A Grave in the Cotswolds (3 page)

‘Besides,’ Thea persisted, ‘you’re not in uniform. Doesn’t that mean you’re not entitled to throw your weight around like this?’

‘Don’t be stupid.’ Jessica was clearly losing any cool she’d retained till then. ‘If I observe a felony taking place, whether in uniform or not, it’s my duty to confront it.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Thea, earning herself my eternal affection. ‘You just enjoy the effect it has on people.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said the daughter, inflating her bosom with dignity and turning back to me. ‘But the law’s the law.’

‘So, what must I do?’ I enquired humbly.

‘Kwik-Fit will still be open – you can go and get new tyres, and be on your way in an hour or so,’ said the girl briskly.

And it’ll cost me money I didn’t have, I calculated gloomily. The credit card could stand it, just, but I’d vowed to myself not to use it again until the end of the month. The business survived only by virtue of a constant juggling act with the finances, and although I had been able to access Mrs Simmonds’ carefully secured money, things were still very tight.

‘Right,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Where’s the nearest one, then?’

They didn’t know. They weren’t local. Jessica and her boyfriend had invited themselves over to join Thea for a meal in Chipping Campden, all three of them staying in Mrs Simmonds’ house (which I thought slightly dubious, but it seemed they felt perfectly justified) overnight, before departing to their respective homes next day. ‘Or we might even leave it till Sunday, if the weather improves,’ said Thea, happy to share their plans with me. Her daughter rolled her eyes again, obviously thinking I had no need to be told about their personal arrangements.

I was uneasy, even agitated. Money trouble always sent me into a spin, and I also had the worry of Karen and the children expecting me home. Plus there was my usual reluctance to finally detach myself from the person just interred. Normally, this was accomplished quite gradually and painlessly, because they were buried in the field behind my house, and I could stroll around the graves every day and commune with them as much as I liked. This time, I believed I would never come back to this remote little village, never revisit my one-time client, to check that all was well with her. Daft, I know, but there’s something about the dead that makes it difficult to abandon them completely. I liked to know I’d done a good job; that nothing had disturbed their resting place. I worried for Mrs Simmonds’ remains left alone in this corner of land, with careless relatives and uncomprehending neighbours, and the constant niggling worry about foxes and dogs that came from the shallower graves employed for ecological reasons. Mrs S might have earned my respect when she said she quite liked the idea of an arm or leg being taken away by a vixen as a hearty supper for a nest of fox cubs, but I had no intention of letting such a thing happen.

I was also annoyed – as anybody would have been – with the young police officer, who I could not help feeling had been showing off for the benefit of her boyfriend, if not her mother. The detective beau further confused me by appearing sympathetic towards my predicament, whilst studiously remaining silent. Where Thea was rapidly becoming a confirmed ally, he seemed, if not quite on my side, then far from impressed by the eager Jessica. The criss-crossing currents of emotion and motivation made me feel tired. The cold wind kept blowing, with a few drops of rain in it, hitting the side of my face. All the mourners had gone, leaving us, a motley foursome, to bid a final farewell to Mrs Simmonds.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ burst out Thea, after a moment or two of silence. ‘You started this, you sort him out.’ She was addressing her daughter. ‘Find out where he can get some tyres, and show him how to get there. The whole thing is completely ridiculous, and you know it.’ She gazed impatiently at the sky, as if appealing for celestial witnesses. ‘Since when did the police become so hopelessly sidetracked by stupid little details like car tyres? No wonder you get so little respect from the public. This is a prime example of where it’s all gone wrong.’

Detective Paul cleared his throat warningly, and his eyes widened. He was big, and muscular, filling the blue rugby shirt he wore with bulges that could only come from serious physical power. I imagined him felling a runaway criminal with a forceful tackle that showed no concern for subsequent cuts and bruises.

Jessica’s bosom heaved again, and she clenched her lips tightly together, before managing to speak. ‘Mr Slocombe, it’s up to you what you choose to do next. I’m going to file a report to say I cautioned you about the condition of your vehicle and the failure to show a valid tax disc. If you report to a police station within forty-eight hours, with proof that the tyres have been replaced, that will be enough. No further action will be taken. Do you understand?’

She was polite and calm. I nodded weakly, feeling I’d had a reprieve from a prison sentence. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to sign anything?’

‘That won’t be necessary.’

‘Well, goodbye then,’ I said, looking hard at Thea Osborne, wondering if I had caused a major family rift, and whether there was anything I could do to mend it. ‘Thank you very much. I mean – it was nice to meet you. I’m sorry if I’ve made you late.’

‘It was a very nice funeral,’ said Thea gently. ‘Dignified but human. Just the sort of thing I’d like to have myself.’

‘Oh, God, Mother,’ groaned Jessica. ‘Don’t start on that now.’

Somehow they appeared to have evened things up, to have established a balance between them that was free from animosity. I smiled carefully.

It was close to two o’clock, the burial having begun at twelve-thirty, and somehow the subsequent business having occupied nearly an hour. Nobody had had any lunch, especially me, and my stomach was complaining. The grave was already being discreetly filled in again by the efficient local man, assisted by young Jeremy, and there was absolutely no further reason to stay.

‘I’d better get on, then,’ I said. ‘I’ve kept you for ages, haven’t I? I’m so sorry. You must be hungry by now.’

Nobody replied, but Thea met my eye with a little nod of understanding that seemed close to an apology for her daughter. I went back to my delinquent vehicle and climbed in. There was a Mars bar in the glove compartment, and I retrieved it and tore off the paper before trying to start the engine. All I needed was the overzealous police constable to get me for eating while driving. According to Maggs, that was one of the latest batch of misdemeanours you could be stopped for.

The country lanes were confusing, and I forgot to check the map before finally setting off. All I knew was that I needed to head south, and my sense of direction was just about reliable enough to ensure I got that much right. I remembered passing through Stow-on-the-Wold on the way up, so hoped to find a sign directing me back that way, once I’d reached a more major road.

All of a sudden I felt any sense of urgency fall away. Karen was quite capable of collecting the kids from school and giving them their tea. Maggs would handle any phone calls or visits to the office. It was Friday, and although my life hardly followed the normal working pattern, there was still the general air of relaxation, if only because we could forget about school uniforms and packed lunches for a couple of days.

It was over three years since Karen had come home from hospital, pale and fearful after being shot in the head at close range. Nothing vital had been destroyed, and at first the doctors had assured us that her periods of blankness and problems with eating and sleeping were the result of trauma, rather than physical damage. The very fact of her still being alive had carried us through several euphoric weeks. And she did slowly get better, although the lack of appetite persisted and the resultant loss of weight alarmed me. She had always had lovely creamy shoulders and neck, well padded for a child’s head to rest on. She had been strong and nurturing, a perfect wife and mother. The new Karen was very different, her efforts to play the same role as before often painful to observe. I watched her self-assessments, whereby she calculated how much energy she had that day, and where the priorities should lie. She tackled everything head-on, from some deep sense of obligation, but there was no joy in her. It took me a long time to see that the euphoria had been all mine, and that my wife was no longer sure about the purpose of being alive.

The only answer she could find to that question lay in the children. Stephanie and Timothy, who had been four and three at the time of her injury, needed her irrefutably.

I decided to stop at a pub for a sandwich and drink before joining the M5 and pressing on home, if I could find one still serving food at that time in the afternoon. A detour on a whim down a small road leading to a village, the name of which I never noticed, took me to a plain-looking hostelry, which offered me a choice of ham or cheese in white or brown. I drank a large quantity of very expensive apple juice, and hoped I could reach home before my bladder started to bother me.

The motorway was busy, it being a Friday afternoon, but nowhere near as bad as it would have been a year or two earlier, before failed businesses, high-priced fuel and general economic gloom took so much commercial traffic off the roads. No longer did people head in their thousands for the South-West the moment a nice weekend was promised. Admittedly, this rush had never really gone mad until after Easter, but given the reduction in lorry movements, and the near disappearance of small vans dashing hither and yon on mysterious business, the traffic kept moving very nicely.

Home beckoned strongly on the final stretch. The children would greet me like Irish setters, as if I’d been away for months. Karen would smile and tell me about her day. Maggs would wait in the background, and then fill me in on any developments. I had never seen myself as a patriarch, but nonetheless, there was a pleasing sense of being absorbed into a world of women and children, all focused on me. The hunter coming home, the returning warrior, the breadwinner with his sack of sustaining goodies over his shoulder.

And so it proved, with only minor deviations. Karen had a headache, which was not unusual, but pained me to witness. Her hair, once thick and tawny, had thinned and faded after the removal of much of it in the hospital. Her suffering head throbbed almost visibly, the crease in her brow suggestive of a heavy weight crushing her crown. Stephanie had lost another tooth, the resulting gap somehow ghastly in my once-perfect little daughter. She and I had enjoyed a close bond from the outset, when Karen returned to teaching and I was setting up the business. My little toddler girl would play calmly in the office while people came to discuss burials. Looking back it felt like an idyll in every respect.

Timothy had been in trouble at school – again. He could never explain his sudden bouts of violence against other children, but we assumed it could only be a legacy of Karen’s injury, an inchoate rage against the loss of the trouble-free life we had known in his first years. When I suggested that it might simply be that he was too young to be confined to a classroom and expected to conform to the rules of an institution, no matter how benign, Karen defended the system, from her standing as one-time professional teacher.

I went to my office, to find out how my weary colleague had fared. Maggs had nothing to report, which in itself was a disappointment. She smiled determinedly, and asked about my trip to the Cotswolds.

‘I got into trouble with the police,’ I said, anticipating her reaction.

She eyed me attentively, her brown face slightly tilted. ‘Speeding?’ she guessed.

‘Nope. I wasn’t even in the car at the time.’

‘Tyres,’ she nodded, pleased with her cleverness. ‘I knew they weren’t legal.’

‘Right. And tax. It was a policewoman, at the funeral. Sort of. Her mother was actually there first, and she came along later, for some reason. With a detective boyfriend.’

‘Bummer,’ said Maggs carelessly. Like me, she had a healthy disregard for life’s trivialities. The small stuff passed us by where other people seemed to find it desperate. They would fight over who did the washing-up, or whether the toothpaste was in the right configuration. We chose instead to focus on the larger issues of grief at the utter finality that came with death; the future condition of the planet; the obligations we had shouldered in our work and our relationships. Maggs and Karen and I had been a forceful trio when we founded Peaceful Repose, carrying all before us. If Karen and I had grown tireder and older since then, Maggs continued just as before, an indispensable inspiration and support. Even now, after twenty-something hours with no sleep, she was reliably focused.

‘It’s daft, though,’ I persisted. ‘When the city centres are impassable and the youth of today are feral monsters, why waste time on model citizens like me?’

‘Forget about it,’ she advised. ‘And have a nice weekend. I’ll see you on Monday.’

‘Yes…you too,’ I said, never doubting that I would indeed see her on Monday.

I went back to take over from Karen. She had put some potatoes on to boil, but done little else towards preparing us a meal. ‘Chops?’ I suggested, looking in the freezer.

‘If you like.’

‘I’ll turn the spuds off for a bit, then, or they’ll be done too soon.’

‘OK.’

I flew around the kitchen, thinking about the food. I could gather some mint from the garden, and fish some frozen runner beans out for the veg. It was simple, basic stuff, which Karen could have done standing on her head before she was injured. Now she so easily lost focus, so that peeling and boiling potatoes could seem to her all that was required for a family meal. We had often sat down to unadorned pasta, or a large quantity of grilled bacon with nothing to go with it. I had quickly learnt to have instant sauces, frozen peas, tins of beans and sweetcorn and soup stacked in the cupboards ready to add to Karen’s partial meals. I had also acquired a microwave oven, despite a strong resistance to that sort of cooking. Karen and I had been united in choosing a simple lifestyle, with slow cooking, home-grown vegetables, minimal use of technology. It went with the ethos of the business, after all. But much of that had changed over the past three years. The world itself was in deep confusion over the demands of the environment, the global recession, the price of oil – the word
ecological
had begun to seem old-fashioned, along with
alternative
and even
organic
. My children were catching up with the digital age, while Karen and I struggled to cling to the ideology that had been so important to us.