Seven For a Secret (24 page)

She hesitated, thinking how competent he was being, how helpful and decisive, and how very many years too late. ‘They'll be fine at the house, if you could just tell them. Thanks,' she said.

‘No problem,' he said softly, leaning across and kissing her gently on the electric area at the edge of her mouth. ‘Take care driving, won't you?'

Kate knew the phone call had been bad news the moment she saw Iain lean across and kiss her mother. The old uncle must be dead, she assumed and Iain was being the first person to have to express a bit of sympathy. He really was a terrifically kind man, she thought as she watched him coming over alone towards her. She wondered, curiously, if he would kiss her, too, in sympathy, and how it would feel, having an elderly mouth in contact with her face. After all, it wasn't as if he was family. As Iain approached, he collected Suzy on the way and led her by her reluctant hand to where Kate was waiting to be told what was happening. While she waited in the dark, walking a little way up the lawn and separating herself from the rest of the gathering, she wondered how she should compose her face to react to the death of someone she neither knew nor particularly cared about. She wanted, she realized, to make Iain
want
to comfort her, put his arms round her and pull her against his large body. She hadn't even been properly kissed since Annabelle's birthday party, and she decided that if she was trying to make such a much older man fancy her, she must be getting sexually desperate.

‘Sorry about your uncle,' Iain said in a voice that was cheerfully normal, and he put his arm round Kate's shoulders, disappointingly as if she was a fellow chap in a rugby team. ‘He seems to be on his way out. Your mother's had to leave. Now will you two be all right at home on your own?' he asked, looking intently at Kate. ‘Or would you rather stay with Margot?'

‘I am nearly seventeen!' Kate blurted out with automatic scorn.

‘And I'm not a baby,' Suzy added, smiling, though, to emphasize that she did intend to be passably polite, even if Kate couldn't manage it.

‘Fine, I was just asking,' Iain said with a grin, moving his arm away from Kate.

‘Sorry,' Kate mumbled, wishing he would put his arm back and that she could snuggle cosily against him. Perhaps it was her dad she was missing, she thought, confused, though he'd never been all that much of a
touching
sort of father. He was affectionate enough in a distant sort of way, just hallo and goodbye kissing, and she'd always been thankful that their family wasn't like Annabelle's.
They
had frequent awful things called ‘bug-hugs', where they all gathered in a circle and put their arms round each other, making cooey noises and assuring each other loudly how much they were adored. She knew this because they'd once done it in front of
her
, when Annabelle's youngest brother had had a major telephone row with his best friend. She'd felt left out, she remembered, and she'd thought them very impolite to brandish their mutual smug love like that in front of her. It was her first suspicion that the nuclear family might not be altogether a wholly good thing. Too excluding and pleased with itself.

‘Could we go home
now
, do you think?' Suzy asked Kate. ‘I'm a bit bored really.'

‘OK,' Kate told her, ‘I don't suppose anything exciting will happen now, anyway.'

‘I'll walk you back, you can at least let me do that,' Iain insisted.

‘Where are you going, aren't you staying?' Tamsin, a huge blue mohair sweater now dousing the effect of her short slinky dress, challenged Suzy.

Suzy looked determinedly solemn. ‘Someone is dying,' she announced importantly, watching Tamsin carefully, but without much hope for any sign of genuine sympathy.

‘What, that old uncle you've never even met?' Tamsin demanded, ‘Why does that mean you've got to go home?'

‘Actually,' Suzy stated bravely, ‘I'm going because I'm bored stiff, if you want the truth, though I don't suppose you do.'

Tamsin's mouth fell open in surprise. ‘Oh. Oh well see you sometime. You will come camping with me though, won't you?' she asked anxiously.

‘I might, it depends,' Suzy told her loftily. ‘I'll phone you.'

‘About time you stood up to her,' Kate said admiringly as the three of them walked down the drive towards the road. ‘She runs rings round you.'

‘Not any more, by the sound of it,' Iain commented, watching Suzy stride on ahead with a newly confident bounce in her step. Kate turned to smile agreement at him and stumbled over a large stone. ‘Careful,' he said, grabbing her hand to steady her. All the way along the road back to their own house, Kate waited for him to let go. It was only when they reached her gate and he still hadn't that she realized she'd wasted all the time she could have enjoyed the feeling of his warm, firm hand, waiting for that feeling to end. What an idiot, she thought to herself. What a complete idiot.

The nurse assured them that Edward was completely unconscious, though Heather noticed she was still careful not to talk about him in his room as if he wasn't yet there at all. Outside the room she'd explained to them about his breathing. Of course Cheyne-Stokes had been nothing to do with chain-smoking, it was just an unfortunate near-eponym.

‘He takes one long breath, then nothing for a while, so you might think he's gone, and then there are short shallow breaths and the whole thing starts again,' the nurse warned them with a big, jovial, inappropriate grin before they went in to start the grim vigil. ‘I just had to mention it, otherwise you'd be forever pressing the buzzer to tell someone he's passed on.'

Delia was looking pale and was wearing her pink straw comfort-hat. Heather sat down on the opposite side of the bed and thought about asking her mother why on earth they were actually there, but the question sounded too bizarrely existential when asked across so nearly dead a man. Surely they could have simply been telephoned when he'd actually gone, especially if he had no idea they were in the room with him. And, poor man, if he
was
aware they were there, he could hardly fail to know he was about to meet his maker – why else would two distant relatives be summoned to his side in the middle of the night, other than to watch for his departure into the everlasting darkness? It was probably all to do with Administration, Heather concluded, as she curled her feet under her in the soft chair and tried to get comfortable. Perhaps if they could get his death over with, certified and tidied away in the night, the clinic could have another profitable patient occupying the room by midday tomorrow. It would disrupt their timetable if they had to leave Edward tidily laid out for a late-morning Family Viewing. What a cynic I'm becoming, she thought, her own long sigh coinciding noisily with one of old Uncle Edward's.

As she sat waiting in the half-dark, she thought about Iain. She put her finger to the edge of her mouth where he had so lightly and thoughtlessly kissed her. She stroked the edge of her lip, absent-mindedly trying to revive the sparky feeling. He had, quite literally, touched a nerve.

‘Do you think . . .' Delia cleared her throat and continued in a loud whisper, ‘do you think I should hold his hand?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps if you feel like it,' Heather whispered back. It occurred to her that not only she, but also her mother, might never have seen anyone dead before, though surely she had seen her own husband, paid those dutiful last respects? Perhaps Delia was frightened, she was certainly looking pale and nervous. They both looked at Edward's hands, which lay as dry and brittle as winter twigs on the white sheet. Every few moments his crab-claw fingers fluttered slightly, as if the trembling was to remind them there was still a tiny trace of life flickering feebly inside him and that it wasn't yet time to pull the sheet over his face. Maybe the twittering hands didn't want to be held, didn't want to have their last free movements stilled by well-meaning confinement.

Heather tried not to doze off. It was so silent, apart from the hoarse, irregular breathing of the old man, that she was sure she could hear a clock ticking out in the corridor. Unless that was Edward's slowly thudding heart, she suddenly thought, jerking herself back from the edge of sleep. ‘Shall I fetch us some tea?' she whispered across to her mother.

‘Please,' Delia said. ‘But don't be long,' she added fearfully.

Heather wandered, almost on tiptoe, along the brightly lit corridor, past the ticking clock (a relief there actually
was
one) to where the night-nurse sat at her desk and concentrated on some intricate pink knitting.

‘Tea?' she said, over the chattering needles. ‘I'll get it for you, no trouble – you go on back.'

‘No, I'll wait if you don't mind. It's nicer to be out of there, to be honest,' Heather told her, pleased to be with someone who could almost certainly be relied on not to be in the next world with her next breath. While she waited for the tea, Heather looked at the framed paintings on the wall. No two were remotely alike, and she wondered if they'd been done by patients undergoing occupational therapy, or those grateful to have been successfully discharged. Perhaps, she decided, they'd been ordered in bulk from the local art circle, set a project on ‘local landscapes – a personal interpretation'. She was looking closely at a very pretty and colourful one depicting an intricate naïve scene of Oxford market when the nurse came bustling back, carrying a tray.

‘You go on ahead, I'll carry this. Don't want you keeling over with the stress of it all,' she told Heather.

‘Do people usually keel over then?' Heather asked, as she trailed behind the nurse back along the corridor.

Delia was at the open door waiting for them. ‘I think he's gone,' she said in a quavery voice. ‘He just growled and stopped, and now I think he's not there any more.'

Heather squeezed her arm and walked past her into the room, half expecting the bed to be empty and the window open, as if the Grim Reaper had been in and claimed the old man's body along with his soul. The curtains drifted feebly in the breeze, and that was the only movement in the room. Edward looked exactly the same, but somehow empty. Whatever it was, life force, soul, whatever, Heather could see had vanished. She imagined him now in committee with St Peter and his keys, St Michael and his clipboard, and with God at the head of a long and important table.

‘I didn't do anything, he just went off. I didn't even quite catch the moment,' Delia was saying, flustered as if someone was about to accuse her of suffocating the old man the moment she'd got him alone.

‘Would you like the tea now?' the nurse asked and Heather thanked God in his celestial boardroom for England's silly rituals.

It was quite flattering to be sought out by Darren. The film crew were an obvious draw, but Darren didn't seem to be showing any interest in the action by the river. Simon had been on the point of losing interest himself, giving up and going back into the cottage to brood sullenly over Tamsin's Megadrive. Anything to take his mind off Kate and the way she hardly even
looked
at him any more. At least they used to be friends, now they didn't seem to be even that. She looked
through
him, not at him; could hardly even be bothered to say hello. Darren came swaggering up the rectory drive as if he owned the place, followed at a respectful distance by his brother Shane and a couple of large and shambling friends. Simon had a fleeting moment of wondering if they'd come to beat him up, but they all looked excited about something and he assumed it was connected with drugs. They might, he thought, have something to sell him that would cheer him up.

‘Remember you said you could drive?' Darren said, separating himself a little from the others who hung around under the apple trees smoking and scuffing at the ground in the dark. They should watch out for dog shit, Simon thought, quickly realizing it would be uncool to say anything so motherish.

‘Yeah. I remember,' Simon confirmed, sensing with slowly growing dread that something was about to be required of him. ‘What about it?'

‘We need a driver. Simple,' Darren said with a shrug and a broad grin.

‘Now?'

‘Yep, now. Right now. Well in your own time, the next couple of hours or so,' he added generously. ‘For a little job. Nothing difficult.'

‘Illegal?' Simon asked, horribly sure it was a stupid question.

‘Not very, not for the driver anyway. No worries,' Darren said, offering him a cigarette.

Simon wanted the cigarette, but didn't want the crime that went with it so he refused. ‘No, I don't want to get involved in anything, you know . . .'

Darren glanced at his shuffling group of friends. One of them had climbed a few branches and was investigating the treehouse.

‘My little sister's den,' Simon called to him. ‘Be careful up there.'

‘He won't fall, not Bugsy,' Darren reassured him, misunderstanding his concern.

Simon had no doubt that Bugsy, who was five feet five and built four-square like a pallet of bricks, would be safe enough – he was more concerned for the treehouse.

‘I just wanted to help you out,' Darren was saying persuasively to Simon, having led him out of earshot and towards the deserted front of the cloth-swathed rectory. ‘That girl, Kate, I just saw her going home. That old man was with her, the one that's staying here, and he was strolling along holding her hand.'

Simon groaned. ‘Bastard, jerk,' he murmured.

‘Exactly,' Darren agreed. ‘And when I say holding her hand, I don't mean like some little kid that needs taking across the road. She obviously likes things – men – that are a bit different, if you know what I mean. She needs to see
you
that way, not some
old
sod. She thinks you're just ordinary. You want to show her you're not.'