A Place for Us (26 page)

When he came into the kitchen that evening, teatime was over and the children were outside. He could hear them chanting, some strange game. Martha was slicing up onions for supper. He stood in the doorway watching her, her slim fingers sliding the moon shapes into the red pot. She wiped her eyes on her forearm at one point, her hair falling in front
of her face; then she looked up and blinked, laughing to herself, and saw him.

“Hello there,” she said, and he knew he loved her more than anything and anyone in the whole world.

“Hello,” he said, coming toward her. “I’m sorry for this morning. I’m sorry for everything. I didn’t sell the drawings, but I’ve had an idea. A wonderful idea.” He gripped her shoulders and kissed her. “Everything’s going to be great.”

She stepped back, holding the knife, still smiling. “Careful, I’m armed. Well, that’s good news. What’s got into you?”

“Just as I say.” He threw his hat onto the table. “Everything bad is in the past. Everything good is in the future.”

Martha stroked his cheekbone, tracing the line of his eye sockets. “You look exhausted.”

The onion scent on her fingers made his eyes water. He kissed her again and she leaned back in his arms, her back curving away, arms outstretched; then she flung herself around him again and hugged him.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispered in his ear, head lying on his shoulder. “I hate arguing with you. I love you, darling.”

“Em, Em . . .” He breathed in the scent of her, closed his eyes. “It’s in the past. I’m getting us a drink. I love you.”

When he’d made them both strong, lime-scented gin and tonics, Martha threw the thyme from their garden into the pot with the chicken, and they went outside and sat on the lawn, watching the children chase the dancing dragonflies, their rainbow wings catching the summer light. Martha sat back in her chair, humming, occasionally calling out to one of them. David gulped his drink down like a dying man. He knew he had seen his past today, in all its forms. And now he had to remake the future.

Martha

March 2013

B
ILL,
D
AISY,
F
LORENCE.

In the weeks after David died, Martha realized that she did not see things clearly anymore. She had lost all sense of what was normal and what wasn’t. She could see the fear in people’s eyes if she walked into the village, when she went to the shop or to church. The horror of grief. She felt marked, like a leper. They wanted to shy away from her because of what she had done, and what had happened in her house that day.

She had to change several aspects of her day-to-day life. At first some were difficult, but it was much better this way.

She didn’t go into the study. There was time to go through his papers, his sketches, the documents of their family. Not yet.

The night it happened, she had found Florence in there, and something about her face, her searching eyes, was like a warning signal. There was too much in the study; it was all him. She couldn’t be going in there, and neither could anyone else. Martha saw that quite clearly.

“I need to use the study,” she told Florence. “Papers in there I need to find.”

“I was just looking for something.” Florence’s eyes were red raw. Her fingers flapped uselessly; she had beautiful hands. She swallowed. “Ma . . .” Then she started crying. Martha stared at her daughter’s sunken, heart-shaped face and knew she couldn’t tell her anything. She stroked her lightly on the arm.

“Just give me a couple of minutes in here, please, darling. The police need some information.”

The next day, Florence left. Left the house less than twenty-four hours
after he’d died. Something about a manuscript on loan in London only for one more day. It was a lie, of course.

“If I don’t go now . . . I can’t explain.” She’d rushed forward and briefly embraced her mother; and just as Martha inhaled that familiar Florence smell of coffee, something spicy, her soft hair brushing Martha’s cheek, Florence gave a soft cry that seemed to stick in her throat.

“I don’t know what else to say to you,” she’d mumbled; Martha wasn’t sure, afterward, exactly what it was she’d said. For how could she know? How could her baby girl, the one she didn’t choose but had been handed on a plate, the one she hadn’t loved to begin with, not at all, how could she know? Was it a memory, the truth of the years rolling back like a stone to reveal the emptiness at the beginning, the huge lie at the heart of it all?

When you were little, you loved to chew my finger. Your long, white, slim little fingers gripping mine, your tiny hard pink gums, your mouth sucking my knuckle, your huge blue eyes as clear as a summer sky. The solid small heft of you in my arms. You in your place with us. And I loved you, even though you weren’t mine.

And then she was gone, like that.

She came back for the funeral, that awful, cold, icy day when everyone except Martha cried, and the earth was frozen so stiff that the men took twice as long to dig the plot, and the ice seemed sewn into the mud, glittering underfoot, as the family gathered around the open grave and watched the coffin lowered in. Martha saw him there, saw the earth she was handed scattering onto the wooden lid, saw the faces of her family—Bill’s eyes hazy with grief, Florence’s red with weeping, hands in front of her mouth, Lucy’s hunched shoulders and flushed cheeks, mouth turned down like a clown’s, Cat biting her woolen-glove-clad finger.

Martha didn’t cry. Not then.

Since the funeral, Florence, like Daisy, had vanished. She was fighting this court case. She was always busy:
I have to meet my barrister tomorrow. I have a paper to finish.
She’d say she was coming back and then she didn’t.
I’m staying with Jim in London. I’ll call you.
She never did.
The trial’s in May.

And in December or January, May seemed so far in the future as to be ridiculous. He would have come back by then; this was all like the
episode in the kitchen, when she had felt herself slipping away. He had gone and would come back. It seemed logical to her.

•   •   •

Bill, Daisy, Florence.

This is what Martha kept remembering: how it was when they returned from the hospital, nearly five years ago. A hot summer’s day, the hills beyond the house golden and lazy with late-afternoon heat. David was limping, his knee still bandaged. She’d helped him from the car, and then walked with him through to the garden.

“I need to show you something.”

His arm was heavy around her neck as she helped him along the rocky path toward the daisy bank. When they reached the scar of the freshly milled brown earth, he stared down at it.

“What’s been going on?” he said in a strange voice, and she knew he understood.

“Daisy,” she began. “Darling . . . she’s gone.”

His hand gripped the metal crutch the hospital had given him. It pressed into the wet soil. “Oh, Daisy,” he said. He scrunched his face up and looked at her. His eyes were dark. “What happened, Em?”

“She . . . did it herself.” She couldn’t say “killed herself,” it was so brutal. “She . . . I buried her.”

He gazed at the crumbling earth, at the crushed daisies around the long rectangular grave. He didn’t speak for a long time, but eventually he said, “Don’t you want to tell someone, Em?”

All Daisy had asked for was to be buried here, to not be bothered anymore. And Martha had felt she had to give her that. She could have rung the police, yes, of course. But since it had happened, she’d realized that she didn’t care about other people. She never had. She cared about the fact that her daughter, who hadn’t ever felt at home in this place, had wanted to stay here at last.

Don’t you want to tell someone, Em?

“I thought I wouldn’t,” she said. “I thought I’d just let everyone think she’s gone away again.”

“Yes,” he said gently.

“I . . . I think she’s happy here now. Do you . . . ?” And Martha faltered, the fatigue and sadness swamping her. She sobbed, stumbled
against him, so that he supported her for a moment. “Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

•   •   •

They’d dug Daisy up. Three policemen and forensics and a pathologist, a big white tent around the daisy bank and the light of huge arc lamps flooding the side of the house, the earth churned into new banks of brown mud. She’d sat at the window, watching them, with her usual cup of tea and gingerbread, trying to tell herself they couldn’t hurt her, no one could anymore. She stood up and drew the curtains that looked out onto the daisy bank and the garden from the dining room. She kept them drawn from that moment on. She left the garden well alone.

•   •   •

Bill, Daisy, Florence.

He’d been eighty-two. Not young. By the New Year, Martha couldn’t bear to see anyone other than close family or strangers, because someone would say again, “It was a good run, eighty-two,” and the fear that she would turn on them in rage and lose control grew to possess her.

He
didn’t tell me he was ill. I could have helped him and he didn’t tell me. I saw how he suffered. I watched him die.

So she stopped going into the village. Karen did her shopping, and then when Karen moved in with Joe in the New Year, Bill did it, Bill and Lucy.

Karen was there that day they took Daisy away, two or three weeks after the birthday lunch. She sat with Martha in the dining room. She had her laptop with her and pretended to be working, but occasionally she’d look up and ask Martha a question, get up to make some more tea, fetch a book.

There was something restful about Karen, something calm and logical about her in those days after David went, when Christmas was approaching and everything was supposed to carry on as normal. Martha was glad of her company.

But come the New Year Karen had left Bill, moved in with Joe. David, Daisy, Florence, Cat, now this little one, another grandchild,
gone. Bill had known his father was ill. She knew it, she didn’t know how. To see him and think of the skinny, muddy, serious, joyful little boy he’d been, nearly, but not quite, brought her down. It would if she thought about Bill then. The little boy who’d thrown himself into her arms, who’d run along the lane with her, jumping up with questions like a kangaroo, who’d left for medical school and said in the doorway, an awkward, acned eighteen-year-old, “Thanks for a great life so far, Ma, really wanted to just say that,” then got into the car with David, waved once, and driven off.

Bill, Daisy, Florence.

•   •   •

Through the long, cold nights of late winter, Martha lay awake, staring at the blue-black ceiling, listening to the silence outside. Though it was never silent, not really: the owls, the dreadful sound of night murder in hedgerows, a lone dog barking somewhere, and always a blackbird, throughout it all, in the tree outside.

One night she was lying, eyes fixed on the ceiling as though a movie reel were playing there, when she suddenly turned to look at David’s side of the bed. It had been cleared, but the book he had been reading still lay there.
The Day of the Jackal
. The tatty green woven bookmark that Cat had made at Brownie camp when she was nine marked his place: only halfway through.

Suddenly Martha saw grief, like the sky, covering everything, all over her, around her, impossible to penetrate. That feeling again, the one she’d had before. The gray mist seemed to fill up the room; it slid along the floor, up the bed, over her, covering her like water.

He’s never coming back
.

He is. Don’t think about it
.

He’s never coming back, Martha. You threw the earth on the coffin. You cleared out his cupboard. He’s dead. David’s dead.

She fought it, literally, wrestling with the bedclothes, scrambling out of the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Memories, like a vortex. David in only a pair of pants, painting the kitchen. Lying on the grass with Bill by his side, listening to the cricket game on the radio. His sweet, hopeful face, staring at her as they lay in bed. The long, sad day they brought Florence back from Cassie’s maternity ward, and
his suddenly joyous expression at their hotel as he peered at the small bundle, clasped tight in Martha’s arms. His screams at night, when the bad dreams came and he’d moan and sob so loudly, sometimes wetting himself, sometimes curling up in a ball so tight she had to wake him to free him.

He needed her, wherever he was. She wasn’t there and he needed her. Who would hug him and comfort him; who would be there wherever he was to smooth his hair, to hold his hand and whisper those words; who would help him draw, help him cook, help him make a house, a home, a family together? He was alone. He had never been without her and she needed him, now more than ever. Just to see him once more, to tell him once more, one more evening together . . . Tears poured down Martha’s cheeks. She retched, her throat swelling up so much with the power of grief that she thought, then and there, she was losing consciousness. She leaned against the wall, panting, sobbing, gasping for breath. But there was no one to hear her in the empty house. No one.

Eventually her breathing returned to normal. She put her hand on her throat, wishing this thickness, this lump would go away. She leaned in and listened through the bedroom door. As if she were trying to hear something.

All was quiet again.

“He’s somewhere round here,” Martha muttered to herself. She clicked her tongue.

In the darkness, she smiled to herself. She understood now. She thought she wouldn’t say anything to anyone about it, but she knew she was right.

She just had to put a few plans in place, then, and she would see him again, when things were ready. She didn’t go back to her room at nighttime. She started sleeping in Cat’s room, hugging the old patchwork cushion with Cat’s name spelled out in blue, and which smelled faintly of Cat, close to her. She avoided Lucy’s calls, because Lucy wanted to come over to look after her, to boss her around and pry and get into things, to find out things. She mustn’t let her do that.

She couldn’t go into the village, so she went into Bath to do her shopping. She would walk through the supermarket, pushing a cart, thinking about what he would like for supper, and sometimes see another person like her. Eyes blank. Face smooth, unlined, frozen. And Martha would
think:
I know why they’re like that. They are waiting for someone too. I hope they come back soon.

She stopped cleaning the house, opening the post, answering the phone. She read and reread her old gardening books. She learned the name of every plant, its soil, its situation, its family. Memorizing them so that, if someone started talking about him and how sad it was, or what she should do, or how plans should be put in place, she could just nod and smile and not listen, recite different varieties of forget-me-nots in her head to shut out the words so she couldn’t hear what they were telling her. Because if she couldn’t hear them, she couldn’t let them in. Since the first day, the day she’d met him and he’d worn that silly hat on his head, since the two of them walked away from the past and into their future, he had always been nearby.