“Good.” He beamed and the creases around his mouth gave him a rather catlike appearance. He turned off the extractor fan and suddenly I could smell his aftershave. “First we’ll get you sick leave. We’ll get through this together—I’ve got something for you to sort out,” he said. “A really lovely object.” That’s how people talk at the Swinburne. They say object instead of clock.
I thought, he is exiling me, burying me. The Annexe was situated behind Olympia where my grief might be as private as my love.
So he was being kind to me, strange macho Crofty. I kissed him on his rough sandalwood-smelling cheek. We both looked at each other with astonishment, and then I fled, out onto the humid street, pounding down towards the Albert Hall with Matthew’s lovely silly hat crushed inside my hand.
I ARRIVED HOME STILL not knowing how my darling died. I imagined he had fallen. He had hit his head. I hated how he always tipped back on his chair.
Now there would be a funeral. I tore my shirt in half, and ripped the sleeves away. All night I imagined how he had died, been run over, squashed, knifed, pushed onto the tracks. Each vision was a shock, a rip, a cry. I was in this same condition fourteen hours later when I arrived at Olympia to meet with Eric.
No one loves Olympia. It is a hateful place. But this was where the Swinburne Annexe was, so this was where I would be sent, as if I was a widow and must be burned alive. Well, light the leaves and pyre wood, I thought, because nothing could hurt more than this.
The footpaths behind the exhibition centre were unnaturally hot and narrow. The lanes were looped and dog-legged. Lethal high-speed vans lifted the dust and distributed the fag ends up and down the street where the Annexe awaited. It was not a prison—a prison would have had a sign—but its high front gates were festooned with razor wire.
Many of the Swinburne’s conservators had spent a season in the Annexe, working on an object whose restoration could not be properly undertaken at the main museum. Some claimed to have enjoyed their stay, but how could I be severed from my Swinburne, my museum, my life where every stairway and lowly hallway, every flake of plaster, every molecule of acetone contained my love for Matthew and my evacuated heart?
Opposite the Annexe I found George’s Café with its doors wide open to the freakish heat.
You would think the author of Balance of Payments: The Sing-song Trade with China in the Eighteenth Century would be clearly distinguishable from the four sweaty policemen at the back booth, the drivers from Olympia, the postal workers from the West Kensington Delivery Office who, it seems, had been given permission to wear shorts. Not a good idea, but never mind. If the distinguished curator had not risen (awkwardly, for the plywood booths did not encourage large men to make this sort of motion) I might not have picked him out at all.
Crofty liked to say that he was a perfect no one. Yet although he was so opaquely estuary and his bone-crushing handshake had roots somewhere in the years of his birth, in the manly 1950s, he might turn up to drinks for the Minister for Arts where you, if you were lucky enough to be invited, might learn that he had been in Scotland hunting with Ellsworth (Sir Ellis Crispin to you) on the previous weekend. It appeared that I was now to be protected by this powerful man.
I saw his eyes—all the frightening sympathy. I fussed with my umbrella and placed a notebook on the table, but he covered my hand with his own—it was large and dry and warm like something you would hatch eggs in.
“What a horror it all is,” he said.
“Tell me. Please, Eric. What happened?”
“Oh Christ,” he said. “Of course you do not know.”
I could not look at him. I rescued my hand and hid it in my lap.
“Heart attack, big one. So sorry. On the tube.”
The tube. I had seen the tube all night, the dark hot violence of it. I snatched the menu and ordered baked beans and two poached eggs. I could feel Eric watching me with his soft wet eyes. They were no help, no help at all. I rearranged my cutlery violently.
“They got him off at Notting Hill.”
I thought he was going to say that this was good, to die so close to home. He didn’t. But I could not bear the thought that they had taken him back to her.
And she, that great designer of marital “understanding,” would play the grieving widow. “I suppose it is Kensal Green, the funeral?” Just up the Harrow Road, I thought, so handy.
“Tomorrow actually.”
“No, Eric. That is totally impossible.”
“Tomorrow at three.” Now he could not look at me. “I don’t know what you wish to do.”
Of course, of course. They would all be there, his wife, his sons, his colleagues. I would be expected to go, but I could not. I would give everything away.
“No one gets buried that quickly,” I said. “She’s trying to hide something.” I thought, she wants him in the ground away from me.
“No, no, old love, nothing like that. Not even the awful Margaret is capable of that.”
“Have you ever tried to book a funeral? It took me two weeks to get my father buried.”
“In this case, they had a cancellation.”
“They what?”
“Had a cancellation.”
I don’t know who laughed first, maybe it was me because once I started it took a while to stop. “They had a cancellation? Someone decided not to die.”
“I don’t know, Catherine, perhaps they got a lower price from a different cemetery, but it is tomorrow at three o’clock.” He pushed a folded piece of paper across the table.
“What’s this?”
“A prescription for sleeping pills. We’ll look after you,” he said again.
“We?”
“No one will know.”
We sat quietly then, and a suffocating mass of food was placed in front of me. Eric had wisely ordered a single hardboiled egg.
I watched him crack its shell, peeling it away to reveal a soft and shiny membrane.
“What happens to his emails?” I asked, because I had been thinking about that all night as well. Our personal life was preserved on the Swinburne server in a windowless building in Shepherd’s Bush.
“It’s down,” he said.
“You mean down, or you mean deleted?”
“No, no, the whole museum system is down. Heat wave. Air conditioning failed, I’m told.”
“So it’s not deleted at all.”
“Listen to me Cat.”
I thought, Cat is not a word that can live in public air. It is a frail naked little thing, all raw and hurting. Please do not call me Cat.
“Tell me you didn’t write to each other on office email.”
“Yes we did, and I won’t have strangers reading them.”
“It will have been taken care of,” he said.
“How can you know that?”
This question seemed to offend him and his tone became more managerial. “Do you remember the scandal with Derek Peabody and the papers he tried to sell to Yale? He came back to clear out his office and his email was already gone. Over.”
I never knew there was a scandal with Peabody. “So his email was deleted forever?”
“Of course,” he said. He did not blink.
“Eric, I don’t want anyone to access those emails, not I.T., not you, not his wife, not anyone.”
“Very well, Catherine, then I assure you that your wish has already been granted.”
I thought he was a liar. He thought I was a bitch.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Who else knows?”
“About you and Matthew?” He paused, as if there were all sorts of different answers he might give. “No one.”
“I’m rather shocked anyone knows.” And then I saw I had hurt his feelings. “I’m sorry if that sounds offensive.”
“That’s all right. I’ve arranged for a little sick leave. You have been diagnosed with bronchitis if anybody asks. But I thought you might like to know that there is a future. Perhaps you should peek at the object that will be waiting for you when you finally come back to work.”