by Toby Litt
‘Perhaps we could go for a walk – get out.’
‘No, really. I think maybe it was the stairs.’
Josephine gave me a look that showed quite clearly that her indulgence had a limit, and that I’d just brushed against it. If I was going to be weak, then I could be weak – but I could not lie about the causes of it.
‘Let me at least get you a drink.’
She came back from the kitchen with a large bottle of Absolut vodka, blue label. After straining for a while to unscrew the cap, she was forced to hand the bottle over to me.
‘I can’t,’ she said, sitting down.
She rubbed the palms of her hands.
For something to say, I said: ‘I thought you only drank gin and tonic.’
‘Oh, I didn’t buy this,’ she said. ‘There were two huge bottles of it in the cupboard.’
Even at the time I thought this odd: Lily never drank spirits, and I’d always bought Stolichnaya – one bottle at a time.
I unscrewed the cap without too much difficultly.
The respite over, I’d started to feel better.
Josephine was speaking.
‘I’ve tidied up a little – well, quite a lot, actually. Obviously, we had to come round – to sort things out. It was very difficult for us, as you can imagine. Particularly the first time. Everything was exactly as Lily left it. The kittens weren’t doing too badly, though they’d fouled the hall carpet – and you know how that can smell. At first we thought there was something dead in there.’
‘You came with Robert?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A day or so after – you know. We couldn’t face coming separately.’
Or, I thought, you didn’t trust each other not to nick stuff.
I wondered if they’d done anything perverse. Had the idea even occurred to them of a grief-stricken memorial fuck on Lily’s (undoubtedly) unmade bed? Had Josephine dressed up for it in Lily’s clothes? (They had always been the same size: 8.) What had the sex been like? There was no way I could ask, but perhaps I might find some evidence in the bedroom – when I finally got there.
‘Quite,’ I said.
‘Are you going to move back in, do you think?’
‘I may,’ I replied. ‘I’ll just have to see how I feel when I’ve spent a bit of time here.’
‘The flat should be ours, you know. She was about to cut you out of her will.’
‘You have a great deal of money,’ I said. ‘I have very little. But that’s not really the point.’
‘It has important sentimental associations for me.’
(I wondered what these might be: Josephine, accompanied by the infant Lily, had moved back in here immediately after she and The Mistake got divorced.)
‘No doubt you’ve already taken a few things of Lily’s from here. Perhaps you’ve even gone through and removed anything particularly personal. I’m not expecting to find, for example, her diaries.’
Josephine looked defiant.
‘We are her parents,’ she said.
‘I never stopped loving her,’ I replied. ‘We may have broken up, but it was Lily that wanted it – not me, never me.’
‘Well…’ said Josephine.
‘If I ask, will you let me read her diaries?’
Josephine looked shocked.
‘The police have everything,’ she said.
We paused at the thought of this: what might be in the diaries, what the police might know about Lily and about us.
Josephine indicated the stainless-steel bowl on the hall table.
‘The keys are in there,’ she said.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m not trying to take revenge on you or anything. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do, yet. I may even just give the whole thing back to you.’
There seemed nothing Josephine could say to this – no way she could permit herself to express a desire which I could in an instant thwart.
But then she managed to think of a way out: ‘Well, you just do what you think is right.’
Instantly, this made it seem as though keeping the flat would be an act of pure selfishness.
I went back into the hall and took the keys out of the bowl. It would have been a nice touch to try them in the locks, but I knew they were the same old ones – and Josephine wasn’t going to leave me without the means to dead-bolt her precious flat.
20
‘The funeral was dire,’ Josephine began, as I came back into the living room. ‘If you’d been able to go, you’d have wished that you hadn’t. The vicar didn’t know a thing about Lily, except of course the breakfast cereal thing. He made it seem as if her whole life had been some ludicrous quest to improve the nation’s bowel movements. Really! I couldn’t stand it. Nor could anyone. But how are you? It must have been quite terrible for you.’
I remembered this from when Lily and I used to visit Josephine at home, confrontation followed by compassion.
‘I’m over the worst of it now, I think,’ I said, sitting down beside her on the sofa.
‘Glad to hear it,’ she said, and touched my knee. ‘What did you want to talk about, my darling dear?’
‘Robert came round yesterday.’
‘He did.’
Josephine, I could tell, hated the idea that Robert, and not she, had been first to pay me a visit.
‘Yes, he particularly wanted to know what Lily and I talked about at the restaurant.’
‘Right.’
Josephine was never this taciturn.
‘You know how annoying he can be sometimes –’
‘Oh god, yes. I was married to the man, you know.’
‘He told me what happened – you moving back in with him.’
I think this was the first time I’d ever seen Josephine embarrassed.
‘We all make mistakes.’
‘Lily said you only ever made one mistake.’
‘It isn’t hard to guess which that was.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But Robert already seemed to know most of what Lily and I talked about.’
‘Well, of course. I told him about it after she died. When we were… together. There seemed no reason for him not to know.’
‘The thing is, he didn’t seem to want to say directly –’
‘Robert always was squeamish. You should have seen him at Lily’s birth. Not that I saw much of him, myself. He was on the floor for most of it. Out cold.’
‘He did seem rather uncomfortable.’
‘I mean, as Lily said, it’s only an abortion, isn’t it?’
I managed to say, ‘Yes.’
Josephine looked across at me.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be quite so brutal. But that’s how Lily looked on it. Didn’t you find she was quite offhand about the whole matter?’
I remembered how calm Lily had seemed during our short time together in the restaurant. She was calmer than I’d ever seen her before. Resigned, that was the word. Resigned in advance to how ugly my reaction was going to be. She had been sitting me down. She had been making sure I was relaxed. She had been preparing me for the shock.
‘When did she tell you?’ I asked.
‘A week or so before.’
‘Before what?’
‘Before’ – Josephine was off into pathos before I could stop her – ‘she was murdered, of course.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘We’ve managed to keep it out of the papers, you know. So far. Whatever else you say, it is pretty ucky. The police have been very good about it. At least, I think they have. It may be that they’re just saving it up for shock-value during the trial. You know – brutal slaying of pregnant actress.’
My act fell apart.
Josephine looked at me, aghast.
‘You didn’t know?’
‘What?’ I said, no longer caring how I appeared. ‘That she was carrying a baby when she was shot?’
‘Oh, it’s very clever of you to trick me into telling you. Mentioning Robert –’
&n
bsp; ‘Josephine, tell me, please. Was it my baby? What did Lily say?’
Josephine wanted an effect – and the one she chose was a long silence of unexpected calm.
We sat there for a ridiculous amount of time.
‘Why didn’t you just ask?’ she finally said. Why did you feel the need to trick me?’
‘Robert wouldn’t tell me. I thought you wouldn’t either.’
This was the worst thing I could have said.
‘If you’d asked, I would have told you. How could I not tell you? But as you didn’t ask, you’ll just have to find the rest out somewhere else. You said there were things you needed to say. I assumed you meant love. That you still loved her. That you –’
‘I did.’
‘It’s no good, now. You’ve entirely lost my sympathy. I feel very hurt. Oh, Conrad, why couldn’t you have just trusted me?’
She stood up to go.
‘Josephine,’ I said. ‘I want to talk about her – generally, in other ways. Please, sit down again.’
‘No. I’m sorry. I can’t. Goodbye.’
And just like her ex-husband, she showed herself out.
21
Something happened. At the moment Lily’s mother left I was suddenly granted access to all my own old emotions again. Once more I realized what had actually been done to Lily – this realization coming through the realization of what had been done to the child unborn inside her. That this child might have been mine made the emotions all the more intense, but I would have had them anyway. A very terrible thing had been done, and half of it – the unsuccessful, botched half – had been done to me. I was a fluff, even in what was meant to be the full-stopping of my life – a kind of perfection of sorts; one that I had anticipated many times. Death. Full stop. But that my emotions came back to me didn’t make them any the less confused. They fell upon me in a messy waterfall – full of solid objects, arms and heads that struck my own head, my own arms. The contents of the charnel-house were being dropped upon me, not one by one, but all at once. Lily’s autopsied body – deconstituted – was part of this thick foul rain. This human sleet. The heaviest of all the blows came when the baby’s head struck mine. Even if it wasn’t my baby, I took responsibility for it. I remembered exactly how I’d felt during the six weeks, once, when Lily skipped a period. We had been on holiday (to New York) and Lily had been under a lot of stress. That was in retrospect probably the best explanation. But at the time my feeling could only be put into these words: If she is pregnant, then, even if I don’t believe the embryo to be in possession of a soul, it might, were it to grow up into an adult, itself believe itself to be possessed of such a thing And so – even if I don’t believe in souls, by this act I would be bringing into the world (or excluding from the world for ever, if Lily were to have an abortion) the possibility of the possibility of a soul. Never had I felt such massive responsibility. This wasn’t just birth defect and money anxieties; this was a metaphysical gamble of such immensity… But Lily’s next period came without herald. She waited two days before telling me – having forgotten, the moment it started, how extreme (though for more career-related reasons) her own anxiety had been. She sat on the toilet, finally telling me that everything was okay – and I cried.
I cried this time, too. Therapy, however good, is no match for bastard events. I cried torrentially, storming out my renewed emotions: grief, rage, hatred, self-disgust.
What I found hardest to deal with, though, was the sheer direct uncensored undeniable passion that I felt. This was something terrible which I’d never had to face before: passion – passion with no recourse to irony. If there was any irony in this situation (if! if there was anything, in some ways, but) – then the irony was on me: it was beyond my control. No expression that I could give my passion was adequate.
I was multiply aggrieved: the baby was dead, dead without me knowing it existed, dead in some abortion clinic bucket even if Lily hadn’t been shot, dead to my grief until I could be certain it had been mine.
For fifteen minutes or so, it was as if Lily were alive again – capable of new and surprising actions.
(In a way, the feeling I discovered that afternoon in Lily’s flat has never quite left me. Even after coming to what I think and hope is The End, I cannot quite believe that Lily has no more ways of hurting me. This whole experience has almost made me disbelieve in death – or what you might call personal extinction. Lily’s actions in life have come upon me – months after the cease of her pulse – as freshly and abruptly as any moment of living impulse or anger. This so-called dead person seems as capable as anyone alive of vindictiveness and contempt. She retains her cruel sense of actorly timing – the inopportune moment is always when she chooses once again to knock me sideways. It is almost as if, I feel, her nervous system still operates. If I pain her, she flinches – then she pains me back.)
When I came out of my reverie, one thing was clear: I needed to find out more about the baby.
Bullet# 3
The third bullet entered Lily’s abdomen, but not until it had clipped the edge of the table close up to where she had been sitting. It passed through her dress, her camisole, through her skin, the fat of her belly. (Again forgive me, Lily.) It plunged down towards her pelvis – its entry point was to the right of her tummy button, and slightly further down.
Ilium, pubis, sacrum – it entered the Latinate language of her tenderest innards as if travelling back in time to Ancient Rome, passing through the Fall, the Decline, to Greece, the birth of medicine, the Hippocratic Oath… A classicism of harm. That things with such exact names should meet with something so rough in its destruction! This was sacrilege, pollution, violation. Yes, this was rape.
The table edge had caused the third bullet to spin – the entry-wound was therefore larger, the bullet was losing kinetic energy faster. This bullet would be penetrating not perforating. Already it was finding a place to lodge itself – working its way in – aimed directly at Lily’s sex. And, inside, there was another being. It was soft and was making its home within softness. It was jelly in amniotic fluid. At this stage it was tadpoley and upside down, eyeless and like the sprig of some plant – curled up like the frond-front of a fern around the deep future importance of its spine.
Perhaps here, already, was a laugh and a way of holding the hands in repose. Perhaps, ready to die, was a love of Italian cooking or a fear of spiders. Perhaps this was the winning goal in the last minute of the FA Cup. Perhaps this was a live recording of Tosca.
The third bullet did not hit the perhaps directly. It may have been an irony, I’m no longer sure about these things, that the embryo (the baby) and the bullet were of approximately the same size. Is that an irony? Or is it merely a coincidence? The two missiles coincided inside Lily – the one a time bomb that she was about to have surgically defused, the other a permanent explorer-exploder.
The baby – a piece of housework needing to be sorted out – the boovering; the bullet – an interior redecoration from which the structure of the building would never recover.
The third bullet finally lodged in the muscles of Lily’s back – sideways on, a cavity closing around it.
22
After a very few minutes, I found I could no longer stand to be in Lily’s flat.
I went out into the street and caught a taxi. There was a place I felt compelled to go.
Lily had been buried in the graveyard where I first saw her: Highgate Cemetery. I wondered if anyone else in the world was aware of that particular irony. I wondered if anyone else would have been particularly interested to hear of it.
The day was bright and muggy as I crunched down the wide gravel path – repeating the directions that the man on the gate had given me.
Up the path. Past Marx’s tomb. Carry on. Right.
There were ten or twelve as-yet-unfilled graves, covered over with rough boards. Beside each oblong hole was a pile of heavy clayey earth, waiting to be clodded down on to a coffin.
Lily’s gra
ve, when I found it, was half-way along a row of small, tasteful headstones. There was, as yet, no headstone for her. Instead, the entire six feet by three (Lily had been five foot ten and a quarter) was covered by heaped-up bunches of now-invisible flowers – lilies, white, inevitably, unbearably – their Cellophane wrappers silvered over with condensation.
The bleating sound of geese came across from the lake in the adjacent park. Through the black iron railings I saw a couple of women pushing their prams past.
There was an empty bottle of whiskey and a half-filled bottle of olive oil over by the next grave along.
I’d loved Lily until that love was no longer capable of return. I had nothing to blame myself for – I’d loved her as well and as long as I could.
Another realization that Lily was really dead and what Lily really being dead really meant came upon me.
I wanted to sink down on to my knees, down on to the earth that lay above her, but my embarrassment held me back. I’d watched that sinking too many times: my natural reaction had been taken away from me. My mourning had been disallowed by soap opera, by TV movies, by Hollywood. I felt myself too English ever to get over my grief: someone needed to tell me that I could allow myself the vulgarity of tears, the kitsch of distraction, the camp of complete prostration.
But no-one was around to do that.
23
In the taxi on the way back to Mortlake I tried to work things out in my head. There were, it seemed, certain immediate facts I could begin with. In her phonecall to me, Lily had said she’d been blown out by someone else for the Le Corbusier dinner date.
Certain other details of the evening recurred to confirm this: Lily’s dress – she wouldn’t have worn a new ghost frock just to meet me. I had never seen it before, and so it must have been a recent purchase, post-split. It screamed special occasion. It strongly hinted at romance – Lily wanting to look her absolute gorgeous best.
This was for the person she had hoped to be meeting.
