“We’re going to have to stop there. I have a meeting to get to.”
Maybe he does, but it’s more likely he’s being considerate.
Mr. Wright knows that I am ill, and I think it must be on his orders that his secretary makes sure I always have mineral water, and why he is drawing our session to an early close today. He is sensitive enough to understand that I don’t want to talk about my physical problems, not yet, not till I have to.
You’d already picked up that I’m unwell, hadn’t you? And you wondered why I didn’t tell you more. You must have thought it ludicrous yesterday when I said a glass of wine at lunchtime could make me black out. I wasn’t trying to trick you. I just didn’t want to admit, to myself, my body’s frailties. Because I need to be strong to get through this statement. And I must get through it.
You want to know what’s made me ill, I know, and I will tell you when we get to that point in the story, the point when your story becomes mine too. Until then I will try not to think about the cause, because my thoughts, cowards that they are, turn tail and flee from it.
Music blaring interrupts our one-way conversation. I am near our flat and through the uncurtained window I see Kasia dancing to her Golden Hits of the 70s CD. She spots me and appears moments later at the front door. She takes hold of my arm and doesn’t even let me take my coat off before trying to make me dance too. She always does this, actually, “Dancing very good for body.” But today, incapable of dancing, I make up an excuse, then sit on the sofa and watch. As she dances, face beaming and sweating, laughing that the baby loves it, she seems so blithely unaware of the problems that she will face being an unemployed, Polish, single mother.
Upstairs, Amias is banging his foot on our ceiling in time to the music. The first time he did it I thought he was asking us to keep the noise down. But he enjoys it. He says it was so quiet before Kasia came to stay. I finally persuade a breathless Kasia to stop dancing and eat something with me.
While Kasia watches TV, I give Pudding a bowl of cat food, then take a watering can into your back garden, leaving the door slightly ajar so I can see. It’s starting to get dark and cold, the spring sunshine not strong enough to heat the air for long into evening. Over the fence, I see that next door your neighbors use the same outside area to house three trash cans. As I water the dead plants and bare earth, I wonder as usual why I’m doing this. Your trash-can neighbors must think I’m absurd. I think I’m absurd. Suddenly, like a magician’s sleight of hand, I see tiny green shoots in the dead twigs. I feel a surge of excitement and astonishment. I open the kitchen door wide, lighting the tiny garden. All the plants that were dead have the same tiny, bright-green shoots growing out of them. Farther away, in the gray soil, is a cluster of dark-red leaves, a peony that will flower in all its exuberant beauty again this summer.
I finally understand yours and Mum’s passion for gardening. It is seasonally miraculous. All that health and growth and new life and renewal. No wonder politicians and religions hijack green shoots and imagery of spring for themselves. This evening I, too, exploit the image for my own ends and allow myself to hope that death may not be final after all, that somewhere, as in Leo’s beloved Narnia books, there is a heaven where the white witch is dead and the statues have life breathed back into them. Tonight it doesn’t seem quite so inconceivable.
9
Friday
Although late, I am walking slowly to the CPS offices. There are three things that I find particularly hard in the telling of this story. I’ve done the first, finding your body, and what’s coming up is next. It sounds trivial, a bill, that’s all, but its effect was devastating. As I dawdle, I hear Mum’s voice telling me that it’s already ten to nine, we’re going to be late, Come on, Beatrice. Then you whiz past on your bike, book bag looped over a handlebar, eyes exhilarated, with pedestrians smiling at you as you whirred past them, literally creating a breath of fresh air. We haven’t got all day, Beatrice. But you knew that we had and were seizing it moment by moment.
I reach Mr. Wright’s office, and not commenting on my late arrival, he hands me a Styrofoam cup of coffee, which he must have bought from the dispenser by the lift. I am grateful for his thoughtfulness, and know that a tiny part of my reluctance to tell him the next episode in the story is because I don’t want him to think badly of me.
Todd and I sat at your Formica table, a pile of your post in front of us. I found the task of sorting out your paperwork oddly soothing. I’ve always made lists, and your pile of post represented an easily achievable line of ticks. We started with the red urgent reminders, then worked our way down to the less urgent bills. Like me, Todd is adept at the bureaucracy of life, and as we worked companionably together, I felt connected to him for the first time since he’d arrived in London. I remembered why we were together and how the small everyday things formed a bridge between us. It was a quotidian relationship based on practical details rather than passion, but I still valued its small-scale connections. Todd went to talk to Amias about the “tenancy agreement” despite my saying that I doubted there was such a thing. He pointed out, sensibly I thought, that we wouldn’t know unless we asked him.
The door closed behind him and I opened the next bill. I was feeling the most relaxed since you’d died. I could almost imagine making a cup of coffee as I worked, switching on Radio 4. I had a flicker of normality and in that brief moment could envisage a time without bereavement.
“I got out my credit card to pay her phone bill. Since she’d lost her mobile, I’d paid the landline one every month. It was my birthday present to her and she said it was too generous, but it was for my benefit too.”
I told you I wanted to make sure that you could phone me, and talk to me as long as you wanted to without worrying about the bill. What I didn’t tell you is that I needed to make sure that if I wanted to ring you, your phone wouldn’t have been disconnected.
“This bill was larger than in previous months. It was itemized so I decided to check it.” My words are slower, dawdling. “I saw that she’d phoned my mobile on the twenty-first of January. The call was at one p.m. her time, eight a.m. New York time, so I would have been in the subway getting to work. I don’t know why there were even a few seconds of connection.” I must do this all in one go, no pausing, or I won’t be able to start again. “It was the day she had Xavier. She must have phoned me when she went into labor.”
I break off for just a moment, not looking at Mr. Wright’s face, then continue, “Her next call to me was at nine p.m. her time, four p.m. New York time.”
“Eight hours later. Why do you think there was such a long gap?”
“She didn’t have a mobile, so once she left her flat to go to the hospital, it would have been hard for her to ring me. Besides, it wouldn’t have been urgent. I mean, I wouldn’t have had time to get to her and be with her for the birth.”
My voice becomes so quiet that Mr. Wright has to bend toward me to hear.
“The second call must have been when she got home from the hospital. She was ringing me to tell me about Xavier. The call lasted twelve minutes and twenty seconds.”
“What did she say?” he asks.
My mouth is suddenly dry. I don’t have the saliva needed to talk. I take a sip of cold coffee, but my mouth still feels parched.