Her laughter ceased on a retching sound and her face contorted in a spasm. It was as if she had been struck from behind with a massive but invisible hammer. Her hands flew up and she pitched forward on to the floor with a slithering crash.
Mrs Pettitt jumped up and screamed. Brenda Evans shouted, ‘Oh, my! Oh, my!’ and put her hand up over her mouth. A patient shouted and a nurse came running.
Stephen walked out of the ward like a man in a dream.
That evening, within an hour of each other, Chantal Tanya Simpson was born and Helena Beatrice Naulls died. Lyn was invited across the road to drink champagne with Kevin and her parents, but she didn’t go. She had come home to find Stephen in a state of shock, scarcely able to speak, although Helena was still alive then. Joan Pettitt phoned with the news that she had died and Lyn broke it to him gently. It seemed neither to relieve him nor make him worse.
He sat beside her, holding her hand so tightly that the bones ached. She had never felt his need of her so strongly. It was as if he were drawing a current out of her, recharging himself from some source of comfort in herself. For a long while he didn’t speak. Then he began talking about his grandmother, about how hard her life had been and how terrible the latter part of it, how awful her death. Lyn had never heard him talk about anyone like that before. She hadn’t thought he cared much for old Mrs Naulls but had visited her out of duty and in the hope of finding out more about her relationship with his grandfather. This outpouring of love and pity was strange from Stephen. And uneasily Lyn began to feel that he wasn’t really talking about his grandmother at all, but that it was someone else he meant when he talked about suffering and cruelty and neglect.
He knelt down on the floor and laid his head in her lap, clasping her body in his arms. He had hardly ever before touched her so closely and intimately. Lyn sighed. She put her hand on his head and stroked his hair. Nowadays, her body and perhaps her mind too in a constant process of change, she felt less able to be Stephen’s support. It ought to have been a mutual thing, for she needed his support as well. The temptation to tell him about the baby and her idea of their future was suddenly very strong, the words were waiting on her breath. She suppressed them. Stephen had gone very white and his eyes were closed. She seemed to see Nick’s face, eager and smiling, the antithesis of this life in death, and as she bent over Stephen, murmuring softly to him, the tears came into her eyes and ran down her face.
Great ceremonial attended Naulls funerals and expense was never spared. Naullses were so intent on being buried or burnt with dignity and display that some of them saved up all their lives for their own funerals. Arthur Naulls, from the age of fourteen when he became gardener’s boy at Chesney Hall, had put aside a penny a week into some insurance scheme to this end, though when the time came, as his son Stanley had remarked with a sneer, it hadn’t amounted to nearly enough.
For his widow there were to be four black Daimlers to follow the hearse. The clans would gather first at uncle Leonard’s and partake later of a doleful banquet at the Bracebridges’, and in between there would be the old Prayer Book funeral service at Holy Trinity as well as a service in the chapel at Byss Crematorium. Mother couldn’t have died at a better time of the year for flowers, said Mrs Pettitt in classic Naulls style.
Leonard Naulls, the only really prosperous one, lived in west Hilderbridge in a district called Callowford. All the other Naullses lived round about, but Leonard’s house was the biggest and in the smartest street. Stephen got there early. He brought a sheaf of red dahlias and carnations with him and put them with the other flowers in the hall. His aunt Midge kissed him and told him how good it was of him to come, he had always been good to his grandma, and then she went back upstairs to finish adjusting her black crimplene turban. He had already seen his uncle Leonard walking slowly round the garden with his sister Joan and his brother-in-law Sidney Pettitt, showing them the flowerbeds. Showing visitors the garden, even though they were one’s own siblings, even though they could see it daily from their own windows, was a Naulls habit, indulged in on solemn occasions. Stephen noticed that the photograph of his cousin Peter, which last time he had been in this house had stood on the hall table, was gone. He pushed open the door into the living room.
This room had french windows overlooking the lawn and the meagre herbaceous borders. Standing in front of them, her back to Stephen, looking out at the gloomy strolling figures, was Brenda Evans. She was alone. Her round plump form was swathed in clinging pleated black and she had high-heeled black patent leather shoes on, stockings with black seams, one of which was very crooked. She hadn’t yet put her hat on. A shiny small black straw, probably bought specially for the occasion, lay on the arm of the settee beside her. Her yellow hair was newly done, yellow, incurved, glossy, like a chrysanthemum.
She hadn’t heard him come in. Stephen stood in the doorway, looking at a woman’s back, a woman standing at a window. A great many things seemed to happen to him as he stood there. Impressions passed in clear bright pictures across the screen of his mind, a pile of coins at eye level on a table, his hands round an old woman’s stringy throat, thin blue air mail letters dropping into the post box on Chesney Green, letters that would never be answered.
A hot dazzling blur fell over Stephen’s sight, he was blinded to everything except that curvy shape, its outlines fuzzy now, the window behind it, and because of the bright light, the green of the lawn transposed to its opposite in the spectrum, blood-red. His hands went up, the fingers bent as if to claw. He was poised for the leap at her. She heard his breath drawn in and she turned round.
‘Why, Stephen! How nice.’
He put up his hand to his forehead, felt on his fingertips the drops of sweat. There was a fierce drumming in his head. To explain the gesture, his robot voice said, ‘Lord, isn’t it hot?’
‘Lovely,’ said Brenda Evans. ‘It just suits me. On our way back from Europe you and me must have a real cosy get-together. I’m dying to meet your wife. Linda, isn’t it? But Stephen, believe me, there just hasn’t been a minute what with Ma taking a notion to die like that. Though in one way it couldn’t have been more convenient, with me on the spot and not having to be fetched over.’ Whatever she had become, she was clearly still a Naulls. ‘They didn’t want to have the funeral till Monday but your uncle Stanley insisted. It has to be before my sister leaves for Paris, France, he said, so of course they gave way.’
The robot said, ‘Well, have a jolly good holiday.’
‘We deserve it. It’s twenty-two years since Fred or me set foot outside of Canada. Now, dear, tell me how’s your father?’
‘He’s fine. Fit as a fiddle. Still at the same old trade, you know.’
‘And you’re his right-hand man. I bet you’ve made yourself indispensable, eh?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Stephen began to laugh. He couldn’t stop once he had begun and he rocked about on the sofa, sobbing with laughter, his chest aching with it, water running out of his eyes. He could see she was staring at him but he couldn’t stop. At last he got up and ran out of the room, colliding with auntie Midge and the Bracebridges coming in. Both his hands and his handkerchief were over his face and they thought he was crying.
‘Stephen was always very good to his nanna,’ said Mrs Bracebridge.
Afterwards they understood he was too upset to stay for the lunch. Stephen had meant to go to work in the afternoon, and when he left the crematorium he drove back by way of the market square, he even slowed briefly as he passed Whalbys’, but he didn’t stop. While his mother was in the town he didn’t want to face Dadda in case he too had heard of her arrival. Dadda’s reaction was beyond his imaginings, he didn’t want to try to think about it.