On the third morning, despite having fallen asleep in the small hours, she’d woken at the same time once more. She knew why. Those quiet, focused minutes. The slow reveal of the day, its light and weight, its texture and scent. Her body was expecting it, and her mind was asking for it. The exact same scene she’d stood before the previous mornings, but changed, altered. Never the same. Capturing it stirred in her a sense both of movement and of continuity. Of seeing afresh. How many times had she looked out her back door and seen that view? But never, not one of those times, as she’d seen it on those mornings, a unique recipe of light, weather, and season, framed in the lens of her camera.
Samantha’s morning sessions became the foundation of what had now become her weekly routine. Every morning, regardless of the weather, and more often because of it, she could be seen out there, next to the willow, bending to her viewfinder. On three of those mornings, after taking her pond photographs and walking Rachel to school, she went to work as a PA for a film director in Hampstead village. The work wasn’t taxing — organising his expenses, replying to emails, ordering prints and booking lunch meetings, screenings. But it was new to her, and sociable. While he worked in his office at the top of the house, Samantha worked on the kitchen table, making her party to the movements of the day. Not just the editors and writers who came to meet him, but also the comings and goings of his wife and two sons. It was a workplace, but also a family home. Martha, her sister, had feared it might make Samantha grieve for her own. But the variety and rhythms of the house invigorated her, inspired her even, reminding her of what she’d once wanted and of how much of it had somehow drifted from her over the years of her marriage.
On the other two days of the week she studied at the Royal College, going to lectures and seminars, spending hours in the computer and printing rooms. Again, despite her being ten years older than most of the students, the environment excited her. But it frustrated her, too. She was impatient to learn, to improve. She felt as if she had years to catch up on, a lost decade. Whereas the other students behaved as if time was an inexhaustible luxury, Samantha, knowing it to be a rare reserve, harried at her course and her tutors.
Over those first months after Josh moved out, Samantha gradually came to realise that just as she had autonomy over the hours of her days, so she could choose how to spend her evenings and nights. There was no mortgage on the house, and although Josh no longer had a job, he was still able to pay regular contributions for Rachel and the housekeeping. Whatever Samantha earned from the PA work was hers to spend how she wished. For so many years she’d allowed her socialising to be dictated by Josh’s work, by his colleagues and their wives. There were few of them she’d liked on her own terms, so when after a few months she’d begun to contact friends again, to email them about cinema showings or phone someone for a drink, it was nearly always a case of reconnecting with a friend from years ago, rather than anyone, except for Michael, whom she’d seen regularly before Lucy’s death.
In this way, between her hours at the director’s house, her studies, caring for Rachel and a few old friends, Samantha occupied herself. But none of it did anything to appease her grieving for Lucy. Her daughter had been just four years old. But Samantha had known her for longer than that. Ever since her body had begun forming within hers, ever since the tides of its growing had driven her cravings, her sleep patterns, and mood swings. And yet, at the same time, she’d only recently felt as if she were becoming acquainted with who Lucy actually was, and with who she might become. In the last few months before her death, when Samantha watched her playing with Michael, or on her own, engrossed in a conversation with her dolls, she thought she’d begun to see the hints of the girl beyond the child. And then, within those hints, like a receding line of mirrors within mirrors, the teenager beyond the girl, the woman beyond the teenager and even, in certain fleeting expressions, the elderly woman beyond the adult.
But now Lucy’s would be an imagined life, existing only in her mother’s projections of who her daughter might have been. The ache of her loss became as familiar to Samantha as breathing, or opening her eyes to see. It was just there, and would always be there, a translucent presence behind the scenes of the day. A shadowing that hurt, but which Samantha would never want to live without, its essence now being all that was left of Lucy beyond the ephemera of memory, photographs, and film, all of which were too painful to ever look at for long.
Rachel, once she’d emerged from the numbing of her own shock, soon became sensitive to these depths of her mother’s remembering. In the light of their altered relationship, she’d developed a breed of admiration for Samantha, which she felt but did not yet understand. From out of nowhere, death, like a meteor, had struck their home. There had been sadness, rupture. They were scattered by its impact. Her father was now a man who met her from school, or took her out on the weekends. He was no longer bound by the family walls. She, herself, had been sent far from her own knowledge, and her mother, too, had been on a long journey. But now, from all this disturbance, her mother was back and revealing a warmth Rachel had never previously known. Focused and strong, as if she was recklessly pouring love directly into her. She asked Rachel more questions, her opinion, as if she were eightteen, not eight. She allowed her to stay up late, to stay on the sofa with her, watching TV together. Sometimes Rachel became aware her mother wasn’t watching the screen at all, but was watching her instead. Without intention or observation, but merely to witness her. Over breakfast, as Samantha asked her which blouse she should wear, or which skirt, it could seem as if they were impossible sisters, rather than a mother and daughter. And then there were those other times, too, when their roles felt reversed completely. When, on entering a room and discovering her mother to be there, Rachel would sense Samantha’s darkness, and would come to her silently, folding her body into its contours in an attempt to at once absorb and soothe her pain.
For Michael, every minute spent with Samantha and Rachel was like torture. There had yet to be a moment, in all the seven months since he’d left their house that day, when, being in their presence, he hadn’t felt acutely the sadness of the loss he’d caused, or that somehow Rachel cradled a secret knowledge of her sister’s death. And yet at the same time being with them was the only salve his conscience knew. To be there, contributing to their recovery, their new lives. It was both his privilege and his punishment. In practice this often meant no more than giving his encouragement or advice to Samantha, or coming round for a drink or some food, or agreeing to look after Rachel on nights when she had to be out. It was as simple as being her friend. Someone who’d known them before, and with whom, now that she was ready, she could talk about her loss as an equal, as a colleague in grief. No one else Samantha knew had lost anyone other than their parents. No one else had had death enter, so suddenly, their lives. Michael, however, had been there before her, felt and thought his way through its aftermath. And so she’d found herself looking to him for markers, for acknowledgement and consent. He made her feel normal and, perhaps more important, possible, a woman shaped by her daughter’s loss, not defined by it. A woman who would still extract joy from life, not despite her grief but because of it.