Instinctively, my gaze had shifted towards Rose, standing back, as the water gushed over the edge of the pool.
‘Eight points!’ David had shouted from the sun lounger as Stella lifted herself up the steps, pulling the goggles away from her face, the corners of her mouth falling as she looked at me and noticed my face turned the other way.
David’s sharp round of applause had pulled my attention back to Stella.
‘Excellent, darling,’ I joined in, the palms of my hands stinging as I clapped along. Wondering, even then, how long we had.
By the time I open my eyes, my head buried in one of the cushions that line the sofa, the moon has risen high above the house so that I can almost feel it pressing down on me.
My eyes settle on the bottle in front of me as I lift myself to sitting position. I had hoped to sleep longer, wishing the night would fade into oblivion and with it the thoughts that had inevitably followed me into sleep.
The original plan, as I had developed it, had been to wait until just before the sun rose before making my way upstairs to Clive’s study. Shielded from the judgemental glare of morning, but close enough to my return to the airport that it would only be a matter of hours that the papers would actually be in my possession, their significance burning into my thigh through my bag.
Once I have handed them over to Harry at the café just inside the terminal building, I will buy my ticket and then I will be gone.
I breathe in. It will be 2 a.m. in London. This was the time I most often woke at home, hearing Rose calling out in her sleep, David’s body, slack and warm, in the bed beside me.
Reluctantly, I picture the girls, their faces pressed against the pillows we had bought just a few days previously. It was an Inset day and David had insisted on bringing them into my office rather than waiting downstairs while I finished up before we had lunch together in town; proudly, he escorted them across the editorial floor, their little faces glowing with excitement.
‘You’re early,’ I had mouthed at my husband as he led my daughters through the doorway to my office, urgently kicking off my moccasins under the desk. I had only walked in from my driving lesson five minutes earlier, and so I discreetly slipped my feet back into the heels I had been wearing when I left the house that morning.
‘No, you said 1 p.m.’ David let the girls in first as I moved out from behind my desk, smoothly nudging out of view the theory book on the floor by my bag.
‘I’m sure I said one thirty.’ I kissed my daughters on the head, pressing my hands against their cold cheeks. Clarissa had been in that day, and had let out a squeal of delight at the sight of the girls, their hair pulled into matching plaits.
I imagined the scene through the eyes of my colleagues: the dutiful working mother and her successful, doting husband, hands linked with their children as they weaved their way through the desks, off to a family lunch.
Stella had insisted on us going to a fancy new pizza restaurant with long benches instead of chairs, then refused to eat, ostentatiously picking at the congealed cheese while she and Rose squabbled about who had more ice in their drinks.
‘Mummy’s going to Greece in a couple of days. Is there anything you want her to bring you back from the airport?’ David said, slicing at the crust with his knife.
I had felt my cheeks sting.
‘I want to come.’ Stella had placed her fork on the table, setting her face against mine.
‘It’s just for work. You would be bored.’
‘I want Mummy.’
‘Well, unfortunately you have to go to nursery.’ I had taken a mouthful of rocket salad, chewing slowly, the leaves bitter and stringy, keeping my eyes on the plate as I reached for my wine.
When I looked up, Rose was watching me, her expression unreadable.
Swallowing, pushing against the feeling that I might throw up, my lips forced themselves into a smile, which Rose mirrored weakly before looking away.
I had been drunk by the time we finished our meal, the clouds glaring back at me as we stepped out onto the street, avoiding eye contact as David kissed me lightly on the cheek, steering the girls away with the promise of ice cream.
‘I’m sorry, darlings, I need to go back to the office, but Daddy’s going to take you to buy new bedding for your rooms.’
I turned back to see Stella’s eyes following me, before I turned the corner and leaned my back against the wall, shaking, waiting for them all to leave.
Pushing my hands against the sofa to steady myself now, I stand. There is no point putting it off. The longer I stay in this house, the longer I am stretching out an attachment to the past, dwelling on memories rather than the facts.
The girls will be fine. They have David, and David is a more attentive parent than I can ever be. Does that make me a bad mother, or simply one who has created a necessary boundary in order to protect my children? What does it matter, now?
Walking through the kitchen, I focus on the soft light of the moon, which streams in from the window in the hallway, next to the door leading to what was once Athena’s domain. From there, I shift my attention to the stairs. One at a time.
As I reach the landing, my eyes fall on the painting by David’s mother, inky blues fading into dusty yellow skies. In a way we weren’t so different, she and I, both of us forced, for reasons beyond our control, to leave our children.
What was worse: to walk out because you felt you didn’t have a choice, because you couldn’t cope with life – or because you had made the choice to leave, as the best possible course of action for everyone within the limited range of options available to you?
Clive’s study is just a few paces away. I turn my head away from the painting, my eyes on the task ahead. Once again, I expect some resistance, but the door is unlocked; the two files, which I half expect to find gone, lie in exactly the spot where I left them all those years before, in the drawer of my father-in-law’s desk.
There are no confidential warnings on the first page – no indication of the power they contain, the horror they promise to expose. Lifting the papers, I hold them against my chest, drawing out the moment until I check, the moment from which there will be no going back.
It only takes a few seconds to find it, even though I am cautious, careful not to bend or mark the pages, as if it will make any difference. The receipt from the shipping company confirming that TradeSmart had successfully attempted to shirk all responsibility for its refusal to dispose of its slops in an approved manner.
Leaning against the desk, I close my eyes, listening to the careful rise and fall of my own breath, controlling the flow of thoughts. Feeling my lungs contract and release in perfect symmetry, a fragile accordion pushing life in and out of my body.
It is cold inside the office, and I tremble under the gaze of the photos that line the walls, the faces that have framed my fate, beaming back at me. The rain beating down on the olive groves outside seems to have risen through the windows and doors, drawing itself into my bones.
Wrapping my arms around myself for warmth, the papers in my hand brushing against my chin, I open my eyes. I breathe in sharply, feeling the hairs on my arms rise as a band of light sweeps over my face. Pushing myself upright, I go to make a step towards the window, to prove it was just a trick of the light: a bird flying across the window, momentarily obscuring the glow of the moon; headlights from a car on the road at the end of the drive.
As my eyes rise to meet the view of the drive through the glass, I hear it, feel it, in fact, as clearly as if one of my own bones has snapped. The crack of gravel. And it is at that exact moment that I see him, staring up at me through a smear of glass.
CHAPTER 62
Anna
In the months after Thomas died, I had been made to see a doctor at a hospital almost an hour’s drive from our home.
‘This is going to make you feel better,’ the GP had told me when he prescribed the treatment, which involved weekly trips in the car, the sound of Radio 4 accompanying the low t
hrum of the engine, my mother’s blank face glued to the road ahead.
The doctor wore thick glasses, focusing on my face in a way that I hated. I willed his eyes to leave mine as he watched me for the full hour of each session, asking me questions about how I was feeling, in a way that was presumably supposed to resonate with a grief-stricken six-year-old.
What had he expected me to say? I want my parents to love me … I want them not to blame me for my brother’s death … I want to know it wasn’t really my fault?
One afternoon, not long after the panic attacks had started, the doctor had sat me down in his office.
‘When you have these feelings, the ones that make you feel scared or angry, I want you to imagine a box. The box has a lid, and I want you to lift the lid up and picture all the thoughts that are making you feel bad, and I want you to picture lifting those thoughts up and placing them inside the box. Can you do that for me? Then I want you to picture placing the lid back on top of the box and closing it tight. So tight that those feelings can’t hurt you any more.’
I pictured the box, small and dark. I imagined my brother’s body inside it, rigid, covered in a white sheet, the soil we had buried him under pressing against the panels from each side.
I picture David in such a box, only a man-sized version, as I step into the car waiting for me outside the airport, my driver briefly attempting conversation before his voice falls away to silence as we move along the motorway, cars sliding across three lanes, just inches apart.
Pushing away the image along with the cascade of thoughts threatening to close in on me, I focus on the back of the man’s head as we crawl along the Euston underpass, the taste of lead filtering through the windows as we move across Marylebone, finally pulling to a stop outside a large townhouse on Connaught Square.
For a second, I imagine throwing open the door to the car and running, but it is no longer an option. It is no longer a question of what I am running from, but who and what I am leaving behind.
As the car pulls up outside the house, I realise I have no money but, unfazed, the driver lifts his arm to indicate that the bill has already been settled.
There is a security guard in a black suit and an earpiece at the doorway to one of the houses a few doors along. I have not been to this flat before but I know the address by heart, from the Christmas cards, and the invitations over the years.
I press the buzzer and there is a crackle and then a woman’s voice, a foreign accent I cannot place. According to her instruction, I follow the curve of the stairwell until I am standing outside a black door finished in glossy paint, which opens as I approach tentatively, finally allowing myself to wonder what lies inside.
The voice on the intercom is Aarti, the maid, who greets me at the entrance to the flat, her eyes falling as I step inside, like a death-row prisoner on her way to the gallows.
We move along the hallway in silence, the walls pressing in on me as I follow her to the living room, the Valium I slipped from my handbag in the back of the cab working its way through my bloodstream, wearing away the edges.
Clive is propped against the sofa on the opposite side of the room. When he looks up, he wipes a tear from his eye and it is as if something in him has died, too.
The funeral is held in the chapel on Rosslyn Hill. Close friends and family only, according to reports in the press, which note the tasteful, restrained ambience. David’s daughters, in matching dusty pink shift-dresses, their mother in signature cream and black, the epitome of decorum as her husband’s body is lowered into the ground.
‘Anna.’ I feel a light hand on my arm, turning to find a woman in front of me, a black fascinator pinned to the front of her head. It takes a moment for the face to register. The same defiant, feline turn of the eyes, same high cheekbones; the auburn Princess Leia buns now replaced with loose strawberry-blonde curls.
I shake my head slowly, disbelieving, as Meg nods, her eyes shining with tears.
Finally, the tears flow as I grip her arm so hard it is as though if I let go she might disappear, my fingernails forming grooves in her forearm.
By the time we reach the wake, my shock at seeing Meg again after so many years has settled into something hard and heavy: an accumulation of the sadness and rage that has simmered for so long below the surface.
‘I just can’t believe it. The report said the car was only going at twenty-five miles an hour when it hit him.’ Her face instantly shows regret. ‘Jesus, I’m sorry, I’m still no good at filtering my words.’
‘I don’t know, you seemed pretty good at holding back the last time I saw you.’ I take a sip of my drink, turning away from her, my body longing for her to stay close.
Across the room, I see the girls sitting with Maria and May, who are attempting to reassure them with one of the bags of sweets I placed in the trolley as I hovered through the aisles at the supermarket, wondering which finger foods would be most appropriate to send off my dead husband.
I feel a cool rush over my skin and drain my glass. It was my idea to hold the wake at the house – for the sake of the girls, I had told myself. The truth was I could not bear dealing with the arrangements otherwise. Talking it through more than I had to, making decisions, watching my tongue.
My mother once told me the reason Thomas died was because I had no interest in other people. If only I had been paying attention that day; if only I had looked outwards, occasionally, rather than in. In self-appraising moments I have sometimes wondered if that is true. And as I thought through the plans for the wake, I realised she was right. How much I never knew. His favourite song, his most-loved photograph of us together, his favourite tie. How many questions I had never thought to ask.
Now, with all these people in our house, the weight of them, moving through our things, mine and David’s, our life on display like this, I feel a sickness rising through my body.
Among the sea of strangers, old colleagues of David’s, family friends to whom I have never been introduced, I cling to Meg like a strip of warm land in a cold black sea.
‘Those poor girls. They’re the spit of you. Nothing like …’ She pauses. ‘Oh God, I didn’t mean …’
For a moment the sickness subsides and for the first time in days, I feel a smile push through the stillness that has taken hold of my body, like a cast.
‘Told you,’ Meg shakes her head, ‘I’m nervous. I don’t know what to say.’
‘David’s dead, Meg, there’s nothing you can say.’
She disappears for a moment and returns with a bottle of wine, filling both our glasses.
‘Anna, there is something I need to tell you.’
I look back at her, my face hardening again at the edges, reading the fear in her eyes.
‘What is it?’
‘Not here.’
Her eyes move around the room, and she leans in, her voice little more than a whisper.
‘Will you meet me? Tomorrow?’
I hesitate. Although there is nothing I want more, there is something about the look on her face that makes me pause; an instinctive fear of what she might say.
It is midnight before the last of the guests leave, while Aarti and Maria clear the empty platters of finger foods and wine-stained glasses, pushing bits of broken glass into a dustpan and brush.
Clive remains, nursing a bottle of whisky on the sofa, Artemis’ framed painting of a fallen tree clutched tightly between his fists.
After Maria has gone up to bed I move into the garden for a cigarette. The garden is still; the only sound comes from the foxes shrieking on the other side of the wall. I watch the smoke expand in the air in front of my face, lifting my head to the black sky. My eyes are met by the gentle glow of light from the girls’ room and I realise I am shaking.
There is a sound from the living room as I re-enter the house, pulling the back door and dragging the lock closed. It is the static of a John McCormack record that has been left playing in the living room, and when I lift the needle from the LP, the room
falls into silence.
On the sofa, Clive’s body is slumped in a stupor. Moving towards him, I lift a blanket from the back of the sofa and drape it over his body, which is frailer than I remember it. Alongside my unease at his presence there is a lingering relief that I am not alone down here with David’s absence wandering the halls like a ghost.
As I turn towards the stairs, I hear a hum from the side of the sofa where Clive is splayed out. Moving slowly back towards him, I spot his iPhone, vibrating, in the space between the sofa cushions. Leaning down carefully, I push my hands between the cushions.
Withheld number. Holding my breath, I freeze as my father-in-law stirs on the sofa. Pulling myself so that my body is taut, ready to fight back, I watch him; after a moment he snores deeply and I feel myself partially relax.
Working on adrenaline now, I move towards the door. Upstairs, hovering at the doorway to the bathroom, I imagine the message I will compose to Harry explaining that I have the phone. Just then, I hear a noise from the bedroom, Rose calling out, her voice small and helpless.
My hands rise to my face and for the first time in my life I know what I have to do.
Turning, I feel myself moving away from Harry, away from the prospect of a world in which my mission is complete, away from a man I thought I once loved, away from the brother who is long dead, and towards the ones I still have: my children, breathing in the room above my head. With a sigh of relief, I make my way back to the living room, slipping the phone back onto the sofa, before moving towards the staircase; towards a life of real redemption, towards motherhood, towards the right thing to do.
CHAPTER 63
Maria
The morning after the funeral, I wake in the same bed I have woken in every morning for the past three and a half years, but everything has changed.
There is a portentous quality to the light that spills in through the windows overlooking the garden as I pull open the curtains. Straining to hear the girls’ voices from their room on the floor above mine, I am unsettled by the silence as I pull the bathrobe around my waist, a moment passing before I remember David has gone.
The Most Difficult Thing Page 30