Dick Francis: Shattered

I went with Catherine to the funeral of Pernickety Paul, but I abandoned her at the church door to her colleagues, uniformed or not. A small bunch of plainclothes enveloped her and mourned with her and it was a thoughtful and subdued police officer who mounted her motorcycle, paused before starting the engine, and said blankly to her future passenger, “The private cremation’s tomorrow and there are drinks in his memory in the pub this evening. I’ve been given leave for the rest of the day, so where do you want to go now?”

“To bed,” I said without hesitation, and added that surely Pernickety Paul would have approved.

Catherine shed sorrow like melting snow.

I said, “I haven’t seen where you live, remember? So how about now then?”

She smiled with a touch of mischief and then kicked down on the starter and invited me to step aboard.

Her home was maybe five minutes’ walk or less than a one-minute motorcycle ride along a straight gray road from the district police station. She stopped outside a single-storied semi-detached bungalow in a row of identical stuccoed boxes, and I knew within a second blink that this was not the place for me. Going there had been a mistake but, as Catherine was my transport, I would smile and pretend to like it.

I actually did both, and not from politeness’s sake.

Inside, the plain clothes’s one-floor living space had been allied to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where a more-than-life-size March Hare and a same-size Mad Hatter sat at the kitchen table and stuffed a dormouse into a teapot. A white rabbit consulted a watch by the bathroom door, and a red queen and a cook and a walrus and a carpenter danced a quadrille around the sitting room. All the walls, everywhere, were painted with rioting greenery and flowers.

Catherine laughed at my expression, a mixture no doubt of amusement and horror.

“These people,” she said, “came to me from a closing-down fun fair when I was six. I’ve always loved them. I know they’re silly but they’re company.” She suddenly swallowed. “They have helped me come to terms with losing Paul. He liked them. They made him laugh. They’re not the same now, without him. I think I’ve been growing up.”

In keeping with the rest of the house Catherine’s bedroom was a fantasy land of living playing cards painting rosebushes white and strong pink against puff ball clouds and vivid green leaves.

Brought to a standstill, I said weakly, “Lovely,” and Catherine laughed.

“You hate it, I can see.”

“I can shut my eyes,” I said, but we pulled the curtains closed.

We made love there in Pernickety Paul’s honor but, in the evening, after the party in the pub, when Detective Constable Dodd and her pillion rider climbed back on the saddle, it was to the big quiet house on the hill that they went.

It was like coming familiarly home.