Adam was on tenterhooks as he sat watching his sister and his first wife, clinking glasses, sipping their naughty lunchtime Sauvignon Blanc, nibbling fat green olives, dunking fresh bread in the White Duck’s specially sourced Cotswolds extra-virgin oil, enjoying each other’s company again, one to one, on this sunny end-of-April day.
As a regular customer, Claire had managed to secure a table by the window, with a view down the grassy slope to the River Mead, which wound its way through lush green meadows at the back of Tempelsham proper, a copse of trees to the right conveniently hiding the sewage works. How nice it was to be out here, Serena said, away from the terrible fumes of London, all the worse at this time of year. The particulates combined with the pollen from the ornamental cherries and plane trees gave her terrible hay fever.
‘How are you?’ Claire asked, reaching out a sympathetic hand.
‘I’m fine. Really. Still shocked, obviously, but I’m slowly coming to terms with it all. You?’
‘I suppose I have. Starting to, anyway.’
But the funeral had been perfect, Serena went on, brightly. Insofar as such a dreadful occasion could be perfect. Presumably Claire had had input?
‘What do you think, Serena?’
‘Endless overruling by the blessed Julie, I suppose?’
‘Maybe just a little.’ But Claire had, as Serena knew, been allowed to organise the music.
‘Which was wonderful, I meant to say. Obviously, I loved the “Pie Jesu”.’
‘What a star Matilda is.’
‘This is the absolutely infuriating thing about her. When she wants to do it, she can. And then…’ Serena shrugged, encompassing the numerous occasions their daughter hadn’t wanted to do this, that, or the desired other, the frustrations that caused even the most reasonable and doughty of mothers.
‘How is she?’ Claire asked. ‘Now?’
‘All over the place again at the moment. Basically, she’s heartbroken. She argues with me, she argues with Walter. She refuses to believe that Adam could have killed himself.’
‘She’s not alone in that.’
‘But, Claire, do you really think he didn’t?’
‘I’m afraid I do.’
‘It’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Particularly with Adam. I know you’re not supposed to say this, but suicide is a dreadfully selfish act. Especially if you have children.’
As she finished off chewing a corner of bread, Claire was nodding, encouragingly.
‘I know Adam could be selfish,’ Serena went on.
‘And how.’
‘But was he that selfish? And I’m speaking as the abandoned wife.’
‘You’re always so forgiving, Serena.’
Adam’s first wife shrugged, accepting the compliment, but in a humorous rather than a smug way. What an easy, relaxed, natural woman she was! Why had he ever thought it a good idea to leave her? He had taken her for granted. He had got together with her too young, then let himself forget what a prize she was.
‘But if it wasn’t,’ she replied, leaning forward and dropping her voice, ‘suicide… what are you saying? The implications, as Walter keeps reminding me, are shocking.’
‘I know,’ Claire agreed.
As an invisible spirit, seated at the adjacent empty table, reserved for who knew what important customer, Adam could smell everything: Serena’s fish soup, Claire’s meaty duck pâté, the slightly overdone toast (which he would have sent back), even the freesias in the slim glass vase at the centre of the table. But he had no menu envy. These powerful aromas didn’t arouse an appetite in him, as they would have done in his human frame. Once again, his strange state was brought home to him; he was in the world, but no longer of it.
More to the point, he could see and hear, even if he couldn’t, at the moment, be heard himself. How he wanted to chip in, though. As the pair of them chivvied over the now familiar ground of his death. ‘It was a poem!’ he shouted when Serena brought up the suicide note. ‘And not even in manuscript. Photocopied!’ Neither of them turned a hair. He reached out with his right hand and tried to grab a piece of Claire’s toast. That would make them sit up. Flying toast! But his fingers had no purchase. The toast could have been a small, low-lying wall that he’d glided through. Why was this, when with his mother he’d been able to push over a flowerpot? Because there were two of them? Because that had been a dangerous situation and this wasn’t? He had no idea.
‘So you had something to tell me,’ Serena said eventually. ‘About Julie coming to see you.’
‘Yes!’
Claire recapped their conversation, excitedly. When she explained about Julie’s visit from the ghostly Adam, she raised her finger and waggled it sideways by her right ear in an old ‘doolally’ gesture that she would never have dared use with her Gen Z niece Matilda.
‘But perhaps he did appear to her,’ Serena said.
She didn’t really imagine that was true, did she? Claire replied. Adam’s ghost had been wearing jeans and Campers. Why not a burial shroud? And then he had insisted that he wasn’t a suicide, that someone else had ‘done him in’.
‘And what d’you think about that?’
‘A ghost! Suggesting that. For real.’ Claire was laughing. ‘No. Dan agreed with me. She must have dreamt it.’ She explained about hypnagogic states.
Serena was nodding. ‘You’re probably right. Julie’s always been away with the fairies, hasn’t she? I suppose it’s nice to know that she’s missing him. The bitch,’ she added with a laugh.
To Adam’s disappointment, they left the fascinating subject of him. They didn’t even speculate, as he had thought they might, about who might have been his murderer, had his ghost been real and telling the truth about his ‘suicide’. Instead, they danced off into a long and clearly mutually enjoyable reminiscence of their friendship, from when Serena had first met Claire, coming up to Larks Hill with Adam from Bristol in the holidays. A spiky teenager.
‘Was I spiky?’ Claire asked, making a face.
‘You were a bit. But sweet with it. You were always quick to give Adam grief.’
This was true.
‘Were you jealous of him?’ Serena asked. ‘He was such a golden boy, wasn’t he?’
Claire paused to think. As well she might.
Come on, admit it, Adam thought. Envy runs through your character like the letters in a stick of rock, even if you do a great job of concealing it (most of the time).
‘No,’ said Claire. ‘Not exactly jealous. I suppose it was a bit annoying that he always knew what he wanted to do. And was so good at it.’
‘Perhaps he was good at it because he always knew what he wanted to do. Whereas you…’
‘Still don’t know what I want to do.’ Claire laughed.
Serena, it had to be said, always brought out the nice side of his sister.
‘I personally think there’s merit in that,’ Serena said. ‘It’s like I keep saying to Matilda, “You’ve got so many talents, darling, it’s just a question of which one you want to use.” Whereas dear old Leo…’
‘Is much more predictable.’
‘Solid, I like to think. But yes, he’s a very different character. Funny isn’t it, how the same gene pool can deliver two such contrasting personalities.’
They were like a pair of conversational dragonflies these two, dancing over their long-shared experience with no coherent thread. One subject led off into another, then back again. As their main courses arrived, they were remembering Claire’s long string of disastrous love affairs, before she had finally met Dan.
‘Mr Right at last,’ Claire said.
‘Although,’ said Serena, ‘I was always rather jealous of some of your more glamorous Mr Wrongs.’
‘Were you?’
‘That Polish conceptual artist. What was his name?’
‘Olek.’
‘Olek, yes. What a very handsome fellow he was.’
‘He was a bit, wasn’t he?’ Claire grinned. ‘Crap artist, though. All those things he found in skips.’
‘And the tenor.’
‘Lend me a tenor Charles. The meanest man on the planet.’
‘I’d be up to my knees in nappies with Leo and Matilda and in you’d waltz, with one of these men, or off on your travels; it all seemed so glam.’
‘It wasn’t that glam. Otherwise I’d have stayed with one of them. And some of that travel was pretty lonely. I was jealous of your happy family life.’
‘The grass is always greener. Anyway, that didn’t last, did it?’
‘No.’
Was it because Adam had died that they were allowing themselves to get into these deep waters, or was this how it usually was? Adam had no idea. But now his sister was onto her third glass of Sauvignon and telling his first wife that she had never understood why Adam had left her. For Julie of all people, who was so obviously such a flashy little tart.
Serena shrugged. It had probably been her fault as much as his, she said. ‘The children were still young; I was so wrapped up with them. Adam was in town all the time, working hard, he always told me, which he was, but also getting up to who knows what. I was in north London, driving them to playdates and sleepovers and birthday parties and all the rest. I’d rather gone off sex. And there was Julie, all pert and willing. She saw her opportunity and took it.’
‘Don’t you hate her?’
Serena looked down, and there was, for just a moment, Adam thought, a proper flash of loathing in her eyes. But then that melted away and her wide, forgiving smile took over. ‘It’s all such a long time ago,’ she said. ‘She is what she is. And what she must be going through now I have no idea.’
‘Unless she did it.’
‘Claire! You don’t really think that, I’m sure.’
‘The whole ghost thing could be a massive bluff.’