A Death in the Parish by Richard Coles

Author:Richard Coles [Coles, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474612692
Published: 2023-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

6

The United biscuit that Josh had so carefully undone had undone Chris. He had sat on the sofa and shaken with grief, which had arrived like seizures. Audrey and Daniel were with him, in the same space, but all knew instinctively that they were not close enough to him to offer the comfort of touch. After it had subsided, Daniel offered to drive him home, but the offer was declined. He had rather fussed over Chris as he walked him from the door to the campervan and taken the casserole and the pie dish that had been carefully washed up and left neatly on the bench seat at the back. He’d felt again the pathos of small, kind gestures made from an ocean of suffering.

After supper he had gone back to his study to read and had found that Chris’s grief was still faintly there, like smoked cigarettes. Perhaps that was why he could not sleep that night. The wind was up, and the tossing of the trees around the rectory and the wet slap of leaves against his windows matched his feelings of unease and restlessness. So he got up and went downstairs in his pyjamas and dressing gown, to the delight of the dogs, who started from their bed like children on Christmas morning. He took a little pan and some milk and left it to warm up gently on the hot plate while he found a tin of drinking chocolate in the cupboard his mother had arranged according to her own system, which bracketed arrowroot and Bemax, but divided honey and marmalade.

He made the hot chocolate in the way his mother made it, remembering at the end to whisk it, for ‘whisking improves the flavour of this luxurious drink’ – his mother always quoted this from the label with a laboured French accent, for no indulgence could pass without some sort of disavowal. Audrey loved treats, but treats, for her, who had victualled a family through the war, could be as modest as a buttered crumpet. As a boy Daniel had found his untrammelled delight in such things soon trammelled, so that now he could not eat a sausage roll without feeling, in some obscure part of his consciousness, that it needed to be negotiated with a Calvinist vegetarian. He sat at the kitchen table in a pool of light cast by the single shaded bulb above it, while Hilda circled his slippered feet and then settled on them. Cosmo, the frequency of the wags of his tail decreasing, realised an unexpected trip out was not going to happen and went back to his bed.

The murder of Josh, the devastation it had caused his family, and the dread that event had triggered in so many, was like a hurricane offshore, an unimaginable chaotic event whose energies intensified more distant weather systems: Mrs Hawkins at the Manor, the mysterious Miss March, the Mohawk bride. Daniel imagined those three suddenly tousled and untidy and wet-faced, as if they had been caught in storms themselves.

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