LITMIR.BIZ

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of him and all his little mates?’

      Jess put down her fork. ‘I’ll never forget the party. He made us go out for the evening, Ian, do you remember? We came back to find the house detonated. Wreckage strewn everywhere. Like a bombing.’

      Ian nodded. ‘We walked in through the front door at eleven thirty. To see some kid puking into the phone.’

      ‘Dad, he was trying to call a taxi. I’d told him he had to go home.’

      ‘That was Danny’s sixteenth birthday,’ Jess said. ‘It took us a week to clear up. Don’t ever let Sock have a teenage bash in your house, Liz.’

      James put out his hand to cover Lizzie’s.

      Nobody spoke for a moment. The scrape of knives and forks grew loud. Then Jess said gently, ‘He will be all right. It doesn’t mean anything will happen to Sock.’

      But for all the affection that underlay her attempt at reassurance, she felt a bolt of anger wildly shooting through her. It clenched her fingers and tightened her throat. Why her boy, why Danny, who meant so much to her, and not some other woman’s son, even – the guilty black whisper of it – her own sister’s?

      Lizzie began to cry. Her face turned into the mask of tragedy before the tears began to run. She sobbed, ‘This is so awful. It’s so final and such a waste.’

      Ian and Beth glanced at each other. When she was still quite small Beth had asked her father, ‘Why does Aunt Lizzie make such a show of everything?’

      He had answered, ‘Because that is what she does.’ And Beth had understood that her aunt’s life was acting, just as acting was her life. Her failure to partition the two had probably meant that her career had never been as glittering as she wished, and her life the same, until James came along. Beth turned watchful eyes on her mother. Jess was always so calm in her gestures and direct in her words. You knew what she meant, as if you could read her mind. If you could act that, you would be the greatest. And Jess was strong, even today.

      Beth realised how much she needed her mother to be strong. The fingers of dread squeezed at her heart, making her breathless. What if something should happen to her mother now, how would she bear that? She wanted to run to her and hide her head in her lap.

      ‘Did you see him?’ Lizzie was asking them all. ‘That boy was there this afternoon.’

      Jess had stopped eating. One by one they abandoned the pretence of wanting food, but they drank the wine. Ian refilled the glasses. Lizzie rubbed her fingers across her cheeks, leaving black streaks of mascara that James tenderly stroked away for her.

      Jess said, ‘Yes, I did see him. I thought it was right for him to be there.’

      She had only caught a glimpse. Rob was sitting alone at the back of the chapel. It had been no more than a noting of his presence along with all the others.

      ‘I bloody well didn’t.’ Ian’s face reddened. His pained eyes were bloodshot. His grief could only express itself in noisy belligerence. ‘If I had done, I’d have got rid of him. Dan’s killer, sitting there with all of us? Why should he be free to have another piss-up tonight and slaughter someone else’s kid?’

      The police had explained to Jess and Ian that once all the evidence and statements had been collected, a report would be submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service, with a recommendation of the charge that should be made against Robert Ellis. The process might take six weeks, or maybe a little longer until his first appearance in the magistrates’ court.

      ‘And until then he walks around as free as I am?’ Ian had demanded.

      That was how it was, they were told.

      Tonight Ian had had wine on top of plenty of whisky, but he wasn’t drunk. He just looked exhausted and baffled, like a large animal in a pen. Beth stared at the tablecloth. Jess leaned across the table to Ian.

      ‘Don’t be angry. Not tonight.’ Ian had been angry too often, all through their marriage. With her, with their children, with the disappointments of his life in Ditchley. At least he had put that behind him now.

      ‘He didn’t come back here, lucky for him. I’d have found it a bit hard to pour a drink for him.’

      To divert the conversation from Rob Jess asked, ‘Was today the way these things are supposed to be?’

      Jess couldn’t remember any funerals except Ian’s parents’, and her mother’s, who had died of cancer when she and Lizzie were in their twenties. Their father had made the arrangements for that one. He was still alive, but he was in a residential home near York. He had been ill, and was too frail to make the journey to Danny’s funeral.

      The wine had made Jess’s head swim. Her thoughts skittered back and forth, as if there was too much pain for them to be pinned for long in any place.

      The service had been simple, just a reading and a hymn and two or three of Danny’s friends who had offered their memories of him. The priest, who had not known him, had said kind, vague things intended to console without raising the controversy of God or an afterlife.

      And after that the gathering in the house, and the inching progress through this evening. After this was over, what would come next?

      It was James who answered. ‘It was just as it should have been. And you were brave, Jess. All of you were.’

      James had shown his unobtrusive strengths in the last days. They had all relied on his cooking and telephone answering and attendance on Sock. ‘And I also think it was brave of the boy to turn up.’

      Jess smiled her gratitude and affection at him. Seeing his greying hair and plain features, and his kind eyes behind his glasses, she felt envy of Lizzie’s happiness twisting the thread of her own loneliness. She began quickly to gather up the congealed plates. She wasn’t brave herself, unfortunately. She only felt that she must appear to be, and that was quite different.

      Beth stood up. She was shivering because the room was cold, and she was still listening for Danny to slam the front door, and the reality of what she knew refused to dislodge the longing expectation.

      ‘Let’s talk about him, not the funeral. Let’s get the photos out or something. I’d rather think about when he was alive.’

      Lizzie swept her arms around Beth. ‘You’re right, darling. All the photos. The christening and the infants’ play and the Cornish holidays, the whole lot. Shall we do it, Jess?’

      ‘Yes. Yes, why not?’ She bumped softly against a chair in her laden circuit of the table, glad of the muzzy distance that alcohol laid over the sharpness of loss. If she drank some more, might it briefly obliterate the pain? She became aware that Ian was watching her; it seemed incredible that he had once been her husband, that they had shared this house and the responsibility for two children. He took the pile of plates out of her hands.

      ‘I’ll get the photos,’ Jess said.

      Rob rang the doorbell and when there was no answer he pressed his thumb viciously against the plastic button and held it there. A train passed up on the embankment beyond the high wire fence and he turned his head to catch a glimpse of the chain of light as it threaded away. The door swung open without warning, making him jump. There was a black girl in high zippered boots and a short skirt.

      ‘Yeah? D’you have to ring like that?’

      ‘Cat. Is Cat in?’ He couldn’t remember her other name.

      The girl shrugged her indifference and walked away, leaving the door open. Rob closed it behind him and tramped up the stairs to the door he remembered as being Cat’s. He hesitated, then knocked.

      Her head appeared, wrapped in a towel, in a shaft of yellow light that shone down the dingy hallway.

      ‘It’s you.’ Her eyes darted past him, looking for help.

      ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

      Slowly

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