The Second of April

The second of April, the following spring, was a Friday.

Maeve was, by then, twenty-nine.

The small flat in Pimlico had been hers, by the small careful arrangement of Mrs Wakeham's solicitor, since the eighteenth of January. She had been working, on the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, at a small charity for girls of school age in residential boarding, the same charity Mrs Wakeham had left the Belgravia townhouse to. She had been on the train to Edinburgh, on the Tuesday and the Thursday afternoon, once a fortnight, with a small green silk pouch in the inside pocket of her good coat, and had been delivered, on the platform at Waverley, by the librarian on duty at the National Library, the small white camellia she had been given to bring back to the second flat — the second flat being a small flat above a tea-shop on Marylebone Road that her cousin DI Conor Halligan, since the eleventh of February when Mr Edwin Wakeham had at last entered a plea, had taken on, for himself and for his father.

Her own father — Mr James Brennan, of Lewisham, the man who had raised her, the man who had been Cath Brennan's husband for thirty-one years, the man who had not, until the conversation Maeve had had with him in the small kitchen of the Lewisham flat on the Saturday after the twenty-third of December, known any of this either — was, this morning, on the train down from Lewisham with a small bunch of yellow tulips in his right hand, which had been her own mother's small particular flower, and which were not, this morning, intended for Tessa.

Maeve was in the kitchen of the Pimlico flat at quarter to seven.

She made the tea. She put the kettle back on the hob. She took, from the second drawer of the Davenport in the small bedroom, the small green silk pouch on top of the pile — the third pouch of the year, the one Mrs Wakeham had written, on the cream A4 sheet at the bottom of the secret drawer of the Davenport, was the one Maeve was to take, this April, herself — and she put the pouch into the inside pocket of her good coat.

She went down the iron stairs at the back of the flat to the small garden.

She knelt down beside the small white camellia tree that the small wiry man from the maintenance company had planted, in the small bed beside the flagstone path, on a Tuesday afternoon in March of the previous year.

The tree was in flower.

The tree had nine white camellias on it, in the first week of April, in the second flowering of its life, which had been the first flowering Mrs Wakeham had not been alive to see.

Maeve cut one camellia. She cut it the way her own mother had taught her to cut a tulip from the small vase on the kitchen window-sill of the bedsit in Lewisham — at the angle, Maeve, always at the angle, the angle keeps it drinking — and she laid the camellia on the flagstone path, beside the bird-bath.

She did not, this morning, cry.

She had finished the morning's small weeping the previous evening, in the careful precise way of a woman who had been raised by her adoptive mother in a Lewisham bedsit and by her great-aunt's best friend in a Pimlico flat and by her great-uncle Stephen in a small Marylebone tea-shop, all of whom had taught her, separately, the same trick — to do it into something soft, so the room never had to know it had happened.

She picked up the camellia.

She went back up the iron stairs to the small flat.

She put on her good coat. She put on Mrs Wakeham's small jet earrings, which Maeve had, by the small careful arrangement of Mrs Wakeham's solicitor, on the eighteenth of January received. She put the white camellia into the small slip-pocket of the inside breast of the good coat, beside the small green silk pouch.

She picked up her handbag.

Inside the handbag, in the small inside pocket where her own mother had taught her, on a Sunday afternoon in Lewisham in 2008, to keep the one small thing she would not, on any day of her life, want to be without — was the small enamel hairbrush with the letters TH on the handle in red.

She closed the door of the small flat in Pimlico.

She went down the front stairs.

She walked along the quiet square of plane trees, in the first week of April light, in the careful neutral steps her own mother had taught her on the front-room runner of the bedsit in Lewisham every morning of her childhood, and she went to Pimlico station, and she took the train to King's Cross, and she met her father — Mr James Brennan, with the small bunch of yellow tulips in his right hand — at the platform at twenty past nine, and she kissed him on the cheek, and she took his arm, and the two of them walked together, in the small careful steps of a father and the daughter she had always, in every single morning of his thirty-one years of being her father, been, to the booking office, and they bought two tickets to Edinburgh.

In the inside pocket of her good coat, the small green silk pouch and the small white camellia rested side by side.

The pouch was warm.

The camellia was, in the way camellias were at this time of year in the first week of April, very faintly cold.

Outside the booking office, in the soft April morning, a black cab went past with its light off.

A delivery bicycle went past with a small wicker box on the back, bouncing.

Somewhere, three streets away, in a small interview room on Bishopsgate that Mr Edwin Wakeham would not, in the rest of his life, again be required to enter, a small mechanical sound was, on this Friday morning, finally, not being made.

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