Want to Know a Secret? (33 page)

He hung on to his temper but he felt it swelling behind his eyes. Why was Natalia giving him such crap for making sure things were done? Did she see it as her role now that Valerie was gone? He had a sudden vision of Valerie lighting a cigarette and leaping up to grab a bottle of wine from the fridge, crying, ‘For God’s sake, James. Lighten up!’

But it had always been his job to keep everything together, to know that everything was insured, maintained, arranged, booked, working, even though he was completely sick of the role, because Valerie would let everything go to hell while she cantered about –

It hit him like a blow.
He would no longer have to worry about Valerie. Not driving or flying, smoking or drinking
. It had all finally ceased to matter. A hole opened in his chest and grief flew in to squeeze his heart.

Then the mortician rang for James and the doorbell chimed and the argument had to be postponed.

When James returned from the phone he halted, shock bolting up his spine. Diane.

She wore a straight denim skirt and her plait gleamed like an ornament over the shoulder of a plain navy shirt. Her eyes looked very blue and she gave him a tiny smile. He thought he had never seen anything more reassuring in his life. ‘I came to see if you needed anything.’

Your tranquility
, he told her silently. ‘We seem a bit disorganised,’ he said.
And they’re not playing nice. I need help with them.

‘I can be useful.’ Diane began by making everybody tea and toast, two slices each, seeming to understand that nobody had eaten that morning – possibly explaining the shortness of tempers – as if to have done so would somehow besmirch Valerie’s memory. At first Harold refused brusquely, but Diane crouched before his chair and took his hands and explained how worried she was about him and he came to the table like a lamb and ate half a slice of toast and drank two cups of tea.

The final slices of toast she put down at an empty place, left the room and returned five minutes later holding Tamzin’s hand as if she were a little girl. Dressed in last night’s clothes Tamzin was silent but at least she was there and some food passed her lips. Everybody ate something, even if not much more than four mouthfuls, and Diane cleared away.

She seemed to have appointed herself general factotum. ‘OK,’ she said, returning to the table. ‘What needs to be done?’

James explained about his appointment with the mortician at four, Harold’s prescription, Natalia’s car.
It’s too difficult
, he added, with his eyes.

‘I could drop Natalia off to pick up her car while you keep your appointment, so she can fill out the prescription.’ Diane turned to Tamzin. ‘Will you come with me to Pops’s house and pick up some things for him? Your dad thinks he shouldn’t go home alone yet and I expect that we all agree. Alice, will you stay here with Pops while she’s gone?’

And everybody nodded, preparing to perform their allotted tasks without a grumble.

James, when he went out to his car, found Diane right behind him.

‘How are you?’ Her voice was low and sympathetic, and he was ashamed that he wanted her to hold him. Just for a moment.

Instead, he leaned against his car, letting her presence comfort him. ‘It’s a nightmare. I see her everywhere. I feel as if I let her down. I let her die.’

Her eyes brimmed with sympathy. ‘But it’s not true, James. You couldn’t stop her dying – that’s not the same thing as letting her die. Nobody could stop her. Fully trained medical staff with all the gadgets and gear tried and failed.’

‘But I keep wondering if the kids think I let her die.’

‘I’m sure they don’t.’

He touched her hand and she didn’t pull away. ‘The guilt’s incredible.’

‘It always is.’

‘I don’t mean about being alive when she’s dead and the usual survivor’s remorse. I mean because I was thinking about you when she began to struggle for breath.’

She nodded, once, jerkily, and blinked. ‘Bryony’s with Gareth. I feel guilty that I’ve left him to come to see if you needed help. But I had to.’

James was finding everything painfully unreal by the time he got home after keeping his appointment with a kindly mortician and a doctor from the Ackerman in a sterile-looking room that smelled funny and then having to fight rush-hour traffic that seemed intent on siphoning him into lanes he didn’t want to be in. He’d grown so used to the thorn of Valerie piercing his side. But now the thorn had been removed, without anaesthetic, and with no dressing to keep his guts from spilling out.

Emotions were racketing around inside him like bagatelle balls. But he wasn’t certain what the emotions were.

In his kitchen he found Diane sliding a chicken casserole into the oven.

The sight of her in the house he’d shared with his wife for twenty-seven years screwed with his heart. He’d wanted to leave Valerie for this woman. He’d made love to her while his wife lay in traction. He’d planned an affair; even taking a six month lease on a flat where they could meet on the outskirts of Peterborough, a flat that he was now arranging to be sublet because Diane had pulled back.

When Valerie had begun to arch and gasp on her hospital bed had he leapt fast enough for the red button on the wall? In the seconds that seemed hours before the staff burst into the room could he have done something to save her?

Guilt rose in his throat like black bile.

Diane met his eyes and seemed to read his mind.

She whisked off the tea towel that had served as an apron around her waist and picked up her car keys. ‘Harold’s watching the news and Natalia and Alice are keeping him company.’ She hesitated. ‘I hope it’s OK, but I rang George. He’s up in Tamzin’s room with her. I had a word with him, told him to let her grieve, just to keep her company – he’s never had to deal with anything like this. I’ll leave you with your family now.’

He nodded, too scoured out with guilt and grief to speak. As he made his way to the sitting room he heard her car start and the crunch of tyres across the gravel.

When he entered the room, Harold pointed the remote control at the television and cut off the
Look East
presenter mid-sentence. James sat down heavily, suddenly sick with fatigue. All eyes were fixed on him, the family focused on every detail of the process of losing Valerie.

He reported his meeting bluntly. ‘They asked me formally to allow a post mortem – although I’m not sure I really had a choice. It’ll take place tomorrow, and after they’ve given me the result I can get a death certificate and arrange for her to be moved to the funeral home.’

After several moments, Harold murmured, ‘Does she really have to be … disturbed?’

‘They have to know how it happened. We all need to.’

The evening stretched ahead. Abruptly, fiercely, James wanted Diane back, making them cups of tea and knowing what to say.

A curious aimlessness descended. No plans could be made without the death certificate. It felt indecent to sort through Valerie’s things so soon. He hadn’t told their solicitor of her death. Or the bank. Or, indeed, her friends or any family but the most immediate. He could begin on the family this evening –

But he remained in his chair, eviscerated by death and tragedy. He shut his eyes. So tired. Soooo tired ... He’d do it in the morning. She’d been only in her forties. It no longer mattered how she abused her body. Never again would she endanger herself or anyone else. She had made him angry and made him sad and he’d wanted rid of her.

But not dead.

He managed a few hours sleep, which helped. Awake since dawn, he sat down at the kitchen table with a spiral-topped pad from the kitchen drawer and began to list necessary phone calls.
Solicitor, bank, insurance companies –

He’d been sitting there for a couple of hours, trying to force his brain to work, when an unfamiliar cough mad him turn. He found himself staring at George Jenner.

George hovered awkwardly, hands jammed inelegantly in the back pockets of ripped jeans so that his elbows stuck out like cup handles. ‘Um, I gotta go, ’cos I’m on a work placement. Tamz said it’s OK. I’m already having time off for the gig in Liverpool on Friday.’

‘No, of course. Right.’

George shuffled and cleared his throat. His eyes flicked to James and away. ‘Um … did you know … Tamzin’s done stuff.’ He fidgeted. Itched his calf with the opposite foot. ‘To her arms.’ He took his hands out of his pockets to make a tentative cutting motion with the side of his hand to the inside of his elbow.

James felt his stomach plummet. ‘Oh hell, has she? Very
 
bad?’

George cleared his throat again. ‘Like, about three …’ He made the cutting motion again. ‘That’s to do with this depression she had, right?’

‘Self-injury. It seems to be a reaction to when something bad happens that she has no control over.’ James pushed his fingertips through his hair.

George shook his head. ‘Amazin’. And you can’t get her to stop?’

James decided to ignore the faint note of accusation. George had no experience of dealing with self-injury. As Diane had pointed out, he was a nineteen-year-old boy. He was talking so awkwardly not because he was rude or inarticulate but because he was excruciatingly embarrassed. He and James scarcely knew each other. ‘Not so far. Unless you’ve got any bright ideas?’

Slowly, George slipped his feet into a pair of oversized trainers that seemed to have spent the night with the family collection of footwear in the corner. ‘I dunno. It’s weird.’ He hesitated. ‘Would it help to, like, make her do stuff?’

James fought down irritation. ‘
Do
what kind of
stuff
?’

‘When my granny died Dad and Uncle Melvyn and Uncle Gareth had a load of stuff to organise, the funeral and that. There’s always a load of stuff, isn’t there, when somebody dies? I’d make her do that.
Ask
her to do that, for her mum. She’ll do it for her mum. Then maybe she’d have less time to rip herself up. But you’d probably have to, like, let her think you really needed the help, not that you were just trying to get her out of her room.’

‘So you think it’s wrong, do you, for her to be left alone in her room?’ James was curious. This lad had become hugely important to Tamzin in a few weeks – maybe he might be the one with the insight?

George rubbed his chin. ‘I think she needs to be out of there but you’ve got to do it without letting on that that’s what you want. Make it something real or she’ll just get the meanies. She’s like it with food. If I act like I don’t care whether she eats or not, she shares my meal. If I make a thing about it or buy her a meal of her own, she hardly touches it.’

When George had gone James stared at his list, at his angular handwriting. George made him feel old and cranky, to think in uncharacteristic phrases such as,
young man, I believe I know my daughter
and, probably,
better than you
.

He’d been desperate to end Tamzin’s nightmare.

He’d thought Valerie unfeeling when she said he was making too much of Tamzin’s problems. Depression was a medical diagnosis, not some babble he’d picked out of a trendy magazine; his instinct had been to make things easy for his daughter. Unlike some households, her lack of occupation hadn’t mattered, financially. She could be safe at home for however long it took for her to find her way out of the grey caves.

But … in taking all possible pressure off, had he removed ‘motivation to progress’ as Cherry in HR would say? Both George and Diane plainly thought that Tamzin should be steered towards occupation.

He wrote,
Ask Tamzin for help
across the top of the list.

Stared at his words on the page. They seemed so foreign. So against the natural order of things. She didn’t give him help – he gave it to her. But, with a mental shrug, he threw down the pen and went to knock on Tamzin’s door. On the third knock, she answered through the door, drearily, blearily, from the depths of her despair.

‘I’m stuck,’ he called. He didn’t have to contrive the flatness in his voice.

A long pause, before her voice came again, puzzled. ‘On what?’

‘On what to do next. There’s so much to do. My head hurts and I’ve hardly slept and I can’t think straight. Any chance that you could help me?’

A long pause. He could imagine her, rolled in her bedclothes, a frown curling her pale eyebrows. ‘OK,’ she answered, cautiously. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

Whilst he waited for her to appear, he made them each a slice of toast and a cup of tea. Following Diane’s example of the morning before, he simply put food down in Tamzin’s place and began to eat his own. She arrived with her hair pulled up into a navy blue scrunchie, blinking. She looked at the toast as if it were left there by aliens but picked up the cup of tea as she sat down.

‘So, what have we got to do?’

He shrugged, palms up. ‘I’m trying to make a list of people we have to tell about Mum. Things we have to do. I can’t think straight.’

‘Oh.’ She picked up a pen and wiggled it. Skewed her head to see what he’d written.

Inform:–

Solicitor