Burial (16 page)

Graham said, 'We would consider it an honour.'

Nathan shook the proffered hand with measured formality.

Holly arrived home an hour later. She opened the door on the latch and called out a speculative 'Hello?'

The champagne was already half drunk and June's flowers were in the vase.

Holly stepped into the kitchen. 'I see he's told you, then?'

June and Holly held each other's hands and sobbed, happy-sad.

Graham stepped back, casting his eyes upon his shoes. When June had disengaged, he hugged his daughter. He kissed her cheek and whispered something. It made her squeeze his hand and screw up her eyes and nod.

Nathan stood in the corner of the conservatory, watching them, the sunlight streaming in behind him, casting a faint amber lozenge on the floor.

21

A week before Holly's thirtieth birthday, she organized a table at a Greek restaurant, so Nathan could meet her friends. He was late; he hurried upstairs, clutching the flowers he'd bought as a gift for Holly's best woman.

Five women and a man were seated round a long table. Holly was in the centre, with Nathan's seat empty beside her.

Breathless, Nathan presented the flowers in a general, speculative way to the people seated round the table, saying: 'These are for Jacki.'

By the way all the faces turned to face one person, he guessed that Jacki was the woman sitting opposite Holly. She turned to him and stood, smiling.

He recognized her at once as the police officer who'd come to his flat with Detective William Holloway. He remembered how she had stood silently, watching the passing buses.

She said, 'Nathan?'

He nodded.

'Come here and give me a hug.'

He and Jacki hugged. The table clapped and whooped and whistled.

He handed her the bouquet, then crab-stepped round the table, saying hello to everyone. He sat next to Holly. She squeezed his knee.

'You okay?'

'Fine, fine.'

'You look pale.'

'Mad rush. Bad day at work. The traffic's insane. The taxi was late.'

'Anyway,' said Jacki. 'Aren't you going to introduce us?'

Holly pressed Nathan's hand flat to the table. 'This, everybody, is Nathan.'

He gave a fey half-wave like an ailing monarch. There was more hand clapping, more whooping.

Only Jacki was in focus. She was pretty short - shorter than he'd imagined police officers were allowed to be. Practical haircut: sleek and dark, tucked behind her ears.

She said, 'We've heard a lot about you.'

'Not all bad, I hope.'

'Not all of it,' said the man, Martin.

(Everyone laughed, as if he'd voiced a broad innuendo.) Holly squeezed Nathan's hand. It was a question. He squeezed back a reply: Really, I'm fine.

He feared the light of recognition in Jacki's eyes. That she'd drop her fork, clattering on the edge of her white dinner plate, and the table would fall silent and heads would turn and that would be the end of it all.

Nathan forced down his starter, then bolted a glass of wine. Steph leaned over to top him up. He thanked her. He could feel the wine, cold in his guts. He wanted a cigarette, but nobody was smoking.

Finally, a waiter arrived to clear the first course. Jacki produced a pack of Silk Cut, dumping them on the table like a deck of cards. In relief, Nathan reached into his own pocket.

Jacki looked round the table. 'Nobody else smoking?'

She half stood, grabbing Nathan's hand.

'Then it's the perfect opportunity to give my warning speech to the groom.'

Nathan allowed himself to be dragged outside. Martin made a loud and witless joke about handcuffs and going quietly. Nathan looked pleadingly over his shoulder. The table laughed.

Outside, Nathan and Jacki stood beneath a lamp post. Drizzle swarmed like midges in its yellow light.

Jacki lit a Silk Cut, offered the pack to him. He thanked her, said no thanks, took one of his own.

She blew a long plume of smoke and said, 'She doesn't know, does she?'

A car went past. Nathan followed its progress.

'No.'

'What did you think you were playing at?'

'I didn't know.'

'Ha.'

'She never talked about it. And by the time she did, by the time she told me, it was too late.'

'You have to tell her.'

'Tell her what? That, along with about a million other people, I was at the same party as her sister?'

'The night she disappeared, yeah. And that you knew the suspect.'

'It was his party. I was employed by him. I hated his guts. And he was never even charged.'

They fell silent and stepped aside, allowing two lovers to pass huddled together, heads down in the rain.

'She's got a right to know.'

'It would break her heart.'

Jacki glared at him, defiant.

'Look,' said Nathan. 'For Christ's sake, she's happy. What else matters?'

'Yeah,' said Jacki. 'Well.'

'I know you care for her.'

'I've known her since she was eleven. Don't talk to me about caring for her.'

'Okay. I haven't known her as long as you have. But Jesus. Please.

Come on.'

'Jesus,' said Jacki, and shook her head.

'Come on,' said Nathan. 'Please.'

Jacki made a face. He thought she was about to spit. She threw down the stub of her cigarette and watched it bob in the gutter.

'I hadn't seen Holly for years. Not since we left school. But it was me she came to, when Elise didn't come home. It was me she came to, because we were friends. I made her a promise. Do you understand that?'

'Of course. Of course I do.'

'I won't let you hurt her.'

'I don't intend to.'

'If you're not on the level, I'll fucking have you. I'll cut your cock off 'But it's the last thing in the world--'

'It had better be. Is what I'm saying.'

He said, 'Trust me. Come on.'

Back inside, nobody seemed to notice how long they'd been gone.

Nathan drank two glasses of wine in quick succession. He and Jacki avoided eye contact, like guilty lovers.

The friends around the table had known each other for many years; the anecdotes were polished smooth with use, the language full of private references and arcane in-jokes. Early attempts to include Nathan fell away with the drink -- everybody, Holly included, grew weary of explaining everything to him.

He barely noticed. But when the evening ended and the bill was paid and the coffees were drunk and everyone was gathering their coats and bags and calling taxis, Jacki made a show of hugging him.

She planted a kiss on his cheek and told him -- perhaps too stridently -- how pleased she was for both of them, that she wished them every happiness in the world. That nobody deserved it more than Holly.

He thanked her. She tottered downstairs, to her waiting taxi.

Nathan and Holly sat alone at the table. Holly looked flushed and happy. Nathan was drunk. Acid spit in his gut. Holly asked him for a cigarette, her first since their aborted date.

'Are you sure?'

She moved her hand like somebody winding up a poor comedian.

He passed her a cigarette.

He said, 'Are you okay?'

Deep dimples at the corners of her mouth.

'I'm happy.'

'Good,' he said. 'That's all that matters.' And it was true.

They married in September, at the small Norman church in Sutton Down. Nathan invited a few guests, all of them colleagues.

They were mixed in with Holly's apparently vast network of friends, relations and neighbours. Holly wore white. As she progressed down the aisle in satin heels, there were some tears from her cousins, her aunties, her old primary school teacher.

At the reception, having raised a toast to his daughter, Graham remained standing. He rode out the guests' slight befuddlement, waiting for them to sit and grow still. Then he said, 'Now, this isn't the normal order of things. And - as many of you gathered here will know - usually I'm a stickler for order.'

He paused for laughter - a fond ripple of it.

'But June and I wanted to take this opportunity to say that a few months ago -- a very few months . . .'

More laughter.

'Nathan blew into our lives a bit like a whirlwind. And the truth is, as many of you will also know, perhaps we needed a little whirlwind in our lives.'

And now there was no laughter. Just silence.

'This young man didn't just win my daughter's heart, but my heart, and June's heart too - for the life he brought into our home.

And for that, we'd like to thank him. So: to Nathan.'

They drank a toast while Nathan sat proud and terrified at the top table.

When the time came to give his own speech, he paused to gather himself and for a while could not speak. There were more tears at that, and some laughter.

When Nathan sat, Holly gripped his hand and Jacki came round to hug him from behind. She crossed her arms across his chest and squeezed, hard.

Holly had insisted on one more toast. She stood, raising her glass, saying: 'We all know there's a guest missing today. Since we were tiny, Elise and I talked about this day. We talked about what we'd wear, which pop star we'd marry. She was pretty stuck on George Michael, I seem to remember. That is, when she agreed to marry a boy at all; she was mostly interested in the dress and walking down the aisle with her beloved dad. She thought having a boy there would spoil it.'

Graham was looking at the table, smiling.

'But Elise is here. I can tell she approves of the boy I decided to marry -- even though he's not a pop star.' She had to pause. 'And I can feel her, being all impatient for the disco to start. By now, she'd want to get her kitten heels off and her Doc Martens on. So I'd like you please to stand, and charge your glasses. Please join me in toasting my dear sister -- Elise.'

Two hundred people stood and raised their glasses. They said her name, and sounded like the ocean.

Their first dance was to Van Morrison - 'Brown Eyed Girl'.

Later, Nathan hoped that nobody heard him, sobbing in the toilets.

In a hotel room in Barbados, he undressed her for the first time.

Nathan had been celibate for five years. He and Holly had never slept in the same bed.

He woke in the tropical night to find her propped on an elbow, looking down at him in the darkness, her eyes unreadable.

He said,'What?'

'You know what.'

He kissed the softness of her belly.

"Me too.'

She twirled an index finger through his bed-addled hair.

He wrapped an arm around her warm and naked waist.

She closed her eyes and smiled, drifting to sleep.

They were away for fourteen days.

Naturally, it was Holly who found them a house.

She led him round a damp Victorian shell with leprous, floral wallpaper, telling him about its potential. He pretended he could imagine it -- but he was worried about the previous occupant. The old man who lived in this house had died in a nursing home, but before that he had succumbed to a lonely kind of dementia; his neighbours had found him billeted in the back room, half starved. Nathan winced to think of it, but Holly laughed and slipped her arm through his and told him not to be so stupid -- it was part of the reason the house was such a bargain.

He looked at the yellow ceiling and said, 'Are you sure?'

She was sure.

Holly employed the architect and Holly employed the builders and Holly employed the site manager. Nathan visited the unfinished house only two or three times. Each time, it seemed to be in worse condition, not better; full of ripped-up floorboards and skinny men in painty jeans, and cups of tea. He decided the house was way too much to worry about, and stopped going. Holly learned to tell him about setbacks and reversals only when they'd been put right.

Most of their furniture had gone into this house a week before the wedding. Nathan spent a strange, transitional week in the almost empty flat above the nursery, sitting in his one remaining chair, watching television.

He'd wondered if perhaps a wisp of Elise - the wisp he'd trailed with him - might be trapped here in this flat, like a moth in a jar. She'd be a flavour in the atmosphere, detected and dismissed by the next tenants - until she evaporated like a dab of scent on a human throat.

June had organized things such that, when they returned from honeymoon, the house was ready to be lived in; there were clothes in the wardrobes, cutlery in the drawers, washing powder in the cupboard and Fairy Liquid next to the sink. There were flowers on the dining table, next to a Welcome Home card. Nathan examined the back of the card to see which of Hermes' rivals had produced it.

He set his luggage down next to the clean bed, never slept in, and said, 'This is so weird.'

Holly was still wearing holiday shorts.

'Well, from now on, this is it. So we'd better get used to it.'

He tested the bed with his hand.

'Shall we try it out?'

They tried it out. They tried out the other bedrooms, too: and the bathroom, and the living room. He fucked her on the windowsills and the stairs. Each time, it was quick. He would grasp her hair in his fist and she would arch her back and thrust herself towards him and he couldn't help it.

she didn't seem to mind. Afterwards, she would walk semi-naked and laughing, barefoot, brushing back her disarrayed hair with her palms, a pearl of semen glinting on her pubic hair.

Usually, Nathan was ready again in a few minutes. When that happened, he made sure it was okay; when her orgasm gathered he grinned to himself, and when he entered her, she screamed and dug her nails into his arse.

On her first day back at work, he looked at her in her sober grey suit and white shirt with wing collars, and he lifted the skirt to her hips and fucked her against the door; and when she came home that evening he undressed her before she said hello and fucked her on the sofa.

She said, 'It's only natural. Your body is trying to make me pregnant.'

'Reckon?'

'Reckon.'

'And how do you feel about that?'

'About what?'