The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [155]
I made myself talk some more: ask after Tracy, husband still unemployed, oh dear, but Spencer working in Currys now, at management level, good, good. Then she looked tired. I kissed her papery cheek as, simultaneously, her eyes closed. I slipped away. Through the double door, down the corridor, out.
Just a scrap of photocopied paper, I thought as I shut the green front door behind me. I stood on the step a moment. But… couldn't you write a will on anything? Back of an envelope? An elephant's bottom? As long as you had it witnessed? I stared at the houses opposite: dusty laurel hedges surrounded them. Wait: of course. February 27. Six months before he died. The end of a long hard winter, never a good time in farming. He'd had a bad day. He'd written it in a fit of pique, but later, after Maroulla had copied it and put it back, he'd taken it from his drawer and destroyed it. That was it. That was why we hadn't found it. I imagined him standing facing the fire, the one he always had going in his office in winter, legs astride, tall, very broad, red hair faded, screwing the piece of paper in a ball and tossing it in the embers. ‘Flog the bloody place,’ I'd heard him say to Tim, on more than one occasion. ‘When I'm under the sod, bloody flog it. It'll be a millstone round your neck.’ And Tim would smile, say nothing, knowing… what? That he didn't mean it? Or he did mean it?
I drove home, unsettled. Something Felicity had said at Alice's party, about how I shouldn't see Maroulla, how she was gaga, reared up at me. But she wasn't really, was she? Just old. Glancing in the rear-view mirror I saw my lips were pursed, my eyes fretted with worry lines. I gave myself a dismissive little shake. Inhaled deeply. No. Forget it, Evie. It's nothing. Tim hasn't reacted, so it's clearly nothing.
On the way back, though, I saw a sign to Holywell, and on a whim, I took it. My tyres screamed in outrage as I cornered left with a spectacular lack of caution, and an angry horn blared after me. I went hot. Christ. I could have caused an accident. I'd end up where Dad was soon, where I was going: Holywell. No room in village churchyards any more, not even if your family had farmed next door for four generations, not even if your house was called Church Farm, not even if all your ancestors were buried there. So Dad was here, on the outskirts of town, beyond the bypass, in a not particularly rural, not particularly lovely spot, behind this long, dry-stone wall, in this vast old cemetery with its dismal dark yew trees and its never-ending lines of graves.
I parked easily at the entrance, perhaps the only place in Oxford one could these days, and went through the towering iron gates. They knew how to impose, those Victorians: knew how to say Remember Where Ye Enter. Rows and rows of graves ran away from me down a grassy slope, with a tarmac path dividing them neatly through the middle. I followed it right down to the end. He was in the second to last row if I remembered rightly, ten from the left, thirty to the right. I'd been back once or twice since the funeral. OK, once. On the first anniversary of his death. I'd meant to come more, but somehow hadn't got round to it.
I found the grave and stood gazing down. A slight breeze had picked up, ruffling the grassy mound. Felicity had chosen the headstone: grey slate, solid and simple, with black lettering. Nothing fancy, she'd said. And indeed it was very fitting. ‘Victor Milligan,’ it read, ‘1934 – 1999. A loving father and husband.’ Father first, husband second, she'd insisted: because she'd come along later. Suddenly I felt ashamed. What was I doing here? Why was I standing, like a melodramatic heroine from a gothic