you, Mikey. Look, it fits perfectly. A bit of glue and everything will be as right as rain.’ The words are out before he realises how empty they are. What has fallen, what is damaged, what seemed repairable and what has survived. That is the reckoning, always has been.
Forbidding them to follow him, Edmund leaves to examine the damage upstairs, instructing the boy to sit tight on the bottom of the stairs, just for a minute or two. From here Mikey can see straight out through the front door, which is open because it won’t close properly. His trainers are still on the mat so he puts them on. If the house falls down again, he can escape that way and from here he can see the firemen. He can’t allow himself to think about what they’re doing, just that they’re out there and strong, and his mum is still here. And from his waiting place he can see the statue in the lily pond, and the bronze boy and the dog seem like the only two people who matter. Diana frightens him, even the sound of her frightens him. He can hear her in the dining room clinking this and clunking that, trying to clear up the big mess she made arguing last night, like that’s all that matters when the firemen are still out there and so is his mum. And maybe she’s not dead after all.
Diana is in the dining room, it’s true, but she doesn’t know why or what to do with the filth. She picks things up and she puts things down again, then because the boy is in the hall, spying on her, she retreats to the utility room where she screws her dressing gown into a ball and pushes it down to the bottom of the black sack, knowing it is the sort of thing criminals do and drags the torn and bloody nightdress over her head. Naked, she sorts through the laundry basket, finds dirty pants, leggings, the cashmere jumper stained with lily pollen and is it only yesterday, the funeral? In the hall, she tries to give the boy a shrunken blue jumper that Mrs H ruined by putting it in the washing machine, but he refuses it and, at a loss as to what to do with him next, she sits at the kitchen window and watches her story being played out on the lawn.
Mikey’s glad she’s gone. He’s lost sight of the men, but he can hear them calling now like people do on the building site opposite his house – left a bit, up here, that’ll do – and the same sort of sounds, metal on metal and engines. The more he sobs, the tighter he sucks his funeral shirt. He allows Edmund to lead him to a sofa and tuck him up tight in a blanket and say he’ll be back in a jiffy and give him his rucksack in case he’s got something he wants in there, but Mikey doesn’t open it; he just holds it tight, as tight as he can. It’s all he has left even if it is almost empty.
The fire crew inform Edmund of their progress; they have been surprisingly efficient given the unfamiliarity of the task. Normally when he visits his development sites, Edmund wears a yellow helmet and a hi-vis jacket, but it’s all too late for risk assessment now. Who knows what the insurance position is, this is probably considered an act of God. Valerie is lying in an air pocket, the beams and masonry crisscrossed above her, except the one monumental block which crushed her chest and her pelvis. It takes a long time to lift it, but once it is winched away, all that is left is her body. To die in the dress you wore to your mother’s funeral – he doesn’t know why that hits him, but it does. The rain falls harder, hammering against a piece of corrugated iron propped up against the potting shed, puddles forming in the tyre tracks on the grass. Ground, dust, sludge: the earth is losing its identity.
The redundant ambulance crew have left and been replaced by an unmarked van. The trolley stretcher gets stuck in the gravel, Diana could have told them that would happen; Valerie’s wheelie case did the same, and what will she do now with her suitcase and everything in it? She can’t see the remains of the tower from the kitchen, it’s almost as though it is offstage and here is the player, walking across the lawn wearing gloves and carrying Valerie easily, thin as a rake she always was. He lays her on the trolley. The zip gets stuck half way up the bag, caught in her dress perhaps. It delays the moment in which Valerie is wrapped in black for ever. When the van has gone, at the kitchen table, Diana flicks through the messages. #earthquake. One hundred and forty will never be enough. My half-sister is dead. She counts the letters. People who know her have sent direct messages and she realises Wynhope must be on the news. She snaps the phone case shut and bursts into tears.
The vehicles have left deep ruts in the grass; Edmund presses the edges with his foot, instinctively trying to even things out. There is a deafening quality to the remains of the day. There will be things to be done: reseeding the lawn for instance, calling the builders, although what they’ll do about the bottomless pit that is the pool, God only knows. Someone will need to contact the electricity board, is there anything to eat, and ordinary things after that, like catching the train and going to his office and renewing his fishing licence. They’ll all still line up along the hours, very close to the edge. And there is a motherless boy on the sofa and he promised him he’d be back in a jiffy, but he can’t face it, not quite yet. He is physically shaking.
Soaked to the skin, Edmund stays outside and throws the ball for the dog into the long grass and the dog brings it back to his feet and waits. He throws the ball again and the dog retrieves it and waits. Remember the dead, pay attention to the living, that’s what the school chaplain told him. Least said, soonest mended. That was what was called counselling in those days. Sometimes terrible flashbacks return, as they do now even after so many years – the firemen and the police shouldering their padded bodies and helmeted heads against the wood, he can hear it, the counting down, the battering, the splintering of the door. He has no memory of their pulling his father’s body from the tower. He does not know if that is because he did not see it or does not want to remember it. There is the smell of Jeyes Fluid, the disinfectant usually kept for the stables, but later thrown over the doorstep to the tower, bucket after bucket of water splashing over the stones like the tide, and the rain runs over his head and down his face, trickling under his shirt, and he wants so much to cry and never stop crying. It will pass. Edmund hurls the ball high into the air, like he used to when he was hoping for a place in the First Eleven; for a moment, it is lost in storm light, but then he spots it again. He keeps his eye on the ball as it falls from the sky and he catches it safely. Again he throws the ball and again he catches it. Just playing cricket in the rain. Once more, he is about to send the ball back up when the boy appears tear-stained and dishevelled in the porch. Embarrassed, Edmund wonders what the child thinks, to see a grown man playing catch with himself in front of the place where his mother has died. As no words come to him to explain himself, he simply holds the ball up in his right hand.
‘For you?’ he says.
The child nods. Edmund throws it very gently towards him in a long slow curve. It falls towards the two cupped palms and the boy catches it and there develops a song of sorts, a rhythm and harmony on this, the ugliest of days: the silence of the throw, the thud of the catch, a safe pair of hands.
It is a long time since Wynhope has dared to welcome a child.
Chapter Fifteen
That night was difficult. Clutching duvets, candles, food, bottles of water, they struggled back to the coach house, asylum seekers of sorts, and as if to ensure they were not mistaken for the dead they both slept fitfully although the boy seemed virtually unconscious; Edmund said he used to sleep for hours and hours, never wanting to wake up.
In the morning, the spring storm has passed but left in its wake a thin drizzle, greyness creeping soft-sandalled into the main house. The gash in the landing wall has allowed rain to splatter over the carpet and Edmund feels the splintered edges of the oak panelling and its violated passage and tests his weight on the floorboards, then he leans out over the edge, the rubble like rocks on a beach beneath him, strewn with the coloured clutter of day trippers who have swum out to sea and never returned. The remains of the spiral staircase are crazy – Escher architecture going nowhere – and somewhere within him is a dizzying desire to follow their lack of logic and plunge. Stepping back sharply, he catches hold of the banisters behind him. He phones John, hears his own voice sounding unreliable when Valerie is mentioned, and feels on safer ground asking for help with boarding up the gap.
