‘A writer possessed of mind-bending talents’
THE MOST
Also by Jessica Anthony
Enter the Aardvark
Chopsticks
The Convalescent
JESSICA ANTHONY THE MOST
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
Penguin Random House, One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW11 7BW www.penguin.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Jessica Anthony 2024
Jessica Anthony has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781529928877
Book interior design by Marie Mundaca
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To my family, and the Bridge Guards
THE MOST
And someday I’ll know that moment divine, when all the things you are, are mine.
and Kern
Hammerstein
K1.athleen Beckett awoke feeling poorly. It was Sunday. November. Warm for this time of year. She threw off the covers and turned onto her back, undoing the bow of her sleeping gown. She wouldn’t go to church, she told her husband, Virgil, but there was no need for concern. Everyone should go on without her.
Virgil hesitated. They had been going to church for six months now, and his wife had not yet missed a service. “Dear, are you sure you’re all right?” he asked, flipping a necktie.
Kathleen, Kathy to her friends, Katie when Virgil felt sweet, nodded from the bed. “I’m perfectly fine,” she said. “I shouldn’t have slept in the flannel. You go. I’ll see you when you get back.”
Virgil kissed his wife on the forehead. Their sons, Nicholas and Nathaniel, were standing in the doorway. “Mother’s not well,” he told them. “Go dress yourselves.”
The boys stared at their mother.
“What’s wrong with her,” said Nicholas.
Virgil glared at him. “I said your mother’s not well. Don’t bother her.”
The boys retreated into their bedroom and put on their church suits. Virgil made breakfast, then piled everyone into the family’s brand-new ’57 Buick Bluebird and departed for the First Presbyterian. The church was fifteen miles from Acropolis Place, the sunny, pentagon-shaped apartment complex on the outskirts of Newark, Delaware, where the Becketts had lived since last May, ever since Virgil started at Equitable Life in Wilmington.
Kathleen had picked it out. Though it was only an apartment, it was new, carpeted in green wall-to-wall, and its signature feature was a gas fireplace that lit with a switch. There was an icebox, a floor-to- ceiling bookshelf for her novels and cookbooks. In the living room, a sliding glass door led out to a white wrought-iron balcony overlooking a small, kidney-shaped community swimming pool, which the Becketts, in their brief tenure at Acropolis Place, had never seen anyone use.
Virgil didn’t care where they lived so long as Kathleen was
happy, but he’d taken a pay cut to move back to Delaware and work at Equitable. Their house in Rhode Island sold for what they paid almost a decade ago. He hoped they wouldn’t stay long at the apartment.
After Christmas, he figured, they could start looking for a house in Wilmington, but until then, each Sunday the family would travel the fifteen miles to the First Presbyterian and sit in the wooden pews for forty minutes, listening to Reverend Underhill speak with passive equanimity about Jesus Christ and potluck suppers.
Usually after the service, Virgil and the other men from Equitable lingered on one part of the church’s front lawn in pressed suits and fedoras, smoking and talking business, family, the free afternoon, while the women, crisp in their crinolines, lingered in the vestibule, chatting with the reverend, anticipating an afternoon of cooking and cocktails. Today, the unseasonably warm weather prompted everyone to flee the First Presbyterian as quickly as possible, leaving the reverend to watch his congregation hastily press themselves into their cars and wonder what it was he’d said that sent them running.
Virgil Beckett was the first out the door. Major chords of the last hymn still sounded in the nave as he whispered to the boys to get their coats. I’ll check on Kathleen first, he thought. Then I’ll call Wooz. The course was bound to be open on a day like this, though he’d never golfed this late in the season before.
There were barely any leaves on the trees.
Virgil had thought about golfing throughout the entire sermon and could not tell you a word of what Reverend Underhill