The Facts of Life (29 page)

She was close now. She recognised the road and dared to drive a little faster. Then she hit what seemed at first to be another big puddle. She drove into it warily then slammed on the brakes as she felt the road dip deeper into the water ahead of her. She backed up a little, turned the wheel slightly to the left and started forwards again. Suddenly she seemed to be surrounded by water. The head-lamps gave her no help in finding where the road lay but merely confused her further by setting the surface water aglitter. Once more she had pointed the car the wrong way. Once more the bonnet lurched sickeningly downwards. She thrust her foot down on the brake. She cursed her stupidity. The road clearly bent somewhere around here. Why could she not remember it? She began to reverse, gently at first, then slamming her foot down wildly on the accelerator as the tyres lost their hold on the submerged turf and the car began to slide. Then water reached the exhaust pipe and the engine died. For two, maybe three seconds, as the rain clattered on the roof, she was paralysed with fear, then the car ploughed down the bank and crashed into a clump of trees beneath the water line.

Sally yelled as a sharp branch shattered the windscreen and freezing water slammed onto her with the force of a punch. Somehow she found time to snatch a whooping breath before she was entirely submerged. She thrashed out of her seat and forced herself to open her eyes. The water was filthy, however, and night had fallen. She could see nothing. Beating out with her hands, thinking she might be able to swim out through the windscreen space, she found it blocked by branches. She felt her way back along the seat to first one door handle then the other. Both doors were wedged against something. One opened only slightly, the other not at all. She knew the rear window was too small to be worth smashing. Lungs burning in her effort to resist the urge to breathe, she returned to the front and began to force her way through the tree. The branches seemed to grow thicker and more tangled as she pushed on. Then her coat caught on something. She tugged it wildly before she realised Dr Pertwee’s idol, still in her pocket, must have swung out in the water and locked itself into a fork. Trapped like a bird in lime, she stopped struggling. She dared to let out a few bubbles of breath, then released one, long, suicidal sigh.

Had she climbed sideways out of the tree rather than heading instinctively through it to the surface, she might have escaped. The rain stopped within hours and the flood grew no higher. When it subsided after only a day, Sally was found wrapped in branches and dislodged ivy, her bare feet dangling some fifteen feet above Thomas’s wrecked Wolseley. Edward was shown the body only after it had been restored to dignity, but the farmer who had taken a ladder to retrieve it needed several whiskies to restore his nerve.

‘She looked like a broken bird,’ he told the barmaid in the Lamb and Flag, pale at the memory. ‘She looked like she’d been blown up there by some great wind.’

Disparate, far-flung households had been made a temporary community by disaster, a community that was still in shock. Many of the people who cried openly during the brief, careful service at St Oswald’s did so from a grief that was more than compassionate; Sally was only one of several claimed by the flood. A thirteen-year-old boy was drowned when he dived from a bedroom window to try to save his sister. A farmer in the land immediately below Sedwich Dyke was crushed by his own tractor under the first wave. A woman had broken her neck trying to gallop her horse to safety across the fields. As the waters subsided and the full extent of the damage to land, brick and inhabitants was laid bare, three of the oldest people on the parish register breathed their last, as though the effort to survive the dreadful night and the trauma of the scenes it left behind had knocked all the fight from their ancient frames.

Thomas had cajoled a rather good-looking cab-driver into bringing him all the way from Rexbridge and picking him up again from The Roundel later. The man swiftly sensed Thomas was not the kind of fare who liked to chat but from time to time he caught his eye in his rear view mirror and his own creased with a kind of amusement that might once have made Thomas blush. Thanking him for the tip, he called Thomas ‘Guv’nor’ with no trace of the customary sarcasm.

They had been held up by a delivery lorry and Thomas arrived late, slipping into a place just inside the door as Sally’s pale, flower-laden coffin was borne towards the altar. He craned his neck to look past a pillar towards the principal mourners. As always, even after all this time and in so anti-erotic a setting, his heart turned over uncomfortably at the sight of Edward’s high-boned face and the contrast between its pale complexion and the dark hair that curled above his ears and vulnerable nape. An only child, whose mother had died young, Thomas had once longed for younger brothers and sisters. At their most avowable, the feelings Edward inspired in him were those of an older brother eager to protect a weaker sibling, but he knew they had darker, more difficult roots.

To Edward’s right, the Bankses sat stiffly, rendered incapable by grief of kneeling or standing. Sally’s father had never been strong since his accident, but within his own reduced capacities, he had always seemed indomitable. Now both he and his wife were prematurely aged, plants robbed unnaturally of sap and sunlight. When she raised her veil to blow her nose, Sally’s mother afforded a brief, shocking glimpse of a face left grey and defenceless, without rouge or purpose.

Thomas had telephoned Edward the previous night and asked if there was anything practical he could do for him, and was confronted with the impossible question, ‘Thomas, how do I grieve? Where do I begin?’

Having shed so many tears, for reasons that now seemed obscure at best, Edward found himself unable to shed even one for the best – worst – reason imaginable. In one of her outbursts of hideous frankness, which Thomas already knew he would miss, Sally had said that the drawn-out agony of giving birth to Miriam had been so much greater than any pain she had ever felt that it had been hard to react to it. It seemed that Edward too now lacked the necessary vocabulary of outrage. Granted a reminder of joy just long enough for him to start fantasising about his future only to be faced with the brutal truncation of this happiness, he was punch-drunk. Compared to his shattered in-laws, however, he was already used to this sense of unreality. He knew better than to seek explanations. He could swim in the medium while they floundered. Overnight, he was the one who was strong, they the ones in need of constant watching and support.

The pallbearers stepped forward to hoist the coffin back on to their shoulders and Mrs Banks let out a harsh, seabird’s cry which caused Edward to hunch his shoulders as though he had been struck. Then he seemed to steel himself and stood to help his stricken mother-in-law to her feet. Mr Banks seemed to have seized up from sitting still too long and could not manoeuvre the wheels of his chair so his wife, in turn, had to help him into the aisle. The three of them thus presented a small paradigm of frail human altruism. As they made their slow progress back towards the irrelevant sunshine, Thomas found his eyes fixed on his friend’s downcast face. When Edward looked up suddenly, Thomas dropped his gaze down to the prayer book he was still clutching, unopened. Then he thought, with a kind of inappropriate amusement,
Bloody hell! I don’t care
, and he looked up again and sent out a great mental beam of love. Edward looked around and spotted him as smartly as if Thomas had called his name. He gave a broken-down attempt at a smile and stepped away from the Bankses to grasp Thomas’s hands in his. It was a gesture of quite uncharacteristic warmth and, disarmed by it, Thomas found himself just as uncharacteristically allowing Edward to draw him out of the crowd to walk with him behind the coffin. Edward continued to hold onto him. Thomas supposed the action was unconscious and gently tried to pull his hand back, but found Edward’s grasp firm and intentional. As quiet improvisation on the organ gathered itself into a sombre Purcell march, Thomas gave Edward’s hand a squeeze and felt momentarily very young and stupid.

People in crises do this
, he thought.
Aeroplanes lose control, liners sink, buildings burn and crumble and the people within them abandon themselves to unwise fondlings and violent, unplanned embraces
.

Edward eventually let go of his hand but not until he had mutely steered Thomas to a position beside him at the grave’s mouth. The priest intoned the sentences that were familiar as certain lines of Shakespeare – familiar to the point of being incomprehensible to the casual ear. Thomas kept his head bowed but found his eyes straying now to the black hairs on Edward’s hands, now to an earthworm that had taken a wrong turning and begun to emerge high in a wall of the moist, black chasm before them.

‘I’m so very sorry,’ he told the Bankses as Edward unnecessarily reintroduced them. Mrs Banks could only stare at him and nod. ‘She had so much to give us all,’ he added fatuously. She looked ill. Wondering whether she were due for a second operation, he looked politely aside, casting a last glance into the grave and, for the first time since Edward rang him hysterically with the news, he felt his throat tighten and had to gulp away the possibility of tears.

He preferred not to be among the first to arrive at the house, so he dawdled in the churchyard while the others set off, Edward caught up in conversation with a rounded, effervescent Indian woman in a white sari. By the time he had finished reading the inscriptions on headstones, by the time the crowd had melted away and the sexton was arranging flowers and wreaths on the small mound of newly turned earth, his mind was made up. It was quite possibly a foolhardy course of action, but he knew he would regret not taking it for the rest of his days. He was going to ask Edward to live with him again. He would move out of the college house and buy himself somewhere larger, on the edge of town perhaps. He would find somewhere big enough for Edward’s grand piano and hire a nanny to care for the child. His father’s death had left him comfortably off. He could afford it. When they shared a house before, he had kept his desire penned in with a regime of spinsterly austerity designed, with unconscious masochism, to drive Edward from him. He had been at pains to treat him like a lodger. Now he would hem him round with unlodgerly luxury. Yet, he entertained no fond delusion that their relations would ever warm to anything more fleshly than friendship.

No. That was a lie. He did, frequently, usually in unguarded hours of the night, feed just such a fantasy. But at least he kept the fondness of the delusion well to the fore of his mind. More realistically, he suspected that a constant supply of creature comforts and kindness would make it harder for Edward to leave him a second time. And proximity was intimacy of a kind.

Thomas left the churchyard just as a florist’s van drew up. The red-haired lad who jumped out saw in an instant that he had missed the funeral and swore roundly under his breath.

‘I told her it was cutting things too fine,’ he said, claiming Thomas as witness to his innocence. ‘Her Ladyship wouldn’t have none of it. Made me drive all the way from the bleeding studios because she wanted the note to be in her handwriting and not some local florist’s.’

He was clutching a huge bouquet of white arum lilies arranged with strips of willow and what appeared to be long sprigs of rosemary.

‘That’s all right,’ Thomas told him. ‘I’m a friend of the family. I’ll make sure they get to Mr Pepper.’

‘It says Pfefferberg here,’ the lad protested, frowning at the foreignness in his mouth.

‘Same man. I’ll give them to him myself.’

‘Oh. Well. That’s very kind of you, then. Sign here.’

Thomas signed.

‘You needn’t tell her you were too late,’ he assured him.

‘No,’ said the lad and laughed. ‘I suppose not. I charged her enough. See you then.’

He jumped back into his van, made a show of roaring the engine and tore away again. Thomas carried the flowers to Sally’s grave and made space for them beside an evergreen cross, on which Sally’s name was spelled out in silvered cardboard. There was an envelope in the bouquet, which he took to pass on to Edward. Half way up the lane to The Roundel, temptation got the better of him and he opened it to read the message. In large handwriting that would have disgraced a girl of twelve, was written, ‘
Teddy you poor poor darling!! If there’s anything Julius and I can do, anything at all, just let me know
.’

It was signed
Myra
, then, in modest brackets,
(St Teath)
and there were three large kisses. Thomas thrust it back in the envelope and, as he walked, turned the name over in his mind for an instant like a half-forgotten scent. When he remembered that it was the name of an actress, not of anyone he knew personally, he folded the envelope up and pocketed it, resolved now not to pass it on.

The Roundel and its grounds bore signs of damage as obvious as his friend’s were hidden. The grass had been combed flat into strange patterns by the retreating water currents and streaked with sweetly pungent mud. In the flower beds only the huge deep-rooted old roses appeared to have emerged unscathed. Numerous plants had been torn out and swept to one side. Others lay broken, crushed, rotting. Someone had made half-hearted efforts to tidy up, but still objects that did not belong lay everywhere, carried from Heaven knows where: children’s toys, a lavatory brush, sodden magazines, buttons, orange rind. The disorder was oddly comforting – a reminder that the recent natural violence had not been exaggerated in remembrance.

The strong, rivery smell grew even stronger as Thomas entered the house. The boiler had been turned up high and fires had been lit in every room in an effort to dry the old place out, adding heat and humidity to an atmosphere already thick with the mildewy stench of wet carpet and sodden wood. The place was crowded with funeral guests, the respectful murmurs of each combining in a chatter which only their mourning clothes held on the gloomy side of festive. Thomas guessed from the way many were looking around them like fascinated strangers that, apart from a few colleagues from the film studios, most of these were people Edward had never met. These were people Sally had worked with, people she had cured, school friends, cousins who couldn’t make the wedding but who had crossed counties to see a relative put in a hole in the ground. The kitchen was full of steam and loud with the clatter of pans and china. Glad of something to occupy their thoughts, some women had organised tea. Thomas had barely set foot in the water-stained hall when a cup of strongly brewed Assam was thrust into his hand with a hunk of seed cake balanced on its saucer.