The Discourtesy of Death Page 8

  Mrs Goodwin crouched forward. She knew her husband would be back soon. There wasn’t much time.

  ‘They were very close as brothers,’ she said, quietly. ‘Which makes what has happened all the more tragic.’

  Always fighting, of course (she explained, smiling). As boys they pulled each other’s hair out. But as they got older – Nigel was the elder by two years – their individual characters began to emerge (the quiet and withdrawn as against the loud and extrovert) and the sheer difference between their outlook and behaviour brought them together rather than pushed them apart. It was a principle of complementarity. The one needed the other. Michael would quieten Nigel down while Nigel would draw Michael out of his shell. A mutual friend once said that when Michael joined the Army he was following a path opened up by his brother. And vice versa. When Nigel began studies in theology, the way forward had already been illuminated by his quiet, reflective sibling. They chose their careers out of personal conviction, certainly, but in a strange way they were indebted to each other. They’d bound one another into their radically different futures … Michael was involved in Nigel’s life of spiritual reflection and Nigel was involved in Michael’s life of military action. No surprise, then, that Michael asked Nigel to be Jenny’s godfather.

  ‘At the time Nigel was studying at Oxford,’ said Mrs Goodwin. ‘Michael had only recently left Sandhurst and got married. He was a lieutenant with a young wife still training to be a vet in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Emma?’ supplied Anselm, securing a bond between them; showing that he was familiar with some of the family history.

  ‘Exactly. She just plugged away at the books while Michael went to postings in Cyprus and Germany. After he was promoted to captain, Emma got a job in Sudbury, and he transferred to the Intelligence Corps. That’s when he specifically asked if he could go to Belfast.’

  ‘Why?’

  Anselm was beginning to worry slightly. How this account of brothers in arms meshed with the death of Jennifer Henderson was beyond his imagination.

  ‘He wanted to make a difference. He said there was a deep sickness in the society that needed healing. Ancient wounds in Irish history that were still wide open. He wanted to help close them.’

  ‘Always the peacemaker,’ ventured Anselm.

  ‘Nigel’s own words, when Michael told him. Michael said something had to be done to bring about lasting change, regardless of the risks. We’re now convinced it’s why he’d joined up in the first place … it had nothing to do with building bridges in Africa.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’ appealed Anselm.

  ‘Because, looking back, he went to Sandhurst the year after the pub bombings in Guildford and Birmingham. The carnage had spilled out of Northern Ireland onto the English mainland. And there were tell-tale remarks … He once said, “We caused the trouble over there, we’ve got to bring it to an end.” We think he picked a terrible intractable problem on purpose … and did his best to help resolve it.’

  Mrs Goodwin looked at her watch and Mitch, as if picking up a signal, pushed her narrative forward. ‘You said he was different when he came home.’

  ‘Yes. He’d been four years at Thiepval Barracks. Lisburn, south of Belfast. We’d seen him on leave, of course, but he never spoke of his work. All he’d say was that he now worked for a special unit. It was all hush-hush and dangerous. Emma was scared to bits … she told me not to say but it was called the FRU, the Force Research Unit. Whatever the dangers might have been, with us, back home, Michael was his usual quiet self. There was nothing untoward. And then, in December nineteen eighty-three, he came back … traumatised.’

  ‘And he never spoke of what happened?’ asked Anselm.

  ‘Never. We knew that he was being treated by the Army doctors, but that was all we got from Emma. She knew nothing either … or if she knew, she wasn’t going to tell us anything. All we could do was watch Michael, locked up, deep inside himself. And that’s when his relationship with Nigel began to fall apart.’

  Only it didn’t quite tumble, bit by bit. Michael just turned his back on Nigel. He didn’t talk to him any more. Didn’t call. Didn’t share his thoughts on politics. Didn’t even stay in the same room as Nigel for longer than a few minutes. Always walked off to find something he didn’t really need.

  ‘It was as though he blamed Nigel for whatever had happened,’ said Mrs Goodwin, trying to understand, even now, after all these years. ‘He severed the bond with his brother. The door was shut. There was no handle. He simply wouldn’t answer to the most gentle knock.’

  ‘Returning to this trauma,’ said Anselm. ‘Didn’t things improve as the treatment progressed?’

  ‘No. Something final had happened, for Michael, in relation to Nigel. He couldn’t even look at him any more. And as for the treatment, whatever it might have been, Emma as much as said the psychologists had given up … but then we saw something … miraculous. Michael’s face gradually began to shine. There was a terrible vulnerability in his eyes … and they were wide open, but only to Jennifer.’

  ‘How old was she at the time?’ asked Mitch.

  ‘Six or seven. She’d just started ballet with a Russian émigré in Stowmarket. Ex-Bolshoi and half crackers. Michael left the Army and worked part-time for a company run by a friend from Sandhurst days. They imported woollen cloth from Italy and Michael managed the office and translated all the faxes and letters. He’d done A level. That filled up the mornings and two afternoons. Whenever he could he went sailing on his boat, always alone. The rest of the time he did the shopping and looked after Jennifer. But, you know, it was the dance that soothed Michael … made him feel better. He went to all her lessons, all her performances … watched her practise.’

  ‘No words,’ said Anselm. ‘He didn’t have to speak.’

  ‘He just had to look … and he stared, at these beautiful, graceful movements.’

  So much of ballet was about death, thought Anselm. Final flights of anguish. Harrowed eyes, heavily blacked with theatrical face-paint. The slightly opened mouths. The triumph of grace over brutality. All done through gestures, great and small. Michael had found a therapy that reached into his darkness without the pain of light.

  ‘We saw this change in Michael,’ said Mrs Goodwin, ‘but somehow, it pushed him even further away from Nigel, and from me. Jennifer became his life, and there was no room left for anyone else but Emma … and she did nothing to bring the two brothers back together again. I don’t blame her, but she seemed to accept Michael’s very private decision … as if she understood why he’d turned away from Nigel. Michael who’d always been a peacemaker effectively smashed the family to pieces. Or Northern Ireland did. Very, very gradually, we stopped visiting theirs. They never came to ours. Nigel went to a parish in Truro and then Carlisle … Canterbury, Bristol … a mission station in Zimbabwe … by the time we came back to Long Melford, the distance between Michael and Nigel was immense. The only link between them was accidental … Emma and I stayed in contact by phone; she let me know how things were going.’

  Mitch looked up and said, ‘And what did Jennifer make of her absent godfather?’

  ‘Well, she had no idea what had gone on. How could she? No one told her. So she presumed he was too busy looking after other people’s families.’ Mrs Goodwin smarted at the unfairness; the depth of misunderstanding. ‘Children never really know what’s happened inside their parents. Why they think what they think and do what they do. The turmoil. The old wounds. The damaged love. All the confusion that can never be put into words. For Jenny, there was no shattered family. Just an adoring mum and dad, a distant aunt and an uncle who couldn’t care less … relatives you had to invite round when pushed … which is how we met Peter Henderson. Jenny insisted. And that day is—’

  A key jangled on the pavement outside. A flash of anxiety and something like regret seized Mrs Goodwin’s face. She quickly left the room, and closed the door behind her. Voices sounded in the corridor. After some hushed insistence, someo
ne went upstairs, their feet stamping reluctant cooperation. Intuition told Anselm another door had, in fact, been closed. Mrs Goodwin wouldn’t be explaining her theory of Jennifer Henderson’s death. And not just because her husband had come home. It was written on her face. She’d felt the sudden and appalling defencelessness that comes with complete honesty. The realisation that you can’t retract what you’ve said. She preferred by far the anonymity of listening to others in the church hall. It was safer. Open your mouth and people asked questions. Keep quiet, and you could think what the hell you liked and no one cared a hoot.

  13

  ‘Sherbet lemons,’ said the old man, a twinkle in his eye. ‘Two ounces.’

  It was not a question. The capped vendor was certain. He’d spent a lifetime memorising the needs of his customers.

  ‘You can read my mind,’ said Michael, reaching behind his jacket.

  ‘I can.’

  The old man tipped the jar of sweets into a measuring dish on some metric scales, ignoring the red needle. He knew what two ounces looked like.

  ‘Still got the old gyp?’

  Michael didn’t answer. Like a specialist in earthquakes consulting the Richter scale, he was quantifying the shake in his outstretched hand, asking himself if the tremors had reduced in severity. He smiled. There’d been some improvement. Deep down the tectonic plates were beginning to seize up.

  ‘Do you want some fresh veg?’ The old man had followed Michael to the door. ‘I’ve got some sprouts in this morning.’

  Michael examined them. ‘Not if they come from Brussels.’

  Taking off his cap, the old man sighed. ‘We know each other, you and I.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘Half a pound?’

  ‘Just what I was thinking.’

  ‘Funny, isn’t it. I mean, with my wife, Christine, we’ve stopped talking to each other. No point in saying anything. We already know what’s going on up top.’ He tapped his head with a finger, not seeming to appreciate that the gesture was also code for ‘bonkers’. ‘Thirty-one years we’ve been married. We just sit there, happy as Larry, switching channels. I hold the remote control. She eats peanuts. I press the buttons. Hates her name. Says it’s old-fashioned. You married?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘Yes.’ Michael took the proffered brown paper bag holding the sprouts from Bramfield. ‘We don’t speak any more either.’

  The vendor tilted his head slightly. He wasn’t quite sure what Michael had meant.

  After dropping the sprouts into a waste bin, Michael took the concrete stairs from the road down to the promenade facing Southwold Denes beach. Following the unforgettable route, he passed a string of huts and found the steps onto the sand. To the right, wooden groynes reached out into the sea like resolute black fingers. They had a fight on their hands. Longshore drift it was called … that action of the waves shifting sand along the coastline. The groynes arrested the process. Kept the beach in place as if they’d brought time to a standstill, made it splash back and forth in the palm of one’s hand.

  ‘It’s all I want to do, Dad,’ said Jenny, with the simple conviction of any other seventeen-year-old.

  They’d come to Southwold in August. Madame Semiglázov, her teacher, had entered her star pupil for the Prix de Lausanne in January. If Jennifer won, she’d get a six-month scholarship to the Royal Ballet School in Covent Garden. Michael hadn’t been able to work out why Jenny couldn’t just take the train up to London and ask for an audition, but Semi-detached (as they called her) had her own strange ways of thinking. She didn’t explain herself. You were expected to trust everything she said, no questions asked. And prior to the competition she’d insisted on ‘Jzenni’ taking regular short holidays. Emma had gone shopping and Michael and his daughter had taken the concrete stairs and the steps onto the beach. They’d sat with their backs to the sea wall, as Michael did now, the barrel of the Browning hurting the bones of his lower spine. The pain drifted away, pushed along by another wave of anguish.

  ‘I only want to dance.’

  Her hair was scraped off her face and tied in a knot at the back. On anyone else the style might have looked severe, but with Jennifer, it wasn’t really a style. It was what she did when she got out of bed. Her elegance was completely natural. Her fine black eyebrows contracted, drawing together her long dark lashes.

  ‘If I don’t win, it’s all been for nothing,’ she said, gazing out to sea. ‘I was never any good at school, never one of the clever ones, but I knew how to move … knew how to speak with my body. To put everything into the way I walk, stand, turn, run … and fly. I’ve learned how to fly …’

  No matter what happens, it hasn’t been for nothing. You’ve reached into me, saved me from drowning without even knowing what you were doing.

  ‘… and if I can’t fly high, very high, I don’t want to fly at all.’ Michael said, very quietly, barely louder than the murmur of the surf, ‘Next year, Nimblefoot, you’ll leave home and move to London. You’ll be a student at the Royal Ballet School.’

  ‘How do you know? It’s up to the judges in Lausanne.’

  ‘Because you dance like a bird in a cage. They’ll know you belong outside.’

  ‘Oh Daddy.’ She leaned into him as if it were cold. The sun was high, a few clouds were clumped and low. Striped beach partitions flapped in the breeze. Parents and grandparents stood close to the breakers, their feet bare, trousers rolled over the knees, skirts tucked into a belt. They were bent forward watching the children cry with ecstatic terror. The sea was immense and they were small. It was the great unknown and there were monsters out there – prehistoric things with tentacles and yellow fangs. Jenny said, ‘If it wasn’t for you, I’d never have got off the ground.’

  ‘We’ve both learned to fly,’ said Michael.

  I’ve flown far away from what I’ve done. Can’t even remember what he looked like. I used to try … as if I owed it to him … but he’s gone. There’s just a dark track in my mind and three closed gates.

  ‘I’ll dance for you, Dad,’ said Jennifer, pulling away.

  ‘No, Nimblefoot, you dance for yourself, and for all the people who can’t do what you can do.’

  The cage door is open, darling. I only ever watched. I’ve never locked you in. You’re ready to go now. Fly, my little girl, fly.

  ‘Let’s go and wrong-foot that man in the sweet shop,’ said Jenny, rising. She looked down at her father, her face dark against the bright sky. Her features were lost, like those of the farmer in Donegal. There was just a sharp outline and the sound of a smile in her voice. ‘We haven’t tricked him since I was a child.’

  Michael stood up. The pain from the gun returned to the base of his spine. Jenny had moved towards one of the groynes in his memory, those barriers that keep everything that’s precious within reach. Head down and forlorn, he hauled himself up the metal steps and concrete stairs, fleeing the weight of Jenny’s unfulfilled expectations. She’d won the Gold Medal in Lausanne. And at the end of her scholarship at the Royal Ballet School she’d joined the Royal Ballet itself. But that didn’t mean she’d always be able to fly. Neither of them had looked beyond the snow outside the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne. They’d given no thought to the brutally unexpected … the arrival of Peter Henderson, that later slip on a church hall stage and the bowel cancer. But who did? Actually, Néall Ó Mórdha did. He’d always been ready for a shock. And look what happened to him.

  The vendor of sweets saw Michael coming from a hundred yards. He smiled. He was on familiar ground. He stepped inside his shop and had just brought down the jar of sherbet lemons when Michael swept into the shop, hand reaching towards the ache in his back.

  ‘Wine gums,’ he said.

  The old man blinked and frowned. One hand pushed back the cap.

  ‘Hundred grams,’ added Michael.

  Christine’s husband recoiled slightly. Something had gone wrong. Life wasn’t like this. Certain things were fo
r sure. There was no room for doubt. He looked at Michael as if he’d unzipped his fair, English skin to reveal the beast within: a metric monster who’d trespassed upon his kingdom of hallowed certainties. He said, eyes bright with resistance, ‘Have we met before?’

  14

  ‘I’ve read all about you,’ said the Reverend Doctor Nigel Goodwin, looking at Anselm with interest, his hands thrust into the pockets of a creased white linen jacket. ‘Remember, Helen? He was in the Sunday Times.’

  ‘Sorry, it never registered.’

  ‘But I read it out. The monk from Larkwood Priory – it’s just up the road. Remember? Well, well, well … you weren’t listening, were you?’ The specialist in Karl Barth shook his head knowingly, his lively features charged with lenience. ‘Talk to myself, half the time,’ he confessed, turning towards Anselm. ‘Sick of my sermons, I suppose.’

  Sensing the muscular curiosity that comes from a man of the cloth faced with a confrère’s celebrity, Anselm deftly avoided any discussion about past cases by producing the letter sent to Larkwood’s Prior.

  ‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Helen, finding an excuse (Anselm thought) to leave the room. She needed a breather. She needed to work out how to escape a storm of her own making. Anselm knew about Michael and Northern Ireland. He knew too much. And if Nigel got going about Jennifer, he might raise a wind, inadvertently, because he didn’t know what his wife had been thinking for twenty years.

  ‘And how about some of that magnificent fruit cake?’ added her husband, merrily.

  Doctor Goodwin was one of those challenging people who radiate energy with the smallest of gestures. He read with eyebrows raised, one foot quietly tapping the floor, his fine mouth following the shape of the words. Silver-framed glasses amplified the mood of concentration. Anselm could easily imagine the doctor, masked and determined, abseiling through a window of the Iranian Embassy, Heckler and Koch at the ready. Grappling with Barth in the quiet of the Bodleian seemed barely credible.