stop calling him ‘Uncle’ about three years earlier when she had flourished into young womanhood. ‘It makes me feel old and you sound young.’ So he had become plain Marcus.
Till now.
I have reverted to my old role, thought Marcus.
‘I would have called round,’ he said apologetically, addressing himself to Jenny rather than Connon. ‘But you know how things … how are you both?’
‘Well,’ said Connon. He did not look as if he was really listening, but glanced back to the grave.
‘What will you do now, Jenny? Is your term over?’
‘No, there’s another couple of weeks yet, but I’ve got leave of absence. I needn’t go back till after Christmas.’
‘How is it? Are you liking the life?’
‘It’s not bad. A bit crowded. There’s more students than space. I can sympathize a bit more with these people who write indignantly to the Express about “smelly students”.’
Thank God for the resilience of youth, thought Marcus. No damage there, or not that’s going to show. But you, Connie, out of the cage at last, you look as if another sniff of free air will shrivel your lungs. No bloody wonder, the shock, the strain of investigation. There’s a new life waiting, if only you’ll believe that, I must make him believe it before it’s too late …
Jenny made a move down the path towards the car park. Marcus touched her arm.
‘I’ll stay here and chat to your father a bit till the others have thinned out. We’ll catch you up. You’d better go and sit in the car out of the cold.’
Jenny was surprised to find herself resenting Marcus slightly as she moved away.
She was my mother after all, and he’s my father. Why should he be treated like the sensitive plant and me chucked down to face this lot?
Because you can think like this at a moment like this, she admonished herself humorously and the shadow of a smile must have run over her face for she caught ‘Bruiser’ Dalziel eyeing her sharply as she stepped on to the car park.
Standing a little behind Dalziel she saw a tall young man, elegantly dressed, with a thin intelligent face – the kind of actor-type who played ambitious young Foreign Office men on the telly. She thought momentarily of Antony. She hadn’t had time to see him before she left, everything had happened in such a hurry. But no doubt Helen would have passed on the news to him. Perhaps even made a come-back in her original starring role.
Definitely her last appearance, thought Jenny, but didn’t find it particularly funny. She intended to make straight for the car and shut the door firmly on all condolences, sympathetic noises, keen-edged questionings probing for vicarious pain. But her arm was taken firmly and she was brought to a halt.
‘I just wanted to say that I shall miss your mother, Jenny,’ said Alice Fernie.
The annoyance that had tightened her lips for a moment eased away. She could not remember anyone else saying this. They were all ‘dreadfully sorry’, it had come as a terrible shock to them, but no one had really suggested that Mary Connon would be missed.
‘Yes, I shall too,’ she replied, then feeling this was a bit too cold she squeezed the gloved hand which still rested on her arm and went on, ‘I know how much she relied on you.’
This was nothing more than the simple truth, she realized, as the words came out. Mary Connon had rarely mentioned Alice Fernie to her except in faintly disparaging or patronizing terms. Her lack of taste; the unfairly large wage her husband earned on the factory floor; the excessive subsidization by the ratepayers of council-house rents. She was capable of blaming the Fernies (‘and all those like them,’ she would say inclusively) for the very existence of the Woodfield estate. It had only been a very few years previously that Jenny had realized that the council estate had been there already when her parents bought the house. She had come to accept a picture of rolling countryside being savaged before her mother’s eyes as the bulldozers rolled in, prompted by the Fernies and ‘all those like them’. But Alice Fernie had been, perhaps by the mere accident of proximity, the nearest thing to a real friend she had. And now Jenny felt real gratitude that this large handsome woman who could only be in her early thirties had thought enough of her mother to accept the condescension of manner and get closer to her.
Closer than me perhaps, she thought.
‘How did you get here, Mrs Fernie?’ she asked. ‘Can we give you a lift back?’
There were no funeral cars other than the hearse. ‘I will judge what is fitting,’ she had heard her father say to the oblique remonstrances of the man from the undertakers.
‘No, thank you, dear. You’ll want to be with your dad. And I’m not going straight back anyway. ’Bye now.’
‘Goodbye. Please call round, won’t you? I shan’t be going back to college till next month.’
I’ll have to watch myself there, she thought as she watched Alice move away with long confident strides, I could become as patronizing as Mum.
As she got into the car, she glanced back and caught the eye of the young man who could have been from the Foreign Office. He took a step forward. She thought he was going to come across and talk to her. But a rumbling, phlegmy cough from Fat Dalziel caught both their attentions and the young man turned away.
Policemen, she thought, angry at her disappointment, and slammed the car door.
Connon watched Marcus walk away from him down the path through the rank and file of headstones.
The car park was nearly empty now. The Evanses’ car was just pulling away. He looked after it thoughtfully. Gwendoline. He formed the syllables deliberately in his mind and smiled. All those youngsters competing to provoke the loudest laugh, craning forward to get the deepest view of bosom, pressing close to feel the warmth of calf or thigh, and imagining a returned pressure. Tales to be blown up into triumphs over a couple of pints. But the real triumphs were never boasted of, but remembered in secret; first with reminiscent delight, but soon with fear and cold panic.
Dalziel was gone, he observed, and his puppy-dog, Pascoe. Mentally he corrected himself. He had no reason for thinking Pascoe was merely that, though he was sure Dalziel would make him that if he got the chance.
And me, what would he make of me if he got the chance? he thought.
A parcel for the lawyers. Strongly wrapped, neatly labelled.
Samuel Connon. Wife-killer. There must be some long Latin word for a man who killed his wife. Dalziel might know it, though he probably wouldn’t admit to it if he did. Pascoe would know. He seemed a highly educated kind of cop. The new image. Get your degree, join the force, the Yard’s the limit. Or … leave school at sixteen, start as office boy. You can be assistant personnel manager by the time you’re forty. If you’re lucky. And if the general manager is a big rugby fan.
I’d better be getting down to Jenny. Poor Jenny. I wish I knew how hard this has hit her. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps we should get away for a bit. Where? What on? There’s not all that much spare in the account. All this costs a bit. Even if you haggled over headstones. Now if I’d gone first, Mary’d have been sitting pretty. But what kind of man insures against his wife’s death?
