10
Lizzie Murray led them behind the bar, and she managed to close the coffin-lid door behind her before she fainted, kneeling then keeling, so that her head came to rest quite gently on the bottom step of the stairs. Her husband sat with her while DC Campbell fetched a glass of water. Shaw sat halfway up the flight of wooden steps, the steps down which this woman’s mother had fallen, bones breaking with each twist of her brittle body. They made her drink, then John Joe carried her up. Ian, the barman, watching from below, was told to mind the bar until noon, then take over in the kitchen, and he should call Aunt Bea, tell her to come, tell her she needed to be with the family.
‘It’s all right, Ian,’ said John Joe. ‘Just get Bea — then we’ll explain.’
They sat Lizzie on a tattered floral sofa in the sitting room of the Flask, looking out through two identical bay windows at the river, now filling with the tide, the mudbanks shrinking. From below they could hear the sounds of the bar: a tape playing Elvis Costello, the clunk of pool balls, and from the kitchen the crackle of a deep fat fryer.
The room they were in was a collection of an achronisms: an Artexed ceiling, a Victorian chandelier and peeling fake Regency wallpaper: Shaw guessed it had been used for functions over the years, an endless unbroken series of wedding receptions, parties and christenings — and, no doubt, the wake for the members of the Free Church after the funeral of Nora Tilden, while downstairs the real party was waiting to begin.
The furniture was out of scale: the modern sofa and two armchairs lost in the space, the disconnect between the room and its furniture driven home by the fireplace, which was big enough for an ox-roasting. A flat-screen TV sat on a flat-pack unit. Next to it was a small table upon which stood an electric kettle, cups, sachets — Shaw was reminded of a B amp;B’s tea-making kit A birdcage hung from a gilded wrought-iron stand; the bird within was white and hit the same note rhythmically, like an alarm clock.
Lizzie drank coffee and more water, and seemed not to notice that they were all watching her. The touch of mascara on her upper lashes had run. She set Shaw’s sketch on the coffee table and every few seconds adjusted it slightly, as if it had three dimensions and she might see more if she altered the angle.
‘I’ve got to tell Ian,’ she said eventually to John Joe, and the thought seemed to release the tears, bringing her eyes alight.
‘Christ, Lizzie — just take a moment,’ said John Joe, shaking his head. ‘Bea can tell him — she’s on her way.’
‘Who is this?’ asked Shaw, impatient, tapping the sketch.
She wiped her lips, smudging the lipstick.
‘It’s Patrice — Pat — Aunt Bea’s son. My cousin. Bea married a GI — a black GI. She brought Pat back when she came home from the States to look after me. Pat was twenty.’ She looked at her hands, the fingers working in knots. She looked at Shaw’s picture with a kind of fond fear.
‘And Ian?’ asked Campbell. ‘The barman?’
‘Yes — Ian’s his son.’
Shaw let the silence stretch out until she answered the question they hadn’t asked.
‘And I’m his mother.’ Her chin came up then, rekindling the figurehead defiance, daring them to tell her it had been wrong. Shaw worked it out: she’d have been nineteen, maybe twenty. They were cousins — first cousins. In some areas of the States the relationship would have been illegal on three counts: age, race and consanguinity. And here in Lynn, in 1982, it would have raised a few eyebrows too, not least in the God-fearing Melville family. Shaw thought about Alby Tilden and his lost years at sea, and the tattooed image he’d brought back home. Lizzie had grown up in a house where the issue of race was a toxic one: a running sore on the family’s collective skin.
They heard a car engine ticking outside the pub’s front door and a minute later Aunt Bea was with them. Shaw knew she had to be in her late sixties, but she looked and moved like a fifty-year-old; a bustling, sinewy woman, with grey hair cut short but expertly. She wore knee-high brown leather boots and woollen tights under a knitted skirt, and she had a vivid blue pashmina wrapped round her neck. No necklace or earrings, but Shaw noticed that both hands bristled with silver rings.
Of Nora, her sister, there was hardly an echo. Shaw worked out a rough age difference — the two sisters would have been born more than a decade apart. But the resemblance to Lizzie was striking: two figureheads. Bea’s face was set against the world too, but it was open, challenging perhaps, and devoid of the bitter irritation that seemed to disfigure her niece.
She came into the centre of the room, dusting snow from the shoulders of a heavy Barbour which she had already taken off. She wasn’t alone. The woman with her was Lizzie’s age, late forties, but blonde, with the kind of skin that reveals the veins beneath, especially on the high forehead, which was only partly hidden by a fringe. Unlike Lizzie she wasn’t dressed for customers, but in a pair of faded jeans and a T-shirt. Shaw sensed immediately that she was a rare woman — unaware, to some extent, of her own beauty, as if her own self-image didn’t match the reality. She hung back, one arm held awkwardly just beneath her breast. She radiated a strange anxiety, as if she perpetually thought she didn’t belong. Shaw was reminded of the embarrassed hesitancy of a teenage child.
Aunt Bea walked forward and picked up the sketch on the table. Shaw noted that she hadn’t even looked at Lizzie. ‘John Joe told me,’ she said. ‘It’s true?’ she asked, looking at Shaw and then, finally, at her niece. Shaw noted she wore no make-up except a dash of concealer, and a smudge of foundation on her cheek, perhaps to cover a liver spot.
Shaw showed his warrant card.
‘I’m Bea Garrison — Lizzie’s aunt.’ Her voice still held the unmistakable twang of the American Midwest. ‘This is my son,’ she added, gripping the sheet of paper so tightly it buckled. She flattened the vowel in ‘son’ — making it rhyme with run. The other woman, whom nobody had bothered to introduce, had slipped round behind the sofa and put a hand on each of Lizzie’s shoulders.
‘This is Kath — Kath Robinson,’ said Bea. ‘She drove me down. She knows us — she’s always known us.’ They watched Robinson kiss Lizzie’s hair, but all the emotion of the moment seemed to be lop-sided, as if only Kath actually felt it.
‘That’s true,’ said Lizzie as her aunt sat beside her and took her hand.
Bea studied the image, her brown eyes softening, but free of any hint of a tear. ‘I knew he must be dead. Even if I never said,’ she looked at Lizzie and Kath. ‘It’s been too long, hasn’t it? Nearly thirty years. He’s just faded away for me, like an old photo.’ She shook her head, putting the sketch back on the table, letting Lizzie’s hand fall free.
Bea looked at Shaw. ‘I’ll tell the story. It’s my story in a way, as much as Lizzie’s, as much as anyone’s.’
John Joe came into the room. Bea looked at him. ‘Stay with Ian, John Joe. He’s young, the words won’t mean anything.’ Shaw noted her easy authority in this house, the almost casual power of the true matriarch.
He nodded, leaving, as if he recognized the wisdom of her words. But Shaw couldn’t entirely disregard the idea that he’d been dismissed, as if he was outside some privileged female circle.
Bea went to the bay window.
‘So what
‘I married here in Lynn in 1959,’ she said. ‘Latrell Garrison — a US GI. I was just a teenager. He was older — twenty years older. He’d been in Lynn ahead of D-Day. After the war he went home, but stayed in the army, then got a posting back here — up at the airfield at Bircham. He was lonely — so he worked his way through his old girlfriends, and then he got to me.’ It was said as a joke, but even she didn’t laugh. ‘We went to the Free together, too — that was his kind of church.’
Bea looked Shaw straight in his blind eye. ‘I didn’t love him. But I hated …’ She looked around the room. ‘This. Nora got the pub after Dad died, and whatever he’d said about this always being our home I knew Nora better than that. No — this was hers. I knew she’d never wanted it, so that helped.’ She shook her head. ‘There’s nothing quite like the hatred between sisters.’
She turned, taking a deep breath, rearranging the pashmina. ‘Alby was on the scene by the end of the war.
