Tarnished (36 page)

She had tried calling him several times and had sent him three emails with details of Doll’s funeral, urging him to come. She had not mentioned the flat or the monthly income.

She couldn’t understand why he was staying away. Guilt or shame shouldn’t figure now he had no abandoned mother to face up to. If it was because he detested Jean so much that he couldn’t bear to see her, surely the fact that he had total power over her now the whole bungalow set-up was coming to an end would somehow mitigate that? And, as for any legal obstacles to his returning to the UK, well, didn’t Archer say that nothing was impossible?

But she had heard nothing from him in return.

‘Please don’t start, though,’ she said to Loz, helping her by taking the antipasti out of the suitcase.

‘I promise. I’m on my best behaviour. I’ll be as good as gold. But is he coming, though?’

‘No. He’s not coming.’ Peg stopped mid-task, the nut pâté in her hands.

‘Put that down,’ Loz said, holding out her arms. ‘And come here.’

‘This is the end of the road for my family,’ Peg said, stooping to bury her face in Loz’s shoulder.

They stood there like that for a moment, until Peg felt strong enough to draw away,

‘It’s not a tragedy, though. It’s a liberation,’ she said, smiling weakly.

‘Almost convincing, Peggo,’ Loz said. ‘What’ll happen with Jean? When she’s in this home Raymond’s going to put her in? How will that work out?’

‘I’ll visit her of course. But I won’t be
responsible
. And that’s how I want it.’

Loz looked at her through narrowed eyes. ‘You could’ve fooled me.’

Peg avoided Loz’s gaze. She wasn’t up to one of her challenges. She decided at that moment not to mention anything about the flat or the money until after the funeral, when she would have a clearer idea of what she was going to do with her father’s offer. There was no point in having an argument with Loz about it now, when she didn’t even know herself where she stood.

The next morning, Peg got up early and put on the new black dress and tights she had bought from one of Whitstable’s fiercely expensive boutiques.

‘Sharp,’ Loz said.

‘Not so bad yourself,’ Peg said, watching Loz button up an extremely well-cut jacket.

‘I bought it for my interview at Seed, and it’ll be getting more outings in the near future, unless Cara bucks her fucking ideas up and starts treating me more like a human being and less like a cooking machine.’

They went together to Jean’s extension to cloak her in the new dress. It was a two-person job and Peg had given Julie the morning off so that she could come to the funeral.

‘I’m not having that in here,’ Jean said, pointing at Loz.

Loz raised one eyebrow at her, leaned against the door frame and folded her arms.

‘Please, Aunty Jean. Can’t we just have one day’s truce? For Nan? We need an extra pair of hands if we’re going to get you ready in time.’

From her pillow, Jean looked first at Peg, then at Loz.

‘I suppose I haven’t got any choice, though, have I?’ she said at last. Grief seemed to have added another five stone to her. ‘Well, get me up then.’

They used the air pillow to hoist Jean into a position where they could lift off her nightie. Peg kept half an eye on Loz, on her first encounter with Jean’s bared flesh. With its folds and sores and stretch marks and blotched purple areas where networks of capillaries had burst under pressure from the fat around them, her body was far more blasted even than one would imagine from seeing her covered in her bed. Peg gave her aunt a quick upper-body wash, taking care to dry and powder underneath her flops of flesh.

‘Give us a burst of that, will you, darling?’ Jean said, nodding at a bottle of Miss Dior nestling among the ornamental pelicans on her dressing table. Peg had bought the perfume for her three Christmases ago, when she was feeling both flush on her first pay cheque from the library and guilty at having moved away from the bungalow. Jean had made a big fuss about how expensive the perfume was, and how Peg shouldn’t have, and said she would only ever use it on special occasions. As far as Peg was aware, this was the first time she had opened the bottle. She took the lid off, and sprayed Jean’s neck and wrists with it, momentarily masking the staleness of her shabby, hospital-like room with an incongruous whiff of glamour.

Peg and Loz slipped the giant black tent of a dress over Jean’s head, taking care not to disturb the heated rollers they had put in for her. Loz was on her best behaviour, quiet and unobtrusive, simply providing help when Peg asked for it.

‘It’s too big,’ Jean said, glumly pulling at the material.

‘It hangs nicely though.’ Peg arranged the yards of stuff. ‘It’s meant to be a loose fit.’

‘Pass me my make-up and mirror,’ Jean said.

Eventually, in the light-absorbing black of her new dress, with her hair pinned up into great billows, her features defined by rouge, blue eyeshadow, black eyeliner and deep red lips, and her skin softened and matted by a dousing of face powder, Jean looked strangely glamorous, like a blown rose. During the process of getting her ready, Peg had been taking and making phone calls to ensure that everything was on track – the priest was in place, the cars prepared, the reception all set up.

And then bang on the appointed hour the bariatric ambulance arrived. Two burly paramedics piled out of the vehicle and assessed the situation.

‘Hello, boys,’ Jean said, batting her eyelashes at them from the expanse of her face. For a second, Peg glimpsed the glamour puss from the early photographs: the Jean before the excess thirty stones; the Jean with the fiancé.

But the charm didn’t work on the ambulance men, who were merely sizing her up to see what equipment they’d need to shift her. They nodded at her politely, then they went into the back of their ambulance and hauled out a double-width wheelchair that looked like it had been built with scaffolding rods. They also brought with them a sling hoist on wheels, which they used to lever the wincing and complaining Jean from her bed into the chair. The men were enormous, built like weightlifters, but still they found the process a challenge.

‘Is my hair all right?’ Jean asked Peg when they had finally installed her in the ambulance.

‘It looks lovely, Aunty Jean,’ Peg said, patting her hand.

‘Your aunt is at the top end of our limit,’ the driver said discreetly to Peg after he had closed the ambulance door on Jean. ‘I’ll let it go because of the circumstances. But we’ll need to have a doctor’s certification of her weight when we next move her. Health and safety.’

Peg turned to Loz, who was smiling and shaking her head.

‘What?’ she said.

‘How did this family produce someone so wonderful as you?’ she said.

Perhaps it was because they had spent the whole morning looking at Jean, but when Doll’s flower-smothered coffin drew up outside in the hearse, it looked impossibly tiny. Peg and Loz climbed into the funeral director’s shiny black Galaxy, and the three vehicles – hearse, car and ambulance – set off in slow-moving convoy towards the cemetery. A couple of neighbours had come out of their houses to watch. One woman crossed herself as the hearse passed.

Sitting in the back of the Galaxy, everything she needed to do accomplished, the enormity of her situation hit Peg for the first time. Here she was, on her way to bury the woman who had been a mother to her for seventeen years. Little Doll, who, through all those years, had given nothing but love, despite the losses and disappointments she had suffered herself. The activity of the past couple of weeks had kept Peg’s feelings of guilt at bay, but now they came flooding back, making her feel dirty and useless.

The tears came. She took Loz’s hand.

She only just managed to gather herself as the car swung up the tarmac path to the cemetery chapel. An inappropriately cheerful Christmas tree with lights and tinsel stood in the entrance, reminding Peg of the Christmases she had spent with Doll. The work her grandmother used to put in to make the day unforgettable was incredible: the wrapping of presents, the carefully constructed party games, the endless sweet and savoury snacks she prepared.

Peg and Loz waited by the ambulance as Jean, her oxygen hooked up to the back of the chair, was lowered to the ground. On its way from the lift platform to the ground, the wheelchair bumped and Jean shuddered.

‘They’re just bloody manhandling me,’ Jean said, wincing. ‘They’re just bloody brutes.’

‘Can I push her?’ Peg asked the ambulance driver.

‘I can’t let you, I’m afraid. We’re not insured to let our equipment pass into the hands of non-employees.’

‘Oh no. Is that her? Mummy . . .’ Jean sobbed, pointing at the coffin with one hand and bringing a tissue up to her mouth with the other.

The white-smocked priest, who had been greeting people as they arrived, rushed to open both chapel of rest doors to let Jean through. Loz and Peg followed behind.

Inside, seven dusty old men with red faces and shiny suits – Frank’s Masonic friends, Peg supposed – sat in a formal row towards the back, each holding his hat in his hands. They nodded at Jean as she was wheeled to the space cleared for her at the front. Sitting on his own in the back row on the other side of the aisle to the Masons, Archer acknowledged Peg as she passed with Loz, following Jean to the front. Like a strange bridal procession, the three of them – Peg, Loz and wheelchair-pusher – walked in time to the solemn recorded organ music, with Jean before them as their distorted bride. All the music was Doll’s choice, as recorded in her will, along with her desire for no words to be spoken. Peg hadn’t even considered that she might have been called upon to give a speech, so when Archer read this clause to her, she felt she had escaped an unforeseen hell.

A couple of neighbours sat at pews nearer the front of the chapel: Mrs Cairns, the woman from the post office in Tankerton High Street, and an Indian gentleman who, from the way he raised a hand as Jean went by, Peg supposed must have something to do with the Taj Mahal. Julie was there in a neat little black coat and a small group of formally mournful-looking people – probably the distant cousins – occupied the front pew on the left side. Other than that, the tiny chapel was empty.

It was sad that there were so few people left to come to say goodbye to Doll. If Raymond had kept in touch, Paulie and Caroline would have been here – a whole new family to pay their respects. But then if Raymond had been around, Doll might even still have been alive, escaped from Peg’s neglectful absence.

Poor Dolly. Poor Nan.

‘Will you please stand,’ the priest said, as the first bars of ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ struck up. Jean shifted in her wheelchair to show that, even though she couldn’t rise, she could pay her mother some respect. The congregation started to sing. Loz, whose strictly secular school had never once forced her to sing a hymn, mouthed along badly. Peg, who had endured daily religious assemblies at school, knew the form, but her voice caught on the pastures green and she couldn’t go on. Loz put her arm round Peg, who laid her head on her shoulder, and wept.

As the song ended, Peg felt a chill on the back of her neck, as if a door had opened behind her. She lifted her head from Loz’s shoulder and turned her tear-reddened eyes towards the back of the chapel.

There, at the back of the assembly, slipped in beside his lawyer, his eyes shielded by dark glasses, was her father.

Raymond had decided to turn up.

Then

I’m on the beach.

No, I’m on The Street and it’s low tide and I’m quite a long way out. Perhaps it’s the time the old bags asked me about my mummy and I said she was dead.

Anyway, if it was that time, the old bags aren’t there any more, and I’m busy looking in a pool at this crab who keeps scuttling away whenever my shadow falls over him.

It’s coming to the end of the day. I’m roasted, my head and my tummy ache and the beach is wiggly with heat. As usual, I’m slathered with sunblock.

I look up just to check Aunty Jean is still there in the trolley, and she is, sitting looking out to sea, or at me. It’s hard to tell from this distance. A plume of smoke rises from her, straight up into the air because there’s no wind at all, not even a little puff. It looks like she’s on fire, but it’s only her cig.

Something catches my eye. It’s a big white car, rolling slowly along the prom towards her.

I can’t see what make it is because it’s too far away. I can’t even hear its engine. But it’s a really big, white car.

You can only drive along the prom if you’re staying in one of the two houses down there. But the car stops a long way away from either of the driveways, a good long way before Aunty Jean, too. It just stops, and for a long time nothing happens. I nearly get bored looking.

Aunty Jean, who hasn’t seen the car, waves at me, and I wave back.

I know this is her way of letting me know we should be thinking about heading back for tea, but I’ve got the car to be interested in now, as well as the crab.

A man gets out of the car, stands and stretches. He’s smoking too, something too big to be a cigarette. A pipe, perhaps. Or a cigar?

A cigar.

Yes, even though I didn’t know it at the time, even though I couldn’t see it because he was too far away, I now know who it must have been in that big, white car, with that cigar.

It’s not rocket science.

It’s really hot, but he’s wearing a pale coat and a dark hat, not a sun hat.

Slowly he walks along the prom, and he stops by Aunty Jean.

They seem to be talking to each other; though they’re so far away I can’t hear what they’re saying.

It’s just someone Aunty Jean knows, I think.

I check the crab. Thinking I have gone, he has come out into the sun again. I jump suddenly to one side to startle him and, very satisfyingly, he scuttles back under his stone.

I wish Aunty Jean could see this. It’s so sad she’s stuck up on the prom. I look up at her and now she seems to be arguing with the man. She’s waving her finger at him, stabbing it into the air. The man has his arms outstretched, holding his hands out, as if he’s trying to make a point.