something was wrong. ‘I’m listening.’
‘It’s Virginia… She’s…’ He was finding it difficult to speak. ‘She’s dead…killed by a tree falling on her car.’
‘Oh, my God.’ She paused. ‘ What about Donald?’
‘She was alone, driving home from Cambridge along the bypass beside the old copse. She was killed instantly…’
‘Oh, George, I’m sorry.’ What else could she say?
‘Will you go and see if Donald needs anything? I can’t go.’ It wasn’t that he was too busy, she understood that, it was simply that he wouldn’t know what to say. Virginia and Donald had been married over two years but George’s hurt was still too raw to comfort anyone else.
‘Of course. I’ll go now.’
The congregation at the funeral mirrored that of the wedding. Donald, grey-faced, followed the coffin down the aisle on leaden feet, a lonely figure with head bowed. Barbara felt sorry for him and stepped out of her pew to walk beside him. A moment later she became aware that George had followed her and regretted her impulsive action, because her husband’s grief was plain for all to see and she had drawn attention to it.
Maggie Doughty had been sent by the Melsham Gazette. It was, so her editor told her, the town’s bereavement and she was to write it up sympathetically. She would do that but she was also interested in George Kennett. He had been heard to remind people that he had advocated taking down the trees when the bypass was built, and if his advice had been taken, no one would have died – not there at any rate. It was a comment her editor had seen fit to publish, but now she was seeing something else: two men in mourning, two men weeping for the same woman, two men who could not even look at each other, let alone speak.
Maggie hated George Kennett. Her father had died because of him. They said he had taken his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed, but who had disturbed it in the first place? George Kennett with his massive new store and its cut-throat prices; her father’s rather old-fashioned hardware shop hadn’t stood a chance. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad except that, bowing to the inevitable and closing down the shop, he had approached George Kennett for a job. The bastard had turned him down, said you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks. Too old at fifty-five! Dad had tried to pretend he had chosen early retirement, but no one had been fooled. One day, a year later, he had hanged himself.
Looking at Kennett standing beside the grave, black suit, black tie, hair ruffling in the breeze, she saw his grief and smiled grimly. He would grieve more than that before she had done with him.
Barbara didn’t know what to say to George. He hardly spoke, turning his misery in on himself, embracing it. Did he suppose she was glad about it? Of course she wasn’t glad, but neither could she tell him she was sorry. It wasn’t that she expected him to fall in love with her all over again – it was too late for that, far too late – but with no Virginia in the background, they might just pull themselves back on an even keel. After all, they were not in the first flush of youth, and they had three children who were fast growing into adulthood, children who needed them both. And she hadn’t been blameless. If they could achieve some measure of ease with each other, that was all she could hope for, all she deserved.
She fell back on her usual palliative and began a new painting, standing before the canvas, slashing colour on it, hardly stopping to think what she was doing. The result was a windswept tree, dark against a blood-red fen sky. In the branches appeared the shadowy heads of George and Virginia, her father, Simon and the children, their faces distorted with some unseen vision of terror. It was horrible, frightening, much too revealing to leave for anyone else to see. She took it down the garden and put it on the bonfire their gardener had made with the branches of the fallen tree. Its therapeutic work done, she went back indoors and began another.
Barbara dipped her brush in black paint and wrote The Market of Old Melsham along the bottom of the picture and signed the corner. It had taken over six months to complete, mainly because she was so busy with