“That’s right,” said Angela Paddle. “He died in the night, didn’t he, and you were in London in that play of yours about the doll. I couldn’t make too much sense of Mrs. Linden. You know how some women get: all over the place, gulping and sobbing. I just thought it was good of her to sit by the body so much.”
“Of course it is,” said Alexandra. “The more the merrier. I might go and sit myself. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, for the copies.”
“It won’t be cheap,” said Angela Paddle.
“I bet it won’t be,” said Alexandra cheerfully.
Alexandra called in down the road to see Mr. Lightfoot. She didn’t have to re-park the car, the morgue was so close. He took her to view the body. Fortunately, there was no one else there doing the same thing. He asked her what she wanted Ned to wear for the cremation. He’d had a phone-call from the deceased’s brother, suggesting a cremation. Now he wanted to confirm with the widow that Mr. Hamish Ludd was the proper person for him to deal with. Mrs. Linden had been in, wanting to know whether there would be an interment. A burial, that was.
“What has Mrs. Linden to do with it?” asked Alexandra.
“The poor lady’s very upset,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “A little bit unbalanced, the way people get. I take no notice. You’re the widow, that’s the main thing.”
Alexandra stared at Ned’s body and could see that she must take charge of the situation. She had never held “truth” in much regard: it seemed to her a thing which shifted with the times, unreliable as any kind of fixed goal. She was an actor: she would find the truth of a role one night, and a wholly different truth the next. Both would work. She understood the slipperiness of words. She knew that those who protested often protested too much. She knew that definitions limited rather than explained: that once you had onion-peeled away opinion and thought you had arrived at a firm layer of truth, that layer went too, to reveal mere sponginess underneath. In the end you didn’t want truth, you just needed to know what had happened.
“Mr. Lightfoot,” she asked finally, directly, “where exactly was the body when you arrived?”
“On the floor,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “With a blanket over it.”
“I know,” said Alexandra. “But where on the floor?”
“Oh well,” said Mr. Lightfoot, “truth’s truth. At the top of the stairs.”
Alexandra took this in.
“Why did my friends say it was in the dining room?”
“Artistic people have their own habits,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “How do I know? All this breaking through, making one room out of two. The front parlour’s a thing of the past, as I know to my cost.”
“Ned fell down at the top of the stairs?”
“He died in his own bed,” said Mr. Lightfoot, “as a man should. Then your friend from the language school tried to carry him downstairs for reasons of her own, but a warm body’s hard to move, as she soon found out. So she left him at the top of the stairs covered with a blanket.”
“Who was in the house when you arrived?” asked Alexandra.
“Why don’t you think about the future, Mrs. Ludd? Put the past behind you? It’s what I always recommend.”
“Was Jenny Linden there?”
“I’ll say she was! Rushing round naked like a headless chicken. Throwing herself all over the body as we tried to get it out. Women will do that, of course, in these circumstances. And the dog barking and barking as the dawn comes up. No one had thought to take him for a walk. I found a nightie and put it on her, to make her decent.”
“Ned was asleep in bed,” said Alexandra. “He heard a noise; he turned on the light, sat up. And there was Jenny Linden in the room. Jenny Linden has been harassing and persecuting my husband, Mr. Lightfoot. She’s quite mad. He tried to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t. He lost his temper with her—and that’s when he had a heart attack.”
“I expect that’s how it went,” said Mr. Lightfoot.
“Don’t be tactful with me,” shouted Alexandra. “That’s how it did go. Then she took off her clothes to make the most of it, to make everyone believe—”
Ned’s body seemed to be radiating a kind of cold blue light. But perhaps it was only the reflection of Mr. Lightfoot’s neon lights off Ned’s now waxy skin. Did all the blood flow out during an autopsy? Or, deprived of life and movement, did the blood congeal, and shrink and harden? Alexandra tried not to look at the corpse too much: it seemed such a mockery of the real thing. An object offered in replacement: a fake, someone’s attempt to deceive. The real Ned had walked off into the forest; he had not looked behind. He had not even wanted her to go with him.
“She killed him,” said Alexandra. “That mad woman killed my husband.”
“I didn’t hear that,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “You have to be careful what you say. There’s such a thing as slander. I’ve seen a lot in my time but I’ve never seen anyone as upset over a death as poor Mrs. Linden.”
“I’m the widow,” said Alexandra.
“You took your time acknowledging it,” said Mr. Lightfoot. “Every time a body’s viewed something goes out of it, but that’s just my opinion. Now you’re finally here, I’ll leave you alone with your husband. What’s left of him.”
He sauntered off, gaunt and dusty in his badly-cut tweedy black trousers. Practice with the bereaved, competence over death, knowledge of what others would rather not contemplate, earned him a surface of worldly self-confidence, which he oiled with a veneer of spite. He was still an Untouchable, Alexandra consoled herself. People, recognising the undertaker or his wife, moved away in the supermarket, not wanting any suggestion of physical contact. Birds of ill-omen. Crows.
“Ask Dr. Moebius,” said Mr. Lightfoot, turning back. “He’s the one to ask, not me. I could tell it was a heart attack; short but violent; unmistakable. Why he wanted all that business with the autopsy beats me.”
“I expect he just wanted to keep standards up,” said Alexandra.
“Running bodies around here and there,” Mr. Lightfoot said. “It isn’t right. Not much is right about death, these days. In some places they bury the coffins vertically, even though that adds to the digging costs.”
Alexandra sat on a hard chair by the body and stared into space. Ned kept her a kind of implacable company. She didn’t cry. There were two witnesses to the death. One was Ned and he was dead. The other was alive but unreliable. She would like to preserve what dignity she could for Ned, herself, and Sascha. She gave up and drifted into inorganic suspension until it was time to collect the documents from Angela Paddle. She was charged £20, which she thought exorbitant, but did not argue.
Alexandra returned the originals to Jenny Linden. She parked her car around the corner from Eddon Gurney prison. A homely little red car was parked outside Jenny’s house. Alexandra recognised it as Jenny’s: she’d seen it around often enough, here and there, even in The Cottage yard. She walked casually by the house, in the road, her face averted from the window. When she got to the car she dropped the documents on the ground, on the driver’s side. Jenny Linden would be puzzled to find them but would have to make up some story for herself which would solve the problem: they’d fallen out when she opened the door; they’d been there all the time. Whatever. If Jenny’s distress was as great as everyone said she wouldn’t be in a condition to give the matter too much attention. It wouldn’t occur to her that copies had been made, that Alexandra now had some undefined power which gave her access to Jenny’s world, as Jenny apparently had into her, Alexandra’s, world.
Alexandra got home to find Hamish worrying about the S to Z’s in Ned’s address book. Abbie had been dilatory; so had Alexandra; there were people yet to be contacted. Alexandra spent an hour or so on the phone going through these last pages, telling friends and strangers the date and time of the funeral. Some knew of Ned’s death, some didn’t. Some groped for consoling words to say to her. Some needed her consolation. It was exhausting. At the end she was no more convinced of Ned’s death than she had been at the beginning. She kept hearing his voice in her ear, and jumping. But it was Hamish’s voice, on the office phone, in another room. Muted, it had the same timbre as Ned’s. As dusk fell the same bats came wheeling out of the old barn in the same way as they always had. Their world had not changed at all: why should it? Perhaps what one mourned for people was that they were no longer there to observe familiar things. Everyone died. It was a terrible system: to plant in the mind the possibility of permanence and then snatch it away.
Of course Ned had not been having an affair with Jenny—it was dreadful that the thought had been put into her head in the first place. Dave Linden had been driven mad by his wife: he had been fed false information; rendered wretched, and was stupid, stupid, stupid to begin with. Everyone knew that. All she had to face was that Jenny Linden had got as far as the bedroom and been the one to find the body. Which was bad enough.
Alexandra called Leah; again using Jenny Linden’s voice. “It’s me,” she sobbed. “It’s me.”
“Be strong and calm,” recommended Leah. “I’ll be able to fit you in tomorrow. I’ve had a cancellation. Let the wife do the earthly part the way she wants: it’s nothing. So the body rots, or the body burns, what’s the difference? You and Ned continue on your spiritual path together.”
“Can you give me a key phrase?” begged Alexandra/Jenny. She remembered that from something Ned had once said. What was it?
“Worst fears,” murmured Leah. “Worst fears,” and put the phone down.
Worst fears.
What did the woman mean by “worst fears”? Was the phrase some kind of therapeutic aid to a peaceful mind? In which the client was meant to envisage the worst that could happen, and because the present didn’t match up to that, feel better?
What would Jenny Linden’s worst fears be? If she, Alexandra, was acting Jenny in a play, what would it feel like? How would it go?
Alexandra took Diamond for a walk in the fields at the back of The Cottage. This is how it went.
Here am I, Jenny Linden, a woman in my mid-forties, my life passing by; loved by a husband who loves me whatever I do, therefore able to do whatever I like and not lose income. I have a little life. I sit in a little house, in a small town, reducing what is large to what is small. The future shrinks, along with the present. I love the theatre, as so many do who have an unsatisfactory life, or feel the need for its enrichment. I am by nature a fan: the extreme example of fan being the one who shot John Lennon; the only way to own his hero wholly being to cause his death. If I can obsessively worship, I can also obsessively destroy.
By chance I, Jenny Linden, have become the fan of one Ned Ludd, a minor celebrity in the outside world, but in the world in which all my yearnings are fixated, that of the theatre. I want him to take notice of me. I have no real view of myself, so it seems to me possible that, if I play my cards right, that my love for him, my obsession with him, will work some kind of magic so he will reciprocate.
I am eaten up with envy for his wife, who is beautiful, worldly, successful, has media attention and press cuttings to show for it. She is so confident I hate her. What does she have that I haven’t? I’ll show her. I will make myself useful to Ned: walk his dog, do his research for free, worm my way into his life; at his death grieve so hard and so publicly the world will believe that we were intimately related, the better to humiliate his widow. I will steal her happy memories: I will disturb and upset her, fill her mind with doubts. If I have no happy memories, neither will she.
Jenny Linden’s worst fears? Now Ned Ludd’s dead? That Alexandra will be revenged on me. That she will damage me, or mine. Stop my husband loving me: now Ned’s gone, I’ll need him. That she will somehow bring me to the realisation that Ned Ludd pitied me but scarcely thought of me, let alone loved me.
Worse, worse, worse. That even Alexandra Ludd can’t be bothered thinking about me; negates me by ignoring me.
Worst fears:
Mine, Alexandra Ludd’s worst fears.
Can I get to this? Be the actress impersonating me?
How would I see myself then?
My worst fear used to be that Ned would die and leave me alone to reinterpret a world so long and well-interpreted through his eyes. Man and wife grow together, sop up each other’s natural juices, there is no avoiding it: if there is a child grown in her it is the joint essence of them both: the character and nature of the child infects the mother, and through the mother the father too. Thus the unit is sealed together, bonded without, suffusing within. This is why death or divorce is so shattering: wrench out a piece of the whole and what’s left is like a raw shank of beef hanging in the kitchen bleeding. The child feels it just as much. It’s the sharing of the bed does it, thought Alexandra. There should be more separate beds, separate bedrooms, coming untos—
How lovely the evening was. She could look back and see the two chimneys of The Cottage showing over the ridge. If she retraced her steps it would reveal itself to her, little by little. That familiar solid structure, waiting patiently for her return, holding its breath: child and mother both: home. You could not love a house as you loved a person, of course not, but you almost could. Old houses acquired personalities, the sum of all who had lived in them. Mended, painted, refreshed, cleaned, they glowed at you, acknowledged you; spick and span, they made you dance: neglected, took your pocket money. Ned was gone, but lived on in the roof, the stone, the beams that had absorbed his attentions; which had often made him groan, as a parent will a child who overspends but still is loved. The climbing roses Ned had planted at the foot of the house, now mingled with the leaves of the Virginia creeper, crept higher and higher; their great red sensuous globes hung beneath the eaves. Ned was gone but they went on; blooming, fading, falling, renewable, as Ned was not. The broad beans on their pyramids swelled and grew big and tough without him: but now at least would survive to seed themselves. So much of what Ned did continued. She, Alexandra, lived; the house and garden were now both her consolation and her obligation. She must remember the woodworm in the settle: do something before it spread. All it needed was injecting, minute hole by minute hole, minuscule death-dealing to minuscule enemies.