Tarnished (37 page)

I wonder if I should go and see what’s going on, but I’m a bit scared of the man, and anyway it’s Aunty Jean’s business, not mine.

Then, blimey, she’s pulling herself up, out of the trolley, and she has the man by the shoulders. She’s pulling back her hand and it looks like she slaps him round the face. She then points at me and I look away pretending not to have noticed, pretending to be involved in my crab.

The next time I dare sneak a look at what’s going on, the man is storming back to his car. He climbs in and slams the door and reverses it so quickly back along the prom that I hear the tyres screech, even from that far away, and two boys on the prom have to jump out of the way to avoid being run over.

Jean is back in her trolley and she’s staring straight out at me.

My tummy grips me with a really hot pain.

A
really
hot pain.

This wasn’t the time the old bags asked me about my mummy. This was much later than that.

The hot pain was there because it was the day my period started.

I was twelve when this happened.

My father came back for me when I was twelve.

It’s not that I forgot it. I just didn’t realise.

I didn’t put two and two together.

And Aunty Jean saw him off . . .

Thirty-Seven

‘Excuse me,’ Raymond said to Loz, stepping into her place by Peg, who was standing next to Jean at the exit to the chapel, shaking hands with the mourners as they filed out. ‘This is where family stand.’

Without acknowledging him, Loz stepped back so that she was next to the two wheelchair-pushers. Peg noticed the set of her chin, though, and it didn’t bode well.

Jean looked up at her brother. ‘You came, then,’ she said.

‘Oh yes,’ Raymond said, standing at the other side of Peg, looking away, rubbing his hands together against the biting December cold.

It was an odd greeting for a brother and sister who supposedly hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years.

‘I’m so sorry,’ one of the distant cousins said, dabbing at her drooping eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief, and trying to avoid looking at either Peg’s haircut or Jean’s bulk.

‘Thank you for coming all this way,’ Raymond said, shaking her timidly surrendered hand.

‘Your mother was a formidable lady,’ one of the old Masons said, patting Jean’s hand. He looked at least a hundred years old, like he had stepped out of a cupboard full of cobwebs.

‘She was that,’ Raymond said, working his jaw and looking up at the sun, which pierced sharply through a cold blue sky, bringing a lot of light, but very little in the way of warmth.

The pub buffet was everything a funeral luncheon should be – greasy fried chicken wings, wobbling bacon quiche, sausage rolls. Nothing too outlandish, and nothing on the savoury table that a vegetarian could touch.

‘Get this down you.’ Loz put a large gin and tonic into Peg’s hand as she listened to two old dusty Masons talk about what a wonderful woman Doll was and how she had held the whole family together through an extended ‘nervous illness’ that Frank had suffered when Jean and Raymond were ‘nippers’. This was yet another revelation. No one had ever said anything about Frank ever being ill.

‘He wasn’t the same after,’ one of the old boys said. ‘He lost his pep. Became a bit of a mouse, really, poor old Frank.’

Poor Frank.

Having learned that Raymond intended to go back to the bungalow after the funeral, Peg was in no hurry to speak to him at the wake. While the part of her that had urged him to come had many reasons to be glad that he had turned up – the closure he seemed to so despise, the fact that Doll would have wanted it, and so on – a newer part of her now realised that she wished he hadn’t.

Speaking with him would be too much like hard work, which, against the emotionally strained backdrop of Doll’s death, she didn’t feel much like facing. It would involve too much verbal ducking and diving, too much dissemblance. Not only were there all the things she had learned about him that he had no idea she knew, but there was also the weight of Loz’s suspicions. Although Peg wanted to write them off as the product of a feverishly inept amateur sleuthing, a tiny voice in her head kept persistently asking:
What if she’s right? What if she’s got a point?
To all this was added her own ambivalence about the flat and the money – she knew Raymond would at some point want an answer from her.

The result of all this was that his presence so complicated this already difficult day that she felt her stomach turning over whenever she caught sight of him.

She circulated among the guests, keeping an eye on Loz, who seemed to constantly have a drink in her hand. She ducked Mrs Cairns’s inappropriate questions about her plans for the bungalow, instead listening to the stories about her grandmother’s incredible nursing prowess, and how everyone in the street turned to her.

‘She ran her front room like an operating theatre,’ one woman said. ‘It was like our own little hospital.’

‘Of course, she were never the same after the accident with little Keith,’ a woman who had introduced herself as ‘Dolly’s mum’s sister’s girl’ said. She wore a silk scarf knotted round her stringy neck and had a voice that bore witness to half a century’s addiction to tobacco. ‘She doted on that little boy, and her world ended when he went. It’s where it all started to go wrong for that one, too.’ The woman waved a knotty hand at Jean, who had been parked at a table with a mounded-up plate of food, a pint of Guinness, and a selection of sympathetic old boys around her.

‘What do you mean?’ Peg said, as Loz weaved towards her to replace her empty glass with a full one.

‘After the accident with poor little Keith, well, Dolly wrapped the other two up in cotton wool and never let them out of her sight again. He –’ she pointed her angular chin at Raymond, who was talking quietly with Archer at the bar – ‘he escaped through his business and all that, that dodgy club racket, and all that other business with your poor mother.’ The woman waved vaguely in the air, and Peg wondered if everyone in the world had known the truth but her. ‘But poor old Jeanie,’ Dolly’s mum’s sister’s girl went on. ‘Well, she never got away. And you see what happened to her.’

Peg took a slug of her drink. But surely Doll had
looked after
Jean, not kept her prisoner? She had single-handedly kept her daughter alive.

She made her excuses and left the woman, who she had decided was a spiteful old cow with nothing better to do than speak ill of the dead.

Irked, she looked around the overheated room. Despite the small number of funeral guests, it was full enough for all the windows to be fogged with condensation. Two double gins on an empty stomach had made her woozy. Had she not been, she might have noticed what was going on before it was too late.

Loz was standing right next to Raymond, yet again waiting to be served at the bar, her eyes glinting over at him, like emeralds sharpening themselves on his jaw.

The she moved in and said something to him – something Peg couldn’t hear.

He froze for a second, like a cobra before a strike. Then, his eyes half closed, he leaned towards her and whispered something back at her.

It didn’t look like a declaration of love.

‘Don’t think you can scare me like you do everyone else,’ Loz said, loud enough for Peg, who was still hovering over at the other side of the room, to hear. At the sound of Loz’s words, the buzz of elderly conversation faded for a second, then politely picked up again.

It was time for Peg to move over and intervene.

‘Why don’t you just leave?’ Peg heard Raymond say, as, with the sense that she was heading towards two colliding tornadoes, she crossed the room. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t belong here, if that’s what you think.’ A vein throbbed in his temple, and he looked like he had when he choked on the piece of meat back in Spain.

He stood and squared up to Loz. He wasn’t a tall man, but next to her he looked enormous. Archer, who was standing at his other side, put a restraining hand on his arm.

‘Enough, Raymond,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any trouble, remember?’

‘You’re not welcome here. And what the fuck you doing with my daughter, anyway?’

Peg moved in next to Loz, ready to step in and take the blow for her, should it come.

But like a tiny terrier, Loz faced Raymond up and, with a protective arm round Peg, she addressed him, her voice loud and clear. ‘You don’t even know her. I love her and she loves me, and if you want anything to do with her, you’re going to have to deal with that.
Raymond
.’

The cousins, positioned by the buffet with their plates, gave a slight but perceptible gasp.

‘Can we leave it, please?’ Peg whispered, pleading, wincing, wishing they would both just melt into the floor. ‘Can we deal with this later?’

‘I don’t think we can,’ Loz said, balling her fists. Peg really thought she might try to land a punch on Raymond, which would be a very bad thing indeed. She could imagine that he might be good at fighting.

She could imagine that he might even carry a gun.

‘Stop this right now!’ Jean exclaimed, thumping her big fist down onto her table, making the old boys near her jump.

‘
Shut up Jean
,’ Loz said, her eyes still on Raymond.

The cousins gasped, far more audibly this time. Then the room fell silent. Everyone was poised, trained on Loz and Raymond.

‘Go on. Tell me about Mary Perkins,’ Loz said. ‘What did you do to her? And what’s in the garage at Heyworth Court, eh? Or don’t you want to talk about that, either?’

‘This is my mother’s
funeral
,’ Raymond said. ‘Show some
respect
.’ His chin twitched and his lower lip stuck out. He flexed his fingers and Peg couldn’t tell if he were preparing to throttle Loz or trying to restrain himself from doing so.

‘Like you showed respect to Mary?’ Loz went on.

‘Loz, please,’ Peg said.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Raymond said, his voice now dangerously low, his eyes narrowed.

‘For God’s sake, shut UP!’ Jean thundered, her flesh wobbling.

The air in the room had grown as thick as fur. Peg realised that her heart was racing so violently, she was finding it hard to breathe.

‘You’ve ruined Mummy’s funeral,’ Jean went on. ‘Are you satisfied now? Haven’t you punished her enough?’

With a shock, Peg realised that her aunt addressed this not at Loz – who she actually thought deserved it – but directly at her father.

The silence that followed this accusation was like a violin string in the moment before a snap.

‘It’s dreadful. Dreadful,’ Jean said, at last, wheezing and purple. ‘Dreadful.’

No one moved.

No one said a thing.

Then one of the cousins coughed.

The spell was broken.

Like so many Cinderellas, people started to put their plates and glasses down and make for their coats and bags.

‘Thank you so much, Margaret. It was a lovely send-off, er . . .’

Pulling on her mothball-scented fur coat, the cousin who coughed came forward to shake Peg’s hand, then moved on to say goodbye to Raymond and Jean. She was followed, one by one, by the rest of the gathering, until there were no guests left except Peg, Loz, Raymond, Archer, Jean, her bearers and Julie, who, after the upset, had helped Jean on with her oxygen mask. Two bemused waitresses in black skirts and white polyester shirts moved among the empty tables clearing up half-finished plates and half-empty glasses.

‘I’ll be up day after tomorrow.’ Raymond turned to Archer and touched him on the shoulder, dismissing him. ‘Thanks for your help, mate.’

‘Are you all right to get my aunt back to her bungalow without me?’ Peg said to the ambulance driver, who made to object but, given the situation, just nodded. Then, unable to stay in the room any longer, she left.

She just walked out.

She needed to find some air.

Thirty-Eight

‘For fuck’s sake,’ Loz said, running behind Peg as she streamed along the freezing low tide sand, heading eastwards, away from The Street. She wanted to walk out to the very corner of Kent and keep going, striding out into the North Sea until she reached mainland Europe and left all this mess of a life behind her. ‘Stop, Peg, please.’

An easterly wind had got up, whipping sand in their faces. Seagulls circled like vultures above them, eyeing a strange crop of blighted dogfish corpses that littered the exposed seabed around them.

‘Why?’ Peg turned and shouted at Loz, nearly backing into a muddy pool as she did so. ‘Why the hell should I? You come in here, into my family, which you know nothing about. You start getting all these stupid melodramatic ideas about my father – my FATHER – being some sort of serial killer; you wind up my aunt and make trouble, and now you fuck up my grandmother’s funeral because what? – because you don’t want to share me with anyone else?’

‘It’s not that. I—’ Loz tried to grab Peg’s hand. ‘Can’t you see he’s no good? I’m just worried for you, that – that he’s going to lead you into trouble.’

‘I CAN LOOK AFTER MYSELF!’ Peg yelled, pushing Loz so that she fell backwards onto the mud, ruining her smart interview suit. Undeterred, Loz scrabbled to her feet, not even pausing to knock the dirt from her trousers.

‘He’s no good,’ she said, running after Peg, who was striding on over the sandbanks. ‘Don’t you see? This is your chance to break away from them. You don’t need to have anything more to do with him or with Jean. They’re . . . toxic! They’re infecting you.’

‘Infecting me because I’m standing up to you?’ Peg said, stopping again and whirling round to face Loz. ‘Don’t you think I’m capable of having an opinion of my own? You just want a piece of me. You want me as some sort of leper project of yours, put me together like some recipe and cook me up. And you want all this drama because your own right-on, sad-fuck family is so fucking well adjusted and so fucking boring there’s nothing you can do for them.’

‘Is that what you think of me?’ Loz screamed above the gulls and the wind that howled round them, scudding fresh grey clouds over the sun, tugging Peg’s dress across her knees and blowing her own duvet coat about her like a black sail. ‘Is that what you really think?’