‘Dusha,’ said Zoya, reaching down to pick him up, and as she did so I looked further along the passageway until I saw a man with a shock of red hair deep in discussion with a doctor and I recognized him as my son-in-law, Ralph. I watched. I didn’t move. The doctor was talking. His face was serious. After a moment he extended an arm, placed his hand on Ralph’s left shoulder and pursed his lips. There was nothing left to say.
Ralph turned then, sensing the commotion behind him, and our eyes met. He stared through me, his expression telling me everything that I needed to know as he focussed on my face for a long time before recognizing me.
‘Ralph,’ said Zoya, pushing Michael aside now and running towards him, dropping her handbag on the ground as she did so – when had she even collected it, I wondered? – a hairbrush, clips, a notepad, a pen, some tissues, keys, a purse, a photograph, I remember it all, falling out and splashing across the white tiled floor as if her entire life had suddenly come apart at its centre. ‘Ralph,’ she shouted, grabbing him by the shoulders. ‘Ralph, where is she? Is she all right? Answer me, Ralph! Where is she? Where is my daughter?’
He looked at her and shook his head and in the silence that followed, Michael turned to me, his chin wobbling slightly in terror at the unexpected nature of the emotions that surrounded him. He was wearing a football shirt, the colours of his favourite team, and it occurred to me that I might take him to see a home game soon, if the weather permitted it. He would need to know that he was loved, this boy. That our family was defined by those we had lost.
Please, Mr Jachmenev, she had said and finally I agreed to accompany the woman who had been watching me at the library to Russell Square, where we sat awkwardly on a bench, side by side. It felt strange to me to be sharing such an intimate setting with a woman who wasn’t my wife. I wanted to run from the scene, to take no part in it, but I had agreed to hear her out and I would not break my word.
‘I’m not trying to compare my suffering with yours,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘I understand that they’re completely different things. But please, Mr Jachmenev, you must believe me when I tell you how sorry I am. I don’t think I have the words to express the remorse that I feel.’
I was pleased by the activity that surrounded us, for the noise and hum of conversation permitted me to pay a little less than my full attention to her. In fact, as she spoke I was half listening to a young couple seated only about ten feet away from us, engaged in a heated debate about the nature of their relationship, which was, I gathered, unstable.
‘The police told me that I shouldn’t contact you,’ continued Mrs Elliott, for that was the name of the lady who had knocked down and killed my daughter on the Albert Bridge Road several months before. ‘But I had to. It just didn’t feel right to say nothing. I felt I had to find you and speak to you both and make some sort of apology. I hope I didn’t do wrong. I certainly don’t want to make things any worse for you than they already are.’
‘Speak to us both?’ I asked, picking up on that phrase as I turned to her and frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘To you and your wife, I mean.’
‘But I’m the only one here,’ I said. ‘You came to see me.’
‘Yes, I thought that was for the best,’ she replied, looking down at her hands. I could see how nervous she was by the way she kept twisting and turning a pair of gloves between her fingers, an action that put me immediately in mind of David Frasier on the evening that he had stood outside our front door in a state of anxiety. The gloves were clearly an expensive pair. Her coat, too, was of a very fine quality. I wondered who this woman was, how she had come into her money. Whether she had earned it, inherited it, married it. The police, of course, had been willing to tell me anything that I wanted to know and I think it surprised them that I wanted to know nothing. I needed to know nothing. What possible difference would knowledge have made, after all? Arina would still be dead. Nothing was going to change that.
‘I thought if I saw you first, and talked to you, and explained to you how I felt,’ she continued, ‘then perhaps you could talk to your wife and I could meet her too. To apologize to her.’
‘Ah,’ I said, nodding my head and allowing a gentle sigh to escape my lips. ‘I understand now. It’s interesting to me, Mrs Elliott, the different way that people have approached my wife and me over these last few months.’
‘Interesting?’
‘There’s a curious feeling among people that somehow it’s worse for the mother than it is for the father. That the grief is somehow more intense. People ask me constantly how Zoya is holding up, as if I am my wife’s doctor and not my daughter’s father, but I don’t believe they ever ask the same thing of her about me. I could be wrong, of course, but—’
‘No, Mr Jachmenev,’ she said quickly, shaking her head. ‘No, you misunderstand me. I didn’t mean to suggest that—’
‘And even now, you come to talk to me first, to lay the groundwork for the much more difficult campaign ahead, as you see it. Of course, I don’t think for a moment that it was easy for you to initiate this conversation. I admire you for it, if I’m honest, but it’s depressing that you think that I feel any differently about Arina’s loss than my wife does. That her death is any less painful to me.’
She nodded and opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it and looked away. I said nothing for a moment, wanting her to think about what I had said. To my left, the young man was telling his companion that she needed to relax, that what did it matter, it had been a party, he had been drunk, she knew that he loved her really, and she was retaliating by calling him a series of vulgar names, each one more repugnant than the last. If her intention was to make him feel chastened, then she was failing, for he was laughing in mock-horror, an action which only exacerbated her wrath. I wondered why they felt the need for the world to overhear their quarrel. If, like film stars, their passion was only real when it had witnesses.
‘I’m a mother too, Mr Jachmenev,’ said Mrs Elliott after a few moments. ‘I suppose it’s only natural that I would immediately consider the feelings of another mother in this circumstance. But I certainly didn’t mean to diminish your suffering.’
‘You’re a parent,’ I said, countering her remark, but I softened a little nonetheless. It was easy to see how much pain this woman was in. I was in terrible pain too, but that could never be alleviated. It would be so easy for me to lessen her anguish, to assuage her conscience even by a small amount. It would be a gesture of infinite kindness and I wondered whether I was capable of it. ‘How many children do you have?’ I asked after a moment.
‘Three,’ she said, sounding pleased to be asked. Of course she was; they all want to be asked about their children. They, now, not we. ‘Two boys at university. A girl still at school.’
‘Do you mind if I ask their names?’
‘Not at all,’ she said, surprised perhaps by the friendliness of the question. ‘My eldest boy is John, that was my husband’s name. Then Daniel. And the girl is Beth.’
‘Was your husband’s name?’ I asked, turning to face her now, having picked up immediately on the tense.
‘Yes, I was widowed four years ago.’
‘He must have been quite young,’ I said, for she herself was only in her mid-forties.
‘Yes, he was. He died a week before his forty-ninth birthday. A heart attack. It was entirely unexpected.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked into the distance, lost now for a moment in her own grief and memories, and I glanced around the park, wondering how many of the people gathered there were suffering similar pain. The girl to my left was suggesting to the boy a variety of things he could do to himself, none of which sounded particularly pleasant, and he was trying to prevent her from standing up and leaving. I wished they would lower their tedious voices; they bored me intensely.