‘I know that we haven’t met before,’ the warden said, ‘but there’s something I want to say to you before the lawyer joins us.’
She gestured to the sofas. I despised formal meetings on comfortable furniture; it was impossible to know how to sit. On the table in front of us was a cardboard box, and a slim brown envelope bearing Mother’s name.
‘I hope that you don’t think that this is unprofessional,’ said the warden, ‘but I remember you and your family on the news at the time. My children were just babies, then. I’ve thought about those headlines a lot since, even before this job came up. You see a great many things in this line of work. Both the things that make the papers, and the things that don’t. And after all of this time, some of those things – a very small number – still surprise me. People say: How can you still be surprised, even now? Well, I refuse not to be surprised.’
She took her fan from the pocket of her suit. Closer, it looked like something handmade by a child, or a prisoner. ‘Your parents surprised me,’ she said.
I looked past her. The sun teetered at the edge of the window, about to fall into the room.
‘It was a terrible thing that happened to you,’ she said. ‘From all of us here – we hope that you might find some peace.’
‘Should we talk,’ I said, ‘about why you called me?’
The solicitor was poised outside the office, like an actor waiting for his cue. He was dressed in a grey suit and a cheerful tie, and sweating. The leather squeaked when he sat down. ‘Bill,’ he said, and stood again to shake my hand. The top of his collar had started to stain, and now that was grey, too. ‘I understand,’ he said, right away, ‘that you’re also a lawyer.’ He was younger than I had expected, maybe younger than me; we would have studied at the same time.
‘Just company stuff,’ I said, and to make him feel better: ‘I don’t know the first thing about wills.’
‘That,’ Bill said, ‘is what I’m here for.’
I smiled encouragingly.
‘OK!’ Bill said. He rapped the cardboard box. ‘These are the personal possessions,’ he said. ‘And this is the document.’
He slid the envelope across the table and I tore it open. The will said, in Mother’s trembling hand, that Deborah Gracie appointed her daughter, Alexandra Gracie, as executor of this will; that Deborah Gracie’s remaining possessions consisted of, first, those possessions held at HM Prison Northwood; secondly, approximately twenty thousand pounds inherited from her husband, Charles Gracie, upon his death; and thirdly, the property found at 11 Moor Woods Road, in Hollowfield. Those possessions were to be divided equally between Deborah Gracie’s surviving children.
‘Executor,’ I said.
‘She seemed quite sure that you were the person for the job,’ Bill said. I laughed.
See Mother in her cell, playing with her long, long blond hair, right down to her knees; so long that she could sit on it, as a party trick. She considers her will, presided over by Bill, who feels sorry for her, who is happy to help out, and who is sweating then, too. There is so much that he wants to ask. Mother holds the pen in her hand, and trembles in studied desolation. Executor, Bill explains: it’s something of an honour. But it’s also an administrative burden, and there will need to be communications with the various beneficiaries. Mother, with the cancer bubbling in her stomach, and only a few months left to fuck us over, knows exactly whom to appoint.
‘There is no obligation for you to take this up,’ Bill said. ‘If you don’t want to.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ I said, and Bill’s shoulders shifted.
‘I can guide you through the basics,’ he said. ‘It’s a very small portfolio of assets. It shouldn’t take up too much of your time. The key thing – the thing that I’d bear in mind – is to keep the beneficiaries onside. However you decide to handle those assets, you get your siblings’ go-ahead first.’
I was booked on a flight back to New York the next afternoon. I thought of the cold air on the plane, and the neat menus which were handed out just after take-off. I could see myself settling into the journey, the prior three days deadened by the drinks in the lounge, then waking up to the warm evening and a black car waiting to take me home.
‘I need to consider it,’ I said. ‘It’s not a convenient time.’
Bill handed me a slip of paper, with his name and number handwritten on pale grey lines. Business cards were not in the prison’s budget. ‘I’ll wait to hear from you,’ he said. ‘If it’s not you, then it would be helpful to have suggestions. One of the other beneficiaries, perhaps.’
I thought of making this proposal to Ethan, or Gabriel, or Delilah. ‘Perhaps,’ I said.
‘For a start,’ Bill said, holding the box on his palm, ‘these are all of her possessions at Northwood. I can release them to you today.’
The box was light.
‘They’re of negligible value, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘She had a number of goodwill credits – for exemplary behaviour, things like that – but they don’t have much value outside.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said.
‘The only other thing,’ the warden said, ‘is the body.’
She walked to her desk and pulled out a ring-bound file of plastic wallets, each of them containing a flyer or a catalogue. Like a waiter with a menu, she opened it before me, and I glimpsed sombre fonts and a few apologetic faces.
‘Options,’ she said, and turned the page. ‘If you’d like them. Funeral homes. Some of these are a bit more detailed: services, caskets, things like that. And they’re all local – all within a fifty-mile radius.’
‘I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding,’ I said. The warden shut the file on a leaflet featuring a leopard print hearse.
‘We won’t be claiming the body,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Bill. If the warden was perturbed, she hid it well.
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘we would bury your mother in an unmarked grave, according to default prison policy. Do you have any objections to that?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any objections.’
My other meeting was with the chaplain, who had requested to see me. She had asked me to come to the visitors’ chapel, which was in the car park. One of the warden’s assistants accompanied me to a squat outbuilding. Somebody had erected a wooden cross above the door and hung coloured tissue paper across the windows. A child’s stained glass. Six rows of benches faced a makeshift stage with a fan and a lectern, and a model of Jesus, mid-crucifixion.
The chaplain was waiting on the second bench back. She stood to meet me. Everything about her was round and damp: her face in the gloom, her white smock, the two little hands which clasped around mine.
‘Alexandra,’ she said.
‘Hello.’
‘You must be wondering,’ she said, ‘why I wished to see you.’
She had the kind of gentleness which you have to practise. I could see her in the conference room of a cheap hotel, wearing a name badge and watching a presentation on the importance of pauses – of giving people the space to talk.