The Start of Everything (10 page)

I breathed in through my nose. My heartbeat slowed with the bus. We’d already passed Corpus, now Pembroke College, and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Something reflective in their new sculpture garden flashed light in my face. I covered my eyes.

I’d had to come by bus, because the box was too heavy to carry any great distance.

I jolted forward when the driver braked. I stood up. A government poster in front of my face advised “Slow down—don’t drown on Fenland roads.” The picture was of a flooded road, but all I could think of was the sketch of the dead girl from the newspaper.

“Are you all right?” the driver asked, because my box was so heavy it hunched me over. My legs waddled so my knees could hold up the corners. I moved gingerly, one foot down onto one step, then the next.

The box slipped out of my arms onto the pavement,
umph
ing heavily onto its flat bottom. The bus pulled away. I’d taped the top together, so nothing could fly out. But damp could climb up from the ground. I tilted it up with my foot and got my fingers underneath. I heaved it up again, leaning back for balance.

That’s when I noticed the police car.

It was one with a flashing light. It was parked on the quiet residential street on the other side of the brook, running parallel to the traffic of Trumpington Road. The houses there were all tall and terraced, rubbing up against one another to the point of shared walls. I felt squeezed just looking at them. George’s was one of those.

A little farther down, people in white coverall suits prodded the shallow waterway. They looked puffed and padded and bald. Their hands were purple rubber, and their heads were white hoods pulled tight with elastic. Their mouths were wide paper ovals, big with surprise or horror.

I turned around. I counted. I counted cars, which doesn’t work, because they move. So I reduced it to red cars only, which I can keep track of, even when the light turns green. I counted people inside red cars. I counted people with beards in red cars. There was exactly one.

I turned. The white suits were still there. They bent. They had poles and a bucket up on the bank. A uniformed officer watched from the footbridge.

I looked past them. George’s was one of those terraced houses behind the brook. I plopped the box back down onto the pavement. I pushed it up against a brick wall. I got a pen out of my bag and wrote “George Hart-Fraser” on it, and the number of his house.

I ran up Trumpington Street, then flattened my back against the
college wall. Down the road, the white-suited police were searching the water.

Up the road, another crowd clustered around the grasshopper clock.

I don’t like answering telephones. I’d been letting the one at home take messages and keep them. The recording is of my father’s voice. He says who we are and that we aren’t home. It was strange to be sitting right there and hear him say I’m not home.

I still had the number Enid had written on a slip of paper for me. I called when I didn’t think he would be home, to tell his machine where I’d left his box.

That evening, the phone in my house rang.

I counted to four. That’s how many times the phone is supposed to ring before the machine picks up.

Five.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. Six. Seven.

It kept ringing. My fork clattered onto my plate, bouncing up once then landing on my half-eaten pork chop.

I wiped my mouth with kitchen roll. I got up and stood in the hallway.

I watched it ring.

“I’ve been phoning you,” George said.

He blocked my way down Senate House Passage. I was on my way to work.

“I don’t like phones,” I said.

“I got the box.”

I nodded. I’d filled it with Dad’s work. George could use it.

“Where is it?”

“You got the box,” I parroted. How could he ask me where it is if he’s just said he got it?

He got close to me and hissed right down at the top of my head. “The watch, Mathilde. Your father promised it to me. We had an understanding.”

My eyes were right in front of his neck. He swallowed.

“All right,” I said, to make him go away. “I have to go to work now.”

He didn’t move. He swallowed again. “You’ll bring it tomorrow?”

“Yes!” I said. I hunched my shoulders up around my ears.

He stepped aside, pivoting on one foot like he was a door swinging open. I pushed through, my feet churning on the slick, round cobbles.

I opened up the charity-shop bags. They were still heaped by the back door.

I looked inside every pocket and every sock. Dad’s watch wasn’t there.

I looked upstairs. None of the empty drawers had a watch in it. It hadn’t been filed with any papers. It wasn’t under his mattress.

I sat on the braided rug with my back up against Dad’s bed frame. I rested my forehead in my hand.

Dad’s watch. It had a leather band. The little hairs on his wrist had curled up around its edges. He always wore it.

I whipped my head up so fast that I cricked my neck. I galloped down the steps.

My bag was on the chair in the lounge, where I always dropped it when I came in. Some things stay the same. I always drop my bag there. My bag always has my wallet and my notebook in it. I carry pens. Every day I add an apple. It’s not often that I take something away.

The hospital had sent me a small padded envelope they called Dad’s “effects.” It had surprised me that you could fit the effect of a person into an envelope. But I knew what they meant, really. It contained his things.

I scrounged it up from the bottom of my bag. I’d willed myself to forget it was there.

I uncurled the top of it, and spilled the contents onto the coffee table: his wallet, his wedding ring, and his watch.

I put the watch back into my purse, for George. He could have it. I didn’t care.

I picked up the wedding band and looked through it. The only time Dad had taken it off was when he dated Amy Banning. Then, after the video evening with Luke, he’d put it back on again.

The next morning was Friday, the day of Dad’s memorial.

I was supposed to wear black. I had a black dress. I had black tights. I had only brown shoes. I didn’t know if that was allowed.

I put everything on and rubbed the shoes with black shoe polish. That only made them look dirty.

I scrubbed my hands under a rushing tap, wrapping them around the white soap bar over and over. I added a cardigan, because it had suddenly gone cold out. The sweater was so dark a blue that it was almost black. I’d done my best.

I went to work. The service would start at half-three at Great St. Mary’s church across the road. Enid wore a black blouse and said she’d worn it specially. Lucy and Trevor also said they would come, but they didn’t have black on.

There was another letter from Stephen.

Katja
—

I apologise for my previous letter. I was distraught. It was only a calf, after all. I retract my desperation
.

Alistair has lodgers coming, so I’m moving on. I’ve a signing in London for the new paperback. I’m able to divert to Cambridge on the way from there. On Friday 19th I’ll be catching the train from King’s Cross to get into Cambridge at quarter to four
.

Please meet me. Wouldn’t it be good to say hello? I won’t try to steal you away from your work, or from whomever you’re close with now. I only want to see you again. Don’t you want to see me?

It can be whatever you like. But please come
.

Wear my red sweater. I like that you kept it
.

Stephen

I accidentally jostled Trevor’s coffee. “Sorry!” I said. “Oh, sorry!”

“It’s all right,” he assured me. He dabbed at a splash with a tissue from the box on the windowsill. “Are
you
all right?”

Trevor looked hard at me. I folded the letter in half. It wasn’t his job to read them. It was mine.

I bounced my chin on my neck to tell him
yes
.

He turned back to his work. I unfolded the letter. I read it again. Today was Friday.

And the red sweater. I knew, right then I knew.

“We should go now,” Lucy said, standing straight in front of me. She knows I don’t like when people talk at me from the side. Everyone was being nice today.

“You go ahead,” I said.

I think she was going to say more, but Enid pulled her away. The three of them left.

I waited until they would be well ahead, then put my jacket on. It was black, too, by chance. My bag wasn’t. It stood out against me. It had the watch in it, for George. He was welcome to it. I don’t wear a watch.

Great St. Mary’s church is near, just at the end of Senate House Passage. People milled in front of it. I hung back in the passage. My breath puffed in front of me, made visible by the unexpected spring chill.

I thought of the inside of the church, packed in with people my dad had known. A lady in a green skirt was handing some paper out as more entered. I pushed my eyebrows together. She shouldn’t have worn green.
I
didn’t.

I counted the people I knew. Not the green-skirt lady, or the two men in college gowns.
One, Dr. Ogilvie in a black suit. Two, three, the sisters who cleaned for us, in elaborate hats
. Not the clutch of students wearing jeans; I didn’t recognise them.
Four, George
. I was supposed to give him the watch.

Five, Amy Banning, in a dress. Six, Luke
.

Luke. I batted my fists against my cheeks. Not the four men entering together; I didn’t know them. Not the student sailing past on a bicycle. I looked and looked for someone else, someone to count after Luke.

He and his mother stopped to talk to the green-skirted lady. He looked uncomfortable in his suit, hands in pockets. He leaned and looked around, in every direction from which someone might come: down both sides of the church towards the market, down King’s Parade,
down Trinity Lane. I curled myself up around the corner when he looked down here.

Seven
. Dad’s ashes were inside the church.

I turned and ran back down Senate House Passage. I stopped at the bottom, panting. If people were sitting in the pews already, then Stephen’s train was coming. It was inexorable.