Earth was thrown on to the coffin. ’Our Father, who art in heaven,’ Herbert Cutcheon suitably declared, and Hazel watched Garfield’s lips, in unison with Addy’s and their parents’. Stewart was there too, now and again making a noise. Mrs. Leeson held a handkerchief to her face, clinging on to her husband in sudden bright sunshine. ‘And forgive us our trespasses.’ Garfield mouthed the words too.
With bitter calmness, Hazel allowed the facts to settle into place. Milton had been told not to. He had been told, even by Garfield himself, that you had fancies when you were fifteen. He had been told that talk about a Catholic saint was like the Catholics claiming one of their idolatrous statues had been seen to move. But in spite of all that was said to him Milton had disobeyed. ‘Your bodies a living sacrifice,’ Hazel’s Great-Uncle Willie used to thunder, steadfast in his certainty. Prominent among the mourners, the old man’s granite features displayed no emotion now.
‘Amen,’ Herbert Cutcheon prompted, and the mourners murmured and Mrs. Leeson sobbed. Hazel moved closer to her, as Addy did, receiving her from their father’s care. All of them knew, Hazel’s thoughts ran on: her father knew, and her mother, and Addy, and Herbert Cutcheon. It was known in every house in the neighbourhood; it was known in certain Belfast bars and clubs, where Garfield’s hard-man reputation had been threatened, and then enhanced.
‘It’s all right, Mother,’ Addy whispered as the three women turned from the grave, but Hazel did not attempt to soothe her mother’s distress because she knew she could not. Her mother would go to her own grave with the scalding agony of what had happened still alive within her; her father would be reminded of the day of the occurrence on all the July marches remaining to him. The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.
A Day
In the night Mrs. Lethwes wakes from time to time, turns and murmurs in her blue-quilted twin bed, is aware of fleeting thoughts and fragments of memory that dissipate swiftly. Within her stomach, food recently consumed is uneasily digested. Briefly, she suffers a moment of cramp.
Mrs. Lethwes dreams: a child again, she remains in the car while her brother, Charlie, visits the Indian family who run the supermarket. Kittens creep from beneath inverted flowerpots in the Bunches’ back yard, and she is there, in the yard too, looking for Charlie because he is visiting the Bunches now. ‘You mustn’t go bothering the Bunches,’ their mother upbraids him. ‘People are busy.’ There are rivers to cross, and the streets aren’t there any more; there is a seashore, and tents.
In her garden, while Mrs. Lethwes still sleeps, the scent of night-stock fades with the cool of night. Dew forms on roses and geraniums, on the petals of the cosmos and the yellow spikes of broom. Slugs creep towards lettuce plants, avoiding a line of virulent bait; a silent cat, far outside its own domain, waits for the emergence of the rockery mice.
It is July. Dawn comes early, casting a pale twilight on the brick of the house, on the Virginia creeper that covers half a wall, setting off white-painted window-frames and decorative wrought-iron. This house and garden, in a tranquil wooded neighbourhood, constitute one part of the achievement of Mrs. Lethwes’s husband, are a symbol of professional advancement conducted over twenty years, which happens also to be the length of this marriage.
Abruptly, Mrs. Lethwes is fully awake and knows her night’s sleep is over. Hunched beneath the bedclothes in the other bed, her husband does not stir when she rises and crosses the room they share to the window. Drawing aside the edge of a curtain, she glances down into the early-morning garden and almost at once drops the curtain back into place. In bed again, she lies on her side, facing her husband because, being fond of him, she likes to watch him sleeping. She feels blurred and headachy, as she always does at this time, the worst moment of her day, Mrs. Lethwes considers.
Is Elspeth awake too? She wonders that. Does Elspeth, in her city precinct, share the same pale shade of dawn? Is there, as well, the orange glow of a street lamp and now, beginning in the distance somewhere, the soft swish of a milk dray, a car door banging, a church bell chiming five? Mrs. Lethwes doesn’t know where Elspeth lives precisely, or in any way what she looks like, but imagines short black hair and elfin features, a small, thin body, fragile fingers. An hour and three-quarters later - still conducting this morning ritual - she hears bath-water running; and later still there is music. Vivaldi, Mrs. Lethwes thinks.
Her husband wakes. His eyes remember, becoming troubled, and then the trouble lifts from them when he notices, without surprise, that she’s not asleep. In another of her dreams during the night that has passed he carried her, and his voice spoke softly, soothing her. Or was it quite a dream, or only something like one? She tries to smile; she says she’s sorry, knowing now.
At ten, when the cleaning woman comes, Mrs. Lethwes goes out to shop. She parks her small, white Peugeot in the Waitrose car park, and in a leisurely manner gathers vegetables and fruit, and tins and jars, pork chops for this evening, vermouth and Gordon’s gin, Edam, and Normandy butter because she has noticed the butter is getting low, Comfort and the cereal her husband favours, the one called Common Sense. Afterwards, with everything in the boot, she makes her way to the Trompe-L’Oeil for coffee. Her make-up is in place, her hair drawn up, the way she has taken to wearing it lately. She smiles at people she knows by sight, the waitress and other women who are having coffee, at the cashier when she pays her bill. There is some conversation, about the weather.
In her garden, later, the sound of the Hoover reaches her from the open windows of the house as the cleaning woman, Marietta, moves from room to room. The day is warm, Mrs. Lethwes’s legs are bare, her blue dress light on her body, her Italian sandals comfortable yet elegant. Marietta claims to be Italian also, having had an Italian mother, but her voice and manner are Cockney and Mrs. Lethwes doubts that she has ever been in Italy, even though she regularly gives the impression that she knows Venice well.
Mrs. Lethwes likes to be occupied when Marietta comes. When it’s fine she finds something to do in the garden, and when the weather doesn’t permit that she lingers for longer in the Trompe-L’ Oeil and there’s the pretence of letter-writing or tidying drawers. She likes to keep a closed door between herself and Marietta, to avoid as best she can the latest about Marietta’s daughter Ange, and Liam, whom Ange has been contemplating marriage with for almost five years, and the latest about the people in the house next door, who keep Alsatians.
In the garden Mrs. Lethwes weeds a flowerbed, wishing that Marietta didn’t have to come to the house three times a week, but knowing that of course she must. She hopes the little heart-leafed things she’s clearing from among the delphiniums are not the germination of seeds that Mr. Yatt has sown, a misfortune that occurred last year with his Welsh poppies. Unlike Marietta, Mr. Yatt is dour and rarely speaks, but he has a way of slowly raising his head and staring, which Mrs. Lethwes finds disconcerting. When he’s in the garden - Mondays only, all day - she keeps out of it herself.
Not Vivaldi now, perhaps a Telemann minuet, run Mrs. Lethwes’s thoughts in her garden. Once, curious about the music a flautist plays, she read the information that accompanied half a dozen compact discs in a music shop. She didn’t buy the discs but, curious again, she borrowed some from the music section of the library and played them all one morning. Thirty-six, or just a little younger, she sees Elspeth as, unmarried of course and longing to bear the child of the man she loves: Mrs. Lethwes is certain of that, since she has experienced this same longing herself. In the flat she imagines, there’s a smell of freshly made coffee. The fragile fingers cease their movement. The instrument is laid aside, the coffee poured.