Twelve

Saturday morning. Early. Thomas’s wife sat on the stairs, the letter in her hand.

It was postmarked Sittingbourne, Kent.

Anna had opened it five minutes ago. Now she sat, turning it over and over in her hands. The funny thing was, she remembered Sittingbourne. She’d had an interview there once for a college place. A long time ago. She remembered a dusty train out of London on a hot afternoon; a long station platform, the haze rippling over the tracks. A small college hidden behind an estate of houses. It had been nice: the interview board, nice. But she had another offer, and never went there again.

Now, from Sittingbourne, of all places on earth, came another letter.

The first from Lincolnshire, the next from Kent. It made no sense at all. But then, she felt beyond sense. Way beyond sense.

They were the same. A sheet of A4 white printer paper. Some letters from newspapers and the rest filled in with a thick blue felt-tip pen. This one called her by her married name.

She read it again.

Dear Mrs JOsceLyNe,

The last one had called her Anna.

Didn’t youR MUM be sick. SHE was OK til the picTuRE was BROKE.

Anna Joscelyne let the paper fall, covering her face with both hands, and weeping silently. Her mother had been sixty-one; she had arthritis. The picture had been her father, in his wartime uniform, taken in the Libyan desert.

Her mother had been sick that day, and the picture was lying next to her body, speckled with that … that terrible last seizure of her mother’s. Her swollen knuckles were pressed to the glass, miraculously whole where the frame was splintered. Her knees were scratched and her stockings torn. The police thought she might have crawled to the spot on the carpet where the photograph had been thrown.

Anna had dreamed of it again and again: reconstructing her mother’s unknown last hour in her head. She ought to have been with her. She blamed herself constantly that she was not. She and Thomas should not have gone away that day.

It had been in the first month of their relationship. They had bumped into each other many times before it blossomed, so suddenly, last year. And she—who’d only had a handful of boyfriends, and no one that remotely moved her at all—was suddenly schoolgirlish, and silly, and wildly happy. Thomas’s hand in hers. Thomas, who looked like some sort of elder statesman, in her arms, telling her his ponderous jokes, asking her advice about work. It was as if she had been caught in a glorious emotional sandstorm.

Of course, Thomas was not like that with her now. He’d reverted to his silences. He went visiting his family, leaving her behind. A fleeting game was over. She had been the toy, and the game was togetherness. But Thomas had grown tired of it. He liked to be left alone, sometimes for days. He liked his own company. Absolute solitude. The only people he ever talked to at length were his family. They were a closed society, that group. The overwhelming step-father, the silent mother, the flashy, gluttonish sister. They talked a language between them that she didn’t understand. And only the mother seemed to be on her side; sometimes she thought that the other two actually hated her.

On that terrible, fateful day last year, they’d driven in Thomas’s car all the way to Leicester. She couldn’t remember a single detail about the seminar. All she remembered was that it was a spring day, and everything had seemed perfectly right. Until she came home. Until she opened the door. And that first agonising wash of guilt had never left her.

Someone had come in and terrified Mother, vandalised the house, perhaps even stood over her as she died gasping on the floor next to father’s picture, her fingers clutching for his image to hold next to her. Perhaps they had even stood over her, laughing.

That was the idea that wouldn’t leave her. That some stranger had stood over Mother laughing while she died, and while her daughter was away.

Until Thomas came into her life, she and Mother had been so close. She had accepted that she would probably never marry—she was so particular, no man ever measured up to Mother’s high standards—and then Thomas came: silent, straight, self-controlled, just as they were, and they seemed like three pieces of a puzzle fitting together …

Thomas had been very good to Mother. Understood that Anna had to visit every day, sometimes to stay overnight if Mother was not feeling well; their relationship was not one of high passion, anyway. Despite the fact that she would have secretly liked it to be. No, they were more two minds meeting rather than two bodies. Thomas didn’t mind if she left his bed and went to Mother instead. He understood all that.

In the grey light of the winter morning, Anna Joscelyne stood up. She looked like an invalid struggling to get upright, worn down with an invisible burden. She eventually got to the front door.

The glass was cold: she rested her head against it. Through this door, the letters came.

The wedding was only a fortnight ago. A fortnight ago, she’d got ready, stepped through this door, gambling that in marrying Thomas she’d be able to erase mother’s death. Start again. But she had known almost at once that it wouldn’t work. There had been a lot of talk at the reception about Cecily walking out of the church, which seemed to worry Thomas’s stepfather greatly, as if Cecily’s disturbance was all that mattered, and not Anna’s feelings at all … and then the night away, at a local hotel, had been so staged somehow, and empty, and lifeless, with Thomas lying on the bed staring into space, and the champagne left unopened, and her dress hanging bleached over the back of the chair like a shroud … And the drive back in the morning, in silence. The moment Thomas got in, he’d rung his mother.

She had no mother.

He couldn’t see how much that phone call, the very act of lifting the receiver to talk to her, when she herself felt so utterly alone, had wounded her …

The way that Mother died, and the letters and phone calls afterwards, had destroyed everything that went before. All the peaceful, pleasant years alone with Mother. All their evenings together. All their little trips out, even the innocuous shopping trips to town at the weekends. All those touching small memories. They were overshadowed completely by one monstrous day. A day that had grown ever larger, ever more significant in her mind, until it edged everything else out. Mother was now the woman on the floor on the old red carpet; no longer the round-faced, arms-crossed woman of the years that went before. Mother was the woman grovelling on the worn red pile begging, perhaps, for help. Her image shattered as neatly as the photograph. All composure gone.

And what the letters said was right.

That was the unbearable thing about them.

They were right.

It was all her fault.

She glanced up, at the dark stairs above her. Thomas was still asleep. She imagined going to wake him, showing him the letter. He would frown; he would sit up in bed, take his glasses carefully from the bedside cabinet, and read the message. Then he would say nothing, except look at her with that level, interrogating gaze. He would not kiss her or put an arm around her.

She took down the car keys from the hook alongside the front door.

Of course … she hadn’t wanted that kind of marriage. She had chosen him for that quality: that silence, that measured, slow approach to everything.

If only, though … if only once in a while, like these times, like the last few weeks in the lead-up to the wedding when all those annoying details seemed to go wrong, and he never helped her, like when the letters came … if only he could have shown that he could be angry. It would have helped her to unfreeze this desperate coldness she carried inside. Just to stroke her hair, as other men might do, and tell her that he would find an answer …

But no, that was not Thomas.

That would never be Thomas.

She opened the front door. She walked over the drive, opened the car door, and got in. The interior was breathtakingly cold; the leather seats stung her bare flesh. She was still just wearing the thin nightdress. No dressing gown. No slippers on her feet.

She turned the key in the ignition, put the car into reverse. The gravel spun a little: she heard it spatter against the underside of the car. She changed to first, and second, steering out of the drive, turning left into the road.

It took her five minutes to reach the right road. A piece of dual carriageway, only a half mile long.

Half-way down was a bridge, a footbridge that spanned the road. Children sometimes hung from here, waving at traffic.

On each side were concrete pillars, the span supports. They were quite pretty, really. Arches above concrete. They made a nice pattern above the grey road. Sometimes in the morning, driving this way, she would see the sun shining through the spaces of the arches, casting a pattern on the grass of the embankment.

She put the car into fifth, thinking, my fault …

She hit the bridge at almost seventy miles an hour.

And died instantly.