After she told me, I had joined her mother in a silent conspiracy of watchfulness. Tilly was watched as we ran under a seamless August sky; a breathless look over my shoulder, waiting for her legs to catch up with mine. She was protected from a baked summer by my father’s golfing umbrella, a life lived far from the edges of kerbs and the cracks in pavements, and when September carried in mist and rain, she was placed so close to the gas fire, her legs became tartanned in red.
I watched her without end, inspecting her life for the slightest vibration of change, and yet she knew none of this. My worries were noiseless; a silent obsession that the only friend I had ever made would be taken from me, just because I hadn’t concentrated hard enough.
*
The noise in the hall drifted into a slur of voices. It was a machine, ticking over in the heat, fuelled by rumour and judgement, and we stared into an engine of cooked flesh and other people’s feet. Mr Forbes stood in front of us, sailing a cherry Bakewell through the air and giving out his opinion, as warmth crept into the material of his shirt.
‘He woke up on Monday morning and she’d gone. Vanished.’
‘Beggars belief,’ said Eric Lamb, who still had grass cuttings on the bottom of his trousers.
‘Live for the moment, that’s what I say.’ I watched Mr Forbes sail another cherry Bakewell around, as if to demonstrate his point.
Mrs Forbes didn’t speak. Instead, she shuffled her sandals on the herringbone floor, and twisted a teacup around in its saucer. Her face had worried itself into a pinch.
Mr Forbes studied her, as he disappeared his cherry Bakewell. ‘Stop whittling about it, Dorothy. It’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘It’s got everything to do with that,’ she said, ‘I just know it.’
Mr Forbes shook his head. ‘Tell her, Eric,’ he said, ‘she won’t listen to me.’
‘That’s all in the past. This will be about something else. A bit of a tiff, that’s what it’ll be,’ said Eric Lamb. I thought his voice was softer, and edged with comfort, but Mrs Forbes continued to shuffle, and she trapped her thoughts behind a frown.
‘Or the heat,’ said Mr Forbes, patting his belly to ensure the cherry Bakewells had safely arrived at their destination. ‘People do strange things in this kind of weather.’
‘That’s it,’ said Eric Lamb, ‘it’ll be the heat.’
Mrs Forbes looked up from her twisting teacup. Her smile was very thin. ‘We’re a bit buggered if it isn’t, though, aren’t we?’ she said.
The three stood in silence. I saw a stare pass between them, and Mr Forbes dragged the crumbs from his mouth with the back of a hand. Eric Lamb didn’t speak. When the stare reached his eyes, he looked at the floor to avoid taking it.
After a while, Mrs Forbes said, ‘this tea needs more milk,’ and she disappeared into a wall of sunburned flesh.
I tapped Tilly on the arm, and a spill of Bovril escaped on to blue plastic.
‘Did you hear that?’ I said. ‘Mrs Forbes said they’re all buggered.’
‘That’s not very church hall-ey, is it?’ said Tilly, who still wore her sou’wester. She wiped the Bovril with the edge of her jumper. ‘Mrs Forbes has been a little unusual lately.’
This was true. Only the day before, I’d seen her wandering around the front garden in a nightdress, having a long conversation with the flower beds.
It’s the heat, Mr Forbes had said, as he took her back inside with a cup of tea and the Radio Times.
‘Why do people blame everything on the heat?’ said Tilly.
‘It’s easier,’ I said.
‘Easier than what?’
‘Easier than telling everyone the real reasons.’
*
The vicar appeared.
We knew he had arrived even before we saw him, because all around the room, conversations began to cough and falter. He cut through the crowd, leaving it to re-form behind him, like the surface of the Red Sea. He appeared to glide beneath his cassock, and there was an air of stillness about him, which made everyone he approached seem overactive and slightly hysterical. People stood a little straighter as they shook his hand, and I saw Mrs Forbes do what appeared to be a small curtsy.
‘What did he say in church then?’ said Tilly, as we watched him edge around the room.
‘He said that God runs after people with knives if they don’t listen to Him properly.’
Tilly sniffed her Bovril again. ‘I never knew He did that,’ she said eventually.
Sometimes I struggled to take my gaze from her. She was almost transparent, as fragile as glass. ‘He said that if we find God, He’ll keep us all safe.’
Tilly looked up. There was a streak of sun cream on the very tip of her nose. ‘Do you think someone else is going to disappear, Gracie?’
I thought about the gravestones and Mrs Creasy, and the fractured, yellow lawns.
‘Do we need God to keep us safe? Are we not safe just as we are?’ she said.
‘I’m not sure that I know any more.’
I watched her, and threaded my worries like beads.
*
The vicar completed his circuit of the room and disappeared, as if he were a magician’s assistant, behind a curtain next to the stage. The engine of conversation started again, small at first, and uncertain, then powering up to its previous level, as the air filled with hosepipe bans and stories of vanishing neighbours.
It probably would have stayed that way. It probably would have run its course, and continued until people wandered home to fill themselves with Brussels sprouts, had Mr Creasy not burst through the double doors and marched the length of the hall past a startled audience. Silence followed him around the room, leaving only the click of a cup on a saucer, and the sound of elbows nudging each other.
He stopped in front of Mr Forbes and Eric Lamb, his face stretched with anger. Tilly said afterwards that she thought he was going to hit someone, but to me he looked as though all the hitting had been frightened out of him.
The words stayed in his eyes for a few seconds, then he said, ‘You told her, didn’t you?’
It was a whisper that wanted to be a shout, and it left his mouth wrapped in spit and fury.
Mr Forbes turned from their audience, and guided Mr Creasy towards a wall. I heard him say Christ and calm down and for heaven’s sake, and then I heard him say, ‘We haven’t told her anything.’
‘Why else would she up and leave?’ said Mr Creasy. The rage seemed to immobilize him, and he became a furious effigy, fixed and motionless, except for the flush which crept from beneath his shirt and into his neck.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Forbes, ‘but if she’s found out, it’s not come from us.’
‘We’re not that stupid,’ said Eric Lamb. He looked over his shoulder at a sea of teacups and curiosity. ‘Let’s get you out of here, let’s get you a drink.’
‘I don’t want a bloody drink.’ Mr Creasy hissed at them, like a snake. ‘I want my wife back.’
He had no choice. They escorted him out of the hall, like prison guards.
I watched Mrs Forbes.
She