I bent down and pulled them into a hug. Their small hard heads butted into my chest. They were now my entire responsibility.
Nathan was with me throughout that fear-filled night. We were in the sitting room. The clock ticked on the half-moon table by the window and we were arguing about it. Nathan thought it would be safer on the mantelpiece. ‘Please do as I wish, Minty.’ I glanced up from a card of paint samples and heard myself say, ‘Do you think Eastern Beige would look right in here?’
‘Eastern Beige,’ he retorted. ‘Compost, more like.’
Nathan was in the garden, in his brown corduroys, favourite blue shirt and a pair of Wellingtons, digging under the lilac tree. On the landing, I was struggling to iron a shirt, which, however I stroked and stretched it, would not lose its creases.
Nathan pushed the fork into the earth, reached into the ground with both hands and extracted a bundle wrapped in a white wool shawl. ‘This is my secret grief, Minty,’ I heard him say, in that restless, half-conscious interlude.
The bedroom was airless, and I alternated between sweating and shivering, which, I supposed, was shock. Could I have done more? Yes, I could. Was Nathan so unhappy? Yes, he was… I fled upstairs to the spare bedroom. The bed was not made up but I slipped on to the bare mattress, pulled the folded duvet over me and stared into the darkness.
I could not see the painting on the wall above me in the dark but, with an internal eye, I traced those roses. I calculated their dimensions, the arrangement of the shapes on the canvas. I struck up an intimate acquaintance with each shade and tint, ticking them off on my fingers: chalk white, clotted cream, weak tea, and the blood-brown of the darkening petals scattered at the base of the vase.
When I could bear it no longer, I slid out of bed, reached up and turned the painting to the wall.
There. They had gone.
A little later – how long? – I found myself in Nathan’s study. I opened his filing cabinet to reveal the sections neatly labelled in black ink. ‘Insurance’, an orange file. ‘House’, blue. ‘Lawyer’, red. ‘Health’, yellow.
Why had he chosen yellow for health? It was not a good colour. Yellow was dispiriting and suggested disease. Yellow fever. Dengue fever. Malaria. Jaundice. I flipped it open at the back, then rifled through the documents from the bottom up.
There were assorted letters from doctors with addresses in Harley Street. One reported the results of an eye test. Another a blood test. All routine, all normal, negative, non-threatening. The top letter on the pile was different. It read: ‘Dear Mr Lloyd, As we agreed at our consultation, I have made arrangements for you to see my colleague, Mr Oxford, at the London Heart Hospital. I have explained my concerns – blood pressure, murmur, etc. – and he will proceed with the investigation. If you would kindly get in touch with him directly…’
The letter was dated six months ago.
I reread the polite sentences. Behind the bland ‘concerns’ by a professional’s marker and coded allusion. Nathan, the consultant was suggesting, displayed a cluster of symptoms and was required to do something about it.
Nathan had failed to do so.
Angrily, I snatched up the letter. Why? And why had he not told me?
It would have been so easy to manage. We could have attended the appointment together. I would have sat meek as a mouse reading Country Life or dog-eared copies of Hello! in the waiting room while the highways and byways of his arteries and the chambers of his heart were flagged up on a screen elsewhere. As we listened to the verdict of what was wrong, I would have reached out and taken his hand.
He would only have had to say, ‘I’m having problems with my heart,’ for me to swing into action. It would have been a field day for lists. Low-cholesterol spread, green vegetables, vitamins, an exercise bike. And for timetables, which I was good at too. Exercise, 7-7.30 a.m. Breakfast, 7.45…
The enormity of Nathan’s silence was an excruciating reminder of how silent we had been during his life. I had failed to comfort him. I had not stroked his cheek. We had not waited stoically together in a consultant’s anteroom.
Neither had my phone rung this morning, and I had not picked it up to hear him say, ‘Minty, I’ve got something to tell you… It will be a shock.’
So he’d never heard my reply: ‘Vistemax sucks. Have you rung the lawyer? Nathan, this isn’t personal, you know…’ And he never heard me say, ‘Nathan, hold on. I’m coming over to get you and we’ll talk this through.’
Nathan had chosen to bury his anguish in silence, and then to seek out Rose.
But Nathan was dead.
I fell to my knees by the filing cabinet, placed my hands on the open drawer, for it held the facts – the hard facts of which I was so fond – of Nathan’s life.
I bowed my head and, finally, I wept.
It was three thirty in the morning on the first day of my widowhood.
At nine the following morning I sat at Nathan’s desk in his study. The boys had gone to school, and Eve was vacuuming in the room next door.
The phone rang. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘You don’t have to say anything, Roger.’
‘I assume it was his heart?’
I put down the phone. It rang again almost immediately. ‘If there’s anything we can do, it shall be done,’ said Roger. ‘Please will you let us know when the funeral is… Minty, I recognize that this is the most tragic, intolerable situation…’
Was this the moment to point out that Roger had made such a mistake in dismissing Nathan’s accumulation of experience for the sake of change? Should I also mention that he had almost certainly driven Nathan to his death?
‘I know you’ll have mixed feelings -’
‘No, Roger. Not mixed feelings. Very straightforward feelings.’
‘We were doing what was best for Vistemax.’
‘Peter Shaker? Really?’
There was nothing more to add. Roger was a businessman and I was a widow, and however much I might long to connect, there was no chance. Again, I terminated the conversation and took the phone off the hook. Not a moment too soon, for it was almost too much. And I could not let go. Not yet. Perhaps never.
The vacuuming drilled into my skull. I called, ‘Eve, could you stop that?’
She appeared from the sitting room. ‘You need clean house, Minty. People will come.’
Would they?
‘You look bad. I get you cup of tea.’
I sat at Nathan’s desk, holding the cup and wondering how long my fingers could stand the pain. That was easy to deal with – unlike the pain I must inflict on Lucas and Felix. An expert could tell me what to say. Experts had formulas at their fingertips. ‘Daddy has gone on a long journey, and won’t be coming back.’ Would that do? Or…‘Daddy is watching over you, but he can’t actually be here.’
The doorbell rang, and Eve clattered out into the hall.
It was Mrs Austen: crabby Mrs Austen. ‘Eve. We’ve just heard. Here is soup. My tomatoes. Feed it to them.’
Ten minutes later, the doorbell sounded again. This time it was Kate Winsom from across the road. ‘This is so awful,’ I heard her say, as I cowered in the study. ‘Look, I’m off to the supermarket. Can I do the shopping? Tell Minty I’ll be in touch at a more – at a more appropriate time. Unfortunately, I have to fly now. The children…’
For the tenth time, I attempted to make a list. But what good was that?
The doorbell – oh, that doorbell – rang and I pressed my face hard into my fingers. Next thing, I felt a light touch on my hair. Gisela said, ‘I came as soon as I could.’
I reared my head. ‘You knew what Roger was going to do and you didn’t tell me.’
‘Would you have expected me to? Would you have done? But I was going to drop a hint at lunch.’ She slid a finger on to my pulse and felt it. ‘Have you slept? And when you did you last eat?’