Cricket (29 page)

“Oh God, what’s happened?” Ryan demanded as he stormed through the mud room and into the kitchen, not stopping to take his boots off.

Henry looked up and swallowed. “Nell….” He cleared his throat. “Nell died last night.”

Ryan’s face drained of color, and he too sank to the floor, pulling Henry into his arms. “I’m sorry.”

“Shenal called. She said sorry too, but it’s not like I didn’t know she was sick.”

“Did they call a doctor for her?”

“Apparently she died in her sleep. We still had so much to talk about, Ryan. It’s so unfair. I was just getting to know her, and now she’s gone, and she’s never coming back….”

Ryan pulled him closer, and with each rattling intake of breath he could smell the mingled scent he was starting to associate with the other man: dirt and mint and fabric softener and a hint of sweat. It was comforting. He didn’t mind crying into that smell.

After a while, Henry gently pulled away and stood to put the kettle on to boil, assembled the things for tea, then came back to Ryan’s side to offer him a hand up.

They sat opposite each other, each curling their hands around large mugs of tea and not saying anything, just waiting for something, whatever came next. It occurred to Henry that he should probably call his mom, or Gareth Swan, the lawyer who had corresponded with Shenal to get him here. But he didn’t want to talk to anyone from New York, not yet. They hadn’t known her. They wouldn’t understand.

When his phone rang again, he jumped. Ryan did too and sloshed tea over the rim of his mug, scalding his hand.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Henry.”

“Shenal,” Henry mouthed to Ryan, who nodded and reached for the biscuit tin.

“So, I, um, I’ve been working through Nell’s will. There’s not a lot in there, to be honest. Most of it we’ve already discussed. I’ll need you to come down to the office at some point to sign some documents. There’s no rush, though. When you’re ready.”

“Okay. Have you spoken to anyone at the home? Did they tell you any more?”

“I spoke to Sandra,” Shenal said. “The doctor has confirmed that Nell passed away in her sleep, probably at about four this morning. Her lights were off at eleven last night when the nurse on duty did her rounds, and she was normally very punctual for breakfast in the morning, so when she wasn’t there by seven thirty someone went to check and found her.”

“I only talked to her two days ago,” Henry said. “She sounded fine.”

“She would have,” Shenal said with a little sigh. “You know she wasn’t on chemotherapy or any treatment for the cancer. Her doctor was very good. He just prescribed painkillers and some aspirin. I don’t know if this is any consolation to you, Henry, but whenever she and I spoke about death, Nell always said that she wanted to go quietly in her sleep. She wasn’t in any kind of pain… it was just her time, sweetie.”

It was, Henry decided, a comfort. The tea, Shenal’s words, and Ryan’s arms, when he was led through to the sitting room, onto a sofa and enveloped in them, went some way to smoothing a balm over the crack in his heart.

F
OR
all the work he’d done on the house itself, Henry had never ventured into the gatekeeper’s cottage that had been Nell’s home for so much of her life. It felt like an intrusion of her privacy—he wasn’t welcome there unless he’d been invited in.

Of course, after she was gone, there was little choice but for him to make his way in to go through her things and decide what to do with them.

It still felt like a gross invasion of privacy, though.

When he’d first arrived in Cheddar and met Shenal, she’d described the cottage as a “two up, two down.” He hadn’t really understood at the time, but assumed (correctly) that it meant two rooms on the ground floor and two upstairs.

Henry stood in the late summer sunshine and looked up the well-kept path to the scrubbed front step and the two flower pots either side of the front door, which had been tended to while Nell had been living in the care home. The cottage had a thatched roof and sash windows that couldn’t have kept the heat in very well, but looked beautiful all the same.

The door opened with a brass skeleton key, and Henry left the door open to let some air through the house. It had been locked up for a few months. He knew Shenal had her own key and came in to collect the odd letters that hadn’t been redirected, to water the plants, and to occasionally pick something up that Nell asked for. Still, the air smelled musty.

Inside, the hallway was narrow and held only a small table, where he imagined the mail once sat. It held a vase with a blue paisley pattern and a shiny old-fashioned red telephone.

The stairs were impossibly steep, considering his great-grandmother was in her nineties while still living here alone, but Henry bypassed them for the moment as he explored the ground floor.

To the right of the front door was the living room, a surprisingly large space with a beautiful wood-burning fireplace. There was a sagging sofa and a well-stuffed armchair, the former having a crocheted blanket made in jewel tones—red and blue and green—folded carefully over the back.

There were knickknacks on shelves built into the walls either side of the fireplace. Here too stood a few photographs that Nell hadn’t taken with her to the care home.

His eye was drawn to three pictures that had been hung over the mantelpiece: one of the Queen, in the center, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the third, Barack Obama. For a moment, he puzzled this bizarre trinity. Then, despite his grief, he burst into laughter. He captured the image in his mind, determined to return to it if he ever got cocky enough to think that he ever, truly got to know Nell Richardson. The woman had a depth and soul and life so far beyond the precious few months he’d known her, and he was sure he’d spend the rest of his life remembering her over and over again.

In the kitchen, Henry’s heart broke a little bit for the woman who had packed up her things, probably knowing she’d never return to her home. All her dishes were carefully wrapped up in newspaper and boxed, the cupboards bare of food and containers. Henry untucked the flaps of the nearest box and pulled out the top dinner plate. It was a beautiful blue-on-white willow pattern that he immediately decided could go on display in the house.

Upstairs he found more of the same. The bathroom was bare of anything that could have suggested a personality, unless he counted the avocado-green tub, toilet, and sink. Henry decided not to. Despite the vile color, the bathroom was spotlessly clean.

At the door to the bedroom, Henry hesitated, the feeling of intrusion still hanging over him. But the door was open, allowing him to look in, and a moment later he found the courage to step over the threshold.

The bed itself was black iron, wide and solid-looking with a white lace coverlet tucked neatly over the edges. There were two nightstands, each with its own blue-and-white lamp, a small wardrobe, and a chest tucked under the window that looked out onto the garden at the back of the house.

The wardrobe was empty of clothes. Only a few sheets remained tucked away on one of the shelves. Henry shut the doors carefully, aware they felt light and brittle.

Opposite the window was a small ladies’ dressing table, complete with a triple mirror, the hinges on each side allowing it to stand on the white wood. Underneath, a tiny stool was tucked away.

It was strange—so many of Nell’s personal things had been taken with her when she moved to the care home, and looking around the cottage now, she clearly didn’t expect to move back. But her personality was practically painted on the walls here, everything from the green bathroom suite to the lace doilies on the nightstands, the thick cream carpets and carefully stowed dinner service.

They were all hers. It was all Nell, and he was flooded with a feeling he could only name as missing her.

As the days passed, he contacted the care home, which had made arrangements for Nell’s clothes to be boxed and sent to Oxfam, who would deliver them to good causes overseas. He was happy with that. Shenal had offered to collect Nell’s personal things and take them back to the cottage, so he didn’t have to deal with that, and she told him Nell had left fairly detailed instructions for the funeral she would like, as well as having set aside the money to pay for it herself.

He felt strangely impotent, wanting to do something more, and one afternoon found himself sitting in the garden of the gatekeeper’s cottage, his pen spilling out words of a speech to give at the funeral. Nell had handfuls of friends, but he alone was her family here, and he wanted to do something for her.

The sun shone brightly on the morning of her funeral, bright and crisp and cool, not unlike the woman herself. Henry had bought himself a new suit and spent an obscene amount of money on it, wanting something tailored and perfect. Ryan, of course, had dragged some old thing out of his closet, and Henry had whipped it away to be ironed before he allowed his partner to dress.

Henry hadn’t bothered calling his parents to let them know Nell had passed. He already knew what their reactions would be: his mother would demand he return to New York
immediately,
and his father wouldn’t care. He wasn’t ready to face either of those options yet, and so he put off calling them for just a few more days, until all of this was over.

He’d always hated funerals, the death, the procession, the ritual. Nell was to be cremated, her ashes buried in the little plot in the graveyard of the village church next to her parents and brothers and husband. Paul took the service. Henry barely heard a word of it.

“Nell Richardson was my great-grandmother,” Henry started, smoothing his paper out over the pulpit to remove any creases. “Many of you knew that already. Many more of you know a great deal more about her than I do—or ever will. Until a few months ago, I didn’t know I had family in England at all. I came here… I came here looking for an opportunity to change my life. I think I stayed for the opportunity to change hers.

“From the moment I met her, I knew Nell was dying of cancer. She was terrifyingly frank about it and her own mortality. Despite that, she always gave off an air of such vibrancy and energy, it was easy to forget she was sick. The house was Nell’s last great project. With the knowledge of her illness, I know that she called me here to do what she couldn’t in restoring it to its former glory. I’d like to think she was proud of what we, together, accomplished.” He paused. “I know she was.

“Nell Richardson will be remembered in this community. She’ll be remembered as an eccentric old lady, a rich old lady, a funny old lady. She was a person who loved greatly and deeply, and Cheddar was one of those great loves. I want to say thank you, truly, thank you, for coming here to show your respect today.”

Henry allowed himself to look up for the first time. The church, which had seemed pretty busy before, was packed. There were men standing at the back, women sitting on prayer cushions in the aisles, more people standing in the gallery. The pews were packed so tightly he could see people’s shoulders hunched up.

He laughed softly as he looked around. “She would have loved this.”

The watery smiles of his friends told him all he needed to know.

There would be a smaller ceremony later to bury her remains. He wasn’t ready to face that just yet. First there was a much bigger problem to address.

Even though Stella had agreed that people could head back to the pub for the wake, he wasn’t really comfortable in holding it in the village “boozer.” Nell was far too classy to be subjected to that. He’d mentioned the idea to Ryan first—foolish, really, as he’d thought it a fantastic idea.

Which was how he ended up with several hundred villagers tromping up the long drive that led to Stretton House.

All Henry’s protestations that it wasn’t ready for visitors yet had fallen on deaf ears. It didn’t matter that there weren’t enough chairs around, or that he couldn’t properly cater the event, or that there was still some scaffolding up outside the east wing. People wanted to see inside, to see what he’d been doing all these months.

And, to be fair, the majority of the work had been done. The new round tables that would be used for functions in the dining room had been delivered, but the chairs hadn’t been sent yet, which was how so many people ended up sitting on plastic lawn furniture. His cry for help with the chairs was responded to by a great many women offering their picnic table set, so many that he’d developed a system of labeling the damn things so he knew whom to return them to.

Stella had catered, a great many fiddly little things on sticks and sandwiches and pasties and crisps. It was, Henry mused, a pretty good first rehearsal on how a party in the house would run.

He considered the pièce de résistance to be the image he’d hung in the ladies’ parlor room, above the fireplace, an echo of where Nell’s Manet hung in the men’s smoking room. It was much smaller, though, a photograph that had been re-created by a local artist. The picture was one he’d found of Nell in the attic. He’d judged her to be about fourteen or fifteen. She was wearing a dress, wellington boots, and a large, chunky knitted sweater. There was a smudge of dirt on her nose, and she leaned on a spade that was shoved securely into the ground, one elbow resting on the handle and the other hand bunched on her hip.

In those days, her hair was a golden brown and worn in tight curls. Despite her privileged start to life, it was a moment of joyous normalcy. She could have been any girl, anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. He’d never found the courage to show her his find or to tell her that he’d asked for the image to be enlarged and hung, pride of place, in the room she once presided over.

She would preside over the ladies’ room always, now. That was the way he wanted it.

“Lovely spread,” Ryan said as he slipped up behind Henry with a paper plate loaded with food. Henry pinched a sausage roll (homemade and delicious) and popped it into his mouth.

“Your sister is an excellent cook.”

“She is. Here, try one of these. It’s like a miniature roast beef sandwich.”