‘No need to clean my study, can you tell Rosa? It’s got all my campaign stuff – paperwork, which I don’t want shuffled about,’ Ian says.
‘Yes, of course. Where are you going?’ asks Miriam. She is arranging lilies in a vase – great brutes from the Tesco Express around the corner. She doesn’t even like them, their dull dark leaves and vulgar blooms, but something about buying them spoke of a reconnect with the land of the living, thanks to Julie from Hendon. Anyway, they brought scent to a winter house.
‘For a quick run,’ he says. ‘You seem brighter.’ He is tying the laces on his trainers, toe on the cream upholstered kitchen chair.
‘Can you get your foot off that?’ she says.
‘Yes, sorry.’
She hasn’t told him about Julie, of course. Julie would be taken as further evidence of her madness. But with a single visit, Julie has made things bearable.
‘I was thinking of going back to the practice, actually,’ she says, plumping the stems in a bid to make them fall about naturally in the vase, but they are rigid as scaffolding.
‘Good idea. Would do you good to be out and about. Occupy your mind.’
‘Stop me thinking about Edith, you mean?’
‘Thinking about her doesn’t find her.’
‘Anyway, I haven’t decided yet,’ she says.
Her partner at the GP practice, Raj, had called just after Christmas – but only to tell her to take as long as she needed, that he had got in a locum, and that if there was anything to sign (the paperwork when you became a fundholder was beyond belief) he’d drop it round. Twenty-four days missing; three and a half weeks of life suspended, sleepless and confined. Like being under water, it was quiet and engulfing, and there was a strong desire to stay submerged, rather than push up into the brash world where people will ask how she is, how things are. Why can’t she stay home, arrange the house, remain loyal to Edith in her mind, and reinforced in that connection by Julie? Why wasn’t that all right?
‘Right,’ he says, pushing his keys into a shallow pocket in his joggers and zipping it shut. ‘Won’t be long.’
An hour later, she has settled at her desk to tackle some neglected household admin: a quote for contents insurance, cheque for the milkman, a meter reading. She realises she needs a stamp and walks through to Ian’s study. He keeps a stash in the central desk drawer, among paperclips and envelopes and those plastic label holders which clip onto hanging files. They clatter now under her patting hand. The drawer is sticky and won’t pull out fully. She shuffles and lifts at the front but can’t see any little books of stamps, so she pats her hand further back, among the elastic bands and stationary dust. Pens, a torch, her finger pricked by a noticeboard pin; then something solid and square, which she can’t identify from memory. She brings it out. It is a Nokia. Old and chunky. A world away from the smart phones everyone has nowadays. Grubby about the edges of the screen. On the back are glittery pirate stickers: skull and crossbones, a boat. A child’s phone. Why would he—
She runs her thumb over the edges of the stickers and they make a flicking sound, pleasingly stiff against the pad of her thumb. She turns it over in her hand again. It’s dead, of course, the battery run down. He must have found it on the ground somewhere.
She returns the phone to the back of the drawer, hearing as she does so, Ian’s key in the front door. She pushes at the drawer to close it but it judders and sticks and as she pushes again, he is at the doorway, saying, ‘What are you looking for?’
‘I just wanted a stamp,’ she says, unsure why she feels nervous. ‘Doesn’t matter.’
He comes between her and the desk and forcibly pushes the central drawer shut, then opens the drawer beside it and offers her a book of stamps.
‘Here,’ he says.