I called it my nest. Cushions from the sofa, laid out in a circle in the parlour. The scratchy woollen blankets from the guest bedrooms. The sheets from my own bed and the soft, velvet curtains I had found in a hamper beneath the windowsill in the attic. I dragged them all into the sitting room a couple of weeks after Stefan died. I arranged them like a wren positioning twigs. Made a circle of linens and drapes. Wove myself a comfortable, padded little sanctum on the bare wooden floor. I lit the space with a single oil lamp, feeling oddly proud at knowing how to fill and light the old contraption. Sat there, exhausted and manic, panting in my small, dark room, lit with the kind of glow beloved by painters and poets.
I kept the curtains closed but there was always enough light to read by. The only picture on the wall was a pencil sketch of a stately home and the shadows cast by the light sometimes conspired to make it seem as if the grand old place was lived in; as if a splendid family were holding riotous gatherings within its great walls. I liked to make up stories for that house. Imagined myself and Stefan and whichever man I saw fit to allow, gliding down polished stairs, my white-gloved hand unsullied by dust as it stroked the varnished wood of the bannister. I saw myself as Jane Eyre. As Cathy. Saw myself as every heroine who had inspired me in happier times. Sometimes I felt as though the world within that picture was more real than the one I inhabited. Every so often I imagined waking up behind the glass; a collection of pencil strokes and smudges.
That night, the night that Fairfax died, I don’t think I even lay myself down. I sat in my nest like the only survivor of a catastrophe – the only passenger in the lifeboat, sitting up and staring into the distance as though hoping for land.
Within my nest I had grown used to sleeping for hours at a time. Before Stefan died I made do with what I could. That’s a mother’s lot, I suppose – especially with a child who doesn’t like to close their eyes. When he was alive I slept the way a hungry man eats, gorging myself when opportunity arose, then surviving on just enough scraps to stay upright. After his death I feasted on sleep. Stuffed myself on it. Slept in a place of such utter blackness that to wake felt like breaking through ice.
That night I knew there would be no sleep. I was too energized to consider closing my eyes. ‘Het-up’. That’s what Felicity called it. Said I was going to do myself a mischief. Honestly, I think she’d have put leeches on my pulse-points to try and drive the demons from my spleen if she hadn’t been in such a state herself.
Harking back, I remember the feeling of anger. Was that it? Would anger do it justice? Perhaps it was something else. Some feeling I cannot articulate. It makes me smile to think how that failure would have angered me, back then. It was so important to me to know what every word meant, and to be able to use them in conversation without jarring. At Oxford, few things upset me more than hearing an unfamiliar word. I remember when Samuel, an MP’s eldest son from a leafy borough in Surrey, referred to his rooms at King’s as his ‘phrontistery’. He’d said it with a flamboyant sweep of his arm; adoring himself, a lesson in confidence, a vision in his black velvet jacket and tangerine chiffon scarf, with his dark curly hair and dead-eel pout. My face had betrayed my lack of knowledge. He looked at me like I was an infant. Pouted, patronisingly, at the silly girl who had bumbled her way into the same college as so many more enlightened souls. I made it my business to use the word in conversation the next day. Learned its meaning. A thinking place. Samuel heard me say it. Smiled that mocking smile. I still remember the red circles of burning shame he brought to my cheeks. They made a game of it, after that. Made up words and dropped them into conversation, winking at one another as I scribbled them down, desperate to open a dictionary and improve myself. They probably thought they were just being funny. Didn’t realize I would have taken a hundred slaps from hard hands in place of that one sensation of being a fraud; an imposter.
Samuel would have known the word for how I felt that night as I sat in my nest and ground my teeth, grabbing blankets in my fists and sucking on my cheek until it hurt. Was it temper? Fury at being doubted? Sadness, even. Fairfax had seemed such a likeable man. Perhaps it was the sting of disappointment. I had glimpsed something other than the darkness of my constant grief. As the body tumbled onto the damp grass I had experienced something ignite within me. It was as if an ember had suddenly erupted in a dead hearth. For that heartbeat, as the rain battered down upon me and I looked upon the limp and broken corpse, I forgot Stefan. For that solitary tick of the clock, I escaped from the mire of my own grief. It felt like being thrown free of a burning car.
I’d seen him. Of that I was sure. He’d worn a blue suit. He had dark hair and polished shoes and he wore a khaki bag on a strap. His face was white and angular, like dough pulled into points. Not old but not young. A man. A dead man, hidden in a crypt alongside ancient bones.
‘That doesn’t matter now,’ Felicity had said, as she snivelled into her sleeve. ‘Fairfax. It’s horrible. We should never have made him go out …’
I couldn’t stand it. Not the self-pity. Not the weeping and the stooped shoulders and the shaking hands. I’d stayed in that churchyard an hour, looking for a body that shouldn’t have been there. Only gave up when the rain started up again. Knocked on Felicity’s door. Her husband opened it. A little man, with square shoulders and bandy legs and a lipless knife-wound of a mouth. He knew what had happened. Felicity had told him. He’d invited me in and offered tea. Handed me a towel. Told me what had happened to Fairfax. It seemed extraordinary. Two hours before he had been standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Now he was a mangled thing on a dirty, rain-lashed road.
‘Sergeant Chivers will be up to talk to Felicity when he has time,’ said John. ‘He’ll want to know what the old sod was thinking, driving in this weather in that daft bloody car. Should nivver have bought it but he wouldn’t be told.’
He hadn’t said it accusingly but Felicity had heard it as such. She’d given in to more tears. Shuddered and wailed and said it was all her fault.
‘The body,’ I’d said. ‘He went to go and see the body we told him about. And now the body’s not there.’
‘This is the body in the crypt, then,’ said John, and his expression was hard to read. ‘Don’t think on that now. Can’t have been nice. Must have been a shock.’
I hadn’t known how to respond. I think I looked a little petulant, like a child about to stamp their feet. What did I actually want? What would I have asked for if given the chance?
‘The body’s gone,’ I said. ‘There are old bones and scraps of clothes and bits of coffin under the branches of the laurel but the body we saw – it’s been moved.’
He’d shaken his head at that. Flicked a finger at Felicity, as if to tell me to say no more that would upset her. I’d wanted to shout at the ceiling. Wanted to start smashing things. I think he saw that in my eyes. Saw that I wasn’t going to be pacified with tea and the warmth of the kitchen.
Chivers never came to my door. I sat in the kitchen all night, waiting for the lights of his car to illuminate the blackness beyond the glass. Nobody came. The silence was absolute. I angled the chair so as to be able to hear the telephone if it rang in the hallway but it stayed maddeningly silent as the evening wore on. I had changed out of my damp clothes when I finished my long, soaking trudge back up the hill. I’d wanted to put on nothing more than a bathrobe or to simply wrap myself in a blanket but I had expected Chivers, and perhaps even a detective or two. I’d expected questions. Gentle probing. Conspiratorial glances and intelligent eyes. So I dressed smartly: a person to be taken seriously. White woollen polo-neck sweater and a black skirt. Even found my wedding ring at the bottom of the cutlery drawer and slipped it on. It was too big. Slid around on my finger like a hula hoop. I kept it on nonetheless. I was a married woman. I’d been to university. I’d suffered bereavement and I’d seen more of the world than any of them. If I said I’d seen a body then I was damn well to be believed. Nobody came. Nobody came the next day either. I rattled around the house, floating aimlessly into rooms I barely remembered having visited before.
It would have been a perfect home for somebody who actually wanted it. Three storeys high, with five acres of land, sitting halfway up a hill with a view across the tree-lined valley and the sound of the River Irthing occasionally bubbling up through the silence to soak into the old stone walls. It had stood for a hundred years and bore the mixed tastes of each of the previous inhabitants. Some of the rooms looked little changed from Victorian times with their high ceilings and dusty chandeliers, picture rails and ornate fireplaces. Others were homely, as if a smaller, cosier residence had been crammed into the interior of the stately shell. I had made little impact. The books that had threatened to overwhelm my living space at college took up barely one shelf of the colossal library and the framed pictures of the Parisian jazz bands that had looked so sophisticated when I was nineteen seemed faintly ridiculous hung against floral wallpaper in the master bedroom with its sagging four-poster bed. Cranham had bought the place at auction. Took it lock, stock and barrel. Paid over the odds, no doubt. Stuffed handfuls of cash into the pockets of locals and told them to make it habitable. Probably held their handshakes a little too long; that little smile twitching in the corner of his eye. It was wrong of me to think of him in anything but affectionate terms. He had saved me, though by God I resented him for that. Took a woman who was carrying another man’s child and offered her a home and an income. Had no interest in what I got up to or who I got up to it with. Just needed a wife and child and a cover story so his family and colleagues would stop questioning him about when he was going to find a wife. Needed one, if he was going to become a parliamentarian. Couldn’t let the truth get out. Couldn’t tell the world that he had as much interest in women as a fish does in aeroplanes. He liked men. Rough, dirty-faced, hard-skinned men. Kept one, almost as a pet, in the Knightsbridge flat where he slept on the nights he wasn’t reclining on soft sheets in some luxurious hotel or another. He was a kind man, in his way. Did right by me when he really didn’t have to. But we both knew what our marriage was for. He would have come to the funeral, had I given him the chance. There was no service. Just the cremation and my own mumbled words as I scooped up handfuls of what used to be my son and tossed them onto the breeze.