Death Trance

Two

Walter Bedford sat behind his wide leather-topped desk, his face half-obscured by his green-shaded lamp, and said, 'I'm taking her mother away next month. A few weeks in Bermuda, maybe, something to settle her mind, help her to come to terms with it. I should have taken her away earlier, I guess; but, you know, what with old Mr Bibber so sick…'

'I'm sorry she's taken it so badly,' I said. 'If there's anything you want me to do…'

Mr Bedford shook his head. To both himself and his wife Constance, Jane's death had been the fiercest tragedy of their whole lives; even fiercer in some ways than losing their only other child, Jane's brother Philip, at the age of five, of polio. Mr Bedford had told me that he felt when Jane died that he was cursed by God. His wife felt even more bitter, and considered that the agent of the curse was me.

Although one of Mr Bedford's younger partners in the Salem law firm of Bedford & Bibber had offered to execute Jane's will, and to arrange for her funeral, he had insisted on handling all the details himself, with a kind of agonized relish. I understood why. Jane had been such a vivid light in all of our lives that it was difficult to let her go; and harder still to think that the day would one day pass when we didn't think about her, even once.

She had been buried at the Waterside Cemetery, in Granitehead, on a sharp February afternoon, aged 28, sharing her coffin with our unborn child, and her headstone read 'Point me out the way to any one particular beauteous star.'

Mrs Bedford had refused even to look at me throughout the ceremony. I think that in her eyes I was worse than a murderer. I hadn't even had the civility to kill Jane in person, with my bare hands. Instead, I had allowed fate to do my dirty work for me. Fate had been my hired assassin.

I had met Jane by accident; at a foxhunt, of all places, near Greenwood in South Carolina, less than two years before, although now it seemed like 20. My presence at the hunt had been compulsory: it was being run across the 1200-acre estate of one of my employer's most influential clients; whereas Jane was there simply because a gushing girlfriend from Wellesley College had invited her to come for the excitement of being 'blooded.' There was no blood, the foxes escaped. But afterwards, in the quiet upstairs gallery of the elegant colonial house, we sat in extraordinary Italian armchairs and drank champagne, and fell in love. Jane quoted Keats to me, and that was why Keats was quoted on her headstone after she was dead.

'I saw pale kings and princes too, pale warriors, death-pale were they all; Who cry'd — "La belle Dame sans merci hath thee in thrall!" '

Ostensibly, we had nothing in common, Jane and I: neither style nor education nor mutual friends. I had been born and raised in St Louis, Missouri, the son of a shoe-store owner, Trenton's Heel-&-Toe, and although my father had done everything he could to give me a superior schooling — 'no son of mine is going to spend the rest of his life looking at the bottom of other people's feet' — I was an irredeemable mid-Westerner. Speak to me of Chillicothe, Columbia, and Sioux Falls; those are the names that move me. I studied business at Washington University, and when I was 24 I found myself a sales job with MidWestern Chemical Bonding, of Ferguson.

I was a 31-year-old business executive who wore gray suits and dark socks and carried undogeared copies of Fortune in my personalized leather briefcase. Jane, on the other hand, was the only daughter of a venerable but not-so-wealthy family from Salem, Massachusetts, the only daughter and now the only child; brought up in prettiness and grace and old-fashioned ways, but sophisticated, too. What you might describe as the local Vivien Leigh. She liked antique furniture and American primitive paintings and hand-sewn quilts, but she had no time for any sewing of her own, and she very rarely wore any underwear, and whenever she went out into the garden she put on high-heeled French slippers, and sank into the dirt alongside the curly kale.

'Damn it, I should have been a good country wife,' she always used to tell me, when her bread lay doggedly unrisen in its tin; or her marmalade turned to tar. 'But somehow I just don't have that edge.'

She tried on New Year's Eve to make Hopping John, a dish of bacon and black-eyed peas traditional in the South, but it turned out like red rubber gloves and scorched glue, and when she took the lid off the casserole we laughed until we were weak, and I guess that's what really close marriages are all about. But she said afterwards, as we lay in bed, 'The legend is, if you don't serve Hopping John on New Year's Day, you'll have a year's bad luck.'

She wasn't as hopeless as Honey, in the country-and-western song, who wrecked the car and cried when the snow melted, but I expect you can understand why 'Honey' wasn't one of those songs I ever wanted to hear. When it comes to people we've loved, and lost, all of us have an infinite capacity for deep-down slush.

It all ended on Mystic River Bridge, in late January, in blinding snow when she was driving home to Granitehead after visiting her parents' house in Dedham, and slowed up for the tollbooth, a young dark-haired lady six months pregnant, in a yellow fastback Mustang II; and the airbrakes failed on a Kenworth truck that was following behind her, too close. She was forced through the steering-wheel, baby and all, by 17 tons of truck and a full load of steel piping for the new sewage project up at Gloucester.

They called me up and I said, 'Hel-Io' really brightly, and then they told me that Jane was dead and that was the end of it.

It was for Jane, less than a year before, that I had handed in my notice at MidWestern Chemical Bonding, and moved to Granitehead. She wanted tranquility, she had told me, a life of tranquility, in old country, old surroundings. She wanted children, and happy Christmases, and the kind of gentle Bing Crosby happiness that modern urban Americans had forgotten about. I argued that I was upwardly motivated, that I needed peer acclaim, and dollars, and a Jacuzzi, and garage doors that recognized my voice. She said, 'You're kidding, John. What do you want to tie yourself down with all of that stuff for?' and kissed my forehead, although it seemed to me that when we moved out to Granitehead we acquired more material possessions in the way of clocks and bureaux and rocking-chairs than I'd ever dreamed possible or even desirable. I felt within me, too, a kind of deep-rooted panic at the prospect of not earning more money this year than I had the year before.

When I handed in my notice I was treated as if I had suddenly declared myself to be a closet homosexual. The president read my letter, re-read it, and actually turned it upside-down, to see if it read any different that way. Then he said, 'John, I'm going to accept your resignation, but I'm going to take the liberty of quoting to you from Horace. Caelum non anitnum mutant qui tram mare cur-runt. They change their skies but not their souls, those who travel across the seas.'

'Yes, Mr Kendrick,' I said flatly, and drove home to our rented house in Ferguson and finished the best part of a bottle of Chivas Regal before Jane came home.

'You resigned,' she said, when she came in, her arms full of parcels that already we couldn't afford.

'I'm home, and I'm drunk, so I must have done,' I told her.

Within six weeks, we had moved to Granitehead, within a half-hour's driving-distance of Jane's parents; and as summer blossomed we bought Quaker Lane Cottage, on the north-west shore of Granitehead peninsula. The previous owner had grown tired of the wind, the real-estate agent told us; tired of the freezing winters, tired of the Granitehead clams, and had already moved south to a condominium in Fort Lauderdale.

Two weeks later, when the cottage was still in chaos and my bank account was beginning to look as if it had suffered a regular spraying with Agent Orange, we took a lease on a shopfront property right in the centre of Old Granitehead Village, overlooking the square in which Granitehead's only witch had been hung up by her heels and burned, in 1691; and in which in 1775 a detail of British redcoats had shot and killed three Massachusetts fishermen. We called the shop Trenton's Marine Antiques (although Jane's mother had coldly suggested Knautical Knick-Knacks) and we opened it with pride and plenty of ivy-green paint. I wasn't at all confident that we could last very long, selling nothing but windlasses and demi-culverins and clocks made out of flagstaff buttons; but Jane had laughed and said that everybody adored marine antiques, especially people who had never been to sea, and that we'd be rich.

Well — we weren't rich, but we made enough to keep us in logs for the fire, and clam chowder, and Paul Masson red, and to pay the mortgage, and I guess that was all; Jane really wanted. She wanted babies, too, of course, but babies are free; at least until they're born.

In the few short months that Jane and I lived and worked together in Granitehead, I made some of the most important discoveries of my whole life. I discovered, first of all, what love could really be; and it became clear to me that I had never known before. I discovered what loyalty could mean, and self-respect. I also learned tolerance. While Jane's father treated me as if I were some anonymous junior clerk he was obliged to amuse at the j office Christmas party, and occasionally, though with obvious reluctance, would offer me some of his 1926 brandy, Jane's mother would actually shudder whenever I came into the room, and pull faces whenever I spoke in my distinctive St. Louis accent, and treat me with an ice-cold politeness that was even more chilling than bare hostility. She would do anything rather than talk to me directly. 'Would he like a cup of tea?' she would ask Jane, right in front of me; but Jane would retaliate by saying, 'I don't know. Ask him. I'm not psychic.'

I wasn't Harvard, you see; I wasn't Hyannisport or Back Bay; or even Kernwood Country Club. They blamed me while Jane was alive for ruining her social prospects; and when she was dead they blamed me for killing her. They didn't blame the truck-driver, who might have swerved; or the mechanic who should have checked the truck's servo-lines, and probably hadn't. They blamed only me.

As if, God help me, I didn't blame myself.

Mr Bedford said, 'I've dealt with all of the tax difficulties now. I've filed form 1040; and claimed for the medical attention that Jane received in hospital, even though of course it was pointless. I'll, er, pass on your accounts to Mr Rosner from now on, if that's agreeable to you.'

I nodded. The Bedford family obviously wanted to wash their hands of me as soon as possible, without appearing to be too boorish, or indecently hasty.

There's one more small matter,' said Mr Bedford. 'Mrs Bedford thought that you might consider it a suitably sentimental gesture to allow her to keep Jane's diamond-and-pearl necklace.'

The request clearly caused Mr Bedford extreme embarrassment; but it was also clear that he did not dare to return home without having asked me. He drummed his fingertips on his desk, and suddenly looked away, as if somebody else had mentioned the necklace, and not him at all.

'Considering the necklace's value…' he put in, abstractedly.

'Jane gave me to understand that it's a family heirloom,' I said, in the gentlest voice I could manage.

'Well, yes it is. Goes back nearly a hundred-and-fifty years. Always passed from one Bedford wife to the next.

But, then, since Jane didn't have any children to pass it on to…'

'And since, after all, she was a Trenton…' I added, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt.

'Well,' said Mr Bedford, uncomfortably. He cleared his throat with a noise like a jackhammer. He clearly couldn't think of anything else to say.

'All right, then,' I said. 'Whatever makes the Bedfords happy.'

'I'm obliged,' said Mr Bedford. I stood up. 'Is there anything else I have to sign?' 'No. No, thank you, John. It's all taken care of.' He stood up himself. 'I want you to know that if we can help in any way at all… Well, you only have to call me.'

I lowered my head. I suppose it was wrong to feel so antagonistic towards the Bedfords. I might have lost my wife of less than a year and my unborn child; but they had lost their only surviving daughter. Who else could we accuse for such evil luck, but God, and each other?

Mr Bedford and I shook hands like opposing generals after the signing of an unpopular armistice. I was just turning to leave, however, when I distinctly heard a woman's voice say, in the most natural of tones, 'John?'

I turned around, my scalp fizzing with fright, and stared at Mr Bedford. Mr Bedford stared back at me. 'Yes?' he queried. Then he frowned, and said, 'Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost.'

I raised my hand, listening, concentrating. 'Did you hear something?' I asked him. 'A voice? Somebody saying "John?" '

'A voice?' asked Mr Bedford.

I hesitated, but there was nothing else to be heard except the traffic outside Mr Bedford's office window, and the rumbling of typewriters in nearby rooms. 'No,' I said at last. 'I must have been imagining things.'

'You're all right? You don't want to see Dr Rosen again?'

'No, of course not. I mean, no thank you. I'm fine.'

'You're sure? You don't look very well. I thought you didn't look too well when you came in here this morning.'

'Sleepless night,' I told him.

He rested his hand on my back not so much as if he wanted to reassure me that we would all get over our grief, given time; but as if he temporarily needed somewhere to rest his hand.

'Mrs Bedford will be very appreciative about the necklace,' he told me.