“Oh. Well, I’m glad you heard. It’s nice to think something good happened on that awful day.”
“Why awful?” asks Corinne. Then, eyes widening, “Ohhh. Last summer. Right. Was that the day—”
“Yes,” says Sally. “The first time I saw Lesley Gavey.”
14
Mum thought, and still thinks, that she saw the woman first, but I was there too and I’d already spotted her. She was staring at our house, crying hard, and not only that—she was crying in a particular way. When I first noticed her, I was struck by the unusualness of that way but couldn’t have explained what was so odd about it to anyone. It has taken me this long to work out the best way to describe it.
The woman (Lesley Gavey, though none of us knew that when she first appeared outside our lounge window) was crying not as if she was at the beginning of something, or even in the middle. She was weepingat our housein a way that suggested she was close to the end of a long-running, grueling drama involving her and it (“him,” Mum would have insisted: Shukes was a “him”), and that this—her being here now, sobbing convulsively on the village green—was perhaps the opening of the penultimate scene of that drama, one in which things could still very much go one way or the other.
“That’s weird,” Mum muttered.
“What?” Tobes asked from the corner of the corner sofa, both hands and his entire mind on his phone.
“There’s a woman standing in the middle of the green, staring at our house and crying,” Mum told him.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The woman had been there for about two minutes by the time Mum said anything about her. She was lurching forward and back every so often and giving an impression of extreme instability. (Anyone who can stagger and reel like that on something as flat as Swaffham Tilney’s village green must have a dangerous amount of wobbliness inside them.)
We all looked. The crying was constant and added the only wet element to a dry and sunny day. The woman gulped and heaved, opening and closing her mouth and not making any attempt to stop the flow. It looked to me like deliberate, committed sobbing, as if coming here and doing this was her chosen project for the day.
“Mum, what have you done?” Tobes asked in a tone of affected weariness. “You must have done something to piss her off, because…jeez.” I think he was scared and didn’t want to admit it. I know I was. I didn’t want someone like this, someone capable of doing this, anywhere near me.
It was definitely Shukes she was focused on—the house itself, not anything inside. If she’d wanted to see the contents, living and inanimate, she’d have needed to come much closer. She seemed, while weeping, to be examining every single bit of Shukes in turn: his roof, his front door, the upstairs, the downstairs. Mum walked over and stood right in the window, but the Weeper gave noindication of having seen her or of caring that Mum was watching her act like a freak in public.
“Mum, what’s going on?” Tobes asked.
“I don’t know. Shh,” Mum whispered, as if the woman outside could have heard us, which she couldn’t. She was standing too far away.
Her hair was glossy, dark brown, shoulder-length—also coarse-looking and a little straw-like, despite not being straw-colored. Her dark-blue eyes were too big for her narrow nose, and her small, neat mouth was almost cartoonishly mouth-shaped, with a pronounced “M” for a top lip: a Capital M Mouth. She was wearing a short-sleeved, fitted, knee-length dress—red with a pattern of white flowers—as if she’d escaped from a cocktail party at which something devastating had happened. Black ankle boots with pointy toes, gold hoop earrings with small pearls hanging down from them, navy handbag over her shoulder. She was absurdly overdressed for the outdoor pursuit of crying in a Fenland village.
“Looks like she might be about to march up to our front door, so…before that happens, do you want to fill me in?” said Tobes. “Am I going to have to stop her from, like, stabbing you to death?”
“I don’t think she’ll come any closer,” Mum told him.
“But who is she?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Well, what does she want?” Tobes persisted.
Mum shook her head. “I don’t know any more than you, darling. Sorry. It’s very odd. Maybe she’ll… Hmm.”
I thought, but didn’t say, that none of us should try to find out any more than the nothing we knew. I sensed that the best thingby far would be for the woman to go away and never come back, without us finding out anything about her. I didn’t want her in my head any more than I wanted her in our village or house. There was something chilling about the way she was endlessly looking, endlessly weeping.
“I’d quite like to get dressed if I’m going to have to physically defend you,” Tobes said. He was still in pajama bottoms and bare-chested, with last Christmas’s joke present on his feet: enormous rabbit slippers. One was missing an ear, thanks to Champ, who had chewed it off toward the end of his puppy phase.
Mum took the bait. “Defend me? I don’t need defending. I haven’t done anything.”
“Are you sure?” said Tobes. “What if she’s, like, Dad’s other woman, come round to make a scene?” He narrowed his eyes in mock suspicion. “Or maybe you’re the one who’s been playing away. Is she the furious wife of your—?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Toby.” Mum pulled a face of exaggerated impatience.
“I’m just saying: You don’t know her, I don’t know her… Maybe Dad does.”
“He doesn’t. Dad doesn’tknowpeople. He’s too lazy. And too busy with work.”
“Fair.” Tobes nods. “Shall I go and ask her what she wants? Tell her to stop staring at Shukes?”
