IT’S GONE MIDNIGHT BY THE time Lily leaves the others to their arguments and alibis and goes back upstairs. But only to the first floor.
Ronnie is still lying on the carpet. She has refused to let anyone touch him. She’s wearing her dressmaker’s gloves to try not to disturb anything. Now, in the quiet, she sits cross-legged a few metres away from him. Even though his eyes are open, staring at nothing, and his limbs have stiffened in his suit, the way his fingers lie curled in his palm make her think that, somehow, he is asleep.
Philippa never got to see him in the suit. And he never got to say goodbye to her while wearing it. Mortality at Christmas is the most cruel. Since Mum died, she’s used to how trauma doesn’t pay attention to the calendar. Death comes at Christmas as much, if not more, as any other time of the year. But for someone to take life during the supposed festive season requires particular cruelty. She thinks of little Samuel, Ronnie and Philippa’s son. Only four and he’s an orphan. Is it good or bad that he won’t have many memories of them? Either way, he’ll carry this with him forever. Christmas will always haunt him.
She understands why Gray has gone to the tiny chapel to pray. He says he can’t comprehend any of this. That he needs answers. Lily, though, would rather whisper her words to Ronnie than God. If God can hear her, then so can Ronnie, and God gets enough conversation. Let Ronnie get her spoken love.
‘I asked you to tell me about Philippa,’ Lily says. She’s lying on the floor, on the other side of the bed, as if they were having a sleepover. This way she can look up at the ceiling rose, whorled like a fingerprint, and pretend that Ronnie’s just listening to her monologue, as she listened to his only days before. ‘So now I’m going to tell you what I love about you. And for once you can’t laugh it off, or go and cook, or distract me in some other way.’
She pauses, as if expecting him to interject with a joke or a fart. She then carries on, a smile warming up her voice. ‘I love the way you always have your buttons done up wrong. Even on your chef’s whites, one side is longer than the other. I love how everything is the best, for you. The best sunset you’ve ever seen, the best walk you’ve ever had, until the next one. I bet, if heaven exists, you’re saying it’s the best afterlife ever.’ Lily has to stop for a moment, in case a sob breaks out.
‘I love your laugh and how it can make a whole room join in with you. I love your patented chilli-based hangover cures, how you collect stones from every beach you’ve been to, your love for absolutely everyone you’ve ever met. I love how you love football, and are absolutely useless at it but don’t care a bit. I love the way you put bright pink laces in your Doc Martens. I love your soft heart and sharp mind.
‘Your impression of a ferret is unsurpassed, including your attempt to climb up your own trousers. I love that you have an inexplicable fondness for blancmange. And your food really is delicious. I’ll never forget the time you cooked me a raspberry soufflé that you brought in on your head like a wobbly toque. I wish you’d had the chance to run this place. I would’ve even come back to eat here.’ She realises as she says it, that this is true. The house is working its way into her heart.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing. You’d have made a brilliant uncle. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you this morning. I should have. About everything. I should have spoken up and I didn’t, and that will always stay with me. But I’ll tell my little girl all about you. So will Tom. We’ll make you so present it’s like you’re still alive.’
A sigh comes from Ronnie.
Lily sits up. What if she was wrong? What if he was unconscious and has just come round, it’s possible, right?
She scrambles up so she can see him. A slow hiss escapes his lips, but his chest is not moving. It’s just air leaving his lungs for good. She wishes she believed that the soul leaves the body in a last exhale. Even so – and knowing Ronnie would laugh at her – she moves over to the window. They had stood here this morning and looked out into the murk. If she’d known what would happen, she’d have followed Ronnie upstairs and not let him out of her sight. She opens the window wide. If there is such a thing as ghosts, then he shouldn’t be trapped in this house.
Footsteps come up the stairs, turn the corner to walk along the landing, and slow to a stop outside the room. Lily holds her breath. The door opens.
Gray steps in. He’s about to turn on the light, then sees Lily. ‘You’ve come to be with him, too,’ he says, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
He’s about to go, when Lily says, ‘Could you take over the vigil? At dawn? And don’t let anyone take him away.’
Gray nods, as if sleepovers with the dead are perfectly normal. And for some, they are. Friends and relatives take turns to watch over the departed. She wonders who will watch over her.
When Charlie, one of Lily’s pagan friends, had died at the age of forty-five, his wife and young daughter spent all night with his body. They had washed and dressed him, they sang, and kept him company. The next day, at the woodland burial site, Lily and the other mourners had thrown compost and buttons, letters, coins and flowers into his grave, and said goodbye.
Lily had thrown in Charlie’s favourite flower, a rose, and then stepped through an archway covered in evergreen fir. Once through the arch, everyone danced and sang, because they’d entered a new relationship with Charlie. One that would never die.
While Lily is here on a vigil because whoever killed Ronnie might want to move him, she also wants to welcome a new relationship with him. That way, she’ll always hear his voice in her head.
Lily makes herself as comfortable as possible on the floor. Pregnancy keeps her awake enough as it is, she might as well make use of it.
The night passes slowly, as interminable as a Monopoly game. The fog has cleared, and now the sky is without cloud. The winter stars stand out like white dots on dominoes.
Every now and then she glances over at Ronnie. In the moonlight he looks gilded with silver, as if he could take his place among the statues in the garden. She tries to remember what he said to her that morning. Whether he had given anything away that might be of use. What had he ‘seen’ that made him think that she was right about Mum being murdered? A conversation with someone that he overheard? No, he said that he’d dig it out and show her later, that must mean it’s physical. Was it something in the house?
Or in this room. She looks around, aware that if she disturbs anything then she is guilty of tampering with a crime scene. But her cousin was killed for a reason. And he might have hidden the reason nearby.
She opens drawers, looks inside his suitcase, under the bed. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. Whatever Ronnie had wanted to show her could be anywhere. At least she might find the key, that’d be something to show for the pain she’s feeling. Going through all of Philippa and Ronnie’s small things, their personal effects – the lipstick and the shaver charger, the tampons and the Eiffel Tower keyring from when they went to Paris on honeymoon – carries such enormous weight. She has to stop several times to cry.
She has almost given up and is just looking in the clothes hanging in the wardrobe. In the inside pocket of a jacket, Lily finds an envelope. Written on it, in Liliana’s swirly script, is Ronnie’s name. And inside that is another letter, addressed to Lily. From her mother.