Nevertheless she was disappointed. This girl had seemed so different.
Twenty-Four
Chris wasted valuable seconds fumbling with the back door key before realising it was already unlocked. A raised step tripped her up and she tumbled out into the garden sending a plastic box, like the one she used to take to school for her lunch, spinning over the path, white bread spilling. She dashed down the path between the cottage and the post office, and stopped at the corner of the cottage. The front door was shut, but the car was still outside. Chris bowed her head, then taking a deep breath, hands shielding her face, she ran out down the path and, leaving the gate swinging, she set off up the lane.
The pavement rushed beneath her, cracks passing faster and faster as she quickened her pace up the hill. Her lungs were bursting, sweat soaking her shirt, but still she kept going.
Since Chris had discovered the articles under her mother’s pillow, her landscape had been demolished. It was years since that morning when she had banged out of the flat without saying goodbye to the woman who was supposed to be her Mum and supposed to be called Alice. Hours and minutes had dragged, shot forward, wound back, and now in a benign country churchyard on a warm summer’s afternoon, they halted altogether.
Storming between the plots, tripping on the uneven ground, Chris was an agitated figure to anyone who might see her.
There was someone.
She caught a movement by the corner of the churchyard. In this horror-film village Chris hadn’t reckoned on meeting anyone. There was a woman, maybe not much older than herself, standing in the dappled shadow of a silver ash. She hadn’t seen Chris. She was looking at a grave and writing, supporting a notebook with one hand, her blonde hair falling forward. At first Chris assumed she was some mourner come to spend quiet time with her loved one. She must have made a sound because the woman looked up and saw her. She snapped shut her book, dropped her pen in the bag slung on her shoulder and marched swiftly over the grass back to the path. As she came towards Chris, a smile already prepared, Chris saw she was much older than her hair and clothes had made her think. Not actually old, but worn-out looking. Chris was also taken aback by her expression. Far from behaving as if Chris had interrupted a precious moment, she was embarrassed and the quick nod of greeting as she hurried by was apologetic.
After the woman had left the churchyard, Chris decided to find out which grave had so interested her.
She was not prepared for what she found. The grave was recent, a long low mound of soil flecked with bits of white chalk with nothing else to distinguish it, no flowers or messages of love. The thick clods of earth were rudimentary and raw while a makeshift wooden cross at its head undermined the permanency of the place and the significance of the grave itself. Chris imagined the body buried below, it probably still had eyes, and a lolling tongue turned colourless by death lying inert in its mouth. She read the name on the metal strip screwed to the wood.
Mark Henry Ramsay
20th November 1925 – 6th June 1999
The Dead Professor.
Chris knew nothing remarkable about this man except the bizarre way he had died. The mass of this ignorance, literally a body of uncharted facts, lured her closer. What had the woman been writing? Who was she? This man might have given her answers. He might have consoled her. They might have consoled each other. But she had arrived too late.
Mark Ramsay’s grave was but a marker for the magnificent marble headstone with forbidding lead lettering that stood next to it. The marble was pristine, unblemished by the years, which Chris calculated dated from when the first name was carved on it – Rosamund Ramsay – in 1934. The shiny stone contrasted with the state of the grave itself, a rampant weed bed entirely merging with the surrounding grass. The neglect was callous. Yet the leaden words said that Mrs Ramsay and her husband Judge Henry Ramsay, who had died in 1958 and was buried beside her, were ‘greatly missed by their children, Virginia and Mark’.
Chris was familiar with graveyards. Before they’d graduated to pubs, she and her friends would sit on a bench in the cemetery behind the school, passing round Red Bull and vodka in a plastic toothmug and spinning preferred realities. Pock-marked angels with spread wings cast gravity on teenage sagacity, as they made up torrid lives for the dead surrounding them from scant tombstone information. One woman had lost her husband in the First World War and all her sons in the Second. Another had ten children and died aged thirty-eight. There had been no words engraved for Pauline Davies who had died aged twenty-one in 1972, just the glazed image of a happy face, with a dreadful hair-do. They had let this pass as they searched for signs of her impending doom in Pauline’s too-red lips and bright brown eyes, looking for what made her different and would ensure their own immortality. There had been no clue except the awful hairstyle. The group would straggle on by, eager to put death behind them.
Chris had always gleaned reassurance from the brevity of the words on the headstones. People were born, they were related to other people and then they died. The facts of life.
Now she sat down on a bench beside the Ramsay plot and from a comparatively safe distance stared at the graves, willing them to yield their secrets. She felt a tickling on her cheek and reaching up to scratch it, her fingers came away wet; she was crying, maybe that was why the lady with the notebook had been weird with her.
The sun was dropping down behind the downs, and Judge Ramsay’s headstone cast a long shadow across his scrubby plot. Between the inches that separated Mark Ramsay from his parents there were over forty years. The child who had ‘greatly missed’ his father was now dead himself, with his own children to miss him. Or not. Where were the years? Were they in the rustling leaves of the ash, the chunks of soil, the lichen-covered stone? Were they around her now, the hundreds of minutes experienced, the birthdays, the family holidays or Sunday lunches? Moments like this, when sitting still she could hear the engines and gears of all the lived lives? The woman who wasn’t Alice had said there was no Heaven and Chris had thought this idea reasonable. But what happened to all the seconds that amounted to a life?
‘That’s your grandfather.’
The whispering voice made Chris start. Then with a rush of delight and relief she put out her hands. Her Mum was here. The next instant white heat urged her to smash Alice to pieces.
‘What do you want?’
‘I came to find you.’ Her reply was addressed to the freshly dug grave. She was holding a twig in one hand and flicked it over the fingers of her other hand, leaves fluttering and tearing.
‘Well, you found me. So piss off!’ Chris was tugged with vicious insecurity at the sight of her Mum, baffled and vulnerable, looking with such desolation at the flimsy cross. There was no one to step out of a crowd and save Chris from kicking, stamping and smashing her mother’s face into silence with a chunk of flint.
‘Haven’t you seen a grave before?’
‘Not this one.’
‘Couldn’t even be arsed to get a proper headstone. Like that ugly bastard of a mausoleum.’ She waved impotent arms at Judge Ramsay’s tombstone. ‘Is that false too? Going to take it away as soon as I’ve gone, are you?’
‘Apparently it’s being carved, this is temporary. And the ground has to settle.’ Eleanor had not meant to point out Chris’s ignorance and reveal her knowledge of the Ramsays’ affairs. ‘Oh, Chris.’ She turned to her, not bothering to dash away the tears that trickled down her cheeks. ‘He’s your grandfather!’