by Woolf, Emma
He looked away from the road ahead, at the woods, the trees. He saw the leaves in red, orange, and gold, the fiery colours reminding him that it was autumn. Through the fog in his head, the pain rose up again, the shame and guilt of failure, a man who has let everyone down, the panic of a trapped animal. He was nearing the coast: There, there’s space to breathe, he said, out loud or in his head.
Suddenly there was a shrill noise, jolting him back to the present. He looked down and saw his phone on the passenger seat alongside scattered cigarettes and the lighter. He tried to block the ringing out of his head but it went on and on, like a baby crying, adding to the voices and the chaos in his brain. He picked up the phone and looked at the screen: Lily’s name was flashing up.
“No, Lily, no,” he muttered. He wanted to answer it—he longed to talk to her one last time—but he couldn’t, just left it to ring and ring. It hurt to know that Lily was trying to reach him, but he knew that if he heard her voice he wouldn’t be able to go through with this, and he had to, for everyone’s sake. There were tears streaming down his face, and Harry was surprised to notice that he was crying. He hadn’t realised that letting go would be this hard.
Suddenly the sky opened up, a salty, briny smell filled the car, and he was at the coast. He skidded roughly into a gravel car park, turned off the engine, and rested his forehead against the steering wheel. The phone started ringing again and he stared at Lily’s name on the screen, willing her to stop and willing her to keep trying. The voices in his head fell silent and then the phone stopped ringing too. Everything was ending, everything was closing in.
Harry wrenched open the car door, leaving the key in the ignition and the door open, and crossed the deserted, scrubby headland towards the white cliffs. The clouds were racing overhead, the gulls were dipping and wheeling on invisible currents of wind. Everything was bright and the morning sky seemed wide open. The sea stretched away, foggy grey green, and there was nothing visible on the horizon. He remembered lying on the floor of his study with Lily, warm and naked in his arms. They had gazed up through the skylight at the blue skies that first summer:
. . . When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant
skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years. I meant all of them with you.
Had he spoken those lines out loud, or only thought them? He felt she should hear them before he went.
This was the coastline of Harry’s childhood; he knew these cliffs like he knew his own hands. Scanning the bay, he saw Dungeness in the east and Selsey Bill in the west. He looked across the sandy dunes to where the pampas grass was waving. This was the place Harry loved, but there was no comfort here today.
Despite the expanse of sea and sky, the darkness closed in again: an inferno of pain in his spine and in his brain. From far away Harry could hear his breathing and his heart pounding in his chest. He was filled with the purest fear and all he wanted was peace. He felt the crumbling ground beneath his feet, the loose stones and chalky cliffs; he closed his eyes and jumped. The screaming of the gulls grew fainter and the wind filled his ears and the waves rushed in.
It was 8.13 a.m. In London, Lily felt something snap.
Two nightmarish days later, and her managing director was calling her at dawn. Lily hadn’t slept all night, wondering what to do. She lay wide awake on her bed, staring at her phone. She didn’t recognise the number but she knew it was bad news.
On the line, Colin’s voice cracked. “There’s no easy way to say this. It’s . . . it’s bad news, I’m afraid. Harry was found, late last night. He’s dead. A man walking his dog along the cliffs, down on the south coast, saw a body. He was identified by a family member early this morning.”
Lily put her hand to her mouth, silent. What was there to say? She had known that Harry was dead since that moment on Friday morning when something snapped. She knew exactly where he would have gone. She took a few shallow breaths, the room lurching around her. She murmured something, later she couldn’t remember what, about it being terribly sad for his children. Colin omitted any specifics, and Lily couldn’t ask what she needed to know: Who had identified him? Where had they taken him? They ended the phone call as quickly as possible.
Up till now, Colin and Lily’s dealings had been limited to those occasional professional interactions. Now, between them was an unspoken mass of problems: that Lily worked for Colin and Harry, that their wives were close, that Lily would be grieving and had no right to, that no one knew exactly how much Harry’s wife knew. And Lily didn’t forget that Colin had just lost his best friend. To call it a mess didn’t come close.
Colin had made it clear that it would be a lot easier for all concerned if Lily stayed away from the office for a while. “Let things blow over” was the phrase he’d used. However, from that first moment, Lily knew she mustn’t stay away. If she’d avoided work, she couldn’t have gone back, not ever. It was important to face everyone immediately—staying away would only make it unbearable.
Harder even than the scrutiny was going back to Harry’s office. Every room in that building was haunted with him, every document held his imprint. In those first few days, she felt his presence everywhere. When the internal phone rang, she automatically expected Harry’s extension number to flash up. When the glass door to her office swung open, she’d look up, forgetting for a moment, expecting to see his tall frame filling the doorway.
Early on Monday morning, the day after Colin’s call, she had gone into Harry’s office before the cleaners arrived. She took the key from where he hid it on top of the bookshelves and unlocked his desk drawer. She removed photographs, letters, airline tickets, three bottles of pills. She reclaimed a pair of silver cufflinks—tiny sailing boats—a present she’d given him for his last birthday. She added a handful of receipts to the pile. This was risky, she knew, and maybe illegal: after a suicide everything was needed as evidence, wasn’t it?
Lily didn’t care. Illegal or not, she wasn’t having her relationship with Harry picked over. These letters and photos wouldn’t tell them anything except that the two of them were deeply involved. As for the tranquillisers and other pills, she didn’t know exactly what Harry had been taking, but she didn’t want him incriminated even more than he already was. Yes, he’d been in a terrible state at the end, but none of that would change anything.
She was aware how futile it was removing these few possessions now, trying to cover his tracks when almost everything was out there in cyberspace. The police would have already accessed his last calls and texts, they would have copies of his bank accounts showing hotel bookings and flights, restaurants they had been to, gifts he had bought her. They would speak to his wife, his sons, his psychiatrist and GP.
She shuddered to think of strangers reading their private messages. She remembered the text he’d sent her that night, at some point after he confronted her outside the flat, staggering around drunk in her street swinging punches at David, even that text—forgive me Lily, I love you—a message she hadn’t told anyone about, that wouldn’t be a secret for long.
She was leaving the office when she noticed the corner of an envelope just sticking out from beneath the desk. It was a thick, cream envelope with her name on it, in Harry’s large scrawl, his usual navy ink. Feeling furtive and guilty, she added it to the stack of papers and walked back down the deserted corridor to her own office.
She waited until she got home that evening to open the letter. Dearest Lily, it read. I won’t be back and I wanted to say goodbye. Lily’s heart began to thump, painfully. She’d known he was dead since Friday morning—and Colin had confirmed this—but somehow reading the letter gave her an illogical burst of hope. I won’t be back was pretty final, but maybe he was writing to tell her he’d just gone away for a while? Anything, Lily thought, any crazy scheme—that he’d changed his identity and emigrated to Tasmania—would be more acceptable than his death.
Hopefully, you’ll find this letter before they start rummaging
through my stuff because it concerns something only between us: the flat in England’s Lane. I wanted to let you know that it’s yours now, all done and paid off.
Lily took a sharp intake of breath. She could hear Harry’s matter-of-fact tone even at this moment of stupendous generosity, she knew him so well.
She realised that a letter was the only way he could tell her about this, to guarantee there would be no digital record.
I’ve sorted everything out with my financial advisor and your mortgage company. There will be no trace and no trail. I also had a brief conversation with Lady Archer and she understands the situation. The deeds are in your name—as I won’t be here I wanted to let you know where you stand. It’s only property, Lily, but I hope it will help. Maybe it will give you the freedom to do whatever you want, whether that’s staying on at work or going freelance or setting up your own business or travelling the world. It’s a small token of my love for you because you have changed my life. I can’t express in words . . . and I think you know already . . . thank you for giving a trapped, depressed, middle-aged fool so much happiness over the past couple of years. I like to think of you in England’s Lane, where we had such good times.
Yours always,
Harry
She sat on the floor of the living room, reading and rereading his final words, looking for a clue. Was there something else he was saying, something she could do?
No suicide note had been found; Colin had been clear about that. This letter was the closest thing anyone had to a statement of intent. I won’t be back, he wrote, but what would it tell them?
Lily stood up and walked over to the window. Her head was spinning. She gazed out across the treetops, seeing nothing. She couldn’t make sense of it. When did he buy the flat? When did he write this letter? How long had he been planning his suicide?
She knew that she should tell someone about this letter, but she wouldn’t. Already the invasion of their communications, their emails and texts, felt like a violation. Surrendering Harry’s letter would also cause practical problems with his wife and family. This letter was all she had now that was truly private. These were Harry’s last words to her, and she was keeping them to herself.
Lily kept working. She didn’t take time out from the office and never left early. The situation was a disaster, but she had to keep going somehow. She wasn’t sure whether working made things harder or easier, but she refused to let herself think about it too deeply. She showered in the morning and dressed smartly; she drank coffee and attended meetings and gave presentations; she was functioning OK on the outside at least. What was the alternative? It was a relief to work, to lose herself for a few hours writing up a commissioning proposal or an author contract. Then she’d be referring back to a document in the files, and she’d turn a page and see Harry’s full name, his handwritten signature, and it would hit her afresh, and she’d find herself staring at the scrawled ink in unbearable pain, tears stinging her eyes (although she never let anyone see her cry). Thank God she had her own office.
As Colin had hinted in that first telephone call, Lily’s presence was problematic. Nothing happened for a few days: he convened a staff meeting and announced Harry’s “sudden death,” supplying few details. It seemed he might leave Lily alone. Then colleagues began to talk, authors rang and asked questions, the trade press got wind of the intrigue and published the story. It was the talk of every book launch and publishing party. A fortnight after Harry’s death, the directors conferred, and Lily was summoned to Colin’s office.
He spoke to her for barely three minutes, never once meeting her eyes. He asked her to report to the HR department to see the firm’s occupational psychologist, whose remit was clearly to find Lily unfit for work. She was pressed in the strongest terms to sign herself off for a while. She was offered leave on full pay and a course of bereavement counselling.
This compassionate, indefinite amount of time “away from the office” was the thin end of the wedge, Lily knew that instantly. Not for a moment did she consider taking it up.
She understood why they wanted her gone. Having her haunting the corridors, wringing her hands like some modern-day Ophelia, would be too inconvenient for words. Every time Colin saw her, he saw Harry, his old colleague and friend. She understood, but she was determined not to resign. Nothing would trigger her depression more than empty, workless hours—she already had entire nights to think about Harry’s death; at least for eight hours a day she could sit at her computer and be productive. She missed him with every fibre of her being but she was desperate to stay busy.
And another part of her decision was sheer bloody-mindedness: She enjoyed her job; why should they get rid of her? Did they fear that she would do or say something inappropriate? In those weeks following Harry’s death, Lily grew up more quickly than any other time in her life. She learned that many people, even close friends and colleagues, don’t want to be around grief. She learned that bereavement is a social embarrassment. On the first day there were hugs of condolence, but in the weeks that followed, she found herself increasingly isolated.
At night, she read and reread a battered copy of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.”
Lewis’s words struck home. Without meaning to, she found it hard to take in what was happening in the world around her. She stared at the news on television, unable to understand what the reporters were saying. With colleagues she cast a sombre shadow, like the death’s head at the feast, and so they avoided her.
It wasn’t that she cared, not really. Death puts things into perspective. Some friends can’t come with you to a new reality, that’s all. Grief is inconvenient and embarrassing and boring and repetitive. The ones who keep ringing and keep listening to memories and tears and regrets, those are the true friends.
So Lily stayed at HEP and worked harder than ever. Less than a month after Harry’s death, she won two bestselling authors from a rival firm, a project the two of them had been plotting for ages. Work was work, and Lily maintained absolute privacy about her loss. She had to harden herself to get through this time. No matter how devastated she felt, she never let the cracks show. At home she allowed herself to fall apart—some evenings she found herself lying on the floor, doubled up with grief—but never once at the office. She refused to let herself be hounded out of a job she was good at. Harry would have approved of her stubbornness.
It was three weeks after his death when Lily realised. She was lying in bed alone in her flat, and she had this thought: it’s not goodbye. For a while now, she’d been aware of something physically different. Not wrong exactly, just different. Without following any logical thought pattern, her body simply told her that a part of Harry was still here. He wasn’t all gone. After everything that had already happened, somehow this wasn’t a shock. She was pregnant.
Lily curled on her side, eyes wide open, staring into the darkness of her bedroom. A gentle night breeze lifted the white curtains at the window. She thought of everything that had happened over the past few years: a wedding, then a suicide, soon there would be a funeral and then a birth. She thought of Harry and wondered what he would make of it all.
Lily had coped for so long, it was a shock to everyone when she finally crashed. Throughout the autumn she’d held things together, outwardly at least, going to work, answering the phone, seeing the family and dealing with life.
It wasn’t a dramatic crash, more of a thirty-six-hour wobble. She left London and went to the coast. She had realised she was pregnant at the same time as she was starting to accept that Harry truly wasn’t coming back. But Lily had had no experience of either situation before and had nowhere to put the emotions they were churning
up. A pregnancy was one thing, even an unplanned pregnancy, but this, on her own and without Harry to talk to . . .
She wasn’t sure what she believed about death, whether there was anything left of a person after they died. She didn’t believe in reincarnation, but since Harry’s suicide she had felt his presence very strongly at times. These moments usually occurred when she was lying in bed at night, unable to sleep. That was when she missed him most and felt closest to him. She had taken to getting out of bed, opening the large skylight in her bedroom, and leaning out to look at the stars. The air was much colder now that autumn was here, and she shivered in her cotton bathrobe.
One star was much brighter than the others, and she always felt it was Harry looking down on her.
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night . . .
Lily murmured those lines from Romeo and Juliet to herself, looking up at the night sky, aware that talking to oneself was an early sign of madness. But the only escape she found during these nights was in books, it had always been that way. She would drift over to the bookshelves to check the lines in her head and end up reading until dawn.
Looking up at the dark sky, she talked to Harry—not out loud, but in her head—and felt certain that he hadn’t disappeared. If he was watching over her, did he know about the baby? She wasn’t sure. Sometimes she felt very alone.
