by Rosie Thomas
Mattie’s hand came up over her mouth. As she ran the last few yards she was moaning, ‘Oh please, oh please God.’
She turned the corner.
Mitch was lying with his legs still tangled in the metal rungs of the ladder. She half fell beside him. She put her hands to his cheeks and turned his head so that he looked up at her. His glasses were broken, and they hung at a comical angle. There was blood on his face. Lumps of gravel were embedded in raw flesh.
Oh Mitch.
Mattie put her arms under his shoulders, trying to lift him. He was a big, warm, familiar weight and she couldn’t move him. Her struggle only shifted the lightweight ladder, and it clanked tinnily against the stones. Mitch’s head fell back.
She was sobbing and gasping, but she scrambled to her feet again.
Mitch. Don’t worry. I’ll get help.
Where? No Mrs Hopper today. Neighbours. The road, that was it.
Mattie stumbled as she fled, the blue folds of her robe tangling between her legs. She dragged open the ornate gate that had Coppins on it in wrought-iron lettering, and ran into the road.
Help me, somebody.
It was the milkman who found her. He came round the corner in his float and saw a woman standing in the middle of the road. All the front of her dressing gown was darkened with a big, wet stain.
Mattie ran to the float. The milkman was very young, pale and freckled, with ginger hair sticking out under his peaked cap. She looked at him, then put out her hands. Mattie could only think that she must clean the gravel off Mitch’s face. She must clean it off, and bathe the broken skin.
‘Please come,’ she said clearly. ‘My husband is hurt.’
They went back together. The milkman was wearing a leather bag on a strap across his chest and the pouch banged and jingled against his hip as he ran. They knelt down again beside Mitch. When the milkman looked up again his face was whiter still,
‘Where’s the telephone?’
‘Inside, on the hall table.’ Mattie spoke in the same clear voice.
‘Get a neighbour,’ the milkman begged her. ‘The nearest.’ He was running towards the front door, hitching his bag over his shoulder.
Mattie hesitated, wondering which way to go. The big houses were widely spaced behind their high hedges. She couldn’t think of anything except Mitch’s face, and the need to sponge the dirt off it. Then she saw a man in overalls come round the corner from the gate, and a woman following him. She recognised the woman. She lived in the big half-timbered house across the way. Sometimes Mattie and Mitch met her in the supermarket. Mattie’s neighbour and the workman both had the same shocked but inquisitive expressions of lookers-on at an accident. They were staring down at Mitch. He’ll be all right, Mattie wanted to say. He’ll be all right. She was shaking now, and her teeth chattered. The sensible words didn’t come out of her throat.
The man knelt down beside Mitch. The woman came and put her arm around Mattie. ‘Come on, dear,’ she said meaninglessly. ‘Come on, now.’
The milkman ran out of the house again. ‘They’re on their way,’ he said. He had taken off his leather bag and his white coat and he stood holding the coat out as if he wanted to wrap Mitch in it.
Mattie saw the workman shake his head. She noticed his big hands, grimy with oil. It seemed a very long time since she had heard the noise. She could hear it still in her head, clatter and rolling thump. But she realised that it wasn’t very long at all. A minute or two, just a minute or two ago she had been standing at the bedroom window, watching the wind.
Mattie looked down. Mitch hadn’t moved, he was lying looking up at her with blood on his face.
It came to her, with a rush of terrible fear, that he wasn’t all right at all.
She dropped to her knees, bending over him, but he still didn’t move. She tried to lie down with her head against his chest, to cradle him and comfort him, but the hands of the people she didn’t know took hold of her and held her back.
Blindly, Mattie lifted her head. The March wind blew her hair into her face.
‘I can hear it,’ the milkman said. ‘I’ll go to the gate.’
She wondered what he was talking about, and then she heard the ambulance siren. Of course, it was a part of this tableau, as much as the faces of the people waiting for it. It was Mitch and herself who didn’t belong here. It shouldn’t be anything to do with them, nor with the security of Coppins. She looked round for Mitch to confirm it for her, and then she remembered that he was lying at her feet.
The ambulance swung towards them. It rolled over the gravel, curiously stately except for the urgency of its blue flashing lights. It stopped and two men jumped out. The milkman and the housewife and the man in overalls stepped back to make room for them. Mattie was left, standing with her hands loose and helpless at her sides.
The ambulancemen crouched down beside Mitch. Mattie watched what they did to him, their busy hands and their intent faces. She felt childishly relieved, as confident as a child that these officials would take care of Mitch for her.
But a moment later one of them looked up, then straightened so that he stood close to her. He put his hand on her arm.
‘I’m afraid he’s dead. Death was almost instantaneous.’
Mattie stepped backwards, shaking his hand off her arm. In her clear, strange voice she said, ‘Oh, no, that can’t be right. Mitch isn’t dead.’
And then the housewife came to her again, putting her arm around her shoulders and trying to turn her away. ‘Come on, my love,’ she said. ‘Come in the house, with me.’
Mattie stared at her, without comprehension. Then she looked around again, searching the circle of faces for Mitch’s, so that he could explain to her how this blank horror had descended on the ordinary day.
Mitch had gone. One of the faces had pronounced the words, I’m afraid he’s dead. The first, brutal blow of understanding struck her.
‘Oh, no. Please.’
It wasn’t a contradiction now. She was begging them.
The faces closed round her, and another sound came out of Mattie’s mouth. It was an involuntary noise, neither a cry nor a moan. The people took hold of her, one on either side, and they led her away. She looked back, over her shoulder, to where Mitch lay still on the ground. The pain of understanding twisted tighter. He wouldn’t move any more, because he was dead.
The big house with the high roof was empty. Why were they leading her back to it? It was so quiet inside after the bluster of the wind. They walked over the dead leaves that had blown into the hall, past the folded newspapers waiting on the side table. The post was there too. Mitch would pick the letters up again, after they had had breakfast together, and open them in his study. Only not today. He wouldn’t, today, because he was dead.
The hands, unwelcome hands, led her into her own bright kitchen. There were copper saucepans, a neatly diminishing set, hanging on the wall, and flowered roller blinds with scalloped edges. Mitch should be here, humming to himself as he moved to and fro.
They made Mattie sit down at the breakfast table.
She looked down at her own hands and saw that they were shaking. She wanted Mitch to take hold of them. Everything she thought of, everywhere she looked, had Mitch in it. He couldn’t die, he couldn’t simply stop being, while the copper pans stayed in their places on the wall, while all the evidence of their life stayed solidly around her?
She turned her head to look out of the window at the patchy blue sky. There were the same shredded clouds that she had watched from their bedroom window. Mattie frowned, hunching her shoulders against the spreading pain. Just this little loop of time had elapsed. It was still only minutes, surely, since she had heard Mitch fall. That’s what it was, he had fallen. If she could only stop her hands from trembling, she could catch the time between her fingers and wind it back again. She would walk on into the bathroom, and she would hear Mitch pass under the window, whistling, on his way back into the house. Mattie closed her eyes. Inside her head, she took
the few steps to the bathroom door, and heard the reassuring scrunch of Mitch crossing the gravel below. But then she opened her eyes again and she was sitting in the cold bright kitchen, the woman from the house across the way was there, and Mitch was dead.
She knew now that he was dead. He wouldn’t be lying there with blood and grit on his cheeks and his head twisted, if he wasn’t dead. She wished that she had taken off his glasses instead of leaving them crooked, as if he was making a joke about dying.
The neighbour and the man in overalls were both moving about in her kitchen. The man filled the kettle at the sink, and the woman opened and closed the cupboard doors. They were trying to make tea. That’s what they gave people at times like this, Mattie remembered. She felt a wave of anger at their intrusion, and a fierce determination to hold herself together in front of them. They had seen Mitch, beyond their inquisitive help, with his glasses broken. They shouldn’t see anything else. That was for Mitch, and herself. ‘The tea is in the blue caddy on the left,’ Mattie said. ‘And you will find the cups in the end cupboard.’
They gave her a cup of tea, too strong and much too sweet, but she drank it, not noticing that it scalded her tongue.
‘Shouldn’t we call the doctor? And the police?’ Mattie made her voice steady, wondering in a remote corner of herself that she could sit here, holding a teacup, when Mitch was dead. ‘I know it was an accident, but the police will have to see, won’t they?’
‘The police are coming,’ the woman soothed her. ‘Tim Wright’s your doctor, isn’t he?’
Mattie nodded. Mitch played golf with him sometimes. The workman had finished his tea. He put his cup down on the draining board, and Mattie noticed the marks that his oily fingers had made on the china. She seemed to see them, and everything else, with lurid and painful clarity.
A car was coming. She heard the crunch of gravel again, and her neighbour bobbed up to look out of the window.
‘The police,’ she murmured. She sounded relieved, glad to be handing over some responsibility.
After a few minutes they came in, putting their caps down on the breakfast table. Mattie looked up into their faces, but their eyes didn’t meet hers. They were calm, doing a job, and the tragedy was her own. Mattie kept it to herself, wrapping her arms around her chest and compressing the pain. There were only a very few questions. Mattie told them that Mitch must have gone up on the roof to fix tiles that had blown off in the night’s wind. He had slipped, or the ladder had slipped, and he had fallen from the high roof. The fall had killed him. Death was almost instantaneous, the ambulanceman had told them.
The absurdity, the pointlessness of Mitch’s death rose up in front of her. The sickening pressure of a sob swelled in Mattie’s throat, but she lifted her head, denying it. The senior policeman closed his notebook.
‘Doctor Wright is here,’ somebody said. Mattie looked over the shoulders of the policemen and saw Tim Wright’s round, reddish face. It belonged in the clubhouse, not here in the Coppins kitchen. Mattie wrapped her arms tighter, holding in her secrets. The doctor drew her to her feet, led her away into the drawing room. As he closed the door she glanced around. There were plumped cushions and photographs in frames, a ticking clock. Just the same, but dead. The room felt dead, and time seemed to be stretching and compressing itself. None of this is real, Mattie tried to convince herself. But she knew that it was real, and her whole body was shaking with the shock of it. She didn’t know whether it was hours or minutes since Mitch had died, only that he was gone. She felt her sob rising again, like vomit, and she swallowed it down once more.
‘Can I have a drink?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’
Tim Wright went to the silver tray that Mitch’s brother had given them as a wedding present. He poured whisky into a glass, and splashed soda into it from the siphon. To Mattie the familiar, sociable little process seemed obscenely out of place, but she took the glass when he held it out to her, and drained it. The doctor was talking about shock, she realised, and about arrangements. She interrupted him, without apology.
‘What have they done with Mitch? I want to stay with him.’
‘They have taken him in the ambulance. There will have to be a coroner’s inquest. Only a formality.’ He was apologising, and trying to avoid the word mortuary. Mattie watched him, thinking that no one wanted to contaminate themselves with tragedy.
‘Did you take his glasses off?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ Mattie went to the drinks tray herself, this time, and poured a much bigger measure. The whisky didn’t warm her, but she drank it just the same.
‘You mustn’t be on your own, you know. Just say who you’d like me to telephone, and I’ll do it for you now.’ The doctor waited, kindly. ‘A friend? A relative?’
Mattie sat down, knitting her fingers around the empty glass. She tried to think of someone and then, without warning, like a dam cracking open to let out the floodwater, the full truth and its significance washed through her. Mitch was dead. He had gone, and she was on her own. There was no one else she wanted to call on. No one she wanted here, at Coppins, where Mitch had been. Not for a week, not even for a day.
Mattie bowed her head. She felt that all the painful, swelling need for Mitch, and anger at his futile death, and fear of loneliness was only just contained in the leaky, fragile shell of her body. If she moved, it would burst out of her. And that mustn’t happen in front of Tim Wright, with his concerned, professional manner. Not even in front of Julia, even if she were to come from Italy. It was private, private. Her own, and Mitch’s.
‘There’s our housekeeper,’ she said at last. ‘Mrs Hopper. It’s her day off. I think she goes to her sister in Crawley. The number is in the book on the table.’
That was all.
‘Are you sure?’ the doctor asked her.
Mattie gritted her teeth. ‘Certain.’
He did what she asked, and then came back. He gave her a sedative and she took it, carelessly. The doctor glanced at his watch, then snapped his bag shut. They agreed that Mattie’s neighbour should stay in the house until Mrs Hopper came back.
Mattie wanted them all to go, to leave her.
After the doctor had driven away she went upstairs, away from her neighbour’s sympathy. She went into the dressing room, and with a little noise like an animal’s whimper she hid her face against Mitch’s clothes, hanging empty on the rail. After a long time, with her body aching from the awkward position, she crept back and stretched out across her bed. A little while later, she fell asleep.
When she woke up, she had forgotten. She lay blinking at the room from the unfamiliar angle, dazed by the sedative and wondering at the dark weight that seemed suspended above her. The oblivion only lasted for a second. When she remembered what had happened reality fell around her in poisonous folds. It lay against her face, suffocating her. Blindly, Mattie drew her legs up to her chest and rocked herself. The silence around her was complete, and terrifying.
Mitch was dead. Mitch had gone, and he would never come back.
Panic rose in her chest. It made her gasp, and lash out. She heaved herself upright, kneeling on the creased satin bedcover.
‘Mitch,’ she called out, to the empty, heavy air. ‘Mitch, I don’t know what to do.’
In the end, it was Alexander she turned to.
Every hour of that day reared up in front of her, a pointless obstacle to be pointlessly surmounted, only to dwindle and turn into another, and then to stretch away into the night. When it grew dark, Mattie wouldn’t have Mrs Hopper with her. She sent the housekeeper away to her own rooms, and then she walked through the silent house, turning on every light so the big house blazed with it. But the darkness still pressed in on her. She was visited by images of Mitch lying in a cold steel drawer, with his poor face still unwashed and his glasses hanging crooked.
Mattie went into the brilliantly lit drawing room and drank the rest of the bottle of whisky. It made her f
eel sick, and she shook so much that her teeth rattled. And at midnight, out of fear that the night would never end, she telephoned Alexander.
‘Mitch is dead. He died this morning.’ She wondered that she could say the words.
Alexander came at once, driving through the night.
Mattie sat waiting for him, with a new bottle on the table in front of her and her fingers clenched tight around her glass. She imagined that when he came she would be able to run to him, and that he would give her some comfort. When she heard his car, rolling up in the lowest, deadest hour of the night, she jumped up and whisky flooded over the white rug at her feet. She ran to open the front door.
Alexander had pulled a jersey and corduroys on over his pyjamas. His fair hair stood up in unbrushed wings and his beaky, ironic face was grey with concern. As soon as she saw him, Mattie knew that she had made a mistake. He was warm, and solid, and he was her friend, but there was no comfort here. He was only Alexander, and Mitch had gone away.
Alexander held her. She felt the rough wool of his jersey against her face, and after a second she moved carefully away. The shock of grief separated her from Alexander as surely as it cut her off from everything else. It began to dawn on her that it was ineradicable.
‘Come in, Alexander,’ Mattie said. ‘I’m having a drink in the drawing room.’
Alexander followed her. All the way from Ladyhill he had been preparing himself, but even so the sight of Mattie shocked him. In their puffy sockets her eyes were flat, and she looked at him as if she didn’t recognise him. The bright drawing room stank of whisky. He put his arm round her shoulders and made her sit down. He realised that Mattie was half drunk, and insensible with shock and exhaustion.
He looked angrily around the room, as if the silk-covered walls might explain to him how Mattie could be so alone, now of all times.