The Thing About Clare

  ALSO BY IMOGEN CLARK

  Postcards from a Stranger

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Imogen Clark

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904965

  ISBN-10: 1503904962

  Cover design by Emma Rogers

  For Tabitha, Jemima, Alexa and Seth.

  CONTENTS

  ANNA – 2015

  I

  II

  DOROTHY – 1961

  I

  II

  III

  MIRIAM – 1977

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  CLARE – 1979

  I

  II

  SEBASTIAN – 1985

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  CLARE – 1990

  I

  II

  DOROTHY – 1996

  I

  II

  CLARE

  I

  ANNA – 2000

  I

  II

  DOROTHY – 2014

  I

  II

  ANNA – 2014

  I

  ANNA – 2015

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  CLARE – 2017

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  MIRIAM – 2017

  I

  II

  III

  SEBASTIAN – 2017

  I

  CLARE – 2017

  I

  II

  ANNA – 2017

  I

  CLARE – 2017

  I

  II

  ANNA – 2017

  I

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ANNA – 2015

  I

  It was far too sunny for a funeral. It had been crazily warm all month, with the newspapers building themselves up into a frenzy. The headlines were now threatening death and disaster as water levels dropped. The fact that it had been the wettest spring since records began suddenly seemed to count for nothing.

  Anna cast a furtive glance at her fellow mourners as they stood around the open grave. Everyone seemed to have faced a similar dilemma. Dark clothing appeared, by its very nature almost, to be thick. Heavy overcoats, sombre suits, dingy hats – that was what one wore to a funeral by rights, and the weather should be accommodating them by raining, or drizzling at the very least. A blazing sun did not create an appropriately morbid mood.

  Anna had had to go last-minute shopping to buy a suitable outfit. That had seemed all wrong too. Shopping should be a treat, a pleasure to be savoured, not a chore. Buying clothes for a funeral took all the fun out of it. Anna had no black in her wardrobe at all. It made her look like death warmed up, her mother had told her during her brief but intense Goth phase. Once she had decided that in this matter, as in all things, her mother had been correct, she had stopped buying herself anything dark.

  So, with a heavy heart, she’d wandered into town in search of a black dress. She had started in the cheap budget shops. After all, she was never going to wear this dress again unless someone else decided to shuffle off in the middle of a heatwave. As she stood amongst the tightly packed racks of badly finished garments, she could hear her mother chiding her.

  ‘You can’t be wearing something as cheap as that to a funeral, Anna. Have you no respect for the dead? They’ll turn in their grave when they see those hems, and the yoke is set all wrong. Put it back.’

  So she had, and headed up the High Street to where the clothing, although no doubt still produced in the same unsavoury sweatshops, spoke quietly of class. There wasn’t much choice. The dresses all seemed to be floaty and bohemian, in zingy oranges and reds, or Mother-of-the-Bride-fitted in muted pastels. Anna thought about suggesting that the funeral go with a bright-colours theme but such new-fangled ideas had no place amongst the older generation and especially not those from traditional, rural Ireland.

  Anna tugged at the pleats of the shirtwaister that she had eventually found stuffed at the back of a rail behind the shoes. It didn’t really fit her and kept riding up at the hip but needs must. She had briefly considered leaving the label on its plastic string hanging itchily down her back all day and then returning it to the shop after the funeral. Her mother’s loud internal tutting had put paid to that and it was with reluctance that she had wrenched the tag from the dress. This, to add insult to injury, had made a tiny little hole in the fabric, which, though small, would be impossible to repair and would grow like a cancer throughout the day until the dress was no longer fit for purpose. Perhaps it was a punishment for being so mean-spirited?

  The other mourners seemed to have made a better stab at looking funereal in the heat. It was easy for the men. Everyone had a dark suit, and if it was more woolly than the weather necessitated, one could always take one’s jacket off at the wake. The priest looked a bit hot. Anna wondered whether he had summer-weight robes. Maybe they wore the same summer and winter but had more layers on when the weather got a bit chilly? Had she ever noticed priests looking more rotund in the cooler months? It must cost a fortune in dry-cleaning bills, being a member of the clergy. Could you claim for robe-cleaning as expenses? Did priests even get expenses or was it all just part of the cost of worshipping the Lord? Anna almost giggled but she caught herself. That would never do, laughing at a funeral. She would be struck down there and then and topple headlong into the grave, hideous black dress and all.

  ‘We now commend the soul of our dearly departed sister Dorothy to the ground,’ said the priest. The pall-bearers began lowering the coffin slowly into the hole. The sides had been cut sharply, and Anna could see the patterns made by the various strata of soil: grey at the top but then meandering through oranges and browns, a bright-yellow stripe of clay halfway down. She tried to identify each layer, to calculate how long they had lain there just out of sight. Mr Monkhouse, her erstwhile geography teacher, would be proud of her. At least it would be cool down there in the hole. A droplet of sweat trickled down her upper back before being absorbed by the tight binding of her bra, also black but with more of a chance of further use.

  They had reached the part when the chief mourners throw soil down on to the coffin. The stars of the funeral show had tossed what was really just dust as there had been no rain to reconstitute it for weeks. Anna watched as one by one the family members grabbed at a handful of earth and then dropped it into the hole on to the shiny brass plate. The soil seemed almost to float down, containing no water to give it solid form, and it landed gently on the coffin top with a little patter, like tiny raindrops at the beginning of a storm. Sebastian, youngest child and only son of the deceased, went to wipe his dusty hand down his trousers and then thought better of it. Perhaps he could also hear the ever-present voice
of his mother in his ear, even at her graveside. Anna noticed that he was crying, not with the emotional heaviness of the others but small, unselfconscious tears that just trickled down his cheeks. He made no effort to wipe them away. Maybe tears would soon be the only form of moisture on the earth, Anna thought. Each tear would become so precious that it would have to be captured and then desalinated. The world would have to become inconceivably sad in order to generate enough tears. Fines would be imposed for laughing, unless it was so hard that precious tears were induced. Only extremes of emotion would be acceptable. There would be no mediocre middle ground, no room for merely feeling fine. How would the tears be saved, Anna wondered? They would surely evaporate if you caught them one at a time. There would need to be an awful lot of crying.

  There were plenty of tears here now, if anyone was looking for some free moisture. Anna seemed to be surrounded by shaking shoulders and sniffing noses. Grief, it seemed, was contagious. Somewhere someone was wailing. Not here, surely? Dorothy Bliss had been old, and at the end of a highly satisfactory life. Sad, maybe, but not enough to induce something as soul-shattering as a wail. Anna and a couple of the other less grief-stricken mourners looked up to trace the sound. It was coming from another party over in a different part of the cemetery. Was that right? Two funerals at once? One would have thought that whoever took the bookings would ensure that there was only ever one group mourning at a time, to avoid confusion if nothing else. It would never do to grieve at the wrong graveside. Perhaps there’d been so many deaths in this heat that it wasn’t feasible to space the funerals out? Maybe the doom-and-gloom merchants of the national press were right after all. People must be dropping like flies.

  As the second, impostor, coffin made its slow procession along the gravel path to its final resting place, Anna saw the gaudy flowers arranged skilfully into letters and balanced on the tiny lid. ‘Benny’. A child? That would probably explain the wailing. Was the death of a child, with so much ahead of them, so much sadder that wailing was permissible, whereas at her own little gathering it would be thought of as over the top? How many dead old people were the equivalent of one dead child?

  Anna pulled her attention back to her funeral, so to speak. It was working, all this random distracting thought. She was still holding it together. There’d been no weeping and wailing from her. Barely any tears, to be fair. She needed to hold fast, for if she lost control of her emotions she was not sure how she might pull herself back. Not long to go now. The priest was wrapping up with prayers and what have you. Not before time. The sun was punishingly hot, hurling its heat at anyone unfortunate enough not to be hiding in the shade. Some of the older mourners looked as if they might keel over at any moment. The priest seemed to be praying faster. Was he needed at the other funeral? No. That had already started. It must be a two-hander. How many clergy could they rota in at any given time? Was two the maximum? More than two funerals and it would begin to feel like a party and that would never do.

  The priest had finished. He lowered his arms and backed slowly from the graveside. The mourners raised their heads, looking slightly relieved. A few were blowing their noses. Anna saw a man she half-recognised draw a mobile phone from his inside pocket and check its screen. No messages. He was apparently more dispensable than he had believed. He popped the phone back into his pocket and shrugged apologetically at no one in particular.

  Slowly, the common-or-garden mourners withdrew until there were just the four of them left. Nobody spoke. They just stared down into the shady hole.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ said Clare eventually. She smoothed down her tatty dress with an air of finality. ‘We better get back to the cars or the rest of them will be there before us.’

  ‘It’s not like a wedding,’ snapped Miriam. ‘There’s no need for a receiving line. We’ll get there when we’re good and ready. Are you okay, Sebastian?’ she asked tenderly, taking her brother’s arm and giving it an awkward squeeze. Sebastian looked up. He must have wiped away the tears with a dusty hand as there was a streak of dirt running from his nose to his jaw.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Clare’s right. We should go. There’s no reason to hang around. It’s not like Mum’s really here. Come on.’ He held out his hands to his sisters. Miriam took one in both of hers and Clare the other.

  ‘Anna?’ he said. There were no more hands left but he raised his elbow towards her anyway. Anna fell in beside Clare and, when prompted by a sharp tap on the thigh, took her sister’s hand. Walking in a line, the four of them turned their backs on their mother’s grave and headed off in the blistering sun towards the car.

  II

  By the time they got to the golf club the wake was well under way. Someone had declared the buffet open, and a snaking queue had formed. The bar was busy too.

  ‘Do you think we should have started a tab?’ asked Sebastian as he looked at their friends and relations standing three deep waiting for service.

  ‘No,’ said Clare, shaking her head like this was a disastrous idea. ‘There’s plenty of tea and coffee on offer. If they want something else, then they can put their hands in their pockets.’

  ‘Seems a bit miserly. She was Irish, after all.’

  ‘She wasn’t a drinker, though, was she? And there’s only Uncle Stephen from over the water and he’s only here in case there’s something for him to inherit.’

  ‘He’ll be disappointed, then,’ said Anna under her breath.

  ‘It’s fine, Seb,’ said Miriam, taking charge. ‘There’s plenty of food. If people want to booze they can buy their own.’ She cast a glance around the room. ‘We’re going to have to circulate a bit. Chat to people.’

  ‘In that case I’m going to the bar,’ said Sebastian. ‘Anyone else want one?’

  ‘I’ll have a double whisky, no water,’ said Anna.

  ‘Really?’ asked Sebastian, eyebrows shooting up towards his blond curls.

  ‘No. Not really, I suppose, although that’s what I’d like to help me get through this. I’ll have a gin and tonic, steady on the tonic. Want a hand?’

  Anna looked at Sebastian in what she hoped was a meaningful way but he wilfully refused to grasp her meaning.

  ‘No. I’m fine. You go and circulate and I’ll come and find you.’

  ‘I’ll have a gin too, please,’ said Miriam. ‘Clare?’

  The word was uttered lightly, in a throwaway tone, but all of them were focused in on the response. Clare didn’t meet anybody’s gaze.

  ‘I’m fine with tea,’ she said, and headed off to where a small gaggle of mourners was gathering and looking out across the eighteenth hole.

  Anna watched her go.

  ‘Is she okay, do you think? She seems sober enough.’

  ‘I think so,’ replied Miriam. ‘We’ll just have to watch her like a hawk. I can’t cope with her kicking off on top of everything else.’ She fanned herself ineffectually with her hand. ‘God, it’s hot in here. Can someone not open those patio doors?’

  Miriam strode off purposefully and was soon throwing open the doors to allow such breeze as could be found to enter. The hot air rushed in. No respite was forthcoming.

  Anna turned to speak to Sebastian but he had already turned his back on her and was waiting his turn in the queue. Miriam was right. Clare was as volatile as nitroglycerine on an ordinary day. Lord only knew what might happen if someone pushed her buttons here.

  Anna’s mind strayed back to their mother and her eyes began to brim with uninvited tears. Their mother had always tried so hard with Clare, never giving up on her even when she’d tested Dorothy’s patience beyond what she could possibly endure. Parenting the rest of them had been a walk in the park by comparison. Of course, they’d each had their moments, but no one had courted catastrophe quite like Clare. She had crashed from disaster to disaster without anyone ever being really sure what drove her on.

  Maybe the answers to the questions about Clare would be in that letter. Guilt pricked at Anna’s conscience as she remember
ed her mother’s very clear instructions. Retrieve the will and the letter from the house without telling the others and burn them both. Anna had taken the documents as instructed but, rather than destroy them, they were still hidden under a pile of magazines in her kitchen. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t yet done as her mother had asked her. Was it mere curiosity or the feeling that the letter might contain something important that shouldn’t be lost? Anna wasn’t sure, but the one thing she did feel very strongly was that she shouldn’t confess what she’d done to her siblings. This was her mother’s secret and she was its guardian.

  She looked around the room, taking in its contents. There were perhaps sixty people there, mainly their friends with their partners. The four Bliss children had not done very well on that score. Only Miriam had managed to find a spouse and hang on to him, which wasn’t entirely surprising. Miriam’s girls were there, looking like they were going to a party and not a funeral in their short black figure-hugging dresses and their towering heels. They stood together, slightly apart from everyone else, Rosie nibbling on a sausage roll. Miriam’s husband, Richard, was fending off two of her mother’s friends from church who seemed intent on smothering him with attention. He was smiling and nodding his head as he tackled a piece of anaemic-looking quiche.

  Anna scanned the room for River, Clare’s son, but wasn’t really surprised that she couldn’t see him. None of them had expected him to turn up. Anna had had a soft spot for her nephew as a boy, deciding that, despite outward appearances, he was good at heart. His prickly persona was just a front built in the interests of self-preservation to protect him from the chaotic world that Clare had created around them both. Or so Anna had thought. It was hard to hold on to that good opinion of him now that he was a grown man. As an adult he had distanced himself from them all, and even from Clare, as if he somehow blamed them for the cards that life had dealt him. This felt harsh to Anna, given the endless offers of help that the Bliss family had made to Clare and her son over the years, but she couldn’t change things. It was a shame but there it was. It might have been nice for Clare if he’d bothered to show his face here, though.