Mr Toppit (12 page)

Rachel shook her head. She looked as if her heart would break. “No, there’s Amy and Meg and …”

Now I understood how Martha had felt when she had screamed,
“Can’t we just get on?”
earlier in the afternoon. Their sobs mingled and, with their arms still round each other, they began to sway in the middle of the room. I turned away from them—they looked so silly.

“I’ll get Laurie,” I said, but either they couldn’t hear or they weren’t listening. I eased open the door of the chapel. For a moment, I thought she had vanished, but then I saw she was kneeling by the side of Arthur’s plinth, her head resting on his chest, just under his chin, and her hand was stroking his cheek. She was so engrossed that she didn’t see me. Finally she looked up. She wasn’t crying now. “Such a fine man,” she said. “You could tell, you could just feel it. The goodness came off of him.” It was an epitaph from a greetings card, but it was better than nothing.

Once I had accepted that Arthur was dead nothing else could seem very surprising, so the fact that Laurie appeared to be coming home with us, was wedged into the back of Claude’s
grandfather’s ancient Daimler between Rachel and me, felt oddly natural.

Maybe we all thought that one of the others had asked her to come. Maybe we were too exhausted to care. Apart from the hum of the engine as we drove down the motorway and the light sound of Martha snoring in the front, it was as silent as a tomb: nobody had spoken since we got into the car. I kept nodding off to sleep, then waking with a start. I could feel great waves of heat coming from Laurie’s body, and she gave off a sweet, fermented smell. It had been so hot all day and now it had turned cool. I felt we were flying to the moon.

Suddenly Laurie cleared her throat. “London’s a big place,” she said.

“We’re not in London,” I said, rather surprised. The fact was, we had left London behind about an hour ago and were on the way to Dorset. The flat we had in London was tiny and, besides, we had all wanted to go to Linton. Arthur would be buried there. We had discussed how we might get there in the hospital canteen while we had something to eat and a cup of tea, but I couldn’t remember whether Laurie had been with us then or not. Anyway, she might have missed it: there had been a lot of distractions—nurses and doctors coming and going, people bringing forms to be signed and asking about burial arrangements, and finally, as we were leaving, the spookiest thing of all, someone handing Martha a cardboard box containing Arthur’s “effects,” the stuff he had had in his pockets at the time of the accident. None of us could face opening it. Finally, Claude had offered to drive us to Linton—subject to Damian, who had been due to have the car that evening, agreeing—and had spent five minutes at the pay phone in the corner of the canteen clearly having a difficult negotiation.

“We’re heading to the country,” I said to Laurie. “Is that all right?”

“Sure.” She sounded quite calm about driving to an unknown destination with a bunch of strangers.

“That’s where we live most of the time.”

“Oh.”

“In Dorset. In the West Country.”

“The West Country,” she repeated. Then she said something quite unexpected: “Where Camelot is.” She spoke so softly I couldn’t tell whether she was telling or asking me.

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “I don’t think Camelot’s anywhere, really. Isn’t it, like … mythical?”

“No, it’s real. It’s a real place. They had a round table. Maybe people just can’t find it. It could be real close to your house and you don’t know it.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I told her the story of our house, how Arthur had grown up there and how our family had moved in after his father had died. When Arthur, Martha, and the baby, Rachel, had got there, it had taken a year to do it up. The top floors were uninhabitable, so they had lived in three rooms on the ground floor, which was scarcely more inviting—Martha said that one day they had found a rat in Rachel’s cot—but at least mushrooms weren’t growing out of the walls like upstairs. There was no heating, other than coal fires, and in the cold winter of 1963, Martha told us, Rachel’s milk froze in the bottle beside her cot.

Over the years, Martha had done quite a bit of research on the house and she believed it had been built on the site of a Roman settlement. Shards of pottery were occasionally found in the garden, but we never located the real prize: the Roman burial ground that Martha said was almost certainly located
nearby. When we were children, we had imagined it would be like Pompeii and that, despite the absence of a local volcano, we would find the perfectly preserved bodies of people in the exact poses they had been caught as the lava overtook them.

The house, though not in itself that attractive, had a pretty setting, nestled at the bottom of a hill beside several hundred acres of woodland, which Arthur had inaccurately metamorphosed into the Darkwood of the
Hayseed
books. Rachel and I knew them like the backs of our hands, and they seemed to us a place full of light. In fact, we spent most of our time there. We much preferred them to the house, which seemed to us, as children, rather forbidding. I’m not going to give you architectural descriptions of everything. All you really need to know about it is this: it was big; it was old; it was rambling; it was dark. Our parents slept in one bit, and we—after we’d stopped being frightened in the night—slept in another. To get from our bit to theirs, you went down two flights of stairs, across a hall and up four flights of stairs. You could also get over to the other side via the roof, but we hadn’t done that for some time. Anyway, the point is that we did not live, as Martha had pointed out to Dr. Massingbird, in a bungalow.

I almost jumped when the car turned into the drive and the tires crackled on the gravel. Up till then, the journey had seemed like a long, low hum. As Claude drove up to the front of the house, the headlights passed briefly across it, then stopped in a still beam that flooded the garden with light. He turned off the engine and for a moment we sat in darkness and silence.

“We’re here,” he said softly, and opened his door. The car was filled with the smell of new-mown grass. Rachel groaned. She must have just woken up. We all began getting out. I was
stiff, my legs and back ached, and I was almost unable to move. I felt like one of those Pompeiians caught in an awkward position by the lava. Laurie was last: she had to maneuver herself along the back seat until she got to the door and then used the frame to ease herself out.

Rachel seemed much calmer. “I can’t believe Daddy’s not here,” she whispered sadly. It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, except that she had called him “Daddy,” which she almost never did.

“This is just lovely,” Laurie said brightly, a curious remark that hung in the air because it was pitch dark and you could see only the vaguest silhouette of the house, which actually looked rather menacing.

“It’s lovelier when you can see it,” Rachel snapped.

I went round the house to the side door we always used and unlocked it. I stood in the hall as they trooped in. “Let’s have a drink. Will you get us one, baby?” Martha said. She headed into the sitting room, and Laurie followed nervously.

Rachel was still standing by the open door as if she didn’t want to come in. “I have no idea why that woman’s here,” she said. “I mean,
why
has she come with us?”

“Didn’t Martha ask her?” I whispered.

“I didn’t hear her.” Rachel didn’t lower her voice. “It’s your fault, Claude. You met her first.”

Claude was outraged. “She was sitting by me while I was waiting for you in the hospital. I was bored.” He looked accusingly at Rachel. “You’d been gone so long. I didn’t know what was happening. I began talking to her.”

“Drink!”
Martha shouted, from the sitting room. “And an ashtray.”

I went into the kitchen and grabbed a bottle of vodka from the cupboard. When I came back into the hall, Claude was
trying to calm Rachel. “You can’t just tell her to go. It’s the middle of the night.”

“She’s American, she’s got credit cards—they’re incapable of going anywhere without them,” Rachel said. “Anyway, why didn’t she tell you about sitting with Daddy after the accident?”

“She didn’t know I was with you. She just asked if I would look after her bag while she went to get some chocolate. She said she was called Laurie and she was visiting somebody.”

“So she lied!”

“Well, I suppose she
was
visiting someone. In a way.”

“How can you visit someone you don’t even know?”

“You’re not being rational.”

“I don’t have to be rational. My father’s just died!” Rachel hissed.

“Drink!”
Martha shouted again. Claude looked at me helplessly. I shrugged my shoulders and went into the sitting room with the vodka.

Martha and Laurie were sitting in dimly lit gloom, facing each other, on the two sofas. Martha had taken out some of her hairpins and her hair hung round her shoulders. She had her spectacles on the end of her nose. I picked up a glass and an ashtray from the cupboard by the door and took them to her; she had a cigarette in her hand waiting to be lit.

“Are you going to pour Laurie a drink?” she said crossly.

I turned to Laurie, who gave a little shake of her head, as if she was being offered poison. “Thank you so much, no.”

Martha took a long drag on her cigarette. “Where are you from? Where’s your accent?” she asked, her head tilted to one side.

Laurie coughed. “Northern California. A town called Modesto.”

Martha breathed out a plume of smoke. “Modesto—what a
seemly
name for a town,” she said thoughtfully. “Northern California is so interesting. Those early Spanish settlements, what are they called? Missions?
Pueblos?”

Laurie gave a gay little laugh, which sounded as if it had come from someone else. “Back home,” she said, “there are people who say we’ve a lot to be modest about in Modesto.”

There was a silence. I could tell the conversation had somehow gone in a direction that didn’t please Martha. She turned away and stubbed out her cigarette. Suddenly there was a squawk from outside, like the sound of chickens fighting, and Rachel ran wailing past the open doorway of the sitting room, her shoes clacking on the wooden floor. Claude came in, looking as if he was going to burst into tears.

Martha indicated the space next to her on the sofa. “Sit down.” He was shivering. “Are you cold?” Martha asked him. He nodded.

I was still standing by the sofa and Martha said, “Baby, get Claude that rug that’s in the bottom drawer of the chest.”

This was too much. “Why can’t he get it for himself?”

She patted Claude’s knee. “Because he’s life’s delicate child, that’s why.”

With a lot of clattering, I went over and pulled the drawer practically out of the chest. I grabbed the rug and threw it at Claude. He caught it sheepishly. Martha was oblivious. She put a hand on my arm and said in a whisper, “You’d better go and see that Rachel’s all right. Tell her I’ll be up in a while.”

I went through the hall and climbed up to the top floor where our bedrooms were. The house smelled stale and unlived-in, as if nobody had opened a window for weeks. Rachel’s room was opposite mine, with a landing between them. She was lying
curled up on her bed. I stood in the doorway for a moment. “I can’t wait for today to be over,” I said.

“Why? Then it’ll just be tomorrow. What’ll be different?” Her voice was muffled because she was talking into her pillow.

I went and sat down on her bed and laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m furious with Claude,” she said angrily.

“No, you’re not. You’re just furious with everything.”

Surprised, she turned to look at me. Then her face softened and she said grudgingly, “Well, he did drive us down here, I suppose.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s good that he’s here.”

“Yes,” she said, in a small, contrite voice.

“And Laurie, too.”

She shot me an angry look. “Why?”

“Arthur was dying by the side of the road …”

“Don’t
say
that!”

“…  and she was with him. He wasn’t alone, she looked after him. She didn’t … well, she didn’t
have
to do that, did she? She’s a tourist. She might have preferred going round Madame Tussaud’s or something.” Rachel was five years older than me: I don’t know why I had to be the grown-up one.

Rachel put her face in her hands and said something I couldn’t hear properly.

“What?”

She took her hands away. “It should have been me,” she spat. “I should have been there.” Then she glanced up at me. “Or you, I mean.”

I didn’t mind. “No, you’d have done it better. You were the one who put the splint on Jamie.”

“Oh, Jamie,” she said gloomily. “I’d forgotten about him.” Jamie had been our cat.

I got up and opened the window. A gust of clear air blew into the room, and the curtains waved and rustled as if someone was moving behind them.

“I think Mr. Toppit’s out there,” she said. Then she was crying and laughing at the same time. I sat down on her bed again, but this time I pulled my legs up and lay down beside her. She rested her head on my chest. “You won’t leave me, will you?” she said.

I closed my eyes. I must have slept for a couple of hours. When I woke, Rachel was snoring beside me. My neck was cricked and I ached all over. I pulled the eiderdown over Rachel, turned the light out, crossed the landing into my own room and got into bed with my clothes on. I didn’t know whether Martha had been up to see Rachel or not.

I hadn’t drawn the curtains so I woke as soon as it was light. The house was gray and silent. Arthur was dead. Yesterday it hadn’t seemed quite so definite. Today it did. When I went downstairs, I could hear Martha talking on the phone in the sitting room. I got a bowl of cereal from the kitchen and went in to see her. As I entered the room, she shook her head and put a finger over her lips. I backed out. She was not to be disturbed.

For a while, I sat on my own in the kitchen. Before long, I heard creaking overhead. Laurie was getting up, and I could hear her moving from her bedroom to the bathroom, which was above the kitchen. There was a wheezy noise as she turned on a tap, and a shuffling of feet. Then there was a sudden, stifled cry. Her footsteps clattered along the bathroom floor and I could hear her rattling the handle up and down, then banging the door.