The Sympathy Card That Wasn’t
The death of Gerald Forthwick came as no great surprise to Nettleford. He had been ninety-one, comfortably stout, and had spent the final years of his life in the armchair by the window of Beech Cottage, watching the lane with the patience of a man who had already seen everything worth seeing. What did surprise the village, however, was the speed with which his nephew, Dennis Forthwick, arrived from Cheltenham.
Agnes Plum noticed it first, as Agnes Plum tended to notice most things. She was returning her library books to the mobile van — Tuesday being its day for Nettleford — when she saw Dennis’s silver car pull into the lane before the parish notice had even gone up in the post office window. The funeral director, Mr. Hobbs, had only collected Gerald that same morning.
“Remarkable timing,” Agnes murmured to her neighbour, Patience Collier, who was examining a large-print mystery on the van’s bottom shelf.
“He was always fond of his uncle,” Patience said, with the charitable certainty of someone who has never particularly liked Dennis Forthwick.
Agnes said nothing further. But she filed the observation away with the quiet efficiency of a woman who had spent thirty-four years cataloguing other people’s information.
She encountered Dennis the following morning at the village shop. He was purchasing a condolence card — an odd thing to purchase for a death that was, technically, one’s own bereavement — and speaking at considerable volume on his telephone while he did so. Agnes selected a jar of honey from the shelf behind him and listened without appearing to.
“The solicitor appointment’s Thursday,” Dennis was saying. “Yes, well, I’ve already had a look at the outbuildings. The main cottage won’t be the issue — it’s the land at the back. Planning’s changed since the old man bought it. Significant value there.” He paused, laughed briefly. “Sentiment doesn’t pay rates, does it?”
He collected his change, tucked the card under his arm without signing it, and left.
Agnes paid for her honey and walked home thoughtfully.
That afternoon she called on Mrs. Draper, who cleaned Beech Cottage twice weekly and had done so for eleven years. Mrs. Draper was a small, agitated woman who wore her grief honestly and her opinions without reservation.
“He’s been through every drawer already,” she told Agnes, over strong tea at the kitchen table. “Poor Gerald not cold and Dennis is measuring the back garden with one of those laser things. And he brought a woman with him — an estate agent, if you ask me, though he called her a friend.”
“Was Gerald fond of him?” Agnes asked.
Mrs. Draper considered this seriously. “Mr. Forthwick was fond of everyone in the abstract. Up close, he found people rather tiring. He did say once, last autumn, that he’d made some changes. To his arrangements. He seemed very settled about it. Said things would go where they ought to go.”
Agnes walked home by way of the church, where she paused at Gerald’s preferred bench — he had donated it after his wife passed — and sat for a few minutes. The Forthwick family history was something she knew well, as she knew most things in Nettleford. Gerald had a daughter, Harriet, who had emigrated to New Zealand twenty years ago following some unspecified but apparently decisive falling-out with Dennis. The village had largely forgotten her. Agnes had not.
On Wednesday morning, Agnes visited the solicitor’s office on the high street. She did not have an appointment. She went instead to the reception desk and spoke with young Miss Tarrant, who had attended Agnes’s reading group for three years and who possessed, beneath a professional exterior, a perfectly normal human curiosity.
“I wonder,” Agnes said pleasantly, “whether Mr. Hobson is aware that Gerald Forthwick had a daughter. Harriet. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. I have reason to believe she may not have been contacted.”
Miss Tarrant looked at her carefully. “The family member who contacted us was —”
“A nephew,” Agnes said. “Yes. But Gerald had a daughter. He mentioned her to me last September, in the context of having updated his affairs.” She paused. “I wouldn’t want there to be any procedural inconvenience for Mr. Hobson’s office.”
Miss Tarrant, who understood perfectly, excused herself for several minutes. She returned looking composed and unsurprised. “Mr. Hobson has asked me to thank you for your visit,” she said.
Agnes nodded. “I’ll see myself out.”
The Thursday appointment was quietly postponed. By Friday, it emerged that Gerald had indeed revised his will the previous October, leaving Beech Cottage and the land in its entirety to Harriet, with a modest and pointed sum to Dennis described in the document, according to reliable village report, as “sufficient for reflection.”
Harriet flew in from Christchurch the following week. She was a tall woman with her father’s patient eyes, and she brought New Zealand wine for the neighbours and sat with Mrs. Draper for two hours without once checking her telephone. Dennis returned to Cheltenham without having signed the sympathy card, which was discovered, still in its plastic sleeve, in the recycling bin outside the post office.
Agnes, attending the small and rather lovely funeral on a bright March morning, stood at the back as was her habit. She had brought snowdrops from her garden, which she placed at the foot of the churchyard wall beneath Gerald’s wife’s stone, as she had done each year without fuss.
Patience Collier appeared at her elbow. “I hear it all came right in the end,” she said.
“Gerald made quite sure of that,” Agnes said. “He simply needed a small amount of assistance being heard.”
The church bell rang eleven. Somewhere across the lane a robin made its determined, territorial announcement. Agnes straightened her coat, tucked her bag over her arm, and followed the others inside.
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