Sister

I looked at him. His eyes were closed, as if asleep. His eyebrows were just a pencil line of down, barely formed and impossibly perfect, nothing crude or cruel or ugly in the world had ever been seen by his face. He was beautiful, Tess. Faultless.

I have the photo with me now. I carry it all the time.

PC Vernon wiped her tears so that they wouldn’t drop onto the photo. She had no edge around her compassion. I wondered if someone as open would be able to stay as a policewoman. I was trying to think of something other than your baby, other than you as you held him.

As soon as I’ve told Mr. Wright about the Polaroid, I abruptly stand up and say I need to go to the loo. I get to the ladies’ room, tears running as soon as the door closes behind me. There’s a woman at the basins, maybe a secretary, or lawyer. Whoever she is, she’s discreet enough not to comment on my tears, but gives a little half smile as she leaves, a gesture of some kind of solidarity. There’s more for me to tell you, but not Mr. Wright, so as I sit in here and have a weep for Xavier, I’ll tell you the next part.

An hour or so after PC Vernon had gone, Mum and Todd arrived at the flat. He’d driven all the way to Little Hadston to pick her up in my rented car, showing himself to be, as I knew he would, a chivalrous son-in-law. I told Mum and Todd what DS Finborough had said, and Mum’s face seemed to crumple into relief. “But I think the police are wrong, Mum,” I said and saw her flinch. I saw her willing me not to carry on, but I did. “I don’t think she committed suicide.”

Mum pulled her coat more tightly around her. “You’d rather she’d been murdered?”

“I need to know what really happened. Don’t you—”

She interrupted me. “We all know what happened. She wasn’t in her right mind. The inspector’s told us that.” She’d promoted DS Finborough to inspector, reinforcing her side of the argument. I caught the note of desperation in her voice. “She probably didn’t even know what she was doing.”

“Your mother’s right, darling,” Todd chimed in. “The police know what they’re talking about.”

He sat down next to Mum on the sofa and did that man thing of spreading his legs wide, taking up twice as much room as was necessary, being masculine and large. His smile skidded over my closed-in face to Mum’s receptive one. He sounded almost hearty.

“The good thing is that now that the postmortem is over and done with we can organize her funeral.”

Mum nodded, looking gratefully at him, like a little girl. She clearly bought his big-man thing.

“Do you know where you’d like her laid to rest?” he asked.

Laid to rest, as if you would be put to bed and in the morning it would all be better. Poor Todd, not his fault that his euphemisms infuriated me. Mum clearly didn’t mind. “I’d like her buried in the churchyard in the village. Next to Leo.” In case you don’t know already, that’s where your body is. In my more vulnerable moments I fantasize about you and Leo being together somewhere, wherever that somewhere is. The thought of the two of you having each other makes me feel a little less desperate. But of course if there is a somewhere, a third person would be with you too.

I want to warn you that what’s coming will be painful. I took the photo out of the cardboard casing and handed it to Mum. “It’s a photo of Tess’s baby.”

Mum wouldn’t take the picture from me; she didn’t even look at it. “But it was dead.”

I’m sorry.

“The baby was a boy.”

“Why have a picture? It’s macabre.”

Todd tried to come to the rescue. “I think they now let people have photos when their babies die as part of the grieving process.” Mum gave Todd one of her looks that she normally reserves only for family. He shrugged as if to distance himself from such an outlandish and distasteful notion.

I carried on, alone. “Tess would want her baby buried with her.”

Mum’s voice was suddenly loud in the flat. “No. I won’t have it.”

“It’s what she’d want.”

“She’d want everyone to know about her illegitimate baby? That’s what she’d want? To have her shame made public?”

“She would never have found him shameful.”

“Well she should have.”

It was Mum on autopilot: forty years of being infected with middle England’s prejudices.

“Do you want to stick an A on her coffin for good measure?” I asked.

Todd butted in. “Darling, that’s uncalled for.”

I stood up. “I’m going out for a walk.”

“In the snow?”

The words were more critical than concerned. It was Todd who said it, but it could just as easily have been Mum. I’d never spent time with both of them together before and was only just realizing their similarities. I wondered if that was the real reason I was going to marry him; maybe familiarity, even negative familiarity, breeds feelings of security rather than contempt. I looked at Todd, was he coming?

“I’ll stay here with your mother then.”