The Lie Tree (16 page)

The dressmaker assured her that there was no help for it, and Myrtle accepted this with poor grace.

‘And everything is so
expensive
,’ Myrtle muttered under her breath. ‘But we must do things decently. Mrs Vellet, surely there must be someone on Vane with old
crêpe for sale?’

‘I can make enquiries, madam . . . but folk do not like to keep it in the house once mourning is over. Bad luck, they say. Besides, madam, crêpe does not last well. It snags easily,
and gets a shabby look, and falls apart if you wash it or get caught in the rain.’

‘Mother,
please
can I speak with you privately?’ Faith could not suppress her impatience.

‘Yes, Faith, yes. As soon as you have been measured.’

Faith had to stand there with gritted teeth as she was draped with bombazine, paramatta and black ribbons and flicked with a tape measure. She was forced to listen as her mother chose, quibbled
and haggled, veering between obstinate extravagance and startling meanness. Yes, she unquestionably needed the black chiffon parasol. But no, black glass jewellery would certainly do instead of
jet. Yes, she would certainly need the bonnet with the extra ribbons. But no, the family would not need a wealth of other black clothes, some of theirs could be dyed black to suit.

At last the dressmaker left the room.

‘What is it, Faith?’ Myrtle took a moment to study her. ‘You are quite white! I shall ask Mrs Vellet to bring you a little broth.’

‘I want to talk to you about Father – about the cliff . . .’

Myrtle’s expression of distracted concern slipped away in an instant. She moved quickly to the door, opened it, then closed it again.

‘Not another word,’ she said quietly and firmly.

‘But—’

‘Do not talk about the cliff – not to me, nor to anybody else.’

‘I found a mark at the top,’ Faith persisted. ‘I think something terrible happened—’

‘It does not matter!’ erupted Myrtle. She closed her eyes and let out a long breath, then continued in a quiet but barely controlled tone. ‘I know it is hard for you to
understand, but
all
that matters is how things appear. We have our story.
That
is what happened.’

Faith felt stifled with frustration and disgust. Why had she even tried to talk to her mother? Why had she expected her to care?

What more could Faith say anyway? The pistol, her father’s hurry to be back at the house by midnight, his desperation to hide the mysterious plant . . . she could not reveal any of these
without breaking her father’s confidence.

As Faith was leaving the room, she glanced over her shoulder and saw Myrtle trying on a black ribbon choker. In that moment, Faith hated her mother.

In the late afternoon, Clay arrived with his camera, tripod and case of chemical bottles. His son Paul struggled in behind him with a collection of stands.

It was to be a memorial photograph, a family photograph. A beloved father at the heart of his family. A picture to show friends and relatives at home, a card to send to close acquaintances.

Faith remembered Paul Clay showing her the after-death photographs in the shop and watching for her reaction. Now he showed no inclination to meet her gaze, and she did not seek his.

The Reverend Erasmus Sunderly had been brought down to the drawing room for the photograph, his clothes straightened and his hair artfully brushed to cover the wound in his temple. For so long
he had been the centre around which the house revolved. It had made Faith sick to see him moved around and positioned, like a doll at a tea party. Now the Reverend sat in state in his great
armchair, his hand resting upon the page of an open Bible.

Myrtle was meekly placed beside him in a straight-back upholstered chair. The full widow’s gown was still being adjusted to her size, but she had dressed as darkly as she could, in deep
blues and a black shawl. She appeared very pretty and mournful, and Faith hated her composure. Howard was hunched at their feet, his wooden lion in his hands to distract him. All Faith could see
was of him was his bowed head, and the vulnerable curve of his tensed back. The lion’s jaws
clack-clack-clacked,
over and over.

Faith stood immediately behind her father’s chair. She let one hand creep up so that it rested on his sleeve, and felt a little throb of comfort and solidarity at the touch.

‘Could you please take a step backwards, miss?’ Paul Clay was behind her, holding a slender stand with sturdy base and a pincer-like attachment at the top.

Unwillingly Faith stepped back, losing her contact with her father. She felt Paul move her plait to one side, then gently fasten the stand’s clamp on either side of her neck.

Her eyes stung, and she hated Paul Clay, hated his flat, coldly polite voice. She reached behind her head, found his hand and pinched the flesh of it as hard as she could. She willed him, dared
him to cry out and disgrace her, but he did not. When she released him and let her arm return to her side, he returned to his father, face unreadable.

‘The stand will help you hold position,’ explained Clay.

Stand exactly here and do not move, or you will spoil the picture. Say this, and only this, or you will spoil the story.

The Sunderly family held still, staring into the black eye of the camera. Faith thought of chemicals fizzing, and her image burning its way into the glass negative, indelible, immortal. She
wondered whether it would have haunted eyes, thoughts whirling trapped behind them like bats in a turret.

‘There,’ said Clay, as tenderly as if he were bringing a baby into the world. ‘We have it.’

After he had fixed the negative, Myrtle called him over to whisper with her by the fireplace. Faith tried not to overhear, but could not help it.

‘. . . I am so friendless on this island, I do not know what I will do if I cannot count on your help.’ Myrtle’s eyes were wide and childlike. ‘If you are clever enough
to paint the photograph so that his eyes appear open, surely you can change the picture in other ways? The wound on his temple still shows a little. Can you hide it with paint?’

And so the photograph, with its lie of a happy family, would have more lies laid over it, and yet more . . .

Faith could not bear it. She left the drawing room quietly and quickly. The hall was kinder, colder and darker. At least she was alone.

But then the door creaked open behind her, and she turned to find that Paul Clay had followed her. There he stood, saying nothing, watching her in the same cool, mask-like way as before.

‘Did it hurt when I pinched you?’ she demanded. There was something wrong with her lungs. Every breath filled them with pins and needles. ‘Tell me that it hurt!’

He took a breath, then held it for a second or two before speaking.

‘It should be a good picture,’ he said at last. ‘Dignified. Not all of our customers . . . That is to say, he makes a good . . .’

‘A good what?’ Faith’s blood felt like magma. ‘A good corpse?’

‘Why are you spitting fire at me?’ Paul snapped back, raising his voice for the first time. ‘I didn’t make him so!’

‘No? Well,
somebody did.
’

The words were out, and Faith’s breathing became faster, easier.

She no longer believed that her father had tumbled off the cliff in a drugged frenzy. Instead she imagined a nocturnal figure struggling up the path with a laden wheelbarrow, halting at the very
top to tip its burden over the edge. A falling body, bouncing cruelly off the rocky face and lodging in a tree. And then the other figure creeping away, abandoning the wheelbarrow where the path
forked.

‘You all hated him – everybody on this filthy, stupid, miserable island.
And one of you killed him
.’ She turned and ran upstairs, because death would be better than
letting Paul Clay see her cry.

Not an accident. Not suicide. Murder.

The day of the funeral was a numb, exhausted grey. The black-clad bearers muttered as they manoeuvred the coffin down the stairs. Their boots left mud on the carpet. The front
door was opened, and the coffin carried out ‘feet first’. Faith had heard that this was to stop the dead looking back into the house and calling one of the living to join them.

I wish he would,
she thought.

One cold coach ride later, the Sunderlys dismounted and paraded towards the church porch, Howard and Uncle Miles walking behind the coffin as ‘men of the family’. The
‘mutes’ walked beside them with long poles swathed in crêpe, like sinister butterfly nets.

When the family entered the church, it took a moment for Faith’s eyes to adjust.

She had thought that she might find the church empty except for the priest, all Myrtle’s set-dressing prepared for a performance with no audience. She had been mistaken.

Nearly every pew was crammed with figures, all turning to watch the Sunderly family’s entry. Most were complete strangers.

The box pews, on the other hand, were all but empty. Dr Jacklers sat at the far end of one, looking extremely uncomfortable. The respectable families, the great and the good of Vane, were
nowhere to be seen.

As they walked to their box pew, Faith could feel gazes like a trickle of cold water down the back of her neck. Myrtle raised her chin and glided in like a dark queen, the
candles glittering on her black glass jewellery, the gold of her hair just visible beneath her heavy veil. The whispering hushed as her black skirts brushed over the floor’s marble memorial
slabs. Faith felt a moment’s unwilling admiration for her mother’s defiant poise. It was somewhat daring for females to attend a funeral service at all, but Myrtle had been adamant that
she would not ‘hide away’.

The Sunderly family settled themselves in their pew, Faith wishing that its walls were seven feet high. Some of the comments had caught her ear as they walked to the front.

‘What does “the trap re-baited” mean?’ she could not help asking quietly.

‘It means,’ Myrtle murmured from beneath her veil, ‘that there are some envious old hags in this church. And that I have chosen the right dress.’

‘I told you it was a mistake to hold this on a Sunday,’ muttered Uncle Miles. ‘Everybody’s day off – leisure aplenty to come and goggle.’

Clay looked so frail in his surplice, dwarfed by his oversized pulpit. His voice was earnest but faint, as though tired of fighting the shadows that hung from the vaulted ceiling.

‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord . . .’

A rustle of hymnbooks. A familiar psalm, sung to an unfamiliar tune. And then Clay was talking and talking again, of falling and rising and sleep and redemption. His words were lifeless pebbles
on an endless beach, and Faith wanted it all to be over, over, over. She wanted her father to be safe under the clod, away from this chill, hostile darkness and the bushfire crackle of
whispers.

At last the curate’s voice came to a soft stop and there was a thunder of shoe-shuffles and shifting pews. Myrtle nudged Faith, and she realized with passionate relief that the service was
done. She stood, and with the rest of her family paraded out towards the grey daylight, so that they could follow the coffin to the grave.

There was a rush of motion ahead of them. Instead of waiting to follow them out, the congregation was pouring from the pews and surging out through the porch door.

The Sunderly family emerged into the daylight, and Faith saw that the crowds had not in fact rushed off with rude haste. The churchyard was full of people, standing, squatting, sitting on
monuments, all watching the approach of the casket.

For a moment, Faith could not see the waiting grave. Then she noticed a man with a spade drooping in his hands, his brow creased with conflict and uncertainty. At his feet was the long, dark
crease of a hole, but there were four or five people defiantly standing in it, their heads just visible, their elbows resting on the turf edge. Others stood massed in front of the grave, arms
folded, a human barrier three rows deep.

‘What in the world is all this?’ exclaimed Clay.

‘They can’t bury him here,’ said one of the men at the heart of the group. He was tall and strongly built, with dark hair and a pugnacious face. Faith recognized him at once.
It was Tom Parris, who had startled her by chance in the woods at Bull Cove. Tom Parris, whose son had been caught in the Reverend’s trap.

‘What do you mean, Tom?’ The curate looked flabbergasted. ‘Why ever not?’

‘This is holy ground,’ Tom answered curtly. ‘No suicides. That Sunderly threw himself off a cliff, and we don’t care who says different. We know where he was
found.’

Only Faith caught a flicker of Tom’s eyes towards a member of the crowd. She followed his glance, and her gaze lodged upon a familiar figure. Jeanne Bissette the housemaid, meek in her
Sunday best and black armband, but with a fierce satisfaction in her eyes.

She told them where Father was found. She told everybody.

‘If they want to bury him,’ Tom continued relentlessly, ‘there’s a crossroads two mile down the road. We’ll even give them a sharpened stick to keep the ghost down.
But not here. Not next to our families’ stones.’

‘But this is cruel – cruel!’ Myrtle was shaking with feeling, her poise broken for the moment. Faith hardly recognized her mother’s voice.

There was an uproar of other voices. Uncle Miles and the priest both pushed forward through the crowd, and Faith saw them in earnest debate with Tom, the crowd’s spokesman. After a while
she saw Uncle Miles turn, and give his all too familiar resigned shrug.
I tried,
it said. Howard mewled faintly, and Faith realized that she was gripping his hand too tightly.

Clay returned to Myrtle and Faith.

‘I have never seen our people so adamant!’ he said. ‘But I can promise you, nobody will be staking your husband and burying him at the crossroads!’

‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’ exclaimed Myrtle.

‘No, that old law was thrown out in my grandfather’s day,’ the curate continued, furrowing his brow. ‘But they are correct that a suicide cannot be buried on holy ground.
I am so sorry, Mrs Sunderly, but since the manner of the Reverend’s death has been called into question, I shall have to refer the whole matter to Mr Lambent as magistrate.’