Quit, quit, for shame, this will not move,
This will not take her;
If of her selfe she will not Love,
Nothing can make her:
The Devill take her.
Song
Sir John Suckling (1609–1642)
THE GROUND WAS SOAKED with the rain of the past week. As he let himself into the front garden, his shoes sank deeply into the wet mulch of leaves and dirt. He didn’t close the small black gate behind him. That gate always creaked on the back swing, and though it was late and not one window in the entire street of terraced houses showed a light, he did not want to take a chance on waking any of the neighbours.
A gust of wind shook the branches of the tree above him and a spatter of wet drops chilled the back of his neck. He moved closer to the house, looking up at the pale window on the top storey where her bedroom was.
For a moment he felt his breath catch—he could have sworn he saw something moving up there, shadow on glass. But then he shook his head and blinked deliberately. No. He must stop this. It was over. She was gone.
The spare key should still be in its usual hiding place behind the loose brick, guarded by the climbing hybrid musk roses. There were no roses in bloom now: just a tangle of tough stems. But come summer, he knew, the pink and apricot buds of ‘Buff Beauty’ and ‘Cornelia’ would scent the garden with a dreamy fragrance.
Roses had been her passion. And she loved the old varieties: ‘Gypsy Boy,’ ‘Grüss an Aachen,’ ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’. ‘The most sweet-smelling rose in the world,’ she’d say, her red hair pushed up underneath the wide straw hat, the large pruning scissors moving through the foliage with unsentimental vigour. She believed in cutting back the roses hard, so hard that he had protested. But she merely laughed at his concern. ‘You have to be cruel to be kind. If you give it a good pruning now, you’ll see. It will reward you with hundreds of blooms in years to come.’
Cruel to be kind. Those were the exact words that had gone through his mind during the memorial service. Cruel to be kind. Nip in the bud. Close the book. Drop the curtain.
Put the lid on.
He smiled. His fingers searched in the hollow behind the brick and withdrew the two keys tied to each other by a simple piece of string. For a moment he stood staring at the keys, absentmindedly wiping away the dirt clinging to them, his mind still on the service. He had never been to a cremation before, hadn’t quite known what to expect. But it had all been done very tastefully. He was a little surprised at how few people there were. Two of the neighbours, some clients, a woman she had befriended at her aerobics class—and that man, of course.
At the end of the service the funeral director had asked them all to sign the funeral book. In a cramped fist Alette’s neighbour had written in the comments column: ‘I will never forget her smile. God bless.’ He had written two words only: Precious dust. His epitaph for her. It amused him to think that she had read these very words only a few minutes before the crash. And what a delicious irony that her epitaph should be words from an elegy written for a woman who had lived more than three hundred and fifty years ago: a chaste woman, a woman of virtue: ‘filia praemortua prima Virgineam animam exhalavit.’ A woman with a virginal mind. Whereas Alette had been a slut. Wanton and hard of heart, to borrow a phrase of his mother’s. In no way like the sainted Maria Wentworth, who died in 1632, and of whom could be said, ‘…a Virgin, yet a Bride, To every Grace, she justifi’d , A chaste Poligamie, and dy’d.’
He placed the key in the lock and turned it noiselessly. He wasn’t going to disturb anything. He merely wanted to touch her things. Maybe lie in her bed for a brief moment, touch his cheek to her pillow. It would be his own private way of saying goodbye to her. A small act of self-indulgence.