“It’s no problem.”
He leaned back and closed his eyes once more. She licked the spoon and scraped the dropped food back into the bowl. She dipped the corner of the tea towel in her glass of water and rubbed gently at the stain. She squeezed his hand. “How are you doing in there?” He squeezed back then slowly loosened his grip. She took the bowls into the kitchen, dumped the remaining treacle pudding into the bin and set the bowls in the sink. She went back into the living room and watched him for a while.
“Let’s make you more comfortable.” She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him forward and slipped the top pillow out from behind his head. He roused himself a little then became still. She waited for thirty seconds then pulled him forward once more to remove the next pillow. The third and last was harder to remove. Gently, she eased it free by pulling it from side to side, taking care not to wake him, until it slipped out.
He was now lying flat on his back. His breathing stopped for a few seconds then restarted. His arms circled, reaching for some invisible thing just above the bed, then they were still again. A couple of minutes later he went through the same cycle without waking. “Bunny?” she said quietly, but there was no response.
Quarter past eight. She waited till half past. The periods when he was not breathing grew longer but some automatic response kicked in every time. Had she miscalculated? Eight forty. She put her hand on his arm. “Come on, Bunny. Help me out here.”
Eight forty-five. He was no longer lifting his arms off the bed, just the ghost of a movement. He looked shattered, as if he were reaching the end of a long fight against a much stronger opponent.
“It’s OK, Bunny. You can let go.”
She could no longer see his chest rising and falling. She could no longer hear him breathing, only a tiny, broken hiss that stopped and started and stopped and started and finally, just before nine o’clock, stopped altogether.
She waited another five minutes to be sure, then she leaned over and kissed him. It was nothing, really, when you thought about it, like turning off a light. You were here, then you were gone.
She took the little brown tub from her pocket, unscrewed the lid and gently dropped both of them onto the carpet on the far side of the bed. She poured the remains of his wine onto the table and laid the glass on its side. She carried her own glass into the kitchen where she washed the crockery, cutlery and glassware and left it to dry. She double-bagged the packaging and the uneaten food and dropped everything in the bin outside the front door. She washed and dried her hands and went into the garden for a cigarette.
She would discover him when she came down in the morning. She would notice the glass but she would fail to see the diazepam. She would check his pulse and his breathing but she would know from the look of him that he had been dead for some time. She would call an ambulance and wait outside for it to arrive. She would call Bunny’s mother. She would call Bunny’s sister. She would say, “He seemed so happy.” She would wrap the owl and the apostle spoons and the wall plate in newspaper and put them at the bottom of her suitcase, but she wouldn’t leave town till after the funeral. The idea of him being rolled through those curtains without a friend in the room was almost unbearable.
WODWO
It is late afternoon on Christmas Eve and the predicted snow has begun, a long front of white teeth sweeping down the weather map of the Baltic and fastening itself into the curved rump of England. Kelmarsh, Clipston, Sibbertoft: red sandstone and rolling green hills, thatched roofs, cattle farms and boxy Saxon churches. Scattered flakes at first, whiter than the darkening sky behind them, that magical childhood silence settling on everything, only the peal of church bells and the chatter of distant trains being carried in the cold, clean air.
Madeleine Cooper is cooking a smoked salmon quiche with honey-glazed carrots and broccoli, getting everything ready for the final bake and steam when the three children and their respective families have safely arrived. There is a chocolate and raspberry pavlova in the fridge.
Her husband, Martin, has completed his allotted, minimal task of setting the table and is now sitting in his study listening to the St. Matthew Passion (the 2001 Nikolaus Harnoncourt recording) and reading Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521–1580. He has set the table wrong, laying nine places instead of ten. It is a drama they play out so often they hardly notice anymore: his feigned incompetence followed by her feigned exasperation (“Can you honestly not count the members of your own family?”) which makes her feel more important and him more justified in not providing any further help. He retired two years ago after thirty-six years of neurosurgery, at St. George’s, Tooting, then Frenchay in Bristol, then out into the sticks for a final few laps at Leicester Royal Infirmary. She worried about him falling to pieces in the time-honoured manner of returning Vietnam vets now that no lives were on the line but he applies to books, music, golf and grade 5 piano the same unsentimental rigour he previously applied to leucotomies, aneurysms and pituitary adenomas.
Madeleine worries about most things. She has been anxious for the greater part of her adult life. She rarely talks about this to anyone, though it is obvious to those around her, Martin included. He believes that she suffers from a basic flaw in her psychological make-up which has been exacerbated by a life in which she has taken very few risks and spent too much time in her own company. It being something he is powerless to change he sees little point in discussing the subject.
Just after four o’clock their eldest daughter, Sarah, and her husband, Robert, arrive. Sarah is the service manager for business development at Hampshire County Council, a job which used to involve building children’s homes, rolling out broadband and getting social workers into GP surgeries but which now mostly involves sacking employees, closing down projects and saving money. Robert is the fund manager for Appalachian, a small wealth management company he set up three years ago with two escapees from Deutsche Bank, which they run from an office in Reading to which he commutes from Winchester three days a week.
They have one child, a teenage daughter, Ellie, who is spending Christmas with her boyfriend’s family in Winchester because she and Daniel are still in the honeymoon period and his parents are “so, so, so much more relaxed than you,” meaning, presumably, that she has not yet had a meltdown in their presence.
Sarah is bloody hard work. That’s her father’s blunt diagnosis. Sarah puts it down to her being a woman and, unlike her mother, having a job and opinions, some of which are not the same as her father’s.
Robert likes the fact that Sarah is argumentative and opinionated, though this is made easier by the fact that he agrees with most of those opinions and most of the arguments are therefore had with other people, but he dislikes visiting his parents-in-law in whose presence Sarah can sometimes regress to the teenage girl he guesses she once was, a teenage girl not unlike their own teenage daughter in her less charming moods. It is a subject he has tried to broach with Sarah. It is not a subject he is going to broach again. There is a constant and generous supply of alcohol at the Rookery, however, which he treats as a medical necessity, like a morphine drip on a low setting.
“Hello, darling.” Madeleine hugs her daughter.
Robert gives Madeleine their traditional uneasy embrace. There is a surge of choral music (“…Ich will dir mein Herze schenken…”) and Martin appears from the opened study door for the golf-club handshake which always strikes Robert as too muscular for a man who previously worked inside the brains of living human beings. He waves the cordless in his free hand. “That was Leo and Sofie. They’ll be here in twenty minutes.”