31

Music filled the house; a large radio-CD player was set up on the kitchen sideboard. The TV was just inside the front door in its box. She’d do that later. There were felt tips and coloured pencils on the table. She did the washing-up, humming along to the songs she knew and thinking, See you, not goodbye. See you, not goodbye. It could have been a line from a Dickinson poem, although hers mostly alternated between six and eight syllables. The short distance she had run earlier that morning felt like a marathon. She lowered the milk pan into the suds and stared out through the window. The study. She hadn’t been in the study yet. She quickly dried her hands and went upstairs. She could tell how he’d got up from the way the duvet was lying on the divan: he’d thrown it off in one go and hadn’t straightened it afterwards. I need to rest, she thought. I’m tired. She took off her clothes and lay down on the divan. It was cold in the study, the fire had burnt out long ago. The duvet cover chafed her nipples. The sweetness and the smell of bitter leaves she had noticed earlier came together at the top edge of the fabric. She pulled the duvet over her head and ran her hands over her belly.

Later, after she had put her clothes back on and lit a fire, she searched the room. Had the pile of books on the coffee table been disturbed? Had he written on the sheets of blank paper on the table next to the open volume of Dickinson’s poetry? She couldn’t remember if she had left it open at this page. A COUNTRY BURIAL. If, she thought, if this was where he had stopped leafing and reading, then . . .

She sat down and stared out of the window because she didn’t know what came after ‘then’. The sea was visible again over the tops of the now almost leafless trees. But far, very far away. She remembered something, also vague and far away, and stood up to rummage through a cardboard box of books she hadn’t yet unpacked. She had been almost certain that Habegger’s biography was in her office in Amsterdam, but it turned out to be in the box after all. She sat down at the desk and riffled the pages. On page 249 – where the book fell open – there was a thick red line under ‘since nothing is as real as “thought and passion”, our essential human truth is expressed by our fantasies, not our acts’. It was a reference to a book Dickinson had read when she was twenty-one which was supposed to have formed her, along with her great-great-uncle’s coughing fit and all kinds of other insignificant events. Habegger was an old gasbag, but she still copied the passage onto the open page of the poetry volume, a little fearfully and with an empty feeling in her stomach, before closing the biography. Not just emptiness, but pain too, a bit higher than usual today, inhabiting her throat and the back of her head. She walked to the bathroom and took two paracetamol. It was almost time for her to see the doctor. She couldn’t go on like this much longer. She wondered if she was up to it. Until yesterday she had been almost certain she was.