Flynn Berry - Under the Harrow

The air in the church is restive and tortured, the result of two hundred people trying not to make a sound. I wish they would all talk. Outside, through the side door, is the garden. There’s still snow in the shade of the church, and under the cedar elms, and the air this morning is clear and scouring.

The priest climbs to the lectern. His sermon and the eulogy are wrong. They’re laughable. I look at Stephen and know he agrees. I wish I had done it myself, though even now I’m crying too hard to speak.

The piano player sets up her music, and I watch, already disappointed. She’s too young, for one thing.

The song starts and it’s like a rope is cut. Something washes over the crowd, settling it. The song isn’t sad, which is why listening to it agonizes me, and Stephen, I can tell. The point is that she loved it, and she can’t hear it.

• • •

Neither of the town’s pubs is big enough for us, so the group splits. Without discussion, the out-of-towners go to the Miller’s Arms, and the locals to the Duck and Cover. There are a few exceptions. Stephen goes to the Duck and Cover. He walks alone from the church to the pub and looks set on destroying himself. None of the detectives come to the reception. They climb into separate cars and drive back toward Abingdon.

At the Miller’s Arms, I carry my glass of whisky around the room from group to group. People watch me. Most of the guests apologize for my loss, and then leave me to steer the conversation somewhere else, which I can’t. My wet eyes give the room facets and panels that it doesn’t have. I notice with surprise that everything that has always been difficult about parties is still difficult. I go to the toilet eight times and for a cigarette three times.

I am surprised that Liam didn’t come, but of course Martha wouldn’t have invited him. Why would she, we aren’t together anymore. I think of the song he always played in the beginning. Never a frown with golden brown.

Daisy, Rachel’s goddaughter, finds me smoking under the awning. She wears a coat over a thin black matelot top and black jeans. She hugs me and says, “I miss her,” and I nod, my chin pushing into her shoulder.

They had an arrangement. If anything happened to Helen, Rachel would take in Daisy. Part of me expected it to happen. When Daisy was younger, I thought that if Rachel had to adopt her, I would move in to help, and the thought of that sort of responsibility excited me.

“Rachel would want you to have something of hers,” I say.

“What?”

“I’ve no idea. Why don’t you go to her house and pick something?”

We go back into the pub. No one wants to talk about what happened, or how I found her. They seem to think it morbid to describe the sequence of events, that I should want to talk about Rachel’s life, which I do, desperately. But I want to talk about this too, with someone who isn’t a policeman. I wish I could tell Rachel, she would want to know every part of it.

I go to the toilet again. As I walk back to the bar, I notice that the crowd has thinned. I let my head fall. Martha steers me outside. We don’t speak, and I lean against her as we make our way down the high street.

In my room, I wipe the makeup from my eyes and lips and throw the stained pads in the bin. Martha climbs into bed. She sets a pillow down the middle, like she did on trips at university, and says, “It’s for your own protection. I’ll break your face if you try to steal my blankets.”

• • •

The dog rotates from the ceiling. I can hear him whining. The fall didn’t break his neck and the lead is strangling him. I stand on the bed and reach my arms up. If I can hold him an inch higher he will be able to breathe. I can’t get to him, and then he isn’t there anymore, and Martha is saying my name.

IN THE MORNING, Martha and I sit in our coats at one of the tables next to the inn. She smokes and we watch the trains go by, hard and glinting and mineral in the winter light.

“The lead detective wants to open a fish restaurant in Whitstable,” I say.

“What about the other one?”

“He’s clever. They’re both clever, but I don’t know if they’re good at their jobs.”

In the spring, the Hunters puts up white canvas umbrellas. It was one of the things I always looked for as the train pulled into the station, the four stiff canvas umbrellas, to know I had arrived. Now our table is bare, and I move my coffee cup over the hole at its center.

“Do you want help raising publicity?” she asks.

“No,” I say sharply. Martha ashes her cigarette and waits. “The famous ones never get solved.”

“Is that true?”

Silence falls as we think about famous victims. I fold my hands in my lap. Clouds drift overhead.

Martha wears a linen scarf and suede boots. To her embarrassment, her family has an estate in Cirencester, with a wine cellar and a gun cabinet. In one of my favorite photographs of her, Martha stands on a hill covered in heather with a rifle broken over her arm.

“Do you want a private investigator?” she asks. “I found one in Oxford with good references.”

“No, not yet. I don’t want to get in the detectives’ way. But I do need to ask you a favor. Can you help me rent out my flat?”

“Are you still not coming back?”

“The police want me to stay in the area.”

“For how long?”

“They didn’t say.” It made sense to me, I hadn’t considered leaving. “Rachel said there was something wrong with the town, only a few weeks ago. And she put her house for sale and rented a place in St. Ives. I think she wanted to escape from someone.”

“Not necessarily someone from Marlow.” At the station, there is a ping and an automated announcement about the London train. We both turn our heads to listen. Martha has to be back in the city soon for a meeting. “How can you afford this?”

“Credit.” The gold rooster on top of the inn gleams in the light. My card has a cap of eight thousand pounds. I should open a new one for when I reach the limit.

“Come stay with me,” says Martha. I shake my head. “Then I’ll come stay here.”

“You can’t.”

“I wouldn’t mind leaving for a while.”

“Liar.”

Martha is acting in a Caryl Churchill play at the Royal Court Upstairs. I saw it at the start of the run early this month. The production is a two-hander and her best role yet.

“No, it’s for the best. If I don’t live alone now, I’ll never be able to again.”

Martha leans down to zip her luggage. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” she asks.

“No.”

She studies the inn, the cream stone and black shutters, and the row of modest houses behind it. In this light, it’s difficult to tell if anyone’s at home.

“Do you think you know who did it?”

“No.”

We sit in silence. Martha smokes, blowing the column to the side. I can tell she doesn’t believe me. A train goes by and reflected light bubbles over the wall of the Hunters. “What do you want me to do about the flat?” she asks.

• • •

After Martha boards her train, I watch it pull from the station, fighting the idea that I am being abandoned. She appears to be the last of the guests to leave. I thought they would stay longer, and knowing that they didn’t is like watching it grow dark in the afternoon.

I have to drop Rachel’s keys at the cleaning agency. Afterward, I will take the train to London and clean out my flat. There is nothing else for me to do today, but I still feel breathless and sick, like I’ve forgotten something important.

Stephen is shoving a bag into the boot of his car in front of the chip shop. There is a moment when we might pretend not to see each other, but neither of us is able to look away in time. As I walk toward him, I stare up the high street to the yellow awning of the Miller’s Arms, as though that is my true destination, and I will only be stopping for a moment.