Ann Cleeves - Burial of Ghosts

I was rescued by a round man in a brocade waistcoat. He gave a few words of explanation to the widow, then walked towards me. His legs were short and he moved with a peculiar bobbing action, like a child’s mechanical toy. Something fat. A pig perhaps.

‘Elizabeth Bartholomew?’ He eyed me from head to toe. ‘I’m Stuart Howdon.’ He smiled unpleasantly.

‘Lizzie,’ I said.

‘You’re not what I was expecting.’

I wanted to know what he was expecting, how Philip had described me, but he went on, ‘I’ve told Joanna you work for me and you wanted to pay your respects. It seemed best.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Stick with me.’ An order. As if left to myself I might cause mayhem. Then he smiled again, an inappropriate grin, the result perhaps of nerves. Maybe he thought it made him appear attractive.

Girls, younger than me, dressed in black frocks and little white aprons, came out through double doors onto the terrace. They carried heavy wooden trays and began collecting glasses. The whole set-up seemed very old-fashioned, like a period drama on the television. I imagined them living in bleak cells in the attic. Mr Howdon saw me look at them.

‘A catering firm from Alnwick,’ he said. ‘It’s cost Joanna an arm and a leg, this funeral.’

Again, I wondered if he considered I was to blame.

The crowd spluttered to a silence. The hearse was moving slowly down the drive towards us. There were no flowers on the coffin. The car stopped outside the house and we formed a ragged group behind it, with Joanna and her children in the front. It pulled off at walking pace and we followed.

Once perhaps the church had been for the use of the house and the estate, but now it was clear it belonged to the village. There were notices about Beavers and Rainbows in the porch, a poster left over from last year’s harvest festival. I have a fondness for old and neglected churches. Hardly surprising, perhaps. Inside there was a fine stained-glass window. Full sunlight shone through it and I was reminded again of the colours of Morocco, of bougainvillaea and jacaranda. The vibration of the organ music made me feel dizzy. I sat on the polished pew and bowed my head. Not an attempt to pray but to stop myself from fainting.

The vicar was white-haired, rather unsteady on his feet. At first I suspected he might be drunk, but I think he’d suffered from a stroke. He had very long canine teeth, so he reminded me of a vampire. I wondered if the children had seen the likeness, even in their grief. I hoped they had and they’d feel able to share a joke about it. I imagined them looking at each other, pulling monkey faces and rolling their eyes. They were sitting on the front row, so no one would see them except the vicar, and he didn’t count. He must be used to small children taking the piss. We stood and sang ‘Jerusalem’, which seemed a peculiar choice for the occasion. There were very few satanic mills in this part of the country and even the mines and factories further south had all gone.

It was from the white-haired vicar that I heard how Philip had died. Cancer, he said solemnly in his introduction. Of course. That explained the skinhead look, his lack of appetite, his tendency to fall asleep suddenly. I had thought him very fit and a fussy eater and all the time he’d been struggling to stay alive. I learned too that he’d been a magistrate and a church warden. A stalwart member of the community, as I’d predicted. There was no mention of how he’d earned his living. Perhaps he’d been on the sick for so long that no one remembered. As with me.

The next hymn took me back to my first year in secondary school. It had been a favourite of Miss Wallace, who taught us RE. Miss Wallace had taken me under her wing, kept me back after class occasionally to ask how I was. I fell in love with her in a way. Once I’d said to her in a joking, self-protective voice, ‘Ever thought of fostering, Miss?’ I’d known of course that adoption was too much to hope for. There’d been a look of panic in her eyes and I don’t think she answered. Her kindness had been professional, like all the others’.

There’s something moving about singing with a big crowd. I joined in. ‘Not for ever in green pastures / Would we ask our way to be.’ Sometimes Mr Howdon shot me odd looks, as if I was making too much sound or hitting a wrong note, but I took no notice. He was just moving his lips, like someone miming badly on a pop video, so he was in no position to criticize.

When the service was over we went outside. Joanna was standing at the door shaking hands, but I slipped past. The sun seemed very hot. Perhaps the breeze had dropped, or perhaps I felt it more coming out of the cool of the church. The graveyard sloped towards the pine plantation and was reached through a narrow gate. I wondered how the pall-bearers would get the coffin through, but they managed without difficulty. They were six very brawny men with scalped heads. It occurred to me that they might have had treatment for cancer too, that they were there as a symbol of hope, but I overheard someone say that they belonged to a rugby club in Alnwick. Apparently when Philip was fit, he’d been a member too. We filed through the gate after them and past the old headstones to the grave. There seemed to be no recent stones and I thought no one had been buried here in years.

A hole had already been dug and we stood in last year’s leaf mould until the ceremony was over. It was completed much more quickly than I’d expected, though when the vicar dismissed us the hole still hadn’t been filled in. A mound of earth, as dark as soot, still stood there. I wished they’d use it to cover up the coffin. I’m not sure why the bare planks made me feel so uneasy, but I felt embarrassed, as if an unclothed body was lying there, and as soon as the vicar had stopped speaking I turned away. I expected everyone to wander away then. I hoped at last to discover why I was there. But no one moved. They waited as if they knew something else was about to happen. There was a moment of silence, broken only by the rooks cackling in a deciduous tree near to the church.

Joanna stepped forward. She spoke quietly, so we had to strain to hear her, but that was what she wanted. She had the range to carry her voice right back to the house if she’d put her mind to it.

‘This is where Philip wanted to be buried,’ she said, smiling sadly. ‘He was always something of a pagan. He worshipped in church every Sunday, but I’m not sure what he was worshipping. I rather suspect it was all this.’ She made a dramatic gesture with her arm which took in the spinney of Scots pine and the sky. ‘We’ve been growing an oak sapling from an acorn. Flora and Dickon watered it while Philip was away on his travels. He wanted us to plant it for him close to his grave. Perhaps you’ll allow us time to do that on our own. Please go back to the house. We’ll join you there shortly.’

She paused for a moment, like an actor waiting for applause, then gave a quick lopsided smile and took her children’s hands. The boy held out his reluctantly. He still looked close to tears. Flora gazed out at us with a clear-eyed stare.

The audience muttered sympathetically and walked slowly back to the church gate. I lingered and looked back once. The spade and the sapling must have been waiting, because Joanna was already digging with great energy. She had hitched up her long, tight skirt and was pressing hard on the blade with her Victorian shoe. In Morocco I’d pictured someone very different for Philip’s wife – a repressed and reined-in creature. This woman wasn’t the conventional wifey I’d imagined. She pulled out the spade and thrust it in again at a slightly different spot. It cut through the earth like a sword.