Twelve Drummers Drumming (29 page)

Tom had been aware of her approach. From inside the church, as he was readying himself to exit through the north porch, he had heard a rustle of noise, as if a breeze had risen in the trees—the sigh of the common folk when tabloid celebrity is made flesh. Oona had arrived at almost the last minute—to be a sensation, he thought darkly—and he had witnessed her final steps as he had wound his way down the pea shingle path bordered with tombstones towards the lych-gate. How she had managed the cobbles in those shoes—the heels were torturously high—he had no idea, but he imagined they were as natural to her as a farrier’s fabrications were to a horse. His eyes returned to Colm, who no more made a movement to acknowledge his ex-wife than she did him. Apparently shared grief had no dominion over pride and ancient belligerence.

Now, catching the first glimpse of the funeral car round the bend by the village hall, his mind went back to Julia. He thought he had not seen such a concentration of misery on her face—not when she had appeared at his door in Bristol in the hours after Lisbeth’s death; not in her unguarded moments when he and Miranda had first visited Thornford; not when he tumbled at the base of the yew and mumbled some pagan wisdom. She was raw.

The cortège drew closer. Tom could see villagers straightening themselves mindfully, pressing against the stone walls, to let the
flower-draped black Daimler pass unimpeded. One or two youths, he noted, stood or sat on the wall—a less respectful posture—but the village, he guessed, had not been witness to many such attention-garnering events and he could hardly blame them. There was genuine distress, but there was a dash of morbid relish, too. He could see the edge of a scaffold that some television network had erected next to the pub and another one, kitty-corner, where Pennycross Road intersected Poynton Shute—manifestations of indelicate attention, about which he could do nothing, and to which he contributed, oddly enough, in the form of the CCTV screen, tucked between the lych-gate and the north porch. Nearer, at the door of the Old School Room, DI Bliss and DS Blessing stood scrutinising the crowd. Behind him, the church was full, but for the chief mourners. They, like him, had turned their attention to the approaching hearse. He could hear, through the ancient stone of the church, the strains of Julia playing on the organ. And despite this admixture of solemnity and carnival, he couldn’t help thinking like a foolish villager at the village pump, or like a jealous teenager:

What
was
Julia doing in Sebastian’s cottage?

O
ona’s sunglasses remained as firmly affixed to her face as a fender to a car frame through the course of the service, which made her a distracting presence, particularly if one was facing the congregation, as Tom was. He glanced at her in the left front pew from time to time as he recited the familiar words of the rite. It was difficult not to be drawn to the famous visage, which he had first noted more than two decades before in the video for Colm’s hit “Bank Holiday,” lending her cool presence to a giddy scene in a Butlins holiday camp, later sighted on the covers of
Vogue
or
Marie Claire
, then more recently glimpsed in a somewhat less flattering form on the cover of one of the tabloids, accompanying a story that often involved noses—either stuffing substances up hers or hitting someone else’s.

He intoned the words, then invited silent prayer as this was the moment before the Collect. In that pause, broken by intermittent sniffles, a squeak resounded, followed by a collective rustle, as if a multitude sought avoidance of mice. It was Enid Pattimore. Having sprung a leak once again, she leaned her head back while Roger, his bald pate bowed and glistening in the gentle light of the south window, rummaged in his mother’s bag for her tissues and her nose clamp. Oddly, Oona alone had remained stock-still through this tiny eruption, as she had through the entire service. Was she slumbering behind those dark glasses? Tom wondered as he began the Collect. Her companion at least had flinched, which meant he couldn’t be deaf, a thought which had crossed Tom’s mind as he sensed the young man’s intent focus not on the words he was speaking but on the movement of his lips. Possibly he was Italian or Spanish—he certainly
looked
Italian or Spanish—and in want of English lessons. The young man rose to his feet a little after everyone else for the hymns, cued by the commotion in the pews behind, lightly touching Oona’s arm, signalling her to follow. Had Oona gone blind? Was this the reason for the eyewear? Perhaps the young man was a seeing-eye toy boy. But, no—if Oona had lost her sight, Madrun would have told him. She seemed to know these things.

He glanced at the coffin before beginning a reading from Saint John.
“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled …’ ”

He was returned by the soothing words to the gravity of the occasion, and obliged to face the truth that his heart was troubled indeed. And that his meandering thoughts had served more to avoid this single truth: that the funeral of someone young was a terrible, terrible thing. The last funeral he had presided over at St. Nicholas’s—Ned Skynner’s—had been untroubling because Ned, besides being a stranger to him, had lived well beyond his three score and ten. But Sybella had been a mere nineteen. Tom had attended to many bereaved people in the years of his ministry, watched eyes brim and heard speech falter, but he hadn’t understood depth of grief until Lisbeth—a mere thirty-four—had been taken so
brutally. He could never have guessed that he would find himself so plunged into sadness, so filled by a silent keening, that there would seem to be no surcease—though, slowly, he did glimpse an end to suffering: It had been vouchsafed to him on these very chancel steps, in this little church, in this pleasant village.

But now—at this moment—it was being reawakened by the presence of a coffin containing a young woman who, like Lisbeth, had been taken suddenly and for no apparent reason. He recalled the disquieting sensation in Bristol of having fallen out of love with God and, worse, the sensation that God had fallen out of love with him, and wanting desperately to rekindle the romance. He had learned since then in prayer and contemplation that faith is always only a reaching towards, an approximation.

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart.” Canon Holdsworth had quoted Rilke in a letter to him sent in the days after Lisbeth’s death. “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

As he spoke the final words of the passage from John 14, he glanced at Colm Parry, who was—as he had been since Revelation Choir had sung the first hymn, “Be Still, My Soul,” with such sweet gentleness—weeping profusely, swabbing his tears in a handkerchief as large as a dinner napkin. As Julia played the first notes of “I Surrender,” Tom fought back his own tears.

At least, he thought, desperate to distract himself once again, the choir had been an inspired choice, and he let himself sway softly to its rhythms. How Lisbeth, a stalwart of the Cambridge Chorale, would have loved to hear these powerful, resonant voices. And how delicious she would have found this nontraditional music filling an old Norman church in the heart of the West Country. His congregation was captured by the spectacle. No one was fidgeting, though he suspected some were ruminating darkly on unorthodoxy. Only
Oona remained utterly impassive, even as the organ’s final note faded. As he began the words to Psalm 23, he felt his throat catch, as a wave of empathy seemed to wash over the assembled and surge towards him. He steadied himself by glancing again at her and permitting himself a new thought: What we have here is the Madame Tussaud’s version of Oona Blanc, waxen and surely imperfect.

“Surely goodness and loving mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,”
he ended, and signalled to Mitsuko to come to the lectern to read another passage from the Gospels.

Though tribute to the deceased would normally be made after the opening prayer, Tom had decided to weave his remarks into the sermon. He had completed it only hours before, scribbling in a pad in bed, as Madrun was thrashing away at her typewriter with her daily letter to her mother, then transferring his notes to the computer downstairs in his study, as the rising sun cast new bars of light over the red Holbein carpet. If Sybella had been unknown to him, he would have woven a narrative based solely on the remarks of others, not always a satisfying exercise, as he felt at times like a mere synthesiser of information. But he had come to know Sybella a little. It saddened him profoundly that his first thoughts were not as kind as he wished they might be. She was a little cunning—was she not? She had a history of provocations, among them humiliating the naïve Charlie Pike, pestering the reclusive Sebastian John, and goading the incendiary Liam Drewe. Had there been others, here or in London? Her flirtation with Tom two months ago at the Waterside had been childish, and when he had seen her in the village afterwards, and more lately when she’d started coming to church, her response to his cheery hello was invariably a kind of smirk, as if exchanging greetings with the vicar was utterly uncool or too too ironic. She was a spikey little fish out of water, landed on Thornford’s banks with tabloid headlines trailing after her, an object of curiosity that soon settled into indifference. But someone, for some reason, had harboured hostility—murderous hostility—towards her.

Or was her death, as the police reckoned with Lisbeth, the triteness of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Tom had paused here in his ruminations, stroking Powell, who had landed on his bed, mercifully without an offering of some dead rodent. It was the same unanswered question that plagued him about Lisbeth: Had someone harboured so deep a hostility towards her—or towards
both
of them—that he decided to take her life in the very place, the church, to which Tom dedicated long hours? Or was it, after all, as the trail grew cold and scraps of evidence proved elusive, a tragic conjunction of events: Lisbeth stumbling into a drug deal in progress; Lisbeth accosted by some crazed individual, desperate for what money she had in her purse, grabbing, too, the doll which was to be Miranda’s birthday present. Would he ever know?

He had flicked a glance at the bedside clock next to the curate’s egg when Madrun began her descent to the kitchen, and refocused on Sybella. Cunning she might have been, but at heart he knew she was really little more than a celebrity edition of that universal creature—the troubled teenager. How many wealthy households with warring, extravagant, narcissistic parents produced children of becoming modesty and fixed life-purpose? Few, he expected. Sybella was more casualty than cause. Her life had been mostly prologue. There was a first-chapter glimmer of the woman she might have become, and this is what he would present to the congregated mourners: that Sybella appeared to have—no,
had
—put much of her old life behind her, with the help of her father, who himself had banished his demons and found health and peace in Thornford. Tom had paused, imagining Sybella’s mother’s reaction to this. Oona, by all accounts, was quite attached to her demons, so praise for Colm’s victory might need tempering. Yet it was Colm—who had battled first for custody; then, when Sybella had passed into legal adulthood, had fought to get her into treatment; then had beseeched her to live with him in the countryside—who had helped straighten out his daughter’s zigzag path. In Thornford, she had met Mitsuko, who had helped her discover her talent as an artist.

What could he say about Oona’s influence, especially when she would be there in a front pew?

Now, as Mitsuko reached the last verse of the Gospel, he looked over at Oona. Her companion held the funeral leaflet open for both of them, but Oona appeared oblivious, transfixed by some pattern in the rood screen, inasmuch as one could tell what she was looking at through black lenses. Though she had curled to her feet with the rest of the congregation at the appropriate moments, she made no movement—no calf stretch, no nose twitch. Well, of course! Her nerve endings were likely becalmed with some cocktail of the finer pharmacological distillations (which his own quack had dangled before him in Bristol) judiciously leavened with something amusing from the street. He asked himself, as he’d asked his doctor: What happens when the drugs wear off? In Oona’s case, given her history, he had an inkling.

As he mounted the pulpit, aware of the delicacy of the duty before him, the words of his text, Psalm 46—
God is our refuge and our strength
—implanted in his mind, he recalled the anchors to his remarks: that courageous adults are sometimes born of reckless teenagers and that finer natures are sometimes revealed in small acts. Miranda’s tale of Sybella taking Emily to Westways for Alastair to patch up her bee sting had been central to this. Of these things he would speak, but he would not praise Thornford’s role in Sybella’s healing, for he had to face the brutal truth that no matter how perfidious her mother’s influence had been, if Sybella had stayed in bad old London, she’d be alive, wouldn’t she?