Under the Harrow: (7 page)

I
WAS ON
the cliff path in Polperro. There were beach roses. I was hauling groceries to our house. Bottles of tonic, cherries, potatoes, spinach, crisps, lemons, and a dozen channel scallops. The shop in town sold ice and firewood. All the grocer’s shops in Cornwall sold ice and firewood.

The bottles of tonic knocked against my knees. Below the cliff, a fishing boat motored through a cloud of seagulls. It looked talismanic, with the birds whirling around it, but, then, so did a lot of things here, like the pointed white caps on the dock pilings, and the anchor ropes disappearing under water.

We ate dinner together every night in Cornwall and had an endless number of things to say. She was my favorite person to talk with, because what caught her attention caught mine too. Rachel cooked and I did the shopping, which I didn’t mind. I liked seeing all the boats straining in the same direction in the harbor and the traps stacked on the quay.

I was starving. We both were, all the time. “Sea air,” said Rachel. I went to the grocer’s nearly every day to replenish our stocks. I wanted salt and vinegar crisps, which tasted like seawater, and Rachel wanted pots of toffee. “What has toffee got to do with the ocean?” I asked, and she said, “It’s delicious.”

I carried the groceries down the path. The beach roses were pink and the Kilburn high street was hundreds of miles away. Later, after I unpacked the groceries, the sun sank through bars of gray cloud, lighting a red path on the water. “The sun road,” said Rachel.

O
N MY WAY BACK
from her house, the priest stops me and introduces himself. He is only in his thirties and reminds me of the boys I went to school with at St. Andrews. Who knows how he ended up here. He should be banking.

He asks about arrangements for the funeral. “They won’t let me bury her,” I say. We stand by the rill, a thin, decorative stream that runs down Boar Lane between the houses and the road. He tells me we can still hold a funeral and offers to perform the service.

“She wasn’t religious. She thought all religions are cults and some, like yours, are just better at distracting people from the fact that they’re cults.”

“I can lead a secular service,” he says. His willingness to please unnerves me. It isn’t what I expect from a priest. “Has it come to that, then?” I ask, and he toes a pebble into the rill. We both watch it sink. He says, “I want to help, and I think a funeral is necessary. To honor her. We have room for one hundred people. Do you want to come inside and see?”

Dust, wood, winter sunlight, black-mullioned windows, the smell of candles like the wax my flatmate in Edinburgh melted down to make encaustic for paintings. An Anglican church. We never had to go when we were children, so it only reminds me of weddings, and Anne Boleyn.

“This would be fine,” I say.

 • • • 

As we sit in the front pew of the empty church, planning the service, he says, “I did know her.”

“Did you?”

“She sometimes dropped Fenno with me.”

I realize he must not have much to do, that he must be lonely. I picture him chattering to Fenno while they walk and think my heart will break.

We place phone calls. Before calling Helen, I go into the garden and pace along the church wall. Rachel was her best friend and her daughter’s godmother.

Helen has always made me nervous. She moved from Melbourne to Oxford when her daughter, Daisy, was an infant, and raised her on her own while training and then working as a nurse. The thought of Helen maintaining a household, heating infant formula after a shift, dropping her daughter at nursery and picking her up, always made me feel useless. I don’t think I would be able to manage either one, let alone both, and Helen seems to agree.

When she answers, her voice sounds stiff. We discuss the police inquiry, and she agrees to do the eulogy. After a pause, I say, “How did Rachel seem last week?”

“Fine, a little withdrawn. She said work was trying.”

“Why was she staying with you?”

“Her boiler was broken,” she says. “She had no heat.”

Rachel lied to her. I would have noticed if the house were cold on Friday.

“Did she tell you she was moving?” I ask.

“No. To where?”

“Cornwall. She would have been there by now.”

“No, that’s not possible. She didn’t give notice.”

“Who do you think did it?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” She pauses. “It might not have had anything to do with Rachel. It might have been the location.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s secluded. Close to a major motorway. Where was she moving in Cornwall?”

“St. Ives.”

“I thought she liked the Lizard.”

“We’ve been there. She wouldn’t go to a place she’d been if she wanted to get away from someone. Has she ever mentioned a man named Keith Denton to you?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes. Do you really think that’s why she wanted to move? Cornwall isn’t very far, it’s only five hours.”

“It feels farther,” I say. “And it’s not so easy to find someone. If she changed her name.”

“I doubt she thought she was in danger. She would have reported it.”

“Someone was watching her from the ridge by her house.”

I can tell Helen doesn’t believe me. When I return inside, the priest says, “Did you have any music in mind?”

“Gymnopédie number one.”

He says he will locate a piano player.

“Do people tell you their secrets?” I ask.

“Sometimes.”

“If one of your parishioners told you they had done something wrong, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It would depend on the severity of the transgression.”

 • • • 

My friends start to arrive at the Hunters on the day before the funeral. This alarms me. I thought they would all stay in Oxford.

I sit on the landing, out of sight, and listen to them bumping into each other. Despite the circumstances, there is something giddy about the encounters, like it’s a reunion or a wedding.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” I hear them say, again and again.

I recognize the voices downstairs, but without any sense of possession. I can’t claim any of them and, hunched on the steps, I’m surprised I ever could.

Then Martha is coming up the stairs at a run. Before I can say anything, she is on the landing and her arms close around me.

 • • • 

On the night before her funeral, I can’t sleep. The dread grows worse with every hour and warps the next day into something I won’t survive without rest. I don’t have sleeping pills or tranquilizers, but I do have the bottle of red wine I brought from London for Rachel. There isn’t a corkscrew in the room. I go downstairs, but the heavy wooden doors to the bar are locked. Upstairs, I stare at the bottle of red wine. I use a knife to cut the foil and then consider the cork.

There is a screwdriver on top of the bathroom cabinet. Someone must have forgotten it after a repair.

I dig the screwdriver into the cork, pushing it down the neck of the bottle. There is a crash as the cork breaks the seal and wine erupts. Red liquid gushes onto my stomach and drips down my chest.

I sit with the screwdriver in my hand. The wine tracks down my arms along my veins. The wet plasters my shirt to my stomach. There are red spatters on the walls, and already the room smells rancid. I stay where I am, under the stained walls, as the ringing starts in my ears, and grip the screwdriver.

B
EFORE THE FUNERAL STARTS,
I scan the church and kill each person in exchange for her. They stand three deep behind the benches and along the walls. I recognize some of them from the library, the pubs, the aqueduct. I notice Lewis and Moretti and the woman, the DCI who walked up the hill with Moretti that day. They sit apart, which at first I think is a tactical police maneuver, but is probably only because they arrived separately and the church filled quickly.

Our dad has not turned up. As far as I know, the police have not found him yet, but this is the funeral of his eldest daughter. He might learn of it somehow. He might limp up the aisle and settle in next to me and start to offer theories. The church doors are shut now, and I wonder if anyone would mind if I locked them.

There are too many people I don’t recognize, which I hadn’t expected. I thought I would be able to note any strangers. Whoever did it might come today.

I find Keith Denton in the crowd. Lewis has him in view, across the aisle, and I’m glad since I can’t watch him myself. A dark-haired woman sits in the rear bench, and I turn to Martha. “There’s a journalist here,” I say, pointing to her.

Martha clips down the aisle until she reaches the last row. After some discussion, the journalist stands, squeezes past the others on her bench, and leaves through the main doors of the church. Before she does, she gives me a wry smile, like we are in on a joke together. She doesn’t show any embarrassment, even as the church turns to stare at her, and I envy her. She seems free.

Stephen has arrived, I realize with a sort of terror. He comes up and kisses me on the cheek. He smells of whisky, and from this morning, not last night.

People shift aside to allow him to rest against the wall. He looks exhausted, and I wonder if he also keeps needing to sit down.

They almost got married. Close brush, she said. He still wanted to. They slept together a few times a year, and he thought she would change her mind and move to Dorset with him. She might have done, eventually. She did love him.

I glance at him. His position or balance is wrong, like he might slide off the wall. Moretti said he was at his restaurant, but I wonder if he has proof.

The air in the church is restive and tortured, the result of two hundred people trying not to make a sound. I wish they would all talk. Outside, through the side door, is the garden. There’s still snow in the shade of the church, and under the cedar elms, and the air this morning is clear and scouring.

The priest climbs to the lectern. His sermon and the eulogy are wrong. They’re laughable. I look at Stephen and know he agrees. I wish I had done it myself, though even now I’m crying too hard to speak.

The piano player sets up her music, and I watch, already disappointed. She’s too young, for one thing.

The song starts and it’s like a rope is cut. Something washes over the crowd, settling it. The song isn’t sad, which is why listening to it agonizes me, and Stephen, I can tell. The point is that she loved it, and she can’t hear it.

 • • • 

Neither of the town’s pubs is big enough for us, so the group splits. Without discussion, the out-of-towners go to the Miller’s Arms, and the locals to the Duck and Cover. There are a few exceptions. Stephen goes to the Duck and Cover. He walks alone from the church to the pub and looks set on destroying himself. None of the detectives come to the reception. They climb into separate cars and drive back toward Abingdon.

At the Miller’s Arms, I carry my glass of whisky around
the room from group to group. People watch me. Most of the guests apologize for my loss, and then leave me to steer the conversation somewhere else, which I can’t. My wet eyes give the room facets and panels that it doesn’t have. I notice with surprise that everything that has always been difficult about parties is still difficult. I go to the toilet eight times and for a cigarette three times.

I am surprised that Liam didn’t come, but of course Martha wouldn’t have invited him. Why would she, we aren’t together anymore. I think of the song he always played in the beginning. Never a frown with golden brown.

Daisy, Rachel’s goddaughter, finds me smoking under the awning. She wears a coat over a thin black matelot top and black jeans. She hugs me and says, “I miss her,” and I nod, my chin pushing into her shoulder.

They had an arrangement. If anything happened to Helen, Rachel would take in Daisy. Part of me expected it to happen. When Daisy was younger, I thought that if Rachel had to adopt her, I would move in to help, and the thought of that sort of responsibility excited me.

“Rachel would want you to have something of hers,” I say.

“What?”

“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you go to her house and pick something?”

We go back into the pub. No one wants to talk about what happened, or how I found her. They seem to think it morbid to describe the sequence of events, that I should want to talk about Rachel’s life, which I do, desperately. But I want to talk about this too, with someone who isn’t a policeman. I wish I could tell Rachel, she would want to know every part of it.

I go to the toilet again. As I walk back to the bar, I notice that the crowd has thinned. I let my head fall. Martha steers me outside. We don’t speak, and I lean against her as we make our way down the high street.

In my room, I wipe the makeup from my eyes and lips and throw the stained pads in the bin. Martha climbs into bed. She sets a pillow down the middle, like she did on trips at university,
and says, “It’s for your own protection. I’ll break your face if you try to steal my blankets.”

 • • • 

The dog rotates from the ceiling. I can hear him whining. The fall didn’t break his neck and the lead is strangling him. I stand on the bed and reach my arms up. If I can hold him an inch higher he will be able to breathe. I can’t get to him, and then he isn’t there anymore, and Martha is saying my name.

I
N THE MORNING,
Martha and I sit in our coats at one of the tables next to the inn. She smokes and we watch the trains go by, hard and glinting and mineral in the winter light.

“The lead detective wants to open a fish restaurant in Whitstable,” I say.

“What about the other one?”

“He’s clever. They’re both clever, but I don’t know if they’re good at their jobs.”

In the spring, the Hunters puts up white canvas umbrellas. It was one of the things I always looked for as the train pulled into the station, the four stiff canvas umbrellas, to know I had arrived. Now our table is bare, and I move my coffee cup over the hole at its center.

“Do you want help raising publicity?” she asks.

“No,” I say sharply. Martha ashes her cigarette and waits. “The famous ones never get solved.”

“Is that true?”

Silence falls as we think about famous victims. I fold my hands in my lap. Clouds drift overhead.

Martha wears a linen scarf and suede boots. To her embarrassment, her family has an estate in Cirencester, with a wine cellar and a gun cabinet. In one of my favorite photographs of her, Martha stands on a hill covered in heather with a rifle broken over her arm.

“Do you want a private investigator?” she asks. “I found one in Oxford with good references.”

“No, not yet. I don’t want to get in the detectives’ way. But I do need to ask you a favor. Can you help me rent out my flat?”

“Are you still not coming back?”

“The police want me to stay in the area.”

“For how long?”

“They didn’t say.” It made sense to me, I hadn’t considered leaving. “Rachel said there was something wrong with the town, only a few weeks ago. And she put her house for sale and rented a place in St. Ives. I think she wanted to escape from someone.”

“Not necessarily someone from Marlow.” At the station, there is a ping and an automated announcement about the London train. We both turn our heads to listen. Martha has to be back in the city soon for a meeting. “How can you afford this?”

“Credit.” The gold rooster on top of the inn gleams in the light. My card has a cap of eight thousand pounds. I should open a new one for when I reach the limit.

“Come stay with me,” says Martha. I shake my head. “Then I’ll come stay here.”

“You can’t.”

“I wouldn’t mind leaving for a while.”

“Liar.”

Martha is acting in a Caryl Churchill play at the Royal Court Upstairs. I saw it at the start of the run early this month. The production is a two-hander and her best role yet.

“No, it’s for the best. If I don’t live alone now, I’ll never be able to again.”

Martha leans down to zip her luggage. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asks.

“No.”

She studies the inn, the cream stone and black shutters, and the row of modest houses behind it. In this light, it’s difficult to tell if anyone’s at home.

“Do you think you know who did it?”

“No.”

We sit in silence. Martha smokes, blowing the column to the side. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. A train goes by and
reflected light bubbles over the wall of the Hunters. “What do you want me to do about the flat?” she asks.

 • • • 

After Martha boards her train, I watch it pull from the station, fighting the idea that I am being abandoned. She appears to be the last of the guests to leave. I thought they would stay longer, and knowing that they didn’t is like watching it grow dark in the afternoon.

I have to drop Rachel’s keys at the cleaning agency. Afterward, I will take the train to London and clean out my flat. There is nothing else for me to do today, but I still feel breathless and sick, like I’ve forgotten something important.

Stephen is shoving a bag into the boot of his car in front of the chip shop. There is a moment when we might pretend not to see each other, but neither of us is able to look away in time. As I walk toward him, I stare up the high street to the yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms, as though that is my true destination, and I will only be stopping for a moment.

“Are you going home?”

He nods. Stephen lives on the Jurassic Coast, two and a half hours away. They both did the drive so many times. And now it’s over. This route they knew so well no longer exists.

And all the landmarks are gone too, the ways she gauged the distance—the spires of towns on the Salisbury Plain, the service station where she always stopped for coffee, the sign for his town, the shapes of his neighbors’ houses. Then she was there, opening the car, her feet creaking on the gravel, and pulling her overnight bag over her shoulder, and heading for his door, with exhilaration in the beginning, and a sense of doom around the end of their engagement, and lately, in the past two years, some sensation I could never pin down.

“How’s the restaurant?”

Stephen owns a Mexican restaurant in West Bay. Even in the off-season, La Fondita does tremendous business.

“I don’t know. Fine. Tom is going to look after it for a while,” he says.

He’s so handsome. That was part of the problem. Rachel
thought he was too lucky. Not anymore. After this, he would be perfect for her. A high, mangled sound leaves my throat.

“I thought your dad would come.”

“No.” I don’t tell him our dad wasn’t invited. Stephen never understood about our father. But, then, it isn’t an easy thing to understand.

Neither of us knows what to say. I think how strange it is, after how much time we’ve spent together. A few years ago, the three of us visited Lyme Regis, where the woman who found the dinosaurs lived. I remember being very sad when we went to the dinosaur museum. One of my plays had just been rejected by a competition. I wondered if the woman who discovered the dinosaurs ever found her life as absurd as I found mine.

“She didn’t find dinosaurs, Nora, she found fossils,” said Rachel. And that was the problem, wasn’t it.

Afterward, we sat in front of a pub the color of pistachio ice cream. I got shit-faced on beer, as did Rachel, companionably, and at some point I laughed so hard I fell off the bench. On the drive down the coast, I watched how the cliffs were eaten away into folds, how the grass grew right to their edge, the felt tip of the coast a green curving line. Watching them, my thoughts expanded to a grand scale, consoling me. In the front seat Rachel, also drunk, also watching the pale cliffs and thinking her own noble, magnificent thoughts, held Stephen’s hand.

“I miss Rachel.” My voice cracks open on her name, like I am yawning.

Stephen looks down the high street, and I am ashamed of saying it. It didn’t need to be said. I remember seeing them asleep on his couch. His lips pursed, chin doubled, kissing the top of her head.

“Will you tell me anything the police tell you? I keep calling the station but they won’t give me anything.”

“Of course.”

He closes the boot and comes around to the driver’s door. I try to ignore how uneasy he makes me now. The police must have confirmed his story. If he was at work all day, dozens of
people saw him. He isn’t a suspect. But the police aren’t telling him anything.

Stephen takes out his keys and stands looking down at them.

“Was she seeing someone?” he asks.

“No.”

“She seemed different the last time I saw her. I wanted to visit in October, and she said she had to work.”

“She probably did.”

There is a pause, and Stephen’s expression shifts. “Did you tell her not to marry me?”

“What, two years ago?”

“Yes, and since.”

“Do you think she would have listened to me one way or the other?”

“So you did.”

“No.” I wonder if he can tell I’m lying. Rachel was restless. I said that if she was restless already, marrying him was probably not the best idea. But she had already decided by then. “I told her she would be fine either way.”

“She isn’t fine. If we’d married she would still be alive.”

“You’re right. I wish she had moved to Dorset.”

And, a few years later, divorced you. By now she would be starting over somewhere, in a new flat, happily on her own again. Unless neither of us is right, and someone has been following her, and would have found her no matter where she went.