Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Letters to My Husband
Then
Now
Then
Now
Then
Now
Then
Now
Between
Now
Between
Now
Then
Between
Now
Between
Then
Now
Between
Now
Now
Between
Now
Between
Now
Questions for the Reader
Find out more . . .
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Sneak Preview
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain as SURROUNDED BY WATER
in 2014 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published as LETTERS TO MY HUSBAND in 2015
Copyright © Stephanie Butland 2014
Stephanie Butland has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473525047
ISBN 9780552779159
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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For my grandmothers,
Isabel and Ursula,
who always knew I was a writer
Mike,
This is stupid. It’s 4am and I’m sitting downstairs in the dark, writing a letter to you by torchlight. I don’t want to put the light on. I don’t know why not. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know where you are but I know you’re somewhere. You can’t just be nowhere. Not all of that you. You can’t have just gone.
Blake was in tears and in uniform when he came to the door, and all I could think of was that you were hurt, that something had happened to you, that you’d got in the way of some idiot drunk driver or waded into an argument that had got nasty. I remember thinking, sod’s law that you’ve got hurt walking the dog when it’s your job that’s supposed to be dangerous. I was already thinking about how we would all tease you, for getting into trouble walking a West Highland terrier. I didn’t want to look at Blake’s face. It wasn’t a face that looked as though it was planning to do any teasing, so I didn’t look. I couldn’t.
I took my coat from the hook and I started to put it on over my PJs because I assumed he was going to take me to the hospital to see you. And then I started to think about it all more seriously. How sad it would be if it was something that meant you couldn’t do your job any more – if you were going to be in a wheelchair, if you had lost your sight – and of how we would get through it, whatever it was, because – well, because what else would we do? It would be you and me, our world inside the big world, a yolk in an egg. It would work. We would make it. It wouldn’t have been the first time things didn’t go according to plan. I was so ready to be strong.
But my fingers struggled with the zip, and I couldn’t see properly, and Blake still wasn’t saying anything, even though I was asking, asking, what’s happened to him, where is he, was it a car crash, did someone hit him, why can’t he ever learn that off duty means off duty. He was just crying, and then he put his hands over my hands and took them away from my coat, and he said my name, twice, once gently, and then again firmly so I had to look into his face, and then I knew.
Blake caught me as I fell. The next thing I knew, I was on the sofa and he was trying to make me drink bloody tea. I think I screamed. I might have thrown the cup – there’s a mark on the wall, anyway – and I was shaking, shaking, and he was sitting next to me and talking, but I couldn’t hear a thing. Nothing. The newspaper was on the floor, we’d been halfway through the crossword when you took Pepper out. And suddenly I got the one that we were really stuck on. 3 across, Geg (9,3). Scrambled egg. Of course. How often have we said how, once you get it, it’s impossible to see how you ever couldn’t? And I opened my mouth to tell you. And you weren’t there. And just for a split second I saw the world in which you’d never be there again. I think I pulled out some of my hair.
I don’t know why I wasn’t worried when you were gone so long. I suppose I assumed you’d found some old lady to help across the road. Maybe I didn’t think about it at all. Already I look back at that me, happy and unaware, and barely recognize her. Another world. A better world.
Andy came – I suppose Blake had called him – and he took my hand, and he cried but I didn’t. I just felt sick at the thought of how many hands would touch mine in my life, but never yours again. I felt as though I was underwater too, with you, although of course I knew they’d got you out. Pepper jumped up on to my lap, and he was still a bit damp – Blake said it was him, standing barking on the bank, then swimming round in circles, who drew attention to where you were – and his wet fur felt like the only real thing in this whole horrible world.
And I’ve been blundering around in the blackest blackness ever since. It hasn’t even been two days and already this terrible place feels as though it will be my home for ever. I could never have imagined how dark, flat, endless this place would be. Maybe that’s why I’ve stopped putting the lights on: they’re pointless. They don’t stop the dark.
Oh, God, Mike. I can’t bear it here, but at the same time I can’t be anywhere else. I can’t believe that it’s true. You wouldn’t do this to me. You wouldn’t. You promised. You’re the person who’s supposed to protect me, so you can’t be the cause of this.
And anyway, there is so much of you. You can’t be nowhere. Where are you?
Come home.
E xxx
BLAKE AND ANDY hadn’t talked about what they would do when they left Elizabeth with her mother-in-law, eight hours after the 999 call from another late-night dog-walker reported a young woman, soaked and unconscious, on the bank of Butler’s Pond, and whipped their world into chaos. They’d obeyed Patricia’s stoical instructions – ‘You know there’s nothing you can do for us, so just let us be, for a bit’ – and gone, leaving the two women side by side on the sofa. Elizabeth was no longer sobbing but making a strange, sad hum of a keening, as though her body had already forgotten how to breathe without also making a cry; Patricia stared straight ahead, eyes glassy, something throbbing in the jut of her jaw.
Even though there’s been no discussion, it feels as though there is only one option for the two men. At the gate, Blake says, ‘Shall we go and have a look?’, a question that’s not really a question, and they walk the short mile to Butler’s Pond in silence as Throckton starts to wake around them.
Andy pulls out his phone. Dials, waits, wonders whether the sound of his wife, sleep-soft and stretching, will be something he can bear. ‘It’s me,’ he says when she answers, then, after a pause, ‘Not really.’ His voice is flat and tight: locked down, for now, until it’s safe to start thinking about what’s happened. It’s too soon to glance at the death of his best friend since childhood for more than a second. Blake matches Andy’s steps and listens as he answers Lucy’s questions: ‘I’m with Blake – it looks like an accident – no, I’ll go to work – I don’t really know, to be honest – OK. Will do.’ He ends the call and says, ‘She says I have to make sure I have something to eat before I go to work. She says to say she’s thinking of you.’ Blake nods. Andy redials. He is surprised that his hands are steady. ‘Me again. I meant to say: I love you.’ He is not the only one, as the news makes its way around Throckton this morning, who will tell someone that he loves them. Who will feel: there, but for the grace of God, go any of us.
It’s still dark, so the floodlit place where Michael drowned and Kate Micklethwaite was saved seems more strange than sad. Kate is in the hospital, vomiting water from her lungs and guts, shivering and unable to speak, or focus, or do anything but submit to needles and lines and wires, something she will have no memory of. Michael, his body identified by Blake earlier, is already in the morgue, where, later, a pathologist will confirm what Elizabeth has already been told: that he drowned. Alive when he went into the water, dead when he came out. As simple as that.
So Blake and Andy stand and watch as the grass, the mud, the water are photographed and scrutinized. Although Butler’s Pond is generally accepted as a beauty spot, a place for Sunday strolls and dog-walking and picnics, this corner of it isn’t the prettiest. It’s one of those places where rubbish blows to and breeds. The duty officer, recognizing the watchers, offers to lift the tape, but Blake waves him away. They are close enough.
‘Unbelievable,’ says Andy, after a while.
‘You should never underestimate the water,’ says Blake.
‘He was a bloody idiot to go in there,’ Andy mutters. They both think of the time six months earlier when Michael, one of the first on the scene of a house fire, had walked into the building and emerged with a mother and baby. Everyone had raged at him – fire brigade, senior officers, Elizabeth, Patricia – but he had remained steadfast: someone had to save those people and the fire brigade was six minutes away, which Michael knew was long enough for a toddler to die of smoke inhalation. So he’d gone in.
Blake had been working with Michael that day. He remembered how they had both raised their faces to the wind, asked each other if they smelled smoke, just before the call came in. They both knew the drill: get the neighbours out, keep people away and wait for the fire brigade. Never, ever go into anywhere full of smoke unless you are absolutely sure you can get out again. But Michael had gone in, and then there was nothing to do but wait, and hope. The hope had run out just a second before the first fire engine had pulled up. Turning towards the fire officers, he had told them what had happened: turning back, he had seen Michael running up the path, blackened and hacking, propelling a young woman who was herself screaming, every line of her body a prayer as she held forward a child who was silent and still in her arms.
And then the controlled chaos began, the hoses and the water and the aching, burning smoke.
It had been months until Michael had admitted to Andy – it was late, and drunken, and deniable – that there was a moment when he thought he was going to die, and he’d been terrified, and life had never been quite the same since, but he couldn’t say exactly why. Andy had put him in a taxi home and they’d never spoken about it again. Now, he wishes that he’d asked more questions.
‘I don’t think he will have felt anything,’ Blake says, a catch in his voice. Andy doesn’t know whether he’s being asked for a medical opinion or a word of comfort, but he agrees, with a nod. And then they turn and walk back to the village, avoiding the eyes of the first curious runners and dog-walkers as the light starts to make some real headway into the sky. They make a strange pair – or at least they would, were the overall impression that they gave not one of two men walking home after being up all night, united by something outside themselves. Blake is tall and broad, straight and strong. Only close inspection would show that his uniform is not as crisp as it was when he put it on before walking to work, sixteen hours ago. His cap hides his receding hairline and so he looks younger than his forty-seven years when he’s wearing it. The shadow of the peak hides the shadows under, and in, his eyes. Next to him, Andy seems slight and short, although there’s only four inches’ height difference: but the doctor is walking with his head down, letting his tiredness show, wearing mismatched clothes and his pale skin made paler by his thick eyebrows and dark brown hair. He’d got dressed in a hurry in the dark, fumbling for quietness and struggling to make the words he’d just heard make sense. I’m asking you as their friend, Blake had said, but your medical eye might help. I don’t want an on-call doctor if I can have someone she knows here. Just in case. Come and see what you think. Lucy had sat up in bed and switched on the light as he was searching the bottom of the wardrobe for his shoes – so the boys sleep, for once, and now you’re the one who is waking me up, she’d said, and he’d told her, more simply and quickly than he would have liked to, his own shock speaking, what had happened. Michael, their best man, godfather to their twins, here one minute, dead in the dark water the next. Lucy’s eyes, rounding as she listened. Her pushing him away – go, go to Elizabeth, see what you can do, tell her – and then she’d hesitated, because, well, tell her what? Andy had kissed the top of her head and gone; sat for a moment longer than he needed to on the top stair, fastening his laces, finding what he needed for what would come next, realizing he was just going to have to do it anyway.
‘I have to go back to the station,’ Blake says when they reach the market square. ‘You?’
‘I don’t know.’ There’s time for Andy to go home, take a shower, watch cartoons with the boys and tell Lucy that he’s all right: there’s time to touch them, all three of them, just the simplest stroke of hair or brush of hand that might help. But he’s not sure that he trusts himself. ‘I think I’ll go and have half an hour at the surgery before I start.’ The bed in the consulting room will be too narrow to be properly comfortable; the staff shower will run out of hot water before he has finished washing; better, safer, for now.
‘I’ll look in on Elizabeth later,’ Blake says. ‘I can take Pepper out when I walk Hope.’
‘I’ll call on my way home,’ Andy says. And, even though they see each other often, they shake hands as they part.
‘It’s terrible that we have to be practical, but we do,’ Patricia says later. Elizabeth nods, but doesn’t agree. She’s barely moved from the place Blake steered her to when he brought the news. Every now and then Patricia picks up the balled tissues that lie around her daughter-in-law. Every now and then she stops to have a few tears herself, caught unawares by something she comes across: her son’s handwriting on the notepad in the kitchen, his muddy trainers by the back door. Early on the first day, the phone had rung, and neither she nor Elizabeth had gone to answer it. Instead they’d sat, transfixed by the sound of Michael’s recorded voice, cheerfully telling the caller that they’d get back to him or her as soon as they could. It was the only time that Patricia had been comforted by Elizabeth: what seemed horrifying to the newly childless mother gladdened the widow who afterwards, during the night, would switch the answering machine on again, sit on the bottom step and call the number from her mobile over and over, until her husband’s voice became like a blanket, the words heard so often that they became meaningless, but the sound warm and soothing.
Less than forty-eight hours from the knock on the door that would always mark the Before and After of Elizabeth’s adult life, she’s had conversations about identifying Michael (which Blake has done), the inquest (opened and adjourned), the funeral (a week away), visiting the Chapel of Rest (which everyone seems to think that she should do), her sister coming over from Australia (which everyone seems to think that Mel should do), and the girl Michael saved (hospitalized, shocked and distressed, but not in any physical danger). She has agreed to meet the vicar, the funeral director and Michael’s boss. She has flinched from every mention of death, or body, or even any use of the past tense as far as Michael is concerned. She feels as though she is being asked to do an awful lot of adult things at a time when she has never been less able to do them. When she looks in the desk for the envelope that Michael had put there – ‘If Michael dies first’ written across it in large letters, next to the one marked ‘If Elizabeth dies first’ and which she runs her hands over, wishing, wishing that it had been her, so she didn’t have to bear any of this – she cries again. But these tears are not grief: they are gratitude. Elizabeth remembers the afternoon Michael had sat them down and suggested that they do this.
It was not long after they’d married, and she’d laughed at him, but when she’d seen the look on his face, when he’d said, Elizabeth, you and I of all people know how suddenly people can be lost, she’d felt ashamed of herself and taken the job seriously. They’d both already lost a parent. They’d each put a copy of their will in the envelopes. Then Michael had photocopied the details of their burial plot so they each had a copy of that. ‘Seriously?’ Elizabeth had asked when he’d bought the plot. ‘We could have a holiday for that money.’ ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘but a space in a graveyard is for ever.’ They’d written lists of who they wanted to have their possessions. They’d chosen hymns and poems, and laughed about how Elizabeth’s choice of ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ would go down in Throckton. ‘It will make you smile,’ she’d said, ‘and Mel and I used to sing it every Sunday at church. We chose it for our mother’s funeral. It’s our theme song. Throckton will just have to lump it.’ When it was done, they’d sealed the envelopes and gone to bed with a bottle of wine.
Elizabeth is so glad of the envelope now. Instead of making decisions she can brandish sheets of paper at people. No to medical research, no to an official police funeral, no to cremation. Yes to ‘Abide With Me’ and ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ and being buried in his uniform. She decides that if it isn’t in the envelope, it doesn’t matter, and lets Patricia choose caterers and cars and go through her wardrobe and pick out something for her to wear for the funeral. Between conversations, she sits, mostly quiet, and waits. Waits for this not to be true.
Elizabeth has never been to a Chapel of Rest before. She and Patricia go there together, and then take it in turns to go in. Patricia goes first, and comes out swollen-faced and silent, nodding and clasping Elizabeth’s hands. So, still unsure, she rises and faces the oak-effect door.
It’s a smaller room than she thinks it will be. The light is low and the smell of flowers, from a complex arrangement in which some of the smaller blooms are dying, is a mixture of sweetness and must. There’s a cross. And there’s a seat, next to the coffin. Because there’s a coffin. There’s a coffin. Elizabeth closes her eyes and tries to make herself breathe. She looks again. Yes, there’s a coffin. Mike’s coffin. Her soul winces. The top part is open, the rest closed.
Experimentally, Elizabeth puts her hand on the wood near the bottom, where she would imagine Mike’s feet to be, were she able to think about his cold, dead feet in a box. She checks her heart and feels nothing new: nothing worse. She takes a step further up. Her hand is where his knees would be, now. The wood is smooth. Her palm runs up thigh, over stomach, rests on chest, in a horrible pantomime of what she’s done so often in life. Her mind is saying, well, if Mike was gone, this is how it would be, yes, but he can’t be gone. He can’t be.
Elizabeth knows what needs to come next. So she takes another step, and she looks down.
Mike’s face is swollen, only slightly, and an odd colour, although that might be the light. Blake had driven them the short distance, neither of them ready for the walk, or the people, or the light of an ordinary day. He had told them in the car that Mike would look as though he was sleeping, but this face, solemn and enclosed, bears no resemblance to her sprawling, duvet-hogging, snoring husband, liable at any moment to throw out an arm and pull her in to him, even though he was fast asleep.
Elizabeth realizes she is holding her breath as she fights to recognize what’s in front of her. Cautious, she reaches out her left hand, her own skin dull in this dull light. She touches his face. Her thumb strokes the indentation to the left of his right cheekbone. He is cold, and his skin is powdery, and she watches, waiting for him to open his eyes. Tears fall from her and gather on his face, and she wipes them away, gently, with the thumb that now wears his wedding ring, and just for a moment these are his tears, and they are crying together.
Elizabeth bends down and whispers, ‘You can pretend all you like, but I know you haven’t left me. I know you wouldn’t leave me.’
She whispers, ‘I want to hold your hand.’ Her own hands, free to rake through her hair and twist round each other and catch at tears falling from her chin, tingle at the horrible thought of being contained in the way that his are.
She whispers, ‘Show me that you haven’t gone,’ and she sits, and she waits, her hand on the coffin where she thinks Michael’s hand must be. She closes her eyes. ‘You promised you would never leave me,’ she says, trying a different tack, thinking a prod might work where a plea has failed. Time stops, and the world stops, and even the tears stop, for a while, as Elizabeth strains for a sign, all of her senses ready and oh, so willing. But no sign comes.
Throckton Warbler, 11 January
TRAGIC DEATH AS MAN SAVES TEEN
Local policeman Michael Gray, 37, drowned in Butler’s Pond late on Sunday night. It is believed he was walking his dog when he spotted 19-year-old Kate Micklethwaite in trouble in the water, and dived into the freezing lake to save her. Michael’s dog Pepper raised the alarm and passers-by found Kate soaked through and unconscious on the bank. Pepper was identified by the attending police officer, Blake Osbourne, who said, ‘I didn’t take a lot of notice of the dog at first. Then when the casualty had been taken away in the ambulance, I realized the dog was still barking. When I went over to it it jumped into the water and was swimming in circles. When I recognized Pepper, my heart sank. Michael was a brave police officer and an important member of our community. We will all miss him terribly, as a colleague and as a friend.’
Michael was well known in Throckton, where he grew up. He leaves a widow, Elizabeth, whom he met while travelling around Australia. His mother, Patricia, head librarian in Throckton, speaking through a family friend, said, ‘We cannot believe this has happened. Michael was a good, kind man, a loving son and husband, and I don’t know what we will do without him. We are in shock. It is typical of Michael that he would die saving someone else.’
Kate Micklethwaite is expected to leave hospital in the next few days. She has regained consciousness and her condition is said to be stable. Her father Rufus Micklethwaite, owner of architectural practice Light and Shade, broke down as he said, ‘Kate is a determined girl and we are sure she will make a full recovery. Her mother and I are so grateful to Mr Gray and so devastated by this tragedy. We cannot believe that this has happened. It feels like a nightmare.’
An inquest into the death of Mr Gray was opened and adjourned until March, pending the post-mortem report.
PATRICIA MAKES HER first foray into Throckton proper on the day before the funeral. For the past week she’s walked swiftly, head down, to Michael and Elizabeth’s house and back, but it’s not far, and she’s been coming and going at odd times – before eight in the morning, after nine at night – when she’s less likely to be stopped and sympathized with by people she knows. She’s bypassed the town square and the streets where her friends live. It’s not that she doesn’t appreciate their support; it’s that, for now, everything needs to be controlled, appointments made, so that she can be ready. There has been no spare energy in Patricia, no space for an unplanned conversation. The funeral director, the police officers, the vicar have all come to them, knowing how grief immobilizes and restricts the heart’s ability to stray far from the hearth.
But Patricia knows that difficulties don’t get less difficult for being left unfaced. And so she is walking from her house into the town, ready and not ready.
Silence washes in front of her as she walks. The familiar streets, curving and banking down to the square, feel the same as they always have. The pavements are broad enough for two pushchairs to pass; most people keep their hedges nicely trimmed. Patricia has lived here all her life and she doesn’t think there’s anyone in this small town that she doesn’t know by sight. The market square is more of a triangle, and Patricia can tell you the history of every shop that’s there: why the family who owns the butcher’s shop settled here, how much nicer the bookshop was before it started selling gifts as well, why the baker is closing down. She hasn’t got as far as the crossroads before the first person has stopped her, tears in their eyes, with kind words to say about her son.
The day is both frosty and bright, and the air spears her as she takes deep breaths and looks firmly ahead, trying to see who is looking at her before deciding whether to accept the proffered eye contact or not. Of course, for everyone who seeks her eye, there are others who turn away, embarrassed and unsure, as though the death of a child could be catching. Patricia has no time for such people. She has spent the last six days holding Elizabeth’s hand as they planned a funeral for a man that neither of them can believe is dead.
A part of her wonders whether she is up to this, but as she said to Elizabeth – who refuses to take off Michael’s sweater and who, after three days of crying and vomiting, had to be coaxed into a bath, like a child – she’s always got on with what life has dealt her. She didn’t ask to be a widow, but when she became one she got on with it. ‘You had Mike,’ Elizabeth had said, without malice but with a shuddering sadness that had made Patricia pause, before agreeing that, yes, having a seven-year-old boy to look after when she lost her husband did make a difference. Privately, she thought that she would never have let herself go, regardless. John had always admired her smartness and she considered it a point of honour to maintain those standards. Which is why she is walking through Throckton today. Monday is her day for the hairdresser. The library, where she works, is closed on Mondays, and so she’s had a wash and blow-dry at the hairdresser’s every Monday for the last forty years, and a cut every two months, except for Bank Holidays or her own holidays. When she realized, this morning, what day it was, she decided she’d go anyway. ‘We have to start somewhere,’ she’d said to Elizabeth on the phone, and Elizabeth had said yes, in a way that meant no, and Patricia had checked that Andy would be with her, and then she’d put on her black dress and her green scarf and she’d buttoned up her coat and she’d stepped out on to the streets that had been the backdrop to her life. Her always-neat hair, still chestnut like her eyes, is as much a part of Patricia’s identity as her low-heeled court shoes and the fact that she never wears make-up or trousers. Now that her identity as a mother is lost, she clings to what she has.
Andy has been a regular visitor at Elizabeth’s house since Michael died, calling in at lunchtime or on his way to or from work before returning to the warm sweet chaos of his own home. (He is making an effort, in his mind, not to call it ‘Michael and Elizabeth’s’, but he did it just this morning, telling Lucy he was going round during his lunch break but not in the evening, and Lucy said, gently, it’s just her house now.) He’s not sure that Elizabeth registers his presence a lot of the time, as she sleeps and gazes, rubbing, rubbing at her collarbone without noticing that she is doing it, but needing to do something. This morning, though, Elizabeth is talking.
‘I don’t know how she can do it,’ she’s saying, for perhaps the fifteenth time, ‘how can she have her hair done? How can she go and have her hair done when Mike’s – when this has happened? How can she care what she looks like?’
‘I don’t think she does care about her hair, so much as needing to do normal things,’ Andy says. ‘I think it’s just her coping strategy.’
‘Coping strategy? Christ, Andy, we don’t need a strategy. We need …’ and Elizabeth is crying again, her body rounding in on itself, her breath coming spiked and harsh from a broken place, ‘we need Mike. You have a strategy for marketing, for chrissakes. For selling your house. You don’t have a strategy for this.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Andy says, thinking: I’ve said one thing, one thing, and I’ve made it worse.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s not you. I just – I don’t know how she can. I feel like I’m having to force myself to keep my throat open every time I try to eat something. I can’t imagine how I used to be able to do the things I used to do. And her son has – and she’s lost her son – and she’s not even going to miss her hair appointment.’
‘Elizabeth—’
She holds up a hand. ‘I know, Andy, each to their own,’ and then her hand falls, with it her shoulder, the straightness that her spine had had for that outraged minute or two. ‘She’ll be sitting at the hairdresser’s now, won’t she, saying, that daughter-in-law of mine, not having her hair done for the funeral, what would Mike say at her letting herself go.’
Andy smiles a smile that says: yes, but I’m not going to say so. ‘This is the hardest thing either of you will ever go through,’ he offers, instead.
‘That’s assuming we’ll get through it,’ Elizabeth says.
Throckton is, as Patricia’s mother used to say, big enough to get up to something but small enough that everyone will know about it. Patricia had married a man who drove local buses all his working life, and was as content in his job and his home town as any man could be. He borrowed library books about natural history, and it was only when his mother told Patricia’s mother that he’d taken a shine to her that Patricia started to notice him: the way he was often there as she was closing the library, his hesitating smile, his clean fingernails. Patricia has often thought about how proud John would have been to see their son, straight and strong as a country oak, serving their community in the way that he did. It would have been better if Michael had married a local girl, of course. There seemed no sense in bringing a wife back from Australia when there were so many here who would have snapped him up, but still. Even so. She had a son to be proud of. Patricia pauses for a moment, pretending to look in her handbag in order to avoid the next well-wisher. John always told her how strong she was – she often wonders whether he had a sense that he didn’t have long, that he was trying to make her ready – but she isn’t sure that she is strong enough to think of her son in the past tense yet.
Anyone watching Elizabeth – and there are plenty of people, a seemingly endless churn of concerned faces, all with the same questions and touches above the elbow and tears and apologies, all with different memories of Michael, each of which sticks a little shard of hurt into a place that she doesn’t expect – anyone watching sees the moments when she starts to realize the enormity of what’s happening to her.
She pushes her hair back. She holds her breath and her eyes grow bigger, or appear to, although it’s actually just the effect of the tears filming before they start to tumble. Her lips pull tightly in, then vanish from sight. She opens her hands, palms wide to the world, an unconscious begging. These are the moments when Michael’s death starts to seem real. Even though she cries almost constantly, thinks about Michael constantly, talks only about Michael, winds her wedding ring round and round and round her finger and Michael’s round and round and round her thumb – even though she is a picture of grief, the moments when Elizabeth starts to truly get what her life is about now make the people around her move towards her, touch her, just fingertips on her shoulder, an arm looping round her back. Just a touch to say: remember, I am here. This will not be the end of you, although, at this moment, you feel ended.
Although Andy feels hopeless, helpless, barely in control himself, he is the best at these moments. During his years as a doctor he’s watched a lot of deaths and he’s seen a lot of grief. He’s told a lot of bereaved people that, yes, he can prescribe sleeping tablets and antidepressants, but the fact is that grief is a long road. It’s a process, and it takes time. So, he tells his bereft patients and friends and relations, what you need more than anything is time, and the expectation that this is going to take time. Let yourself be sad. You’ve loved: you’ve lost, let there be time to heal. Of course, people agree with him, but he knows that most of them are disappointed. They want someone, somehow, to take the pain away.
But Elizabeth is different. She doesn’t want him to take the pain away. She’s almost translucent with misery. She bats away suggestions about sleeping tablets, she ignores fruit and biscuits and other morsels that Patricia tries to get her to eat, she lets tea go old and cold at her elbow. Andy watches her, and he wishes for a cure for grief. Either that or a cure for drowning. Or one for bloody stupid heroics. He wishes for his best friend back.
When Patricia gets back from the hairdresser’s, Elizabeth says, ‘They’ve done a good job today, Patricia,’ and Patricia says, ‘They said they would come here to do yours, if you wanted,’ and Andy takes Pepper for a walk around the block because the weight of the effort in the room is crushing his chest.
Mike,
I think it’s starting to dawn on me. The fact that you’re not here, and you’re not coming back. Even though I feel like all I do is cry, even though you are all that people come and talk to me about, even though I’ve looked at you lying in a box with your name on it and tomorrow I’m somehow supposed to watch as they put it in the ground – it’s all still unreal.
When I wake up and you’re not there it takes me a minute or two to realize that your side of the bed is empty for ever, not just because you’re on an early shift. When Susan next door brought in the shopping I’d asked for, I’d got some fig rolls, even though you were the only one who ever ate the things. I ironed all of your shirts yesterday because not ironing them felt like giving up: I didn’t know what else to do with them. I hung them in the wardrobe and the smell of your leather coat burst out at me when I opened the door. It was like a punch in the stomach.
People keep offering to ‘clear things out’ for me. They mean: let me throw away Mike’s toothbrush, because I understand that you don’t want to. Let me get rid of the half-used shaving foam and the nearly-gone shower gel and the new shower gel ready for when that one runs out, because it will be easier for me to remove these reminders than it would be for you to do it. But I say, no thank you. I don’t understand why a half-empty bathroom cabinet is better than one with all of your half-used stuff in it. I can shower in the smells you showered in. I can open your aftershave and let lime scent the air while I have a bath, although it doesn’t smell the same when it’s not on your skin, and when I wear it it seems too sharp. I can put the blade of the razor that you ran down your face against my fingertip. Why would I want your things taken away?
Yesterday I took Pepper into the garden – Blake has been walking him for me – and stood with my bare feet on the cold stones, and felt frightened by how big the world is. Nothing seems to make sense any more. Sometimes I want to go to bed and it’s only 10am, sometimes a whole day goes by and I haven’t even got dressed. I can’t eat, and then I’m standing in front of the fridge eating cheese out of the packet while your mother hovers and offers to make me an omelette.
I keep trying to work out what happened. I don’t know how you ended up in there, in that cold water. I don’t know why you couldn’t get out. I don’t know why I thought it was a better idea to sit on the sofa when I could have put my coat on and come with you, and then there would have been two of us, and between us we could have saved that girl without losing you. I don’t even remember when my evening bath became such a habit that the evening walk became your job. I don’t know why I didn’t realize you were late, or ring you, or do something. There are so many places where things could have taken a different turn, but they didn’t.
So I don’t think this is the real version. I’ve just slipped into the wrong scenario, somehow. Every time I hear the door open I wait for it to be you, and you’ll smile your normal homecoming smile, and I’ll say, God, Mike, I was just having the most awful dream.
E xxx
BLAKE’S FIRST ACT, on the morning after Michael died, was to ask whether someone else could be family liaison officer for the Micklethwaite family. He wasn’t surprised by the answer he got. He said, very calmly, ‘You are asking me to be compassionate to the person whose actions resulted in the death of the man who has been my friend and colleague for more than fifteen years. You want me to support people who have not lost their daughter, while I also support a widow so shell-shocked that she barely remembers her own name. I’m not sure I can.’
‘You can, Blake,’ had come the answer, ‘and I’m afraid you must.’
He looked at his shoes while he heard how he is the best, the most experienced officer available, and was reminded that family liaison wasn’t so much about drying tears as looking out for something that has been missed: ‘We owe it to Michael to make sure that we have the full story.’ He listens to the part about how, although obviously this was a difficult time for them all, losing a colleague and friend, the powers that be have every faith in his professional capabilities, we must be strong for our fallen colleague. After a while he stopped listening and just waited for the noise to stop. When it did, he went straight to the hospital, and found Kate Micklethwaite.
Even surrounded by tubes and wires, tucked under a faded puce blanket and seen through a mist of grief and resentment, she is a beautiful girl. Her mother, Richenda, wan and almost worn through, has a certain grace as she gets up to greet him; her fingernails are the pink of the inside of shells, her hand small in his. Kate’s father Rufus’s handshake is gruff and wary. Kate doesn’t move, but the atmosphere in the room, and the conversation he’s just had with the doctor on duty, tell Blake that she is doing nothing more worrying than sleeping. Richenda offers him a chair and he sits. Rufus says, ‘We’ve already had some of your people round. She doesn’t remember anything, apart from slipping on the bank. She’s in shock,’ his voice breaks, ‘she could have died.’ Blake holds Rufus’s gaze for long enough for Rufus to understand what Blake isn’t saying – your daughter could have died, but my colleague did die – before he sits and introduces himself as their family liaison officer.
Rufus wants to know why they need him. Blake takes a deep breath. You’re good at your job, he tells himself, you can do this, and he selects the candour card. ‘You might not need me at all, Mr Micklethwaite,’ he says, ‘but I’m here if you do. I’ll keep you informed about matters relating to Michael Gray—’ he pauses as Richenda’s whole body seems to flutter at him.
She indicates her sleeping child. ‘We haven’t talked about Michael with Kate yet,’ she says, her eyes pleading for understanding and her hands, unconscious, making a prayer, ‘and your colleagues only asked what she could remember, they didn’t tell her anything.’
‘Ah.’ Blake plays the caution card alongside candour. ‘Well, I’ll keep you informed of developments regarding Michael. We’ll need to talk to Kate again about what happened, and my colleagues will be in touch about that. If Kate, or any of you, want extra support or help, I can point you in the right direction. That’s what I’m here to do. You’ve been through a difficult time’ – Rufus barks his agreement, a what-would-you-know laugh which Blake ignores, concentrating on Richenda – ‘and you may find that there are all sorts of repercussions as you go through the next few months. I’m here to help, and to keep you informed of any – developments.’
Rufus walks to the window and looks out over the car park, his back to Blake, unwilling to admit that his personal life is in any place where police family liaison might be appropriate.
Richenda nods her understanding. Carefully, holding Blake’s gaze then flicking her glance to Kate to make sure he understands, she asks, ‘How is Michael’s family?’
‘Struggling,’ he says. Tears stand ready to ambush him and he stands, too suddenly, the scrape of the chair making Kate stir. They all freeze, a tableau of tension watching to see whether she will wake, or sleep on.
She sleeps.
Blake leaves. He’s got as far as the lift when Richenda catches up with him, interrupting as he swipes at his eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she says, then, ‘I’m so sorry. About your colleague. We are so grateful to him.’
‘He was more than a colleague,’ Blake says, ‘he was a great friend.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Richenda says, again. She means it; he can tell.
The lift doors open before Blake has time to see whether he has a grace card. Not this time. He steps in, and almost says: I can do my job better than this. But he doesn’t trust his voice to get the words out, and he isn’t sure that Richenda deserves to hear them.
Blake goes straight home. He drinks whisky until he can barely move. Had there been anyone to talk to, he couldn’t have spoken, his tongue too slow to form so much as a word, his thoughts too fast to catch. He wonders what on earth he could have done differently: what he could have said to Michael to change the equation that had this result. There seem to be an infinite number of possibilities, spiralling away from him like mirrors reflected in mirrors, as useful as shadows.
In the end, he sleeps in his chair.
It is five days after the accident when Kate is allowed home. What she remembers is not enough for anyone, but it’s all there is: after leaving a friend’s house, realizing she’d had too much to drink, she’d decided to take a walk round Butler’s Pond to clear her head. She hadn’t known how close to the water she was walking until she lost her footing. She remembers the slip, the fall, the cold. She has no recollection of anything else, until the hospital. She had no idea that Michael was even there, something that makes Elizabeth blanch when Blake tells her. The doctors cannot say whether or when any other memories of that night will return, but she is recovering well in all other respects. She knows her family, the month and year, that she has a place at Oxford to study geography: she can tell her mother where to find her iPod and the book she’s reading and the clothes she would like her to bring in for when she is allowed to get up and dress; her temperature, pulse, heart, lungs, bowels, pupils are all behaving as they should. So Rufus and Richenda have been permitted to manoeuvre her into the car and bring her home.
As Richenda locks the car and follows Rufus and Kate up the path – wretched, wretched squeaking gate – she thinks about the time she has spent sitting by her daughter’s bedside in the high dependency unit: about how those first twelve hours had been like twelve months of waiting for bad news to open its mouth, and the time since filled with a mix of fear, relief and fresh guilt. Her shoulders ache, her eyes feel scratchy, her hips are knotted from too long in bad chairs, her bowels blocked with cheap sandwiches and more coffee than she wanted. But the pain in her body is nothing, really. Her heart has been shrivelled by watching her daughter struggle and sob, sleep and ebb: there’s been nothing for her to do for Kate but dampen her lips with a flannel and watch the monitors as though it’s the watching that makes them give the readings that make the nurses smile and the doctors nod. Her mind hurts from thinking about what could have happened to her girl, nineteen years old, but still as precious and vulnerable to Richenda as she was on the day she was born, a miracle of blood and squalling. Her mind hurts even more from the effort of avoiding thoughts of what did happen to that poor policeman.
During the hell of A&E, Rufus and Richenda had stood truly together for the first time in twenty years, answering questions with one voice, holding one breath. As soon as Kate was declared out of danger, they had filled the time at her bedside with round after round of Who’s to Blame? It’s a game they are both good at, with an easy seventeen years of practice under each of their belts – nearer twenty-two, if you go back to the First Mistress incident, although the birth of Kate is tacitly acknowledged by both parties to have been a wiping clean of the slate.
But the stakes of Who’s to Blame? had never been as high as they were in the bleak, bleeping hospital room, and for once the deck was not loaded in Richenda’s favour. Rufus blamed Richenda for not knowing where Kate was going. Richenda retaliated by reminding her husband of two facts: their daughter was nineteen, and he was her father and equally entitled to know where she was, especially as they were both in the house when she went out. Rufus scored extra points for being the first one to wonder when Kate might be home; Richenda drew level by trying to call her and, finding her phone switched off, leaving a message. Both of them admitted to having no idea why she was anywhere near Butler’s Pond. Both were guilty of going to bed still wondering where Kate was, but Rufus claimed a bonus for not having yet gone to sleep when the hammering at the door began. Richenda was the one who had interrogated each of Kate’s friends – not that there were many, most being off on gap-year adventures – as they arrived at the hospital full of tears and exclamations. In what his wife considered to be a rare show of backbone, Rufus had refused to leave his daughter’s side when the police came to her hospital room, and sent them away when he judged that Kate had had enough of them.
In the end, they’d called it a draw. ‘So long as she’s all right, it doesn’t matter, does it?’ Rufus had asked. ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Richenda had replied, and had patted him on the leg – knee rather than thigh – and found a feeble smile from somewhere.
And now they are coming home, the words ‘out of danger’ dancing in front of their tired eyes, permission at last to admit that for a moment, just a moment, they wondered whether Kate would live beyond the night that she, for no good reason they can imagine, had to be rescued from January-cold water by a man she didn’t know.