Best Wishes. She was elated. That was the secret: Best Wishes.
A car pulled in and drew up in front of her. It was a three-mile walk from Eddon Gurney to The Cottage. The road wound between high banks and trees which sometimes met overhead. It was a pretty walk, but long. Abbie was driving the car, on her way back from the supermarket to Elder House.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Just fine,” said Alexandra.
“Want a lift?”
“Yes,” said Alexandra. She got in. A tractor was about to overtake Abbie’s car. Abbie pulled out without checking to see if anything was coming. They missed a collision by a fraction of an inch.
“These people never look,” complained Abbie, turning round to make faces at the tractor driver, who was Kevin Crump, and swerved over to the wrong side of the road. An approaching van was obliged to pull over to his right to avoid her and in his panic smacked into the tractor. “Serve him right,” said Abbie, and continued driving. “It was only a little bang,” she said, confidently, after they were safely round a bend and out of sight.
“No one will have got hurt. People ought to drive more slowly on these country roads.”
She told Alexandra she should have gone to Ned’s funeral. It was too bad of her. “Your own husband. People will think you have no feelings.”
“I don’t have many left,” said Alexandra. “I couldn’t spare any for a cremation, and social chit-chat.”
“There was lots of that,” said Abbie. She described the funeral in detail and said that Ned had been a very popular man.
“Was ‘Sailing By’ your idea?” Abbie asked.
“Yes.”
“It sounded ridiculous,” complained Abbie.
“As in life so in death,” said Alexandra.
“Talking about the ridiculous,” Abbie said, she’d seen the photograph of Jenny Linden in the paper and the caption “Alexandra Ludd mourns” beneath. Things could hardly get more absurd.
“So long as no one thinks that’s what I look like,” said Alexandra, offended.
“You’re so vain,” said Abbie.
“And you’re so treacherous,” said Alexandra, with a savagery that startled them both. “You’re lucky I haven’t killed you. But you’ll kill yourself soon enough with your own driving, so why should I bother.”
“But you’ll trust Sascha to me,” said Abbie, “to drive him to school and back every day because that suits you.”
That silenced Alexandra. The road in front was dark; they drove through twilight but the clock on the dashboard said it was lunchtime. The road carved through a hillside, and went through woods. Alexandra thought she might see Ned stumbling out into the road. All woods were probably alive with the accursed dead, against whom the living had grievances.
“Sorry,” she said to Abbie. “I’m all over the place.”
“You certainly are,” said Abbie. “If it’s any consolation to you Ned and I were just sitting in the bed, wondering whether to or whether not to, and would probably have decided not to, out of loyalty to you, when Jenny came in, and he grabbed his chest, and so on, like people do in films.”
“How did you get to be sitting in the bed in the first place?”
“We’d been watching
Casablanca
and got bored. I used to find talking to Ned difficult. Ned made me feel inadequate, you know? So I’d prattle on about plum jam and he’d despise me even more. If you’re having sex you don’t need to talk so much. It’s something to do.”
“I suppose it is,” said Alexandra. “Shall we not talk about it?”
Abbie asked Alexandra how she’d got on at the lawyer’s. Alexandra said that for some reason Ned had left everything to Jenny Linden.
Abbie said no wonder Alexandra was in such a bad temper, and Ned was a fool. He must have done it when he was sulking about something or other Alexandra had done, or not done, like come home, and then forgotten to revoke it. Alexandra would just have to go to Court and do it herself. Alexandra said there were circumstances which might make that difficult. Abbie said Ned had certainly not been best pleased to see Jenny Linden when she came into the room dressed in a black and scarlet suspender belt and white lace stockings and nothing else, and his ashes were around to prove it.
“After he died she took his toothbrush,” said Alexandra.
“And the socks he’d been wearing that day,” said Abbie. “Can you imagine?”
A wind had got up, presage of the storm, which still did not break. Great boughs tossed above their heads. The road finally took them out of the wood, and to the crossroads, and the left turn which took them to The Cottage.
As the car turned down the drive, the sun glinted out through a rent in the black clouds, and the day was suddenly bright again.
“Creepy weather,” said Abbie.
“Very suitable,” said Alexandra, pushing open the gate. It jangled gently as it always did when moved. Ned had attached some ancient animal bell to it, as an early warning system against visitors. Loud enough to be heard at a distance, soft enough not to startle the animals. She wondered how often Jenny Linden had pushed it, heard it, contemplated the anticipatory excitement that would go with it. Worst Fears. She and Jenny were in some international war; Jenny winning: pushing forward, taking territory, defiling memory, altering history. Now she, Alexandra, must retreat. But she would adopt a scorched-earth policy. You had to be careful though; you had to do it on purpose, not by accident, and you could not allow yourself any possibility of return. Napoleon’s army had got it wrong in the autumn of 1812, stripping the countryside bare as it went, raping and looting, emptying the brimming barns, killing the fat livestock, advancing like locusts. But winter came and there was no one to declare the glory of victory or the martyrdom of defeat. Napoleon’s army had to crawl home through the starved landscape it had itself created, dying by the hundred thousand of hunger, cold and disgrace. If you scorched earth you must bar the way to your own retreat. Well, that was okay.
“Blowing up a storm,” said Abbie.
The leaves of the Virginia creeper were beginning to turn red around their finely-formed, delicate edges. Four weeks from now the stone walls would seem to be on fire. The house always looked good this time of year.
“Quite a wind,” said Alexandra. It whipped her ears and shivered up her skirt. It was exhilarating. There was no such thing as a defeat, if you didn’t accept it.
The sun went beneath a serrated layer of black cloud; most of the light went with it. Inside the house Diamond lay back his ears and whimpered, very much preferring outside to in, and began to scrabble at the back door.
“It’s okay, Diamond,” Alexandra called to him. “It’s only a storm.”
Alexandra and Abbie pushed and pushed at the door, but it didn’t open. There was damp in the air: sometimes the door would stick after a long spell of hot weather. Alexandra had a vision of herself in a future which would be hers if she allowed it to be. It was as in the dream she had at Angliss Street. She was shut out, standing outside in the cold, beating against the locked back door. “Let me in, let me in!” she was crying; Jenny’s little face peered at her through the window; she knew Ned was in there but he didn’t come to look. He was blind and deaf to her existence: he might as well be dead. The body in the morgue had been the metaphor: this dream, this vision, was the reality. Jenny was going about her business in her, Alexandra’s, home; at her table with her, Alexandra’s, erstwhile friends; preparing food, opening wine, pouring tea, victorious. Hamish would be a regular guest, she could foresee it. She was the ghost, they were living flesh and blood. She was the one who haunted her own home; the one Diamond saw, why Diamond crept under the table. Alexandra pushed and pushed on the door, in her vision; and then Ned pushed too. He wasn’t on the inside, he never had been, he was on the outside with her, Alexandra, with her and Diamond, and against Jenny. Ned recognised Alexandra again. He had made a dreadful mistake. She, Alexandra, must put it right. She had not been to the funeral; that ceremony was trivial. There must be a proper funeral pyre. He demanded it.
The door opened suddenly; Alexandra and Abbie went in. There was no Jenny, just the familiar hall, and the dining room where Ned had not died, and the bright rugs on the polished floor, and an instant warmth, once out of the wet, cool wind: and a stillness, an emptiness. Everything was very quiet: the house waited for a decision from its keeper. Even the ghosts were still, acquiescent. What was going to be must happen.
“So still, out of the wind!” said Abbie, sensing something, but not sure what. Diamond went to lie beneath the kitchen table.
Jenny Linden had circled the borders and massed her forces, and pounced, and now, cried “mine!” but it wasn’t so. Couldn’t be. Best wishes, Ned! I hope you had a happy time. I hope you made her glow. Life’s short.
“You okay?” asked Abbie.
She was making tea in the kitchen.
“Fine,” said Alexandra. “It’s so grim out there,” she said. “I’ll just light a little fire to cheer ourselves up.”
“Good idea,” said Abbie.
The house insurance was in both their names: Ned’s and hers. The payments came out of Ned’s bank account, into which she, Alexandra, paid money. Ned paid the bills, looked after the paperwork of the household, in a desultory fashion. She supposed he had renewed the policy. It did not matter. Money was not the point.
Alexandra went out to fetch firelighters and logs from the Barn. Twigs crackled beneath her feet. Everything was bone dry. The storm might carry with it the first signs of moisture for weeks, but the rain had not begun in earnest. Just a heavy drop or so, wind carried, quickly evaporating. She stood on the path and watched the wind whip away the beanpole pyramids Ned had built: the bean plants writhed and stretched and reached into the air before falling. They seemed alive.
Alexandra went back into the house with her basket of logs, and lugged them not into the living room, but into the dining room. Hamish, in his search for documents, the better to incriminate her, Alexandra, the better to destroy her, had littered the grate in here with piles of old envelopes, papers, the recorded trash of the past. Alexandra saw an old school report of her own, despised and discarded by Hamish, and left it where it lay. Why bother? Who wanted anything of so sorry a past, so much of it based upon vanity and indecision? The shelf above the grate was all but hidden by cards—postcards from friends, invitations for Private Views, antique fairs, First Nights, PR junkets, Sascha’s drawings. More of Sascha’s drawings Blu-Tacked casually to the wall above, edges curling: just a little leap across for a flame, and on to the parched curtains; another leap and the flame would be over to bookcases: and the hundreds of art cards collected over years, propped up against books. “Where’s our book on early porcelain, Ned?” “Behind the Picasso, you know, the geometric lady.” “Where’s the biographical encyclopedia, Alexandra?” “Behind the Monet, you know, those dozy water lilies, I think. Somewhere near van Gogh’s boots.”
The crows—or was it jackdaws?—built their nests in the dining room chimney. For some reason they scorned the chimney that led up from the living room. Sweep the chimney as you would, the new vacuum method of chimney-sweeping never quite got rid of the twigs. Masses of them. They stuck and clung in the crevices of the sooty bricks. You’d have to send children up, said Ned, if you wanted this chimney really swept. Sometimes a collection of tangled sticks would fall through into the grate, with a bang and a great puff of dust, soot and ancient bird shit. Each single twig in its time had been lovingly carried by some trusting bird to an entirely inappropriate nesting place. Dangerous for fledglings. Alexandra and Ned never lit the fire in the dining room, for the young birds’ sake. Who could tell what family dramas went on up there? But it was September. The young ones should all have flown the nest by now. Dave Linden and Jenny would convert, modernise, remove fireplaces and chimneys altogether. Fireplaces mean dust, and fire. Alexandra arranged paper, firelighter, twigs and logs in the grate, making a neat pyramid, decorous, but perhaps a little large for its iron nest. She applied a match to the paper.
“Sorry,” she said, to anyone or anything which was listening, and felt the house prepare itself.
“That’ll soon warm us up!” she called out to Abbie, and went into the kitchen for tea. Abbie settled in to tell Alexandra more about the funeral. Abbie was conscious of the frozen peas she had bought thawing in the back of her car, but said nothing about them. She was doing her best for her friend, who smiled a lot but seemed distracted.
Soon Alexandra heard a roaring noise coming from the dining room.
A whoosh, an echo, and a steady, windy, throaty noise continuing after.
“Listen to the wind,” she said. “How it’s getting up.”
“So it is,” said Abbie. “Howling round the chimneys.”
“Abbie,” said Alexandra, “could we leave the house right now? Drive over to your place? Hamish might come back and I really don’t want to see him. I couldn’t face it! Or even Jenny Linden, to say how we can all be friends, or her husband Dave to marvel at how I ever got by in this kitchen.”
“Okay,” said Abbie, “if you’re sure you don’t want to finish your tea. It seems a waste to me.”
“I want to go now,” said Alexandra. “And it’s got so peculiar in here. Look how Diamond’s trembling.”
“Old houses always move and shift,” said Abbie, “and make strange noises. You’ve got so much imagination, when it comes to things that don’t matter.”
But Abbie got up from her chair and they left the kitchen together, and Alexandra went into the dining room for a moment as they left, careful to stay between Abbie and any sight of what was happening to the far wall.
“Fire okay?” asked Abbie as they went out of the back door. Diamond shot out ahead of them.
“Fire’s fine,” said Alexandra. “I threw an extra log on.” And so she had.
Sparks hurled themselves into the blue-black sky from the dining room chimney. Spitter-spat of raindrops. Fire and rain must fight it out. Abbie didn’t look up to see them. The wind howled. Abbie and Alexandra had to lean into it to get to the car. The rain was fitful. They hardly got wet.