Whatever You Love (9 page)

‘I’m okay,’ I say.

‘No, you’re not,’ he replies.

I would like to spend the whole occasion with David but am determined to be brave. I must not be selfish about what has happened to Willow. I must acknowledge who we are mourning here. I go back out into the hall and into the sitting room where groups of older relatives are seated. A woman who is standing by the mantelpiece comes over to me and says, ‘Laura?’

I nod.

‘I’m Willow’s godmother, Vivie,’ the woman says. ‘We met last Easter. It was good of you to come when you’ve got so much on your plate.’ We both grimace at the euphemism, and it comes to me where I have met her before. She was at an Easter-egg hunt one of the other mothers had arranged in the park, a year or two ago. She brought a giant thermos flask of coffee and half a dozen plastic mugs. She told me about why she had never had any children of her own, something to do with being adopted.

We stand in the middle of the sitting room, talking politely, for a while. I think to myself, how well I am doing. I allow myself the tiniest blush of pride at my own ability to talk normally, to transcend the part of me that still wants to scream at the inanity of anything but my own loss. Perhaps this is what the loss of Willow is doing for me, offering me a perspective. How appalling that I should be benefiting, even a tiny amount, from someone else’s misery. Vivie the godmother talks on, quietly, unobtrusively. I nod.

Towards the end of our conversation, something odd happens. I am standing talking to Vivie. We have not moved from our positions. I feel a scrape and a sharp pain against my shin. I turn and see a small woman with brown curly hair standing close behind me, scowling. Behind her is an armchair. I guess that she was sitting in her armchair and, in standing, has somehow scraped her pointed heel along my shin, although I can’t quite work out how, or why. I look at her with a surprised, half-smile, waiting for her to say, ‘I’m sorry,’ but she simply glares at me, then turns away.

I watch the small woman leave the room, then say to Vivie, ‘Who was that?’ She shrugs.

*

Not long after that, I realise that I am desperate to go back home – I should have got a lift with Julie. I say goodbye to Vivie and leave the sitting room, wondering if I could sneak out, without saying goodbye to anyone. I would be forgiven, after all. I have done my bit. I hesitate, glancing down into the kitchen, which is still full of people. I can’t face going back in there.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, I am unable to find my coat. There is a heap of them on the main bed but, pushing through them, I do not see mine. I go into the small bedroom next door, where there is a group of teenage girls lounging around, on the bed, on huge cushions on the floor. It looks as though they have all been crying. Willow was the youngest of four children. I see her older sister, Beeny, by the window. She stares at me, eye make-up smudgy, then says dully, ‘Hello.’

‘Hello Beeny,’ I say. ‘Do you know where the rest of the coats are? I’ve got to go.’ She turns her face back to the window.

*

As I come down the stairs, Ranmali and her husband are at the front door, in their coats, about to leave. It is the first time I have seen them close enough to speak to since the accident – they came to the crematorium for Betty’s funeral but not back to the house. Although I have been dreading seeing Ranmali for weeks, I suddenly feel relieved that we have encountered each other and wish I knew her well enough to embrace her. There is a conversation she and I must have, some time, and although I am not yet ready for it, I am pleased to see her.

She is buttoning her woollen coat. She turns and looks up at me as I descend. She stares for a moment, then her eyes fill with tears. I am not alarmed by this because I know her polite, precise English will not stretch to platitudes. Her husband is standing next to her, already buttoned tight, ready to go. He has pulled a hat over his neatly oiled hair, but is staring up at me from beneath its brim. His expression is not warm or sympathetic, like his wife’s. It is like the expression he adopts when too many schoolchildren are crowding into his shop.

As I reach the bottom of the stairs, he steps forward. His wife puts out a hand and rests it on his arm. He glances at her briefly, then looks back at me.

I stop where I am. I think, he wants to say something but can’t. I realise that in all these years I have never heard him speak.

He bows his head briefly and then says, so quietly I can hardly hear. ‘I am sorry, Mrs Needham.’

I nod in return, a curt acknowledgement of his condolence, and half-turn to go towards the sitting room to continue the hunt for my coat, but he takes another step towards me and I realise there is more he wants to say.

He leans forward, as if he does not want anyone else to hear. ‘My wife is mistaken,’ he says.

I look at him. His face is expressionless. His mouth scarcely moves as he talks. ‘She makes a mistake.’

I am forced to bend my head closer to hear him. There are deep lines on his face, grey grooves that betray his age, but his teeth are small and neat. ‘The car, my wife thinks, but I believe she does not want to know, it was not normal. It came too fast. That driver was too fast. He should be punished.’

I stare at him. I have a feeling that he wants to elaborate but that the shock on my face has silenced him.

‘I am sorry,’ he repeats, and turns away.

I look past him at Ranmali. The tears still stand in her eyes, brimming so fulsomely it seems odd they do not fall. She glances at her husband, then at me. Then she shakes her head. I am not sure whether she means that her husband is wrong, a little deranged even, and I should take no notice of what he is saying, or whether she is simply expressing the wrongness of everything, of the whole situation. She turns and opens the door behind her, then speaks to her husband sharply in another language. He does not look at me again as he leaves.

*

My hand is still resting on the swirl of wood at the end of the banister. I swing backwards and sit down on the bottom of the stairs. I put my head in my hands, unable to process this information. I was doing so well, this morning. I was managing to think about Willow, rather than the fact that Betty is absent. Betty would have wanted to say goodbye to her best friend. Why isn’t Betty here? I realise the small progress I have made by coming here was illusory. It has taken a huge effort of will for me to come but I have felt as though, for the first time since the accident, I have managed to take a brief holiday from my own grief – only possible because of the fresher grief of others. But Ranmali’s husband has reminded me that my own tragedy is waiting for me, as soon as I collect my thoughts. It has been displaced as temporarily as the coat I cannot locate. I will be shrugging it over my shoulders again before I step outside.

He should be punished.
I don’t even know his name.

*

I hear a shuffle from the sitting room. The door opens and the hallway is filled with murmuring voices. I sense a general movement from within, people preparing to leave. I rise from the stair. Sally’s mother, Willow’s grandmother, comes out first and as she sees me she gives a small start. I know she is about to say something and I can’t cope with any more so to forestall her I say, ‘Mrs James. I’m going to go now.’ I feel old, as old as the cliffs. And tired. I’m so very, very tired.

Mrs James looks around her. ‘Is David going to drive you home? Or have you got your car?’ She is one of these women who believes it is her job to look after everyone, I think, even in the midst of her own tragedy.

‘No, I’m going to walk.’ I can see her looking down the hallway, looking for someone to summon to take me home. ‘I need some air.’ My voice is a little louder than it needs to be.

She looks back at me. ‘Of course you do,’ she says, softening. All at once, to my surprise, we move together and embrace. We stand like that for a minute in the hallway, the walls around us aflame with pictures of her dead granddaughter, and for a moment, just a moment, I experience a little comfort. Then I pull back. ‘My coat…’ I say weakly. ‘It went upstairs,’ as if it has escaped from me like a recalcitrant child.

‘I’ll get it for you, dear.’

‘It’s the…’

‘Yes, I know. I saw you when you came in.’

I step back and she climbs the stairs slowly, a little arthritically, gripping the banister. The feeling of exhaustion has not left me and although I do not want a lift from anyone, let alone David and Chloe, walking home is the last thing I feel like doing. My legs are lead. I give a harsh exhalation of breath at the thought that Mrs James, in all her age and grief, is the more nimble of the two of us as she mounts the stairs to go and find my coat.

Mrs James is gone a long time. People keep going past and looking at me, then looking away. By the time she descends the stairs, I am desperate to leave and retrospectively sincere in my desire for fresh air. Mrs James is frowning slightly as she comes down, my coat over her arm – a distinctive dark purple, with a ruff, the smartest item and most expensive item in my wardrobe.

‘Very odd, dear,’ says Mrs James, as she holds it out to me. ‘The big girls must have been playing with it. It was in the top bathroom. There’s something on it.’

She extends her hand and I take the coat without looking at it. ‘I’m sure it’s fine. Will you tell Sally, you know.’

‘Yes, don’t worry, I’ll tell her.’

I slip out of the front door, the coat still in my hand. Mrs James closes the door softly behind me. It is only as I pull the coat on and button it, that I see what she means. There is a long strip of fluid right the way down the front, bleach or some other corrosive cleaning fluid, which has burnt through the top layer of the material. The coat is ruined. I shake my head, and lift my face to the rain. It feels cold, good. I cannot piece together all the separate elements of this strange morning and decide that, of course, it must be me – I am the strange one, standing in the rain.

A few days after Willow’s funeral, Toni comes round again. It isn’t one of Rees’s nursery mornings so he is in the sitting room where he has pulled all the cushions off the sofa and chairs and piled them high in a wobbly tower. He says he is making a helicopter. Toni and I leave him to it and walk through to the kitchen but she declines the ritual of tea and says, ‘Would you mind if we went into the garden so I can smoke a cigarette?’ I am flattered by this, presuming she is not supposed to smoke on duty and that asking if she can in my garden is a sign she likes and trusts me. I want to be liked by her, I am not sure why. I want her to like me more than all the other bereaved relatives she has dealt with. I feel competitive towards them.

‘Not as long as you give me one,’ I say. Toni responds with a straight-mouthed expression.

‘It was good you made it, Sally’s house,’ she says, as we sit on the low wall at the back of my garden. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t easy but I’m sure Sally and Stephen appreciated it.’

‘Are you their liaison officer too?’ I ask.

Toni nods, and I feel a pang. I don’t like the idea of her sitting in Sally’s immaculate kitchen, empathising. Still, at least she’ll be getting a decent cup of coffee there. From here, I can see through to the sitting room, where Rees is jumping on and off the bare frame of the sofa with both hands raised high above his head, attempting flight. Toni hands me a cigarette, then bends to offer me a light – her lighter is a flamethrower but the cold breeze extinguishes it repeatedly and after three attempts I say, ‘Light yours first and I’ll light mine off it.’ When I have done this, I exhale and say, ‘How do you know I was there?’ then burst into a fit of coughing because I have had to inhale so hard.

‘David told me. Are you all right?’

I cough until I am purple. ‘No, I’m fine. I used to smoke when I was a student but I haven’t for years. David hated it. I started again after we split up, to annoy him mostly, but then I realised it was a bit of a pointless gesture, so I gave up again.’

‘Do you want a pat on the back?’

I shake my head. ‘Do you and David talk about me a lot?’

‘Of course. You know what men are like. It’s more acceptable for them to talk about someone else than themselves, or worry about other things, as if, I don’t know. You know the way some men are, problem-solving.’

‘I’m the problem.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Task-orientated.’

‘That’s another way of putting it.’

‘I used to think, sometimes, this sounds a bit odd, but sometimes, when we were still together, I used to tell David he should have been a cop. He was always concentrating on things, drove me crazy.’ I cough again. ‘It was great when he concentrated on me, though, intense, you know. He would have made a good police officer.’

We both smile briefly at this suggestion, are quiet for a moment. The sky above us is blanket white. On the bare trees, one or two tiny buds are beginning to form. They seem premature. ‘Such as?’ I ask, aware that my tone is a little sardonic.

‘Such as what?’

‘What other things?’

‘Well, you know. He’s been very composed in public, very good with the press, trying to calm things down. He went up before the television cameras last week, which I thought was brave of him but he said he would if it would help with the problems we are having in town. I’m just a bit concerned. Outwardly he seems to be doing well but you know it’s often the ones who are doing well at first who completely collapse later on. The ones who go under quickly, well the ones who seem worst hit – I suppose…’ she dries, briefly, ‘well, maybe that’s a more natural reaction.’

My cigarette burns slowly on its own while I stare at her. ‘The ones that go under quickly like me,’ I say.

‘Yes, like you,’ she admits, looking at the cigarette between her fingers then taking a long drag. ‘I didn’t mean to imply you’re doing anything wrong. Quite the reverse in fact.’

‘Television cameras?’ I have not turned on the television since Betty went away, or opened a newspaper.

‘Laura…’ her voice is still gentle but I think I detect a hint of exasperation. ‘It went national, not any more, but for a bit it was. Last week it was just local telly.’

This explains something I have wondered about. ‘So is that part of your job too?’

She nods, then adds, ‘Did you look at any of those folders I gave you?’

I roll my eyes. ‘I work for the NHS, remember. We have a leaflet for every occasion. We have a leaflet on how to deal with your feelings if the water fountain isn’t working and the number for the support group for people who’ve been annoyed by water fountains.’

‘I know a lot of the way things are put sounds patronising.’

‘Look, there isn’t a single inane phrase I haven’t heard from you or anyone that I haven’t used myself. People die on me at work too or I have to tell people they’ll never be able to do something. I’m not made of glass.’

A small silence follows. I wonder if she can translate my burst of antagonism, whether she understands how important it is for her to realise that I am a fellow professional, how unbearable I would find it if she treated me like a victim. It isn’t that I want her to be my friend – I know that is not what she is here for – but I want her to accord me a friend’s equal status, emotionally, intellectually. At the same time, I can feel something small and childlike inside me, something that wants me to cave in to my need of her. I want to know what she says about me to her colleagues.

‘Are they all like me?’ I am trying to lighten the tone.

She pulls a so-so face.

‘Better or worse?’ I prod.

‘Every bereaved relative is different, that’s the first thing they teach us,’ she responds firmly. ‘Whenever you go and knock on someone’s door, you never know what’s behind it.’

It is unfair of me to want her to treat me like an equal. If I was her equal, she wouldn’t be here. I try to give her what she wants. ‘It’s like I’ve been in a swimming pool, treading water, just managing to keep afloat. And now I look around for the first time and see that the water I’ve been swimming in is milk, or purple, or full of frogs. So many weird things have started happening.’

She is looking at me. ‘What do you mean?’

I tell her about how strange I found Willow’s wake, how everything about it seemed detached, surreal, even the conversation with Ranmali’s husband, which should have horrified me but bewildered me. I tell her how it was difficult to walk home, how with each step, I felt as if the ground beneath my feet was spongy and could dissolve at any moment. And now. Television cameras? Nobody from the press has come near me but for some reason they are bothering David.

Toni sighs and stubs her cigarette out on my garden wall. I have the feeling she is going to say something she has been preparing for a while, something she has been holding on to until the appropriate moment. ‘We interviewed Ranmali and her husband separately. Their accounts differ slightly. It’s a matter of interpretation but it’s important. What charges we bring could depend on it.’ I know that the driver of the car was initially arrested on suspicion of causing death by dangerous driving, a category-A offence and very serious. The car was impounded and they took his clothes. The drink and drugs tests they did on him were negative. He was released on police bail. They are appealing for other witnesses – and without them, it is possible that the charges against him could be downgraded to causing death by careless driving, a less serious offence. Careless is less bad than dangerous, in the eyes of the law, despite the fact that the outcome for my daughter was exactly the same.

‘Have you been lying to me?’ I say.

She shakes her head. ‘When you are grief-stricken and depressed it’s easy to get paranoid but, take it from me, it doesn’t help. No one’s lying to you, but we haven’t pressed information on you when you don’t seem ready for it, that’s all. It’s all there, when you’re ready.’ She has never been quite this firm with me before. ‘Are you sleeping at all?’

‘You always ask that. Stupid question.’

‘Not really. It will come back eventually you know, sleep, and appetite.’

‘I don’t want them back.’

‘I know. I know you don’t.’

I throw down my cigarette. ‘Please God don’t tell me you’re coming round here to make sure I’m going to get normal again. Go and see Saint Bloody Sally if you want normal. She does the grief thing much more
normally
I’m sure.’

‘I don’t.’

‘When I’m awake, in the night I mean, not the daytime. It’s the best time. It’s the only time I am alone.’ Toni is looking at me. The sky is still white, a great, aching arc of white. I am as raw as a newborn baby, I think, and it is not a sentimental image. I am thinking of how red babies are when they are first born, beneath the white smear of vernix, like a thing that has been skinned. ‘I mean, I know I’m alone all day long, well, as much as I can be. I don’t mean that. It’s the only time I’m really alone, when everyone else is asleep. It’s the only time I don’t feel watched.’

‘Who do you think is watching you?’

‘Everyone,’ I say, and it is only as I say it that I realise how true it feels. ‘They watch me all the time. When I’m walking down the street, in the shops. I don’t want to go to the school ever again. There’ll be hundreds of them, and even on an empty street you never know when someone might look out of their window or drive past in the car. Everybody thinks they know me. The other mothers are the worst. They all think they know what I’m going through, just because they have all imagined it, just because they love their own kids. I saw a woman in the playground and I thought, she’s glad it’s happened to mine. She thinks it makes it less likely it will happen to hers.’

Even though Toni is looking at me, I don’t mind her looking. Her looking doesn’t feel like watching. She is being paid to be with me. She has a good excuse. There is another silence then she says, ‘You do know that there isn’t anything they could be doing that would be right. You’d feel insulted whatever they did.’

‘I hate them,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘Maybe I always hated them. Maybe I only thought I liked them because we were in this club together, the parents’ club. Sally, I haven’t got a thing in common with her. She’s one of these wholesome types. She’s into dolphins, inner wisdom, and those stupid names she’s given her children. She’s always trying to get me to help at school, sit on all the committees she sits on or run clubs. When I had trouble feeding Rees, she offered to come and sit with me while I tried. I can’t stand her. Now everyone is going to think we should be joined at the hip. They’ll be expecting us to go around together. She’s doing it the right way, I bet, being all dignified and letting people make her feel better and tell her that Willow will always be with her and would want her to be happy. She won’t. Betty has gone away forever and now so has Willow. They haven’t made the world a better place. They haven’t enriched all our lives with their love and innocence. They’re just
gone
.’

Toni’s voice becomes very gentle, which I take as a sign of admonishment. ‘Don’t you think you might be guilty of judging her in the same way you think people are judging you?’

‘I’m just sick of being watched, the whole time. That’s why being awake at night is so good. The dark. Knowing they are all asleep. Knowing that just for a few hours they have stopped watching me.’

There is another long silence. ‘Laura, I’m sorry, but have you had any thoughts about hurting yourself? You do understand why I need to ask that, don’t you?’

Of course she needs to ask – stubborn, selfish Laura, made even more stubborn and selfish by her grief, has refused all offers of counselling. I haven’t even read the leaflets and the brochures the bereavement counsellor gave me after our one short and from her point of view entirely unsatisfactory chat at the hospital. Poor Toni. She landed a double shift when they gave her me.

‘Is duty of care in your remit too?’ I ask. ‘Poor you.’

She smiles. ‘No, it isn’t, strictly speaking. I’m just asking.’

I look down. The cigarette I tossed so carelessly lies in the scrubby winter grass, the tip still aglow. I step on it. ‘Who was the pathologist? Who signed off on Betty?’

She pauses. ‘David Bradley.’

‘I know him.’

Through the window, we can see Rees standing alone in the sitting room, looking around. He has bored of his helicopter made of cushions and is wondering where I am. He will come running out any minute, a demand on his lips. He usually says, ‘I’m hungry,’ when he means, ‘I want attention,’ but the very act of making the demand convinces him it is hunger he feels and he is furious when attention is all he gets. These small episodes of fury have not increased in frequency since Betty went away, but they are more intense. I sense I am about to pay for my sneaky fag in the garden.

I stand up. Toni stands too. ‘You want me to come with you?’ she asks.

I shake my head. ‘I know him,’ I repeat. ‘You think it’s a good idea?’

She nods. She knows what I mean. For the first time, I am thinking about stepping outside the darkly enveloping fact of Betty’s absence to examine the detail of it. ‘One step at a time, but the information is all there when you need it. I can talk to you any time, about all the other stuff.’

I’m not interested in the other stuff. I don’t want to hear what a Gold Group is or why, for some reason, strangers seem so intent on owning what has happened to me, to my girl.

‘There’s something else I would like you to think about doing…’ I glance at her as we walk back into the house. ‘I just think,’ she continues, ‘well, I know you and David are separated and you obviously won’t be supporting each other in the same way you would if you were still married but, all the same.’

‘You think it’s odd we’re not spending more time together, talking about Betty.’

She nods.

‘Well,’ I said drily, ‘if you knew the full story of our break-up you might not think it was all that peculiar.’

‘I understand it was a bit acrimonious.’

‘That’s something of an understatement.’