Past Tense Read online

  Ahead of her now and after the organ voluntary had come to a stop, the vicar, robed in full canonicals, was pronouncing the words ‘“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out…”’

  Janet Wakefield had no quarrel with these sentiments as far as the late Josephine Short was concerned. Detailed examination of the bedroom in the nursing home had been singularly unrevealing, her possessions there few and far between. Certainly there was everything present in the room that one bedridden old lady could or would possibly need, but nothing whatsoever to shed light on the personality of that same old lady – not even anything about the Rowlettian Society. There were some rather worn black and white photographs in a torn brown envelope in a bottom drawer but they had had no names on them that had meant anything to her and Janet had left them where they were.

  As the vicar began the Sentences ‘“I know that my Redeemer liveth…”,’ and while the coffin was being set upon the waiting trestles, Janet Wakefield sat herself down in the right-hand front pew and picked up the prayer book there.

  Her solitary splendour in that pew, though, was not destined to last long. Seconds after she was seated, a tall youngish man wearing a dark suit and a black tie slid into the pew in which she was sitting. He sat down beside her, bowed his head, and gave every appearance of entering into silent prayer. ‘“Whom I shall see for myself and shall mine eyes behold, and not another”,’ finished the Reverend Derek Tompkinson, reaching his stall after first reverencing the altar and turning to face the congregation. Janet cast a covert glance in the direction of the newcomer but was little the wiser after that beyond being aware that the man’s suit was of a light wool and had been cut in a slightly un-English way.

  ‘The first hymn,’ announced the vicar, ‘is “Father, Hear the Prayer We Offer” which is number 172 in the green book…’ Under cover of the general rustling of activity, caused by the taking up of hymn books and the searching for the right page and the starting up of the organ again, the newcomer leant over towards Janet and whispered in her ear, ‘Phew! That was a near thing. Just made it in time, thank goodness. Mother always said I’d be late for my own funeral but if I was late for Granny’s there’d be big trouble. Well, I’m not, am I?’

  Chapter Two

  Sheila, Mrs Linda Luxton’s deputy at the Berebury Nursing Home, in St Clement’s Row, took a deep breath and carefully counted to three before she spoke. They had learnt the hard way at the Home that, while people who wanted to become resident there queued up for a bed in the place, good care staff were very much more difficult to come by and keep.

  Ellen Steele was good care staff in the sense that she had an idle, no-good husband, a heavy drinker to boot, and an even more ne’er-do-well son, who was forever in trouble, and thus she could not easily afford to leave the employment there.

  ‘Smashed, you say?’ said the deputy matron, playing for time.

  ‘Smashed into little pieces,’ said Ellen Steele energetically, ‘dozens of them and it wasn’t me, Sheila. Honest. And I just can’t work out what happened to it.’

  ‘Are we talking about that vase that stood on her shelf?’ Shelves were few and far between in the less-than-ample residents’ rooms at the Berebury Nursing Home. ‘The pretty red and green china one?’

  Ellen nodded. ‘That’s right. Beautiful isn’t…wasn’t it? It was the only thing that old Josephine would have there. She was really fussy about it.’

  ‘I must say it looked valuable,’ said Sheila, wondering what they would have to say about the breakage to the family.

  ‘But if you ask me it was the only thing of hers that was, ’cepting those rings that she always wore. Lovely, they were.’

  ‘Biggest diamond I’ve ever seen,’ agreed Sheila, momentarily diverted. ‘The other one was a sapphire…a Sri Lankan sapphire, I think she once told me it was.’

  ‘Matched her blue eyes lovely, it did,’ said Ellen. ‘Like ice, they were.’

  ‘But as to the vase being valuable, I couldn’t say for sure,’ said Sheila.

  ‘Most of them stand their photographs along that shelf,’ continued Ellen, ‘but Josephine wouldn’t never have nothing there but that vase. Ever.’

  ‘I’ve an idea that she’d lost people in an accident and couldn’t bear to look at their photographs,’ said the deputy matron absently. Strictly speaking care in the home only related to the here and now, but in every care home the past always cast its long shadows towards the present.

  ‘Kept all of them tucked away in a drawer, she did,’ said Ellen, from whom no secrets of Josephine Short’s room could very well have been hidden in the circumstances. ‘Loose in a brown envelope. Didn’t look at ’em much, though, I can tell you. Couldn’t get to the drawer herself, not lately anyway.’

  ‘Josephine wasn’t ever one for talking about the past, either,’ said Sheila, who took her share of the caring when someone else on the staff didn’t come in.

  ‘Unlike some,’ groaned Ellen feelingly. ‘I tell you, Sheila, if I have to hear about that Kathleen in number 11’s safari trip one more time I shall scream. I’ve begun to wish those lions she saw had eaten her. Or, come to that, Lady Alice’s tale about crossing the Bay of Biscay in the war with U-boats about when she was in the Wrens…’

  ‘I hope, though, that that vase wasn’t as valuable as it looked,’ said the deputy matron, sticking to the point. She sighed. ‘I don’t know what Linda will say when she gets back from the church, I’m sure. I don’t know when the family’ll be coming back here either but we’ll have to tell them then about its being broken.’

  ‘But that’s not it…’ insisted Ellen with vigour.

  ‘No?’ said Sheila, puzzled.

  ‘What you don’t understand, Sheila, is that that room has been kep’ locked ever since Josephine died.’

  ‘Someone must have knocked it over,’ pointed out Sheila mildly, careful not to cast aspersions. ‘It can’t have fallen on its own. Not short of an earthquake.’

  ‘So they must,’ agreed Ellen, ‘but if it wasn’t me – and I tell you it wasn’t – then who was it? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘And what were they doing in there, anyway?’ asked the deputy matron, catching on. ‘Nobody had any business to be in that room after the old lady died, never mind that it was kept locked and the key hung on the board on the wall in Linda’s office here.’

  ‘Exactly. That niece of hers – if that’s what she is – Jan somebody…’

  ‘Wakefield,’ supplied the deputy matron. ‘Wife of Josephine’s next of kin. It should have been him taking care of things, only he’s away somewhere on business.’

  ‘Her, then. Linda was with her all the time she was here when she came up to get the old lady’s papers for the registrar and that vase will have been all right then or we’d have heard all about it and no mistake.’

  ‘We would,’ sighed Sheila, on whose shoulders much of the minutiae of running the place fell. Mrs Luxton, the matron, dealt with the paperwork and the ever-burgeoning requirements of the regulatory authorities.

  ‘So,’ said Ellen ineluctably, ‘short of that earthquake you mentioned, how come that vase fell off the shelf and broke if the room has been kept locked ever since? Or, at least, until I went in this morning to give the room a bit of a tidy before the family come?’

  Sheila frowned. ‘Think carefully. Is there anything actually missing from the room that you can see?’

  Ellen Steele shook her head. ‘Not that I noticed. Mind you, there wasn’t a lot left in it to start with – not since them lovely rings went with the body to the undertaker’s, like Morton’s said Josephine had asked.’ She sniffed. ‘Not, I must say, that that stopped that young woman who come having a good hunt for anything valuable. Never been near the place before, either.’

  ‘She did say that neither she nor her husband knew anything about his great-aunt being in here or they would have visited.’

  Ellen sniffed again, not mollified by this.
‘Didn’t stop the old lady naming him as her next of kin, did it? Funny that, if you was to ask me. Mind you, Sheila, that wife of his got here pretty quickly after she’d died. People always do.’

  The deputy matron did not attempt to dispute this. Instead she stood up and said she’d go and look at the room herself, and then perhaps Ellen would go ahead and sweep up the pieces before Linda and the other staff came back from the church at Damory Regis, and certainly before the relatives got to the Home. She halted suddenly on her way out and said, ‘On second thoughts, perhaps not, Ellen. Just leave the broken pieces on the floor where they are. It might be better.’

  She had hardly got to the door before the cook appeared, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. ‘’Scuse me interrupting, Sheila, but you’d better come and take a look at the pantry. Someone’s taken the window out.’

  While Janet Wakefield struggled to sing the words of the hymn, her mind now in a complete whirl, her neighbour beside her in the front pew appeared quite at home with them, joining in the singing with ease.

  ‘I nearly didn’t make it,’ he bent down and hissed into Janet’s ear as they settled down and prepared to listen to the reading. ‘I got lost on the way down.’

  ‘Where from?’ was all Janet could manage in the way of speech before the vicar welcomed the congregation and announced that the sentences of scripture would be from Ecclesiastes: ‘“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven…’”

  The Reverend Derek Tompkinson had reached ‘“A time to be born, and a time to die”…’ before she got an answer.

  ‘The airport. I hired a car there,’ he said, sotto voce, under cover of the vicar’s walking back from the lectern. ‘I stayed there last night on my way here. My plane was too late in, yesterday evening, to come on here.’

  ‘Where from?’ she asked again.

  ‘Lasserta,’ he whispered. ‘The sheikhdom thereof.’

  Janet Wakefield settled herself back in the pew, trying to place Lasserta in her school atlas. Somewhere out East was all that came to her mind, it being the mysterious East in more senses than one as far as she was concerned since she couldn’t think exactly where Lasserta was. With an enormous effort of will she turned her mind back to the matter in hand – the funeral service.

  The vicar was talking about the late Josephine Eleanor Short. ‘There will be those of you present here today who will have known she whose death we are gathered together to mark. I am not numbered among you but I join with you in bidding farewell to an old lady who chose to spend her last years here in our county of Calleshire and who had especially asked to be laid to rest among the villagers of this ancient settlement. She had asked, too, that you all be invited back to the Almstone Towers Hotel after this service for suitable refreshment.’

  The Reverend Derek Tompkinson then gave his gentle smile and went on with practised fluency, ‘In medieval times a candle would be lit in the church porch when a parishioner died to guide them to church. It was called a “fetch-candle” and while we do not know what it is that fetched Josephine Eleanor Short to our church and churchyard we assure those who mourn of our welcome here and of our love.’

  Janet let her glance slide towards the man at her side, and wondered if he knew what there was about Damory Regis that had drawn Josephine Short – his grandmother, that is – here in death. She would ask him as soon as she could but not before she found out how it came to be that the deceased, apparently always known as Miss Short, had had a grandchild whom nobody – well not her Bill, anyway – had known anything about.

  Janet’s own husband was certain he had never heard of his great-aunt having had any children, that was for sure or he would have said so. As far as Bill Wakefield had been concerned, his Great-Aunt Josephine had always been called Short, which had been his own mother’s maiden name, too.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she hissed suddenly in the direction of the man sitting at her side.

  ‘Joe Short, short for Joseph.’ He bent his head down towards her again and said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘What’s yours?’

  ‘Jan Wakefield,’ she answered.

  ‘Bill’s wife?’ he said, surprising her.

  Before she could do more than nod, the vicar had started to speak again. ‘I am going to read to you a piece by Bishop Brent called “What is Dying?”.’ The Reverend Derek Tompkinson cleared his throat and began:

  ‘A ship sails and I stand watching till she fades on the horizon and someone at my side says, “She is gone.” Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all; she is just as large as when I saw her. The diminished size and the total loss of sight is in me, not in her, and just at the moment when someone at my side says, “She is gone”, there are others who are watching her coming, and other voices take up a glad shout, “There she comes!” and that is dying.’

  Quite unexpectedly and much to her own surprise Janet became aware of the trickle of a tear down her face. She told herself that this was utterly ridiculous – she hadn’t ever set eyes on Josephine Short and she wasn’t even a relation of the woman, let alone a close one. She was very conscious, though, that in some indefinable way the vicar had skilfully introduced into the ceremony an atmosphere of real devotion.

  She gave a covert glance along the pew in the direction of her neighbour but his head was bowed and his face hidden from view. It was only when the final hymn began and Joe Short unfolded himself and stood up beside her that she could see his face again. His expression was suitably composed as he once again turned his attention to the singing.

  As the last hymn drew to a close, Janet was aware of a rustle of movement at the back of the church as the undertaker’s men prepared themselves to come forward. That was when the vicar and congregation began to sing the ‘Nunc Dimittis’. This was something that Janet did know and she hastened to join in the familiar words: ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace…’ while the undertaker’s men lifted the coffin, swung it round with practised ease under the watchful eye of Tod Morton, and set off down the aisle.

  Janet stepped out of the front pew behind the bearers and, with Joe Short now by her side, followed the cortège down the aisle and out through the open west door of the church. ‘I didn’t know Great-Aunt Josephine had had any children,’ she said as soon as they were outside in the open air, speech then seeming somehow less constrained.

  ‘One,’ said Joe Short. ‘My father.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Janet alertly. ‘She had been married, then.’

  ‘No,’ said Joe Short. ‘At least, not that I ever knew about.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Janet again. She searched about in her mind for something to say that sounded suitably broad-minded. ‘Never mind…it was a long time ago.’

  ‘She did mind,’ said Joe Short flatly.

  ‘Perhaps in those days—

  ‘Especially in those days,’ he said bitterly. ‘She was thrown out of the parental home and told never to darken the door again. Talk about Victorian melodrama…’

  ‘We forget how much times have changed…’ Janet began but fell silent as the undertaker’s men reached the open grave with the coffin and the rest of the congregation gathered round as the vicar began to pronounce the committal.

  It was after that when Janet nearly lost her composure altogether. It was as Joe Short stooped and cast some earth down on the coffin. Shakily she followed suit – it was something she had never done before – and then the vicar brought the proceedings to an end.

  As soon as Janet had raised her head and straightened up again she turned to Joe Short and said, ‘Your parents aren’t here, though, are they?’

  A spasm of pain crossed his face. ‘Didn’t you know? Mum and Dad were killed in that air crash coming back to England from Lasserta nearly three years ago now. That’s why Granny had to go into that nursing home in Berebury. She couldn’t cope alone – not without Mum and Dad, anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she stumbled contritely. ‘I didn’t know.
’

  ‘No, I suppose you won’t have done.’ His expression was set now in a controlled way that made him look suddenly older. ‘They’d come out to visit me, you see, and were on their way back home afterwards.’

  ‘I can see how that would make it worse,’ she said sympathetically.

  ‘Nothing could have made it any worse, believe you me,’ he said grimly, ‘especially for poor Granny. Losing my father and mother, and with my working so far away, she was very alone. All I could do was telephone…’

  ‘That must have been a help,’ she said, at a loss for the right thing to say since redeeming features in the situation seemed very few and far between.

  ‘Oh, it was all right until Granny began to get so deaf that she couldn’t hear me properly.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Janet helplessly.

  But Joe Short’s attention had been diverted. ‘Do you know who all these people are?’ he asked, looking round as the congregation started to leave the graveside.

  Janet pointed out the solicitor and the matron and two care assistants from the nursing home. ‘Who the others are, I’m sorry, I just don’t know myself.’

  He thanked her and dutifully peeled off to shake hands with the vicar.

  Very slowly the group round the open grave broke up as first one and then another of those present began to move away towards the church gate and the waiting cars, some making themselves known to Janet or Joe. Then Janet looked round to see her erstwhile companion punctiliously taking leave of the matron before moving over to talk to Simon Puckle, while just at the right moment Tod Morton appeared at her elbow again and steered her to the funeral car.

  ‘What about…?’ she began and then relaxed when she saw a hire car – presumably Joe Short’s – parked behind several others alongside the church wall.