‘There you go,’ he said, applying the hand brake decisively. The car lurched back, making my empty stomach heave.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
He nodded meaningfully out of the window, and I noticed a makeshift banner hoist above the gate.
‘WELCOME HOME, KAREN,’ it said, in blue poster paint, the letters surrounded by multicoloured hearts and flowers.
‘That’s sweet of you.’
‘Team effort,’ Nick said. ‘My idea, Cath’s handiwork. Min and Ray supplied the paints. This is what you get when you live in a proper community. Can you imagine anyone bothering in London?’
I climbed down gingerly from the passenger seat and Nick hurried round to assist me as if I were royalty.
‘Can I carry you over the threshold?’ Nick said. ‘Go on, let me carry you over the threshold.’
‘I might just walk if it’s OK with you.’
He installed me on the couch with a blanket over my knees and pointed out the three bouquets I’d been sent – none of them, this time, anonymous.
‘Right, I’ll put Madam’s washing on,’ he said, brandishing the holdall. I smiled at him.
‘Oh, Nick…’ I remembered, ‘my phone’s in there…’
He scrabbled in the bag and handed it to me.
‘You’re not to start doing stuff on it,’ he said sternly. He flicked on the TV.
‘There you go – Netflix.’ He handed me the remote.
When I thought he was safely out of the way, I picked the phone up and scanned the screen. Three missed calls all from the same London number. My thumb hovered over the playback button.
‘Er…’ He popped his head round the kitchen door, jokily admonishing.
I grinned, put the phone down and picked up the remote again.
‘The Gaineses send their love,’ Nick called above the sound of water thundering into the kettle. ‘Frieda’s recovering well you’ll be pleased to know…’
Frieda? Frieda…? I couldn’t think who… oh yes, the blessed dog.
‘Cath said she’d drop round later. She and Min are helping Jean’s daughter with the funeral arrangements.’
‘Mmmm?’ I said vaguely. It didn’t sink in at first. I was too busy scrutinizing Ethan’s card.
‘Whose funeral arrangements? Nick?’ I threw off the blanket and started towards the kitchen, panic rising in me; desperate to be told I’d got it wrong, but the cold feeling of dread in my stomach told me I hadn’t. I remembered the pale bruise on Jean’s cadaverous face, the way she had cringed in fear as Gordon and Nick had marched her back towards the cottage. She may or may not have met a violent death but my allowing her to be returned to that morgue, that benighted prison of a house, to which even her own children had long since stopped coming, had been an act of betrayal.
‘Nick…?’ I said again, but he had his back to me, fishing in the teabag jar and I was no longer in the kitchen; I was back on the lane and it was no longer the squeal of a boiling kettle, but the sound of Jean’s keening.
‘Karen!’
My body jerked like a marionette as he caught me under the arms, one of my fists thwacking the doorframe as I passed out.
‘Now stay put,’ he said with pretend sternness when he’d laid me in the bed, and pulled up the duvet around me. ‘I’ll bring your tea up in a minute. And how about a nice bit of toast?’
He looked at me, then shook his head in self-reproach. ‘I knew I should have carried you.’
‘It wasn’t that,’ I protested, ‘it was what you said about the funer—’
He raised his hand.
‘Don’t even go there. It’s not for you to be worrying about. If you’re better, fine, but if not… we hardly knew them and there’s plenty of people rallying round… the daughter’s here and the son’s flying in from Dubai.’
He paused for a moment, and, resting his hand on the door handle, added wistfully, ‘You’d hope your kids’d visit before you popped your clogs, really, wouldn’t you?’
Then he left the room.
I was probably still a bit unhinged. I was certainly light-headed and Nick was right, I needed something to eat, but the thought of Jean’s death tormented me. I kept thinking back to the hunted look on her face when we had found her wandering in the lane, her resistance to being led back to the cottage. No wonder. No wonder…
Nick brought the toast, cut into four dainty triangles and watched me force down two of them. I handed him the plate and he narrowed his eyes and took it away with a grudging smile. Later he brought home-made broth and fed it to me, spoon by spoon, laughing when the vermicelli noodles slithered down my front and making a game of retrieving them with the spoon. I must have slept after that. When I woke, the room was grey with dawn and I could see him, cheek propped on palm, face silhouetted above me, eyes grave with concern.
I finished the course of antibiotics, but my body was rebelling by the end. Food was passing straight through me and the one time I attempted to make it to the bathroom by myself, I collapsed and Nick got mad at me for ‘trying to be a hero’. But it was that or feel mollycoddled – claustrophobic. He’d bought a smoothie maker, on the basis that I was finding solids tricky, and kept appearing by my bedside with large unappetising glasses of gloop, one time with a stick of celery for a swizzle stick. It was touching, I suppose, but it wasn’t really helping. In fact, with each day that passed, I found Nick’s devotion a little more irksome. Perverse, perhaps, considering I had spent the twenty years of our marriage yearning for such behaviour.
Suddenly, I was flavour of the month. He couldn’t get enough of me. He perched on the bed, pretending to lose at Scrabble while he told me about his plans for a family Christmas and a winter holiday – maybe Spain again for the art. He planned kohlrabi in the veggie patch come spring, he told me, and a Trivial Pursuit night with the pub quiz team when I was properly better, just to limber up, so we didn’t get trounced a second time. He plumped my pillows and laid his cool palm across my forehead and looked at me as though he were seeing me for the very first time.
Once, I woke late in the evening to hear the familiar burr of Cath’s voice downstairs. I sat up in bed and called her name, but my sleepy croak couldn’t compete with Newsnight on the telly and Nick holding forth and I was halfway out of bed when he caught me.
‘Hey, young lady, where d’you think you’re going?’
‘Cath’s here!’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he agreed,’ taking my elbow and steering me back to bed again, ‘and she’d be mortified if she thought she’d disturbed you. She just called in because she’s got nothing to wear for the funeral tomorrow and she wondered if we had anything she could borrow.’
‘She can have my grey pashmina,’ I said, breaking free of him and struggling with the catch on the wardrobe door. ‘It’s got sequins round the edge, but I don’t think that’ll…’
‘Not a problem, hen,’ Cath’s voice called up the stairs. ‘Your man’s lent me a very smart fedora. Just the job. Now, you get some rest and don’t be showing your face tomorrow unless you’re a hundred per cent, you hear?’
Before I could get near the landing, her footsteps were receding, the front door pulled shut behind her.