What to Do When Someone Dies

by Unknown

  There were dozens and I read them all. Their affair had lasted weeks. They usually met late at night, but sometimes they grabbed an hour or two in the day. They used Johnny’s flat, Milena’s house, when Hugo wasn’t there, a hotel a few times, and once, according to Johnny’s rhapsodic account, which I read with wincing shame, the back of Milena’s BMW. I noticed that whereas Johnny’s emails were often emotional – besotted, elated, grateful, angry or hurt – Milena’s were almost always the same: short, practical, and often in the form of orders or careless ultimatums. She rarely mentioned her husband, and when she did it was as an irritating obstacle; she gave Johnny dates, times, places, that was it. I felt sorry and embarrassed for him: Milena was very sure of her power over him, and in his messages to her, he was not the sardonic and assured man I knew but someone insecure, needy, painfully submissive. By the end his messages deteriorated into abusive accusations about other lovers, deceit and calculating cold-heartedness. To these, Milena did not bother to respond.

  In her work, Milena had been untidy and disorganized, not writing down appointments, expenses or even formal agreements, operating on a private whim that, often, she had not even shared with Frances. But her personal emails were scarily well ordered, almost playfully businesslike in their arrangement of betrayal, jealousy and loss. The first thing I discovered, when I entered Milena’s virtual world, was that she had a special mailbox for her love affairs, labelled ‘Miscellaneous’. Johnny was in there, and so was a lover from the previous year, who had begun as a client. It struck me that she rarely called them by their name: it was never ‘Dear Johnny’ or ‘Dear Craig’.

  Gradually I came to feel a certain grudging, appalled admiration for the woman who’d taken my husband: she might have been predatory and cold, but she wasn’t a hypocrite. She didn’t say ‘make love’ but ‘fuck’; she didn’t pretend to feelings she didn’t possess; she never used the word ‘love’. I was struck by the apparent absence of pleasure, the energetic joylessness of her affairs. And she’d had so many. How had she managed it? All that planning, all that deception, all the lies she must have told, different lies to different men and having to remember which version of herself she was meant to be with which man. It made me weary just to think of it.

  I searched for Greg by name, but wasn’t discouraged when nothing turned up: if I’d learned anything over the past grim weeks, it was that their secret was buried deep. I wouldn’t stumble across it but would have to uncover it with patience and guile. I glanced at the mailboxes, one by one. Johnny, the client Craig, someone called Richard, with whom Johnny had overlapped and who had unceremoniously faded out. There was a mailbox labelled ‘Accounts’, which set my heart pounding so ferociously that I pressed my hand against my chest to calm it, feeling dizzy with the terror that I was finally about to enter the hidden world of my dead husband, but it turned out to be just what it said: increasingly exasperated messages from Milena and Hugo’s financial adviser about her accounts, which were clearly in a mess. There were also several people who didn’t sign off with their own names and whose addresses didn’t give any immediate clue as to their owners’ identity – perhaps, I thought, one might turn out to be Greg, masquerading under an assumed name. And then, of course, there were other people who hadn’t been given their own special compartment, but were scattered randomly through the in-box, or who had been moved to the catch-all ‘Personal’ mailbox, which also held messages from friends, acquaintances and family.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I started. I had been so engrossed that I hadn’t noticed Beth arrive. I felt as if I’d been caught with my hands in the till. Perhaps, in some way, I had. ‘Checking some stuff out,’ I said.

  ‘You want some coffee?’

  ‘Great.’

  While Beth was gone I wondered if what I was doing was wrong. Well, of course it was. The question was how wrong, and whether it mattered. Frances was my employer and she probably thought of me as a friend. Here I was, under false pretences, snooping through her office, rifling through her dead friend’s personal life, behaving like a spy. When Beth returned, she gave me the coffee but she didn’t head off, as she normally did, to potter around and talk on the phone. Instead she pulled up a chair and sat close to me, cradling her mug in her hands. I quickly closed Milena’s email window.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said.

  I made myself laugh. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m working here because Frances is an old friend of my mum’s. It doesn’t pay much but the job’s good for making contacts. And it’s Frances’s life. But I don’t understand what’s in it for you.’

  I couldn’t tell whether Beth was teasing, curious or suspicious. Had she picked up on some mistake? I tried to change the subject. ‘What about Milena? What was she in it for?’

  ‘Why are you so curious about her? It’s like an obsession with you – Milena this, Milena that.’

  ‘It’s strange her not being here,’ I said. ‘It’s like going to a play that’s missing the star.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Beth. ‘I’d never really known anyone before who died. There was a girl at university who was killed in a car crash but she wasn’t really a friend. I worked with Milena for a year and I’d never met anyone like her and I still wake up in the morning and suddenly remember she’s dead and it comes as a shock each time.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said, although I wasn’t thinking of Milena any more.

  When we’d finished our coffee, and Beth had taken my mug away, I told myself I mustn’t look at Milena’s emails, that it was too risky while Beth was there, but I couldn’t help myself. I arranged the screen so that she couldn’t see it and opened a notebook, so that I appeared to be doing accounts, and returned to it with dread and overpowering curiosity.

  First – or first in this computer’s memory, going back two years and nine months – there was Donald Blanchard, barrister and colleague of Hugo’s, who called Milena ‘Panther’ and suffered from bursts of anxiety about betraying his friend, not to mention his own wife, which hadn’t stopped him taking Milena to Venice for a weekend.

  I was able to follow one of the affairs, with a man who signed himself J, as if it was a piece of music. It began, as several did, with memories of ‘last night’ and anticipation of the next time. It wasn’t like reading love letters, more like a series of diary entries, times and places. Then it gradually petered out, although there was a sudden flurry at the end, as the affair finished. The last message consisted of the single ominous sentence: ‘Well, I can just phone her up, then.’ Milena clearly didn’t like being left.

  This overlapped a more drawn-out affair with Harvey, who was visiting from the States. He went home and Richard arrived on the scene. During her time with Richard, Milena had a couple of flings: one was with a man much younger than herself, whom she referred to as her ‘toy boy’ and sent packing when he became too insistent. After Richard there had been Johnny. And after Johnny, in the crucial month before Greg and Milena had died together, there was only one other significant player: he never used a name, simply put a couple of crosses at the end of a message. I wrote his address in my notebook.

  I stared at the screen until my eyes hurt. Was the anonymous lover Greg? He signed off with kisses and his hotmail address was ‘gonefishing’ – there were dozens of messages from him, spaced out over three months. They were love letters: they commented on her hair, her eyes, her hands, the way she looked when she smiled at him, the way he felt when he saw her before she lifted her head and saw him too. For a moment I had to stop reading. There was a lump in my throat and my vision blurred. If this was Greg, he had never written to me in that way. And if this was Greg, he was writing to a Milena no one else had known: someone more tender and lovable than the bright, glittering, heartless woman everyone else seemed to remember. And that made horrible sense to me: I couldn’t imagine Greg having a cold-hearted affair, but I could imagine him falling in love with a woman, and by his love trans
forming her into someone different, better. I used to think he had done that to me – discovered a version of myself that only existed when I was with him and that had disappeared when he had died.

  Gradually the pain in my chest eased and I could look at the screen again. I put away the messages from the anonymous lovers for the moment and browsed through the in-box to see if anything relevant cropped up. There were various messages from ‘S’, cranky and intemperate. I looked at a couple of messages from her to him and recognized the flirtatious tone she reserved for certain men, very different from the brisker style she adopted with Frances, Beth or female clients. It seemed a very particular sort of betrayal to be reading Beth’s mail while she was sitting in the same room but, then, I was becoming something of a connoisseur of betrayal.

  I was about to open a message from Milena’s husband when I heard the front door open and Frances hurried down the stairs, looking flushed. ‘Hi!’ she said, tossing her coat on to the sofa and coming over to kiss my cheek, which felt hot with shame and anxiety. ‘Sorry I was away so long.’

  ‘That’s OK.’

  ‘What have you been up to?’

  ‘Just clearing things up a bit,’ I mumbled. Couldn’t she tell that everything was exactly as it had been when she had left, not a single piece of paper moved or dealt with?

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t work too hard, though.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t.’

  She looked at Beth. ‘Could you make us some tea, darling?’

  Beth pulled a face, got up and left the room with obvious reluctance.

  Frances came over and stood close by me. ‘It’s been good having you here,’ she said, in a subdued tone. ‘I haven’t said this to you – well, I haven’t said it to anyone – but when Milena died I thought I might give up the business.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘To be honest, even before that things hadn’t been going well. Milena had…’ Frances paused. ‘Let’s just say that a lot of what brought me into the business seemed to have gone away.’

  ‘So things were bad before she died?’

  There was another long pause, in which Frances’s face took on a troubled expression I hadn’t seen before. ‘It’s all in the past now,’ she said finally, ‘and it’s not what I wanted to talk about. Maybe another time. We could go out for lunch – or dinner, even.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I said.

  ‘You’re easy to talk to and, to be honest, I need advice. There are things I need to say out loud.’

  I didn’t know how to respond; I felt my deceit must be written across my face. I made an indeterminate sound and stared at my hands, my ringless finger.

  ‘What I was going to say,’ Frances continued, ‘is that I know David was talking to you but I wanted to ask you formally if you’d think of staying on.’

  ‘Here?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘That was the general idea.’

  ‘I’ve given you the wrong impression,’ I said. ‘I’m just a teacher taking a bit of time out.’

  ‘I like having you around. Most people irritate me. You don’t.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I couldn’t meet her eyes. ‘But I don’t think it’s possible.’

  ‘Don’t say no at once. Think it over at least. Are you in tomorrow?’

  ‘There are things I need to do.’

  ‘I’d be grateful if you could manage an hour or so in the morning. I’ve got to go out.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Now I ought to leave. Things to do.’

  ‘But before you go, I think I should pay you for the last few days.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘Gwen! Anyone would think you were doing this for nothing.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not a saint.’

  ‘Johnny seems to think you’re pretty perfect.’ My face burned. l heard myself mutter something unintelligible. ‘Don’t worry. He hasn’t said anything to me. He’s pretty discreet. I’ve just seen the way he looks at you.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I managed to say, and dashed out.

  I told myself I mustn’t go back, but it had become an addiction. I had to go back, just to look through the rest of Milena’s emails. I arrived home in a restless and agitated state. My answering-machine was flashing but I didn’t bother to listen to the messages. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it while I paced round the house. I opened the fridge and had one of the liquid yoghurts Mary had brought. She said it would be good for my digestion; it tasted of coconut and vanilla and coated my tongue. I went into my neglected little garden. Darkness was drawing in, giving everything a mysterious air. I noticed the drifts of sodden leaves on the lawn, the nettles growing up against the back wall. There were a few yellow roses left on the bush by the back door. The bedraggled little blackbird was singing its heart out in the gloom. I reminded myself that I still had time to plant bulbs for spring. The previous autumn we’d planned snow-drops, winter aconites, daffodils and red tulips. Greg had loved tulips – he said they were the only flowers that were as beautiful dying as they were unfurling. I realized that I no longer had any difficulty in thinking of him in the past tense. When had that happened? On what day had he slipped between the cracks of memory to lie with other departed people in the deeper places of my mind?

  Back in the house, I laid my two charts on the kitchen table and looked at them, my brain tingling uselessly. I took my notebook out of my bag and stared at the two addresses. What should I do now? The phone rang and I didn’t answer it. I waited to hear the message but there wasn’t one. Then it rang again, but still I didn’t answer. It rang yet again. It was like a game of chicken. Finally I gave up and answered.

  ‘I knew you were there.’ It was Fergus.

  ‘Sorry, I was tired.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you for supper. Jemma’s put a chicken in the oven, I’ve lit a fire.’

  ‘As I said, I’m a bit tired.’

  ‘If you don’t come, we’ll put the dinner in the car and drive over to you. And if you don’t let us in we’ll eat on your doorstep and embarrass you in front of your neighbours.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll come.’

  ‘I’ll come, thank you.’

  I laughed. ‘Sorry for being so rude. Yes, thank you for asking me.’

  Jemma was very, very pregnant. Every so often she winced as the baby kicked her. At her invitation, I put my hand on her belly and felt it writhing and jabbing. She told me it kept getting hiccups.

  ‘There are so many things people won’t say to me,’ I said, after two glasses of wine.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fergus leaned forward to top up my glass but I put my hand over it.

  ‘Well, for example, you two don’t talk to me about the baby unless I press you. You think it might upset me – because of Greg, because we never managed it and now it’s too late. And of course it upsets me, but it’s not as if I forget about it until you remind me. It’s much better to say things, otherwise I feel shut out from life. Mary used to go on about Robin at every hour of the day – his snuffles, his nappies, the way his fist closed round her finger – and now she barely mentions him. Gwen used to tell me about her love life. Joe would regularly complain to me about having a cold or some bloody rich client. Not any more.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Fergus, glancing sideways at Jemma for her approval, ‘we wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Will you be its godmother?’

  ‘Godmother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you don’t believe in God.’

  ‘Well, that’s not really the point.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘Is that a no?’

  ‘Of course I’ll be its godmother! I’d love to.’ I was crying, tears sliding down my cheek and into my mouth. I wiped the back of my hand across my face and held out my glass for more wine. ‘Here’s to whoever-it-is.’

  ‘Whoever-it-is,’ they echoed.

  Fergus got up and hugged me.
‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ he whispered.

  I shrugged.

  Chapter Twenty

  When I got home, I had decided what to do. It would have been easy to send emails from Milena’s account, simply replying to the messages she had received from old lovers, but that felt too risky. Even if I stayed anonymous, it would have to be sent by someone who knew Milena’s password. It might even establish a connection with Milena’s computer or her office. The safest idea seemed to be to set up a hotmail account for myself. I had no idea how easy it was to trace emails, but I probably wasn’t dealing with computer experts here. Creating the new email address, I simply jabbed randomly at the keyboard and ended up with j4F93nr4wQ5@hotmail.co.uk. I entered my first name as J and my second name as Smith. As a password I wrote out a sequence of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters. When I was done, I sent myself an email, just to check. There was just ‘J Smith’, the subject line, the date and time and the address. That seemed safe enough.

  I entered the first of the email addresses I had retrieved from Milena’s computer, wrote ‘re’ beside ‘subject’, and then, after a few moments’ thought, typed: ‘Dearest Robin, I am LONGING to see you and…’ I tried to think of a plausible name. ‘Petra’. No – wasn’t that a dog’s name? And a tourist destination. ‘Katya’. Sounded a bit exotic. I realized I was thinking of names that sounded too like ‘Milena’. I looked at the books on the shelf. ‘Richmal’. Hopeless. ‘Elizabeth’. Was anyone called that any more? ‘Eliza’. ‘Lizzie’. ‘Beth’. ‘Bessie’. They all sounded ridiculous. Anyway, what did it matter. ‘Lizzie’ would do. And then I remembered. No, it wouldn’t do. The name needed to start with a J. Jackie then. ‘Jackie again after all this time. Ring as soon as you arrive, love Jackie xxxxx PS I hope this is your email address and if it isn’t will whoever is reading it let me know!!!!!’

  I read it over and then again. I pressed send and it was gone. I wrote the same message to the second address as well and sent it. I thought of when I was a child and sometimes I had been afraid to post a letter because when I pushed it through the slot and heard it fall, I would realize it was still there, a few inches away, but lost to me, beyond change or recall.