upon them a minute later.

‘I’ve found your dad,’ he said, peering over the headstone behind them. ‘Who have you found?’

‘Oh, just an old friend,’ Connie said, standing up and brushing non-existent dirt from her jeans. ‘Where’s Dad?’

Richard led them to the grave, which was near a wall at the back of the churchyard. It was under a covering of trees, so that it felt dark and gloomy, the thin light offered by the grey sky obscured by a cluster of leafless branches. The stones under the trees were more heavily marked than those out in the open, and Marcus’s headstone was almost illegible under a coating of dirt and lichen.

‘It’s so dirty,’ Connie murmured, brushing at it with her fingers and knocking off dark clumps of filth. ‘Didn’t Mama ever think to get it cleaned?’

Lily didn’t reply, thinking of the day of his funeral.

‘It doesn’t look as though she came down here much,’ Richard volunteered, his voice quiet and solemn.

The three of them stood in silence for a while. Richard thought of the man he’d never met, who had had such an influence on the woman he loved. He’d never asked Connie about him. Never bothered to find out if they’d been close. But he knew from rare conversations with Lily that the only stability the two of them had had in their childhood had come from him.

After five minutes, Lily turned and walked away, back to the place where they’d jumped over the wall. Richard stayed with Connie, standing silently behind, until she drew herself out of her thoughts and realised that he was there and that Lily was gone.

‘I’ve never bothered,’ she said, and her voice was quiet and rough with tears. ‘I just thought – well, graves aren’t really relevant, are they? This isn’t
him
.’

‘No,’ Richard agreed. ‘It’s not him. But it’s a representation of him.’

‘It’s a terrible representation.’

‘Well, it’s dead, and he was alive. So that’s hardly surprising. But it’s supposed to signify the everlasting spirit, you know? The fact that, even though he’s gone, he still made a mark on the world that was permanent and irremovable.’

‘It’s not much of a mark.’ Connie gestured vaguely around them. ‘It’s the same as everyone else’s.’

‘It’s the only one that has his name on it.’

Connie shrugged. ‘What’s in a name?’ There was a pause, and then they both laughed. ‘Sorry. I’ll stop it now. I just feel guilty, I guess. Because I’ve never done anything to show how much he meant to me. I never even went to his funeral.’

Richard was surprised. ‘Really? How come?’

‘Lily never said?’

‘I don’t think we’ve ever spoken about it.’

‘Oh.’ Connie looked up, to where her sister was perched on the wall, swinging her feet and kicking the concrete lightly with her heels. ‘I was away when Dad died. I was in Germany.’

‘Oh.’ Richard did some quick maths, figured out how old she would have been. ‘School trip? They could have waited until you got back, couldn’t they?’

‘No, it wasn’t a school trip. I ran away.’ Her eyes were still on Lily, though they seemed to be focused on something else entirely.

‘For how long?’

‘Maybe eleven months, a year? I meant to ring, but I kept putting it off and putting it off… You assume the world is just carrying on in the same old way, when you’re wrapped up in yourself like that. Never occurs to you that things might change. When I finally got round to coming back, he was long dead and Lily had gone back to our grandparents’ house and I… Well.’

The sentence hung between them, uncomfortably. ‘What did you do?’ Richard asked eventually.

‘Oh, you know. This and that. My grandparents helped me get somewhere to live. I visited Lily fairly often. And when she went to uni I moved nearby, met Nathan, and, well, the rest is history.’

‘Do you regret running away?’

‘Yes.’ Connie took a last look at her father’s headstone, and then started to walk back towards Lily. ‘Come on. The kids will be wondering where I’ve got to.’

Lily had been looking at her feet, but she looked up when she heard them coming, and smiled. The three of them linked arms once they were on the other side of the wall, and walked home in a line, not saying a word, completely unaware that, from the corner of the churchyard, their movements were being watched.