Twelve Drummers Drumming (9 page)

“Is Sybella …?” he managed to utter.

They all stared at him, waiting for him to complete the question. No words came. Finally, with a regretful glance at Colm, Tom murmured:

“I’m afraid Sybella has died, Sebastian.”

“Sybella,” Sebastian had repeated in a wondering tone. He had looked at them, one by one, as if seeking confirmation. Finally his eyes settled on Colm. “I’m so very sorry,” he said. His face shifted through sympathy to its normal, impassive mien. Though thinking about it now, as he rolled down the pavement past Pattimore’s shop towards Fishers Hill and the turn towards the adjunct road that would take him to Thornridge House, Tom was possessed by the worrying notion that it had been relief, or something akin, that he’d glimpsed in those cobalt blue eyes. No one at the fayre had known that Sybella was anything but asleep in the drum. Yet somehow Sebastian had intuited the most cheerless of scenarios. It had been on the tip of his tongue to ask his verger if he had some intelligence on the tragedy, but a moan from the floor had redirected everyone’s attention.

“Phillip,” Sebastian had said, the surprise in his voice detectably genuine. “What has happened to you?”

“I’ve had a fall, my boy.”

“Some of the boys were fighting and one of them knocked Colonel Northmore over,” Julia corrected. “And, yes, an ambulance is coming,” she added as Sebastian, kneeling by the colonel’s side, looked up at her enquiringly. “I’ve asked Alastair to come, too … oh, and here he is now.”

Julia and her husband exchanged cool glances, after Alastair, dressed as if he’d just blown in off the course, in a blue and green striped golf shirt and matching golf cap, had pushed through the door. Quickly, wordlessly, he bent down across from Sebastian and twisted the bill of his cap to the back of his head. “Old Course St. Andrews,” Tom found himself reading. Alastair lifted Colonel
Northmore’s arm, pushed the shirt cuff back with one hand, and felt along his wrist.

“Your pulse is strong,” he commented.

“It’s the colonel’s
legs
, Alastair,” Julia snapped. “He’s had a fall.”

“Do you mind? I’m the doctor here.”

“Where’s your bag?”

“It’s at the club. Old Mr. Gill had a seizure of sorts in the locker room.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means, Julia, that I forgot my bag in the locker room after I’d examined Gill. I’m quite capable of examining someone without it.”

Alastair ordered the colonel to try moving his right leg, then his left. Northmore’s features shuttered with pain as he attempted to shift the latter. “Ten,” the colonel gasped when Alastair asked him the level of pain he was feeling on a scale of one to ten.

“Is something broken?” Sebastian asked.

“You’re in my way. Move!”

As Sebastian shifted off his knees, Alastair moved to the colonel’s right side, turned his suit jacket aside, and palpated alongside his hip with his hands. After a moment, he, too, rose.

“Well …?” Julia said.

“Well what?”

“Perhaps the colonel would care to know your diagnosis?”

Alastair jerked his cap back the right way. “Colonel,” he responded, readjusting his shirt over an incipient paunch, “an X ray will tell us more, of course, but I expect that you’ve broken your hip. I’m very sorry.”

Northmore’s lips formed a thin line. He said nothing.

“I’d be happy to stay with you, Colonel, in other circumstances, but I’m afraid I have another appointment. If you’ll all excuse me …” Alastair touched his cap in a salute.

“It’s Bank Holiday!” Julia protested.

Alastair gave his wife a tight smile. “Enid Pattimore craves my attention.”

“Nonsense.”

“I saw Enid not an hour ago at Liam Drewe’s stall,” Tom added, surprised. “She looked fine.”

“My service paged me while I was in the car. I can show you both, if you like.” Alastair reached into his pocket.

“Never mind that.” Julia waved a dismissive hand as Alastair thrust his pager in her face. “There’s someone else you must look at here. Something terrible has happened.”

“What?”

“It’s Sybella.”

Alastair glanced around. “I don’t understand.”

Tom opened his mouth to speak, but Colm interjected. “Alastair, really, there’s nothing you can do. It’s not necessary to …” He trailed off.

“Sybella has died, Alastair,” Tom explained. The words were awful to say.

Alastair blinked. “What? But …?”

“Her body’s in that drum.”

Alastair frowned deeply. “I don’t under—”

“Please, no one touch her,” Colm moaned, lurching on wobbly legs to block the drum. “Please.”

“Alastair, it’s fine,” Tom said, one eye on Colm, who looked about to collapse. “We’re waiting for the police. Go and attend to Enid. We can … cope here.”

“But how …?”

“We don’t know,” Tom replied.

“I’m very sorry,” Alastair addressed Colm. “If there’s anything—”

“We’ll be okay, Alastair, really.” Julia lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry to have dragged you here.”

“Oh.” Alastair looked vaguely startled. “Well, under the circumstances …” He moved towards the door, then turned. “Perhaps someone ought to pick that walking stick off the floor. Before anything else happens.”

Colm hailed Tom as he was walking his bike by the box topiaries that flanked the driveway between the gate and Thornridge House, a Nash-designed jewel of golden stone that glowed in the midmorning sunshine. Startled out of his thoughts of the previous day’s events, Tom veered down a curving flagstone path past deep beds of boisterous wildflowers towards the rhythmic scrape of chafing metal. Next to the slender pillar of an ancient sundial, Colm—dressed in a straw hat as wide as a sombrero and a pair of jeans so worn the blue had given way to strands of white at the knees and the pockets—was attacking a clematis vine with vigour.

“You have to keep after these buggers or they just get tangled and monstrous.” He grunted and took a final swipe at a stem, sending it cascading to the pile of cuttings. Tom, who had vague knowledge of gardening gleaned from his two mothers and their passion for their back garden in Gravesend, had a notion that pruning clematis in late May wasn’t the done thing, but thought better of mentioning it. In his years as priest, he had met with many varied responses to the loss of the loved one, of which a brisk workout in the garden was by no means unusual. When he was a curate, he had gone around to the home of a man who had lost his wife and found him feverishly hacking away at a crabapple tree in his back garden. And when he was in Bristol, a woman whose son had been stabbed outside their council house began painting an angel over the bloodstain on the pavement. By the time he arrived, a heavenly host was running up the front door and the neighbours were growing restive.

“It’s a lot of work,” Tom responded, surveying the expanse of plantings.

“Well, it keeps me off the sauce.”

Tom half expected a smile to follow this remark—Colm had been famously off the sauce for years; in the pub, he drank orange
juice or Perrier—but no smile came. Colm took another swipe at the plant. “That should do,” he said, staring glassy-eyed at his handiwork.

“Shall we go in?” Tom asked.

“Oh … I doubt Celia’s back from her morning ride.” To Tom’s faint look of surprise he added, “I forgot to mention you were coming. Celia thinks it’s best if we all keep to our routines. I expect she’s right. I would be feeling a bit cooped-up inside.”

Tom glanced at Thornridge House through the almost imperceptible humid veil that softened its outlines. Certainly the largest coop in the village or vicinity by a long chalk, but he understood the sentiment. After Lisbeth’s death, when family had descended upon him and Miranda, he had walked and walked and walked all over Bristol.

“Bring your bike. We’ll go round to the pool garden. I don’t think you’ve seen the back of the house before. We should be able to hear Celia when she comes back.

“This was a tennis court in the Northmores’ day,” Colm continued when they’d emerged from the east gardens into an expanse of lawn that dipped below the pergola at the south façade of the house. Cut into the middle was an oblong of untroubled water dotted with white water lilies, its stone corners softened by mauve irises. On each of the long sides was an iron bench, simple in design, but with sufficient length to seat St. Nicholas’s choir, if need should ever be.

“It’s beautiful, serene,” Tom commented, leaning his bike against the grilled back of the nearest bench.

“Yes, I find it … comforting. At times like this.” Colm settled on the bench and dropped the shears on the grass at his feet. Tom flicked him a worried glance.

“I don’t think Phillip much approved,” Colm added, removing his hat and squinting at the sunlight glistening off the water.

“Of what?”

“Of taking out the tennis court.”

“I’m not surprised.” Tom smiled. Edwin Northmore, Phillip’s father, had sold Thornridge House for taxes in the 1950s, and though Phillip had had a successful postwar career in London as a bank director,
he had not been successful enough to buy it back. Nonetheless, Phillip retained a proprietorial interest.

“He sort of harrumphed when I showed it to him. The old boy’s not much for change, is he? Speaking of which, how is he?”

“I haven’t heard. I’ll be going up to the hospital this afternoon.” Tom joined Colm on the bench. “More to the point, how are you?”

Colm raised his eyes to the sky. Tom followed his gaze. Above them a flight of swallows circled into a shimmer of white cloud. “Oh, stunned, I think,” he replied after a moment. “Deeply sad.” He glanced over at Tom, who could see that his eyes were rimmed with purplish shadows. “You would know, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes … although—”

“Time heals all wounds?”

“I was hoping not to be banal.” In the wake of Lisbeth’s death, every platitude had been fed into his ears, usually by the well-meaning, embarrassed to be proximate to one with such a loss. He could do nothing but accept their awkward kindnesses, but he had learned this: In grief so deep, sentimentality has no home. “I was going to say that the awful agony does subside, I’ve found—perhaps it’s a little like those half-lives we learned about in science class.”

“One day the residual half will be tiny.”

“Perhaps. Though I haven’t got there yet.”

“I doubt I shall.” Colm plucked absently at one of the strands of cotton taut across his knee. “And your parents, tragically, too, I recall.”

“I was only a baby. I have no recollection.”

Colm gave him an assessing gaze. “Of course. I remember it, though. I think I was about eight or nine. It was a little like when Diana died. The whole nation was caught unawares for a moment. Sorry, I shouldn’t go on about this.”

“That’s all right.” Tom shrugged. The grieving often preferred to talk of other things. “For me, it’s something in a press clipping, really.”

He thought back to the newspaper and magazine stories Dosh—his aunt, who became his second adoptive mother—saved for him in a scrapbook, which she presented to him when his child’s
consciousness began to encompass the world beyond the garden gate. No, it wasn’t anything remotely like the emotional gale wind following the death of the Princess of Wales, but his young parents’ death in an airplane that plunged into the North Sea after takeoff from Stockholm, where his mother had won the Eurovision Song Contest, had captured the public imagination for a time. He himself had been a figure of sentimentality, the poor orphaned—
twice orphaned!—
Xmas (tabloid headlines were invariably truncated) Baby. He could recall from the scrapbook a particularly vivid picture of Dosh, her scolding face turned towards some news photographer, caught outside some shop in Gravesend. In her arms, a bundle of swaddling clothes. Him. Tom Livingston Christmas.

“I still have your mother’s winning single somewhere, ‘If Wishes.’ It was a good tune.” Colm’s head began swaying as if to an inner rhythm. “ ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride,’ ” he began, his voice, huskier yet sweeter in the decades since
Top of the Pops
, embracing the last note. “ ‘If time would turn back, I’d have you by my side …’ ” He faltered then; a beat passed. Tom opened his mouth to offer to allay the discomforting lyric, but Colm recovered, stronger: “ ‘All life’s trials and sorrows would never abide …’ ” He smiled at Tom in invitation.

“… ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.’ ” Tom drew out the last words in the voice that ensured his exclusion from any respectable choir.

“Yes, that’s right.” Amusement crinkled the corners of Colm’s eyes. “Your mother had a lovely, lyric voice. In your case, the apple seems to have fallen really quite far from the tree.”

Tom laughed. “But I was the
adopted
son of Iain Christmas and Mary Carroll—”

“I’d forgotten that.”

“—My natural parents probably had tin ears, as do I.”

“Well, you have a fine speaking voice, Vicar.”

“I expect the stage training didn’t hurt.”

“Eh?”

“My former life as The Great Krimboni.”

“Ah, yes—the magic act. Did you get called ‘Krimbo’ at school?”

“I still get ‘Krimbo’ if I’m in certain parts of the southeast.”