7

John Brigham had met his wife, Claire, when she was working in the West End.

She had only been in London for two weeks after a year in the provinces, touring. She was a designer for a theater company. She always joked that John had snatched her straight off the train. She had a beautiful voice, so beautiful with its soft Dumfriesshire burr.

For those first few dates, John would meet her when the theaters came out, in the crush on the corner of Wardour Street. For a while, they met only then, late at night, going to a restaurant in Chinatown. The first few times with her, he would get home at one or two in the morning and spend the next hour or so too wired to sleep, looking out of the window at the castellated gable end of the house that faced his, absorbing every last detail of its white-on-gray pattern until the very texture of the bricks came to mean Claire, and the way that the lights from the street crept only into one corner, and all the rest was hazily dark.

And then one night she came home with him.

He didn’t even go into the office the next day. He sat with her, watching her face with its sunny smile; her neat and practical hands fastened around a coffee cup; listening to the swing of her skirt against the stairs as she ran down them, late, to go to the theater.

One night he went to the Apollo and saw the play.

He was on the end of a row. Directly behind him sat two women in their fifties, equally discussing the clothes and the amount of the surgery that the leading actress was reputed to have undergone. His attention on the morose one-woman play had wandered; he tilted his head upward and looked at the ornamentation of the boxes, the doorways, the roof. He looked at the stage and imagined Claire in the wings, hardly fifty feet from where he was sitting, and had a barely controllable urge to rush the stage, go into the wings, and find her.

When they got home that night, she told him that she was going away.

“She’s taking the play to Broadway,” she said.

“Who?”

She named the actress.

“And you go with her?”

“That’s what she’s asked.”

He tried to absorb the information, what it meant to him. “When?” he asked, eventually.

“In the summer. It’s a big deal.” She didn’t meet his eye.

He felt as if the blood were draining right out of his body. He had known her precisely three weeks.

“I have to go. It’s my work,” she said. “It’s a dream chance.”

“Couldn’t you work with someone else, here?” he asked. She had said nothing, her eyes lowered. He wondered if he ought to dash the dream. He wondered if he could.

“Do you want to go?” he asked.

“I would like to see America,” she said.

Moments passed. He had lived a bachelor life until then; he had told everyone that he would never marry. He couldn’t imagine ever being in the frame of mind to commit his life to another person.

“I’ll take you to see America,” he said.

She had given him a quizzical smile. “Oh, yes?” she asked. “When, exactly?”

“This summer,” he’d replied. “On our honeymoon.”

They bought a house in Rotherhithe, near the Tube, on a road that thundered all day long with lorries ferrying backward and forward from the new Docklands houses half a mile away. Their own was not new. It wasn’t appealing, either. Not at first. Not until he set to work on it. It had once been a pub, and had been boarded up for over a year. The windows and the roof were rotted through. He drew up plans that kept the anonymous face it turned to the road, and extended it back, behind the nine-foot walls of the old delivery yard.

When they took the windows out, they found farthings that had been brand new in 1840, with a young queen’s head on them. In the narrow chimney, among two centuries of rubbish that came raining down, were pewter buttons, a tattered shoe, the door of an iron birdcage. Under the floorboards were more superstitious gifts to the house: horseshoes, plaited twigs, a comb, a cup and saucer wrapped in cotton, and, a kind of miracle, a wineglass, without a crack or a mark.

He sold his flat and he and Claire lived there, among piles of bricks and piping. The first night they had a mattress on the floor, no bed. He had never slept so well, and woke up to the sound of rain pouring, hammering on their newly secure roof and blowing through the windows they had left open in the warmth of the evening. Claire had walked out to the bathroom, laughing at herself, shaking rain from her hands. He looked at the trail of wet footprints on the dusty floorboards, saw the arch of her foot in the print, the long area that barely touched the floor. It was as if she walked without touching her heels to the ground. He saw that imprint over and over again. He saw it in Spain and he had seen it once here, in the Dorset house.

Closed his eyes every time, waiting for it to vanish.

The following year, the year after they married, Claire changed her job. She started to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Costume. She told him that she wished she’d done it long before. To be no longer at the mercy of a production, of whatever flavor, was like being released from prison, she said. He knew that she was happy; she would go out of the house at more of a run than usual. Occasionally she would accept a lift from him, fretting at his later start, or his ability to be distracted by something he wanted done in the house during the day.

His love for her never altered, not in a single direction. It felt fresh, newly minted, interesting, as if he were looking daily at something he had never seen before, and was surprised by it all over again.

That particular morning—that unforgettable morning—was cold. It was March. Not a particularly noteworthy day. Not bright. Not cold. A mild, gray day. As he turned the car around in the yard, he saw her talking to the builders. She was wearing a reddish-colored coat. A long coat. They said something to her and she laughed. She looked at the car and nodded in John’s direction, paused, and then turned and added something. As she walked away, he saw the three men look at him, their faces betraying a mixture of reactions: envy, affection, surprise.

The traffic was bad. They got out of Rotherhithe, having crawled all the way down Salter Road toward the tunnel. Claire was putting on her makeup in the vanity mirror over the passenger seat. They’d argued about the route. She had a lecture to prepare, she said. She had an appointment that morning at nine. She wanted to be early.

“I’m getting out at Bermondsey tube,” she’d told him, hand on door. “I can change at Westminster and be at South Kensington before you’ve got past this next set of lights.”

She was always impatient. Pointless to try and dissuade her. With one eye on the road, he turned to kiss her.

Her hand was still on the door. But her face had a strange, abstracted expression.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Something’s happened,” she said.

When he looked back at that day, he always wondered in what freakish split second she had managed to say those words. At the end of the sentence, her mouth stayed dropped slightly open. Then she leaned to one side. Not slumped. Leaned, almost a conscious movement, as if she were trying to avoid something that was coming toward her.

“Claire,” he said. “Claire?”

He pulled the car to the side of the road. It was a bus stop. The queue all stared at him as he leapt out and came round to her side of the car. He opened the door. In those few seconds, she had closed her eyes. She was perfectly limp, like a toy, like a doll. He tried to prop her head up a little. A bus came. The driver blew his horn to get him to move the car.

A woman came out of the queue and touched his arm.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

He looked at her.

“I’m a nurse at St. Thomas’s,” she said.

They both leaned down to Claire. A line of saliva was running out of his wife’s mouth.

“Have you got a phone?” the woman asked.

“What?”

“A cell phone.”

He was looking about to find something to wipe Claire’s face. In peculiar exasperation, he pulled on his wife’s elbow. “Wake up,” he said.

The woman reached behind him and took his cell from the dashboard. She took his hand from Claire’s arm and put the phone into his hands. “Dial 999,” she told him.

He drove behind the ambulance, his eyes fixed on the rear doors. Nothing else. When the journey finished, he couldn’t have told anyone how many sets of lights they had passed through, anything at all, in fact, about the journey. But he remembered the doors.

They took Claire inside and straight into a cubicle, and they asked him to wait in reception. He had to stand next to a ridiculously small glass window and give them Claire’s details through the tiny pane of glass. He couldn’t catch what the receptionist was saying.

Then he stood in the center of the corridor and waited.

After a minute, a nurse came along. “Would you like to sit down?” she asked.

“No,” he said.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

“No,” he repeated.

He watched as they took Claire away again, along the long and brightly lit corridor. He watched them go into the lift, watched the lift doors close.

“Where is she going?” he asked, more frightened than he could say by the obvious urgency with which they had brought her out of the room.

“She’s going for a scan,” the nurse said. “Sit down.” She guided him to a seat.

They were gone for a long time. Forty minutes. In that time, a little boy was taken into the opposite cubicle; John could hear his mother saying that the child had fallen down during a game of football. Then the doctor’s careful explanation that the cut needed stitches.

“It’ll be all right,” the mother kept saying to her son. And later, when the tears subsided, “We’ll go for an ice cream,” she was murmuring. “You can tell Daddy you had a whole ice cream, the big kind.”

John started to plan what he and Claire would do when this was over, when they got out of here. What he would say to her. He would take her on holiday. They would go where they had been saving to go. Not save any more. Just go. They had been planning a holiday in Mauritius next year. They had the brochure. He would go straight from this hospital, he told himself, and book the flight. He would book the hotel she liked, the one with the little villas facing the sea.

And he kept repeating the other woman’s words to himself.

It’ll be all right. It’ll be all right.

His fingers flexed and unflexed. He saw himself turning the brochure pages in the shop. Giving them his credit card. He rehearsed it in minute detail, watching the clock above his head.

The mother and the boy passed him.

Someone else came along, an elderly man on a paramedics stretcher. He was put in the same cubicle, and the paramedics came out and walked up to the nearest nurse.

He looked at them, two burly men in their fluorescent lime yellow jackets. He tried to make sense of what they were saying. Something about a stroke. Something about what they were doing after work. John tried to connect the two, the information about the patient, the plans for that evening.

The lift doors opened. The doctor who had been with Claire came out, looked up and down the corridor, and then walked toward him.

And he knew before the man uttered a single word.

He walked a long way. He crossed the river. By then, it was lunchtime.

When he first came out of the hospital he had turned right and found himself in the curious labyrinth made for cars, not people, that led to Waterloo Station. He had stopped, puzzled, trying to remember where he was headed; then he went back and walked over Westminster Bridge.

When he had first come to London, a newly qualified graduate, this view had thrilled him. All this area. The Houses of Parliament, the Cenotaph, St. James’s Park, Horse Guards. He had come down here maybe a hundred times, just to walk it. Westminster Abbey with the oldest garden in England; the Tate at Millbank, where the awesome New Penitentiary had once stood, packed with industrial workshops and stables. He had walked the route of the eighteenth-century builders, the Cubitts and Johnsons, Gibbs and Flew. He had walked right through Kensington, where the Rutlands and Chamberlains had once occupied the new Italianate villas, and down through Hammersmith, where speculators had thrown up five-storied terraces over the market gardens. Up again through Holland Park, where the walls of Debenhams peacock house had once been covered in blue and green tiles, and a draw to endless crowds; back through what had once been piggeries and potteries. Fulham and Hammersmith, that had been once famous for spinach and strawberries, destroyed by builders of the railways. Ealing, with two hundred market gardens, disappearing under tram lines and pavements.

He loved the city. He knew it. He could feel its organic growth beneath his feet. And yet that day, walking across Westminster, he felt that he had been put down in a foreign country. He couldn’t recognize anywhere; even the street signs didn’t make sense. He almost stepped out in front of a bus on the other side, on the corner of Parliament Square. He looked up at the Abbey and felt nothing at all, except perhaps a dreamlike fluidity like the motion of waves.

He walked until he felt tired, and found himself in a square, with trees in the center. He had stared at it. It could have been anywhere in London. He glanced up to his left and saw the long shallow steps of a house and a sign on the door. It was familiar. He knew that he’d been here before and that it held some significance for him. He had the oddest conviction that if he could get inside he could rewind, replay the day, start it again. He would be safe. His eyes ran over the lettering of the black-and-white sign without making any sense of it. It might as well have been in another language. He knocked on the green paint of the door and a woman opened it.

“We close in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“That’s OK,” he told her.

She opened it and he stepped inside.

“It isn’t really enough time to see everything,” she warned him, taking his money in the dim hallway.

He wandered forward. Every inch of wall was crammed with objects. He walked into a dining room painted red and full of mirrors. Above the fireplace was the portrait of a man. He went on, into a narrow space with an ancient writing desk that looked out past pale green panels into a courtyard. He passed a hand over his face. His skin was covered in a cold sweat. He felt dazed. There were architectural fragments everywhere, casts of cornices and capitals, statues, plaques, tiles, medallions. Fragments of a life. Fragments of his. The pieces reached right to the tops of the walls and spilled over across the ceiling: hundreds. Perhaps thousands.

Beyond the room he could see many more, all colored by the light that came filtering down through a far-off rooflight. He stepped into a three-story shell of more stone, more statues, more paintings. There was a marble sarcophagus below him. Paintings crammed frame to frame. He looked up and saw implacable stone faces, carved leaves and vines, animal heads. And funeral urns.

“It’s Seti the First,” said a voice beside him.

He turned. There was an attendant in a green uniform. “Thirteen hundred years before Christ,” the man said. “It’s carved out of a single piece of alabaster. When Soane brought it here, he invited a thousand people to look at it, and he lit the rooms with three hundred oil lamps.”

John stared at the man. Then, at last he realized where he was. “It’s Soane’s house,” he said. “Soane, the architect.”

The attendant looked back at him, frowning.

“It’s Soane’s house,” John heard himself repeat.

“Yes,” the man said.

“I saw his drawings,” John whispered. “I did a paper on them.” He shook his head slightly. “Six years ago. Seven.”

The man touched John’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked.

John turned away. He was stifled and breathless. He wanted to get out, but he couldn’t find the way. He tried to get back to the first red room and found himself in another gallery, where the paintings were hung in movable racks as well as on the walls. It was a dead end.

Another attendant glanced up at him.

“The way out,” John said.

He followed where the man pointed, brushing past the model of a tomb.

Made for his wife after her death, said the printed label.

He gasped at it in the shadows.

Made for his wife after her death. St. Pancras Gardens. 1815.

He got out somehow, out into the dusty end of light in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

He walked over to a bench and sat down on it heavily, trying to stop the pavement under him lurching; trying to stop the stone spinning drunkenly wherever he looked.

Getting out his phone, he dialed his sister’s number, hoping it was still the same. He hadn’t spoken to her in a long time. All he could think of was that he needed someone who had never met Claire. Even if that someone was Helen.

“Hello,” said a voice, inflected with a questioning note.

“It’s me,” he murmured. “Helen, can you help me?”