Set in stone, p.1
Set in Stone, page 1
part #10 of Robert Goddard Series
Robert Goddard
Set in Stone
1999
Recovering from the recent death of his wife in a tragic accident, Tony Sheridan goes to stay with his sister-in-law, Lucy, and her husband, long-time friend Matt, in their home in the country. Disturbed by memories of his wife, and an attraction for Lucy, he starts having weird dreams.
PROLOGUE
Maybe you already know what I’m going to tell you. Maybe death isn’t the slammed-shut, sealed-tight doorway we reckon it is. I’ve seen enough these past few months to doubt it. If it isn’t, maybe you’ve been watching me all this time, wondering when I’d turn round and look at you and speak.
I can’t see you, Marina. I can’t hear you. But that doesn’t matter. And then again it does. More than anything. I love you. I will always love you. I never expected to feel as much for another person as I feel for you. I never even wanted to. Because dependency is dangerous. And dependency on the dead is halfway to madness. But still I love you. It’s as simple and as desolate as that. I don’t need to chase your ghost. It’s here, at every moment, beside me. It’s almost tangible. But not quite. You’ll always be just out of reach. I can’t touch you. Ever again.
But I can talk to you. And maybe, just maybe, you can listen. I wish I could tell you a different story, though. I wish I could tell you your death was just a single outbreak of meaningless misfortune. I wish I could wipe away the events it set in motion and have you back, alive and contented, to love and be loved. But wishing is all it comes to. It changes nothing. There is only one story I can tell you. And this is it.
ONE
I never wanted to leave London. You know that. The simpler, purer country life was your dream, not mine. You’d always talked about it and I’d gone along with the idea to keep you happy, silently banking on a solid set of practical objections to fend it off. Then Matt and Lucy moved to Leicestershire, and every weekend we visited them gave you an extra ounce of determination to turn your dream into a reality. Suddenly Lucy had something you wanted more than you reckoned she did. And you and your sister always were a competitive pair.
The difference was that Matt was already making a success of Pizza Prego by then. He could afford the country-squire act. We weren’t so free and easy. Whatever my career amounted to, it wasn’t the prototype for home-based working in the sticks. And your client list was all corporate metropolitan. But fortieth birthdays do strange things to people. I let you persuade me that London was choking me as well as you, and that you could earn enough as a rural solicitor to tide us over until I sold the concept of professional recruitment services to local employers. Then you threw yourself into the search for a suitable opportunity and, before I’d done more than flirt with the implications of what we were embarking on, you found one.
It was everything you wanted. A cosy little practice over a pharmacy in the centre of a genuine Devon market town. Real people with real problems, not sharp-faced men in suits demanding contracts by yesterday. I remember driving down to Holsworthy with you for the first time and walking round the square on a quiet, sunny Saturday afternoon. There was a gleam in your eye that told me this place was our future. Well, yours, anyway. I’d be moving, whereas you’d be going home. You belonged there, instantly and completely, whereas for me…it was where I had to be to stay close to you.
Not that I was blind to its attractions. The pace of life was slower, the surrounding countryside was a picture postcard succession of winding lanes and rolling hills. And the air was like champagne. The back of beyond had its own allure. And Stanacombe was beautiful. “A cob-and-slate whitewashed farmhouse just over the Cornish border, in need of some renovation.” That’s what the estate agent’s blurb said. But I saw in it what you saw: a private patch of heaven, nestling in green fields, beneath the last westward swell of the land before Cornwall hit the Atlantic in a jagged line of high granite cliffs.
You thought I was reluctant to take on the work that needed doing on Stanacombe. And so I was at the outset. But after we’d moved down I really began to enjoy it. It was a lot more rewarding than headhunting high-flyers in London, even if nobody was paying me to do it. Besides, we had a comforting slab of capital to fall back on after selling the house in Chiswick, and you charmed most of your predecessor’s clients in Holsworthy into staying with you, so I didn’t need to rush into making any money. Three months of renovation stretched into six. Spring came in, clean and fresh and new, scattering flowers round the high-banked lanes in a way I’d have thought belonged to some remote, rustic past. That’s when I knew what you’d known all along: moving to the country was going to be the best move we’d ever made.
Contentment crept up on us during those months. We didn’t seem to miss our London friends. The isolation I’d feared became a privacy I cherished. We never even visited Matt and Lucy as promised at Easter, to see the new house they’d moved into. We would have done, of course, sooner or later. There just didn’t seem to be any urgency about it. Not when there was so much to be enjoyed in our own new home. It could be an illusion, bred by the loss of you, but I don’t think so. Last winter and spring at Stanacombe, we fell in love all over again. It seems so clear now, the memory of you lying beside me in our bedroom beneath the eaves. So clear, yet so fragile. More fragile than I knew.
What was the last thing you said to me? I’ve been trying to remember, but the words won’t come. It was nothing. Just a run-of-the-mill farewell, a leave-taking for a few inconsequential hours. You’d said you’d be home early, to make a start on the garden. And I’d said I might not be there when you got back. It depended on whether there were any useful lots in a furniture auction at Bideford I was driving over to at lunchtime. You nodded and called something back to me over your shoulder as you walked out to the garage. I heard the car start and pull out into the lane. I went to the window and waved. I think you waved back, but the sun was in my eyes and I didn’t glimpse much more than a flicker of movement through the glare. Then you were gone. And already, though I didn’t know it, as the sound of the car faded into the softness of the morning, you were a memory.
I bought a gateleg table at the auction. I reckoned it would go well in the hall. I was confident you’d like it. I phoned the office to tell you. But Carol said you’d already left. Two hours since, apparently. I tried you at home, but there was no answer. Busy in the garden, I assumed. I started back an hour or so later and made it to Kilkhampton about six. I stopped at the New Inn for a drink and phoned you again from there, thinking you might want to join me. The sun had been hot enough to give you a thirst, but now there was the first cooling hint of evening in the air—our favourite time of the day. Still no answer, though. I finished my drink and left.
You weren’t in the garden. You weren’t at home at all. But your car was in the garage and your briefcase was in the study. And it looked as if you’d brewed some tea. The pot was standing upside down on the draining board in the kitchen, the way you used to leave it to dry. There was a rubbish sack full of prunings outside the kitchen door, so some gardening had been done. But that was it—no other sign of you. Not that you ever left many signs. You always were meticulously tidy. There was a time that used to annoy me. But that time was long gone.
I decided you must have gone for a walk. I had another beer, read the paper and waited. When you weren’t back by seven thirty, I began to worry. Nothing concrete, nothing desperate, just low-level anxiety. I headed out, down the lane, and tried the footpath to Stowe Woods, your favourite after-work stroll. It would have been a swiftly forgotten relief to see you emerging from the trees ahead of me, but you didn’t.
I turned back then, knowing you could have taken one of several routes through the woods. Besides, you might just as easily have gone the other way, down to Duckpool Beach. It made more sense to return home.
I saw the police car as I turned into the drive. In that instant, anxiety became alarm. I hesitated, then strode towards the car. A policeman was sitting in the driving seat, talking on his radio. I could hear what he was saying through the open window. “No reply at the house. I’m going to—” He broke off, catching sight of me in the wing mirror. Then he climbed out, the setting sun flashing at me in the mirror as the door opened and closed. He was young and burly, built like a rugby player. He pursed his lips and said, “Mr Sheridan?”
“Yes.”
“Mr Anthony Sheridan?”
“Yes.”
“Husband of Marina Sheridan?”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m afraid there’s been—”
“What’s happened to her?”
“An accident, sir. We think the victim is your wife.”
“What kind of accident? How badly hurt is she?”
“I’m very sorry to say, sir, that she’s—”
“Dead.” That’s what he said. Dead. The full stop in the middle of a sentence. The end before you’ve properly begun. You can talk about it, envisage it, acknowledge it, but you can’t prepare for it. Not when neither you nor the one you love most in all the world is ill or old. Not when everything you’ve done assumes a future.
They must have told me what had happened several times before it sank in. I didn’t want to believe it and so, at first, I couldn’t bring myself to. So much fear hides beneath our everyday concerns, Marina, so much dark, lurking dread. We bury it deep. We pretend it isn’t there. And then, in a sickening instant, it surges to the surface. And consumes us. I was shocked. Of course I was. But most of all I was frightened. Of every hour and day and week and
A couple of walkers had found your handbag, discarded at the top of Henna Cliff, near Morwenstow. They’d followed the footpath down towards the stream to the south and gone out onto the landslip halfway to get a view of the beach at the foot of the cliff. From there they’d spotted you lying among the rocks, the incoming tide crashing around you. To them you were no more than a crumpled shape against the black rocks and foaming white surf. Your life crushed, and mine smashed, beneath the soaring cliff face and the wind-stirred clumps of gorse.
I think now of the times I saw you in death, at the mortuary and the chapel of rest. It wasn’t you, really, not any more. But that didn’t stop me dreaming of you slowly sitting up and smiling at me and making everything right again. Only a dream is all it was. You were gone, and you weren’t coming back.
The police thought you’d killed yourself. I could tell that by the way they cleared their throats and avoided my gaze. I knew better, of course, but there was no way of convincing them of that. It was an unaccountable accident, after all. The cliff top is fenced off, the danger obvious. And you knew the area. Then there was the handbag. Why put it down unless you meant it to be found, to ease identification and save me some suspense? It didn’t make any sense.
Except to me. I went to the cliff top two days later, when I was beginning to be capable of logical thought and action. The sunlight was dazzlingly bright, the blue of the sea and sky sweepingly vast, the clarity of the air almost intoxicating. You loved the cliffs, didn’t you? Perhaps you loved them too much. I’ve known you cross the fence in that very spot to get closer to the edge, while I’ve waited for you on the bench near the stile, back up the path. The wild flowers delighted you. You could reel off all their names and recognize them at a glance, whilst I still can’t tell a thrift from a campion. That’s what I decided must have happened. You noticed an interesting specimen clinging to the edge, put your handbag down so that it didn’t flap around your shoulder in the breeze, stooped for a closer look, either slipped or momentarily lost your bearings and took a step in the wrong direction, then…
A sheer plummeting drop of 400 feet or more. Standing there, buffeted by the wind, confused by grief and the out-of scale wonder of that high green corner of cliff, I saw the whole event as a sudden scrambling mishap, neither more nor less. I saw it and felt the loss of you, there in the pure yawning chasm of air. It wouldn’t have taken much, except the courage I didn’t possess, to step after you into the void. But if onlys clung to me like restraining hands. I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it was true, so I turned and ducked back beneath the fence.
Matt and Lucy arrived later that day. It was a bleak reunion. Matt offered me what comfort he could in his gentle, understated way, while Lucy was clearly as shocked and bewildered as me. You’d always been a part of her life. In that sense, I was just a newcomer. She’d been expecting to see you again soon and now she never would. You were closer than a lot of sisters. More like twins, you used to say, despite the two-year gap. And she looked even more like you than usual on account of a recent diet. To see her smile, and to be reminded instantly and acutely of your smile, was hard to bear. Not that she did smile much. Or cry, come to that. Her grief was a kind of paralysis, through which she seemed to fumble for meaning as much as consolation.
But there was no meaning. That was the worst of it. I could show them Stanacombe and describe the plans we’d had for it. I could take them to Morwenstow and up onto Henna Cliff. I could drive them down to Bodmin and wait outside the chapel of rest, while they went in to say goodbye to you. But I couldn’t explain what had happened in any way that seemed either fitting or appropriate. I sensed that Lucy blamed me for your death, blamed me, that is, for not taking better care of you. She didn’t say so, of course. She knew it wasn’t rational or reasonable. You’d have resented any hint of protectiveness, just like her. But it was there nonetheless. In me as well as her.
They stayed on for the funeral and handled a lot of the arrangements, thank God. Well, Matt did, to be honest. Lucy and I weren’t up to much, beyond talking about you. We drove to Bournemouth to see your mother, but she didn’t show the slightest understanding of what we were telling her. Maybe senility does have its blessings after all.
You’d specified cremation in your will, of course, like the model solicitor you were. I’d have preferred burial. It would have meant I could visit you. But you always were suspicious of markers and memorials, weren’t you? Or perhaps you wouldn’t have wanted me moping at a graveside. I never asked what your reasoning was. I didn’t want to think about your death, even as a remote contingency. But now it was neither remote nor contingent. It was here and now. It was what I had to live with. And to live through.
A lot of our friends from London came down for the funeral. I was glad they were there, though I probably didn’t show it, glad for your sake as much as mine. Kilkhampton Church was nearly full. I had no idea there were so many people who were going to miss you. You liked that church. I remember you saying so. I was glad of that too. It was just Matt, Lucy and me at the crematorium in Bodmin, though. There’s nothing I can say about those final moments. They passed and it was done. I tried to register them in my mind, but all I could think of was you alive and laughing. It was nothing to do with you, that clinical consignment to the flames. You weren’t there at all.
But you were nowhere else either. Your clothes still hung in the wardrobe. Your creams and perfumes still stood in the bathroom cabinet. Your lists of useful things still lay in the kitchen drawer. Yet all they amounted to was physical proof of your absence. I’d wake at night, believing for a fraction of a second that your death was a dream. But it wasn’t. I was alone.
Matt and Lucy went home two days after the funeral. They urged me to accompany them, but I insisted I was better off learning to cope without you. Not that I think I’ll ever learn how to do that.
“You can’t mean to stay here,” said Lucy. “It’s not you, Tony. This place is all Marina.” She was right. It might have been different if we’d lived at Stanacombe for a few years. As it was, we’d hardly finished moving in. And without you I felt like a stranger there. But then, where wouldn’t I? “Let us take care of you for a while,” Lucy urged. “This is going to take a lot of getting over.”
I promised to think about it. Lucy wrote, repeating the offer, a few days later. By then I’d been notified of a date for the inquest, so I suggested visiting them after that. I wasn’t sure I’d want to, even then. Stanacombe was as close as I could be to you. It wasn’t my home, but it was still yours. I helped Carol close down the practice in Holsworthy and carried on with the renovation work, between long cliff-top walks. I tired myself out, one way or another. I got through the days and looked forward to the nights, when I could sleep and forget you weren’t sleeping beside me.
But it was only a short-term survival strategy. Sooner or later I had to make a break. And I suppose the inquest made it for me. Lucy came down on her own to attend. It was a brief, low-key affair at the courts in Bodmin. The coroner was businesslike but sympathetic. He asked me to describe your state of mind in the days before your death, giving me the opportunity to scotch the idea of suicide.
“My wife was sometimes impulsive,” I said. “I’m afraid that probably explains what happened as well as it can be explained. She must have got bored with gardening and gone for a walk. I’ve known her to walk much further along the cliff path than she intended, just because the scenery’s so magical. That would be why she went as far as Morwenstow. She was probably glorying in the spring flowers. Neither of us had realized how colourful they’d be when we moved down here. I’m sure that’s why she was so close to the edge. No other reason. It must just have been…a misjudgement, an accident; a terrible, terrible accident.”
They let me have my way, Marina. Accidental death was the official verdict. “There is absolutely no reason to suppose,” said the coroner, “that Mrs Sheridan was minded to take her own life.” Exactly. No reason at all. And therefore an accident was the only possible explanation.
