What to Do When Someone Dies

by Unknown

  I wanted to be as honest as I could, so I told Judy about how I had constructed the charts, how I had cross-referenced them and how, this morning, I had wrapped them up in a giant folder and lugged them into the police station. I had been taken into an interview room and then I had unwrapped them in front of the startled gaze of the young detective. I had taken him through the most important details while he had consulted his own pretty skimpy file.

  ‘I knew I wasn’t going to convince them,’ I told Judy finally. ‘What was it that someone said? In order to understand me, you have to agree with me. For the police, the most important aspect of the case is that it’s closed and a line has been drawn under it. They don’t care about truth; it’s a matter of statistics. If they reopened the case and solved it, their statistics would look the same as they do now, except that they would have done a great deal more work.’

  Judy looked at her watch.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Am I boring you?’

  ‘I was going to say that our time is up,’ she said. ‘I make it a rule to be very strict about that. I find it’s helpful if the participants know that the time is limited. But just this once I’m going to continue for a few minutes. What did the detective say?’

  ‘He said lots of things, all negative. He looked carefully at my charts and then he called for another detective to come and look at them as well, but I think that wasn’t because he found them interesting or convincing. It’s more likely that he thought it was all so bizarre that someone else needed to witness it so they wouldn’t think he was making it up when he told them about it in the pub later. What he said was the sort of thing that people have been saying all along. Namely, that I haven’t proved Greg and Milena weren’t having an affair. I’ve just proved they weren’t on those particular days. And then he said that maybe they weren’t having an affair, and if they weren’t he hoped that would be of some comfort to me.

  ‘We had a bit of an animated discussion about that. I said I hadn’t even found evidence that they knew each other. He said if it came to that, they didn’t even have to have known each other. They might have met for the first time that day. He might have given her a lift for no reason at all. I tried to point out that there was a problem with that: there was a note from Milena to Greg, which I had found in Greg’s possession, about a sexual encounter on a day when they couldn’t – absolutely couldn’t – have had one. Didn’t he think that was a problem?’

  ‘What was his response?’ asked Judy.

  ‘You’re a psychologist,’ I said.

  ‘Actually I’m a psychiatrist.’

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You must know that when people have adopted a position in a controversy, if they encounter evidence that contradicts it, that just entrenches them more strongly in the view they already hold. He had no answer to that. Well, no real answer. He just said every case had aspects to it that didn’t fit together and it was never possible to dot every i and cross every t. He saw no reason to reopen the case and he might even have said something about my needing to get a life or some cliché like that. He made it painfully clear that he didn’t want to see any more of me or my theory. So I gathered up my charts and left, and now I’m here telling you about it and I don’t expect you to be any more sympathetic than Detective Inspector Carter was.’

  ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand,’ said Judy.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How did you compile the chart about Milena?’ said Judy. ‘I can understand how you could reconstruct the movements of your husband, but how could you do it for someone you didn’t know?’

  I cursed myself silently. Lying was so much harder than telling the truth because the truth fitted together automatically. ‘It wasn’t exactly a chart,’ I said in desperation. ‘I had bits of information from here and there.’

  Judy leaned towards me and her face took on a shrewd expression. ‘Ellie, are there things you’re not telling me?’

  ‘Not relevant things,’ I said, with an uneasy sense that, as I spoke, my nose ought to have been growing like Pinocchio’s.

  There was a silence during which Judy looked at her watch again.

  ‘I should probably go,’ I said.

  ‘What would you say if you were sitting where I’m sitting listening to you?’

  ‘I’d probably think I was mad,’ I said. ‘But, then, when I’ve heard a tape of myself speaking I’ve always hated my voice. It sounds different from the inside. In the end, I don’t really care about convincing other people. I knew the police wouldn’t be interested, but I felt I had a responsibility as a citizen to tell them what I’d discovered. I need to know the truth. It’s as simple as that. As long as I know, I don’t care what else happens.’

  ‘Ellie, I once had a patient, a woman, and her child was ill with cancer and after a time she died. There was a suggestion that the early signs of the disease might have been missed by the doctors. The father became obsessed with this while his child was still alive. He started a campaign and took legal action, and he fought the case for years. I think it may still be going through the courts even. He took early retirement from his job. The case became his job, really. I was never quite sure of the rights and wrongs of it but the result was that the time he should have spent with his child, when time was precious, and later mourning after her death, was spent going to meetings, filing files and writing letters. He kept telling his wife he wanted something good to come out of their child’s experience, but to the wife it just felt as if he was avoiding facing up to what had happened and living through it. He kept busy so he wouldn’t have to stop and think and feel.’

  ‘His efforts might have changed procedures so that other children were saved,’ I said. ‘And you wanted him to give it up just so that he and his wife could feel better. Anyway, I’m not like that man. I don’t have a dying child to nurse. I don’t have a partner I might be neglecting. The only way I could neglect my husband now would be to allow people to have the wrong idea about him when he’s dead and can’t speak for himself.’

  ‘If you believe that, why are you here?’ asked Judy. ‘You know I’m not a policeman. I’m not someone who can evaluate evidence or discuss the legalities. I’m a person who helps people heal. So they don’t have to go out into the world and do things, they don’t have to set things right or revenge themselves on their enemies. They simply give themselves permission to be normal.’

  ‘That’s why I came,’ I said. ‘It’s like a reminder. You’re a reminder to me that there’s another way of living. It’s like someone who’s incredibly depressed trying to remind themselves that there will be a time in the future when things don’t look as they do now. There’ll come a time when I’ll buy shoes and meet people for drinks and flirt and be a good friend again…’

  ‘You make being normal sound frivolous.’

  ‘I don’t mean to. What I mean is that coming here is like looking through a window at a garden I’d love to go into and that maybe I will some day. But for the moment I’m not giving myself permission to be normal, quite the opposite. I’m giving myself permission to be abnormal. I’m going to stick with my charts and my conspiracy theories and I’m not going to play the part of the grieving widow who’s accepting and passive and basically invisible.’

  Judy shook her head. ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she said. ‘These aren’t just roles you can choose between. You can’t put off healing as if it were a foreign holiday.’

  I thought for the moment. ‘Maybe I’m on holiday now,’ I said. ‘A holiday from being normal and nice and what everybody wants me to be.’

  ‘It’s called grief,’ said Judy.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘The grief comes later, when I know what I’m grieving for.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  There were some things, however, that I couldn’t put off, no matter how much I wanted to. ‘I’m dreading it,’ I said to Gwen on the phone, just before I lef
t. ‘Why am I dreading it quite so much? It’s almost like a phobia.’

  ‘Then don’t go. Say you’re ill.’

  ‘I might as well get it over with.’

  I’d seen Greg’s mother and father at the funeral, and spoken to them briefly twice since then, I’d erased several of their messages from my answering-machine, along with some from his brothers and his sister Kate. I had tried not to think about them because I knew that, whatever I was going through, it was probably worse for them. No parent should ever bury a child. Greg was their first-born. However they had treated him when he was alive – his father had patronized him, bullied him and lost his temper with him, while his mother had compared him unfavourably to his more conservative and prosperous siblings – they had loved him in their fashion. And presumably it made it still more painful to have lost him before they had had a chance to become reconciled. Their last words (Paul had accused Greg of being part of the selfish generation who hadn’t even given his parents grandchildren yet) had been bitter and heated.

  They were waiting for me at Bristol Temple Meads station, and I climbed into the back of the car before leaning forward to kiss their cheeks and hand over the flowers I’d bought.

  ‘You’re a bit late,’ said Paul, starting the car and fiddling with his rear-view mirror, so that for an instant I found myself gazing straight into his slightly bloodshot eyes.

  ‘The train was delayed.’

  ‘You’d have done better to drive.’

  ‘I don’t have a car,’ I said. The fact hung in the air between us. I didn’t have a car because Greg had died in it. With someone else.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ said Kitty, unenthusiastically, as the car drew away from the kerb and joined the queue nosing out on to the main road.

  ‘Thanks.’ I knew I wasn’t. ‘You too, Kitty. How have you been?’

  She turned in her seat and gave me her plaintive smile. ‘I’ve got a bit of a sniffle this morning. I think I’m coming down with a cold.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. But I meant since Greg’s death.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, flummoxed. Paul coughed. Clearly Greg’s death was a taboo subject.

  ‘It’s been hard,’ said Kitty. ‘Very hard. Especially with –’ She stopped dead. Her eyes filled with tears and she started fiddling nervously with her hair.

  ‘With him dying with another woman?’ I suggested.

  Paul coughed again, then said, ‘Here we are. Our humble abode.’

  The house was scrupulously tidy and filled with objects Paul and Kitty had collected over the years: the teddy bears on the sofa, the thimbles in the glass cabinet, the snow domes ranged along the mantel, the glass cats on top of the piano that nobody had played since Greg had left home at eighteen. There were photos on the window-sill, and while Kitty went off to get lunch for us, I examined them. ‘Where have all the photos of Greg gone?’ I asked Paul.

  He gave his short cough. ‘We thought you might like them. I’ve put them in a bag for you to take, with things like his school reports.’

  ‘But don’t you want them? I mean, now more than ever, I would have thought –’

  ‘This has been painful for his mother,’ he interrupted me. ‘The photographs upset her.’

  Kitty called from the kitchen, announcing lunch. As we sat down to eat, I made myself say what I had come to say. It came out sounding too much like a prepared speech. ‘One of the reasons I’m here is that I wanted to give you some things of Greg’s as keepsakes, Ian, Simon and Kate as well as you two. Just books, mostly ones I thought you might like. There are photos too. But if you don’t want them…’

  ‘Well,’ said Paul. He blinked at me. ‘We can have a look at least.’

  ‘I brought you his one and only tie.’

  ‘Paul’s very particular about his ties,’ said Kitty. ‘Nothing fancy.’

  ‘I just thought it would be a memento.’

  We were sitting on three sides of the small table, with a curried egg salad in the middle, and the fourth – where Greg should have been, his complicit smile meant just for me – empty. Kitty divided the salad neatly into three and put my portion on the plate in front of me. I could feel her eyes on me. She and Paul had never taken to me: my job was too odd, not a proper job at all, really; my clothes were strange; they didn’t approve of my opinions, which was strange because I’d never thought of myself as someone who had them. Yet now here I was, the publicly wronged and tragically widowed daughter-in-law.

  ‘Aren’t you hungry, Ellie?’ said Kitty.

  ‘This is lovely.’ I took a determined bite of my egg and swallowed it with an effort. ‘I just wanted to say that it seems strange to me that we’ve never talked about what happened.’

  Paul looked grim and embarrassed and didn’t speak.

  ‘I didn’t like to ask Greg about things,’ said Kitty, placidly. ‘If he had come to me and said he wasn’t happy I would have listened. I’m his mother after all. I suppose he must have had his reasons for doing what he did.’

  ‘Our marriage was very happy,’ I said, pushing the plate away.

  The two of them exchanged a glance.

  ‘It must be hard for you to bear,’ said Kitty.

  ‘I don’t need to bear it,’ I said. ‘That’s another reason why I’m here today. I wanted to tell you that Greg was a good man. He was the most loving husband.’ I looked at the clock on the wall: I had only been there for twenty-five minutes. When could I decently leave? ‘I trusted him.’ Then I corrected myself: ‘I trust him.’

  ‘It was awful,’ I said to Joe, who had insisted on taking time off work to pick me up from the station and drive me home, even though it would have been much quicker to catch the Underground, and even though I didn’t want to go home. It was warm and luxurious inside the BMW and I sank gratefully back into the seat.

  He grinned and put a hand on my knee. I pretended it wasn’t there and eventually he moved it to change gear.

  ‘I’ll bet it was,’ he said. ‘I’ve met them, remember? How Greg came from a family like that I’ll never know. At least you’ve done your duty.’

  ‘I took them books they didn’t want, photos they gave back, and memories they were trying to erase. We all hated every minute of it.’

  ‘What are you doing later?’

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘A little,’ I said evasively.

  ‘Good. You need to get back to things, Ellie.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘You look a bit tired. Have you been okay?’

  ‘Some days are better than others.’

  ‘If you ever want someone to talk to…’

  ‘I’ve talked enough. I just go over and over the same things. There’s nothing left to say that I haven’t said already.’

  ‘Are you all right for money?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Money,’ he repeated. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine, I think. As far as I know. I haven’t gone through everything. I’ve let things slide. Greg and I weren’t big savers, but we didn’t spend much either.’

  ‘I can give you some. Lend,’ he corrected himself hastily. ‘If there’s a cash-flow problem.’

  ‘That’s good of you. But I’ll be all right.’

  The car pulled up outside my house. I went to kiss his cheek but he turned his face and, before I had a chance to pull away, kissed me on the lips. I pushed him away. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘I’m kissing you.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my friend. And you were Greg’s friend. And you’re married to Alison. Who knows what you get up to behind her back? But not with me.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ he said, with a groan that was also a half-laugh. ‘I don’t know what came over me. You’re a lovely woman.’

  ‘Do you pounce on every lovely woman?’

  He held up his hands in mock-surrender, trying to make it into a joke. ‘Just th
e ones I can’t resist.’

  ‘Poor Alison,’ I said, and saw a flash of anger cross his face.

  ‘Alison’s fine. We have a good marriage.’

  ‘I’m going to forget it happened,’ I said. ‘Don’t ever do that again.’

  ‘I won’t. Sorry, sweetheart.’

  I looked at him as if he were a strange, exotic specimen I’d observed. ‘Is it easy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To have an affair and then go home at night.’

  ‘You make it sound as if I do it all the time.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Of course not! You know me.’

  ‘What about at the moment? Is there anyone?’

  ‘No!’ But something in his voice, in his expression, told me he was lying.

  ‘Come on, Joe – who?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘I know there is. Is she married?’

  ‘You’ve got a one-track mind. Ever since Greg died, you’ve been on the look-out for adultery and deception.’

  ‘Someone from work? Someone I know? It is, isn’t it?’

  ‘Ellie.’ He was half laughing, as if this was a great joke.

  ‘Oh, God, I know who it is.’

  ‘This is ridiculous. I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘It’s Tania, isn’t it?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Joe?’

  ‘It’s nothing, I promise. But she’s so young and eager.’

  ‘Oh God, Joe,’ I said. I felt anger well inside me as I gazed at his handsome, rugged face, his smiling mouth. ‘She’s half your age.’

  ‘Maybe that’s the point, Ellie,’ he said. ‘And maybe you should stop judging everyone.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You do, and I understand why.’

  ‘I don’t mean to. I just can’t bear to think of Alison getting hurt.’

  ‘She won’t, I promise. And that – just now –’ he gestured round the car as if the kiss was still floating in the air ‘– that was wrong of me. Greg’s death has left me feeling at a loss. Forgive me.’

  After he had driven away I entered my house, but only to dump the shopping bag of Greg’s effects I’d brought back from his parents. Then I walked to the Underground station, eyes watering in the easterly wind. In spite of everything I made up my mind to go back to Party Animals, and I couldn’t bear to wait, even though I wasn’t sure what I would do there, except more snooping.