Bad Girls Good Women (95 page)

She knew now that he was dead. He wouldn’t be lying there with blood and grit on his cheeks and his head twisted, if he wasn’t dead. She wished that she had taken off his glasses instead of leaving them crooked, as if he was making a joke about dying.

The neighbour and the man in overalls were both moving about in her kitchen. The man filled the kettle at the sink, and the woman opened and closed the cupboard doors. They were trying to make tea. That’s what they gave people at times like this, Mattie remembered. She felt a wave of anger at their intrusion, and a fierce determination to hold herself together in front of them. They had seen Mitch, beyond their inquisitive help, with his glasses broken. They shouldn’t see anything else. That was for Mitch, and herself. ‘The tea is in the blue caddy on the left,’ Mattie said. ‘And you will find the cups in the end cupboard.’

They gave her a cup of tea, too strong and much too sweet, but she drank it, not noticing that it scalded her tongue.

‘Shouldn’t we call the doctor? And the police?’ Mattie made her voice steady, wondering in a remote corner of herself that she could sit here, holding a teacup, when Mitch was dead. ‘I know it was an accident, but the police will have to see, won’t they?’

‘The police are coming,’ the woman soothed her. ‘Tim Wright’s your doctor, isn’t he?’

Mattie nodded. Mitch played golf with him sometimes. The workman had finished his tea. He put his cup down on the draining board, and Mattie noticed the marks that his oily fingers had made on the china. She seemed to see them, and everything else, with lurid and painful clarity.

A car was coming. She heard the crunch of gravel again, and her neighbour bobbed up to look out of the window.

‘The police,’ she murmured. She sounded relieved, glad to be handing over some responsibility.

After a few minutes they came in, putting their caps down on the breakfast table. Mattie looked up into their faces, but their eyes didn’t meet hers. They were calm, doing a job, and the tragedy was her own. Mattie kept it to herself, wrapping her arms around her chest and compressing the pain. There were only a very few questions. Mattie told them that Mitch must have gone up on the roof to fix tiles that had blown off in the night’s wind. He had slipped, or the ladder had slipped, and he had fallen from the high roof. The fall had killed him. Death was almost instantaneous, the ambulanceman had told them.

The absurdity, the pointlessness of Mitch’s death rose up in front of her. The sickening pressure of a sob swelled in Mattie’s throat, but she lifted her head, denying it. The senior policeman closed his notebook.

‘Doctor Wright is here,’ somebody said. Mattie looked over the shoulders of the policemen and saw Tim Wright’s round, reddish face. It belonged in the clubhouse, not here in the Coppins kitchen. Mattie wrapped her arms tighter, holding in her secrets. The doctor drew her to her feet, led her away into the drawing room. As he closed the door she glanced around. There were plumped cushions and photographs in frames, a ticking clock. Just the same, but dead. The room felt dead, and time seemed to be stretching and compressing itself. None of this is real, Mattie tried to convince herself. But she knew that it was real, and her whole body was shaking with the shock of it. She didn’t know whether it was hours or minutes since Mitch had died, only that he was gone. She felt her sob rising again, like vomit, and she swallowed it down once more.

‘Can I have a drink?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’

Tim Wright went to the silver tray that Mitch’s brother had given them as a wedding present. He poured whisky into a glass, and splashed soda into it from the siphon. To Mattie the familiar, sociable little process seemed obscenely out of place, but she took the glass when he held it out to her, and drained it. The doctor was talking about shock, she realised, and about arrangements. She interrupted him, without apology.

‘What have they done with Mitch? I want to stay with him.’

‘They have taken him in the ambulance. There will have to be a coroner’s inquest. Only a formality.’ He was apologising, and trying to avoid the word mortuary. Mattie watched him, thinking that no one wanted to contaminate themselves with tragedy.

‘Did you take his glasses off?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Mattie went to the drinks tray herself, this time, and poured a much bigger measure. The whisky didn’t warm her, but she drank it just the same.

‘You mustn’t be on your own, you know. Just say who you’d like me to telephone, and I’ll do it for you now.’ The doctor waited, kindly. ‘A friend? A relative?’

Mattie sat down, knitting her fingers around the empty glass. She tried to think of someone and then, without warning, like a dam cracking open to let out the floodwater, the full truth and its significance washed through her. Mitch was dead. He had gone, and she was on her own. There was no one else she wanted to call on. No one she wanted here, at Coppins, where Mitch had been. Not for a week, not even for a day.

Mattie bowed her head. She felt that all the painful, swelling need for Mitch, and anger at his futile death, and fear of loneliness was only just contained in the leaky, fragile shell of her body. If she moved, it would burst out of her. And that mustn’t happen in front of Tim Wright, with his concerned, professional manner. Not even in front of Julia, even if she were to come from Italy. It was private, private. Her own, and Mitch’s.

‘There’s our housekeeper,’ she said at last. ‘Mrs Hopper. It’s her day off. I think she goes to her sister in Crawley. The number is in the book on the table.’

That was all.

‘Are you sure?’ the doctor asked her.

Mattie gritted her teeth. ‘Certain.’

He did what she asked, and then came back. He gave her a sedative and she took it, carelessly. The doctor glanced at his watch, then snapped his bag shut. They agreed that Mattie’s neighbour should stay in the house until Mrs Hopper came back.

Mattie wanted them all to go, to leave her.

After the doctor had driven away she went upstairs, away from her neighbour’s sympathy. She went into the dressing room, and with a little noise like an animal’s whimper she hid her face against Mitch’s clothes, hanging empty on the rail. After a long time, with her body aching from the awkward position, she crept back and stretched out across her bed. A little while later, she fell asleep.

When she woke up, she had forgotten. She lay blinking at the room from the unfamiliar angle, dazed by the sedative and wondering at the dark weight that seemed suspended above her. The oblivion only lasted for a second. When she remembered what had happened reality fell around her in poisonous folds. It lay against her face, suffocating her. Blindly, Mattie drew her legs up to her chest and rocked herself. The silence around her was complete, and terrifying.

Mitch was dead. Mitch had gone, and he would never come back.

Panic rose in her chest. It made her gasp, and lash out. She heaved herself upright, kneeling on the creased satin bedcover.

‘Mitch,’ she called out, to the empty, heavy air. ‘Mitch, I don’t know what to do.’

In the end, it was Alexander she turned to.

Every hour of that day reared up in front of her, a pointless obstacle to be pointlessly surmounted, only to dwindle and turn into another, and then to stretch away into the night. When it grew dark, Mattie wouldn’t have Mrs Hopper with her. She sent the housekeeper away to her own rooms, and then she walked through the silent house, turning on every light so the big house blazed with it. But the darkness still pressed in on her. She was visited by images of Mitch lying in a cold steel drawer, with his poor face still unwashed and his glasses hanging crooked.

Mattie went into the brilliantly lit drawing room and drank the rest of the bottle of whisky. It made her feel sick, and she shook so much that her teeth rattled. And at midnight, out of fear that the night would never end, she telephoned Alexander.

‘Mitch is dead. He died this morning.’ She wondered that she could say the words.

Alexander came at once, driving through the night.

Mattie sat waiting for him, with a new bottle on the table in front of her and her fingers clenched tight around her glass. She imagined that when he came she would be able to run to him, and that he would give her some comfort. When she heard his car, rolling up in the lowest, deadest hour of the night, she jumped up and whisky flooded over the white rug at her feet. She ran to open the front door.

Alexander had pulled a jersey and corduroys on over his pyjamas. His fair hair stood up in unbrushed wings and his beaky, ironic face was grey with concern. As soon as she saw him, Mattie knew that she had made a mistake. He was warm, and solid, and he was her friend, but there was no comfort here. He was only Alexander, and Mitch had gone away.

Alexander held her. She felt the rough wool of his jersey against her face, and after a second she moved carefully away. The shock of grief separated her from Alexander as surely as it cut her off from everything else. It began to dawn on her that it was ineradicable.

‘Come in, Alexander,’ Mattie said. ‘I’m having a drink in the drawing room.’

Alexander followed her. All the way from Ladyhill he had been preparing himself, but even so the sight of Mattie shocked him. In their puffy sockets her eyes were flat, and she looked at him as if she didn’t recognise him. The bright drawing room stank of whisky. He put his arm round her shoulders and made her sit down. He realised that Mattie was half drunk, and insensible with shock and exhaustion.

He looked angrily around the room, as if the silk-covered walls might explain to him how Mattie could be so alone, now of all times.

The toe of Mattie’s shoe poked at the sodden rug.

‘Give me another drink,’ she begged him. And then added, in bewilderment, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

Alexander filled her glass, watched as she emptied it, then took her hands.

‘You need to go to sleep now.’

‘I can’t.’

He saw fear in her face. ‘I’ll stay with you. I’ll be here.’

He led her upstairs. In the pink marble bathroom he sponged her face, and undressed her as if she was a child. He was ashamed of seeing that her body seemed as richly perfect as it had done six years ago, at Ladyhill. He found a nightdress, and covered it up. He straightened the creased bed, and drew the covers back for her. Like an obedient robot, Mattie lay down. Alexander closed the dressing room door, so that she couldn’t see Mitch’s empty clothes. Then he sat down in a velvet chair and watched until her face sagged, the lines in it softening, and she fell asleep.

In the morning, it was Alexander who made the necessary, painful telephone calls. He spoke to Mitch’s brother in Whitby, and to Mattie’s family and her agent. He fended off the reporters and photographers who had heard the news and gathered in the Coppins driveway, and he dealt with police and solicitors. He broke the news to Felix in his office at Tressider & Lemoine, and he answered the telephone’s increasingly insistent ringing.

‘Thank you,’ Mattie said to him. ‘I couldn’t do any of this myself, you know. I never could do anything like this. That was why Mitch was so good for me.’ She shook her head, turning her flat eyes away from Alexander’s sympathy. She seemed to watch the sad arrangements being made as if they concerned someone else, he thought, and half wished that she would cry so that he could make some attempt to comfort her. The bluff, golfing GP came back and confided to Alexander, ‘Grief manifests itself in a dozen different ways. We can only let it run its course.’

He left a prescription for tranquillisers and sleeping tablets and Alexander, irritated, watched him drive away again.

In the evening, Alexander sat beside Mattie on the slippery sofa in her drawing room. Every lamp was lit, and the housekeeper had taken away the whisky-stained rug.

‘Let me call Julia,’ he pleaded. ‘She’ll want to come and be with you. You should have her here, Mattie.’

Mattie didn’t even look at him now. She turned her wedding ring to and fro on her finger. ‘What can Julia do?’ She added, almost conversationally, ‘Better to leave her in peace. Her garden is beautiful, you know.’

But when Mattie had taken her sleeping pills and gone to lie in her wide bed, Alexander picked up the telephone on Mitch’s desk. The news would be in the papers the next day, and he didn’t want Julia to have to learn it from them. As he waited through the complications of reaching Montebellate, his eyes wandered over the neatly arranged documents in front of him. Copies of Mitch’s will, insurance policies and everything else that was necessary, had been immediately to hand. Mattie was right, he thought. Mitch had been very good for her. Grief, and anger at the pointlessness of his death, struck him simultaneously. Alexander had to rub his face as the call went through at last. He found himself trying to explain to an elderly-sounding Italian man that he must speak to Julia Bliss at once.

‘Julia Smith?’ Nicolo Galli asked. ‘There is no trouble, I hope?’

‘Tell her it’s Alexander here. It’s not Lily, tell her.’

‘Thank God,’ Nicolo replied. ‘I will fetch Julia for you.’

Alexander waited for a long time. He tried to imagine the little hill town and Julia’s house, but he could only see Mitch’s tidy desk, and the photograph of Mitch and Mattie on their wedding day that stood at one side. Julia was in the picture too, but a shadow partly hid her face. Alexander found that he couldn’t even remember exactly how long it was since he had spoken to her. He rubbed his knuckles wearily into the sockets of his eyes.

‘Alexander?’

Julia’s voice came from a long way away, but he could hear the sharpness of anxiety it it. Quickly and quietly he told her what had happened.

There was a moment’s silence.

‘Poor Mattie. Oh God, Alexander. Poor Mattie.’

They talked for a moment longer. It struck Alexander that Julia spoke English too carefully, as if her command of it was slipping away. But yet there was no hesitation between the two of them. They were drawn together by their love for Mattie, and the common bond of the years.

‘I’ll come as soon as I can,’ Julia promised. ‘Tomorrow, sometime.’