Mischief (35 page)

Maude-and-Martha....  Do stay! Turkey and all the trimmings. Waste not, want not.

If the twins were being at their most Aspergery it was not surprising; first an all-night party; then their father, there yesterday, gone today. I hurried down. All who arrived stayed. They came in assorted executive cars, provided by their hotel in Knightsbridge. They seemed stunned and upset and took time to settle. They were sombre and embarrassed over the turkey but cheered up over Christmas pudding and drank and toasted and laughed and chattered; even the twins smiled, if only in unison. We all distributed presents as planned. Ted’s were put aside on the hall stand, still wrapped, to go straight to charity. Only the present from me to Ted stayed under the Christmas tree. When all the guests were gone I looked at the tag on the slippers I’d wrapped for him the night before, and it was blank, though I remembered very clearly writing out his name. Still, one can be mistaken. But to me it was as if Ted’s presence on this earth was being rapidly and steadily obliterated by forces greater than me. Well, odd things happen.

December 25th and 26th were public holidays so I couldn’t get down to the Harrow Civic Centre to register the death until Thursday the 27th. When I found I was not entitled to a certificate because the coroner had to sign off the autopsy and I needed various papers I didn’t have, I fainted. I was picked up, sat down and given water by a Civic Centre employee wearing a Happy Winter Festive Season broach that flashed on and off very close at eye level. Reality dawned and grief began.

C
ynara’s words in my head… ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

Why had the body seemed so cold when I woke? Was that natural? Weren’t bodies meant to take time to cool down? Could the chill be indicative of some kind of poison? But wouldn’t an autopsy pick such a thing up? I came back from the Civic Centre wondering exactly where Ted was. I’d assumed he’d be in the morgue where I’d left him: I rang them and they said they’d signed it out to the undertakers of my choice – oddly named Loam
&
Leap, chosen from a list the morgue gave me. I called Loam
&
Leap who referred me back to the medical attendant who had signed the death confirmation, apparently different from a death certificate.

I went round with the twins to the surgery. Old Dr Nevis was ‘away on a well-earned holiday’ so they gave us an earnest young man who stared goggle-eyed at the twins. Pretty identical twins, especially if they have long blonde hair, are much in demand in the porn industry, and heaven alone knew what erotic fantasies came to his mind. The twins have a lot to put up with – and all my fault, according to the latest findings of the medical profession. Being starved of mitochondria in the maternal womb, their degree of identicality was extreme – ninety-three percent, Robbie reckoned, though I would not let the girls be tested. There are too many scientists wanting to prod and poke identical twins as it is.

Of course the twins are angry with me: I’ve so often failed them. Once when they were about eight and arguing and giggling in their private language in the back of the car I turned and slapped them both and almost crashed the car. They shut me out after that; they were cold to me, and made do with me as servant, not as a loved and trusted Mummy. They adored Ted. Motherhood can make one mad.

And then of course I’d let Ted die and thus failed in my wifely responsibility of keeping him alive. I’d find them glaring at me in the same way as when they were four, when they’d fallen down in the gravel path and hurt a knee, and I represented a world which had treated them unfairly. Or they’d start one of their peculiar sibling arguments about who was most upset. Sometimes they’d both stop talking in mid-sentence and one or the other would begin to cry great big terrible sobs, usually Martha, because Maude tried harder not to screw up her face, having read an article which her sister seemed not to have, about how weeping developed wrinkles. They worry so about their looks, like so many of their contemporaries and not at all like me. I don’t bother much about my appearance. I always seem to have too much to do other than simply comb my hair, drag on clothes and find my shoes in the morning, forget make-up. But that may be just what having twins does to a woman. Pre-motherhood, I’d spent a lot of my youth staring into a mirror, like my girls do today.

C
ynara’s words in my head: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’ But one way and another I did not think the twins were so angry with me they would collude with Cynara’s ‘they’ in the murder of their father, even to obtain the possibility of replacing him with some stepfather who could provide them with all the goodies Ted could not. I could safely remove my girls from suspicion.

But I wasn’t happy they were with me when I asked Dr Nevis’s young locum about the necessity of an autopsy. It seemed that because Ted had died young, in apparent good health and had not seen the doctor in the last three months of his life, an autopsy was required. An autopsy! The twins were fascinated.

Maude....  Do they think Mum did it?

Martha....  She was the last person to see him.

Maude....   It can’t have been us.

Martha....  We have an alibi.

‘No-one’s suspected of anything,’ the young man replied, startled back to his senses, erotic fantasies abandoned. ‘They’ll assume SADS, Sudden Arrhythmic Death Syndrome. Largely a hereditary condition. Nobody’s fault, just most unfortunate.’

Maude....  They actually chop up the body?

Martha....  Not even key-hole surgery?

‘They open it up, yes,’ said the young man.

Maude....  To get at the brain?

Martha....  They have to use some sort of saw?

The doctor agreed that yes they would. The NHS was investigating the use of non-invasive forensic techniques where possible but they were not yet operational.

Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me.’

Yes, why had Dr Nevis insisted on an autopsy? Ted had been to visit him in August for a malaria jab: Nevis could have stretched a point and ticked the ‘been seen by doctor within last three months’ easily enough, but he didn’t. Had he suspected something? Murder? But then the coroner had eventually signed the death certificate. Could Dr Nevis have been involved in the plot? No, that was absurd, the wake-up pills were doing things to my brain. And God alone knew what Robbie’s little pink pills were doing to me.

The twins would be off to college with the new spring term and I’d be glad of it. I didn’t want to have to think of the reality of what an autopsy meant, and they would make sure I did. A buzz-saw, splinters of bone and splashes of cold, cold blood. My Ted.

‘And then they plonk the top of the skull back on again, I suppose,’ one or both of them had said, ‘for appearance’s sake. And who are these pissy “they” anyway?’

Maude....  Then they pluck out the heart, all dripping—

Martha....  —with blood, like in a horror film.

Then they’d both said ‘Sorry, Mum,’ for which I was grateful. But whether it was for saying ‘pissy’ or because they realised I can’t stand too much reality I don’t know. I took them home as soon as I could, and waited as instructed to hear from the Coroner’s office. It was a busy time of year, I was told, and there was a shortage of pathologists prepared to do this specialist work so I should be patient. I resigned myself to waiting, and getting on with all the letters, phone calls, notifications, the closing of bank accounts and so on that go with a death. Ted’s brothers stayed around to help.

Cynara: ‘I’m not saying they bumped Ted off just to try it out, but it wouldn’t surprise me’.

I waited and waited for Ted to say goodbye, for his spirit to touch me before it departed, but he did not come. There was a kind of heavy silence in the house, a blankness. My deceased birth mother had come to sit on my bed, my adoptive parents had said goodbye as they left; but from Ted, my husband of twenty years, nothing. I’d felt aggrieved at the time but I wonder now if the delay was because Ted was waiting for me to avenge his death but I was doing nothing.

Then Cynara called me out of the blue on New Year’s Eve to say how sorry she was to hear of my loss and how fond she had been of Ted. Such a dear, darling man, such a great loss, but she felt better because he’d visited her in a dream the previous night.

‘Such a vivid dream, Phyllis. I woke and Ted was standing beside my bed! He smiled at me and said he was okay and wished me well. Then he kind of faded out. I went back to sleep and felt so much better in the morning. As if he’d wiped away my grief.’

‘I’m happy for you, Cynara,’ I said, though it took considerable effort to say so. I hated her. Why had he come first to her, not me? The answer was horribly clear. Cynara had been more on Ted’s mind when he passed on than I had been. A simple affair I could have forgiven; it had happened before and meant nothing in the long run. But this?

‘I’ve been so upset,’ Cynara complained. ‘And nobody called me to tell me. I was left to find out from strangers.’ Her voice was a little slurred. It occurred to me that she was a little drunk. Many people are at that time of year.

‘I’ve been rather upset too,’ I said.

‘Of course you have, poor darling. I’m such a selfish bitch. But you must tell me when the funeral is.’

I told her it was not yet settled. Ted’s family were over from Ireland. I didn’t mention the autopsy; I didn’t want to engage with her.

‘Oh yes, all those brothers,’ she said. ‘Me, I’m so alone in the world. And Phyllis, I just have to say this. I didn’t have any kind of affair with your Ted. We just worked together. He was my business partner. It was purely business. I want you to know that.’

Which of course made me the surer that she was lying. Why even mention it otherwise? She was feeling guilty.

‘Why thank you, Cynara,’ I said, cool as cool. ‘That’s very thoughtful of you. All my best wishes to you both for a happy New Year.’ And I put the phone down. I suspected her of not being alone. I resolved not to tell her anything about the funeral: I didn’t want her turning up.

Ted’s three older brothers all came back to visit in that strange lost time between Christmas and the New Year, when the whole country falls back into a kind of exhausted stupor. All three, left-side dominants (left brain is rational, orderly, analytical – right brain fuzzy, creative, intuitive) had regarded Ted as the arty and confused sibling; the irresponsible one, the right-brainer. Frank and Hector were accountants – or so they described themselves, though I’d have called them hedge-fund managers – and Aidan was a lawyer. They lost no time. They went through Ted’s papers. A trendy art gallery in the West End was out of their ken, though they seemed impressed by the mark-up considered normal in the art world. But the gallery was obviously a risky project – a market for fakes people knew were fakes could only be a flash in the pan – and Cynara was a wild card. But I was glad of the brothers’ comfort and support.

Their wives and hangers-on were a different matter. They did not take the arrival of New Year as a signal to go away. The wives saw it as their duty to sit with me a lot, though the body itself was away for the autopsy and the funeral couldn’t happen until the coroner said so, and of course the New Year sales were on. All had to be fed and watered by me, though all assured me of their willingness to ‘help’. There was a lot of running to and from Marks and Spencer on my behalf for chilled food of the expensive kind – they were a well-heeled and classy lot – and no end of sherry, gin and Guinness. They were also quarrelsome, large and noisy and kept turning up the heating, when all I wanted was cold and cool. They’d throw their arms around me and squeeze the breath out of me, weeping for my loss. I needed Ted to come back and say goodbye to me, but how could he, why would he, with all this going on?

They disapproved of so many things –

....‘Sure and why didn’t you keep the body at home, girl? Throwing him out of the house and his body not yet cold. Those morgues are terrible, terrible places.’

....‘Those girls of yours need to learn not be mean. Those mince-pie fillings were a disgrace. They do everything by halves. We don’t have twins on our side of the family.’

....‘We can’t even go down to the morgue to view! You English just love to sweep everything under the carpet, even dead bodies.’

....‘An autopsy? They want to cut our poor Ted open? This country’s a madhouse.’

....‘But we can’t stay around forever waiting for a funeral. Not if we’ve already had the wake on Christmas Day.’

They took the Christmas baubles down, not waiting for Twelfth Night, saying they were tired of looking at them. I was glad: I couldn’t bear the sight of the decorations now, though Ted had always been a great stickler for keeping them up. I didn’t have the will power to make the decision to take them down myself and it didn’t seem right to ask the twins to do it – they’d put them up in the first place: too much the stuff memories are made of. Martha and Maude sobbed in unison and worried about the effect of tears on the skin beneath the eyes. I didn’t do much sobbing, though. I couldn’t believe Ted was
dead
, just that he had rather wilfully deserted me.

It was after Cynara’s phone call that I began to ‘hear’ the relatives, still busy embracing and weeping over me, saying things to my face that were simply too rude and callous to be said aloud. I was hearing their thoughts as well as their words. Frank’s ex-wife’s mother, who seemed to travel everywhere with his new wife, began it at breakfast: ‘I didn’t sleep a wink. Nylon sheets! Cheap, slippery and hot. And those towels! Thin and scratchy. Ted should never have married her.’ I stared at her in disbelief and then realised no-one else seemed to have heard what I had. It got worse:

....‘People don’t just up and die like that for no reason. Must be something
she
did.’

....‘No instant coffee in the house. A rotten house-keeper she is!’