Aifric Campbell was born in Ireland. As a convent schoolgirl in Dublin, her greyhound won the Irish Derby and a hymn she co-wrote won a national TV song contest. She moved to Sweden where she worked as an au pair, completed a linguistics degree and lectured in semantics at the University of Göteborg. She spent thirteen years as an investment banker in the City of London before leaving to study psychotherapy and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Aifric lives in Sussex with her husband and son.
Her first novel, The Semantics of Murder, published by Serpent’s Tail, was shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award 2008.
Praise for The Loss Adjustor
‘Aifric Campbell is one of my favourite Irish novelists and I love this book. It’s written with seriousness, lightness, intelligence and insight, but most of all with great beauty and presence’ Joseph O’Connor
‘Sexy, sad, riven with longing, The Loss Adjustor confirms a talent of unusual promise’ Nicholas Shakespeare
‘Campbell allows her disturbing story to seep out slowly and to deliver unnerving punches in this extremely well-paced novel’ Mslexia
‘So full of beautiful writing that even the insurance industry comes to life. From its beguiling first sentence – “I was born in a place that presumed departure” – to its simple, humane ending, it is beautiful to read. Aifric Campbell’s language is rich and exact, never flowering into too much; she is concise without being dry, her characters painted in deft, tight strokes’ Suzanne Harrington, Irish Examiner
‘Aifric Campbell’s absorbing second novel celebrates friendship past and present and the enduring hope of redemption’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘Clear-eyed, lyrical… Campbell manages to infuse the cool, lucid language of narrator with some truly luminous descriptions of place and emotion… a book that demands to be taken seriously, both because of its ambitions and the beauty of its writing’ Catherine Heaney, Irish Times
‘Campbell writes with lambent precision… a mesmerising study of a woman clinging to the knotted cord of adolescence, uncertain whether to go backwards or forwards’ John O’Connell, Guardian
‘Campbell’s style is lyrical, revealing sharp, important truths with mesmerising intensity as Caro begins to embrace a future that is rich with possibility, hope and reconciliation’ Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘The imagery is evocative, the narrative well-paced and there is a genuine sense of sympathy with the main character. Thought-provoking’ Scotsman
‘The flawless depiction of a life destroyed by the devastating loss of a loved one is testament to her skill as a writer’ Jennifer Ryan, Sunday Independent
‘Campbell’s eloquent prose is both beautiful and compelling, making The Loss Adjustor a haunting and gripping novel’ Ulster Tatler
‘A powerful and thought-provoking book… the real beauty lies in her elegant and evocative prose’ Sunday Business Post
‘The Loss Adjustor is a beautifully written, lyrical exploration of loss and grief. Campbell’s skill as a writer, however, ensures that although this is a sad story, the overall effect is far from depressing’ The Canberra Times
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com
This eBook edition published in 2011
Copyright © 2010 Aifric Campbell
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
eISBN 978 1 84668 232 4
To Oscar
The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton
Stiff and white.
TS Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night
I WAS BORN IN A PLACE that presumed departure. A strip of kerbless road that claimed village status but was really only known for its proximity to other larger, more substantial places. When I was six years old our lives were transformed by the opening of a bypass that took all the traffic away and turned us overnight into a dead end. From then on we were access only and would stand astride our bikes in the new culde-sac where we practised our wheelies watching lost drivers make sloppy U-turns, gears screaming in reverse before they sped off to their true destination two miles further south: a thriving town, a retail park and all the other places where people actually wanted to go. This was how we became both a wrong turn and an unsustainable community that, according to the planners, was not earmarked for growth but destined to shrivel up and die.
From the gate at the bottom of our front garden I could survey the entire limits of my childhood universe with a sweep of the head: twenty-eight post-war semis thrown up on surplus farming land when a chicken factory was built nearby and then shut down fifteen years later after the owner fled a contamination scandal, leaving a trail of job loss in his wake. Our house was attached on the right-hand side to Estelle’s and if I leaned out of my bedroom window I could look down on the tiled slope of her porch. Just a few feet away on my left was the perspex roof of Cormac’s leaky conservatory where a nest of blackbirds once settled in the gutter late in the season, as if they’d run out of time to find a better home. The houses were set back from the road behind long, narrow gardens separated by privet hedging that took my father a full day to cut. There were child-sized gaps on both sides that led into Cormac’s and Estelle’s, little crawl spaces that we began tunnelling as toddlers, but these have long since disappeared. New neighbours have run fencing along one side and the holes in the privet have filled in as if the three of us never existed.
I do not recall a time when I did not feel my friends’ presence on either side of me. I do not remember a single moment when I experienced the solitariness that could have come with being an only child. From the earliest days I was part of both their families and wandered in and out at will. Mealtimes at their houses were large, messy occasions with high chairs and spillages and interrupted chatter that contrasted with the silent triangle at home. I often slept over, in the bunk below Cormac’s that had been abandoned by a succession of older siblings or in the room that Estelle shared with her two sisters, curled up on a jumble of beanbags, surrounded by teddy bears and dolls and dust balls.
My own family organised itself around sudden exits. When I was twelve years old my father suffered a fatal coronary at the kitchen table one Wednesday morning in May. Strangely enough, it is not his choking slide from the chair that I remember most clearly but how my mother rose from the table and made the emergency call, calmly spelling out the address as if she had been rehearsing this moment for years. She stood in the hallway while we waited for the ambulance, cradling the Bakelite phone that my Dad cherished as a relic of times past – a sweeter, better time when objects were heavy and durable and anchored to the wall.
Two weeks after my father’s death, Spike hurled himself under the wheels of a passing car as I left for school. I distinctly saw him turn his head to check that I was watching before he ran at full speed into the path of a car that had just completed a U-turn and was accelerating back to the bypass. Although no one but Estelle believed me, as the only witness I knew it was a deliberate act. Even as a puppy Spike had never shown the slightest interest in traffic and would lie in the front garden, head resting on his front paws, behind a fence that he could have cleared in an instant. His eyes might appear to be closed but border collies are always on high alert, constant vigilance is a hallmark of the breed; they are like aspirational scouts always at the ready for some unexpected twist of fate. After the killer-driver was absolved and dismissed by my mother, I stood looking down at Spike with Cormac and Estelle beside me, her hand slipping into my palm. I thought how it looked like he was sleeping except for the blood puddling beneath his head and the strange angle of his neck. But I should have known then that Spike’s suicide was an omen, a warning that life as we knew it was poised to unravel and that we were on the brink of a future he could not bear to witness.
‘Poor Spike, poor Spike,’ Estelle kept repeating in a flat low voice, tugging at my hand. Cormac said nothing, just stroked my head as I bent low over the black and white fur. Already at eleven and three-quarters he understood the power that resides in silence, a talent he has since honed to perfection under the blaze of light that follows him wherever he goes.
There didn’t seem to be much point in going to the vet just to arrange for incineration and there was the problem of transporting the body, so we buried Spike in the back garden beneath the laurel hedge that looked out over the open fields where he liked to chase rabbits in the early mornings. Digging a hole that was big enough was surprisingly difficult with one small spade so we took turns, Cormac, Estelle and I, but Estelle just made doll-sized indentations in the earth and quickly tired. My mother stood by the back door tapping a cigarette by her side. She’d taken up smoking in the days after my father’s death and had not yet perfected her technique. Her mouth was slightly agape and for a while I thought she might be about to speak but she was somehow preoccupied – with what I do not know – except that for the rest of my childhood she exuded an untroubled vagueness that may possibly have bordered on neglect.
On the night of Spike’s funeral, Estelle, Cormac and I lay pinwheeled under the stars, legs and arms spread like spokes, staring up at a midsummer constellation until the grass chill crept along our spines and Estelle’s mother called out in the darkness and we went inside. The next day Cormac showed up in my front garden with a chisel and slab of sandstone in a wheelbarrow. We spent all morning hacking Spike’s name and date into the stone and then hauled this secret memorial the half-mile up to the church and placed it by the western wall, hidden behind a spreading gaultheria. Every time I visit the graveyard it is that moment of solemn reflection that comes to mind: the three of us holding hands, Estelle in the middle at her insistence. I can still feel the dry heat of her clasp, Cormac’s pulsing palm on my right, both held in a grip that seemed eternal. And although I should be used to it by now, I am still periodically astounded that only one of us remains, that I have been left alone to brood on the complications of the past.
Sometimes I try to force a little perspective and remind myself with a spare summary of events: Estelle died two weeks after her fifteenth birthday. It was sudden, violent, explicit. Shortly afterwards, Cormac decided to leave. After that was new time, the very texture of experience was forever altered and I was left with the sense of empty seats all around me, as if my life had become a theatre for one.
Immediately after Estelle’s funeral, Cormac locked himself in his bedroom for three days. His mother left brittle boards of buttered toast on a tray outside the door and I sat on the landing listening to the silence of his headphones. I could picture exactly how he would look from the bottom bunk where I used to lie staring up at Springsteen’s matted poster hair while Cormac sat on the floor inches from the speaker, playing ‘Jungleland’ over and over and over again.
Hwuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Every couple of hours his mum appeared in the landing gloom and bent down to lift the tray, a big fat tear rolling to a halt in the furrows by her mouth. ‘Grief-stricken,’ I heard her whisper on the phone downstairs, but I knew different. Cormac was in New Jersey on a boardwalk he had never seen, washing his own sorrow in someone else’s story. And Estelle was bathed in a halo of memory, already elevated to so much more than she had ever been: stupid, silly, unpredictable, unreliable – all the things that infuriated but none of it her fault, of course, and none of it ever enough of a reason to make it possible to walk away.
‘Take this, dear,’ his mum handed me a mug of tea. ‘I’ll leave his here just in case,’ she said, placing another on the floor beside me. I wanted to fling it at Cormac’s door, this ownership of grief that was nowhere near the true story.
On the third day he emerged backlit at noon by a sun that shone right through his T-shirt. He stood on the threshold without speaking. I leaned my head back against the wall, I wouldn’t look at him until in one movement he crouched down in front of me and took my hands in his.
‘I’m leaving soon,’ he whispered.
‘Are you asking me to come with you?’
He shook his head, let my hands flop down on my lap.
‘Good. That’s good,’ I said. ‘Because I would say no.’
That was the last time we spoke. A few weeks later I watched him pack up his dad’s car from my bedroom window. Cormac gave no sign that he knew I was there until the engine was running and then he stood in the passenger doorway wearing his Born to Run T-shirt, staring straight up at me and waving, a long slow side-to-side motion like semaphore, as if he was wiping all traces of us clear. I did not return his gesture, could not entirely decode the signal, but I could tell that this baggage would not weigh him down and I knew he could see clearly where he was going now and that the journey wouldn’t take long.
‘Is this a retrospective?’ said Cormac last night. ‘Because I’m not dead yet.’
The interviewer laughed. The studio audience laughed too and although I have lost count of how many times I’ve replayed this scene, I still smile at each repeat. For unlike Estelle, Cormac is very much alive although we have lost touch through my own meticulous doing. But everyone knows where he is. I could lift the phone right now and track him down in less than an hour and he would take my call. Instead, in the twenty years that have passed since Estelle’s death, I have watched him closely from a distance, studied his work for any signs that the past might be infecting his present. I press my hand over his screen heart, it has a strong and steady beat and I am convinced he remains untroubled by history. He has successfully absorbed or perhaps deflected the past while I am stalked by guilt.
The interview was first broadcast a week ago to launch the publicity extravaganza that is building up to Cormac’s forthcoming appearance. His billboarded smile trails me around the city, I touch his laminated face in bus shelters, I even stood amongst the shifting crowds in Piccadilly Circus on Tuesday and watched him stride across the giant video screen in endless thirteen-second loops. And last night I lay on the couch freezing the frames, cataloguing all the ways in which he is both recognisable and different. Cormac leans back in the leather armchair, one arm slung over the side, his right ankle balanced on the opposite knee. He used to sit this way at school, tilting back on his chair, tapping a pencil against his thigh, sometimes even humming in class. His jeans are stone-washed and there are intricate patterns etched in the side of his oxblood ankle-boots. He wears a white T-shirt with a burst of swirling colour on the front, green, red, blue and yellow and some Japanese calligraphy running a vertical black line from shoulder to waist. A tall lean frame that can fold effortlessly into yogic poses. His arms and hands are strong and he does not carry any excess weight. He still has his mother’s colouring, pale skin lightly freckled in an off-beat symmetry about the nose and cheeks, the same summer-blue eyes. And his hair has remained long with dark blond curls that fall to his shoulders in lustrous tangles. He has acquired a mid-Atlantic twang that suits him. Even in this pixellated rendering, he glows.
A counsellor once told me that a successful bereavement consists of a period of intense mourning followed by the vigorous rebuilding of a new life that will make you realise you can dispense completely with the dead person. The initial stage should last no more than three months. After that, excessive grief is an indicator of pathological tendencies and intervention is recommended before the problem gets out of hand. Survival depends on being able to cut loose, to believe that the dead are not as central to your happiness as you might think. I cannot live without you. Without you I am nothing. But how do you grieve when the one you have lost is not dead, when the object of your passion is still out there? How do you plug a human-size hole? There is no strategy other than a simmering acceptance when your heart is pierced by a sharp object, but such palliative remedies are no more than puncture repair, patching you up so you can battle on, hurtling towards the next disaster on the horizon.
‘I am getting tired of all these sad stories,’ said Nicola at Friday’s monthly meeting. My boss is not usually given to emotional reflections and prefers to focus on the practical resolution of difficult cases, but pregnancy has triggered a style change as if new life demands that old certainties be re-examined.
‘It never used to bother me before. But now…’ she leaned back in the swivel chair, her voice trailing away, her hand comforting the growing bump.
‘Foreseeability,’ shrugged the forensic engineer, closing the file in front of him. ‘Her husband was warned that the brakes were faulty. He should have made sure the car was taken off the road.’
‘Yes, I know that,’ snapped Nicola with a fierce jerk of the head, ‘but he didn’t know that his wife was going to use the car to do the bloody school run when her own one wouldn’t start.’
The engineer glanced at me as if looking for guidance about how to proceed. This new unpredictability in Nicola’s mood was taking some adjustment and he was still learning how to tiptoe through these meetings without setting off the alarm. And of course, the human cost was not his problem, he had done his duty and had no intention of being drawn into a lingering exploration of lives that have been blighted by loss.
‘They’ll suspend the sentence. He won’t do time,’ he offered in an attempt at consolation.
‘He’ll be doing time for the rest of his life,’ she muttered but he did not respond, just tucked the folder under his arm and stood up, waiting for the right moment to depart. Nicola frowned and hunched forwards, inclining her head. I have noticed these moments of still attention before, it is as if her unborn baby can communicate on some frequency that only she can hear. I held my breath, the engineer did not move, both of us suspended in anticipation of some pre-natal announcement and then Nicola sighed, levered herself out of the chair and returned to the public space. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled wanly. ‘Blame it on the hormones,’ and he nodded and left us both wrapped in a rare silence staring out the window at a sunstreaked skyline, Nicola with her back to me and one palm pressed flat against the glass.
‘How do you come to terms with killing the one you love? How do you manage the guilt, Caro?’ and I flinched at this sudden accusation but when I raised my head I saw that this was not a charge flung at me but out the window where Nicola stood shaking her head at the beak of a receding crane as it swung blindly away over the City.
I PASS BENEATH THE TWO stone eagles that guard the grand entrance to the hotel’s estate. A single-track road leads past the cricket ground which is empty now but will soon busy up with members of the local archery club who congregate here on winter Sundays. Middle-aged men and the occasional woman, many of them dressed in green, form a silent line and take aim at coloured targets arranged like giant dartboards on the edge of the boundary. They fire on a single cue but many of the arrows miss their targets and come to rest at strange angles in the grass. One morning just after dawn I watched a longbow archer in a Robin Hood costume practise alone, his arrow slicing the air with an audible quiver before thudding hard and clean and deadly straight into the bull’s-eye.
As I pull up to park by the churchyard wall an old woman emerges from the gates on a motorised chair, a little England flag taped to the handlebars. I have seen her walk quite sturdily and without the aid of a cane but when I stopped to open the gate for her some months ago, she told me that she no longer drives and cannot manage the quarter mile walk from the house to visit her dead husband. She waves to a smiling woman in a grey anorak who stands by the church entrance holding a rake – one of the volunteers who tend to the grounds, burning leaves, cutting grass and sweeping up the confetti that is supposed to be thrown only in the area immediately outside the wooden gates, but the wedding guests are mostly out-of-towners who make their own rules.
Two years ago this place was included in Bride magazine’s list of the top ten most picturesque venues within a fifty-mile radius of the city. The sandstone church dates back to the thirteenth century and is in an elevated position overlooking a deep wooded valley and a lake. In late spring the distant woods are carpeted with bluebells and the sloping lawns are visited by nesting ducks and Canada geese who waddle across the grass in an afternoon foraging ritual.
Just a few hundred yards away and discreetly obscured by enormous rhododendrons is a grand country-house hotel that was once the family seat of Lord Liverpool who presided over this 800-acre estate and who, in 1830, had the entire village moved a mile to the north so that he could enjoy an uninterrupted vista from the stone terrace at the rear. Summer wedding parties can walk the short distance between church and hotel and it makes a fine sight – bridesmaids skipping along in dresses with big bows and mini bouquets and the bride following slowly behind. The vicar, however, will only agree to two weddings a month. He is unhappy about SUVs churning up the grassy verge, cigarette butts in the church grounds and the hotel’s recent ad for helicopter weddings which will involve the bride and groom hovering above the church and sweeping over the countryside for a panoramic glass of champagne before landing fifteen minutes later on the lawn. The owner – a city financier with a portfolio of country hotels – is trying to tempt the vicar with donations for a restoration of the rose garden on the eastern side of the church, but the vicar refuses to budge.
Or maybe he is holding out for more money, for just as the secular population is expanding, the congregation is dwindling. I have learnt all this from Hannah, one of the volunteers who seizes any opportunity to engage mourners in conversation. Most of the others keep a respectful silence as they go about their work. They are lean and diligent retirees who cling to a sense of community that is under siege from frantic commuters as house prices force city workers even as far out as here – a fifteen-mile drive to the nearest station and a fast train to their desks. Men line the platforms like skittles at dawn and return under cover of night. Mothers ferry their children between nurseries and schools and part-time local workplaces.
My life now seems to revolve around tending to the departed and the absent. Of course there are other distractions: there is work to be done, a world to negotiate, but I often think – stalled at traffic lights or running on tarmac in the early evening – it is reality that feels illusory. As if there has been some sort of reversal in the physical laws so that the tangible eludes my grasp, as if the here-and-now is two-dimensional. I fulfil my commitments. I go to work, clean the car, pay my taxes, recycle my glass and plastics, but it is history that appears in three dimensions, loaded with colour and scent. I try to convince myself that it is an irrelevancy, that all that matters should be the now and the next second, but present moments dissolve, slipping by like fast-moving rapids, and I am washed up again in the lagoons of the past. So it is that I find myself back in the place where it all began, lured here by memory and a certain guilt and all the accumulating losses to which I cannot be reconciled.
There was a time when I came here every week, but these days I ration myself to a fortnightly visit – I have a fast car and get up on Sunday morning when the city is still asleep, straight into jeans and sweatshirt so that in seventy minutes’ time I can be cosying up to the dead. This was the landscape of our childhood. Cormac, Estelle and I came here in autumn for the shiny conkers that fell in their hundreds from the horse chestnuts that line the southern perimeter wall, we picked blackberries by the churchyard gate, inspected the famous poet’s brother’s grave on a nature walk from school and took half-hearted bark rubbings. We played in the shade of the giant yew that is said to be two thousand years old and whose heavy branches veil ancient gravestones that are sinking into the needle-covered earth and will eventually be completely submerged. The branches conceal a shadowy inner chamber where the huge trunk has cleaved to form three hiding places, deep lacquered grooves that shine as if glossed by a recent rain. From this secret spot we used to spy on weddings and funerals, crushing the cerise berries between our fingers. We would lie back in the folds of the trunks during choir practice on Thursday evenings, the voices spiralling upwards and out across the graveyard. Sometimes Cormac led us down the valley, through the woods to the other side and an out-of-bounds housing estate where we crouched behind the bushes and watched teenagers burn tyres and drink cider.
In the weeks after my father’s death we used to come here to contemplate the site of my future interment: a small granite cross and a rectangular strip of chipped gravel beneath which I would one day be laid to rest on top of my grandparents and parents. I would live out a lifetime – which a female could expect to be 77.3 years – and then be consigned to silence in the place where I was born. But I do not come here now to visit my father’s grave and neither does my mother, judging by its forlorn condition which is in stark contrast to the neatly tidied plots that surround him. Clumps of weeds have worked their way to the surface in one corner, an old wreath has fallen apart to reveal its skeletal core and a stubborn moss clings to the edges of the stone. No doubt the volunteers disapprove, for they expect the living to honour their dead. They have their hands full tending to those who have no one left on earth to rake the gravel, scrub the lopsided tombs and scrape away the lichen.
I take up my usual position on a wooden bench by the wall that backs on to the car park and is partly shaded by the branches of an alder. There is another seat much closer to Estelle but I prefer this vantage point at a clear diagonal to her notional resting place. The Garden of Remembrance is tucked away in the south-western corner and separated from the cricket grounds by a wire fence erected as temporary cover when that section of the wall was destroyed by the storm of 1987. The estate lost over two hundred trees and some of the lightning-scorched stumps still stick out from the hillside like animal carcasses in a desert. But the smashed wall remains unrepaired as local sandstone is expensive and there are more important priorities – Hannah tells me that the church bells are being restored, some copper from the lightning conductors on the tower has mysteriously disappeared and the congregation is struggling with the burden of maintenance. The volunteers have planted ivy in the hope that it will train along the fenceposts and hide the wire but the soil seems curiously hostile and the leaves are speckled with a queasy pigment. A rusted sheet of corrugated metal hides a compost heap in the furthest corner. Thus the Garden of Remembrance feels like a paupers’ resting place in a graveyard that is otherwise filled with customised tombstones and grand family vaults.
‘Estelle,’ I say aloud, for I am still captivated by her name, there is a phonetic perfection about the sibilant and the closing labial that lingers like a whisper in an enchanted forest. ‘Estelle,’ I repeat for the familiar effect – ephemeral, insubstantial, a name that conjures up a moss-covered gravestone askew in an old churchyard and a tattered wedding dress. Estelle’s mother believed she had named her daughter after the heroine in Great Expectations but when her eldest son brought Dickens home from the library and showed her the error, she didn’t seem to think that substituting the ‘a’ for an ‘e’ obscured the reference. She used to remind Estelle of her literary connection as she brushed her flaxen hair each morning before school – twenty steady strokes while I stood fidgeting in the kitchen. ‘You girls,’ she’d murmur, shaking her head, with a smile that sometimes seemed close to tears. When we turned to wave goodbye as we rounded the corner, she would be standing on the porch with little Harry on her hip. She seemed to be frowning at some complexity on the horizon and I wonder now if she could somehow foresee a cloud scuttling across our futures. There are people who have a sixth sense, there are dogs that bark long before the doorbell rings. Perhaps, like Spike, Estelle’s mother could already sense disaster looming up ahead.
When I re-read Dickens after Estelle was dead, her fictional namesake struck me as an inspired choice although at first glance they seemed to have nothing in common. Estella had brown hair, she was beautiful and haughty and liked to make young boys cry. Estelle’s manipulative powers were chaotic and spontaneous, never premeditated, her anger was like a sudden squall precipitated by frustrated impulses. But Estella’s froideur could have been interpreted as that missing part that singled Estelle out. Cormac, of course, saw meaning in her differentness, endowed it with a sort of mysticism. For a while he even toyed with the idea that she might be in possession of superior truths and watched her more carefully than usual, listened to her chatter as if he might detect an undiscovered profundity.
The real Estelle has no corporeal remains and, as far as I am aware, no memorial other than this communal garden, an uninspired square of grass enclosed by a straggly box hedge that refuses to flourish. The occasional bunch of roses in fogged-up cellophane is left here as a further reminder of decay but there are few visitors. It is as though those who were happy to consign their relatives’ bodies to the furnace do not feel the need to keep returning to pay their respects. A slate slab in the centre of the miniature garden urges visitors to ‘Remember those whose ashes are buried here’. But technically speaking the ashes are buried in the rectangle of cheap gravel off to the side that is overlooked by another yew and constantly in shade. Small squares of granite record the details of the dead and Estelle is in the middle of the third row, a simple note of her name and dates etched in thick blunt capitals, a bleak and spare announcement of all that could not be said.
This memorial gives no clue to the grim circumstances of her death and perhaps that was the family’s intention, as they did not want the site to become a ghoulish shrine. Estelle, however, would not have approved of her send-off: she would have chosen something far more glamorous than cremation at a non-religious service to which only immediate family were invited. Her parents – although her mother did not attend the proceedings, she was too distressed, too drugged – wanted the whole business excised from their lives; there was, after all, her brothers and sisters to consider and little Harry was only eight years old at the time. It is possible that they kept some of the ashes for a private memorial elsewhere but I do not know if they did because her family moved away just a few weeks after the funeral. A red and black truck pitched up outside their house early one morning and three men in overalls cleared the contents in a couple of hours while I watched from my bedroom window. They stood around smoking and drinking from a thermos until Estelle’s father came out and spoke briefly to them. I did not see the rest of the family leave – Estelle’s mother and the kids, the cat and the hamster – they must have slipped away while we were sleeping and I never found out where they went. The postmistress knew, of course, but for once Mrs Harris kept her mouth shut. ‘If they had wanted anyone to know their business they would have said so,’ she replied to a stream of enquirers that afternoon. ‘Doesn’t the whole country already know enough about that family’s grief?’
After the truck had rumbled away, Estelle’s dad locked the front door behind him and hurried down the drive, trench coat flapping loosely around his shoulders. He seemed to have shrunk to half his size in a month. I pushed through the hedge and ran after him but he spun round and raised a hand, his palm outstretched to deflect, finally and for ever, any further communication. Then he got in the car and drove off, never checking the rear view mirror.
No one comes to visit Estelle any more although there used to be a family delegation on her anniversary and I would park down by the hotel and watch them arrive in varying groups – first her mother, in the morning and usually alone. Her father came in the afternoon, speaking of a rift that has never healed. It always had the look of a long-distance drive and for a few years he arrived with a large capable-looking woman who held his elbow as she clicked along the tarmac path beside him. Once he stumbled into her as if his legs had buckled and she pulled him close, put both hands to his face and kissed his forehead, but he broke away from her the way men do on screen. She let him go and knelt down to stroke the memorial stone as you would smooth a child’s head. I thought it a kind act from someone who only knew Estelle’s story and not the person.
Estelle’s older brothers and sisters grew up tall and heavy and arrived in a convoy of people carriers with sweet wrappers blowing out of the windows. Little Harry had become a man but he still had the loping stride of the boy I remember, fists thrust deep in his trouser pockets. The children were never taken into the graveyard. Jenny stayed behind to chaperone, distracting the little ones with bubbles while the teenagers slumped in the back seat plugged into earphones, occasionally craning their heads out through the window to watch the proceedings. After the others returned, Jenny would nip in quickly as if she was taking a cold bath. She blessed herself unfamiliarly, rearranged a flower and hurried back along the path with her arms wrapped round her front against a cold that wasn’t there. The oldest sister never came, not even once.
Six years ago Estelle’s dad stopped coming, but of course, he may be dead, he has reached the age where men disappear overnight without warning. For the last five years I have waited till nightfall but no one has come. It is as if the family has reached some agreement that observing the anniversary is no longer appropriate or necessary. Perhaps they have decided that they can more usefully spend their time amongst the living.
I bumped into Estelle’s mother three years ago at Victoria station. She was queuing at the excess ticket office on platform 19, her outline blurred by a crumpled raincoat. When she turned to look at me I saw her reflex-check over my shoulder as if Estelle might be trailing along behind like she always did, but the expectation vanished in a small collapse of her face. There was a worn peace about the way she hugged me and she smelled of ginger, which I said and she laughed. ‘Still baking, always baking, you remember, dear,’ her voice teetering on the brittle high notes. The queue shuffled forwards and she was at the window, time was slipping away, she clutched at my sleeve but I had a sense she would prefer that I refused her invitation to keep in touch. I was a creature walking out of the sea, a reminder of what she had struggled so hard to forget.
And there is no gain in the further expenditure of regret. I see this often in my line of work – on Wednesday this week, for example, when Nicola asked me to step in on a case with a couple who had lost their little girl in a fire three months ago. These cases are rare enough and responsibility always rests with the forensic engineers when there is loss of life. But my colleagues are sometimes squeamish about the face-to-face, many of them have children themselves now and their empathy is unmanageable. ‘I’m worried they might find my condition upsetting,’ Nicola said, patting her swelling tummy as if reassuring the unborn child. ‘And you are so good at this kind of thing, Caro,’ she added, meaning that I have all the style of a seasoned undertaker. I have learnt to compartmentalise and I do not over-identify. I am unflappable in the face of misery, my emotion concealed behind a mask of professionalism like a walled-in corpse.
Under normal circumstances, meetings are always conducted at the clients’ home and I was apprehensive about this deviation from the usual routine since the office environment is somewhat clinical. But Nicola’s secretary told me the husband held firm, quietly resisting the idea of a visit at their temporary rental. We sat in a room on the fifteenth floor which is suitably muted for sensitive discussion, with an oblique view of the city that is not too distracting, a Persian rug with priestly purple swirls, a subdued landscape painting whose earthy oils suggest endurance, a circular teak table with six comfortable carvers and a selection of refreshments that the couple refused. The wife gave very little sign that she was even aware of her surroundings, pinched her lips every now and again and occasionally lapsed into a compulsive nodding. She was flushed – a side effect of medication perhaps – her forehead beaded with sweat although the room was fiercely air-conditioned. Her husband wore a thick jumper and said he would be returning to work within the week.
‘What, what?’ she shouted suddenly as I was explaining the procedure for assessing the quantum. I paused, he squeezed her hand and she stared down as if appalled by his touch. He turned to me with a quick tip of the chin to indicate I should continue and I read aloud from the list of contents on file, ticked the boxes as the husband gave curt yes and no replies. When we reached the discussion of valuables the wife’s nodding reached a frenzied pace. I began winding up with a summary of the terms of reparation. We would bank-roll their shiny new childless life, we could replace everything that was lost except the only thing that mattered. The walls around us screamed with the omission, the human cost not itemised in the inventory of loss.
The husband prised his wife from the chair, led her shuffling to the lift, and the receptionist bowed her head as if a funeral procession was passing. We emerged into a lobby flooded with brilliant autumnal sunshine and the wife shielded her eyes, almost doubled over at this point, swinging from her husband’s arm. He shook my hand and stepped away with the grim determination of one who has resigned himself to the worst possible outcome. He may have to cast her aside if he is to survive this. Her heart will break, is already broken. Statistically I think she will never entirely mend.
THE WOODEN GATE CREAKS and I check my watch. The old man drops the latch into place and makes his way slowly but purposefully towards me. And I am struck again by the conviction that he chooses this route with a certain defiance, for instead of taking the direct path from the gate to his preferred bench on the other side of the graveyard, he makes this completely unnecessary detour. We have an established etiquette of silence. The path is narrow so I have to tuck my legs underneath the bench to let him pass, a gesture that he acknowledges with a nod, although this movement is so subtle he could be bending to avoid the low branches of the alder. He is tall and remarkably straight-backed and carries himself with a thin-lipped rigidity and a military bearing, his Barbour riding a little too high above the knee as if he had bought the wrong size. He wears thick leather walking boots and a knobbled hawthorn stick swings in practised time by his side. Today he sports a ribbed jumper underneath the raincoat but in summer I have seen him wear soft-collared shirts with the cuffs rolled up, sometimes a jacket. A trace of aftershave lingers in his wake, a faint scent of almonds that is a lighter and more youthful choice than I would have expected.
A bunch of carnations dangles from his left hand. It is