Joanna May did not get back for many hours to her house on the banks of the Thames, where once a monarch had kept his vulgar mistress, and when she did she found Oliver dead. She’d wasted time talking to Angela, and then walking around Richmond Park to calm down. She found Oliver hanging by a rope around his ankles from a beam in the barn which was now a garage, swinging gently first this way, then that, his arms fastened gently across his chest as if he were an Egyptian mummy. His face was calm and not distressed, his eyes were open and everything he saw, if only the dead could see, was upside down. His bare young feet were smooth on top and rough-skinned underneath, but that was no surprise to Joanna May: she’d felt them often enough, and the nails were tough and horny and had earth beneath them as usual – the boots he liked the most to wear were not watertight. They stood neatly together in a corner of the garage, placed as if on guard. Who in the world would want them now, poor battered useless things? This way, that way, he swung. She sat down to adapt to a world deprived of this especial goodness, to recover from the shock. She grieved for his mother, and his friends, and the girl in Scotland he would never marry and the seedlings in the greenhouse which no one now would get round to planting out. She grieved for herself, of course she did. Who now would fill her bed? She was old. She was old: surely the old could be spared the shock of losing a lover, of understanding that the body that inspires you, fills you, is frail, mortal, corruptible, as liable to stop on the instant as anything else. This way that way. Through the grief and shock ran a thread of relief: it was over, finished: sharply, quickly: now he would never decide it wouldn’t work: wouldn’t one day see her wrinkling skin in a clear light, or some aspect of her nature she could no longer hide and decide she wasn’t the one for him, and be off (in the fallow season, of course) to some other garden in need, some other divorced lady with excellent alimony and a waiting bed. The back of her neck hurt when she moved it. The graze smarted.
Her fault, of course, her fault: she wailed aloud, and a bird fluttered down from the eaves and out the open door. (She thought it carried Oliver’s soul with it, and now she was truly alone and he was truly gone.) His eyes had shut now, the lower eyelids drooping, as the flesh gave up its residual resilience. She was glad of that: he had seen more than enough upside down.
On the floor, beneath the hanging body, brushed by Oliver’s hair, lay a single card from the Tarot pack. It was the Hanged Man, from the Minor Arcana, that benign and peaceful fellow suspended by his feet. Above, below, to right and left were four more cards, the Queens of Wands, Pentacles, Swords and Cups.
She should never, as a wife, have tried to discuss the nature of reality with Carl: her fault. She should never have told him about the Fates, about there being more gods than one God, about the Tarot pack: fidget as he might over the Financial Times, he heard, he heard: he did not forgive and he did not forget. As an ex-wife she should have faded away, ceased to exist: not quite murdered, not quite unmurdered. Her fault. She should never have told Carl May about Oliver, boasting, denying the inevitability of her desolation, her non-existence; her fault: she should never have answered back: her fault. She should never have gone in the first place, but listened to Oliver. She should have come straight home to warn him: her fault: she should never have allowed him into her bed: her fault. She had, she had, and now Oliver was dead. Her fault. A little niggle of anger arose, swelled; she screamed and screamed. Not her fault, not her fault at all. Carl May’s fault. Carl May the murderer.
She went into the kitchen and found Trevor the butler, with his soft hands and soft round face, sitting at the scrubbed-elm table shaking and weeping; and the expensive wall-to-ceiling kitchen units, which he so loved and Oliver found claustrophobic, rising like the walls of a mausoleum around him, and a dozen hanging copper pans caught the reflection of his shock and grief and threw it back and forth across the room, one to another. Well, it was his world: it was fitting.
‘What happened?’ asked Joanna, and Trevor told her.