The safe house

red my hair looked topping such dark attire, I’d even pulled on a black cloche hat. Finn was wearing her black polo-necked sweater, and I’d lent her a shapeless charcoal-coloured shift to go over the top of it. It came down to her calves, but actually she looked rather touching and graceful standing in its inky folds. Her glossy head came barely to my shoulder; under its fringe her face was pale and her lips looked slightly swollen. Suddenly, never taking her eyes from her reflection, she did a small and disconcerting jiggle; one bony hip jutted out from the enveloping shift. If it had been in different circumstances I might have giggled and offered some ironic or self-mocking remark. As it was, I remained silent. What, after all, was there to say?

Out of the picture except for one plump knee sat Elsie, off school with a cold which seemed to consist of a theatrical sniffle every twenty minutes. If I turned round – which I didn’t yet want to do for I felt that some subtle drama was going on for Finn in front of this mirror – I would have seen her sitting, legs tucked up under her bottom, draping herself in the cheap round beads which she was scooping from a lidded box. As it was, I heard her muttering to herself: ‘That looks nice, I’m so proud of you. A little princess.’

Outside, it was raining. The countryside gets wetter when it rains than cities. It’s to do with the increased surface area from all those leaves and blades of grass. Much of it still seemed to be hanging in the air as well, as if the marshland and mud were so sodden already that it was incapable of absorbing any more moisture. This was my bit of England, undecided whether it was in the sea or on land. A loud revving and a splutter of pebbles signalled the arrival of a car.

‘Danny,’ I said. Elsie slithered off my unmade bed, pulling a mess of duvet behind her, loops of coloured glass bouncing round her neck, a crown of pink plastic falling out of her unruly hair as she made for the stairs.

‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked Finn, again. She nodded.

‘And you’re sure you want me there too? I won’t be able to sit anywhere near you, you know.’

‘Yes. Sure.’

I wasn’t sure. I know that funerals help us to realize that loved ones are dead and not returning; I know that we can say goodbye at a funeral and start to mourn. I’ve been to funerals – well, one funeral in particular – when this has been true, the start of the melting of the great ice-block of grief. The familiar words do touch you, and the faces around you, all wearing the same look of battened-down grief, make you part of a community, and the music and the sobs inside your chest and the sight of that long box and the knowledge of what’s inside it well up into a kind of sorrow that’s the beginning of a thaw.

But at this funeral there would be police and journalists and photographers and busybodies peering eagerly at her. Finn would have to see all the people that she’d hidden from since the day she lost her parents. We’d be escorted there by plain-clothes policemen, and she’d be flanked by them throughout the ceremony, bodyguards for a girl still at risk. People talk too easily about facing up to loss, coming to terms with it. Finn seemed to me more in need of protection than self-knowledge. Avoidance is a common and ill-advised coping strategy for people suffering from post-traumatic-stress depression; Finn was certainly avoiding. But safe, soothing routines may be the best way for them to start the healing process.

‘It’s your choice,’ I said. ‘If you want to leave, just tell me. All right?’

‘I just need to…’

She didn’t finish her sentence.

‘Let’s go and meet Danny then.’

She looked at me imploringly.

‘He’s not going to bite you. At least, not in a horrible way.’

I took Finn by the hand and pulled her out of the room. Later, Danny laughed about his first sight of Finn, she and I descending the stairs in melodramatic black, but then he looked up at us, hair over his shoulders, unsmiling. Finn didn’t smile either, but nor did she hesitate. She let go of my hand, and the two of us – me clip-clopping behind in my leather buckled shoes and she softly padding in front in her pumps – approached him. She stopped in front of him, looking tiny against his bulk, and lifted her eyes to his. Still no smile from either of them.

‘I’m Finn,’ she said in a murmury little voice from behind her silky curtain of hair.

Danny nodded. He held out his hand and instead of shaking it, she laid her thin fingers against his palm, like a small child deciding to trust someone. Only then did Danny look past Finn at me.

‘Hi, Sammy,’ he said nonchalantly, as if he’d been away for an hour, not nearly two weeks. ‘Do you know what you look like?’

‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’

‘Later I will.’

Elsie came in from the kitchen.

‘There’s a man called Mike.’

‘It’s time for us to be off, Finn.’

Danny bent his head down and kissed me on my lips. I put the flat of my hand against his cheek and he leaned into it briefly, and we smiled at each other. I smelled his skin. Then Finn and I went into the rain. Daley got out of his car. He was dressed in a crinkled navy-blue suit with wide lapels. He looked more like a slightly hungover jazz musician than a mourner. Finn stopped suddenly, one foot in the car.

‘No.’

I laid my hand on her back.

‘Finn?’

Daley stepped forward.

‘Come on, Finn,’ he urged. ‘It’ll be…’

I interrupted him.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ I said.

‘You go,’ Finn said suddenly. ‘You and Michael go for me.’

‘Finn, you ought to go, don’t you think, Sam?’ Daley said. ‘You should see people.’

‘Please, Sam. Please will you go for me?’

Daley looked at me.

‘Sam, don’t you think it would be good for her to go? She can’t go on not seeing people like this.’

A look of panic came into her eyes. I was getting wet and wanted to move from the muddy gravel and pouring rain. We couldn’t force her.

‘She should make up her own mind,’ I said.

I beckoned to the figures in the doorway, who ran out to hear the change of plans. The last glimpse I had of Finn was of her being led into the house, a small damp figure resting limply against Danny, while Elsie skipped behind them and the rain rained on.

During the service I was silent and still, Daley was silent and fidgeting endlessly. He ran his fingers through his silky hair, rubbed his face as if he could wipe away the dark shadows under his eyes that made him look so dissolute, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Finally, I put a calming hand on his arm.

‘You need a holiday,’ I whispered. An elderly woman sitting on the other side of me, a pork-pie hat jammed on her head, warbled. ‘Bread of Hea-a-a-a-aven,’ she sang, in a passionate vibrato. I mouthed the words and looked around. I was trying to get a feel of the world of Finn and her family. For me, Finn so far was pitifully isolated. This funeral felt unreal. I had no connection at all to the dead couple, except through their daughter. I hardly knew what they looked like, except from the photograph I had seen in all the papers – a blurred picture taken at a charity ball, him burly and her skinny, both smiling politely at a face out of the frame, while the fact of their terrible death cast them into history. ‘Fe-e-e-d me ti-ill I-I want no more.’

Sometimes I wonder if people can smell suburbia on me, like a dog is supposed to be able to sniff out fear. I think I can smell wealth and respectability a mile off, and I smelled it here. Modest black skirts and neat black gloves, grey gaberdine suits with a dash of glamour at the neck, sheer black tights, low shoes (my buckles gleamed loudly in the dull air of the Victorian church), small ear-rings on a hundred lobes, make-up which you couldn’t detect but knew was there on the faces of all the middle-aged women, the low-key, well-bred grief, a discreet tear here and there, modest and expensive bouquets of early spring flowers laid on the two coffins that sat so baldly on the catafalque. I had had to arrange a funeral once and I had gone through the catalogues and learned the vocabulary. I glanced from face to face. In one pew ahead of me sat seven teenage girls; from the angle at which I sat their sweet profiles overlapped each other like angels on a gilt Christmas card. I noticed that they were all holding hands or nudging each other, and they tilted their heads occasionally to catch whispers from one side or the other. Finn’s