Platitude:
An animal that looks like a hot water bottle.
Hearing Helen’s laughter, he shut his eyes tightly until the phone stopped ringing, just as it had the day before. And the day before that.
Quiet loomed, welcome and unwelcome in the mausoleum of his house.
He stared at the inert typewriter in the study, the signed photographs and letter-headed notepaper stacked beside it, the avalanche of mail from fans and well-wishers spilling copiously, unattended, across the floor from the open bureau, littering the carpet. He pulled the door shut, unable to bear looking at it.
Hardly thinking what he was doing, he re-entered the kitchen and spooned two scoops of Ty-phoo into the tea pot and was about to pour in boiling water when he froze.
The sudden idea that Joyce might pop round became horrifically possible, if not probable. She wasn’t far away. No more than a short car journey, in fact, and she could be here and he would be trapped. Heavens, he could not face that. That would be unbearable. Instantly he realised he had to get out. Flee.
Unwillingly, sickeningly, he had no choice but to brave the day.
Upstairs he shook off his slippers, replacing them with a pair of bright yellow socks. Put on his grey flannel slacks, so terribly loose around the waist. Needing yet another hole in the belt. Shirt. Collar gaping several sizes too big now, too. Tie. No time for tie. Forget tie. Why was he forced to do this? Why was he forced to leave his home when he didn’t want to? He realised he was scared. The scaremonger, scared. Of this. What if he saw somebody? What if they talked to him? Could he be impolite? Unthinkable. Could he tell them how he really felt? Impossible. What then?
He told himself he was an actor. He would act.
Back in the hall he pulled on his winter coat and black woollen hat, the kind fishermen wear, tugging it down over his ears, then looped his scarf round his neck like an over-eager schoolboy. February days could be bright, he told himself, and he found his sunglasses on the mantelpiece in the living room sitting next to a black and white photograph of his dead wife. At first he avoided looking at it, then kissed his trembling fingertips and pressed them gently to her cheek. His fingerprints remained on the glass for a second before fading away.
He walked away from 3 Seaway Cottages, its curtains still drawn, giving it the appearance of a house in slumber. As a married couple they’d bought it in the late fifties with money he’d earned from The Hound of the Baskervilles, because having a place by the sea—especially here, a town they’d been visiting for years—would be good for Helen’s breathing. “You have two homes in life,” she’d said, “the one you’re born in and another you find,” and this one they’d found, with its big, tall windows for painting under the heavens and enjoying the estuary views across Shell Ness, clapboard sides like something from a whaling port in New England. They were blissfully happy here, happier than either of them could have dreamed Now it seemed the house itself was dreaming of that happiness.
He paused and breathed in deeply, tasting brine at the back of his tongue.
Good, clean fresh air for her health.
The mist of his sighs drifted in short puffs as he trudged along the shingle, patchy with errant sprigs of grass, in the direction of the Neptune pub, the wind buffeting his fragile frame and kicking at the ends of his dark, long coat. Above him the sky hung Airfix blue, the sky over a cenotaph on poppy day, chill with brisk respect, and he was small under it.
Automatically he’d found himself taking the path he and Helen had taken—how many times?—arm in arm. Always arm in arm. His, muscular and taut, unerringly protective: hers light as a feather, a spirit in human form, even then. If he had grasped and held her, back then… stopped her from… Stupid. Foolish thoughts. But his thoughts at least kept her with him, if only in his heart. He was afraid to let those thoughts be blown away. As he placed one foot in front of the other he felt that stepping from that path would be some sort of blasphemy. That path was his path now, and his to tread alone.
His heart jumped as he noticed two huddled people coming towards him, chequered green and brown patterns, their scarves fluttering. A man and wife, arm in arm. He felt frightened again. He did not want to see their faces and fixed his eyes past them, on the middle distance, but in his peripheral vision could tell they had already seen him and saw them look at each other as they drew unavoidably closer. His chest tightened with dread.
“Mr Cushing?”
He had no alternative but to stop. He blinked like a lark, feigning surprise. Incomprehensibly, he found himself smiling.
“Sorry.” The man had a local accent. “Bob. Bob and Margaret? Nelson Road? I just wanted to say we were really sorry to hear about your wife.”
He took Bob’s hand in both of his and squeezed it warmly. He had no idea who Bob was, or Margaret for that matter.
“Bless you.”
The man and woman went on their way in the direction of West Beach and Seasalter and he walked on towards the Harbour, still smiling. Still wearing the mask.
He was an actor. He would act.
Act as if he were alive.
The sky had turned silver grey and the wind had begun whipping the surface of the water. After passing the hull of the Favourite, that familiar old oyster yawl beached like a whale between Island Wall and the sea, he sat in his usual spot near Keam’s Yard facing the wooden groynes that divided the beach, where he was wont to paint his watercolours of the coast. But there was no paint box or easel with him today. No such activity could inspire, activate or relax him and he wondered if that affliction, that restless hopelessness, might pass. If it meant forgetting Helen, even for an instant, he hoped it would not.
Usually the music of the boats, the flag-rustling and chiming of the rigging, was a comfort. Today it was not. How could it be? How could anything be? When there was nothing left in life but to endure it?
He took off his sunglasses and pulled a white cotton glove from his pocket onto the fingers of his right hand, momentarily resembling a magician, then lit a John Player unfiltered. It had become a habit during filming: he said, often, he didn’t want to play some ‘Nineteenth Century Professor of the Nicotine Stains’. As he smoked he looked down at his bare left hand which rested on his knee, lined with a route-map of pronounced blue veins. He traced them with his finger tips, not realising that he was enacting the gentle touch of another.
He closed his eyes, resting them from the sun and took into his smoker’s lungs the age-old aroma of the sea. Of all the senses, that of smell more than any other is the evoker of memories: and so it was. He remembered with uncanny clarity the last time he and Helen had watched children building ‘grotters’—sand or mud sculptures embellished imaginatively with myriads of oyster shells—only to see the waves come in and destroy them at the end of a warm and joyful Saint James’s Day. Clutching his arm, Helen had said, “Such a shame for the sea to wash away something so beautiful.” He’d laughed. His laughter was so distant now. “Don’t worry, my dear. They’ll make more beautiful ones next year.” “But that one was special,” she’d said, “I wanted that one to stay.”
The fresh salt air smarted in his eyes.
“I know who you are,” said a disembodied young voice.