Jubilee (4 page)

‘Don’t stay too long,’ he said, gently. ‘We need to make plans, contact the clinic—’

‘No.’ The word took me by surprise. ‘No more clinics. We need to move on, plan our lives round something different.’ The cross-London rush to the clinic for daily blood
tests. The nasal sprays that made me retch. The injections I had to administer at home. The sense of failure, growing stronger every day so that it had started to affect every part of my life. I
could barely write some simple copy for an advertisement which I could once have dashed off. ‘All the embryos are gone, anyway.’

‘We could try to—’

I held up a hand. ‘I can’t bear the thought of producing more. It makes me feel like a brood mare.’ I sounded brattish but Luke just nodded and closed the boot.

‘Perhaps it’s wise to leave things.’

And as soon as he said this I felt my emotions rush in an opposite direction. I’d wanted him to try and persuade me it was worth trying again.

I pushed the stop button and ejected the disk. Evie had gone to all the trouble of having this home movie transferred to a DVD just before Christmas. I knew this because
I’d found the receipt from the computer company in Wantage that had carried out the transfer for her.

She’d placed the DVD in her desk with her will and details of her solicitor and of various insurance policies and other papers I hadn’t yet had time to examine. Evie had meant this
footage of her daughter to be seen in the case of her death, probably by me as I, along with her solicitor, was an executor and had the task of clearing out Winter’s Copse and selling
everything that couldn’t be rented out along with the property itself.

She could never have expected death to come so suddenly, though. Cardiomyopathy, the post-mortem had revealed, a condition I’d had to look up on the internet. Inflamed heart muscles. Evie
had never mentioned heart trouble to me. Perhaps she hadn’t realized. It seemed unfair that a woman who still tramped up and down the hill and maintained a huge garden with barely a
moment’s breathlessness had suffered such catastrophic heart trouble. Luke had raised his eyebrows over the post-mortem results, too. ‘Your aunt seemed one of the healthiest people we
know. Perhaps the strain of not knowing what had happened to Jessamy had worn her down. But you should ring her GP, Rachel, see what she thinks.’

The GP had been kind but mystified. ‘Evie came into the surgery about four months ago to have her blood pressure checked,’ she said. ‘I listened to her heart then and it
sounded fine.’ There was a pause. ‘I’m just looking through her notes again but there’s no sign of anything like a virus that might have damaged her heart.’

‘When I rang her two days before she died she told me she was planning to dig up one of her flowerbeds and try a whole new planting scheme for the summer.’

‘Nothing giving her problems on the farm?’

‘Not that I’m aware of. She sold the livestock a few years ago. Thank God.’

I’d shuddered at the images of the burning pyres of sheep and cattle in the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001.

Evie’s doctor could add nothing more except her regrets.

In the last two days I’d emptied drawers and cupboards, written to the telephone company to have the landline disconnected, informed Evie’s bank and building
society of her death and phoned friends and family on my mobile, ticking actions off a list and feeling as though I was moving underneath an ocean, limbs weighed down by the pressure of the water.
We hadn’t even had the funeral yet: that would have to wait until the crematorium was less busy. Flu season.

As the house emptied it seemed to reflect my own state: a vacant womb that couldn’t contain what it was supposed to contain. Only Evie would have understood this. ‘Not being able to
have a baby made me feel I was worthless,’ she’d told me after one of my failed IVF treatments. ‘We were surrounded by animals who could reproduce whenever they were required to,
year after year, and I couldn’t even carry a baby past a few months.’

I felt like that every time I walked to our local shops at home, tripping over buggies and prams and toddlers, all of them mocking my barren state.

‘Until Jessamy,’ I’d said.

‘Until Jessamy,’ Evie echoed. ‘When I got to four months with her and realized I wasn’t going to lose this baby I couldn’t believe it.’ And there was a
fierceness on her normally gentle face.

My mobile trilled, breaking in on my remembering and alerting me to a text. ‘Cd come down 2 help . . .’ Luke. ‘No point, all going well, thanx, xxx,’ I texted back,
feeling even worse. But I’d manage. I always did.

And I didn’t want Luke here just now. Admitting this made me feel shame, but it was true. Sometimes mad thoughts bubbled up and wanted to burst from my lips. I wanted to tell him to ditch
me and find himself someone else, someone who could produce a child or who wouldn’t care about not having children.

Evie’s dog Pilot whined gently at me as I passed him in the hallway. ‘What am I going to do with you?’ I stroked his smooth dark head and went upstairs to my
cousin’s bedroom and sat on her bed, staring at her chest of drawers and wardrobe, the bookcase that Evie had long ago emptied of books and toys. Little of Jessamy remained in this house
except the DVD film and some photographs. And yet I often sensed my cousin’s presence in Winter’s Copse. Sometimes I found myself turning suddenly, half expecting to see that broad
grin, that way she had of standing, thumbs tucked into the belt loops of her skirt or trousers, ready for action, for a walk down to the village shop to buy sherbet fountains or Curly Wurlies.

My pulse was still racing. The film had shaken me. I hadn’t been expecting to see Jessamy leaping across the garden. I hadn’t braced myself for it. ‘Did you think I’d
forget Jessamy, Evie?’ Like a loon I almost listened for an answer. Nothing. ‘I’ll never forget her, I promise,’ I went on. When I’d watched that DVD I’d felt
myself falling through time, back to when I myself was nine or ten again, spending much of the summer with my widowed aunt and my cousin at Winter’s Copse while my parents were abroad. I was
once again that child who swung on ropes and collected eggs, who fed calves and rode the pony round the paddock, who shared Jessamy’s bedroom and giggled with her after lights-out.

Evie always greeted me with outstretched arms. My aunt, so reserved and dignified with adults, was a different woman in the presence of children. She’d show us how to do magic tricks with
cards and coins and how to make explosive mixtures of bicarbonate of soda and vinegar. She said that the house was too big for such a small family. I knew from conversations with her in the last
months of her life that my aunt had wished for more children. Sometimes, looking at her fine, straight nose and perfectly shaped forehead, I could picture her as the matriarch of some Italian
dynasty, sitting at the head of a long table and indulging her grandchildren.

I went back downstairs to the television set and laid the DVD in a cardboard box with the photographs and the diaries I’d put aside to read. Had Evie ever intended me to see these? Perhaps
she’d have burned them if she’d known death was on the way. She’d left Jessamy’s little medal in the box, too, the last prize she’d won. I remembered my aunt twisting
the medal’s ribbon round her wrist that afternoon as we waited and waited for its owner to come back to the party.

I took the box into the kitchen and looked at the gap on the dresser where Jessamy’s Silver Jubilee mug should have stood as part of an unbroken chain linking Queen Victoria’s
Coronation to the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II last year. Victoria, the two Edwards, the two Georges and Elizabeth II herself: all commemorated in this collection of china. Evie had valued
continuity even though she wasn’t much of a one for chitchat about the Royals. I can’t ever remember her expressing an opinion about the divorce of Charles and Diana, for instance.

What should I do with these mugs? Sell them along with everything else of value that I didn’t want, I supposed. Our London flat was small and minimalist. The mugs wouldn’t work
alongside the stripped wood floors and modern art.

Perhaps I’d just leave them here when the house was rented out. Twenty-five years was the period Evie had decided upon. If the case of Jessamy’s disappearance hadn’t been
resolved by then, I was to inherit Winter’s Copse. The house owned by the Winters for hundreds of years would pass out of the family. I picked up the newest of the mugs, the Golden Jubilee
one given to my aunt just months ago. Something rattled inside it. I pulled out a small lead knight on a horse. He’d been painted once but the colours had peeled off. Enough of the pigment
remained on his face for me to see he’d once been carefully coloured in. Lancelot. Or perhaps Galahad, who, I thought I remembered, had been the knight pure in heart who’d found the
Holy Grail.

Evie’d never recovered her grail, her lost child. It had slipped from her grasp and remained in shadows. I replaced the mug and its contents on the shelf.

A little cowardly part of me wondered whether Luke had been right and I should have delayed the task of tidying up her affairs, not that there was too much to do. But who else was there?
Evie’s face, still in its final repose, flashed back into my mind. I pushed the image away and swapped it with a happier one: Evie waving Luke and me off after a weekend’s visit to
Winter’s Copse.

‘See you next weekend,’ I’d called, throwing her a last kiss.

‘Drive carefully,’ she told me. I turned at the door and looked back at her. She was wearing a dark blue wool dress, a scarf pinned round the neck in the elegant manner only she
could effect and flat ballet pumps. She’d looked like Audrey Hepburn. That had only been about ten days before her death.

When I went to the hospital after her death she was lying in a small, quiet side room, wearing that same blue dress and scarf. Evie’s heart had given up in the morning at home. I’d
pictured her wearing old trousers and a jumper to walk the dog, but perhaps she’d been planning to go out to lunch with a friend. The scarf was pinned very carefully round her neck. Evie
always joked that nobody except her understood scarf-tying and only she could arrange her scarf correctly. Surely the scarf would have been taken off while they did all those horrible violent
things they did to people’s hearts when they were trying to save them. Someone must have retied it after she’d been pronounced dead.

‘It was lovely that you took the trouble to tie her scarf the way she liked it,’ I told the nurse, when she knocked on the door and brought me a cup of tea. She blinked.

‘Oh, that wasn’t me.’ She frowned. ‘Can’t remember who was on duty then.’ She’d opened the door. ‘Stay with her as long as you need.’

I’d stooped down to rest my lips on my aunt’s smooth cheek, scared she’d smell of death but determined I should carry out this last gesture of affection. Her skin felt smooth
and soft. She smelled slightly of the scent she always wore and of the herbal shampoo she’d used for the last thirty years, buying it by mail order when local shops stopped stocking it. It
was the realization that Evie would never again need to wash the long hair she’d worn tied back in a bun that made the tears flood my eyes. She’d never again hand me a cake or a pie to
take back to London.

I fell forward onto my knees and wept for my aunt in a way I hadn’t for my own father following his death in a car crash, or for my long-vanished cousin. I couldn’t have cried more
for Evie had she been my own mother and I stopped only when exhaustion bowed me over her bed, my head resting on the scratchy white hospital sheet with its chemical scent.

‘You’ve gone,’ I said now, addressing her empty kitchen. ‘Where are you now, Evie?’ Surely if her spirit lingered anywhere it would be somewhere here at
Winter’s Copse. But all I heard in answer was the squeak of the birdfeeder swinging as a woodpecker, harlequin coloured in black and red, fed from it. Someone had kept it topped up with bird
food. Probably Evie’s cleaning lady.

I listened for a few more seconds until the woodpecker flew off, then tried to get back to the letters I was writing at the pine table.

I kept having problems with the word ‘executor’ and misreading and mis-writing it as ‘executioner’. That’s what my executor’s jobs felt like, too, as though I
was rummaging through boxes and drawers and killing off my hopes and dreams. I finished the letter and decided to tidy up. As I picked up the cardboard box the contents shifted and I noticed the
scrap-book lying underneath the farming diaries I’d scooped up from the filing cabinets. This was a scrapbook as I remembered them from the seventies when scrapbooks were made of
dull-coloured sheets of thick paper with plain covers, rather than flowers and seashells and God-knows-what-other whimsy.

I pulled it out and opened it. Every sheet was stuck over with cuttings. They came from a mixture of local and national newspapers and started around the time of the Coronation. With a sick
feeling I flicked through until I reached the events occurring at the Silver Jubilee party. I felt my insides knot together as I read them. There was my own nearly-ten-year-old face peering out
from one of the cuttings as I stood beside my aunt, my eyes wide and blank. The photograph must have been taken the morning after the party. I remembered the journalists coming to the door. We
hadn’t been expecting them and, unsuspectingly, Evie had opened up.
Grieving widow begs for news of missing Jessie . . .
Nobody had ever called her that.
Farmer’s wife loses
only child . . . Little Jessamy vanishes as country toasts Queen . . . Gypsies questioned about missing child . . .

I replaced the scrapbook in the cardboard box and decided to put the box in Evie’s office.

But in the office my energy seemed to ebb away, as though the act of reading the cuttings had sapped me. I sat at my aunt’s desk and looked at the photographs I’d gathered up and
placed here so I could decide which ones I wanted to take back to London with me. The one of Jessamy as a ten-year-old, of course, sitting on her pony with a beaming smile, her back straight.