Even Money

20

At three o’clock on Friday afternoon I sat alone in the chapel of Slough Crematorium as my father’s bare coffin was carried past me by four men from the funeral home and placed on the curtain-skirted catafalque at the front.

A clergyman in a white surplice over a black cassock came in and stood behind the lectern.

“Are you the son?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Are we waiting for anyone else?”

“No,” I said.

“Do you wish to say anything at any point?” he asked me.

“No,” I said again.

“Right, then. We’ll get started.”

The door at the back of the chapel opened with a squeak. I turned around. Detective Sergeant Murray came in and sat down two pews behind me. I nodded to him, and he responded in the same manner. I turned back to the minister, who then began.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

The clergyman droned on, rushing through the funeral rite as laid down in the Book of Common Prayer.

I didn’t really listen to the words.

Instead, I sat and stared at the simple wooden coffin and tried hard to remember what the man inside it looked like. I had seen him alive only briefly, for hardly more than an hour, yet his reappearance had dominated my life for the past two and a half weeks in a way it hadn’t done for the previous thirty-seven years.

It was difficult to describe my full feelings, but anger was uppermost amongst them. Anger that he had now gone forever and anger that he had been here at all.

Undeniably, he was my father. The DNA had proved that. But it didn’t feel like he had anything to do with me. But he, and his actions, had certainly been integral to the direction of my life, who I was and what I would become.

I wished I’d had longer to talk with him on the day he’d died, and the chance to talk to him again, even if it was to rant and rave at his conduct or to gather answers to so many unanswered questions: why did he kill my mother? why did he run away? why didn’t he take me with him? how could he have deserted me for so long? and, in particular, why did he come back?

I thought about his daughters, my sisters, so far away in Australia, who probably didn’t even know their father was dead. Should I say a prayer on their behalf?

The minister was nearing the end.

“In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Peter, and we commit his body to the elements, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him, and keep him, and give him eternal peace. Amen.”

As he was saying the last few words, the minister pushed a button on the lectern, and I watched intently as my father’s coffin slowly disappeared from sight behind long red curtains that closed silently around it.

The whole funeral had taken precisely nine minutes. The cremation would take a little longer. And then that would be that. My father’s earthly body would exist no more.

If only his influence could be so easily and quickly eliminated.

“Lovely service,” I said to the minister on my way out. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure,” he said, shaking my hand.

Everyone always says it’s been a lovely service at a funeral, I thought, even if it hadn’t. It was neither the time nor the place to criticize, however bad things had been. In this case, the service had been functional. And that was enough.

“Thank you for coming,” I said to Detective Sergeant Murray as we stood together outside afterwards.

“Chief Inspector Llewellyn apologizes for not being here himself,” he said.

“I hadn’t expected him to come,” I said. I hadn’t, in fact, expected anyone to be here, and especially not the detective chief inspector, and not least because I hadn’t told a soul about the arrangements.

“The coroner’s office let us know,” he said. I nodded. “The police always try to go to murder victims’ funerals if we can.”

“Just in case the killer turns up?” I asked.

“It has been known,” he said, smiling.

“No chance today,” I said. “Not without being noticed anyway.”

“No,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Not much of a crowd to hide among at this one.”

“How are things on the detective front?” I said. “Any suspects yet?”

“Only you,” he said, but he said it with another smile. “My chief really doesn’t like you, does he?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The feeling’s mutual.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

“Has my e-fit been of any use?” I asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it has,” he said. “It’s been shown to some of the other witnesses, and they now generally tend to agree with you. So yours has now taken on the mantle as being the most accurate.”

I was pretty sure that shifty-eyed Kipper wouldn’t have been best pleased by that.

“But I haven’t seen it reproduced in any of the newspapers,” I said. “Or on the television.”

“It’s been in the Bracknell and Ascot Times, and in the Windsor and Eton Express,” he said. “But no one has yet come forward to say they recognize him.”

“Perhaps it would have been better to have put it in the Melbourne papers,” I said. “Or at least in the Racing Post.”

“Now, that’s a thought,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go and recommend it to the chief inspector.”

And, with that, the detective sergeant made his apologies and departed.

That just left me and the funeral director, who had been hovering to one side.

“Was everything in order, Mr. Talbot?” he asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “It was fine.”

“Good,” he said. “And what would you like done with the ashes?”

“What are the choices?” I asked.

“You can have them, if you want,” he said. “They will be ready for collection tomorrow. Or we can collect them for you and hold them at our office, if you like. We’ll be coming here anyway. Funerals take place on Saturdays.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“They can be scattered here, in the Garden of Remembrance, if you would prefer,” he said. “That way, you wouldn’t need to provide for a container.”

“Container?” I asked.

“If you wanted to take the ashes away, you would have to provide or pay for a container. Perhaps a box or an urn.”

“Oh,” I said. “No. Just have them scattered here, then. I don’t want them.”

“Right,” he said. “That will be all, then. I’ll send you an itemized receipt in due course.”

“Thank you,” I said. “That will be fine.”

He nodded to me, it was almost a bow, and then he walked quickly across to his car and drove away. I wondered if funeral directors laughed more at home than other people to make up for the solemnness of their work or whether they are so conditioned to having a sad disposition that they have difficulty letting their hair down.

I was left standing alone in the crematorium parking lot with that strange feeling of having mislaid something but wasn’t quite sure what, like when you leave a shopping bag on the counter and get halfway home before realizing it.

Perhaps it was a childhood that I’d mislaid, with loving parents, family holidays and happy Christmases. But was it my childhood that I’d lost or those of my nonexistent children? I stood next to my car and wept.

A few early arrivals for the next funeral spilled out of their cars and made their somber way over towards the chapel. None of them bothered me. Weeping in a crematorium parking lot was not only acceptable, it was expected.

Early on Saturday morning I went to see my grandmother. I told myself it had nothing to do with having been to my father’s funeral the day before, but, of course, it did. I desperately wanted to ask her some more questions.

Sophie had come to the front door to see me off, still in her dressing gown and slippers. As far as she was concerned, I’d spent the previous afternoon at Warwick races. I would tell her the truth, I thought, eventually.

“Give her my love,” she’d said as I’d left.

“I will,” I had replied, but both of us knew that my grandmother almost certainly wouldn’t remember who Sophie was. She might not even remember who I was either, but I was going early in the day to give her the best chance. My grandmother was at her most lucid when she was not tired, and, very occasionally, she would actually telephone me around seven in the morning and sound almost normal. But each day varied, and the good days were getting fewer, shorter and less frequent. It was an ever-steepening downhill run towards total full-blown dementia, with just occasional small plateaus of normality to break the journey. Part of me hoped that she wouldn’t survive long enough to reach rock bottom.

“Hello, Nanna,” I said, going into her room.

She was sitting in her armchair, looking out of the window, and she turned towards me. I went over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Hello, Ned,” she said. “How lovely.”

Today was clearly a good day. She looked very smart in a dark skirt, a white blouse with a line of small yellow-and-pink embroidered flowers down the center and a lavender-colored cardigan over it, open at the front. And she’d had her hair done since my last visit.

“You look beautiful,” I said, meaning it.

She smiled at me, full of understanding. How I wished it could last for ever.

I sat on the end of her bed next to her chair.

“How have you been?” I asked. “I like your hair.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Julie will be here soon.”

“Who is Julie?” I asked.

“Julie,” she repeated. “She’ll be here soon.”

I decided not to ask again.

“Sophie sends her love,” I said. A small, quizzical expression came into her eyes. “You remember Sophie. She’s my wife.”

“Oh yes,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she really knew.

There was a knock on the door, and one of the nursing home staff put her head into the room. “Everything OK?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Would you like some tea or coffee?”

“Coffee would be lovely,” I said. I turned to my grandmother. “Nanna, would you like some coffee or tea?”

“I don’t drink tea,” she said.

“I’ll bring her some anyway,” said the staff member with a smile. “She always says she doesn’t drink tea, but she must have at least six or seven cups a day. Milk and sugar?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “One sugar.”

The head withdrew and the door closed.

“I like Julie,” my grandmother said again.

“Was that Julie?” I asked, but Nanna didn’t answer. She was looking again out of the window. I took her hand in mine and stroked it.

We sat silently for a while until the woman came back in with a tray and two cups.

“Are you Julie?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’m Laura. But we do have a Julie here, and your grandmother calls all of us Julie. We don’t mind. I’ll answer to anything.” She laughed. “Here you are, Mrs. Talbot,” Laura said, putting the tray down on a table beside her armchair.

It was comforting for me to know that there were such caring people looking after my Nanna.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Just pull the alarm if you need anything,” Laura said, pointing at a red cord that hung down the wall alongside my grandmother’s bed. “She should be all right for a while, but call if she needs the loo or anything. She can sometimes get quite urgent.”

“Thank you,” I said again, “I will.”

I sat patiently drinking my coffee as my grandmother’s tea slowly cooled.

“Here, Nanna,” I said, giving her the cup. “Don’t forget your tea.”

“I don’t drink tea,” she said, but she still took the china cup in her thin, bony hands and drank from it. The tea was soon all gone, so I took the empty cup from her and put it back on the tray.

“Nanna,” I said. She went on looking out of the window. “Nanna,” I repeated a little louder while also pulling on her arm. She slowly turned to face me.

“Nanna, can you tell me about my parents? Can you tell me about Peter and Tricia?” It didn’t seem odd for me to call my parents by their names rather than Mummy and Daddy. I’d never had a mummy and daddy, only a nanna and grandpa.

She looked up at my face, but the sharpness of fifteen minutes previously had begun to fade. I feared I had missed my chance and that I was losing her. At the best of times, what I was asking would not have been easy for either of us. In her present state, it might be impossible.

“Nanna,” I said again with some urgency, “tell me about Peter and Tricia.”

“Peter and Tricia?” she said, some of the sharpness returning.

“Yes, Nanna. Peter, your son, and Tricia, his wife.”

“Such a dreadful thing,” she said, turning away from me and again looking out of the window.

“What was a dreadful thing?”

“What he did to her,” she said.

“What did he do to her?” I asked, pulling gently on her hand to keep her attention. She turned back slightly towards me.

“He killed her,” she said slowly. “He murdered her.”

“Tricia?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She looked back up at my face. “He murdered Tricia.”

“But why?” I asked. “Why did he murder Tricia?”

“Because of the baby,” she said.

“What about the baby?” I pressed her. “Why did he murder her because of the baby?” I wondered if he had killed her because the baby wasn’t his.

My grandmother stared into my eyes. “He killed the baby too,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Whose baby was it?”

“Tricia’s baby,” she said

“But was Peter the father?”

“Peter ran away,” she said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Peter ran away because he killed Tricia. But was Peter the father of her baby?”

That quizzical look appeared again in her eyes.

“It wasn’t Peter,” she said slowly. “It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.”

I sat there staring at her, thinking that she must be confused.

“No,” I said. “Surely it was Peter who murdered Tricia? That’s why he ran away.”

“It was Teddy who murdered Tricia.” She said it again quite clearly. There was no confusion.

I sat there stunned. So it was not my father but my grandfather who was the murderer.

“But why?” I asked pitifully.

“Because of the baby,” she said equally clearly. “Your grandfather was the baby’s father.”

Oh my God, I thought. My mother’s unborn female child, who would have been my little sister, would also have been my aunt.

I stayed with my grandmother for another hour trying to piece together the whole sorry story. Trying to pull accurate details out of her fuzzy memory was like trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded. Not only could I not see the puzzle, I didn’t know when, or if, I’d solved it.

But now that she had started to give up the secret that had burned within her for so long, she did so with a clarity of mind that I didn’t realize she still possessed. I knew it was true that some patients with even advanced dementia could recall events of long ago in spite of the total loss of their more recent memory and also their inability to function properly day by day. So it was with my grandmother that morning, as the awful knowledge poured from her, almost in relief, of at last being able to share her hitherto private horror. I learned more in that one hour about my parents and my early life than I had managed to extract from her at any time in the previous thirty-seven years. And I didn’t like it.

I discovered that the five of us had lived together in my grandparents’ house in Surrey, my mother having moved in there on the day of her marriage. It wasn’t something that I had thought about before, but, clearly, my grandmother hadn’t considered the arrangement at all unusual.

However, if what Nanna told me was right, and if I correctly read between the lines of what she said, severe tensions had existed between my mother and father throughout their short marriage. There had also been considerable friction between my parents and my grandparents. It had obviously not been a happy family home.

I found out that it hadn’t only been my mother and father who were staying in Paignton at the time of Tricia’s death. Both my grandparents had been with them, and I had been there as well. It seemed that the holiday in Devon had been my father’s idea, an attempt to make things better amongst them all, but it had actually made them much worse.

“Peter and Tricia argued all the time,” my grandmother said, placing her head to one side and closing her eyes. “On and on, they went. They physically fought more than once. Peter slapped her, and she scratched his face.”

Hence the traces of my father’s skin and DNA under Tricia’s fingernails, I thought. The DNA the police had found and wrongly believed was her killer’s.

“Then she told him that her baby wasn’t his,” Nanna said. “She told him that it was your grandfather’s baby. He went completely wild.”

“Peter went wild?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “But Teddy went wild as well, because she threatened to tell everyone and to get it in the newspapers. She said he would lose his bookmaker’s license.”

I wasn’t sure if that was actually true, but it would have been enough to frighten my grandfather.

“But was the baby Tricia was carrying really Grandpa’s child?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, opening her eyes and looking at me again, “I believe it was.”

“But are you certain?” I pressed her.

“Yes,” she said. “I had suspected it even before she said anything. I’d been telling Teddy over and over for months that we would be better off without her round, but he wouldn’t have it. He thought he was in love with her. Then the morning after Tricia tells us that he’s the father of the baby, he walks into the hotel where we were staying and tells me it’s finished between them. Then he calmly tells me that he’s strangled the little bitch.”

I stared at her almost in disbelief.

“But why did my father run away if he hadn’t killed her?”

“Because I told him to,” she said quite matter-of-factly, as if it was the most common of things to do.

“But why?” I asked her.

“So that Teddy wouldn’t get arrested for murder.”

“But why didn’t you go to the police?”

“Because then we would have been ruined,” she said, as if it was obvious. “What would I have lived on with your grandfather in jail?”

The faithful, practical, scheming wife, I thought. She had not only seen no need to go to the police and repeat what her husband had said about strangling his daughter-in-law, she had even sent away her only son in the full knowledge that he would be blamed for the killing, simply to protect her income.

Perhaps strangling the “little bitch” had been her idea too. Was that what she had meant Teddy to do by continually saying they would be better off without her around? Had my grandfather finally got the message?

And my father had gone to the other side of the world, banished forever by his domineering mother in order to save her tyrannical husband from justice. No wonder he hadn’t asked after her when he had spoken to me at Ascot.

“How about me?” I said with passion. “Why didn’t my father take me with him?”

“He wanted to,” she said. “But I told him he couldn’t. I said that I would look after the child. He tried to say that he would come back for you, but I told him to go and start somewhere else and forget that you ever existed. It was for the best.”

“Not for me,” I said with barely contained fury.

“Oh yes. It was the best for all of us.” She said it with unshakable conviction. “And I decided that it was also the best for me.”

It was like a knife to my heart. How could this woman have sent my father out of my life like that? He had done nothing to deserve it. And how could she have then kept silent about it for so long? Just because she thought it was the best for her.

I had sat in the chapel of Slough Crematorium only the previous afternoon with my head bursting with anger. Now I felt totally bereft. I had been cheated of my right to grieve properly for my father, and I further believed that I had been cheated out of my rightful life.

I stood up. I didn’t want to hear any more. I looked down at her, this frail demented eighty-year-old woman whose decisions had destroyed so much.

She, and my grandfather, had together raised me from babyhood into adult life in a stable home, even if it had not been a particularly happy one for me. I had loved them, trusted them and believed what they had told me as being the truth, only for it now to emerge as a tangled web of lies and deception.

I walked to the door without turning back and I went away.

I would never visit her again.