‘But I don’t want to see any of them! It would… it would be too difficult. Too awful.’
‘Well… well then, darling, it’s a big enough city. Nobody need know you’re there at all, if you don’t want,’ she said.
‘That’s true,’ said Boyd. He sounded careful, hopeful, as if he hadn’t considered this, so Clare pushed on once more.
‘We don’t have to go any of the places that you… went before. I’ve never travelled, Boyd; not properly. We can make it our second honeymoon. It would be such an adventure, and, well, it can only be good for you, surely? I mean, workwise.’ The month before, Boyd had been passed over for a senior partnership for a second time. He ran his hands through his hair, stood up and paced the sitting room carpet for a while. ‘Please let’s go, Boyd. I think it would be wonderful.’
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘All right, we’ll go.’
It would be a better honeymoon this time around, Clare decided, since the first had been rife with the awkwardness of two shy people making love for the first time. They’d gone to the Isle of Wight for a week, but her memories were of all the painful little misunderstandings, odd misfires and subtle disappointments. Boyd made the journey to New York first, and had been there some weeks before Clare travelled out to join him, leaving Pip at home with a nanny. He’d started work on his design for the new bank building – not quite a grand hotel, but still something monumental. That was the word the bank used – monumental. Something that people would have to stop to look at, and tip back their heads to take in. He had a design but it wasn’t quite there – she heard those words a lot in the six weeks she stayed in the small rented apartment near Central Park. It’s not quite there. They never mentioned Emma; Clare watched her husband carefully for signs of grief or painful memory, and was relieved to see none.
She’d been a little anxious that the trip might make him worse, not better, but she began to relax. Boyd had spent the first year of their marriage jumping at shadows, and now and then they’d overwhelmed him. Like the time she’d found him holding Emma’s silk gloves, cast away in thought. He was the first to check the post every morning; he stiffened whenever the doorbell rang. Clare sometimes found him staring out of a window, or into the fire, hands in his pockets, eyes glassy. Once she saw him staring at Pip as he played with his trains on the nursery carpet, and she went in to them with a smile but paused, because Boyd was looking at his son as if he hadn’t the slightest idea who he was. But things had improved since then; the shadows had receded, and he was less distant. Clare spoke about Emma with Pip, but never with Boyd. She wanted her husband to concentrate on the future, not the past, and it seemed to her, in those first few weeks they were together in New York, that he was doing exactly that.
Boyd seemed focused, but happy. He spent long hours studying the Flatiron, and the brand new Woolworth Building, and the St Regis Hotel. He knew the bank had three firms working on preliminary drawings, and that he was the only European. He knew they expected to see something stately and Victorian in style from him, or something beaux-arts; something with all the dyed-in-the-wool grandeur of the Empire. Boyd wanted to give them something they hadn’t even considered – something they’d never seen before, but that wouldn’t shock them overly. A clock tower to break the roofline, with decorations either side after the ancient Egyptian style, and thin obelisks at each corner, like delicate, geometric rock pinnacles. He was secretive, and wouldn’t show Clare the drawings he spent so many hours hunched over. Late in the day he’d let her coax him away from them to walk beneath the brand new leaves in Central Park, where the constant city roar was a murmur, and the air smelled of living things as well as food and sweat and burning. The owner of the bank was hosting a party to mark the submission and unveiling of the three designs. The mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, would be attending, and with that news Clare realised, finally, the significance of what her husband was working on. And the day after that announcement came something happened, and Boyd was never the same again.
Clare returned to the apartment from lunch with the wives of two of Boyd’s colleagues, and found him at the window in a posture of such unnatural stiffness that she thought at once he’d had terrible news of some kind. Her stomach dropped; she thought immediately of Pip.
‘Boyd, darling, what is it? What’s happened?’ she said, but he didn’t move. She went to stand beside him and saw the glass in his hand, and the brandy bottle on the ottoman, and noticed the stink of it all around. ‘Boyd?’ she whispered, but she might as well have been mute, invisible. He looked dead. His face was grey and had a shine to it; unpleasant-looking, like something was trying to ooze out from inside him. If he was breathing it didn’t move his chest and it made no sound. His eyes looked dull and empty. If she’d found him lying down in that state she would have screamed. She tried to take his hand but it was clenched tightly around something, and then she noticed a few white spots against the green carpet. She frowned at them until she realised what they were. Frantically, she prised open Boyd’s hand and found his little jar of barbiturate pills, which he took to soothe his nerves and help him sleep. The jar was empty.
At her touch Boyd turned his head slowly towards her and, just as slowly, his face collapsed; his mouth melting open, misshapen, trembling. Clare caught her breath. ‘Boyd, tell me! Tell me! Is it Pip? Has something happened to Pip?’
‘They were here. They came here,’ he said. ‘They knew… knew where I was.’ The words were so slurred and distorted she could hardly make them out.
‘Who knew? Who came here? Boyd, I don’t understand.’ Boyd swayed, took a staggering step, fell to his knees. Clare went down with him and put her arms around him, tried to soothe him. He was heavy, and threatened to topple all the way; she struggled to hold him, and then, with a spasm that felt strange against her body, he vomited. She felt the heat of it spatter her calves, and the stink of the brandy got stronger, and as she tugged and cajoled him towards the bathroom she saw more white pills in what he’d brought up. Many more. He was sick again, and a third time before she managed to get him any distance at all. Everything about him was unfamiliar; his long body was a dead weight, his loose face and rolling eyes had no trace of his personality, or the melancholy dignity of the man she’d married. She left him lying on his side while she called the doctor, so panicked that at first she couldn’t remember how to use the telephone, even to reach the concierge.
The doctor was with him for a long time. He gave Boyd an emetic that brought up everything else inside him, until his convulsions resulted in nothing but strands of spittle and horrible choking sounds. Clare went back and forth to the bathroom, emptying the doctor’s bowl, trying to clean the worst of the sick from the carpet. The smell of it was inescapable. Outside the window, the sun moved below the rooftops and the sky turned dove grey. Clare watched pigeons bolt across it and noticed how the twilight took the colour out of everything. She felt that these were things that were happening to another person, someone quite other than her. She was detached from them; she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to think too much about it. She only knew her own fear for what it was when the doctor emerged, and sent her heart jolting madly.