Trespass (36 page)

At the foot of the slab which covered Lal’s grave was a small, freshly dug hole. Here, the remains of Anthony would be placed – deep down in the earth, not
beside
his mother, but resting at her feet.

This had been his wish, his will. But for a while, it had looked as though his will couldn’t be accommodated. The graveyard at Netherholt was full, Veronica had been informed. Her brother would have to go into the ‘overspill’ cemetery behind the village hall.

Veronica knew that Anthony wouldn’t care for this word, any more than he’d care to lie in the vicinity of the Netherholt village hall, a low, brick building which was host to drunken weddings, children’s tea parties, Bingo nights, amateur dramatics and (it had been known to happen) illegal raves. Anthony wanted to be near Lal – as near as it was possible to be – and that was that.

Lloyd had saved the day. ‘I’ll sort it,’ he’d told Veronica blithely. ‘The Church of England loves to make a ding-dong about everything, but the only thing to remember when they do is that all their little parishes are practically bankrupt. Leave it to me, Veronica.’

How much had Lloyd Palmer paid to get permission to bury Anthony’s ashes here? Veronica didn’t ask. But the vicar of Netherholt had quickly said that yes, after all, if it was . . . erm . . . just a question of . . . erm . . . a small receptacle, not a coffin, then space could perhaps be found ‘between the rows’.

And so here they were, with Anthony clutched against Veronica’s bosom, and Lloyd wearing a black cashmere overcoat and a red cashmere scarf, and the vicar shivering just a little in his cotton surplice, holding a prayer book.

‘Shall I start?’ the vicar asked anxiously. ‘Are you ready?’

‘Yes,’ said Veronica. ‘Please do start.’

The familiar words fell into the cool but sunlit air. ‘
. . . Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live . . . He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow . . . Earth to earth, ashes to ashes . . .
’

The voice of the vicar was soft, not unpleasing. On the breeze, Veronica could
smell
ash: leaves and twigs being broken down to dust and smoke on a garden bonfire. And she thought, All of this feels right. It’s where Anthony and I began. It’s home.

But then, when the moment came to put the urn into the muddy hole, she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t let go. Lloyd and the vicar waited silently, with their heads bowed. She hugged the plastic jar. She kept thinking, I loved him too. He belongs to me, too, not just to Lal . . .

She held the urn out in front of her and the sun fell onto the lid, painted with copper-coloured lacquer, and gave it a burnished sheen, like an antique saucepan. She saw Lloyd raise his head and look at the urn and then up at her face.

‘Anthony,’ she said aloud, in as strong a voice as she could manage, ‘this is what you would have called a “ghastly moment”. Letting go. But I’m going to do it. When I think about it, I probably should have let you go years and years ago, but I never did. I loved you far too much.’

She paused. She knew that her voice sounded strangely loud in the still air.

‘You’re at Netherholt,’ she went on. ‘OK, darling? I know you can’t see it or feel it. I know you’re nowhere, really. But this was the place you wanted to be. The beech tree’s still here. And the sun’s shining. And I’m putting you by Ma’s feet. It’s the best we can organise. I don’t think you’ll mind. I expect you’ll remember better than I do that she always wore absolutely brilliant shoes . . .’

Veronica half wanted to go on, to say something more portentous, but she found that she just stopped there and then she knelt down and put the jar in the ground. At her side, she discovered that Lloyd Palmer was crying. He blew his nose loudly, then gathered up a fistful of damp earth and threw it onto Anthony’s urn.

‘Bye, old sod,’ he said. ‘Happy times.’

Veronica and Lloyd walked beyond the churchyard to the meadow where the horses grazed. Above the distant combes, rain clouds were shading the sky. Lloyd and Veronica stood leaning on a wooden fence. Then, in a gesture that was second nature to Veronica, she held out her hand to the horses and immediately saw their heads go up.

They stood still, ears pricked, regarding her. She loved that moment, when she spoke silently to a horse and it seemed to listen. And now they came to her, ambling slowly across the shining field, and as they got near to her, the scent of them – the scent of living horses, which, to Veronica Verey, was more consoling than any other scent – reached her and held her in its spell.

‘Good girls,’ she said. ‘Lovely girls . . .’

She took off her black gloves and touched the hard, warm heads of the bay horses, rubbing and caressing their noses, each in turn. At first, they trembled imperceptibly, still wary of the stranger. Then Veronica felt all their anxiety vanish and they came nearer to her still, and one of them rested its head on her shoulder and her arm went round its neck.

‘Good lord,’ said Lloyd. ‘Love at first sight!’

Veronica smiled. ‘They were always my thing, horses,’ she said. ‘I used to love my pony Susan far more than I loved my mother.’

‘It figures,’ said Lloyd.

Then he blew his nose again and stuffed the handkerchief away in his pocket and said, ‘What are you going to do, Veronica?’

‘Do? You mean, with the rest of my life?’

‘Yes. I know it’s none of my business, but you will come into quite a bit of money, once we get probate . . .’

Veronica stood still, caressing the horses, loving the warmth of them, their breath on her neck. She wondered whether, after so much time, she could be taught to ride again.

‘I don’t know . . .’ she said. ‘I’ve never loved anything very passionately. Only gardens. And horses.’

She looked up at the sky. The sun was still shining on Netherholt, but rain was falling on the combes and she thought how beautiful these things were in their proximity, the sunlight and the drift of rain.

‘I thought I was happy in France,’ she said. ‘But now, after everything that’s happened . . . I don’t know whether I really was. I think I just made myself believe I was.’

‘Happiness,’ said Lloyd, with a sigh. ‘It’s what Anthony and I talked about the last time I saw him. The near impossibility of ever hanging on to it for more than five minutes. He told me he thought he’d only been happy once in his life.’

‘What? Drinking from Ma’s tits when he was a baby?’

‘Almost. He said he made a tree-house . . .’

‘Ah, the tree-house! And he invited Ma for tea?’

‘Yes. He said it was the most perfect afternoon of his life.’

Veronica began to stroke the ear of the horse whose head rested on her shoulder.

‘Did he say that?’ she said.

‘Yes. He said everything was completely beautiful.’

‘Yup? Well you know, Lloyd, it wasn’t, in fact. It wasn’t beautiful. The tea may have been perfect – made by Mrs Brigstock, no doubt. And Anthony and Ma may have had a nice conversation up there in the tree. But on the way down, climbing down the ladder, Ma slipped and fell. She hurt her back very badly. And after that day, she was always in pain. Till the day she died. The pain was always there. It might even have been the thing that brought on her cancer.’

Lloyd re-knotted his expensive scarf, as if he suddenly felt cold.

‘Anthony just cut that bit out of his mind,’ Veronica went on. ‘He literally forgot about it. If you ever reminded him, he always told you you were wrong. He succeeded in convincing himself that Ma’s fall was on a different day – somewhere else. Because he couldn’t bear to think that he was in any way responsible.’

Lloyd and Veronica drove back to London in Lloyd’s silver Audi. Rain slicked the grey motorway.

Suddenly tired, Veronica rested her head against the soft black leather upholstery and dozed as the darkness came on.

Half asleep and half awake, she remembered the strict, unvarying routine she’d followed when she was a girl and cared for Susan. It was like a High Mass, she thought, with each stage followed in exactly the same way, morning after morning, with nothing missed or bungled, nothing out of time or out of place:

Wake up at six.

Look out of the window to check the weather. Long for sun in summer, rain in spring, snow or hard frost in winter: everything in its right season.

Pull on old clothes: Aertex shirt, jeans, sweater, boots, riding hat.

Go down the stairs, quiet as the tooth fairy. Unlock the back door.

Inhale the first scent of the morning air. Feel like running, running all the way to the stables.

Open the stable door and hug Susan and breathe in the smell of her and talk to her and give her a handful of oats.

Rope halter. Lead Susan out. Tie her to post.

Get the shovel and start mucking out. Twenty minutes average time.

Hose down the stall. Lay out clean straw. Lay it thick and soft.

Fill the water trough.

Saddle up. Girths properly tightened and correct. Lead Susan to the paddock. Sun up now, or nearly up in deep winter. Or rain.

Trot twice round the paddock, then just dig gently into Susan’s broad flanks to start the rocking canter. The most comfortable canter any horse ever perfected: rock-and-rock, rock-and-rock, easy and lovely. The trees and the fencing waltzing by.

And as they waltz by, see the two plumes of breath, mine and Susan’s, telling me that we’re alive, alive, alive,
alive
 . . .

Veronica shifted in her luxurious car seat.

She realised she must have slept for a few moments because she’d been having a dream, not about Susan, but about Kitty.

In the dream, Kitty had sent her an invitation to a forthcoming show:
Recent Work by Kitty Meadows
. On the invitation card was a reproduction of Kitty’s watercolour of the mimosa blossom. Reduced to a surface no wider than a few inches, this painting looked deft and accomplished, and Veronica now wished, for Kitty’s sake, that these things could have been true: that there could have been a one-woman exhibition, that the mimosa watercolour could have been perfectly achieved. But she knew that neither was the case.

What had arrived instead at Les Glaniques, before Veronica had left for England, was a postcard from Kitty, postmarked Adelaide. On the front was a picture of Kitty, smiling, wearing a white T-shirt and blue dungarees, and holding in her arms a koala bear. Underneath this, Kitty had inscribed the caption:
At least somebody loves me!

Veronica had looked at the photograph for a long time, and at Kitty’s backward-sloping writing and imagined Kitty, alone in an Adelaide hotel room, smiling as she wrote it, proud for a moment of her sorrowful little joke.

Then Veronica had torn up the card and thrown it away.

Veronica reached for her handbag and took out a peppermint and put it into her mouth.

‘All right?’ said Lloyd.

‘Yes,’ said Veronica. ‘You’re a very good driver, Lloyd. Do you want a Tic-tac?’

Lloyd refused the mint. Veronica was silent for a moment, then she said suddenly: ‘You know, I’ve been thinking: gardening in southern France is really, really arduous. I can’t grow any of my favourite things, it’s far too arid.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘More and more often, I have dreams about English flowers; sweet peas, peonies, forget-me-nots . . .’

Lloyd turned off the Mozart concerto that had played softly, in a repeating loop, since they’d left Hampshire.

‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Sell up in France and buy a house here. Benita can help you decorate it, if you want her to. Make a divine garden, Veronica. Think of primroses and cowslips and daffodils and trellises of blowsy roses . . .’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I think that’s what I’d like. Just that: an English garden and a paddock for a horse. Or is that terribly selfish?’

‘I can’t see why,’ said Lloyd. ‘When life is so bloody short.’

Audrun woke up in a dark room.

She was lying in a bed, but she knew this wasn’t her own bedroom in the bungalow. So where was it? She could smell something acrid, as though the walls might be damp. Was she in a prison cell?

She tried to sit up. But there was a pain in her chest which grew stronger, deeper as she moved. It pushed her back down again, pushed her violently, like an old enemy, standing at her bedside.

Her hand groped to her breast-bone and kneaded the scant flesh there. She thought that all she could do was wait: wait for someone to come into the room, or for a light to be switched on. Then, she would know . . .

If this was prison, it was very quiet. No sound of doors closing or opening. No screams. No footfalls. Or were there noises all around her that she couldn’t hear? Was the silence inside herself? She tried whispering her own name aloud: Audrun Lunel. She thought she heard it, but it sounded timid and far away, like a shy schoolkid reluctantly reciting her name at morning roll-call.