The Sleeping and the Dead (13 page)

Recreating the scene in her head, Hannah thought it had been the beginning of December. She could remember the cold. He must have been in the town for three months but still she had no idea that
his family was different from anyone else’s. They hadn’t talked about it. She hadn’t told him about the drama with her father, though it was possible that the others had been
whispering behind her back. At that age families weren’t as important as friends.

‘Old folks?’ she said. It seemed an odd way to talk about parents.

‘Sylvie and Steve. You’ll see.’

‘You call your mum and dad by their first names?’

‘No. They’re not my parents. My mother’s dead. My father . . .’ He seemed thrown for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t get to see much of him.’

They walked slowly up the school drive to the house. It was almost dark by the time they arrived at the house, one of a small row, flat faced. As the light went the temperature plummeted. They
stood for a moment on the pavement, looking in. There was a street lamp and they could see their breath as a white mist. The lights were on inside but the curtains had not been drawn. There was a
fire in the grate and an elderly man sat on a leather armchair, with a cat on his knee, reading.

‘That’s Steve,’ Michael said with enormous affection. He took out a Yale key and let himself in.

Inside there was a smell of fruit and spice. A small kitchen led straight from the hall and she’d seen Sylvie, red faced, turning a cake on to a wire tray. She looked slightly flustered.
Her hair had come loose from her comb. Michael put his arm around her.

‘This is Hannah,’ he said. ‘She’s a George Eliot fan too. I’ve brought her home for tea. You don’t mind?’

‘Of course we don’t mind.’ She smiled at Hannah. ‘We haven’t met any of his friends before. I think he’s ashamed of us.’

‘How could I be?’ he said.

Hannah didn’t know what to make of the relationship between Michael and the Brices. Usually she was jealous of other people’s home lives. Her own was so bleak. Her mother struggled
on to keep the house as she wanted it. They hadn’t been forced to sell, though at one time that had been a possibility. There was even less money than there had been before and Audrey hated
the forced economies. She pretended not to mind the gossip and in fact seldom went out to hear it. Television had become her consolation. Hannah was grateful because it provided a safe topic of
conversation. Without it they would have had little to say to each other. Later she thought that her mother had been depressed and had been brave to keep things as normal as she did. Then she
longed to be a part of a different sort of family. That’s why she spent so much time with Sally. Her dream family would have been quite like Sally’s, but the parents would have been
younger, interested perhaps in different things. There would be a brother as well as a sister and they would have shared meals together discussing ideas about books and plays. There would have been
noise and laughter. At the time she didn’t consider Michael’s situation as ideal. It was too different from her dream. Everything was so quiet. There was discussion but it was calm and
measured.

There was one room which served as living- and dining-room. They sat at a round mahogany table and drank tea from translucent china cups, ate crumpets which Michael squatted by the fire to
toast, and the cake Sylvie had baked. They talked about Stephen’s lecture on the Psalms. At one point Michael reached out and touched Sylvie’s hand.

‘Why don’t you go too?’ he said. ‘You know you’d enjoy it and I’ll be perfectly fine here on my own.’

‘I’m sure you would be.’ Her voice was serene. ‘But Stephen and I have had a lifetime together and I’ll have your company for such a short while. I’d prefer
to stay and make the most of it.’

Then she asked him the question about his having been abroad.

Hannah had always been an observer. Even in her youth she could usually work out what was going on between people. But the situation in the Brices’ home confused her. She couldn’t
make out at all where Michael fitted in.

After tea the Brices refused the offer of help with the washing-up and Michael took Hannah to his bedroom to find her his notes. She was tidier than most of her friends but his room was almost
Spartan in its lack of clutter. She wondered if he had planned to invite her back and had cleared it specially, but she went there on subsequent occasions and it was always the same. It reminded
her of a cell.

‘Are they your grandparents?’ she asked.

‘No, we’re no relation. They’re just friends.’

‘Friends of your father’s?’

‘Yes,’ he said, seeming grateful for an explanation that worked. ‘That’s right.’

It was a small room but there was a big desk under the window, of the kind that you’d have found in offices everywhere. It had three drawers on each side of the knee-hole. It wasn’t
well made. The varnish was scratched and the top was chipped. Michael seemed flustered when he couldn’t find the notes where he’d expected them to be, with others in the top drawer.

‘Sorry, I thought I’d brought everything with me. But obviously not.’

‘Couldn’t they be somewhere else?’ Hannah yanked open a bottom drawer which was wider than the others. When it came to school work she was competitive. She wanted the notes, a
chance to shine in the essay. She hadn’t come along just for the chance to know Michael better. She had expected to find more files in the drawer, neatly labelled, but it was empty apart from
a shoebox, the sort she had collected when she was young for use in
Blue Peter
projects. He must have had the box for a long time. It was too small to hold shoes of the size he wore
then.

Michael slammed the drawer shut with a ferocity which almost trapped her hand.

‘There’s nothing in there. I told you, I must have left them behind.’

‘Sorry.’ She looked at him, expecting an explanation. He said nothing.

The incident seemed to have thrown him. Hannah thought he was angry about the invasion of his privacy and apologized more profusely. It was something she could understand. He hardly seemed to
hear what she was saying and when she said that her mother would be expecting her he seemed relieved to see her go. When Hannah saw him at school the next day he greeted her as if nothing had
happened.

For several weeks she was haunted by the mystery of the small, blue shoebox. She imagined it contained answers to her questions about Michael.

Just before Christmas she was invited back to the Brices for mince pies and mulled wine. She made an excuse to go upstairs, slipped into Michael’s room and opened the drawer. She hated
herself for doing it. Her hands were sweating as she tried to turn the knob. She had kept the door open so she would hear if anyone was coming. But it was an anticlimax. The drawer was empty. When
she returned to the others Michael looked at her as he had on his first morning in the common-room, as if he knew exactly what she’d been up to.

Throughout the interview both Porteous and Stout went on about Michael having been Hannah’s special friend, as if they had been lovers from the start. But they were never
lovers, not in the sense the detectives meant, and they didn’t even start going out with each other until after the lower-sixth exams. She tried to explain that to them. The detectives
listened but she wasn’t sure they understood.

The town itself had nothing to attract young people. The cinema had shut and the pubs were gloomy and unfriendly. In the summer at least, they were drawn to the lake. A couple of years before,
the valley had been flooded to provide water for northern industrial towns and the biggest man-made lake in Europe was created. It was news at the time. Although it was surrounded by forestry
plantations and was miles from everywhere, the novelty of the development and the scale and spectacle of it attracted tourists. An enterprising farmer opened a caravan site, then built a bar and a
club, so it was more like a small holiday camp. It hardly provided a sophisticated night life but it was livelier than anything else the town had to offer and it drew the kids like a magnet.

The Saturday after the end-of-year exams they gathered on the shore in the afternoon and collected dead wood to build a bonfire. Hannah had expected Michael to be there but he didn’t turn
up. You could never guarantee his presence on these occasions, and he never offered explanations. They ate chocolate and crisps as a makeshift picnic and later moved on to the caravan park, to the
bar where Sally’s boyfriend was DJ. It was only supposed to serve residents but no one asked questions when they all piled in. It was June, early in the season. No doubt the owners were glad
of their money. The bar was a horrible place, furnished like a transport café with Formica tables and plastic chairs. Along one wall a row of one-armed bandits clacked and flashed. Hannah
and her friends didn’t mind. There were no awkward questions about under-age drinking, and they took it over and made it theirs. When they arrived there were two residents, an overweight
Brummie and his wife, leaning against the bar. Soon they shrank away and the Cranford Grammar brigade had it all to themselves.

Hannah still found events like that evening daunting, but she began to enjoy herself. She thought she’d done well in the exams, better than she’d expected. And she’d arranged
to spend the night with Sally, so for once she didn’t have to worry about her mother. Since Edward’s death, Audrey had become increasingly anxious, in an obsessive, unhealthy way. It
seemed that anxiety was the only way she could express her concern or her love. When Hannah went out Audrey always waited up. She would be pacing up and down the dining-room, her face knotted with
tension, although Hannah was always back before the agreed time. Later she was to understand something of what her mother had gone through – she could never sleep until Rosie was in –
but then it had seemed an unnecessary intrusion.

The evening of the party it was a relief to know there would be no prying questions to answer and she felt she could let herself go. She started drinking her usual halves of cider but later
Sally’s boyfriend, Chris, bought all the girls vodka. He was always throwing his money about, trying to impress. They made him play the music very loud and they started to dance. At closing
time, as she stumbled and giggled with the others down the sandy path to the shore, Hannah thought this must be what it was like to be drunk. She had led a very sheltered life.

The bonfire was already lit. They could see the flames from the path, reflected in the water beyond. Sparks from the burning wood shattered in the sky like fireworks. Michael had lit it and he
was there, alone, tending it, throwing on more wood as soon as the flames subsided. While the others ran down the bank to join him, pretending to be angry because he’d started the fire
without them, Hannah stood and watched him. He was absorbed in his watch over the flames and seemed not to notice the approaching crowd. Even when the others crowded round him, yelling and
cheering, he didn’t look away.

Of course, she fancied him like crazy. In the beginning she
had
thought him cocky, still did if it came to that, but that was part of the fascination. And perhaps he’d seen her
resistance as a challenge, because he’d made an effort to win her over. No one else had bothered to do that. She wasn’t seen as much of a catch – skinny with no figure to speak
of, black oily hair and the hint even then of dark down on her upper lip. He said she looked Mediterranean. Perhaps he had heard about her father and felt sorry for her, though if his friendship
was prompted by pity he hid it well. She could usually pick up a reaction like that. It turned her spiky and moody. Perhaps their unusual homes in this conventional town of happy families gave them
something in common. She thought he was happy in her company and for a while that was enough.

After Hannah’s first visit to his home the relationship continued to revolve around the books they were reading, the essays they had to prepare. When school finished for the day they went
to the library together. Not to the school library where the few recommended books of criticism were fought over but to the dark building in the town centre, a Victorian heap, with enormous
polished tables and rows of reference books smelling of damp. Hannah never wanted to go home immediately to face her mother. The Brices placed no restrictions on Michael’s movements. That
always surprised Hannah. She would have expected such elderly people to share her mother’s anxieties. He would have stayed with her all evening if she’d wanted. As a friend, of course.
Not a lover. But she had her pride and sent him home at five o’clock in time for the tea Sylvie would have prepared. She knew that the pretty girls with the short skirts who lusted after him
never felt jealous of the time they spent together. They didn’t consider Hannah as any sort of competition.

By the night of the bonfire he’d been at the school for nearly a year, but he’d never had a proper girlfriend. Some of them saw it as a challenge. He tantalized them with the
possibility, snogging them at parties, but nothing came of it. He was indiscriminate in his physical contact in a way which was unusual at the time. He liked to put his arm round people, boys and
girls. He often hugged Sylvie, making her blush with pleasure. He had never touched Hannah though, not even a hand on the shoulder, not even brushing against her by mistake. She longed for it.

She didn’t make straight for Michael when she reached the shore. The booze had made her up for the games other people played. Let him come to her if he wanted to. That night there was a
huge orange moon which lit the scene, so she would be able to see Michael even if he moved away from the fire.

She latched on to a tall lad from the upper sixth, who was a figure of fun, because his picture was once in the paper when he got a Queen’s Scout award. Someone had torn it out and stuck
it on the noticeboard at school. He had stood in the photo in the ridiculous uniform, blushing in a way which made his acne stand out. Since then he’d got rid of the acne, but the reputation
of being what they now called a geek had stuck with him. He did science and maths, and was considered brilliant at both, which didn’t help. He came along to parties like this, but always
ended up on his own.