Half Broken Things (20 page)

‘Ah, hello?'

Steph did not turn from the window.

‘Hello. Yes. We need some oil. Urgently, I'm afraid, we're out. Yes, bit of a cold snap, took us unawares! Yes, it's Standish-Cave, Walden Manor. That's right.'

Michael sailed through the negotiations; fill up the tank, about 3,000 litres please, put the receipt through the door, and then he confirmed breezily that they could manage to wait until six o'clock. He thanked the person at the other end for helping them out of a spot. Just before he rang off the woman said, ‘And how's your wife doing?'

‘Oh, oh. My wife? Oh, she's, er . . .' Michael looked up desperately at Steph, who turned just then and smiled at him, lifting and twisting a loose lock of her hair. Michael said, ‘Oh, she's absolutely fine, thank you. Very well indeed.'

‘Oh, glad to hear it. Do tell her I was asking.'

Men were deceivers, ever. Shakespeare, but I can't remember where from. Father would know. And only half right, because women aren't above a bit of deception either. I have come to believe that just about anyone will deceive to get what they need, if they have no other way open to them. In that strict sense there is no difference between me, Michael and Steph, and Mr Hapgood (in other, crucial respects there is all the difference in the world). And people who think oh no, they could
never
do the kind of thing we did, well, perhaps they are just people who have never had to, and who lack the imagination to see that if one day they found themselves in the same circumstances, they probably would. People who have landed in another category, who have somehow got what they needed by easier means, are no different from us. No, that's wrong, they are different. They are luckier, that is all. Not better.

What Mr Hapgood did was this. He came to see the clock the next afternoon after I'd got back from school. I thought it only polite to offer him a cup of tea in return for his the day before, and while I was making it he had a good look at the clock. He came into the kitchen while the tea was brewing and leaned against the draining board. He would have to go and consult somebody, an ‘associate in the trade,' he said, but it was without doubt a fine clock. I poured out a third cup of tea and took it to Mother, who was in bed, and when I came back he asked all about her, and I found myself crying again. He said he understood perfectly because his mother was much the same, not at all well. He said we should make ourselves comfy in the sitting room because life could be very difficult and what we both needed was a little cuddle. I think he might actually have been right about that.

———

The next day Michael and Steph returned to the study, bringing with them the pile of unopened post that had been accruing in the library desk. They opened the bank statements, which showed that whatever the Standish-Caves were living on while they were away, it was not being drawn from the Household No 1 account. Twelve hundred pounds a month were going in, and the account was in credit for a little over six thousand. Outgoings amounted to rather less. There were direct debits for electricity, water, telephone and oil, and to the local authority for council tax. Jean Wade's monthly salary was the only other regular payment. They guessed that the statements for other accounts, that the owners must be using, were being sent by the bank directly to them.

They began to feel clever. Steph found reams of specially printed Walden Manor stationery. In the filing cabinet they found previous letters from Oliver Standish-Cave to his bank so that they could copy the style exactly. Michael fed a sheet into the typewriter and together they began to compose their letter. Steph lost all sense of proportion and wanted to clean out the account.

But it's a
fortune,
six thousand quid,' she said. ‘Once we transfer all that lot into Jean's account we'll be laughing, won't we?'

‘And then what? Suppose the bank thinks it's a bit funny and investigates? We got to do something quiet, something that'll just slide past them without them noticing. Just a little rise that nobody'll notice, so it can go on and on, see? Look, Jean gets four hundred a month. We just make it six, it'll make a big difference.'

The clatter of the typewriter keys sounded cheeky and illegal, and it was hard not to laugh. The extra would make a difference, but not all the difference. And Jean's next payment was not due for three weeks in any case, Michael thought, as he watched Steph sign the letter. She was laughing a little too triumphantly, not really taking in that the problem had been eased, not solved. They would have to do something more.

Michael sifted again through the post. Among the other unopened letters were credit card statements which proved the existence of a credit card that had not been used since shortly before Christmas. But the statements did not give the card's expiry date, and that was essential, Steph declared, before they could order things by telephone. She had stopped laughing.

‘If only we had the card,' Michael said.

‘Or a chequebook,' Steph said, looking round as if one might be lying to hand somewhere. Then they heard Jean's soft footsteps downstairs, crossing the hall from the drawing room to the kitchen. She would be putting the kettle on, and soon would come upstairs to fetch the sleeping Miranda. Then she would call them both down to tea, for which she might have made scones or a cake, although there had been less of those lately. It might be just toast, then. Since her outburst the day before she seemed again to move in her own unhurried way, perhaps even a little more slowly, Steph had remarked last night. Getting on, she and Michael had agreed.

He would not, could not fail Jean over the money. Because Michael thought that her slowing down was not entirely to do with ageing; the tread of her feet seemed to have something to do with a simple absence of strain. Perhaps Jean had ceased to strive. It was strange, he thought, remembering his desperation over paying his fines, that while there was now more point to everything, life for all three of them had grown less effortful. It was not that the struggle to find enough to live on had lessened, but rather that there was no longer any need to outrun a lurking sense of futility about everything. The question
is it worth it?
did not arise any more. There was peace in Jean's footsteps, the work of her hands, her look of concentration as she peered at recipe books. She was sedate, but still busy most of the time. Her self-appointed duties in the house undoubtedly made demands upon her energy; towards seven o'clock she would sink into the big chair in the kitchen, tired, and Michael would give her the glass of sherry which she always said was just what she needed. But it seemed to Michael that her energy was freely and willingly expended. She had no need to hoard any, to hold a little in reserve against the day when it would be required in the struggle just to stay cheerful. He recognised in her a picture of himself in his freezing flat and remembered the tight battles fought between himself and the persistent nag in his head, telling him that nothing was ever going to get any better. It was an almost forgotten picture, now abandoned in the old attic of his life before Steph had come, but looking over at Steph now he could tell, now he thought about it, that the same voices had nagged in her head too. They must none of them ever again have to squander energy trying to hold off the conviction that nothing they did made any difference.

Steph and Michael resumed their search through the desk drawers and filing cabinets. Jean's footsteps were crossing the hall again, and then they stopped. They listened to the silence. Jean must have paused in the hall, perhaps to consider the tall vase of daffodils on the carved chest opposite the stairs. She might have been drawing out the stems that were yellowing now and proffered flowers too crumpled and papery to deserve their places any longer, adjusting the fresher ones to fill the gaps they left. She would be humming to herself. Now came the faint creak and the sound of her climbing the stairs, another pause while she rested for a moment at the top. She might turn left to go to her room to change her shoes (sometimes she put on her slippers before tea) or, as they could hear her doing now, she might turn right along the broad landing. She did not, nor did they expect it, come into the study, but walked past the closed door towards the nursery. Michael and Steph smiled at each other. In a moment they would hear her talking softly to Miranda as she changed her, and then she would call them on her way past and they would all go down to tea. But the sound they next heard and which froze them where they stood was a rising, disbelieving scream.

It might have helped to be drunk. In a way I felt as if I were, in the sense that I still have no clear memory of the days following that one when I came upon Miranda dead. Glimpses, that's all I have, and although I can't be sure how many days it took, I know that Steph kept Miranda by her for too long, and that by the time Michael could persuade her to give her up so that we could bury her, some terrible things were happening.

I want it understood that the child was not neglected, whatever she might have died of. I hope that's clear. Don't think it hasn't worried me, not getting a doctor. There must have been something wrong with her, perhaps her heart. I think now of the slight frown she sometimes wore when she was lying awake quietly; it seems to me now that she might have been listening to her little heart. I think it must have been her heart. It is hard to accept, but if that was the case then perhaps it was better to let her slip peacefully away, undisturbed by strangers. In the end, what do doctors know?

I prepared her with my own hands. There is no pain like it, the washing and dressing of the dead, because it is unbearable that one should be doing such things to a body that is so dear yet so changed, and equally unbearable that these necessities should be left undone or trusted to other hands. I used a strongly scented soap which I thought might do the trick at least for a while, but her skin began to wrinkle and slough, gentle though I was, and I feared that I was hurting her. I whispered that I was sorry, isn't that silly? People sometimes say that dead people don't look dead, they look as if they are sleeping. Miranda did not look asleep. Miranda was dead in my arms, gone. How else could I have contemplated placing her in the ground? I dusted her with talcum powder until I realised that it made me think of quicklime. I wrapped her in two white silk handkerchiefs. They covered her, tiny thing she was. She had hardly grown at all. I fancied that she looked even smaller than she had on the day she was born, though sometimes that happens when people die, they look emptied of something. I remember thinking that the silk would be soft against her skin, another silly thought, but it's the kind of thing that comes to you in those circumstances.

Next I wrapped her white shawl round her tightly so that her mother would not feel the stick limbs. I had meant to dress her properly, in bonnet and bootees and everything, but I could not do it, not for the want of caring. Her hands and feet were too far gone. Then I slipped her into a pillowcase. Then I had a good idea; there were lots of lavender-filled pillows in the bedrooms, so I gathered them all up, ripped them open and poured all the dried lavender flowers in the pillowcase with her so that she would be buried with sweet flowers surrounding her. So that we might be distracted a little by the lavender scent and not have to notice the state she had got into. Then I bound her round and round with white ribbon, covering her completely.

Because by now Michael had managed to get through to Steph and almost bring her out of a kind of blindness that the death had plunged her into, and I did not want her to see (I do not think she really had seen it yet) the colour that her baby's face had turned to.

So it wasn't a tree, after all, that the space in the garden had been waiting for. We put Miranda there, in the same spot where her afterbirth lay buried. I hardly remember what was said. Michael had found volumes of poetry in the library, and he seemed to know what to say. I'm sure it was all beautiful, I remember parts of it, but of course it was not enough. A funeral is supposed to explain the whole thing, is it not? But not even my sweet Michael could find an acceptable way to say that this little one was dead and that she should be left in the dirty cold ground while we went back into the warm house without her. Steph could not be persuaded to come with us. So Michael buttoned her into her coat, and let her be. She stayed out until well after dark.