Regardless, it made it slightly easier to slip into the room unnoticed. Dad, out of loving kindness for his middle daughter, had kept the seat beside him, the one closest to the door, free for me, for which I gave a quiet vote of thanks.
From the other side of the table, Edward gave me a small, tight smile. I wondered how long he’d already been there.
“Right then,” Dad said, bearing in a huge pot. “Pasta bolognese. With about a bottle and a half of red wine in it. Just the thing for tonight, don’t you think?”
We all made the appropriate appreciative noises, and avoided looking at each other.
Dinner was, perhaps not surprisingly, a fairly silent meal. Isabelle, I noticed, ate as little as possible, pushing her pasta around her bowl and looking faintly sulky. Her loss, I thought, as I tucked into the bolognese with gusto. Dad might not have been able to heal all family rifts, but he certainly knew how to cook dinner.
The seat at the head of the table was, of course, empty, and as much as I avoided looking at it, I still felt the lack of Nathaniel keenly. It wasn’t as though he’d have been able to make everything all better. On the contrary, he’d probably have gone out of his way to make things worse, purely for entertainment value, and at some later date snippets of the ensuing fight would have shown up, entirely out of context, in one of his books.
Something Nathaniel did fairly regularly, but never admitted to critics, was put his family into the background of his novels. We never appeared as main characters, or even any incidental character anyone would remember. But when the hero was sitting in a cafe listening to a couple arguing, or the heroine was walking in the park and saw a small girl fall in the lake shallows as she tried to feed the ducks, her grandfather standing there laughing while her grandmother yelled – that was us. Every time.
As Greg swiped the last piece of garlic bread, Mum pushed her empty plate aside and put on her serious teacher face. It never looked right on her. Mum was the opposite of serious and focused, but sometimes she liked to pretend, just for our benefit.
“We should talk about the funeral,” she said. “Shouldn’t we?” she added, belying the decisiveness of her words.
“We should,” Ellie confirmed. “Apparently Nathaniel didn’t leave much in the way of instructions. Isabelle, did he ever say anything to you about what he wanted?”
“Why would he?” Isabelle sounded astonished, and I exchanged a frustrated glance with Edward.
Because you’re both in your seventies. Because you were his whole world, once. Because that’s the sort of thing people do. Normal people.
People who believed they were going to die, anyway. I suspected that Isabelle just intended to go on for ever, and Nathaniel wouldn’t ever have wanted to consider the possibility. Except that he had, with Edward. He’d made provisions to ensure that his memoirs were taken care of, and his legacy. Just not his body.
Typical.
“Did he have any favourite hymns?” Dad asked. “That’s always a good place to start.”
Isabelle perked up. “I always liked For the Beauty of the Earth.”
I glanced up at Edward again. Nathaniel had hated going to church, and everyone knew it. And yet, because her social circle would expect it, Isabelle would plan a traditional church funeral.
“He liked For Those in Peril on the Sea,” Therese added, which earned her a glare from Isabelle.
“I’ll contact the vicar tomorrow,” Ellie said, and Isabelle shook her head.
“No. He was my husband. Leave it to me.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a headache. I think I’ll go to bed.”
“I think it’s your bedtime too, young lady,” Dad said to Caro, scooping her up from her chair. “Come on. I’ll read you a story. I don’t care if you’re nearly ten, you’re never too old for a bedtime story.” Caro protested, but only for a moment. She looked as exhausted as the rest of us.
The door clicked shut behind the three of them, and I looked from face to face around the table. What happened now? I had no idea. I didn’t know where to start. How did this work? How did we function without Nathaniel?
I worried for a moment that they’d want to talk about the memoirs again, but it quickly became clear that they all had bigger concerns.
“Are we really going to leave the funeral up to Isabelle?” Ellie asked.
Therese shook her head. “I wouldn’t recommend it. She’ll probably insist on funeral favours.”
“She wouldn’t,” Mum said, sounding tired. “But if you could help her out, Ellie… She works so much better with you.”
“Of course.” Ellie didn’t point out that Isabelle only liked working with her because she could boss her around, which I would have. “But what are we going to do after the funeral? Greg and I…” She trailed off, but I thought I caught her meaning. Living at Rosewood with Nathaniel and Isabelle and Therese had been one thing. Taking sole responsibility for Isabelle was another entirely.
“Let me talk to your father,” Mum said. “We don’t need to be back in Manchester for the start of term for a few more days. Maybe I can look at taking a leave of absence.”
Ellie shook her head. “We can stay.”
I should offer to move back. To take care of things. To be useful, for once. But I wasn’t at all sure that they wanted me to.
Especially since, if I stayed, I’d be working on the memoirs. With Edward.
I glanced up at him again and found that, somehow, he’d disappeared from the room without any of us noticing. When? Had he followed Dad and Caro out? And where had he gone?
The answer to the last came to me easily. Nathaniel’s study. Where else?
While Mum, Ellie, Greg and Therese talked about the future, I slipped out of my chair, opening and closing the dining room door as silently as possible, and headed for the stairs – and the past.
Chapter Nine
An author writes to leave a legacy, a mark on the world. The stories we leave behind are our way of showing the insides of our heads – our thoughts, our beliefs, our loves. Never mind what truth there is in our words, what we send out into the world is greater than truth, and longer lasting. Stories, after all, survive far longer than facts.
From the notebooks of Nathaniel Drury
The door to Nathaniel’s study had been locked since I came home again, but now, as I crept down the long hallway towards it, I could see the door was ajar. I stared straight ahead as I passed the place where I’d hidden, the night of the Golden Wedding, and pretended I couldn’t still hear my grandparents arguing in my head. What was the point? Nothing I – or Isabelle – did could change those last moments now.
It occurred to me that Edward had probably commandeered one of the bedrooms at this end of the building – he seemed like the sort to want to be near his work. And that meant he had easy access to the study at all times. I wondered how much time he’d spent there over the last couple of days, without Isabelle noticing.
The study door opened in one smooth sweep. As I’d predicted, Edward was already there. Not in the seat behind the desk, Nathaniel’s chair, but in a hard wooden seat to the
side of the desk, one I imagined he must have used throughout the long months of working with my grandfather.
I bit the inside of my cheek as I looked around. Somehow, the whole room felt different than I remembered. Emptier, despite the floor being covered in boxes and journals. Paler, somehow, like the lights had faded when Nathaniel did.
I stared at the chair behind the desk, empty except for an orange fisherman’s jumper draped over the back. That was where Edward had found him. Where he’d died.
Knowing Nathaniel, I supposed he’d probably say it was the second best place to go. The best, I imagined, was probably next to the drinks cabinet.
I took a deep breath. I had to keep moving. Keep living. The moment I got lost in my memories, I worried I’d never find my way back to the surface again.
“We should probably lock this door,” I said, shutting it softly behind me. “Someone’s bound to notice we’re missing eventually.”
Edward looked up from the papers he was reading with a start, but relaxed quickly once he realised it was only me. I liked that he could feel relaxed around me. “Maybe they’ll think I’m seducing you in an attic, or something.”
“Unlikely.” I grabbed a chair from the corner of the room, one covered in shabby red velvet that I remembered curling up on as a child as I watched Nathaniel work, and pulled it closer to the desk. “They’ll all immediately jump to the conclusion that we’re up here working on the memoirs.” I took a deep breath. “Which it looks like we might be so, seriously, lock the damn door.”
The look he gave me was long and assessing, but he did at least get to his feet and move towards the door. As the key turned in the lock, I heard the tumblers fall into place and wondered just what in hell I was doing.
“Are you sure about this?” Edward leant against the closed door and kept on giving me his ‘concerned and caring look.’ It left me with the impression that he was slightly afraid that I might lose it at any second.