When she arrives at the door of Jean’s room she comes face to face with a nurse leaving, sheets bundled up in her arms. Another taking the charts down, like the scorer after a game.
Although she knew the day would eventually come, she thought they had more time. She sways on the spot, her hand reaching for the chair she always sits in. She steadies herself, then slumps into it, looking at the empty bed. The nurse with the understanding eyes, who has been her companion through these visits, as Dominique has been hers, rests her hand on Dominique’s shoulder.
It is a bright morning, a good day for a drive. Her car is parked in the street, ready for the journey. But this is where the journey ends. Nurses come and go, and she barely notices, except when one of them enters with a bucket and a mop.
Then this eruption of everything that has been held in over the last few weeks while she composed herself, and composed and read her story, claims her; something so elemental she has no power over it. To the nurse glancing at her, mop in hand, they are simply tears, another outbreak of grief, a common sight in this house of tears, for that’s what the clinic is. But what is erupting from Dominique at this moment, she is convinced, is the very fire of her being. Leaving her. She doesn’t know anything any more, except that she wants to be dead too. The sun haunts the window. She stares at the garden outside, through which Jean walked at sunset only yesterday, Dominique at his arm. How can he be gone?
Surely, she imagines, if I simply go out, turn around and walk back in again everything will be as normal. Jean will be there sitting up in his clothes, all ready; and they will take the planned drive.
She has no idea how long she sits slumped in the chair. The nurses come and go, mopping up after death. When she finally has the presence of mind to ask about the how and the when of the matter, she learns from the young nurse who sat by his side in the early hours of the morning that he was sitting up in bed, eyes wide, almost as though, she swears, he was taking one last look around. Then he drifted off. The nurse carefully removed his glasses and placed them on the table beside him. He dozed on, undisturbed. A bright full moon pressed its nose up against the window. The nurse pulled the blind down. His doze turned to a deep sleep, the breathing irregular, sometimes long gaps between breaths, and it was obvious what was happening. She held his hand, she said. Then the gaps between breaths became longer until there wasn’t another breath. Sometimes the body dies hard. Sometimes it goes quietly. No fuss. So it was with Jean. A good death. He was here, then he was gone.
Her owl has taken flight. Back to the forest he came from, never really of this earth anyway. Gone back to being what he always was, a forest creature perched on some bough, eyes wide and bright under a full moon, alert and complete.
The clean-up is finished. Dominique takes with her his glasses: the things he peeked through onto this world during that last look around, and the last thing he held.
Outside, she puts the glasses in her satchel, along with her story. It doesn’t seem much to leave with, but it is all she wants. She has no desire to see the body. His family, his son and his daughter-in-law, will look after all those things that need to be done and organised. Besides, with all that astonished life gone from him, it wouldn’t be her Jean.
She sits behind the wheel of her car, a picnic basket on the seat beside her, a vacuum flask lying on its side. What now? Today, or any day? She pulls out into the street, everything a dream, like the song her father used to sing, an English song . . . Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a . . .
* * *
She has little memory of how she came to this part of the city, nor does she care. Perhaps because it was always their part of the city, and the car, like a horse of habits, found its way here naturally. Down the street, in the distance, the café called Hope is open for business. And as she stares at it she knows with absolute certainty that she will never go there again; never again gaze upon the portly, accommodating host, asking herself if there was ever anything more behind the accommodating face he showed the world. Just as the notebook in her satchel containing the story of the girl in love will be the last thing she will ever write.
Her audience of one has gone. And if she can’t show him what she has written any more, if he can’t be the first reader of what she has done, what is the point? He was the only audience she ever wanted. One was enough; one was all. This, too, she knows with absolute certainty as she surveys the rubble of the street. The riot police are standing about in front of her, eyeing her car, almost at a loose end. For while the riot police are here, ready and waiting, the rioters are not. Perhaps the revolution is over. Perhaps, she’d like to imagine, the revolution has taken a holiday because something immense and irreplaceable has gone from the world, whereas revolution, wars and coups will come and go, just so much passing show.
She eyes a policeman drawing on his cigarette, master of what’s left around him. How can you know, she asks herself, how could I tell you? The fact that Jean is gone is incomprehensible enough. But the fact that she will now have to live, if that is the word, without him being in the world, being at the other end of a telephone call, at their table, in their room . . . the cold fact that she will have to live somehow without the mere possibility of him, a secret society of one, creeps into her bones and leaves her numb. This is it, she tells herself, this is when May flowers turn black.