The Discourtesy of Death (Father Anselm Novels) (32 page)

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Ask that truth be given a chance. This is their moment. This is their chance to gather in all the pain and misunderstanding that’s never been faced before; gather it in and decide, together, how they’re going to build a very different future.’

Having left Mitch to track down Vincent Cooper, Anselm prepared the Old Mill for the gathering of the Henderson and Goodwin families. The threshing area, with its jammed grinding mechanism by the wall, was (he thought) an appropriate location. He placed a round table and seven chairs in the centre of the room. He built a fire. He thought of Schiller: ‘It is wise to disclose what cannot be concealed.’

By 2.15 p.m. everyone was present: Michael, in a navy-blue blazer, head lowered; Emma, bolt upright, still wearing her long black coat; Nigel, in a rumpled white jacket; Helen, in what seemed like borrowed clothes; Doctor Ingleby, in a tweed suit, his chair furthest away from the table; and finally Peter, in jeans, his hollowed eyes resting on the fire.

‘Normally, I’m diffident in these situations,’ began Anselm. ‘I think families need to decide for themselves how and when to resolve their differences. But since I nearly got shot last night, I thought I might take a more direct approach. You have all run out of time. This is the moment of decision. My guess, Peter, is that everybody has something to say to you. In those circumstances, I strongly suggest you get your defence in first.’

‘I mistreated her,’ said Peter Henderson.

The room was eerily still.

‘She was so very young, when we met. So innocent. I was so much older. Without her simplicity. She—’

‘You took her life away before she had it,’ shouted Emma. ‘You never valued who she was, and what she wanted to do with her life, you never cared, you were so damned full of yourself and what you were going to do next.’ She gagged abruptly as if she’d tried to breathe under water. Her eyes were bright and dark with agonised resentment. ‘Why?’ she managed. ‘Why?’

Emma couldn’t say any more for the moment. There was too much to hurl in accusation. It was all pressed into that one word. A trembling hand covered her mouth as if she might disgorge the ocean of poisoned feeling that had never been expressed.

‘Because I was blind, Emma,’ said Peter Henderson. ‘In every sense.’

‘You could have loved her,’ exclaimed Emma, uncomprehending. ‘You could have made her happy. You’d have been happy.’

Peter Henderson tried to reply, knowing that words would fail. ‘Things changed, Emma, too late, but they changed. And I loved her, like you would have always wanted, and more, because only I could know what I’d thrown away. I’ve wanted to tell you this since she died, but I know you’d never have believed me.’

‘But what of Timothy?’ murmured Emma, agreeing and choking. ‘He
needed
you. You left him to grow up without any guidance. You weren’t there.’

‘But I’m here now.’ Abject and reduced, Peter Henderson had little else to say. ‘I’m going to be there in his future. I lost out, too. I don’t want to lose any more.’

There was a long pause. And everyone realised that in this one short exchange, fifteen years of resentment and recrimination had been disclosed. All anyone could do was repeat themselves. It didn’t seem possible. It had taken two minutes. A shocked silence filled the space of all the arguments that had never happened.

‘What changed, Peter?’ asked Anselm, quietly. ‘When did you discover Jenny?’

‘After the accident,’ he replied, just as quietly. ‘From the moment I walked into the hospital. And I didn’t only see her, I heard everything she’d ever said in the past, everything I’d never listened to … and it was like a great roar in my head. An awful noise … and yet her voice was barely audible, just asking me to spend some time with her. And now it was too late.’

Jenny was saying something very different now. She wanted to die. She wanted to be swept up fast off the floor of Timothy’s life … and Peter’s. She wanted out. She felt like she’d already gone, that nothing of value remained, just some excess baggage that hadn’t been squeezed through the closing doors of dying.

‘I wanted her to say to me what she’d once said,’ murmured Peter Henderson, tears breaking out. ‘That
we
mattered. I wanted to go back to where we’d once been … only I hadn’t been present … I’d been somewhere else. I wanted her to see that I’d come home … but she was blind to me. I wanted her to speak again … about
us
… only she wasn’t saying it any more; she was saying something very different, and I couldn’t bear to listen.’

Michael’s head lay on his chest as if he’d been shot. Emma was the same. They were like bodies propped up for inspection. Helen was staring to one side. Doctor Ingleby was leaning forward, his face lined with a sort of paternal unease. Nigel was trying to meet Peter Henderson’s gaze, but the philosopher wasn’t entirely present. He was with Jenny again, when he’d found her ten years too late.

‘Because she couldn’t move … because she’d lost
so
much … she thought she had no value – for me, for Timothy, for anyone … but especially herself. Whereas, from where I stood, it was the opposite … the complete opposite. It was only when she’d lost everything that I saw her for who she was, simply and cleanly. She was just … there. Irreducibly there. Present. Alive. Herself. Without the distraction of talent or gifts. I know this is a strange thing to say – a travesty of what she endured and where she found herself – but, for me, it was as though she’d lost nothing. And I just wanted to be with her.’

Jenny’s desire to die did not ebb away. Her mood swung in a circle, certainly, from desperation round to calm deliberation, but the central axis, the still centre, was a chosen death. That is what she wanted. She was unable to listen to Peter, just as Peter had once been unable to listen to her: she wasn’t remotely interested in his declaration that she mattered, profoundly. How could she? There was nothing left of her.

‘Tell us about the conversation,’ said Anselm, remorselessly.

Peter Henderson had the bewildered look of a man overtaken by a storm; accusing himself because he hadn’t checked the forecast before stepping outside.

‘Jenny became deathly calm,’ he said. ‘There was no communication between us. Nothing I said or did reached her, until I said I’d … help. Then, for once, she looked at me differently. She looked at me with hope.’

‘The conversation, Peter,’ nudged Anselm, firmly. ‘What did she say? What did you say?’

Peter Henderson had been examining his hands darkly as if they’d held something he shouldn’t have dropped. He raised his eyes to Michael and Emma who, in a dreadful representation of the waking dead, looked up as one.

The conversation had taken place in the middle of the night, three months before the cancer diagnosis.

It was blustery outside and a kitchen window, left open by accident, was banging against its frame. Peter came downstairs to close it. Jenny was awake. He sat by the bed in the darkness, listening to the whistling in the trees. During a lull – one of those strange moments of absolute silence during a squall – Jenny said:

‘Peter, I’m not scared to go.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘This is my life, Peter. I’ve taken a long look at what it’s worth. I’ve waited for some kind of surprise, something to change how I understand my situation, but nothing has come. How could it? I can’t wait for hope; I have to go find it. Will you help me? Just this once?’

Peter couldn’t answer. He nodded meaninglessly.

‘I’m fine for now,’ said Jenny, ‘but if things get worse, I just want to slip away, quickly and quietly … after a party. Do you understand?’

Peter nodded again.

‘I’d like champagne. I’d like to see Tim and Mum and Dad and Nigel and Helen and Bryan. And then, when everyone’s gone, I want you to help me go.’

‘I can’t, Jenny, I can’t,’ murmured Peter.

‘I’ll help you to help me. We’ll help one another.’

‘No, Jenny, I’m sorry, but I can’t.’ Peter stood up, leaning over the bed in the dark, feeling Jenny’s warm breath. ‘I don’t want you to go, my love, I want you to stay.’

‘Your job is to help Timothy understand that I’m not leaving him,’ she whispered, loudly. ‘That I’ve already gone. That I’ve found peace for everyone.’

Anselm stood up slowly.

The action drew to a close the remembered night. He walked over to the hearth and threw a log onto the fire. Looking down at the wood and the flames, he asked Peter Henderson to explain what had happened over the next few weeks – how he’d contacted Vincent Cooper who’d overseen the fabrication of the Exit Mask; how he’d given Jenny a sort of freedom of movement, not questioning where she wanted to go or why. How he’d accepted a passive role so as to restore her autonomy. Returning to the table, Anselm said:

‘What was the effect of this agreement to cooperate with one another?’

‘She changed.’

‘How?’

‘She became more calm.’

‘Did she speak of the mask?’

‘Never.’

‘She never discussed using it with you?’

‘No. It was as if … having made it, she forgot about it.’

‘And, as between yourselves?’

A pause followed that quietly spoken question.

‘We began to get closer … like never before … in a way that couldn’t have happened before … because we’d made a momentous decision together … and now we were on the other side of it. We were in a new land.’

‘Side by side?’

‘Yes.’

‘How was that possible, given your previous … treatment of her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, Peter, you do. Tell us. It’s important.’

Peter Henderson looked at his hands again. ‘Because I’d heard her, and she’d heard me, and because of that … we were …
present
to one another. It took time for us both to realise it, but once we’d sorted out the manner of her dying, we gradually noticed that we’d found one another, found what we both thought we’d lost. I loved her; she loved me. It was as simple as that. She knew it, and I knew it. The paralysis couldn’t change this discovery … nothing could. It was mysterious…’

Emma Goodwin’s eyes were wide and vacant, as if the shutters had been pulled down. Michael had reached for her hand. Helen was watching Michael as if he might speak. Nigel held his head in his hands, elbows on the table. Doctor Ingleby listened from a strange distance.

‘What was the effect of the cancer diagnosis on you?’ asked Anselm, pertinently.

‘I couldn’t believe it,’ replied Peter Henderson. ‘I’d come home at last and now she was definitely going … whether she chose to or not. There was nothing either of us could do, except submit to what was happening.’

‘And for Jenny?’

‘She was frightened. She said things couldn’t be worse.’

‘Did Jenny talk about ending her life?’

‘No.’

‘Did you refer to the mask?’

‘Never. I abhorred the thing. It stood between me and Jenny … against what was happening between us.’

Anselm removed his glasses to clean them. Rubbing one of the lenses on his scapular, he said, ponderously, like a man casting his mind back to a turning in the road, ‘Jenny was frightened, you said. Did she stay that way?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was she depressed?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Would that complete her mental picture … fear and despair?’

‘No.’

‘What would you add?’

Peter Henderson began kneading a brow as if he wanted to completely rearrange the shape of his face.

‘She was composed. Right alongside the fear. As the weeks went by, it was as though the illness had become detached from her, running parallel to who she was. Sometimes … she seemed to look at it from afar … as if it couldn’t harm her. She was at peace.’

‘What do you mean?’

Michael had spoken. He’d taken his hand back from Emma and was staring over the table in confusion.

‘I don’t know, Michael. Honestly, I don’t fully understand what happened. But it was as though the certainty of death had brought some kind of light into her life. You, me – if we’re lucky – we see to the end of the street; Jenny … she saw
everything
. She saw the whole road. No obstacles ahead, no distractions to the side. She knew where she was going and it removed most of the anxieties that claw at the rest of us. She said she could still enjoy a sherbet lemon.’

‘A what?’ whispered Michael in disbelief.

‘A sherbet lemon.’

Anselm had finished cleaning his glasses, but he’d kept them in his hand as if preferring a slightly blurred view of the table and the people around it. He said: ‘Of course, there’s no way of knowing what anyone is really thinking, is there? Illness is a very private thing. As private as choosing death.’

It wasn’t really a question, so Peter Henderson didn’t reply but as if pushed over the edge his voice dropped a register, cracking hard in his throat. ‘I just wanted to go back to the wine bar where I’d first met her. I just wanted to run things differently. And I was just grateful for what was left, now, between us. Time together became invaluable. I pushed everyone away … it was like we’d met for the first time.’

No one seemed to be breathing. Anselm’s heart was in his mouth. He settled his glasses on his nose and said, ‘The truth of Jenny’s final year alive is this: she chose to end her life’ – he looked around the table – ‘but she never took the most important step. She never asked anyone to get that mask. On her birthday there was a party. For once everyone was together in one room. You all came and went … except for Vincent Cooper who came back because he’d forgotten his wallet. But Jenny died that night. And this is where the complications—’

‘We all know she was killed.’

Nigel Goodwin spoke to the ground. He spoke for the young woman who’d written him a letter, a cry from the heart.

‘Someone took her life. Someone thought they could—’

‘Do you want to know who it was?’ exclaimed Helen at last, looking around the table at the harrowed, watching faces. Throughout the entire meeting she’d angled her head to one side, but now she’d turned on everyone, flushed with authority. ‘Well, I can tell you.’

Nigel raised bloodshot eyes to his brother, shaking his head, knowing he couldn’t stop Helen once she got going. She was off the leash again. Her features were contorted with a suppressed certainty that had been swallowed for the common good and which she would now spill all over the floor. ‘It was … it was…’