The Sleeping and the Dead

Hannah saw Jenny Graves audition that day too. She was in the lower sixth, a year younger than them, tall and willowy, rather nervy. Hannah thought it was typecasting. The panel had gone for the look. She wasn’t sure she would have chosen Jenny over some of the others. She realized that Michael and Jenny would have lots of rehearsals together. It didn’t bother her at the time, but nearer to the performance she thought she could afford to get involved and she volunteered to help with props and to prompt. She never admitted to herself that she wanted to keep an eye on him.

One Saturday, at about the time of the Macbeth auditions, Michael and Hannah took a trip to the coast. Occasionally they wanted to get away from home and homework and explore the surrounding district. Hannah liked to have Michael to herself. On this day they went to Millhaven, the seaside town where Hannah would end up living. Where Rosie would be born. Where her husband would fall in love with a PE teacher called Eve. They caught a bus into Newcastle, then another to the coast. It was the longest trip they had made and she wasn’t sure how they came to decide on it. On the bus Michael said he liked seaside towns in winter.

When they arrived, however, she could tell that he had been there before. It was a freezing day. Flurries of snow blew in from the sea, gathered like piles of confetti against the lampposts and wrought-iron benches. They walked shoulder to shoulder, hands deep in coat pockets, heads bowed against the wind. But not in an aimless way. Michael knew where he was going, where he wanted to be. He found his way immediately to the sea front, knew which way to turn for the funfair, closed and deserted for the winter. He stood there for a moment, looking in over the padlocked gate at the entrance to the ghost train and the helter skelter, at the still and tarnished horses under their gaudy awning. Hannah guessed he had been taken there as a child, though it didn’t seem to hold any happy memories for him.

‘A penny for them,’ she said lightly.

‘Sorry?’ He turned to her, still preoccupied.

‘What are you thinking about?’ She had to yell above the wind and felt a bit ridiculous. They weren’t ideal conditions for a deep and meaningful discussion.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘Actually.’

She sensed that he was ready to talk, took his arm and pulled him into a pub.

Talking to the detectives, she was aware on a number of occasions of coincidences, links between her life as an eighteen-year-old and her life as a mother. Often she caught herself thinking, What would Rosie have done if that had happened to her? Certainly she would have been more assertive. She wouldn’t have waited for almost a year, content with a kiss and a fairly chaste grope. She would have wanted to know what was going on. The pub was the most obvious coincidence. When Rosie first started work in the Promenade, Hannah thought the name was familiar. She called in occasionally to collect her daughter from a late shift but the place stirred no memories. By the time Rosie worked there the Prom had become one big room with long windows painted white. One evening, when she wasn’t quite ready for her lift home, Hannah looked at the old photographs on the walls. They hadn’t been bought as a job lot by the brewery; they showed the place as it had been before it had been taken over. With a start she realized it was the pub where she and Michael had sat on that winter’s day. Then, the Promenade had two small bars separated by a gloomy corridor. The walls were half panelled in wood covered in a sticky yellow varnish, wrinkled like custard skin. They had sat all lunchtime in the corner of the snug, with their half-pints in front of them, and nobody disturbed them.

That was the time he told her about his mother’s funeral, the story Hannah passed on to the detectives, without giving them the context, without telling them where she sat to hear it. He talked in short phrases, not trying to call attention to himself this time, but trying to get it right. He described the big car whose purpose he could only guess at. The stern people in black clothes. The crocuses on the lawn.

But the funeral hadn’t taken place in Yorkshire. Hannah was sure of that. It had taken place in the windswept town on the coast. Why hadn’t she passed on that particular gem of information to Porteous and Stout? She had her reasons. Because they had irritated her with their insinuating questions. Because Michael wouldn’t have wanted them to know.

In the pub it was cold, so cold that she found it hard at first to concentrate on what Michael was saying. At one point she put her hand on the radiator and pulled it away because it was freezing, almost literally, so she felt her skin might stick to the pipe. They sat, huddled in jackets with the hoods still pulled up, Michael talking in spluttering fits.