Raking the Ashes Read online

  ‘That bust-up with Arif was weeks ago. She may well not be up to speed on taking care.’

  ‘A bit late now.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘I should have thought a father ambling up and down outside might well quell the urge. Or at the very least put the two of them into a more cautious frame of mind.’

  Geoff pulled his pillow closer and punched it up again, ready to go back to sleep. ‘I shouldn’t have thought so, Tilly.’ He gave the matter a moment’s further thought. ‘And it has been the shittiest day.’

  ‘What are you saying, Geoff? “Whatever works”?’

  He didn’t deign to answer. His daughter, not mine. ‘Well,’ I said in a voice that brimmed with sarcasm, ‘let’s just hope one of the things that isn’t working is her fertile body.’

  He just pretended he’d gone back to sleep.

  Over breakfast, I asked him, ‘When will the funeral be? Is it decided?’

  He looked washed out. ‘Thursday, they think.’ He gave me a pleading look over his mug of tea. ‘You will be here on Thursday, won’t you, Tilly? I don’t believe I can do it without you.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Look at it this way. You’ve managed to remortgage a flat and sell a whole house without my knowing a single thing about it. I should have thought that getting through a funeral would be a breeze.’

  Maybe it was cruel. I still think he deserved it. The silence hung between us, then his head went down, his shoulders shook, and he was crying, not like a man but like a child. I’d never seen anything like it. Grown men cry often enough. There was an accident on one of our rigs a couple of years ago, and lots of the men wept. Pete and Anton had both been popular, and Anton had four small children. But that sort of crying was of the ‘Don’t mind me, these tears just keep leaking out’ sort. Geoff’s was extraordinary. He was blubbing like a five-year-old. Snot bubbled from his nose, the tears streamed, he had slug trails up his sleeves, and the noise he made was close to that frightful ‘boo-hooing’ you hear from toddlers.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ I told him. ‘Pull yourself together. Think of poor Minna. She can hear you upstairs.’

  He just kept wailing. The phone rang. It was Harry. ‘What’s going on? Why are you leaving messages all over town? Mum knew that I was spending last night at Tod’s flat. I told her I’d be—’

  ‘Listen,’ I interrupted him. ‘It’s good you didn’t go home last night. There’s been some really bad news.’

  He knew at once. ‘Can I please speak to Dad?’ he said, cheering me mightily with the firm reminder of just how marginal I’d always been with this particular family – indeed, how little I’d be missed. I held the phone out to Geoff, then poked him to look up and notice. Wildly, he shook his head, but he did have the grace to quieten. I put the phone back to my ear. ‘Your dad’s upstairs with Minna,’ I said to Harry. ‘She’s crying her eyes out and he’s trying to comfort her.’

  ‘Really? I thought I heard something.’ There was a long, long pause. Then: ‘Tilly, is Mum …?’ I heard him swallow hard. ‘Is Mum … at home still?’

  I took it carefully. ‘I don’t believe so, Harry. I rather think that they’ll have taken her away to get things …’ What was the bloody word? ‘… ready.’

  ‘Ready?’ There was a rush of anger. ‘Like what? Like cut about on a slab?’

  It was the Harry of childhood nightmares back again. ‘Christ, no!’ I told him firmly. ‘There won’t be any of that.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘I promise. The doctors already know everything they need.’

  ‘I’m coming round.’ Almost before he’d finished saying it, he had hung up.

  Geoff lifted a head and said through blubbering slug trails, ‘Is that true?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About not having to have an autopsy?’

  ‘How should I know?’ I snapped. ‘I don’t know the first bloody thing about funerals. All I know is, that’s what he needed to hear.’ I made for the door. ‘And if it isn’t right, he won’t find out till he’s a bit less shocked.’

  He called me back. ‘See, Tilly? You tell lies too, when it suits you.’

  I turned and stared. Was he trying to compare my easing a twenty-one-year-old through the first moments of shock after losing his mother with his own solid deceptions? ‘What did you say?’ I asked in a tone deliberately shaded to scare him.

  ‘Nothing.’ His voice did tremble, and not just from leftover tears.

  ‘Good,’ I said icily, and assumed I wouldn’t hear another word. But after a moment or two he was back on his hobby horse. (Really, the man was craven.)

  ‘Tilly, you will come to the funeral, won’t you? I know I can’t manage without you.’

  I took a moment to think. There was no way that I could throw him out that night. Better to leave the whole sorry parting till after the service. Then I could easily persuade him to move into Frances’s house for ‘just a few days’ to see his son and daughter through the first throes of grief. And I’d not have him back. The perfect solution.

  I didn’t want him to suspect that I was stalling. So, to cover my tracks, I drove a bargain. ‘Promise you’ll never lie to me again?’

  ‘Never. I swear, Til.’

  What is the word of a liar worth? Fuck nothing. But I let it go. ‘And no leaving out the truth? No more weasel excuses: “I didn’t think you’d want to know” or “Didn’t I mention it?” or any of that crap?’

  He blew his nose fruitily. ‘No, no. I absolutely promise. I’ve learned my lesson, Tilly. I’ll do anything rather than lose you.’

  Surely he couldn’t think someone like me would cave in so soon? The moment his wits returned, he’d realize that I was playing for time and manage to thwart me. Desperate to get through the next few days without having to wade through washes of pleading and blubbering, I looked round for some way of convincing him I was in earnest. ‘All right, then. Write your promise down.’

  He stared. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. Write down what you’ve just promised. “No lies, no leaving information out, no sneaky little deceptions of any sort. That is the deal.” Then sign it.’

  ‘Sign it?’

  He looked offended, rather as if he took it poorly I had the nerve to question his good faith. You had to hand it to the man: he could snap out of denial, then back in again, in no time at all.

  ‘Yes. Sign it.’

  Shaking his head as if in wonder, he tore a square of paper from the shopping-list note block, and made enough of a labour of the writing task to make it clear he would have rolled his eyes if he had dared. In the end, handing it over, he asked me, ‘And what are you going to do with this?’

  I checked the wording, then I slid it into my pocket. ‘Keep it, of course.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘For when it happens again.’

  ‘It isn’t going to happen, Tilly. I’m a changed man. Believe me.’

  I could have said, ‘No, you believe me, Geoff. Nobody ever changes.’ But Minna was coming down the stairs. And anyway I couldn’t be bothered. What would have been the point?

  The next few days were grim indeed. Harry vanished back to Tod’s flat and all attempts to get him to respond to phone calls failed. Tod kept insisting Harry would show up for the funeral, and he was ‘fine’. I had my doubts. The next time Geoff put the phone back on its cradle, shaking his head and shrugging, I said, ‘You should go over there and root him out.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I do. After all, Tod does have a reputation.’

  ‘I never heard Frances saying anything about him.’

  ‘I expect she had other things on her mind,’ I told him tartly. ‘Nonetheless, when Tod was back in school there was a lot of talk about him dabbling in drugs and stuff.’

  Geoff was well back on form. Ignoring the times I’d warned him of his son’s suspiciously elated moods, he said complacently, ‘Oh, I think Harry’s sensible enough not to
get tangled up in anything like that.’

  I rolled my eyes and muttered, ‘If you say so, dear,’ under my breath. I had enough to deal with anyway, managing Minna. Back in our house till after the funeral, one minute she’d be in a flood of tears and the next storming into the kitchen demanding to be allowed to deliver the eulogy.

  ‘You?’ I’d said, startled.

  She shot me a very sullen look. ‘Why not? Why shouldn’t I be the one to talk about my own mother? I knew her best, after all.’

  ‘Of course,’ I soothed. ‘I didn’t mean you shouldn’t. Not at all. I was just a little surprised.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘Well,’ I defended myself, remembering all those times she couldn’t choose an ice-cream, ‘I suppose I just never thought of you as …’

  Admittedly I faltered, not at all sure how to finish. But there was still no need for her to jump in so aggressively. ‘Perhaps you haven’t been looking.’

  And perhaps I hadn’t. The tall cold girl who stood there glowering was no one I recognized. Maybe in all those hours that she’d been slipping off to the Odeon when she should have been in school, she’d learned more than I thought. Dismissing me, she turned back to her father. ‘I want to do it. So just say I can.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ he told her, ‘I’d be thrilled. And so would your mother have been.’

  So that was that. Flashing a look of triumph at me as she passed, she flounced from the room. I don’t know if she wrote the eulogy alone or if Josh helped. I know he was around an awful lot, and most of their time was spent in her bedroom. The evening before the funeral, he went off to borrow a dark jacket from a friend, and Minna came downstairs with four handwritten pages she handed to her father. ‘What do you think?’

  Geoff read them through, and hugged her. Determined not to be treated as if I were invisible under my own roof, I picked up the sheets of paper from the table one by one and read them myself. The only bit I didn’t care for much was when she said ‘and even Tilly came to love and respect her’, but there was nothing to be done about that. ‘Just grin and bear it,’ I’d have told myself if grinning hadn’t seemed so out of place. So I just bore it.

  True to form, in the morning Harry failed to arrive at the agreed time.

  Geoff shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Maybe he’s gone straight there.’

  ‘Perhaps he isn’t coming.’

  Geoff inspected his watch for the tenth time. ‘The car can’t wait much longer. We will have to go.’

  ‘I’ll pin a note on the back door, just in case,’ I said. ‘With money for a taxi.’

  As soon as I stepped into the kitchen, I could see Harry’s shadow on the ribbed glass. I opened the door. My Christ, the boy was in a state. The black tie I’d sent round was all awry. His hair was sticking up, his voice was slurred, and his jacket was coated with cat hairs.

  I stood in silence for a moment while he stood swaying. Then I said, ‘Ready to go?’

  ‘Ready,’ he said, then added insolently, ‘I forgot to ask. Is this a fry-up? Or a dig-and-drop?’

  I rammed him up against the wall, adding a graze on his cheek to his other scruffy aspects. ‘Just knock it off, shit-head!’

  He tried to pull himself together. ‘Sorry, Til.’ Out seeped the tears.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I consoled him. ‘No hard feelings, Harry. Just “time and place” and all that.’ And, putting my arm around him, I led him through to join his sister and his weeping father.

  * * *

  The funeral was over by three, and not even Frances’s mother stayed long at the reception. To be free of the stragglers – mostly a gang of grimly positive women from Frances’s self-help group – I led the way to a bar. It was a dismal couple of hours. I didn’t drink. Harry was scowling, and Minna kept going on and on about how very much her mother must have enjoyed ‘looking down on us saying such nice things’. I glanced at Josh, wondering if this sort of sentimental drivelling would put an end to the relationship once and for all, but he kept nodding encouragement. For God’s sake! Did the boy not have a forkful of brain? Or was he one of those lovers who simply buy the whole package, however daffy, until things end? Minna kept turning to her father and squeezing his hand. ‘And you,’ she rebuked him at one point with wet eyes, ‘you should have let me put in that bit about how kind you were to Mum.’ I didn’t miss Geoff’s slightly panicked look, and the small frown as he pressed her knee to silence her. I simply waited. I had never known the man get through more than one pint without a trip to the Gents and, sure enough, as soon as the conversation moved back once more to Josh’s idyllic childhood in Cornwall, Geoff took his chance. ‘Won’t be a moment.’

  The instant he was out of earshot, I moved in. Nodding at Geoff’s departing back, I interrupted Josh to say to Minna, ‘He was good to your mother, wasn’t he?’

  She couldn’t wait to draw us all back into her little family love-fest. ‘Yes, he was. Right to the end. And very generous.’

  ‘Very,’ I encouraged her.

  ‘And Mum appreciated that. In fact, she said she’d never have been able to carry on with everything without his help.’

  At first I took her to be referring to Frances’s last frail return to the house, and the times she’d needed help with the wheelchair. But Minna kept on with her praises. ‘I mean, I know Dad doesn’t even believe in crystals and homeopathy and reiki and all that other stuff. And it was horribly expensive, especially with everyone having to come to the house. Mum said she’d never have been able to afford it herself. Never. And even after Terence told him it was a waste of money, Dad kept on helping her.’

  ‘Well, there’s your father for you. Generous to a fault.’

  I tried not to spit out the last word, and hoped that the sound of my chair legs scraping back over the tiles would disguise at least some of the venom. I marched off for my coat. When Geoff came back from the lavatory, we left at once. Harry insisted on being dropped off at Tod’s flat. The rest of us went home. Even before Geoff had reached the drinks cabinet, Minna and Josh had vanished upstairs. It wasn’t long before, down through the ceiling, we could make out a sort of rhythmic reprise of the bed creakings of a few nights earlier. I wondered if Minna was quite so confident now that her mother was ‘looking down’ on her with such great pleasure. But I said nothing and just followed up the stairs a short while later.

  Geoff caught me coming down again with my bag. ‘You’re not off? Not tonight?’

  I checked my watch in self-important fashion. ‘I’m sorry it’s so rushed. I hadn’t realized how long everything would take. They’ll all be waiting.’

  ‘Waiting?’

  ‘At the hotel,’ I lied. ‘The rest of the team have been there all day, preparing for tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s tomorrow?’

  ‘I told you,’ I said glibly. ‘We’re training university recruiters. It’s been arranged for months. The presentations go on all weekend, and then I’m straight up north.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘I’ll give you a ring in the morning. But right now I am keeping people waiting.’

  Beaten, he stepped back.

  I pecked him on the cheek. ‘Chin up. Look after Minna.’

  I don’t think I’ve ever driven quite so fast over the speed bump at the end of our street. I made straight for the bypass. A few miles up, I stopped at The Danesmoor Inn. They had a room and, within half an hour, I was in the bath, breathing more easily and reading the paper, and waiting for the knock on the door that meant room service had at last arrived with my large whisky in a nice clean glass.

  Talk about needy. I hardly seemed to get through a day without one of his phone calls. ‘Not coming home again? But, Tilly, it’ll be over a week!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Geoff. We’re having a hell of a time getting the shims under these derrick footings.’ I missed his next moan when the generator I was leaning against sprang back to life. ‘Look, I’ll be
home when I can. This is a big unit we’re moving, and there are problems with the pinion gear teeth.’

  I flapped a hand at the rest of the team, who were already rolling their eyes, making faces and sniggering.

  ‘Well, hurry home when you can,’ Geoff pleaded. ‘I’m feeling crap here. Harry’s disappeared again. He won’t return my calls. And Minna’s going down to Torbury Bay.’

  ‘Torbury Bay?’

  ‘Cornwall. To meet Josh’s family. So I’ll be all alone.’

  The tone of self-pity galvanized me into spite. ‘Why don’t you do something useful while she’s gone? Surprise her. Paint her bedroom. Tart up the kitchen. Put back that side of the porch Frances had to take down to park her wheelchair.’

  ‘Oh, that house. There’s no point really. After all, the lease will end in June.’

  Can people sense when I turn dangerous? For it did seem to me that suddenly all the men had stopped their fooling and had fallen silent.

  ‘Lease? I thought that Frances got the house when you divorced.’

  ‘She did. But all those treatments … And the trip to Arizona, of course … This last place was a rental. Didn’t you realize?’

  He must have known from the silence that this was news. I suppose he was waiting. Presumably he thought we’d run through the old, old performance: ‘You never told me.’ ‘Well, I thought you knew.’ He may even have been a step ahead, waiting for me to say ‘You promised me!’ so he could argue triumphantly, ‘No, Tilly. This doesn’t count. Frances had sold her last house long before you made me sign that piece of paper.’

  Instead, I held the phone out to the wind. ‘Fixed pins in!’ I yelled. ‘Yoke pins to Out!’

  It was a little skit we ran through each time Digger’s wife phoned up in tears. The man could only take so much, then he would rouse everyone standing round into performance to help him get away.

  ‘Raise yokes!’

  They all came in on cue. ‘Disengaged fore!’

  ‘Yokes down!’

  ‘Disengaged aft! Check pins!’