four thousand miles away.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and blew her nose. ‘I’m better now.’
I phoned them. First I talked to Mary’s boy, my nephew, Matthew, who appeared not to know who I was. Perhaps he didn’t. He fetched his father.
‘Yes,’ Alan said. ‘She is dying. No, she doesn’t want to see you and, to be honest, nor do the rest of us. She says you’ve done enough harm.’
He cut the connection. I went online immediately and googled the hospitals within a twenty-mile radius of her home. I tried them all, but none of them had Mary among their patients.
The next day I widened the search, concentrating on the big hospitals. I found Mary at last in Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge. I telephoned the ward and, when I said I was her brother, they put me through to the room, telling me not to talk for long and not to tire her.
But Alan picked up the phone.
‘Go away,’ he said. ‘Can’t you leave her in peace?’
What happened after Mother died was not my fault. Her estate consisted of the bungalow in Norwich, about £50,000 in savings and a motley collection of shares inherited from my father and an uncle with a taste for dabbling on the stock exchange.
Alan wanted the bungalow for his own father, who was coming down to live with them. The valuation of the shares and the savings was roughly equivalent to that of the bungalow and its contents, so it seemed obvious that I should have the money and Mary the house.
The last time I saw Mary was when we met to discuss the division of the estate. It wasn’t a cordial meeting – we were never comfortable together – but it was perfectly amicable and businesslike.
Four months after the distribution of the estate, a small, almost moribund confectionery company in the Midlands was taken over by a multinational conglomerate that wanted two of its products for their own. I had inherited a block of shares in the confectionery company. The sale made their worth rocket to five or six times their previous value.
Mary and Alan were convinced I had masterminded the whole thing, that I had had advance knowledge of the company sale. I offered them half of the profit, although I had no obligation to do so. They turned it down.
It wasn’t rational. Mary preferred to believe a lie and to be out of pocket because of it. But of course, it wasn’t about the money at all. It was about the spider in her cereal and the frog in her bed. It was about the shed roof and the nail.
I didn’t see Mary again. But I did hear from her. Four days after my abortive attempt to phone her at Addenbrooke’s, my mobile bleeped.
I was alone in the house – Beth, my wife, was in New York. When the text arrived, I was chopping broccoli on the kitchen counter and half-listening to a resolutely unfunny comedy programme on the radio.
Knife in hand, I glanced at the phone, which was by the chopping board. The screen had lit up and there was a message from a mobile number I didn’t recognize:
Go away. I hate you.
By the time I left the crematorium, everyone else had gone and the cars for someone else’s funeral had refilled the car park.
I had no desire to join them in the village hall, so I set off for home – or rather, towards Ipswich, where I had booked a room in a Travelodge for the night. I had an appointment nearby with a client first thing in the morning, and afterwards I planned to drive back to London.
That was the idea. But the journey went wrong from the start. There were roadworks and I took several wrong turns. My mind was on Mary, not navigation, and I managed to get myself thoroughly lost.
By now it was the provincial equivalent of rush hour. I joined a line of traffic crawling behind a mechanical digger a hundred yards ahead. Darkness fell, the light leaching slowly from the pale grey dome of the East Anglian sky. The rain grew steadily heavier. After nearly an hour we passed a junction with another main road and the digger turned aside. But afterwards the traffic moved almost as slowly as ever.
It was seven o’clock before I found myself on the A12, which runs roughly parallel with the coast down to Ipswich. I was miles out of my way. How I had got there, I have no idea. I soon discovered that the A12 is not a fast road. You are at the mercy of whatever lies ahead of you.
A sign loomed up by the side of the road: Put British Pork on Your Fork.
The headlights of passing vehicles swept over the field beside the sign. The beams revealed hundreds of arcs made of corrugated iron standing in a sea of mud.
It was a pig farm. I had seen several of them on the drive up to Norwich in the morning. It looked like a prison camp, but perhaps, compared to the solitude and confinement of a traditional sty, it was a porcine paradise.
On the other hand, some or possibly all of the pigs had broken out of paradise. The headlights ahead picked out at least half a dozen of them in the middle of the road and others rootling on the grass verges. The stream of cars was slowing. Then it stopped.
For a minute or two I sat there, watching the wipers slapping to and fro across the windscreen. No traffic was coming from the opposite direction. When she was very small, Mary had had a thing about pigs. She had pigs on her wallpaper, pigs on her duvet, pigs on her favourite mug. I used to call her ‘Piggy’ and make grunting noises, which enraged her – partly, I think now, because she liked pigs so much that she almost wanted to be one.
Two drivers in the queue ahead had left their cars and were discussing the hold-up. I grabbed my umbrella and went to join them.
‘It’s at least half a mile solid up there,’ one of them told me with gloomy pride. ‘Them bloody pigs are all over the shop. They made an artic jackknife right across the road. That’s why nothing’s bloody getting through.’
The other one was looking ahead, peering through the rain. ‘They’re turning off up there.’
He was right. Ahead of us, cars were peeling away one by one from the main road and turning left.
‘Seawick Road,’ said the first one. ‘You can cut through that way – work your way back to the A12 a mile or two south.’
A car overtook us, followed by a second and a third. They all turned left. Other drivers had had the same idea.
The second man said, ‘Could be hours before they clear this lot. Where are the police when you want them?’
‘I ain’t waiting around for them. I’m late for tea already and it’s my eldest’s birthday.’
They went back to their cars, and so did I. When they pulled out of the line, I joined them. There’s nothing so tedious as waiting in a queue. The first man was a local and clearly knew the way. All I had to do was follow. Besides, I had a satnav program on my phone, so, if the worst came to the worst, I could always find my own way back to the A12.
That was my first mistake. Perhaps the pigs were an omen, if only I’d had the sense to see it.
