Constable Watson was true to his word.
At ten past two that the afternoon, Harold came through the door. From his slow gait, from the way he took his hat off, from the tiredness in his eyes, Alberta knew. He raised his eyes to look at her, and in them she read the grief, the pain.
"You were right," he said, his voice a blessed relief in the roaring silence. "I shouldn't have let him go."
No, you shouldn't.
The words were almost on Alberta's lips when they turned to ash and fell to the carpet (she still needed to clean the shards from the vase).
"He was with his cousins- my nephews, my niece," she told him instead, dully. "It wasn't your fault."
But it wasn't theirs, either, and they, too, lay in a cold mortuary, awaiting identification.
It was the train.
Alberta tried to summon up her anger, but it had deserted her, slipped like a thread through a broken needle head.
It was thirteen past two when she met Harold's eyes again, still weary, still sad. (But still strong.)
I must be strong, too.
"I suppose we should head to St Bartholomew's," she said presently. In some far distant chamber of her mind something laughed. How inane, how ridiculous, it sounded almost as if she were talking to Cynthia. "I suppose we should purchase some flour, then" or, "I suppose we should hand in our articles. Are you heading past the office?"
Harold nodded slowly, as though the very motion gave him pain.
"Come," he said, holding the door open. "I'll drive."
As opposed to taking the train.
Alberta closed the door, so cool to touch, and closed her eyes.
Eustace Clarence, she thought, as a small blue-eyed child walked smartly through the swimming darkness. He looked at her, puffed out his chest, held up a butterfly, pinned to a cardboard backing. Then the darkness rippled, and he was fourteen, standing beside the sitting room copy of Guernica, shoulders straight, eyes forlorn. Eustace Clarence. Then she saw him again, sixteen years old and satchel in hand, walking towards the Pevensies, waiting by the pavement. He gave a smart wave and faded away into the inky black, washed behind a wall as realistic as a Dali.
The car pulled up outside St Bartholomew's.
-
Inside the walls and floor were bare, lit by a murky green light.
We have lingered beneath the chambers of the sea.
Harold had read that poem to her, she recalled, and it had been on a warm summer's day, the rare sun edging cautiously around the low-lying clouds. It had always been special to her, and she had encouraged Eustace Clarence to read it.
He might have read it, and even liked it, she thought blankly, had he not discovered George MacDonald.
I write not for children but for the childlike- wasn't that how the man's ridiculous statement went? Eustace Clarence had quoted it at her several times until she had lost her temper at him. In this moment, she could hear Eustace Clarence saying it, even now; that strange little inflection at the word 'childlike', the way he would glance at her, almost furtively. How she had hated that furtive look.
He will not give me that look anymore.
But of course he would, that was absurd. Eustace Clarence could not simply disappear just like that. He would come back home and she would realise that he had not folded his bed sheets properly and she would berate him, and then he would come to dinner. They might even discuss art afterwards. She would like that, when she found another painting for the sitting room wall.
Rothko's swell.
Beside her, Harold took her hand in his. His grip was firm, familiar, and she pressed back, glad to have his solid flesh as a (reminder).
A young, bright-eyed man with dull blonde hair came to meet them.
"Mrs Alberta Scrubb and Mr Harold Scrubb?" he said, checking the clipboard. He had the mildest hint of a Cockney accent.
Harold murmured an assent.
"I'm Dr Louis Brealey. It's nice to meet you," he beamed, sticking out a hand. "I work here," he added as an afterthought, as though Alberta and Harold had not yet made the connection.
Neither Alberta nor Harold took his hand. Dr Louis Brealey looked at them dubiously, and at his proffered hand, before retracting it to wipe against his doctor's coat.
"Er, well, through here," he said awkwardly, gesturing to a dark blue door with a glass panel, patterned as with metal netting. As she passed through the door, Alberta glanced at the man who was clearly trying to smile. She wished he would stop trying.
Unlike the corridor before, this room was blindingly bright, and painfully white. It made Alberta feel strangely like she was at home in her sitting room. Waiting for Constable Watson. No, not waiting; he had come. And then he had said-
"Eustace Clarence!"
She felt, rather than heard, Harold's intake of breath.
Her first thought was, he is so white.
A thousand thoughts pricked her mind: he must rest, she would make him soup. He needed a shower, his face was so dirty and brown-
Brown with dried blood.
She drew her hand back from his cheek. Brown, all she could see was brown- a dirty, rusty brown that would once have been red.
Rothko, she thought wildly, one of Rothko's abstracts.
But it had been her son's face that she had been looking at, it had been Eustace Clarence and his eyes were so wide, and his skin was so pale, and all she could see was brown, a cloudy brown that burnt at her eyelids and stung at her cheeks.
Harold, she wanted to say, but it hurt to speak and her lips were heavy. Harold!
"Yes," she heard Harold say distantly, "that is our son."
Inside her stomach stirred like a spoon.
"Lovely!" Louis Brealey piped up.
Alberta's insides coiled, reared, and she drew herself up fiercely. The man looked startled, as if he was facing a sea serpent, or one of those ridiculous creatures Eustace Clarence had insisted upon babbling about not long after Lucy and Edmund had first stayed in Hampstead.
Lovely, she thought, and something near her eyes burned as she continued to stare at the man. He was now turning a shade of red, but it was not like the rusty red on Eustace Clarence's pale, still skin, not like that rusty wretched red (a splash ripping apart a blank, stretched canvas).
"Oh, well, not- lovely," the man amended, far too late, "I just mean- I'm glad- glad it's not the wrong body. We had a muddle up just a few weeks ago with this lady, Irene Pulver- honestly thought it was her, but her face was so smashed in, we needed to-"
"Don't try to make conversation," she snapped as Harold cut in at the same time, saying,
"Mr Brealey, at least try to be a little less insensitive."
Louis Brealey gulped.
"I'm sorry," he said.
Such empty words. I'm sorry. And Eustace Clarence still lay before her, though his body was wavering in the light.
"I believe my brother is also here," she said, and wondered that her voice was so strong, so clear. "I should- I should like to see him."
"Er, yes," Louis Brealey said, hurrying to the other side of the room. "We've identified Professor Victor Andrew Pevensie and his wife Mrs Helen-"
Victor, Alberta thought, Louis Brealey's words fading to an inexorably unforgiving pulse in her brain.
There was no rusty red on his face, only that same paleness that made her think of the time he had broken his arm as a child. How afraid she'd been that he'd never be able to use his arm again; but he'd only looked at it and shrugged.
Don't worry, Bertha, it'll be ok.
His shrug, that careless shrug, how she knew that shrug. It was just so Victor, to brush off lightly things that any rational person would fret about. She had seen his sons, particularly Peter, give that very same shrug. It had been one of the few traits Eustace Clarence had picked up from his cousins that she had been loath to berate him for.
But there, why think of that? He wasn't shrugging now.
He will never shrug again.
She clapped her hand to her mouth and turned away. Harold moved, instinctively, touched her shoulder gently, almost hesitantly.
"I can't do this," she whispered, and fear like a blank canvas rippled through her stomach as she realised the truth in her words. "Harold, I-"
He pressed a brief kiss to her forehead.
"It- Alberta- I'll do it," he said, and she heard the cracks in his voice, heard his own fear.
Had Harold always been braver than she had? Perhaps, but she had never seen it.
"Thank you," she breathed, her eyes shut. Around her, the world spun (almost like that time Victor had taken her to the park and then grabbed her hand, and they had spun, back when they were children)- only it felt that somehow the ground had fallen through, and she was suspended (marionette Bertha, raise your hand to your eyes and blink, and see the drop fall, fall, fall).
"How long can you keep the bodies?" she heard her voice say, breaking through the growing din.
Louis Brealey's voice was hesitant. "Mrs Scrubb, it's only a matter of days, we have to-"
"Please keep them as long as you can," she said curtly. "My niece is travelling back from America. Open casket funerals are distasteful, and I am sure she will want to see her family. Please keep their bodies as long as is possible."
"Yes, Ma'am!" said Louis Brealey, looking half terrified as he scuttled through the door.
When he had disappeared, she collapsed against Harold. He caught her and held her against his chest (like a broken doll).
"I'm here, Alberta," he whispered, "I'm here."
And she pressed her face against his collar and felt the material, warm and wet against her cheeks.
A/N: Although my father, being a doctor, has signed off autopsies of bodies in mortuaries, I have never been inside a mortuary and so cannot vouch for the realism or arealism of this chapter. All I can say is that I hope it is as emotionally harrowing to read as it was to write, and I ask that those of you who have read this chapter please leave a review. Thanks muchly.