A Family Affair (29 page)

Vanessa had kicked her bedclothes into a tangle and her face was wet with tears and sweat. It had run into her hair too; damp strands and curls clung round her small round face.

‘What's the matter, my old Dutch?' he asked.

‘The moo-cows were chasing me.' Vanessa hiccoughed.

‘Dear, oh deary me. Dreaming, was you? That's all it was, my love. You go back to sleep. There won't be no more moo-cows tonight.'

He bent over to tuck her in and she clutched his sleeve.

‘Grampy … Nessa's frightened …'

‘Come on, my ducks. Grampy'll leave the light on for you.'

Her fingers tightened their grip. ‘Grampy stay!'

‘Grampy can't do that.' He was thinking of the milk heating on the gas ring, boiling over, perhaps, putting out the flame but leaving the gas to escape. But he was feeling pretty groggy again too. He didn't think he could make it down the stairs to turn the gas out and back up again. Well – not make it back up again, leastways.

‘D'you want to come down with Grampy?' he asked.

‘'es! 'es!' She wasn't crying now, but the whimpery tone suggested she would be if he left her.

Walt turned back the covers and lifted her up. Her arms twined trustingly round his neck and she wound her plump little legs around his waist. Love surged through him and tenderness and pride. He thought he saw his mother again, in the shadowy corner beside the wardrobe.

‘See, Mother?' he said, but silently this time. ‘I didn't do so bad, did I? This here's my grandbabby!'

He carried Vanessa along the landing, holding her tightly and started down the stairs. He was two or three steps down, just rounding the curve, when the dizziness hit him again. He stopped, swaying, and let go of Vanessa with one hand to grab at the bannister, but it wasn't there. He hadn't reached it yet; here it was only a sham against the landing wall. He felt forward, his shaking hand grasping air, his fingers rasping on the wallpaper that divided the wooden struts, took another step and lost his balance. He heard Vanessa's cry of alarm, then there was nothing but the bump, bump, bump as he was propelled downwards, each stair thudding into his thin body, knocking the wind out of him, blotting out thought.

As he fell Vanessa fell with him, clinging on to him, too startled and frightened to scream again. It was only at the foot of the stairs that she began to cry once more as she lay trapped beneath him. But Walt could not hear her. He had been dead even before they reached the bottom.

The male-voice choir concert had been a great success. Heather and Glad had found seats right in the front row – why was it that people always filled up the middle first? – and Heather had been glad she had such a wonderful view of Steve, who looked smart and incredibly handsome in his dark suit, white shirt and red tie (the uniform of the choir), standing with the baritone section and singing his heart out.

There was something tremendously uplifting about the massed voices of the men, too; though their only accompaniment was an elderly woman on a somewhat tinkly piano, they
were
the music, singing in four-part harmony. The range of songs was enormously wide – ‘Brigadoon'and ‘The Desert Song'and ‘South Pacific'; ‘In A Monastery Garden', ‘The Bells of St Mary's'and ‘Ave Maria'. There were supporting artistes too – ‘turns', as Glad called them – a fat tenor, resplendent in a black evening suit, frilled shirt and wine-coloured cummerbund, singing ‘Granada'and ‘O Sole Mio', and the local elocution teacher reciting Joyce Grenfell monologues.

Glad had enjoyed herself every bit as much as Heather, though for different reasons. She had met up with a lot of people she hadn't seen in a long time; she chatted with this one and that during the interval, almost regretting that the concert had to start again, and when it was over she took up where she had left off, hanging on in the hall whilst the organisers cleared away the chairs around her and then delaying on the pavement outside for a last lingering exchange of news and gossip.

Heather and Steve had almost begun to despair of ever getting her home at all. Steve had gone on to where the car was parked in the Island and Heather stood a few paces away from her waiting impatiently. Eventually her anxiety to get home to Vanessa got the better of her and she went back to Glad and touched her arm.

‘Gran – look – I don't want to hurry you but I think we ought to be going home.'

‘I'm coming. I'm just coming …'

But still she delayed, enjoying the chance for a gossip, even enjoying being able to regale her old friends with the details of Linda's leukaemia, for in spite of her genuine distress on David's behalf, her involvement in the drama made her feel not only important, but also like a tragedy queen.

By the time Heather eventually managed to propel her to the Island, Steve had the lights on and the engine running. Heather installed her grandmother in the front passenger seat – sitting in the back made her queasy, she always said – and climbed in herself.

‘I thought we'd lost you, Glad,' Steve said as he turned up the High Street in the direction of Hillsbridge.

‘I was just talking,' Glad said, slightly huffy. ‘I haven't seen Mrs Wilcox since I don't know when. I don't know why you had to drag me away like that, Heather.'

‘Because I think we ought to get home,' Heather said. ‘You know Grampy hasn't been well today.'

‘Oh, he's all right,' Glad said dismissively. ‘You don't want to worry about him.'

‘Well, I do,' Heather said. ‘Especially …'

She broke off. Especially since he's in sole charge of Vanessa, she had been going to say, but suddenly she didn't want to. Why she didn't really know, unless it was because the words would give form to the vague but unmistakable sense of unease that had been niggling at her for the last half-hour. But Glad wasn't listening anyway. She was still mulling over the titbits of gossip she'd gleaned.

‘D'you know, Heather, Mrs Wilcox was telling me poor Connie Parker's gone funny again. She's in Wells …' Wells was the local mental hospital, or asylum as the old folk knew it. ‘Gone down to Wells'in local parlance didn't mean a shopping trip or a visit to the Cathedral. It meant the equivalent of a fate worse than death.

Heather said nothing. She didn't know Connie Parker and she couldn't have cared less if she'd gone to the moon. All she wanted was to get home and make sure everything was all right.

Steve pulled up opposite the front gate to let them out then drove on around the block to the back lane where he had built a hard standing on the end of the back garden to park his car. Heather helped Glad up the steps, carrying her stick and her voluminous bag for her and noticing that a light was showing through the gap in the curtains of the small front bedroom – Vanessa's room. It wasn't the main bedroom light, it was too faint for that, but at the same time it was too bright to be Vanessa's little red light bulb. She could only conclude it must be the landing light showing through, which must mean the bedroom door was open. The realisation gave her anxiety another tweak. She knew she'd pulled the door almost closed when she'd left as she always did.

She turned the knob and tried to push the front open – they never locked the front door until they went to bed at night, although they usually turned the key in the kitchen one when they'd finished outside. But the door would go no further than a few inches. She pushed again and again encountered solid resistance. And then she heard Vanessa whimper, no more than a foot or so away from her, behind the jammed door.

‘Vanessa – is that you?' She was trembling suddenly from head to foot, ice water running in her veins instead of blood.

‘Mum-my! Mum-my!'

‘Vanessa – what are you doing? Let me in!'

‘Mum-my! Mum-my!'

Heather dropped down on to her knees on the doorstep, placing herself at the level her child's voice was coming from, wriggling a hand through the narrow gap between door and door jamb. Her outstretched fingers encountered something that felt like thin human hair and beneath it flesh that didn't feel like flesh but cold and clammy. She withdrew her hand as if what she had touched had been searingly hot, gasping a scream as she did so.

‘What in the world … ?' Glad, who had been standing on the step looking only vaguely puzzled and still, for all the world, wrapped up in her wonderful gossipy evening, now sounded thoroughly alarmed herself. The panic in her voice went some way to calming Heather. Glad had had a bad heart for years.

‘It's all right, Gran.' She bent forwards again, prepared now for what her groping fingers would encounter. And they did. A cold grizzled neck. The collar of a flannelette shirt. The sturdily made wool of Walt's cardigan.

‘Oh God, Oh God!'
she whispered to herself between chattering teeth, and then, louder: ‘Vanessa – are you all right, sweetheart?'

‘Mum-my! Mum-my!'

She couldn't move Walt or the door by so much as an inch. She should have known she wouldn't be able to.

‘It's all right, Vanessa. Mummy's here. Mummy's coming.' She scrambled to her feet, tearing the knee of her stocking on the rough edge of the doorstep.

‘What is it? What's going on?' Glad demanded again, panicky yes, but also, curiously, almost determinedly obtuse.

‘I think Grampy's fallen down. In the doorway. I've got to get in. Is the front-room window open?'

She stepped on to the strip of garden beneath it, feeling at the surround with her fingertips in the almost total darkness. It wasn't open. Again, she should have known it wouldn't be, not at this time of night. Thinking it might be had just been a straw to grasp at.

In her panic she had almost forgotten that Steve would be approaching the house from a different direction – the back-garden path. It was only when she heard him rapping on the living-room window and calling her name that she remembered and flooded with relief.

‘Steve!' she called desperately.

She heard his footsteps coming along the side passage between the house and the sheds.

‘Heather?' he called over the solid wood door at the front garden end of the passage, which was also locked at nightfall to stop anyone who might want to take a short cut from the main road to the back lane by way of the gardens. ‘Heather? What's the matter?'

‘Can't you get in?' she called back.

‘No – the back door's locked.'

‘I can't get in this way either. Grampy's fallen down.' She still used the euphanism, though she knew in her heart it was more than that. ‘He's right in the doorway. And Steve – Vanessa's there too, and she's crying!'

‘All right. I'm coming.'

She heard him clambering on to the dustbin, then haul himself up on to the dividing wall and inched along it, sending a shower of small stones skittering down. Then he lowered himself to the ground, crunching into the lily of the valley bed that thrived in the shady corner.

‘Steve – what are we going to do? The window's shut too!'

First he pushed at the front door with no more success than she had had. Then he went to the window and a moment later there was the tinkle of breaking glass.

‘My window!' Glad said, outraged. ‘You've broke my window!'

Neither of them answered her. Steve reached through the shattered pane, unhooked the window and hoisted himself up and through. Heather ran back to the front door and as she did so, heard Steve in the hall speaking to Vanessa, and a series of thuds and scufflings. At last the door opened and Steve thrust a sobbing Vanessa into Heather's arms.

‘Take her … I can smell gas.'

He disappeared along the hall. Heather stepped over Walt's outstretched body, then, as she too smelled it, stepped back again into the fresh air.

‘Wait there, Gran. There's gas escaping …'

A minute or so later Steve was back. ‘It's all right. I've turned it off. It's not too bad – the lav window was open.'

Heather stepped over Walt's body again and pushed past Steve who was now kneeling beside him. Vanessa's chubby arms were wound tightly around her neck; in the light of the hall, Heather could see congealed blood in her hair.

‘Steve – call the doctor!'

‘It's too late. I think he's gone.'

‘No – for Vanessa. She's hurt …'

Not waiting for Steve, she grabbed the phone herself, somehow managing to dial the number which she had learned off by heart in case of an emergency such as this, whilst still cradling Vanessa. As if from a long way off she heard Glad moaning and then the shrilling of the bell, over and over and over …

Helen was enjoying a plate of cold beef and ham when the telephone began ringing. She paused, fork poised halfway from plate to mouth, tensing slightly and listening, then consciously relaxing. This wasn't her house and it wasn't her phone. But some sixth sense was nudging her, all the same, and a moment later Matthew appeared in the doorway beckoning to Paul, who had been cornered by a large and ebullient lady who looked like nothing so much as a bejewelled tank.

A few moments later Paul was back, making his way to her side.

‘We've had a call; can you come?'

Helen dumped her plate, found her bag and stole and followed him outside.

‘What's happened?' she asked as she slid into the car beside him.

He told her.

‘I think we might have a sudden death on our hands, and Vanessa's been hurt too.'

‘Have they phoned for an ambulance?'

‘I don't think so. We'll probably need an ambulance and the police, but we can assess the situation when we get there. They didn't give Dorothea many details, but she said Heather sounded very upset.'

Dorothea had been fielding calls and had Matthew's number in case of emergency.

Paul drove fast, negotiating the almost empty main road with skill and ease. The front door of the Simmonses'house was ajar, light spilling out on to the step and the peony bush sentinels and framed within it Steve, still wearing the blazer and flannels that made up his choir uniform, but with his tie pulled loose at the neck, could be seen looking out.