Roger put in a brief appearance on his way to a golf club gathering. He advanced into the room in a hearty manner and kissed my cheek. ‘So good to see you,’ he murmured, one eye on his wife. ‘I hope everything’s under control.’ He looked healthy and wealthy, but not particularly rested or happy.
I was tempted to punish him with a catalogue of what was not going well, but spared him. More than once over the past few weeks, as I reflected on what had happened to Nathan, I reassured myself that Roger, for all his power and success, was as likely to be done-to as often as he did-by. Soon or later, Roger’s career would end.
After he had left, and Angela had brought in tea and chocolate cake and taken the boys away, Gisela asked after Paradox and the job. I put down my cup. ‘I have a fight on my hands,’ I told her, ‘and I’m going to need every ounce of guile I possess.’
Gisela cut a minute slice of chocolate cake and arranged it on her plate. ‘I appreciate how difficult it must be for you, Minty. I admire how you’re handling everything.’
It was nice of her to mention it, but I wondered if she meant it. ‘Have you heard from Marcus?’
At his name, she leapt to her feet. ‘No, I haven’t.’
I waited for more information, but Gisela had retreated into painful reflection. The scene on the tapestry cushion at my right elbow depicted hunters in the forest and a wounded white stag. The forest had been woven with a dreamy, mysterious quality, and its floor was carpeted with little animals and flowers. ‘Are you angry, Gisela?’
‘I am and I’m not.’ Gisela took up a position by the long window and fingered the curtain tie-back. ‘OΚ. I’ll say this. In the end, I felt I had no choice. I’m married to Roger, and I can’t break a vow as easily as Marcus suggests.’
This shone a new, fascinating light on the situation. ‘Gisela, since when have you minded about marriage vows?’
She tossed her head. ‘You’ve read me wrong, Minty. I always observed the contract. I did exactly what was expected and what I undertook to do. Marriage is a business, not some mystical revelation.’ She fiddled some more with the tie-back. ‘In the end, it wasn’t a choice. That’s what upset me… a little. I did not have it in me to consider the alternative, with Marcus, to what I have now, with Roger. I couldn’t see it.’
‘Ah.’
‘Does that make me dead?’
I hazarded a shrewd guess. ‘Is that what Marcus said?’
Gisela smiled bleakly. ‘Something along those lines. But it’s done.’ She returned to her seat, and I watched her slip back into the hostess’s skin, straightening her skirt and lifting the teapot. ‘More?’
Gisela’s pact with the devil had evidently not made her that happy. ‘Are you sure?’
She put down the teapot. ‘You know what they say about addicts? If you take away the addiction and the fuss around it, there’s nothing left to fill the day.’
‘Charity work?’
It was as bad a joke as Nathan would have made. Gisela managed a wintry smile. ‘Then I would be truly dead.’ She pointed to the cushion. ‘French. Eighteenth century. Note the superb vegetable dyes.’
‘Noted.’ I had half an ear listening for the twins and whether they were creating mayhem with Angela.
Gisela traced the outline of the wounded stag on the cushion with a finger on which gleamed an important diamond ring. ‘I had become used to a set-up where everything on the surface appeared straightforward but wasn’t, and only I knew about it. There was an edge to my life, like the hem on a garment. I could say to myself, “I’m married to Nicholas, or Richmond, or Roger, but I have the option to pack my bags.”’ She laughed. ‘The trouble is, since I’ve told Marcus to go, I spend all my time thinking about him in a way I never did when he was on the scene.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘That’s bad. You’ve got guilt plus the grass-is-greener syndrome rolled into one.’
Gisela was startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a stubborn, pesky illness that won’t go away.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’m intimately acquainted with it,’ I said.
In the car, Felix piped up, ‘If we don’t have a daddy, does that mean we’re not a family?’
‘No, Felix. You can be a family without a daddy’
‘And you really are a mummy.’
I stared at the snarled traffic. ‘I really am a mummy.’
When we got back, Eve was in the kitchen. She looked a lot stronger, even if her clothes hung off her. ‘I make supper,’ she said, and when I tried to stop her she held up her hand. ‘I do.’
I helped her to cut up cucumber and carrot sticks, and to heat up the shepherd’s pie. She moved painfully slowly, but with determination. Afterwards she insisted on clearing up. She raised her normally indifferent eyes to mine and, in them, sparked gratitude. ‘You are nice, Minty.’
During the bad nights, I had been getting rid of Nathan. It should have been a logical process – Nathan was no longer there to wear his shirts, socks, suits, shoes, ties, and they were easy to sort and pack. But their disposal defied logic. Sometimes I managed to clear a drawer; sometimes it was beyond me. It was a process that had to be secret because I didn’t wish the boys to witness it and because… it hurt. So I accomplished it in fits and starts, stealthily, during those nights.
It was a quarter to two when I got out of bed and opened the doors to Nathan’s wardrobe. Already light dust coated the contents. There were his ties, blue, red and green. A scarf was jammed on to the shelf and I picked it up. It was an expensive one, and I caught the faintest echo of his aftershave. The sensation of a sharp instrument striking through my breast made me gasp. I sank down on the bed, holding it between fingers from which the feeling had drained.
Nathan was dead.
After a while, I put it aside, took out his favourite grey suit and laid it on the bed. Into the jacket I tucked his favourite blue office shirt. Round the collar went the tie, red silk. A pair of silk socks and polished shoes completed the ensemble.
There. This was the shell of Nathan. I could pretend he was there, leaning against the pillows, hands folded behind his head. Minty, will you please pay attention… Pillow punched. Shoes eased off and discarded. Minty, what do you think?
The bag for the hospice charity shop was on the floor. If I removed the tie from the shell and placed it in the bag, part of Nathan had gone. If I took out the shirt, as I now did, and folded it carefully, another bit of him had vanished. The shoes… the shoes? If I dropped them into the bag, it would be impossible for Nathan ever again to walk into number seven and run up the stairs – where are my boys?
And with the suit went the businessman who formulated strategies and said, Our competitors are really strong. Let’s give them a hard time.
‘When I married Nathan,’ Rose had confided to me, at one of our lunches in the early days, ‘I was brokenhearted from a love affair that had gone wrong. But Nathan was so anxious to make me happy, how could I resist? He was a rock, and Hal was unreliable sand. What more could I ask?’
I was not so convinced by Rose’s capacity to sort out the rocks from the sand. This was a woman who, she also confided to me, used to slip into St Benedicta’s church en route for home and light a candle under the Madonna. If that was not building a house on sand, I didn’t know what was.
‘Hal could never be what I wanted,’ Rose had added. ‘We both knew it. But Nathan was.’