Again I did as I was told. And again to my surprise I drifted off into a this time uneasy, rather unpleasant sleep, disturbed by nightmare visions of bodies with distorted faces and twisted or even missing limbs.
Eventually Bella woke me and led me downstairs. She’d heated a pizza in the oven and made a tomato salad, warmed a loaf of bread and put some cheese on the table.
I couldn’t touch the pizza. I’d bought it for Robbie. Just looking at it made me want to cry again. But this time I managed to hold the tears back. Perhaps there were no more tears to come. Not yet anyway.
I put some salad, some bread, and some cheese on my plate and began to eat mechanically. I ate quite a lot. There was a big empty hole inside me. It was almost as if I were trying to fill it. But it was, of course, impossible to fill.
I kept checking my mobile. Like a teenage girl waiting for a call from her boyfriend, or a woman waiting for one from a married lover, more than once I picked up the house phone just to make sure there was a dialling tone. Still no call from Robert. I was both bewildered and desperate to hear from him.
Bella had opened a bottle of red wine which I presumed she had selected from the rack in the kitchen, where we kept some of our stock, so that we didn’t have to scramble continually through the funny little door under the stairs which led to the cellar Robert was so proud of. Even at that moment I noticed that it was one of his best clarets. The bottles he would never share with visitors, not that we had many visitors. Our home was for us, not for showing off to other people, he said.
Bella’s hand shook as she began to pour for me and she knocked over my glass, the stem of which snapped as it fell sideways onto the tabletop. Bella, too, was suffering from the stress of that dreadful day, I supposed. She muttered apologies as she mopped up the precious liquid and replaced the glass. I barely noticed. Of course, if Robert had been with us, under normal circumstances he would have been furious. But these were certainly not normal circumstances.
I downed the first glass of wine in almost one swallow, hardly tasting it, and found myself also reflecting automatically on what Robert’s reaction to that would have been. The expensive mellow red liquid hardly touched the sides.
We were still sitting at the kitchen table when the grandfather clock in the hall struck once. It was one in the morning. Bella had a little earlier muttered something about it being time for bed, but I was afraid of going up, afraid of being alone, afraid of attempting to sleep in the room which was directly below the place where I had found my son hanging. And I was afraid that if I did sleep the nightmare images would return.
Also, I was still waiting for the phone to ring.
I suggested to Bella that we open another bottle of wine. As she moved to do so I heard the handle of the kitchen door behind me begin to turn. Florrie was lying under the table by my feet. She did not bark. Instead she jumped up and ran towards the door, her feathered tail wagging frantically.
I swung round in my chair just as Robert stepped inside. He always made his way round to the back door if he arrived home late, as he liked me to bolt the one at the front at night, even though, or maybe because, we were so far from anywhere. He was unshaven, ashen-faced and dishevelled-looking. His thick black hair, which he wore long, needed washing. Greasy curls flopped over the collar of a filthy denim shirt. He had not been expecting to be coming home and, in order to have reached Highrise by now, wouldn’t have had time to change or to shave. Even if he’d given such matters a fleeting thought after the news I had given him. His appearance still shocked me, though, even at that moment. Was this how he really lived out on those rigs, I wondered obscurely?
‘Oh, Marion, Marion,’ he said. Then again. ‘Marion.’
Just my name. Over and over. But there was such pain in his voice and in his eyes, which filled with tears as I rose from my chair and rushed towards him.
‘I c-can’t believe it,’ he stumbled. ‘Is it really true?’
I nodded, once more searching for words that wouldn’t come.
‘But why, why would he do such a thing?’
I had no words with which to answer that, either. I wrapped my arms around him and just clung to him. I could feel his weight. He seemed to be leaning on me.
Then I saw his glance shift. He had seen Bella standing behind me, a bottle of his wine in her hand.
His face seemed to turn even more ashen. His eyes widened. I could not detect quite what I saw in them. My first thought was that it might be anger. It was probably just a mixture of grief and distress, and the horror I know he would have of being forced to share any of this painfully private time with an outsider.
‘What the hell is she doing here?’ he asked quite quietly.
‘Somebody had to be with me,’ I burbled. ‘The police insisted on it. This is Bella. You know, Bella whom I told you about. I met her on the beach with the dogs...’
I stopped. He couldn’t be about to go into one of his tirades about unwanted visitors, surely. Not now. I wasn’t going to let him.
‘Robert, what does it matter?’ I asked. ‘You’re here now. That’s all that matters.’
I looked up at him pleadingly, although I had absolutely no idea really what I expected of him. I was clinging to him, but he made no move to touch or hold me. His arms hung limply at his sides. His face was so grey and so still. Frozen almost. I supposed it was the shock. I had never seen him look anything like it before. This almost wasn’t my Robert. Even his accent, usually very light, was far more Scottish than usual. Through stress, I assumed.
‘You’re here,’ I said again. ‘Thank God. But how did you get off the rig? You seemed so sure you couldn’t until morning.’
‘The boss pulled out all the stops,’ Robert replied in a distant kind of way. ‘He managed to borrow a ride from BP. He and the pilot decided the regs didn’t apply in an emergency. They choppered me straight to Glasgow airport. EasyJet do a 9.45 p.m. flight to Bristol. I didn’t even know that—’
‘Why didn’t you phone?’ I interrupted.
‘It all happened so suddenly. I only usually bother to recharge my mobile just before I’m about to go on leave and I didn’t realize the battery was flat until I reached the mainland. Then when I got to Bristol I just hired a car. I couldn’t wait to...’
His voice tailed off. What did it matter, I thought, how he’d got home so quickly? Why was I even bothering to ask? He was here. That was all that counted.
He still seemed to be looking at Bella over my shoulder. I knew him so well, knew just how much he would not want her or anyone else there with us.
‘I’ll be off then,’ said Bella, as if reading both our minds. She put the bottle of claret down with a bump on the table.
‘Now you’re home, Mr Anderson, there’s no need for me to stay,’ she continued. ‘You’d rather be alone, the pair of you, I’m sure. I’ll just clear this lot away and put the plates in the dishwasher—’
‘No, I’ll do it,’ Robert interrupted, rather curtly I thought. But surely neither of us could be expected to remember our manners. I managed to find a semblance of them.
‘I just can’t thank you enough, Bella,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know how I would have got through this evening without you—’
‘Bella,’ said Robert, interrupting. ‘Bella,’ he repeated. His eyes were still looking in her direction but I could see he was off in some other world inside his head. So was I. A shattered world which had once been made whole by a truly beautiful boy.
Bella backed away out of the kitchen towards the front door. Robert and I stood together silently as she left the house, and stayed like that until we heard the engine of her car start.