T
ilda heard only her pulse, fluttering in her ears, her irregular, shallow breathing. The vicar’s voice barely registered. Tilda wondered if he was closer to Nan, if that’s why he sounded like he was speaking from the other end of a tunnel. His lips were moving, his Book of Common Prayer open in his hand as he led the mourners through the funeral rites, but sound came to her oddly distorted, an audio track out of sync with the video. She knelt beside her mother, folded her hands, bowed her head, but all she heard was the odd discordant silence that rang when loud machinery was shut off. Not echoes but rather the tympanic hum of the bones in her inner ear quivering with the strain of trying to hear something that was no longer there: Nan’s voice.
“In the midst of life we are in death; from whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered,” the vicar said. He was young with a shock of ginger hair that stood out against his black robes, the black-clad mourners, and the walnut coffin, and painfully solemn about the rites, as if not quite comfortable with them yet.
That makes two of us,
Tilda thought
. I am not comfortable with this at all.
Then the ringing began again. “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitterness of eternal death,” the congregation repeated. The opening notes of a hymn burst into her consciousness, booming against her eardrums. She startled, heard voices behind her take up the first stanza of “Amazing Grace,” Nan’s favorite hymn. The music seemed to envelop her in an echoing drum. The notes ran at odd angles to each other, and tearing the sheet would leave jagged, uneven lines, pressing against her skin, her inner ears, her nostrils. She felt that if she opened her mouth the dark notes would slide down her throat, course through her stomach into her intestines, until she burst from it.
The last notes died away, intensifying the ringing in Tilda’s ears. The pallbearers came forward to lift the coffin containing Nan’s slight body and bear it out of the church. The vicar paused by their pew. Nan’s Book of Common Prayer clasped in her gloved hands, Tilda followed her mother and grandmother as she’d always done. As she walked she saw bodies in black and navy blue, but faces were a blur.
The sunshine was grotesque, blinding her until she fumbled on her sunglasses. The procession moved slowly down the steps, the pallbearers pausing to keep the coffin level, a gentleness that closed Tilda’s throat until it seemed like the ringing in her ears came not from the organ or the abrupt silence but rather from what she throttled in her own throat. The slate pathway was uneven, requiring all her concentration to keep her balance as she placed one foot in front of the other, the solid ground an unfamiliar and inhospitable place to be. She followed her mother, who followed the vicar, who followed the coffin to the graveyard, where the pallbearers set the coffin on the hoist that would lower it into the ground. She would send them notes edged in black, when she could find the right words, the right paper to say the unsayable. The vicar would know their names, addresses.
The thought of writing another letter made her stomach heave. Letters were for what was real. They were for Nan. Tilda had built her whole life, her whole career around the one thing that had grounded her since she was eight years old, and now Nan was gone.
Her mother sank into the first chair beside the grave as if her knees gave way at the sight of the obscene gash in the ground and the bald mound of dirt beside it. Perhaps the dirt made it real for her, as it did for Tilda. Tilda did not have the strength to push past her to the second chair, so she locked her knees and stood beside her mother, waiting while what seemed like the entire village formed a rough semicircle around the grave. A breeze shivered through the leaves.
She couldn’t do this alone, and yet she deserved to do it alone. After all, she had left her husband to deal with his own grief not once, but twice. She’d been there for Deshawn’s funeral only in body, not in spirit.
“You are dust, and to dust you shall return. All of us go down to the dust, yet even at the grave we make our song: alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” The vicar bent, his movements both awkward and real, and grasped a handful of dirt, letting it trickle through his fist, onto the polished walnut. He glanced at Tilda. She was supposed to do the same. It was a ritual, comforting, an anchor for the living in the scent and feel of Cornwall dirt, where it all began.
Could she claim an earlier beginning than the one she’d had in a hotel room in Tokyo?
Her mother’s rigid shoulders forced Tilda to push the question aside. “Mum,” she said softly. “Come on, Mum.”
Like a child, she led her mother to the mound of dirt, where they reached down. Her mother gingerly scraped her palm over the dirt, her hand trembling while the little palm full of dirt clattered onto the coffin. Tilda scooped up a greedy handful. She had to feel something, the bite of a pebble into her palm, the grit under her fingernails, and nearly put the dirt to her mouth to swallow it, shove back the wail that threatened to claw its way out of her throat.
She’d lifted it. Everyone was staring at her, the vicar, her mother, the mourners.
Daniel.
Sunlight glinted off his gold-and-silver hair, refracting off the tears on his cheeks. He stood outside the semicircle of mourners. Tilda stared at him, her cupped hand spilling dirt into the trampled grass at her feet.
Daniel was there, and he was crying.
She made a choked little sound, swallowed hard, and he was in motion, striding around the mourners to stand beside her. “Shhh,” he said. “It’s okay.”
His voice was deep, thick, like hot earth, dialing down the noise in her head, and his arm was steady around her waist. She let herself sag just a little, felt him catch her, then he cupped her fistful of dirt, his fingers gentle and strong on hers. He didn’t force them open, just held her, let her tremble.
“I can’t,” she said, and clenched her fist more tightly. Nan loved this earth, loved the small world she lived in, a world so small that Tilda was the highlight, and Tilda couldn’t bring herself to throw it into her grave. Tears streamed down her cheeks, ran along her throat to pool in the hollow. She was sniffing, her throat working, she couldn’t do it, she couldn’t. The clanging in her head was going to drive her insane if it didn’t stop.
Then Daniel bent his head to hers. “Tilda,” he whispered.
Her name. The name he’d used on the ledge a year earlier, trying to establish a connection when he thought she was going to jump, not knowing she was already falling. The name he’d spoken at their wedding ceremony. The name he used when he was exasperated, amused, angry, aroused. It husked into her ears, mouse-quiet and clarion-clear, slicing through the roar like a pen on paper. Other sounds returned. A bird singing in the tree overhead, Daniel breathing, his heart thumping, or perhaps that was her own heart.
She extended her arm over the gaping wound in the ground and relaxed her fist. Dirt trickled into the earth’s wound, pattered against the wood, slid to the earth underneath. The bird trilled above her. She opened her hand, and let it all stream into the grave.
“Sit down,” he murmured. “Tilda, sweetheart, sit down before you fall down.”
He supported her while she stumbled to the chair, and sat. The vicar’s voice took up the unfamiliar cadences of the funeral rite. The bird sang. Daniel hunkered down on his heels next to her while she stared into the grave, and gently brushed the earth from her palm, into the grass.
—
She woke up in her old bedroom at Nan’s house without any memory of getting from the graveside into the bed. She wore her dress but no shoes, and had the old quilt tucked around her. Twilight filled the room, casting the furniture in shadows, and the scent of Nan was so strong she forgot what had come before.
She untangled the quilt from her legs and sat up, then bent forward against the pounding in her skull. When the pain receded she got to her feet. Her stockings snagged on the floorboards as she shuffled to the door and leaned against it. Daniel sat at the counter in the kitchen, his suit jacket draped over the back of one of Nan’s kitchen chairs, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows. A cup of instant coffee sat beside the local newspaper. Her last letter to Nan leaned against the salt and pepper shakers. He looked up, his gaze skimming over her, but she couldn’t read it. Read him. For the first time in their relationship, he was utterly unreadable.
“What time is it?”
“Gone seven,” he replied.
She shuffled past him, into the bathroom, where her body went on autopilot. The trifold mirror covering the medicine cabinet reflected back a woman she did not recognize. For a moment she stared into the mirror, unable to process the swollen eyes, the reddened nose, the lines carved on either side of her mouth.
Without blinking, she opened the mirror, withdrew the painkillers, shook three into her palm, and swallowed them dry. Back in the main room she looked around, and saw pictures tucked behind lamps, between African violets on the end table, the albums spread over the coffee table.
“Where’s Mum?”
Daniel got up and ran a glass of water, then held it out to Tilda. “She’s gone back to Oxford.”
Tilda stared at him. “What?”
“Drink this,” Daniel said, and waited until she had taken the glass in front of him and swallowed half of it before answering. “She had two tutorials tomorrow. And a committee meeting she was chairing. She said she’d be in touch.”
Tilda gripped the back of a chair, pulled it out from the table, and eased into it. Sitting seemed like enough, until she put her head in her hand. Colin and the deal belonged to another lifetime. “Is that what I’m supposed to do? Work? Because I don’t know if I can do that. I called Colin right after I called you. I don’t remember what I said to him other than Nan had died and I wasn’t going to be able to meet them for dinner. It’s entirely possible I hung up on him midsentence.” She paused. “The deal feels like it was happening to another person in another life, and Mum went right back to work.”
Daniel didn’t say anything for a long moment. “People react differently to grief,” he said finally. “Some people take comfort in work. When was the last time you ate?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and tried to remember, because he was here, taking care of her, and it meant so much to her. It meant everything, and she should answer his questions. “Um. Not today. Not yesterday. Um. Maybe yesterday. I didn’t eat on the flight, or at the airport. I can’t remember. I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”
He reached across the table and covered her hand with his own. “I’m going to make you something to eat,” he said. “Toast and eggs.”
He might as well have been asking her to hoist Nan’s coffin out of the grave. “I don’t think I can eat.”
“Just try,” he said, and got up.
For a while she just sat there while he got out the ancient cast iron pan and oiled it, cracked eggs and scrambled them, sliced bread for toast. The scent of the bread toasting made her stomach growl. When the food was ready he slid a plate of eggs and toast spread with currant jam in front of her, and added a cup of tea. She stared at the eggs, the steam rising from them, then at him.
“Just one bite,” he said.
But her body betrayed her, because after one bite it wanted more. Ravenous thing. Rapacious thing. She finished the eggs, ate the toast down to the crust, and felt better. She looked at Daniel, who had cleared his plate, and saw
better
in his eyes.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“Most of the village was there. I can’t imagine anyone was in the shops. I saw Rupert in the crowd,” she said, slowly. “A few of Mum’s other friends. Not Andrew.”
Daniel said nothing.
“He didn’t come to the funeral. But you did. You came. This is what you do. You go to the funeral.” It suddenly seemed the most meaningful thing anyone had ever done for her.
He nodded gravely, then cleared the table, tipping her crusts into the bin, running water in the sink to do the washing up. “I should do that,” she said.
“You should go back to bed,” he said without turning around. “You’re dead on your feet.”
She did. She undressed into the pajamas in the drawer, scented with ancient lavender sachets, and slid back into the bed, surrounded by the scent of Nan overlaid with the medicinal odors of wound care. She lay there long enough to watch the moon rise over the house, listening to Daniel get ready to leave. He’d gotten a room at the inn, she deduced. Maybe he’d already signed the papers. Her throat closed and tears prickled behind her eyes, but she didn’t cry.
Grief left her defenseless. Ruined. In wreckage she found a single, pure need.
She got up and opened her bedroom door. “Daniel,” she said. “Don’t go.”
The room was dim, moonlight bathing the worn wood floors in silver. He stood in the door, turned toward her, his shoulders broad against the starry sky. “Don’t ask me to do that, Tilda. I know you’re hurting, but I can’t be that for you tonight.”
“I don’t want . . . I just . . .” She took a shuddering breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was very small. “I don’t want sex. I just want to be close to you.”
He looked at her, and for the first time in their short, whirlwind relationship, she let him see her exactly as she was. He locked the door again, then crossed the floor and met her by the bedroom door. She crawled back into bed, listening to him removing his suit, shirt, and tie. Then he lay down beside her. She let her eyes close and his warmth seep into her, right down to the bones.
—
She awoke the next morning to sunlight, birds, and Daniel lacing up his trainers. “Go back to sleep,” he said without looking up. “I’m going for a run.”
When the door closed behind him, she lay in Nan’s bed, for the first time in months anchored by scent and light and sound in time and space. She thought about Daniel, setting off along the narrow road. Processing grief and hurt and uncertainty through intense physical exercise. The hills and cliffs would give him a challenge. Perhaps she should take it up, learn to leave it all behind on the pavement, rather than in hotel rooms.