“I didn’t talk to her.”
“You were probably out of the office, darling. Or stuck in a meeting,” said Todd. He’d come back from Amias’s, full of incredulity about your paying your rent in paintings, to find me sobbing.
“No, I was there.”
I’d got back to my office from a longer-than-expected briefing to the design department. I vaguely remembered Trish saying that you were holding for me and my boss wanted to see me. I asked her to tell you I’d call you back. I think I made a note on a Post-it and stuck it on my computer as I left. Maybe that’s why I forgot, because I’d written it down and didn’t need to hold it my head. But there are no excuses. None at all.
“I didn’t take her call and I forgot to phone her back.” My voice sounded small with shame.
“The baby was three weeks early; you couldn’t possibly have foreseen that.”
But I should have foreseen that.
“And the twenty-first of January, that was the day you were given your promotion,” Todd continued. “So of course you had your mind on other things.” He sounded almost jocular. He had single-handedly found me an excuse.
“How could I have forgotten?”
“She didn’t say it was important. She didn’t even leave you a message.”
Exonerating me meant putting the responsibility onto you.
“She shouldn’t have had to say it was important. And what message could she have left with a secretary? That her baby was dead?”
I’d snapped at him, trying to shift a little guilt his way. But of course the guilt is mine alone, not for sharing.
“Then you went to Maine?” asks Mr. Wright.
“Yes, a last-minute thing, just for a few days. And her baby wasn’t due for three weeks.” I despise myself for this pathetic attempt to save face. “Her bill showed that the day before she died and the morning of her death she phoned my office and apartment fifteen times.”
I saw the column of numbers, all mine, and each was an abandonment of you, indicting me again and again and again.
“Her calls to my apartment lasted for a few seconds.”
Just until your call was put through to voice mail. I should have put on a message saying we were away, but we hadn’t, not because we’d been carried away in the spontaneous moment, but because we’d decided it was a security risk. “Let’s not broadcast the fact we’re away.” I can’t remember if it was Todd or I who’d said it.
I thought that you must have assumed I’d be back soon, and that’s why you didn’t leave a message. Or maybe you simply couldn’t bear to tell me your ghastly news without hearing my voice first.
“God knows how many times she tried to phone my mobile. I’d switched it off because there wasn’t any reception where we were staying.”
“But you did try ringing her?”
I think he’s asking this question out of kindness.
“Yes. But the cabin didn’t have a landline and my mobile had no reception, so I could only phone her when we went out to a restaurant. I did try, a few times, but her phone was always engaged. I thought she was chatting to her friends, or had unplugged it so she could concentrate on painting.”
But there is no justification. I should have taken your call. And when I didn’t do that, I should have immediately rung you back, and then kept on ringing you until I’d got hold of you. And if I couldn’t get hold of you, I should have alerted someone to go and check on you and then got on the next flight to London.
My mouth has become too dry to talk.
Mr. Wright gets up. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
As the door closes behind him, I get up and pace the room, as if I can leave my guilt behind me. But it tracks me as I walk, an ugly shadow made by myself.
Before this, I’d confidently assumed myself to be a considerate, thoughtful person, vigilant about other people. I scrupulously remembered birthdays (my birthday book being annually transcribed onto the calendar); I sent thank-you cards promptly (ready-bought and waiting in the bottom drawer of my desk). But with my numbers on your phone bill I saw that I wasn’t considerate at all. I was conscientious about the minutiae of life, but in the important things I was selfishly and cruelly neglectful.
I can hear your question, demanding an answer: Why, when DS Finborough told me that you’d had your baby, didn’t I realize that you weren’t able to phone me and tell me? Why did I focus on your not turning to me rather than realizing it was I who’d made that impossible? It’s because I thought you were still alive then. I didn’t know you’d been murdered before I’d ever reached London. Later, when your body was found, I wasn’t capable of logic, of putting dates together.
I can’t imagine what you must think of me. (Can’t or daren’t?) You must be surprised that I didn’t start off this whole letter to you with an apology, and then an explanation so that you could understand my negligence. The truth is that, lacking courage, I was putting it off as long as I could, knowing that there are no explanations to be offered.
I’d do anything to have a second chance, Tess. But unlike our storybooks, there’s no flying back past the second star to the right and through the open window to find you alive in your bed. I can’t sail back through the weeks and in and out of the days returning to my bedroom where my supper is warm and waiting for me and I’m forgiven. There is no new beginning. No second chance.
You turned to me and I wasn’t there.
You are dead. If I had taken your call, you would be alive.
It’s as blunt as that.
I’m sorry.
10
Mr. Wright comes back into the room with a glass of water for me. I remember that his wife died in a car crash. Maybe it was his fault; perhaps he was driving after drinking or momentarily distracted—my guilt shadow would feel better with some company. But I cannot ask him. Instead I drink the glass of water and he switches on the cassette recorder again.
“So you knew Tess had turned to you?”
“Yes.”
“And that you had been right all along?”
“Yes.”
There was a flipside to the guilt. You had looked to me for help, we were close, I did know you, and therefore I could be absolutely confident in my conviction that you didn’t kill yourself. Had my confidence ever wavered? A little. When I thought you hadn’t told me about your baby, when I thought you hadn’t turned to me for help when you were frightened. Then I questioned our closeness and wondered if I really knew you after all. Then quietly, privately, I also wondered, Did you really value life too highly to end it? Your phone calls meant that the answer, however painfully obtained, was an unequivocal yes.
The next morning I woke up so early it was still night. I thought about taking one of the sleeping pills, to escape from guilt now as much as grief, but I couldn’t be that cowardly. Careful not to wake Todd, I got out of bed and went outside hoping for escape from my own thoughts or at least some kind of distraction from them.
When I opened the front door, I saw Amias putting carrier bags on your pots, using a flashlight. He must have seen me illuminated in the doorway.
“Some of them blew off in the night,” he said. “So I need to get them put back again before too much damage is done.”
I thought about him recently planting daffodil bulbs in the freezing earth. From the beginning the bulbs never stood a chance. Not wanting to upset him, but not wanting to give him false platitudes about the efficacy of his carrier-bag greenhouses, I changed the subject.