Free The Ted Dreams by Fay Weldon Page A

said.
    But a post mortem had been obligatory, it seemed. The death ranked as ‘mysterious’ though non-suspicious, and it being the holiday season and very few pathologists around at the best of times – autopsies were a messy job and delay distressing for the loved ones – Dr Nevis had done what he could and found a slot in Scotland. The body had been transferred by ambulance from the Royal Free to the Edinburgh City infirmary and hence by taxi to the city morgue for the autopsy.
    ‘By taxi? Just ordinary taxi?’
    ‘One of the new ones big enough for wheelchairs.’ Ted’s corpse would have travelled with a nurse attendant. It was a short distance and taxis were quicker, simpler and cheaper than ambulances.
    Cynara at lunch: ‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you, just how important you are to the future: that is to say, how much money they’re prepared to spend on you.’
    So many people had been involved – corners must have been cut, taxi drivers could have been bribed, even pathologists – ‘cause of death: apoplexy’ in a tremulous hand – filled in by some unpaid intern, or some batty old morgue attendant anxious to get rid of a body and home for his tea. Do coroners keep their blank forms under lock and key? Once you begin to doubt you doubt everything. The cost of anything simply did not apply if you were thinking of the behaviour of social media, or the search engine people, or the great Internet stores – the ‘they’ to whom Cynara referred. The ‘they’ who had sent Robbie in to keep an eye on me, because of my alleged closeness to the other side. Blast this bloody wicked paranoiac nonsense, breeding paranoia in me…
    I wondered if I should call the twins in the morning and ask them if they thought there was anything strange about their father’s death. But then I thought no, they would not, like Hamlet, feel the need to avenge their father’s most foul and unnatural murder – if that’s what it had been. It was hardly in their interest. They no longer lived with us – they now shared a flat near Lambeth Bridge, overlooking the Thames: Robbie had put down the deposit for them a month or so after we were married. I hadn’t asked how much, but it can’t have been cheap – three rooms, bathroom, kitchen and a river view in central London? And he’d paid off their student loans, at £9,000 a year each hardly negligible. Was Robbie paid so much that he could afford this kind of thing almost without noticing?
    Were ‘they’ involved in some way, even in this? Had the twins too been bought off – my lovely, light, dancing, two-peas-in-a-pod girls? Mind you, life with the twins wasn’t always sweetness and light. On bad days during their childhood, when I was tired and low, I’d resented the fact that I had one child but twice the work. Most identical twins develop differences in looks and temperament as they grow older, but not ours. Martha and Maude just seemed to become more and more alike. I’d said as much to Jill Woodward on the day that Ted died, ‘It’s all so unfair. All that work with Ted and now he’s just gone, and all that work with the twins and still there’s only one of them,’ and she’d looked at me blankly with her botoxed face. If she felt sorry for me she couldn’t show it even if she wanted to. She was unreadable.
    In their early teens the twins make a real effort to become more easily recognised as separate individuals, wearing different clothes and following different celebrities but by the time they were nineteen they’d given up – they looked and moved and thought like the same person, ultra, ultra identicals. People accuse me of being telepathic, when all I am is normally empathetic, just over-sensitive to what others must be feeling, but I’m nothing compared to Martha and Maude: their bickerings often end (and they do bicker) just because one of them is using the other’s lines and they get confused.
    Robbie of course has always wanted to take