Told in Silence

‘It’ll be strange,’ I heard Laura say, as if half to herself. ‘Seeing everyone again. It feels like such a long time since we’ve had this sort of gathering.’ Her fingers plucked disconsolately at a thread of lilac crêpe, teasing it apart into long filmy strands. ‘I hope Dad enjoys it.’

‘I hope we all do,’ I said, ‘but there’s no reason why we wouldn’t.’ Empty though the words were, they seemed to reassure her, and she nodded. I hesitated, and then put my hand over hers. Despite the heat of the day, her skin felt cold and faintly damp, as if she had just come in out of the rain.

‘I think this will be good for you, Violet,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘You’re too young to…’ She trailed off and, not wanting her to go on, I gripped her hand more tightly. The sudden smart of tears behind my eyes surprised me. Affection, even love, for Laura tended to strike me like that; randomly, as if unthought of ever before.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ I said, as brightly as I could muster, and as I smiled at her I felt my spirits lift with the knowledge that I wasn’t lying. The closest I had got to a party in the past nine months was a strained, abortive gathering with a few of Jonathan’s old university friends – women ten years older than myself who wanted to drink cocktails, talk loudly about their own lives and subtly compete to give the impression that they themselves had been far more deeply touched and bruised by my husband’s death than I could ever imagine. It was a mistake that I had never made again. There was something unsettling about the distance I felt from them, a sharp contrast to the easy friendliness with which they had seemed to welcome me when Jonathan and I were first married. Perhaps they had seen me as temporary. Now, in their eyes and mine, he would always belong to me, and they had not liked it.

‘Really, I’m looking forward to it,’ I said again, almost defiantly. Still smiling, I swung round to look back at the house, and saw Harvey there. He was standing motionless at the kitchen window. I raised my hand, but he gave no sign of having noticed me. He was staring out through the glass across the lawn, his face blank and remote, as if he were watching Rome burn.

I began to walk back towards the house. I didn’t want to see the garden through his eyes, as I knew I would if I turned around again: the pointless little bunched-together groups of tables, the coloured bows fluttering emptily in the breeze. Harvey had a way of stripping back pretence, albeit without intent or volition. He simply saw the futility of things, and it bled out of him, tainting everything that it touched.

I heard them before I saw them: a rising and falling hubbub of voices outside the kitchen door, their words blurring into each other so that I could barely make sense of them. I kept my head down, piping cream into meringues in perfect circles, feeling heat spilling over me. Now that the guests were arriving I wanted them gone again. A painful shyness was spreading in my chest, making me gasp for breath. My fingers shook as I placed the strawberries one by one on top of each meringue, taking far longer than I needed, spinning out the task. Above the general hum I heard Harvey’s coolly authoritative tones, inviting the guests to go out into the garden and exchanging niceties. Now and again, I thought I could hear Laura chiming in, palely echoing his words. Shadows moved across the work-surface as people passed outside, but I kept my back to the window. I collected the meringues on to their silver platter, then went to wash my hands. In my agitation I turned the tap on too hard and water sprayed out on to my dress, staining darkly against the red linen. I dabbed it ineffectually with a tea towel, feeling my heart beat faster, hearing the voices grow louder outside.

‘And where is Violet?’ I heard someone say, my name cutting through the babble of words. ‘How is she?’ I didn’t recognise the woman’s voice, but her tone was deferential, sympathetic, as if she were referring to an invalid. I couldn’t catch Laura’s reply, but the woman made a noise of ostentatious understanding in response. ‘Of course, it’s very hard on her,’ I heard her say. ‘On all of you.’

I snatched up a tray of quiches at random and made for the back door, gripping the tray tightly to cancel out my shaking. When I saw the lawn I stopped in my tracks and blinked, half dazzled; dozens of people, many of them women with bright, jewel-coloured hats and shoes that danced and sparkled jauntily in the sun. I had not meant to make an entrance, but as I appeared, conversations seemed to fade, heads turn sharply my way for an instant before whipping back into place. I came forward across the lawn, placed the tray carefully down on to the nearest table, then straightened up, searching for a face I recognised. Many of them stirred up vague memories: ex-colleagues from Harvey’s law firm, their eyes alert and watchful. I couldn’t remember a single one of their names.

I saw Laura and made my way towards her, forcing my lips into a smile. Next to her, a large matronly woman loomed, her hair teased up into tight little brown curls that clustered around her bovine face. I knew instinctively that it was her voice I had heard in the kitchen, but I had no idea who she was.

‘Violet, I was just going to bring out some more of the food – but you remember Miranda,’ Laura said, almost beseechingly, as if willing me to say yes. I looked closer, and with a shock I connected the name and the face: Miranda Foster, Jonathan’s godmother and an old family friend. All at once I could see her on our wedding day, bearing down on me and telling me how lucky I was and how Jonathan was like a son to her, before enfolding him lasciviously in a hug like no mother I had ever seen. The past eighteen months had not been kind to her; her face looked strained and stiff, as if it had been dipped in wax.

‘Of course,’ I said, holding out my hand, but Miranda made an impatient gesture and cast aside the sandwich she had been holding, pulling me against her voluptuous bosom into a forced embrace. I froze in shock, the sticky, cloying scent of her perfume flooding my nostrils.

‘My poor child,’ she whispered into my ear. ‘What you must have been through!’ As swiftly as she had drawn me towards her, she pushed me back, holding me by the shoulders to examine me. ‘You look older,’ she said, a little critically. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected.’

Yes, I almost said, the passage of time tends to have that effect – but I knew that was not what she meant. What she was trying to imply, not very subtly, was that grief had ravaged me, stolen the youthful bloom that she might once have envied and rendered me wholly unremarkable. She may well have been right, but I fiercely resented her assumption that she was entitled to say it. She was no one to me; had meant less than nothing to Jonathan, who had once told me that he wished the old harridan would stop undressing him with her eyes every time they met. For an instant I felt my colour rise and the words threatened to burst out of me.

‘I suppose it is, yes – for all of us,’ I contented myself with. ‘I would hardly have recognised you.’

Miranda’s brow wrinkled in suspicion and dismay, but before she could speak Harvey materialised at my side. He was wearing a crisp linen suit in pale grey, his silver hair drawn back from his forehead, and a necktie I had not seen before: an unusually flamboyant affair, apple-green silk shot through with metallic thread. When she saw him, Miranda’s face softened into what I suspected she thought was coquettishness, and which indeed might have been in a woman half her age.

‘Lovely to see you, so glad you could make it,’ Harvey said smoothly. ‘Violet, why don’t you go and see if anyone would like a top-up? There’s more champagne inside.’

Gratefully, I broke away. Harvey had an instinct for seeing when people needed to be rescued and an admirably selfsacrificing nature when it came to substituting himself into the firing line; it was something I had forgotten about him in these months of near-isolation. As I retreated, I stole a look back at him. He appeared relaxed, urbane and smiling. It was impossible to tell whether it was just an act.

I spent the next hour passing through the crowd, offering drinks and canapés, stopping here and there for a brief five minutes of small talk. Most of the guests had eyes that flooded with a mixture of pity and curiosity as they spoke to me, but at least, unlike Miranda, they had the good sense to keep their tongues in check and stuck to chatting about the weather. As time passed I felt myself begin to unwind, the tension relaxing from my muscles. A couple of Harvey’s colleagues flirted gallantly and unthreateningly with me, making me roll my eyes and blush. I wondered whether I might be having fun. Standing there on the lawn in my red dress, tossing my hair over my shoulders and laughing, I caught a glimpse of the future opening up. It was not the future I had planned and not the kind of fun I had been accustomed to, but there was little prospect of that any more. Glancing into the crowd of guests, I tried to imagine Jonathan among them, moving with his old confident ease from group to group, and found that I could not. For so long I had carried him around with me like a dead weight, projecting him so vividly into every situation I found myself in that it sometimes seemed I had summoned his ghost. The thought felt disloyal, but if I had lost the knack, I was not sure that I wanted it back. I was tired of missing him, tired of living my life around someone who no longer existed. Any respite from it, no matter how temporary, made me giddily thankful.

I was helping Laura to collect some empty glasses when I saw Harvey stride across the lawn towards us. He put his arm lightly around Laura’s waist, bending in towards her so that his mouth almost brushed her ear. ‘What is that man doing here?’ I heard him murmur, jerking his head to indicate who he meant. To anyone who knew him less, his voice would have sounded unruffled, but I caught a steely undertone to it, the merest hint of a threat.

Laura followed his gaze, narrowing her eyes in the sunlight, and I did the same. Underneath the low-spreading apple tree at the edge of the lawn, a little apart from the crowd, a man stood, smoking a cigarette and looking out across the grass, his face half turned away.

‘It’s Max Croft, isn’t it?’ Laura said. When Harvey did not reply, she turned her face up to his appealingly, searching for a clue as to what to say. ‘I suppose his parents brought him,’ she said finally.

‘His parents?’ Harvey repeated, a little bitingly. ‘Couldn’t they find a babysitter?’ His voice threatened to become louder, and he took a full minute to compose himself, smoothing the flat of his hand slowly and repeatedly over the knot of his tie. I squinted harder at the man, but could make out little but the short, angry-seeming drags he was taking on his cigarette; hard, muscular movements.

‘I didn’t realise that you didn’t want him here.’ Laura fluttered, her hands making desperate shapes in the air now as she spoke. ‘I mean, I didn’t specifically tell Patricia and James that they couldn’t bring him, I wouldn’t really have thought of it – and after all, he did know Jonathan, I thought they were quite friendly once—’

‘Actually,’ Harvey cut in levelly, ‘I don’t think Jonathan liked him at all.’

‘Oh dear…’ Laura began to flap, her eyes darting wildly back and forth between Harvey and the man underneath the apple tree. ‘I’m not sure…I don’t think I can…’

‘Of course you can’t,’ Harvey said, so softly that I could barely catch the words. ‘All the same, next time, perhaps you could finalise the guest list with me.’ His tone was perfectly pleasant, almost soothing. Before Laura had a chance to reply, he had turned and melted into the crowd, clapping yet another well-wisher on the back. Laura looked after him, wringing her hands, her face haunted. I knew that she would worry about the incident for the rest of the afternoon.

I drifted away from the central tables to get a better look at the man whose appearance had jolted Harvey’s famous equilibrium. As I stood on the fringes of the group, staring across at him, he saw me and half raised his hand in a silent salute. Automatically, I waved back. He paused, stubbing out his cigarette against the tree, then beckoned me over. I hesitated, glancing back, but curiosity drove me forward; I walked slowly across the lawn, the pointed heels of my shoes sinking a little into the earth with each step. As I drew closer I realised that Harvey was right. This face had no business at his garden party. The features were bold, tough and cruel; brutal slashed cheekbones, a hard, unsmiling gangster’s mouth. His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, bristling along the strong lines of his bones. His shoulders looked tensed for battle, and his body gave the impression of being hard-packed into a container a little too small for it, restraining its force. If I ran into you in an alleyway, I thought, I would be terrified. I could smell the powerful scent of nicotine and burnt smoke rising off him.

‘All right,’ he said when I halted a few feet away from him. His voice was every bit as harsh as his appearance, a faint rasping rattle running underneath the surface that made me want to clear my throat. When I didn’t reply, he lit up another cigarette, keeping his eyes warily on me, cupping his hand secretively around his mouth.

‘Hello,’ I said at last.

‘Max Croft,’ he said, thrusting his hand out so that I had no choice but to take it. He crushed mine for a few painful seconds before throwing it back. ‘I think you work with my sister.’

It took me a beat to understand who he meant. I looked more closely at him, and could see no trace of Catherine’s elfin prettiness in his face. ‘Really?’ I said.

He gave a grin more like a sneer, showing even, regular teeth. ‘Well, you tell me,’ he said. ‘Do you or don’t you?’

‘If you mean Catherine,’ I said, ‘then yes.’

‘That’s the one.’ He was silent for a few moments, leaning back against the apple tree and smoking, his lips sucking on the cigarette in a way that made my skin prickle with revulsion and fascination. ‘Nice do,’ he said eventually, jerking his head in the direction of the clustered guests. His voice was lightly laced with irony.

‘For those who were invited,’ I said. His mocking tone had set off a small fire of protectiveness in me, and I folded my arms. ‘Harvey didn’t seem to think you were one of those.’

Max raised his eyebrows, looking at me speculatively. ‘Come to kick me out, then?’ he asked. I was silent. ‘Look,’ he said after a few more drags, ‘I don’t want to cause any trouble. I don’t think your old man likes me very much, but it’s not down to anything I’ve done. I liked Jonathan – we didn’t have a lot in common, granted, but he was a good guy. We played a few games of pool, hung out a few times. If your old man doesn’t think I was a suitable friend, then that’s his problem.’

I frowned, trying to remember. As far as I could recall, Jonathan had never mentioned this man. I had certainly never seen him before. I thought of Harvey’s quiet words to Laura: Actually, I don’t think Jonathan liked him at all. There was no way of telling who was right. The silence threatened to stifle me. ‘He’s not my old man,’ I said.

Max shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Obviously. He might as well be, though. Seems you’ve been well and truly welcomed into the family bosom. Just shows what an untimely death can do, eh? But for that you might still be knocking on the back door pleading to be let in.’ His voice had dropped, taking on a nasty, sarcastic quality.

A bright flush of anger swept over me. This man was being insufferably rude, and he had no business saying these knowing things to me, as if he knew more about me and my family – for family they were, in a way – than I did myself. I drew in a sharp breath and turned to go. In the same instant, he had leant forward and caught me easily by the wrist, the tips of two fingers still holding his cigarette, burnt down to the stub now, sending heat coursing across my skin.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking straight into my eyes, and I felt my whole body jolt with something strange and dark. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. It just makes me angry to see a girl like you shut away with those two. They’re not so bad, don’t get me wrong, but they’ve got no life to them. You’re, what? Twenty? Twenty-one? You should get out more.’ Incredibly, I thought I saw his left eye briefly flicker in a wink. He dropped my arm, still staring at me. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said, making it sound like a promise and a threat. I backed away from him, breathing hard. My heart was thumping in my chest, as if he had pulled a knife on me.

The next few hours slipped by like minutes. I watched, as I might have watched a scene in a dream, as Harvey commanded everyone’s attention and made a short speech, thanking all the guests for coming and saying how pleased he was that he was able to celebrate his birthday with so many of his friends and family. The polite smattering of applause fell into my ears like rain. As people gradually started to peel away, the sky above began to darken. I helped to find coats, showed departing guests to the exit. The wind was picking up, shaking the green and lilac crêpe paper tied to the chairs, setting up a low insistent rustle across the lawn. Drinks were finished, glasses cast aside, presents left in the hallway. I stood smiling and thanking people for coming, saying the same lines over and over, kissing and shaking hands with what might as well have been so many brightly dressed puppets. ‘I saw you talking to Max Croft earlier,’ Miranda whispered as she left, intent on imparting one final sting, ‘he’s not our sort, not our sort at all.’ As I waved off the last of them, a light drizzle began to slash against the windowpanes.

I went back out into the empty garden, feeling the rain soaking into my skin, collecting coldly in my hair. Far in the distance, I could see Laura, sitting still on a bench by the rose garden. I walked down towards her, my shoes sucking and sticking to the damp earth. She was gazing at the yellow rose bush, the one she had planted in memory of Jonathan. I remembered her digging the cold ground, her head bent down, shoving the spade in with such violence that it shook her whole body, sending gravel spraying in a fountain around her, muddying her dress. The roses were in bloom now; huge, gorgeous blooms the colour of sunshine, trembling with fat drops of rain. I sat down beside her, and for a long while we didn’t speak. Her face was set and distant, as if she were sorting through her memories and finding nothing new there.

‘Do you ever wonder?’ I said. ‘Do you ever wonder what happened?’

Laura raised her head slowly, searchingly; didn’t speak.

‘I don’t mean…I know that we know what happened,’ I said. ‘But…’ I didn’t know how to continue. All at once, and without warning, I felt the old familiar grief and incomprehension rising to the surface, sending a shiver of nausea the length of my body. As we sat there, I began to cry as I hadn’t done in weeks, huge ugly sobs that shook the air around us. I wanted these feelings gone – wanted them out of me. It seemed that they were here to stay; that however much I wanted it and however much I might fool myself that I was moving on, they wouldn’t ever leave me.

I unlock the door and push it open as quietly as I can, feeling it snag and scrape against loose carpet. As I slip into the dark hallway, I hear the low static noise of the television coming from the sitting room. I move towards it, the familiar smell of must and musk flooding my nose and mouth as I do so. If I stay in this house too long, it starts to cling to my hair and my clothes, infecting everywhere I go. It’s the same with the mess; even when I’m not here, I can see it in the back of my mind, weighing me down. Now, coming from Jonathan’s immaculate flat, it hits me even harder: boxes piled up against the hallway wall containing God knows what, stacks of old yellowing newspapers, a heap of ironing that never seems to get done. I have long since passed the stage of seeing these things as charmingly bohemian.

I creep to the sitting-room door and stand there, peeping through the chink. The room is dark but for the television, light bristling off it like an eerie aquarium, and a small floor lamp throwing dim shadows against the back wall. The backs of my parents’ heads are there, popped up above the sofa and framing the television, motionless. I know they will have heard me come in, despite my efforts to be quiet, but they don’t turn around. I push the door open and come into the room, go and sit opposite them on an armchair that sighs and whines when I settle myself down on it.

‘Nice of you to join us,’ grunts my father, and for a few moments we’re just sitting there silently, all of us together, our eyes trained on whichever stupid quiz show they’ve been watching for however many minutes or hours or days. The pictures dance in front of me, blurring meaninglessly into blobs of coloured light. I think of Jonathan, the hot sharp smell of sweat and sex in his bedroom. Already I can’t wait to see him again.

‘Are you all packed, dear?’ my mother asks idly. I have told them that I have been staying with a friend, Gemma, for the past few days. It seems they haven’t bothered to check. From anyone else this question might be barbed – if she had bothered to set foot in my room, my mother would know that no packing had been done – but from her, it denotes nothing but ignorance. I look at her, her calm and indifferent face. In a minute I will make that mask crack. I can feel my hands growing hot and damp; I wipe them slowly against my skirt.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I haven’t packed, because I’m not going to Manchester.’

The change, in my mother at least, is instant. Her head jerks up and she shoots a sharp glance at my father. He just stays slumped in his seat, watching the television, looking bored and faintly contemptuous. He has heard this before, of course, but he doesn’t know what has changed.

‘We’ve been through this, Violet,’ my mother says in a voice that might be meant to be compassionate, but just sounds hard and impatient to my ears. ‘It’s difficult going to university at first, but you’ll be fine. You’ll make friends. You’ll manage with the work.’

‘I’ve met someone,’ I say. ‘We’re in love.’ Saying the truth here, in this faded room with its threadbare rug and peeling walls, makes it sound totally unreal, a little girl’s fantasy. I dig my fingernails into my palms and will myself to remember. I won’t let these pedestrian surroundings crowd him out. Still, the echo of my words around the room sounds hollow even to my ears. Quietly, my father snickers, a low, unimpressed chuckle that makes me so angry I have to close my eyes briefly, seeing bursts of red pumping across the dark.

‘Oh, Violet,’ my mother says, her tone exasperated and brittle. ‘You’ll meet plenty of boys in Manchester.’

I picture them: spotty youths with stripy scarves and flat Northern drawls. ‘He’s not a boy,’ I spit out. ‘He’s a thirty-year-old man with his own flat. And I love him, and I’m not leaving him. Some things are more important than—’ I stop. I want to say ‘than education’, but it sounds wrong. It’s not a question of importance, but one of necessity. I can’t leave him. The thought twists a fist in my stomach, tensing my whole body in desperation.

‘Oh, Violet,’ my mother says again. She clasps her hands in front of her, and I see the ancient engagement ring glinting on her finger. When I was younger I had thought it was the most beautiful ring in the world, but now it looks dulled and tarnished, just like everything else in this house. ‘This sounds like a crush to me. We’ve all had them, but really, a thirty-year-old man is not going to be interested in a young girl like you.’

I feel a surprised bark of laughter rise in my throat. How can she be so naive? ‘I think you’ll find he’s very interested in me,’ I say, my voice shrill and loud, battling against the television’s merry clatter. ‘I’ve been with him for the past three days, not that you’d care.’ For a wild moment, I want to shock her further, push her over the edge, tell her every detail of what we have done. Forbidden words crowd into my mind, making me breathless.