All Things Undying

THIRTEEN

‘An elderly driver caused a spectacle when his vehicle crashed into an opticians. The man, aged 89, had only just started his automatic car when it ploughed into the front of Sussex Eyecare in Broad Street, Seaford. Daeron McGee, the owner of the opticians, said: “I was round the corner… and came back to see a car in my front window. The driver seems to be OK… He said he had a dizzy turn and hit the accelerator instead of the brake. Thankfully there was nobody in his way but I’ve got an entire range of Oakleys and Ray Bans which have been demolished.”’‘Elderly Driver Creates Spectacle At Seaford Opticians’, Brighton News, 27 June 2009

Wednesday morning dawned dark and drear, with rain drizzling from a leaden sky. An earlier phone call to Alison had produced nothing but an invitation to leave a message on her call minder, so after a quick breakfast, I zipped myself up in a slicker, grabbed an umbrella and headed up Waterpool Road to her house.

The way Alison had been carrying on the previous day, I expected to find the shades drawn, a black wreath on the door, and have my knock answered by a lugubrious butler droning, ‘I’m sorry, Madam, but Madam is indisposed.’

Imagine my surprise, then, when Alison herself opened the door almost immediately, dressed in neat jeans and an Aran pullover, hair brushed until it shone, and make-up so expertly applied that it hardly showed. She held an open lipstick in her hand; I’d apparently interrupted her in the act of applying it while peering into the mirror in the tiny foyer.

‘Come in, Hannah! Good to see you.’ She stepped aside so I could get out of the rain. ‘I’m just heading out, I’m afraid. Dad called this morning all at sixes and sevens. He’s got some Hooray Henries coming all the way from Manchester for a viewing, and the house is a tip.’ She opened a handbag that lay on the table under the mirror and tossed her lipstick in. ‘But then, what else is new?’

‘I just stopped by to see how you’re doing. I called first, but got the machine.’

‘Sorry! I unplugged the phone yesterday and forgot to plug it back in.’ She reached for a raincoat that hung on a hook behind the door. ‘Almost wish I hadn’t. Dad’s call came in so fast after I plugged it back in that he must have had me on speed dial.’

‘Want company?’

‘That would be super!’

Three pairs of boots were lined up along the wall under the coat rack. Alison reached down and handed me a bright green pair. ‘You’ll need some wellies,’ she said. ‘It’s been raining since midnight and the lane is going to be a mucky mess.’

I held the bottom of one of the wellies up against my shoe. ‘It should fit.’

‘They’re Kitty’s,’ she said, referring to her daughter. ‘I’ve been nagging her to come and pick them up, but now I’m glad she didn’t.’

I sat down on the third step of the staircase that led up to the first floor, pulled on the wellies, turning my foot this way and that, admiring the fit. ‘These will do nicely.’

Alison slipped her feet into her own boots, grabbed an umbrella out of the stand and waved it in the air like a baton. ‘Why couldn’t those people come on a sunny day! Sod’s law, I suppose. Ready?’

‘As I’ll ever be.’

The twenty-minute drive to Three Trees Farm took us nearly forty. Alison had not yet replaced her Micra, so we were riding in Jon’s old but still serviceable Peugeot. Even with the windshield wipers set to frantic, visibility was so poor that Alison hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it tightly with both hands, focusing her attention to the road. When we reached the relatively straight stretch on the outskirts of Merrifield and Alison relaxed her grip on the wheel, I figured the time had come. ‘Can I ask you something, Alison?’

‘What?’

‘Kitty. Is she yours, or is she Jon’s by his first marriage?’

Alison took her eyes off the road long enough to flash me a wan grin. ‘I think you can do the math on that, Hannah.’

‘She’s twenty-one, and you and Jon have been married for… how long? Fifteen years?’

‘Bingo.’

‘So she’s Beth’s daughter?’

Alison bit her lower lip, concentrating as she guided the car through a pool of water that had accumulated on the road. ‘Yes.’

I’ve got a fairly tough skin, but the fact that Alison hadn’t shared that important part of her personal history with me really stung. But I decided there was no profit in giving Alison a hard time about it. I was sure she had her reasons, and with time and a little gentle prodding, I’d find out what they were.

‘It never occurred to me that Kitty wasn’t your biological daughter,’ I said. ‘She looks like you for one thing. Same coppery hair, same green eyes.’

‘She favors Beth,’ Alison said wistfully. After a beat she added, ‘I’ve always wondered if that wasn’t why Jon was attracted to me in the first place.’

Alison had the heater going full blast to keep the windscreen defogged, so I adjusted the dashboard air vent to blow upward and unbuttoned my slicker. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever asked you, but where did you and Jon meet?’

Next to me, I saw her smile. ‘In a tiny village in Wiltshire. I’d gone there with a friend on bank holiday weekend to attend the Edington Music Festival. I ran into Jon outside the tea hut.’

‘I didn’t know you and Jon were into classical music.’

She shook her head so emphatically that her teardrop earrings bounced against her neck. ‘You’re thinking of the Three Choirs Music Festival. Edington’s not a series of classical concerts like that. It’s music within the liturgy.’ She smiled at me again. ‘Basically, you go to church four times a day for a week. Very smells and bells.’

‘So, the choir is singing masses? Sounds divine.’

‘Not choir. Choirs. It’s August and most of the choirs in England are on hiatus, so Edington is able to attract choristers from all over the country. There’s a choir of men and boys, a mixed group called the Consort – counter-tenors and all! – and the Schola. They’re my favorite.’ She was grinning hugely. ‘Twelve guys singing Gregorian chant by candlelight. To. Die. For.’

‘Sounds like you and Jon hit it off right away.’

‘He was so depressed, Hannah. He’d just lost Beth, and Kitty was only six. He told me later that he hoped the music would bring him closer to God, help fill the vast emptiness inside him.’ Alison glanced into the rear-view mirror, tapped the brakes, then turned left into a narrow country lane. ‘We were both a little surprised at how quickly it seemed to happen. One minute we’re drinking instant coffee in a sunny churchyard, the next minute we’re tearing at each other’s clothes and falling into bed at the Travelodge near the Little Chef at Warminster.’

‘How come you never told me about this?’

‘I guess we were both a little embarrassed about moving in together so soon after Beth’s disappearance.’ Alison braked hard as a pheasant flapped its way out of the hedgerow, narrowly missing the windscreen. As the car sat idling on the lane, she faced me and said, ‘It sounds ghoulish, I know, but God, I wish they’d found her body!’ She shifted the car into park. ‘The first year we were together, I lived every day in fear that Beth would come back. Then what would I do? “Hello, Jon, I’m back. You can go away now, Alison.”’ She made a brushing, run-along-now motion with her hand.

‘At dinner that night, when Beth tried to come through? I rejoiced, Hannah! Rejoiced! Because that meant…’

‘She was really dead.’ I finished the sentence for her.

‘Yes! God forgive me, but I was happy about that. Jon was crazy about Beth, Hannah. When we first met, he talked about her constantly. I always felt I could never measure up. You always said that I had impeccable taste in decorating, but it was all Beth. Jon didn’t want me to change anything, at least not at first. Kitty’s bedroom was a shrine to Beth. Photographs, Beth’s hairbrush, her little bottle of Chanel Number Five. Every time I went in to clean… well, it broke my heart. All that moved out with Kitty when she married, thank goodness, but I know that Jon kept a picture of Beth in his wallet for the longest time.’

I wondered if that was the same picture of Beth that had been published in all the newspapers. If so, I thought Alison’s resemblance to Beth was superficial, more like a second cousin than a sister, but I didn’t say so.

Next to me, Alison leaned back against the headrest. ‘Maybe if we’d been able to have children of our own…’ She let the sentence die.

I didn’t know what the laws were in Britain, but in the United States, one had to wait seven years before a missing person could be declared officially dead. Unless Jon had divorced Beth for ‘desertion,’ or petitioned the court to have her declared dead, I imagined he and Alison would have had to wait quite a while before they could legally marry.

‘But, after a while, when it must have been clear that Beth was never coming back?’

‘Oh, I wanted to marry and have babies of my own, but it wasn’t to be. It wasn’t Jon’s problem, obviously, since he’d already had Kitty.’

‘Does the National Health cover fertility treatments?’ I asked.

‘They do now,’ she explained, ‘but the waiting list can be very long. Most couples opt for private treatment, but that can be very expensive.’ She turned her face toward me and smiled wanly. ‘And we could never be one hundred per cent certain about Beth, could we?’

A stray thought wafted into my head, took root, and blossomed. Before Alison could put the car into drive and begin moving forward, I touched her hand where it rested on the gear lever, and said, ‘Alison. You and Jon never married, did you?’

I watched as a blush of embarrassment turned Alison’s cheeks from white to pink. ‘Please, Hannah. Don’t tell my father! It would kill him.’

‘Now why would I do that?’

‘Kitty doesn’t know, either.’

‘Jeeze, Alison!’

‘I know, I know. We’ve meant to tell her, of course. I’ve started to many times, but the time just never seemed to be right. We just let everyone assume we’d eloped to Gretna Green or somewhere, like that silly Bennett girl in Pride and Prejudice.’

‘Seems to me that the right time would be for you to turn this car around, drive back to Dartmouth, brew up some tea and have a little chat with your daughter.’

Alison bit her lower lip, nodded. ‘You’re right, of course, but it’ll have to wait until Jon gets back from Cowes. This is something we need to do together.’ As she accelerated down the lane, she added, ‘Besides, I have to take care of this business with my father right now.’

‘If it isn’t one thing, it’s another,’ I said as the Peugeot slid around a curve.

‘Shit!’ Alison wrenched the steering wheel right, then left, finally regaining control of the vehicle. ‘That low spot is always a bloody mess!’

‘Are we there yet?’ I sing-songed, channeling my four-year-old grandson.

‘Yes, sweetheart. And if you’re especially good, Mummy will give you a lolly.’

Alison ducked her head and pointed left through the windscreen. ‘See that stone farmhouse at the crest of the hill? That’s Dad’s. The property starts right… about… here. See where the fence line changes?’

I did. In contrast to barbed wire draped almost casually from wooden post to wooden post, Three Trees Farm was enclosed by a neat stone wall. We followed the wall for about a quarter of a mile, then turned into an even narrower lane, beginning a steep, winding ascent to the farm proper. I had the farmhouse in view the whole time, first to my left, then to my right. Behind the house was a long, low barn built of the same honey-colored stone as the house and roofed with thatch. Stephen Bailey’s Prius was parked next to the barn. I was wondering where the cows were when Alison pointed them out, a patchwork of brown and white, huddled under a tree in the pasture, mud coating their legs up to their hocks. ‘Meet Graceless, Aimless, Pointless and Feckless,’ Alison said with a grin. ‘Daddy named them after the cows in Cold Comfort Farm.’

We had passed through a gateway marked by two stone pillars and a hand-painted sign that said Three Trees Farm when Alison muttered, ‘What the hell?’ She braked suddenly and I instantly wrenched my gaze from the poor, rain-soaked cows to whatever had attracted her attention. ‘What is that silly man doing?’

As we watched, Alison’s father climbed into the driver’s seat of the Prius. After a few seconds, the car began rolling down the hill in our direction. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake! Has he forgotten we’re coming?’ Alison accelerated, causing the Peugeot to fishtail on the muddy track, so she cut back to a crawl.

‘Take it easy,’ I said reasonably. ‘He has to come past us. We can always wave him down.’

The Prius was still more than a quarter of a mile away when it seemed to pick up speed. ‘What the bloody hell is he doing?’ Alison shouted. ‘Dad!’

As we watched in horror, her father’s vehicle slowed, fishtailed, slowed again, then shot forward like a racehorse out of the gates, barreling down the hill toward us at high speed.

‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, what do I do?’ Alison whimpered, seemingly paralysed at the wheel.

I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything, Stephen Bailey sailed by us, his face set and grim. He slid on to the verge, sideswiped one of the pillars, and in almost balletic slow motion, brought his brand new Prius to a slow, grinding halt against the trunk of a tree that grew out of the hedgerow.

Alison and I were out of the car and at the scene in seconds. ‘Dad, Dad!’ Alison screamed as she wrenched the driver’s side door open.

‘I’m fine,’ the old man said. ‘Don’t fuss, Alison.’

He didn’t look fine to me. Although the air bags had deployed on impact and now lolled out of the glove box and a flap in the center of the steering wheel like limp tongues, Bailey had a small cut on his chin, and his right thumb was twisted back at an angle Mother Nature never intended. While Alison helped her father out of the car, I fetched the Peugeot and backed it down the road, parking it opposite the damaged Prius. Holding his arm, Alison guided her father to the back seat and forced him to sit down.

Alison smoothed her father’s hair back from his forehead so she could examine him for injuries more closely. ‘You’ll live, but I think that chin will need a couple of stitches.’

Bailey batted his daughter’s hand away. ‘Don’t fuss, daughter.’

Undaunted, Alison reached into her handbag, pulled a clean tissue out of a pack, licked a corner of it and used it to dab some of the blood off her father’s forehead. Seemingly satisfied that he was in no imminent danger, her tone changed from solicitation to exasperation. ‘Dad, where on earth were you going?’

‘I started to do the washing-up, but we were out of Fairy Liquid.’

‘Why didn’t you call me, then? I could have brought you some.’

‘I didn’t want to trouble you.’

Alison stared up at the heavens as if praying for patience. I could almost see the wheels turning. As if asking me to come all the way out here today wasn’t already trouble enough? ‘What happened?’ she said instead. ‘We saw you start down the hill, but all of a sudden you were coming at us like a bat out of hell.’

Cradling his broken thumb in one hand, Bailey winced. ‘That damn cat that’s been hanging around the barn ran across the lane, and I went to hit the brake, but I think I got the accelerator instead.’

Alison pulled her cell phone out of her handbag. ‘I’m going to take you to the hospital, but first, I’m going to call the AA and have them come for the car.’

‘No!’ Bailey ordered. ‘Leave it. Tom’ll fetch it with the tractor.’

‘You pay for breakdown coverage, you old fool. You should use it.’

‘Tom’ll haul it up to the barn so I can think about it. Just had some body work done, remember. If I file another claim, I’ll have a rise in premium. Can’t afford that. Not at my age.’

Alison shrugged, capitulating. ‘It’s your car, so you can do what you bloody well want with it, you old fool.’

‘Who’s Tom?’ I asked as Alison fastened the seatbelt around her father and prepared for the long drive to Dartmouth Hospital.

‘He’s one of the lads who helps with the chores. Works part-time at a body shop in Plymouth, so Dad probably figures Tom can pop the airbags back in, pound out the dents, and repaint for pence on the pound.’

‘What will I do about the people who are coming to see the house?’ Alison’s father said wearily.

Alison raised both eyebrows and shot me a pleading look.

I took the hint. ‘Don’t worry about that, Mr Bailey. I’ll stay at the house until you and Alison get back. What time are you expecting the estate agent?’

‘Half two.’

‘No problem. I’ll wait. Is Tom working today?’

‘He’ll be in the barn.’

‘And I’ll see to it that Tom takes care of the car, then.’

While Alison and her father were at the hospital, and after speaking with Tom, I moved through the house like a whirlwind. Tossed two sweat-stained T-shirts, a pair of grimy khakis and half a dozen mismatched socks into the washing machine and slammed the door closed. Threw two pairs of shoes and some slippers into the bottom of a wardrobe. Made the bed. Washed, dried and put away a sinkful of dishes using detergent from a half bottle of Fairy Liquid I found while rummaging under the kitchen sink. Bailey hadn’t been out of it after all.

As I stood at the sink holding the bottle of Fairy Liquid in one hand and a dishtowel in the other, I watched Tom, perched high in the driver’s seat of his tractor, tow Stephen Bailey’s damaged car past the kitchen window. I felt a chill, not entirely explained by the blast of air conditioning blowing on the back of my neck from the small window unit over the kitchen table. Scrapes and scratches cut a wide swath along the entire passenger side of the Prius, and the left front fender was curved around the tire. If Alison’s father had staged the accident in an attempt to cover up damage to his vehicle from a hit and run, he couldn’t have done a better job of it.

But what possible motive could he have had to mow Susan Parker down?

I shrugged, draped the dishtowel over the oven door handle to dry, and moved on to the farmhouse’s single bathroom. Old folks were mistaking accelerator pedals for brakes every day of the week, I reasoned as I swished a rag around the rim of the bathroom sink. Add eighty-six-year-old Stephen Bailey to that statistic. I decided that cleaning the toilet was way above and beyond the call of duty, so I closed the lid on the offending rust stains and hoped for the best. Then I sat down to watch TV and wait.

By the time Alison returned with her father a few minutes after four, a butterfly bandage on his chin and his hand in a splint, I’d learned a whole lot about converting a garage into a granny annexe, but not a single estate agent or Hooray Henry from Manchester or anywhere had showed up expecting a tour of Three Trees Farm.