Without Her

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  He stands to shake hands with each of us in turn. “Have a good evening.” Then he leaves. We look at each other. Alexandre puts a hand on Phil’s shoulder, man to man, and once again I am grateful that Alexandre is here, and knows so surely, it seems instinctively, what to do.

  Hannah says, “Some people take a lot of convincing, don’t they? Now, for God’s sake, let’s go and get some dinner.”

  Watching her suck up her spaghetti—“no, I’m absolutely not going to have baby food on my last night on earth”—her white napkin tucked around her neck over the Armani silk, I feel relieved and grateful after all that she can do this exactly the way she wants, even if the vongole are too chewy and are left in a little line on the rim of her plate. I sip my strong red wine and am grateful too for the way it goes to my extremities, and, presumably, hers.

  “Remember how we lived off spaghetti when we were in Italy that time? Remember how we used to swig wine from the bottle? Remember how thin we got, running away from Italian men? Remember that time we hid in the railway station to have baths, and that guy was still waiting when we came out? Remember that young Frenchman we met on the train? Alexandre, I think his name was. Remember how you fancied him?” It’s as if she spins a tighter net of memory, with which to draw us in. The past lives in its details. You remember the detail, and you recapture the scene. I drink my wine and feel what she is doing to us, for us, even on this last night of her life.

  The dinner comes to its end, with small glasses of limoncello offered by the maître d’, and then we have to collect up our purses and jackets and move on. On, into what awaits us. Phil pays, and we all let him, as if this has been arranged. We get a taxi for the short distance back to our hotel. There, Philip and Hannah say goodnight and are about to go up in the elevator to spend their last night together. I don’t want to think this. I want, we all want it to be casual, a normal thing, goodnight, goodnight, see you in the morning. I can’t imagine what this is like now for Phil, who is taking her arm a little stiffly to lead her across the foyer; but I have more of an idea now. He’s already walking with the upright careful gait of someone at a wedding. I see her stumble at his side. I go to hug them both, one at a time. Alexandre kisses Hannah, one on each cheek, then Phil. Phil says, “Thank you.”

  Hannah looks tired. She says, “Beam me up, Scotty,” and steps forward to the elevator. I see them step inside, and the door closes, and the little light shows where they are, the second floor, the third.

  Alexandre takes my hand again, with his brief caress, holding and letting go. “Shall we go to the bar?”

  I don’t want to drink any more, but where else can we go? I agree, and follow him into the padded red recess of a small bar, where one barman is polishing glasses. We sit on bar stools.

  “No, let’s sit in the corner, over here, it’s more comfortable.” He orders cognac and it comes in big glasses, and all I do is breathe it in, as if its fumes are enough.

  “This is so strange, isn’t it?” We’ve been speaking English all evening, but move into French, the language of our intimacy. I’m glad of it, it makes him feel closer, more real. Alexandre speaking his accented English in an Italian restaurant in a small Swiss-German town where my friend has come to die: well, it was all adding to the unreality, the sense of detachment. I want him alone with me, in French, in the half-dark, if only for a short time.

  “Yes, it’s strange.”

  “How are you, Claudie? You have known her longer than anyone.”

  “I’m all right,” I say finally. “I feel strange, but it feels right too. It’s Phil I’m worried about, it’s worst for him. And he’s been so marvelous. By the way, you were so good with him this evening, I noticed, entre hommes, you know what I mean?”

  “All I did was what I’d like someone to do for me, in his position. But I’ll never be in his position. Nor will he, ever again. That’s why it is all so bizarre, it’s as if we are people in a play, acting our parts, hoping to get through to its end without forgetting our lines, or letting each other down.”

  “I’m so glad you are here.”

  “So am I.” His hand finds mine across the little table, as it did in the restaurant the last time we met. There’s a warm silence. Time seems to have stopped. The man behind the bar stands still, and for a moment nothing moves, there is not even a clock in this Swiss bar to remind us. There is no point in planning anything. We have let memory play and reconfigure us this evening, and now it’s all done, we are who we are, we have arrived.

  23.

  The place we are going to in the morning is immediately across the street; we saw it as we reached the hotel, but I didn’t know what it was then: an ordinary house, quite innocent, divided into apartments, with an outside staircase and separate front doors, and a garden at the side. We cross the street, looking both ways, Phil wheeling Hannah in her chair. This morning she is wearing the Armani suit again, and I don’t know if she never undressed, or if she is wearing it because of Phil and their past, or if it’s like a talisman to her now, the perfectly tailored outfit she bought when she was still young. She has a faint pink lipstick, and eyeliner, and I can pick up the waft of her Chanel No. 19. The summer morning sunlight hits the end of the street and the sun pours light down the sides of buildings, shade sharp at its moving edge. It’s like a tide coming in. I can smell new bread from a bakery somewhere. A blackbird is singing. Alexander asks us, can you hear it, I think it’s in the garden, listen. Le merle. I remember how he notices birds, as I do. This morning everything is a sign. I don’t say this, because of the pact between us all, because of being there for Hannah, who doesn’t do signs and portents. She won’t want any of us to think she’s turned into a Swiss blackbird, or a butterfly, or a black cat we see crossing our path. She’s going out on her own terms, bleak though they may be; she’s a realist to the core, her scientist parents’ child, who only hid her face to pretend to pray in our school services so that she could glance sideways and smirk at me. But I know her, she’s not cold or cynical or unfeeling, she’s the person she has been over all these years, she’s Hannah. We’re sitting on the seawall sharing our fish and chips. We’re singing, as we skip all the way home. Her parents are at the Yacht Club, drinking gin and tonic. She doesn’t complain; she never complains, but she does run away, she makes her bid for freedom. She has run here.

  As we go inside the place I think: we will come out of here without her. We will be people we do not recognize.

  Then Alexandre looks sharply at me and I feel him catch my arm and hold me up.

  “Claudie, are you all right?”

  “I just felt a little dizzy. I’m all right.” The moment passes, and he doesn’t let go of me.

  A big solid woman with a knot of blonde hair greets us. She’s like a matron, built like a brick shithouse as Hannah might say, the right size for this venture. Hannah has to sign more papers. The rest of us wait on, not speaking. Then I see Phil’s face move and begin to break up, it’s like watching a wall begin to crumble, from the bottom up. He’s at the point where he can’t take any more; he’s arrived there after days and weeks and even months of self-restraint, and he’s going to collapse and howl. The blonde woman sees this just as I see it and she steps forward on a long stride and imprisons him in her embrace. She holds him with her bare fat arms, muscle flexing under the little blonde hairs. She’s done this before, she knows what happens. She holds him so that he droops against her, and I can’t see his face, and Hannah won’t see it because she’s still signing papers, she has her back to us in the wheelchair that met us at the door, she’s simply doing what she has to do next.

  The blonde woman holds Phil against her as if he were an infant. She says, “Sir, you cannot do this now. You cannot.” She gives him a little shake. Phil straightens, as she lets him go. It’s enough. Her strength has held him up, held him in, and now he can do it. Hannah signs the last page. She looks exhausted. I wonder how
their night was and think, I will never know, and I don’t need to. The blonde nurse says, “Good. Now, would you like to be in bed, or just sitting, or, would you like to be outside?”

  Hannah says, “I can be outside? I’d like to be outside.” Everyone is speaking English, or I think they are. The nurse has a strong accent, she is Swiss-German; she must have learned to do this in many different languages. We follow the nurse. She isn’t wearing a uniform, but she’s obviously a nurse: those scrubbed hands. Hannah says, I don’t need the chair, let me at least walk out there, okay? She seizes her stick, and Phil’s hand, and they set off together. I once saw them walk down an aisle, young and striding towards an open church door. We follow, Alexandre and I, he still holding my arm. We are their attendants. I can do this, I tell myself. There is a garden, fenced in and bamboo growing, and a lilac tree that has just finished flowering, and I think that the blackbird we heard might be in the lilac, and there are seats, like chaises longues, and a little table, as if someone were about to serve us drinks, or lunch. None of us ate much breakfast, earlier, just sipped our good coffee. My stomach rumbles, and I hope nobody hears; but really, what matters anymore, stomachs rumbling, tears, even howls, even fainting; in just a short while it will not matter what sounds our bodies emit, or how we control them. We sit out on the patio in sun and shade behind a carved Indonesian screen with figures on it. It’s hot already, but there’s a breeze. The young doctor we met yesterday comes out carrying a small box and greets us in English, and we all say good morning, and Hannah smiles her ironic smile when he asks her for a last time, are you sure?

  “Yes, I’m sure.” He opens the box, gives her the cup. The first drink is a sedative, to settle her stomach, so that there is no chance of her throwing up. She takes it, asks for a sip of plain water, licks her lips. After a few minutes she takes the second drink. She has to lift it herself, even as the doctor’s hand cups hers to support it. I see a shadow pass across her face: this is it, no turning back. I am stunned by her courage, her clarity. It’s not hemlock, it’s not Socrates dying in agony, it’s nothing that has happened before anywhere, it’s my friend Hannah, lifting a plastic container in her good hand, as she looks at us—a small toast, even?—and sucks it all up through a straw. I see her pursed lips, her effort. The blonde nurse films her as she does this. For the police, she says. To be safe. I dare not look at Philip, but take his hand. Hannah closes her eyes. The sun on her eyelids—does she see red, and patterns? We all sit still, and the blackbird starts up again in the lilac. I see tears on Phil’s cheeks. Alexandre and I are motionless and silent and once again time stills and stops around us, as it did for him and me in the bar last night.

  It takes about fifteen minutes, as we were told it would. The world stands still around us, silent except for the blackbird. Hannah is here, and then she is not here. She looks unconscious after five or six minutes, her head lolls as if she has fallen asleep in the sun. I think, but do not say, goodbye. We all sit there without moving, and if tears fall, they are unnoticed, and nothing has to be done or said. I feel the garden begin to move around me: a swirl and rustle of leaves, the spring light altering patterns on the grass, the bird in the tree, the air that shifts and goes on shifting invisibly as the wind currents pass across the earth and flutter matter into life, here in this garden, in a village outside Zurich, in Switzerland. It’s like being at the center of the world. It is the center of the world. Perhaps it will always be. We are still, as Hannah is still; and then there’s a creaking and shifting into slight movement, knees, stiff backs, faces lifted, hands grasping chairs, a breathing out, a wiping of cheeks, a common agreement that we will begin to move on.

  Then—now, suddenly—it is the time after. We can’t stay at the center of the world. Life is centrifugal, sends us staggering out to its edges; it always will. How do we do this? How can we manage the next thing? By acting as if it’s normal. As if she’s asleep in the sun, as if we are coming back for her soon. As if. Life, real life has passed us by; death has come quietly, it has taken Hannah, she has drunk it down. She is not breathing now. The young doctor has felt for her pulse, in the moments after, nodded at us: she’s gone. I don’t know how to let this in. None of us knows. We get up and stand there for a moment, a little huddle of three, not knowing, until he says, that’s it, you understand, you can go now; and picks up his phone to call the police and speak to them in German. He’s dismissed us: we aren’t needed, we’ve done our job, and he has done his. We have to move, to leave here, to go outside into the rest of life, and never return.

  Philip stutters a little as he asks, “What happens next?” As if there has to be a next, as if he has to ask, because otherwise there is a blank, a sheer drop.

  “As I say, that is it. She has gone, sir. We will see to all the rest. You can go home.”

  All the rest: what you normally have to do after a death, prepare a body, order a coffin, arrange for cremation or burial, tell people, put a notice in the paper, choose hymns, order in food, receive ashes, whatever people do; all the rest. They will cremate Hannah and send her ashes to him at home. Philip looks stunned, pale, exhausted. Alexandre takes him by the arm, “Come. We’ll go back to the hotel.”

  Holding on to each other like the road-sign picture of old people crossing a street, we cross the street, walk back to our hotel. On the threshold, where it says Willkommen on the doormat, Philip stalls like a horse that won’t go into its stable. “We can’t go in there. I can’t go in that room. We have to leave.”

  I see his panic, his refusal. He can’t live life without her. He can’t do what’s asked of him. Yet he knows, oh, yes, he knows what he absolutely won’t do—and that is, go back into that room. At least he knows that.

  Alexandre sits him down in the bar, with a brandy in front of him. Alexandre, with his hand kindly on Philip’s back, his murmur in English, sit here, you don’t have to do anything, we will do it, Claudia and I. Then he and I go up in the elevator to our floor, and collect our things from our rooms first and then, using Phil’s key, go into his room, the one he shared with Hannah on her last night, and start packing everything into suitcases, his and hers, just as if she were going too. He doesn’t speak as we do all this, and neither do I. I’m hardly able to see through my tears, as I pick up her bottle of Chanel, her nightdress, her toiletries, her dressing gown, the underwear she wore yesterday, the clothes she traveled in. It feels like the last possible thing I can do; but Alexandre is here, he is putting Philip’s things into the other suitcase, folding his sweater, his pajamas, his socks, as if he’s spent his life as a gentleman’s valet. If we weren’t both in pain, it would even have been funny. I see him brush a tear away, this man I have seen cry only once, after his mother died; I’m touched, move towards him, we drop the clothes we are holding on to the bed and are in each other’s arms just for a moment, holding each other hard. In all the years I have known and loved Alexandre, I have never seen this side of him: this practical kindness, this ability to help another person. He is perfect, I want to tell him, he is exactly right. I will tell him one day: I will say, on that day, you were perfect, the essential friend. You were kind, and practical. You were exactly who was needed. And yes, I am always moved by kindness between men. It seems so rare, and they are rarely brought up to show it; when they do show it, it disarms me, and this, one day, is what I want to say to Alexandre.

  He strokes my hair; I cry on his shoulder, noisy sobs at last. He hands me a handkerchief. “Claudie. You did well.”

  “So did you.” I blow my nose, scrub my face, hand him back the handkerchief. Who carries real handkerchiefs around with him these days?

  “No, keep it, you may need it.”

  “We have to get out of here. Don’t we?”

  “We have time,” he says, “but I don’t want to leave that poor man sitting alone for too long. We should go down. You know, I never thought I could do this, take somebody to their death. I never thought I would
have to. When she asked me, first, I thought, no, never. Then you asked me, and I thought, I can’t refuse. I didn’t imagine it would be like this. So simple, really. I can’t believe it. Perhaps none of us will be able to believe it, it will seem like a dream.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I thought, this has nothing to do with me, it’s not my business, ce n’est pas mon débat, you understand what I mean. But today, I feel I could not have missed it, it has shown me something—I don’t know exactly what.”

  I smile, though I’m still sniffing back tears. Alexandre’s first thoughts about everything have always been about the interesting effect it has on him. He’s already examining himself for signs of change. But he’s shown me his kindness, his practicality, his sympathy for a man he didn’t even know until yesterday. I’ve already seen a new Alexandre, or one I haven’t fully known until now. He’s all these things, practical, self-absorbed, kind, obtuse, sensitive; he is, I know, a person I love.

  “Yes. It will take time. Where will you go next? Home?”

  “Back to Paris. I have a case on Monday, as usual. I’ve a flight at four-thirty. And you?”

  “I’m going back with Philip, at least for a few days. I don’t want to think of him going into their house alone.”

  We close the suitcases, glance around the room, check that we have left nothing behind: no clue of what has happened here. The maids will come and clean, change the sheets and towels, all signs of anyone’s passage here will be removed. A good hotel is always a clean blank page. Alexandre and I know hotels, and they were not always this way.