Part 6 (2/2)

'Of course.'

'Natalie was last seen by the Col, which is a small river or a large stream that runs along one boundary of the Martellos' land. There's a little path from Westbury, the local village, that crosses the Col and then goes through Alan's and Martha's land, and pa.s.ses by the house. The man was walking along the path to deliver something to the Stead, or collect something, I can't remember, and he saw Natalie standing on the track by the water at the bottom of the slope of Cree's Top. He even waved at her, but she didn't notice him. That was the last time anybody saw Natalie alive.'

'Where were you?' you?'

'On the other side of Cree's Top. It sounds like the summit of a mountain, or something, but really it's just a bit of raised ground that the stream winds around.'

I closed my eyes.

'I haven't been back there since that day, I could never bear the idea of it, I never even walk in that part of the grounds, but I can picture every detail. If Natalie had walked away from the bridge, along the track that goes beside the south side of the Col, Alan's and Martha's side, it would have taken her up the pebbly path through a few trees on the top and then she would have been able to look down at me. We were no more than two or three minutes' walk away from each other.'

'What were you doing there?'

'That is the one thing I do remember clearly. Every detail. I was a moody sixteen-year-old girl. I don't think you would have liked me much. I was a bit in love and a bit forlorn and during that summer I was either with Natalie, though not so much as I had been, for various reasons; or with Theo; or on my own. That day, it was early afternoon, I was feeling particularly gloomy. So I took the sole existing ma.n.u.script copy of the love poems that I had been writing during the summer and I went down to the Col and lay there, right on the edge of the stream, against a boulder down at the beginning of the slope of Cree's Top. I sat there for a couple of hours reading through these poems and writing another one. Then, on an impulse, I tore the poems out of the book one by one, and screwed each one up so that it looked like a little white carnation and threw it into the stream and as I sat there I watched them float down the stream away from me until they were carried out of sight. Look, I don't think there's any point in going on about this.'

'Please, Jane, humour me.'

'If you say so. The problem I have with this process, what I distrust about it, is that I feel I'm being encouraged to indulge, maybe even increase, emotions that aren't particularly valid or positive.'

'What emotions?'

'I didn't mean any emotions in particular. But to take the situation I've just been describing. For years I felt this intense guilt that I could have done something to prevent what happened. I was so close and if things had been just a tiny bit different, if I had decided to walk over Cree's Top, it might never have happened, I might have been able to save Natalie. At the same time I always knew that that was ridiculous and that you could reason like that about almost anything.'

'You felt an intense guilt.'

'Yes.'

'Right, I think we'll stop there.'

Alex helped me up off the couch. 'I think you've done wonderfully,' he said.

I felt myself blush, the way I used to when I was singled out for praise at school and I felt a little cross at my own susceptibility.

Nine.

There were bones among the bones. Natalie had been pregnant when she was strangled. The police told Alan and Martha, Alan called his sons, and Claud called me the day before the funeral. At first, I couldn't take in what his soothing voice was telling me. As always when Claud a.s.sumed his professionally calm manner, I became babblingly irrational. I could only think in unordered questions.

'How could she have been pregnant?'

'This is difficult for all of us, Jane.'

'Who could the father have been?'

Claud began to sound weary and impatient. 'Jane, I've only this minute heard, I know nothing more than you do.'

'The funeral isn't going ahead now, is it?'

'Yes, it is. The police have released the remains to us.'

'But aren't there examinations they can carry out? Couldn't they find out who the father is with DNA tests and things like that? You're a doctor, you must know.'

This was Claud's cue to a.s.sume his pedagogic tone. 'I'm sure the forensic scientists have retained specimens, Jane. But as far as I understand it, DNA profiling won't be possible. I believe that samples of blood or bodily fluid are required.'

'Can't you get DNA from bones?'

'Is this really the time, Jane? Bone cells have nuclei, so of course they contain DNA, but so far as I know it degrades in skeletons and if it has been buried in soil, the DNA strands don't just crumble, they also get contaminated. But this isn't my area. You must address your enquiries about this to the proper authorities, as they say.'

'It sounds hopeless,' I said.

'The situation is not good.'

Pregnant. I felt sick, and the feeling of foreboding that had been closing in on me felt like a fist around my pounding heart.

'Oh Christ, Claud, Claud. What are we all going to do?' I sat heavily on the old green easy chair by the phone and rocked to and fro slightly.

'Do?' he replied. 'We're going to stick together as a family, as we have always done, and we're going to get through this. I know it's hard for all of us, but we've just got to help each other. And it's hardest for Alan and Martha. It's very important to them that you should be at the funeral tomorrow.' His voice went soft. 'Don't desert us, Janie. We're in this together. You'll be there tomorrow, won't you?'

'Yes.'

I rang Helen Auster at her Kirklow direct line but she was too busy to say much. She said she'd be down in London in a few days and we could meet. What would I have asked her anyway?

The coffin was slim and the sky was grey. There were no leaves on the trees but there were bright flowers on the s.h.i.+ny new gravestones with their synthetic green gravel and picture postcard inscriptions. The beautiful old worn stones had no flowers. I looked up at the church. Northern Romanesque, said a whisper in my ear. Claud, of course. If I had time afterwards, he told me, I must go and look at the Norman font. His voice was mercifully drowned out by bells.

Her grave was an open wound in the ground. Soon the parcel of bones would be lowered into it, the mud flung over it. In a year, gra.s.s would have grown over the scar. It would become a site to visit occasionally, to lay flowers upon. At Christmas we would come with holly, and in the spring we would gather daffodils and blossom. Eventually, the grave would no longer look new and livid. It would merge into the melancholy landscape and children would play beside it. The small band of Sunday wors.h.i.+ppers would walk by it unseeing. One day, there would be no one left to visit the place where Natalie lay. Strangers would pause beside the gravestone and run their fingers along the gouged dates, and say : she died young.

When I saw Martha I thought my heart would break. She had aged ten years in the s.p.a.ce of a few weeks. Her face was old with grief, her hair a colour beyond white. She stood quite straight in the icy wind and did not weep. I wondered if she had any tears left now. She didn't believe in G.o.d, but I knew she would come every week to sit by her daughter's grave. For the first time, I wondered how many years she had left. She'd always seemed immortal to me, and now she seemed frail and worn. Alan, too, looked ravaged. I thought he seemed suddenly smaller, hunched over in his greatcoat, clutching his stick. The four sons stood tall and still, handsome in their dark suits. The rest of us wives and ex-wives, grandchildren and friends stood back. Jerome ('Got a cla.s.s') and Robert ('Nah, don't like funerals') had not come, but Hana, unexpectedly, had turned up at my door at seven in the morning, dressed in a long mauve skirt and clutching a bacon sandwich, a Thermos flask and a bunch of jewellike anemones.

'Just say, if you don't want me to come,' she'd said, but I did want her to come. I was glad that she stood beside me holding my hand, with the air turning her nose red and her absurd clothes flapping in the wind. A few feet away, a middle-aged man with a vaguely familiar face beaky and intent blew his nose loudly into a large handkerchief. There was no other sound. No birds sang.

Into the chill air, the vicar awkwardly delivered his words of death and resurrection. The coffin with its pitiful double burden was lowered into its s.p.a.ce. Martha stepped forward very slowly and dropped a single yellow rose onto the top of it. There was a low sob from behind me. No one else made a sound. Martha moved back and took Alan's hand; they didn't look at each other but gazed steadily at the hole in the ground which even now was being filled in. Claud stepped forward with a bunch of flowers, and one by one we followed him. Soon the raw earth was quite hidden by a heap of vivid colours. The family's wound was exuberantly patched.

The Stead looked different to my aching, itchy eyes. When I was a child I thought it the most welcoming house in the world. I remembered it as a place one came home to after long walks in the dusk : glimmering stone, the glow from the windows, wisps of smoke from the chimney, all promising warmth inside. Now, I thought it looked abandoned. The windows were dark. There were weeds around the front door. The weeping willow that hung over the driveway looked dank and untidy.

Jane Martello, the flying caterer, had brought meringues, plump scones with unsalted b.u.t.ter and the jam I'd made the year before, and a Madeira cake. The night before the funeral, I'd baked until the early hours : the kitchen had been full of the smell of vanilla essence and lemon zest. As the cake had risen in the oven, I'd called Claud again.

'Who'll be there?' I'd asked.

'I'm not sure,' he said, and mentioned a few names.

'Luke! Will Luke Luke be there?' be there?'

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