The expression on Robert’s face remained one of total despair. And he seemed rooted to the spot. I reached up to kiss his face. It was damp. I saw then that tears were rolling down his cheeks, but he wasn’t sobbing. It was as if he had no idea that the tears were falling.
He was still staring straight ahead.
As I kissed him he switched his gaze, with what seemed to be a considerable effort, and looked down at me, his troubled eyes meeting mine for the first time. He kissed me on the forehead. Just as he so often did. Only this time it was different. I supposed it would always be different in future. Now that we shared this terrible loss.
‘Oh, Marion, what has happened, what has happened to us, to our wonderful little family?’ he asked. ‘What’s going on?’
I was fleetingly puzzled. That was a strange question. He knew what had happened well enough. Our family had been destroyed by an inexplicable tragedy.
‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’ I asked falteringly.
Something flickered in Robert’s eyes.
‘What? What? Did I ask that? I don’t know what I’m saying. I don’t know what I’m doing. I rushed here to comfort you and now I’m talking gibberish.’
Only then did he at last enfold me in his arms and hold me tightly. He began to kiss me all over my face. To my utter astonishment I felt my body react to him the way it always did. Even though the stubble of what must have been several days of beard scraped my skin and he smelt of stale sweat and something else I didn’t quite recognize. The stench of the rigs perhaps, which he had never brought home with him before. I didn’t care. I just wanted him close. As close as possible.
Robert and I had always had a wonderful sex life. He was, I thought, a truly fabulous lover, not that there’d been many men in my life for me to compare him with, but I just knew he was special. My body had always known that.
‘I’m so very glad you’re here,’ I said. ‘So glad you got here so quickly. I don’t know how I would have got through the night without you. As long as you’re with me, as long as you love me, I feel that maybe, just maybe, I can survive anything, even this.’
He kissed me hard on the mouth then, and I could feel the sheer power of his love, just the way I always did.
‘You will always love me, you will always be with me?’ I asked when he stopped kissing me, knowing as I did so that this was a question far more stupid than anything he’d asked. Robert and me. Mr and Mrs Robert Anderson. We were cast in stone together. Had been from the day we met and would be until the day we died. Even the death of our beloved only son could not change that. Surely it couldn’t.
‘Always, my darling,’ he said. ‘I will always love you and I will always be with you. Always, always.’
As he spoke he picked up the as yet unopened second bottle of wine, two glasses and a corkscrew. Then he led me upstairs to the bedroom and I could feel in him a determination greater and indeed grimmer than I had ever felt before. I didn’t quite understand it.
But then, we had never lived through a day like this before.
Three
Robert wanted to shower and shave. I was clinging to him again and wouldn’t let go. In the end he just discarded his clothes on the floor where I’d dropped mine earlier, and we climbed into bed, me still in my dressing gown which I couldn’t bear to remove because I was shivering so much. I felt chilled to the marrow even though the day had been warm and I had stepped out of the bath not long before.
Robert wrapped his arms around me inside the dressing gown and eventually his body and the bedclothes covering us warmed me at least to the point where the shivering stopped.
We did not make love. It might have brought us comfort, but I don’t think either of us were capable. Neither could we sleep. Instead we talked, going over what had happened again and again, asking the same questions repeatedly. The same unanswerable questions.
After a bit Robert sat up in bed, opened the wine, without any of the care he usually applied to the task, and poured us both large glasses. We drank deeply then clung to each other again.
‘I want to know why, Robert,’ I said. ‘We both do, don’t we? Why would our beautiful boy have taken his own life?’
After all, hadn’t he had everything that he could possibly have wanted? A loving family, a wonderful home, the brightest of futures?
Yet I recalled how Robbie had once responded when Robert and I had been discussing a teenage suicide case reported in the press. I had wondered aloud how anyone so young could find life so hopeless. Robbie had enquired what difference age made, if life no longer felt worth living.
‘Do you remember that, Robert?’ I asked. ‘We were quite taken aback. It was when he didn’t seem happy at school. We even thought he might be being bullied.’
‘Marion, that was nearly three years ago at his old school,’ said Robert. ‘Everything changed when we moved him.’
I nodded. ‘But he was always such a sensitive boy. Maybe even more so than we realized...’
Robert made no further reply. At first he seemed content to let me do most of the talking. We were both in shock, of course, him every bit as much as me in spite of it having been me who had found our son’s body.
However, when he started to ask questions, in some detail, about exactly how I’d found Robbie, exactly what the police had said, exactly what conclusion they had come to, and so on, it was as if the floodgates opened. He talked and talked. We both did.
‘They don’t really think there’s anything suspicious about his death, do they?’ he enquired.
‘I don’t believe so. I don’t know. There will have to be an inquest apparently.’
‘An inquest?’ Robert sounded alarmed. ‘Why does there have to be an inquest?’
‘Just routine, the CID man said. He said that about everything.’
‘Will we have to appear in court?’
‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t think you’d have to. I might. I found his body. Doesn’t that make me what they call a material witness?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘No.’
‘I just don’t understand it, any of it.’
‘How will we ever be able to understand it?’
‘Your friend. Bella? Has she been to the house before?’
‘Yes. Two or three times. She came here and then we took the dogs up over the moors for an hour or so. She’s barely a friend. Though she was tonight, that’s for sure.’
‘What about Robbie? How did they get on? Did he go with you on the walks?’
‘Only the once, I think. He seemed to like Bella actually. But to him I suppose we were just two old biddies nattering on. He wasn’t very interested in our company. Who cares about that, Robert?’
Suddenly I felt irritated by him. That was unusual. But then, this was an unusual and horrible night.
‘I was just trying to think of anything that was new or different in his life, anything that could have caused him to... to want to do such a thing. What about school? Maybe things weren’t as perfect as we thought. You’ve always been much more involved than me. Could there have been something wrong at school?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m almost sure not.’
Robbie had been a day pupil of Kelly College, the famous Devon public school just outside the Dartmoor market town of Tavistock, about thirty minutes’ drive from our home. He’d won a swimming scholarship there a couple of years previously, which had halved the fees, thus making it possible for us to remove him from Okehampton College, where we had felt he was unhappy. There was nothing much wrong with our local community school, as I knew well enough first-hand now that I taught there part-time, but it had probably been a tad too boisterous for our Robbie. However, he seemed to have fitted in smoothly at Kelly, one of the country’s top swimming schools. He was not remotely interested in any other school sport and hated team games, but he loved his swimming, and had successfully represented Devon County on several occasions.