‘I want it to stop. All the help, I mean. I couldn’t be more grateful, I really couldn’t. But it is time it stopped. I can manage now.’ Vincent couldn’t see Hilda’s face properly. It was dappled with the sunlight falling through the beech trees guarding the entrance to St Winifred’s. ‘Everyone has been so… charitable. All summer. But now we must manage. Alone.’ Vincent was aware he was talking in strange bursts. He found it easier to be fluent standing before his congregation, with the structure of a service to follow.
Hilda’s small grey eyes were widening with dismay. It was the last Sunday of August and she had hovered on the path after the service, pinning the girls into conversation while he shook the hands of parishioners. Attendance to all his services had surged since Connie’s death. Vincent liked to think it was more than pitying curiosity but knew in his heart that it wasn’t.
His daughters, released from Hilda’s attention, were playing tag around the gravestones, leaping dots of colour in his peripheral vision. Kat skipping and squealing. Eleanor in more lumbering pursuit at her heels. His eldest was growing fat, Vincent had recently observed, turning, in spite of her height, into an ungainly lump of a girl. It pained him to see, though the reasons were obvious: too much sitting around with her head in a book. Too many snacks and summer ice creams. He couldn’t wait for the autumn term to start.
‘It has been the least I – all of us – could do.’ Hilda fiddled with the big round buckle on her handbag. She was wearing a blue dress with padded shoulders and a wide belt that accentuated the vertical lines of her thin torso. In recent weeks her hair had undergone a transformation, the lifeless brown helmet converted into layers of dusty blonde. Feathery tresses flicked neatly off her face in two symmetrical wings.
‘School is about to start,’ Vincent pressed on, ‘and Eleanor is old enough to be in charge of Katherine on the bus. She is very grown-up for her age, as you know, and loves the chance to take charge. And Kat, as I am sure you have also noticed, adores her.’
As if in validation of the claim, Kat, caught at last in the tag game, shrieked her sister’s name in gleeful acknowledgement of surrender. The two of them slumped down against one of the big lichen-speckled sarcophagi, giggling and catching their breath.
‘They are dear girls,’ Hilda murmured, unable to resist adding, not for the first time, ‘and Kat more and more the splitting image of her mother… that alone must be so very hard for you. But also, I hope, a consolation.’ She reached out and squeezed Vincent’s forearm.
Vincent dropped his eyes, regarding the gesture numbly. Hilda’s fingers were thin, the nails long and filed into neat white crescents. In widowhood, she kept the fourth finger on the left hand laden: a wide gold band next to a large sapphire circled by diamonds. His own fingers looked fat and shapeless in comparison. It occurred to Vincent that he loved nothing properly any more, least of all himself.
Below the line of his and Hilda’s arms, he could see the black skirt of his robe falling to the path. The hem was scuffed and grey. He had another that was even shabbier. He was never out of his priestly clothes these days; not for the provision of solace or loyalty they inspired, but simply for camouflage. Looking the part had become paramount; the least – and the most – he could manage.
Hilda released her grip. His silence filled her with confusion, making her ramble on, dropping more grains of salt into the open wound. ‘Such an uncanny resemblance, the extraordinary hair colour, and those eyes…’
Vincent shifted his gaze to Hilda’s throat, which moved as she talked. He imagined his hands closing around it. He had done that to Connie sometimes, taken her to the edge by keeping his thumbs on her windpipe. She loved to be on the edge, to live dangerously. He had understood that about her, in spite of her denials. A fresh, violent sense of loss coursed through him, pinpricking his body with sweat and flooding his mouth with some strange juice, acrid and salty.
‘Yes, indeed. There is a remarkable likeness.’ It was hard to speak. He swallowed. ‘And now, if you’ll excuse me, I should lock up the vestry. And the girls need—’
He was rescued by the girls themselves, running up to them, Kat in the lead, Eleanor chasing in her cumbersome way behind.
He put an arm round each, pulling them a little roughly against his body. ‘And now we will be visiting the graveside, of course.’
‘Of course,’ Hilda echoed faintly. She looked fragile suddenly, her new thin hair lifting off the tops of her small, pale ears.
‘Thank you again for all your help during the past difficult few months,’ Vincent went on, recovering himself, ‘but, as I have said, the three of us can manage alone now. If you could pass the word on.’
‘I see, yes. I am just so fond of you all,’ Hilda blurted. ‘All of you. So never be afraid to come to me if you need anything. All right?’
Vincent nodded, keeping his grip on his daughters as she walked away.
He had buried Connie in the lower reaches of St Winifred’s graveyard, a strip of land bordering a field which had recently been bought by a developer finalising plans for a housing estate. Several wooden notices advertised the fact, pitched at wonky angles along the dividing fence.
Kat flopped down next to the still fresh-looking mound, sitting cross-legged and cupping her face in her hands with a dramatic sigh. ‘Do you think Mummy still likes our flowers?’ She gestured with her chin in the direction of the small pewter tub of sweet williams which they had brought along a few weeks before. The flowers had grown ragged, but their orange and yellow still glowed against the square granite headstone. Connie Keating, it said, 1947–1985 Loved and Missed.
‘Of course she likes the flowers,’ Eleanor said sharply, looking at their father, who had lowered himself onto the grass and was sitting with his arms round his knees, staring into space. Eleanor held out a hand to Kat, who took hold of it, shifting closer. They looked at each other, waiting, since Vincent normally said a prayer.
Vincent was staring at his legs. His cassock had ridden up a little, revealing his weathered leather sandals, grey ankle socks and meaty calf muscles. Outlined on the inside of his right sock was the folded envelope on which he had scrawled his message on that fateful day. Darling Connie, came home for a 10-minute lunch. I love you. Vx.
It was both a comfort and a torment to Vincent that he had written it. A thousand times in his mind he had replayed propping the envelope on the bottom stair. Whether it had been missed, or seen, he would never know. She could already have set off on her fateful walk. The clanking pipes he had heard could have been just that, trapped air, not a running bath. The coroner’s verdict had offered no solace. She may well have meant to die. Or she may not.
The sickly metallic taste was back in Vincent’s mouth. She had gone for a walk, that was all, he told himself. She had got hold of a drink, from God knows where, gone for a walk, decided to cross the line and the train had come. It had caught her by surprise. She had stepped back but, with her senses dulled, not quite in time. That was why she had been thrown as she had into the undergrowth. Why the train had sped on unknowing. Why it had taken their neighbour, Farmer Watson, chasing after one of his ill-disciplined dogs the next morning, to find her. Before that it was weeks since he had so much as caught a glimpse of her, the man had assured Vincent when he asked.
‘Daddy? There’s a bee on the flowers.’
Eleanor’s face came in and out of focus.
‘Yes. Bees are good. We like bees. They help flowers to spread their seeds.’
‘But Kat…’ Eleanor bit her lip. Her little sister’s allergy to wasps and bee stings was ancient family lore, drummed into her thanks to an incident she had been too young to remember. Kat, stung in her pram at three months, had swollen up like a football and been rushed to the hospital down the road from their house in London. But her father’s thoughts were far from that now. He was getting himself into position to pray at last, levering with visible effort onto all fours and then sitting back on his heels.
‘Dear Lord…’
Eleanor and Kat scrambled quickly into position, pressing their palms together and crinkling their eyes shut.
‘Dear Lord,’ Vincent intoned, ‘please look after Connie – Mummy – whom you called from this earth before we were ready to lose her. Help us to accept her loss and to live our lives in ways that would make her proud. We know she is looking down on us…’
Eleanor peeped through the slits of her eyes. Her tummy was rumbling for lunch. The bee was gone. She tried to think about her mother, but also not to think about her. The memories hurt, so it was easier just to push them away. It felt, increasingly, as if she was missing something she had never really had. Eleanor stole a glance across the grave.
Vincent was still pressing his palms together, his eyelids trembling. It was a long prayer this time. In fact, he was starting to repeat things over and over, as if he couldn’t find a way out of his own sentences.
Eleanor shifted her weight, her knees tingling. Inside, she was aware of a rising, terrible urge to get up and run away, not to the vicarage, but in the opposite direction, across the lumpy fields towards the line where the land met the sky. But there was Kat, she realised, flicking her eyes to her little sister. Kat would have to run too. She couldn’t leave Kat behind.
Vincent sensed his daughters’ restlessness, but he didn’t care. My words fly up but my thoughts remain below. Who had said that? He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t think about anything except that he was alone and lost, all the more acutely for having once believed himself found.