Dark Undertakings (15 page)

Jack blinked. ‘Well, yes. We had a game on the computer for a bit, and after that we just chatted. He didn’t fancy watching a flickering screen, he said.’

‘Was that because he had a headache? Did he feel poorly? You see, you were very possibly the last person to talk to him.’

‘But, surely—? He must have got home before ten. Didn’t you see him?’

‘Yes, sort of. Just briefly. Just enough to know he’d come home. But I didn’t
look
at him. We didn’t have a proper conversation. I’ve no idea how he was feeling. I thought you might have taken more notice.’

He paused, as if trying to remember. ‘He was a bit quiet,’ he offered. ‘And he didn’t really have his mind on the game. That’s unusual for him; he just seemed to lose interest in it.’

‘Jack, you’ve known Jim for a long time. Longer than I have, even. You work with him all day, and see him at least one evening every week. Would you tell me, honestly – did you like him?’ She spoke in a rush, as if the question had forced itself out of her against her will.

Jack cocked his head, first one way then the other, examining the question. Then he sat down on one arm of the sofa, and gripped the edge of it tightly. ‘We were like brothers,’ he said. ‘You don’t ask yourself whether you like your brother. You just take him on as part of your life.’

‘But there were people who didn’t like him – isn’t that right?’

He nodded. ‘Loads,’ he agreed. ‘But I don’t think you need worry about that. They won’t take it out on you.’

She flapped a hand impatiently. ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s just – well, I know it’s stupid – only somebody suggested that just possibly Jim didn’t die of a heart attack after all. And if he didn’t, then there’s a chance that something else happened. I mean, there is just a faint chance that he was deliberately—’ She couldn’t say it. Especially not to the man who had been the last to see her husband.

‘Garbage!’ he said fiercely. ‘The sort of thing people say just to stir up trouble. The doctor was happy enough, wasn’t he? Now, you forget that sort of talk.’ His eyes, distorted by the glasses, bored into her. There was a sheen of sweat on his brow, and a tic at the corner of his jaw.

‘I know,’ she capitulated weakly. ‘It’s just silly.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Why don’t you and Jodie compose something for the front of the service sheet – name, place, date – and when I’ve sorted out the rest with the vicar, I’ll let you have it. Tomorrow, probably. Or I’ll get the undertakers to fax it to you. Okay?’

He took the signal, and stood up slowly, saying nothing.

‘Thanks very much for coming, when I’m sure you’re busy,’ she babbled.

Jack bristled. ‘Jim and I were best mates,’ he reproached her. ‘Something’s wrong if I can’t come to offer my condolences.’

She let him out with as much dignity as she could muster. The undertaker’s vehicle had gone. With a belated pang, she realised that she would miss Cassie more than she’d admitted to herself. The house was going to seem very empty that evening.

Lorraine couldn’t sit still. She’d done the shopping, put the holiday clothes in the wash, watched TV with Cindy and made supper for the three of them. Cindy was now in bed and there were two hours or more before Lorraine could decently follow suit. ‘I’m going to get some cigs,’ she said suddenly, not waiting for Frank to argue. ‘I’ll be ten minutes.’ And she was out into the darkening night, the late summer evenings closing in, still warm, but with a sense of things ending, in the air. They lived just around the corner from

The King’s Head, where Jim had played darts. Unhesitatingly Lorraine walked in, knowing that half the people there would be her friends. And Jim’s …

‘Hi, Lorrie!’ said a voice from the table inside the door. ‘Where’s Frank?’

‘Babysitting. I just came to get some fags. How are you, Sid?’

‘Can’t grumble. Waiting for Brenda to finish in the Ladies, then we’re off home. First time we’ve been out for ages.’

‘That’s nice.’
Did you hear about Jim
?
She wanted to scream. She looked round, wondering who else might be there. No familiar faces caught her eye. Then she remembered. ‘Sid? You work at the undertaker’s, don’t you? I was just catching up with the paper. We’ve only just got home from Cyprus. I saw …’ Something in her throat, like a huge ball of cotton wool, prevented further words.

Sid looked at her closely and said nothing. She thought she detected suspicion in his eyes.

‘Hi, Lorrie!’ came a second voice from behind her. Brenda stood there, dumpy and self-satisfied. ‘I suppose you heard about Jim?’

‘I was just saying,’ she managed to stumble. ‘Awful. So sudden.’

‘Sid says he looks just as if he’s asleep. Like they do after a heart attack, apparently. When they’re youngish, like him. Poor Monica. It’s her birthday next week, you know. Jim was planning a celebration. Not that we would have gone. Monica is my sister-in-law’s cousin, actually.’

‘Oh. Right.’ Lorraine edged away. ‘Well, must get back. Good to see you.’ A throbbing headache began, switched on by an invisible hand. This was going to be unbearable. People
were going to talk about him and she’d have to pretend only a passing interest in a man twenty-five years older than her. She and Jim had been so fantastically careful; she was sure nobody had suspected at all. Ever since that first afternoon in May when they’d met by accident on the footpath beside the river, got talking and fallen in love. They’d been able to devise times and places to meet which went completely unobserved. As manager at the printer’s, Jim had been his own boss, popping out easily, claiming to be visiting suppliers, consulting with customers. Lorraine, with a five-year-old daughter, was yet to return to any sort of paid job. From nine to three every day she was free to go where she liked. Even when Cindy was on holiday from school, there had been chances. The school ran summer activities; little friends invited her to spend the day.

How could she go home to Frank and her daughter, carry on as a normal wife and mother, after this? Without those secret afternoons, always spent outdoors in that long hot summer, life wouldn’t be possible. It was as simple as that. She could feel her body drying up, flaking away, uncelebrated by the lovely man who had enjoyed it so unashamedly and always thanked her afterwards.

But she did go home, and Frank barely 
noticed that she’d been out. Why did she have to meet that creepy Sid and Brenda, of all people? She really hadn’t wanted to know what Jim looked like dead. A natural-looking corpse was no better than a mangled mess from a car crash. She couldn’t bear to think of Jim on the undertaker’s slab. She ran upstairs, but there was nothing for her to do. Popping her head round Cindy’s door, she saw her child asleep, limbs flung out in the evening warmth, carefree and tanned. Would this brief, secret summer simply form an unbreakable barrier between them for ever?

‘Hey, did you see this?’ said Frank, when she went downstairs again. He shook the paper at her. ‘Old Jim Lapsford’s dead. Can you believe it? Wasn’t he in the King’s Head, right as rain, the day before we went away?’

Lorraine closed her eyes briefly and nodded. ‘They were all talking about him in there just now. It’s been a shock to everybody.’

‘You know what I heard?’ Frank went on, lowering his voice against invisible listeners.

‘What?’ She wasn’t paying him much attention; the thudding ache inside her head was too insistent. And she’d just noticed a telltale metallic taste on the back of her tongue. A certain sign of pregnancy, that.
Oh, God,
she thought.

‘Well, someone mentioned to me a while ago now that old Jim was having it off with that Roxanne woman. You know – the one in the caravan, with the frizzy hair. Always over there, apparently.’

Lorraine stared at him. She felt her stomach swelling, forcing itself upwards, filling her throat. Her head clouded over inside, so she could hardly see. ‘What?’ she repeated, foolishly. ‘What did you say?’

‘Steady on, love. You look really rough. Must be jetlag or something. Sit down, before you fall down.’

‘
Roxanne
?
The one who’s in the pub sometimes? Who told you that? I don’t believe it.’

‘Can’t remember who. Anyway, he died in his own bed, it says here. A blessing for his wife, some’ll say. Let’s go up, shall we? It’s been a long day.’

Lorraine allowed him to chivvy her up to bed. She pretended to fall asleep as soon as the light was off, but she lay there for hours, endlessly exploring ways in which she could learn the truth. Had Jim
really
been having sex with Roxanne as well as her? The sense of betrayal was as painful as it was irrational.
But he loved me,
she kept repeating to herself.
He said he loved me more than anybody he’d ever
known
. And then, as she finally drifted off to sleep:
If he wasn’t already dead, I think I’d kill him.

Monica’s doorbell rang three more times that day, and the telephone hardly stopped. Apparently the traditional British habit of avoiding death and anyone touched by it was long departed. Now there were people in droves, all wanting to commiserate, or ask about the funeral, or suggest helpful things they might do for her. She had known Jim was a prominent local figure, of course, but she had never fully realised how big a part he played in the lives of so many. Most of the people who called, she scarcely knew. She felt invaded, loaded down with other people’s emotions. One girl from a local shop had actually started crying down the phone, saying how much she’d miss his cheerful face every morning when he called in for his papers and peppermints. ‘I hope I haven’t bothered you?’ she said at the end, and Monica was very close to telling the truth.

‘It sounds as if you and the rest of the world are going to miss him rather more than I will,’ she could almost hear herself saying by the end of the day. ‘Just let me get this damned funeral over with, and Jim can rest in peace as
far as I’m concerned.’ But she just murmured platitudes.

It was eight o’clock when a fourth ring came at the door. Monica, at breaking point, opened it ready to snarl. Standing there, mouth slightly open, face slightly pink, was a huge man wearing a clerical collar and other accoutrements. ‘Mrs Lapsford?’ he enquired in sonorous tones, raising two thick grey eyebrows. ‘It’s not too late in the day for a visit, is it?’

She gave a little cry of exasperation. ‘Vicar. They told me you’d want to see me. You’d better come in.’

The clergyman burbled, like a slowly gathering tidal wave, ‘I know I should have telephoned first, but I was literally passing by, and decided to take a chance.’ He moved gradually into the house. ‘And I should have said, of course, how very sorry I am about your terrible loss.’

Monica tried to suppress the hysteria she felt gathering in her chest. The mere sight of this man was farcical enough, without his meaningless utterances.
He must weigh twenty-five stone,
she thought, mentally assessing his girth.
How is it I’ve never noticed him before
?
‘Sit down,’ she invited, indicating the couch. He waited for her to take an armchair and then sank quite gracefully into the cushions.

‘I forget which church you’re from,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No matter,’ he smiled. ‘It’s St James’s, on the Hillbrow estate.’

‘Oh yes.’ She summoned a mental picture of a functional-looking church, built in the sixties, with a huge stained-glass front wall and a futuristic cross standing outside. ‘Of course. I’m afraid Jim didn’t go to church.’

He smiled again, forgivingly. ‘I’m Father Barry, by the way. That’s what everyone calls me. Now, perhaps we could just talk a little about the service on Tuesday, and what you’d like me to say about your husband? If it’s convenient?’

Father Barry,
Monica giggled to herself. What were his parents thinking of? Had they no inkling of their baby’s vocation when they named him? Perhaps they thought it would effectively rule out any such calling.

The effort to concentrate was exhausting; she seemed unable to recall any suitable facts or anecdotes about Jim. She found herself idiotically telling a trivial little tale from his workplace about the time they printed ten thousand menus with ‘Lobster’ spelt as ‘Lostber’ and how
lostber
had become a family joke word for anything that went awry, after that. ‘But you can’t use that,’ she added lamely, at the end of the story.

‘No,’ he agreed regretfully. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

He stayed for an hour, and she slowly warmed to him. They drank tea together, and let a few comfortable silences develop. She knew he would do his best, and that it wasn’t his fault that she’d never been inside his church, and didn’t believe that there was any sure and certain hope of a resurrection to come. It was entirely down to her. She ought never to have agreed to have a minister at the funeral. She should have been brave enough to do the whole thing herself. Should have been – but wasn’t.

He left her an order of service for Jack and Jodie to print up, and patted her gently on the arm. ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday, my dear,’ he said, as he departed.

There was then a thirty-minute lull, during which she made herself a simple supper of soup and a sandwich. The day had felt aimless, and she wondered whether there were vital things she should have been doing. People always talked about the great rush and bustle of paperwork and plans following a death. She supposed they meant things like the talk she’d just had with Father Barry, and the visit yesterday to the undertaker. And the letter to the life insurance people, enclosing a copy of the death certificate. If so, then she was clearly coping wonderfully,
because here she was now with half an evening still ahead of her, and no idea how to fill it.

But she need not have worried. The final ring on the doorbell came just before nine. With a sense of being saved from her own company, she went quickly to answer it. Gerald Proctor was standing there, holding a great mass of yellow and gold chrysanthemums. His broad face with its horizontal crinkles at eye and mouth peered shyly at her from over the top of the flowers.

‘Oh, Gerald,’ she sighed.