As she later recounted to Beam, Suze had sure enough spotted Grace in the church early on, before the first round of mumbled warbling in fact, thanks to Harvey’s clunky attempts at the furtive glance. She’d also seen Grace leave the church prematurely and knew at once the nervy walk of a woman upset and keen to disappear.
Suze had known that if Grace was on foot, she would soon find herself on a walking trail into the nearby botanic gardens, an ambitious description for a tangle of unkempt warrens and broken benches. And this is where she’d found Grace, sitting on the edge of a dry fountain and looking into her hands.
‘I’m Suzanne,’ she’d said to Grace as she approached the fountain, momentarily startling the woman and causing her cheeks and neck to flush like algae bloom.
‘Sorry, love. I’m Harvey’s wife. Ex-wife. Very ex.’
Grace had looked up at Suze, suitably mystified.
Suze plundered forth, feeling that she was doing good here and would be able to say the right thing once she’d determined the cause of Grace’s sadness. It was her gift.
It transpired that in attending a funeral she’d almost not attended and now wished she hadn’t, Grace had come face to face with her past. With her first husband, the man whose love for her had somehow withered on a childless vine. Who had let her go when she’d said she wanted to go—a request she’d made partly to hear what it sounded like outside of her skull. A man she’d thought about ever since but had never contacted and hadn’t known how. He wasn’t on Facebook, a fact that did not surprise her. Grace had heard he’d moved to the country, settled down. She’d heard he moved overseas. What had become of him? Her Matthew.
Matt.
‘Fuck,’ says Harvey, toe to toe with Suze on the driveway at the front of Matt and Naomi’s home. Cars are parked at odd angles all over the front lawn. The wake is in full swing. Their daughters are inside.
‘I know,’ says Suze. ‘I know. It’s unbelievable. They were married and everything. Not for long, but still. Married.’
Harvey looks down at his feet, at Suze’s feet. His head is moving side to side of its own volition. ‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘I know!’ Suze seems increasingly pleased that Harvey’s reaction is commensurate to the size of the news and her delivery of it.
‘She’s mentioned him to me before,’ Harvey says, finally leaving the comfort of dumbstruck obscenity. ‘She said she was married, they’d tried to have a kid and couldn’t, so she’d gone overseas to work as a nurse somewhere, some sad and poor place, and that was it. They’d lost touch. She didn’t seem heartbroken, but maybe … who knows. Shit.’
‘Well, it would have been confronting today to see him standing up in front of everyone, effectively saving the day. To know that he’s remarried and has children. No matter how you feel now, that would be difficult,’ Suze says.
Harvey nods. Suze puts a hand on his shoulder and then removes it, deciding it’s not Harvey who most needs comforting.
‘Did Matt see her?’ he asks after a long pause, during which a family he doesn’t know files past them wielding things covered in alfoil.
‘She said she doesn’t think so,’ Suze says. ‘She said she hopes not.’
‘Do you think I should call her?’
‘Maybe,’ Suze says. ‘I don’t really know.’
Harvey takes this to mean yes.
‘Fuck,’ he says.
‘I know.’
With this, Suze throws up her arms in a flippant oh-well-must-run gesture that looks utterly unconvincing to Harvey and she strides into Matt and Naomi’s home as though there is still much more interference to be run before the day is out.
Beam looks at his phone. At the sky. At the phone. At the faded ‘No Junk Mail’ sign on the mailbox and the kaleidoscope of catalogues bulging out of its slot.
He hadn’t meant to find Grace. He hadn’t asked to find Grace. This isn’t his fault, and yet somehow he feels responsible for a woman he hardly knows, at least not in the sense of time and injury, walking tearfully out of a funeral for all the wrong reasons. He has done this, brought old worlds together via the clusterfuck of his own. Even if you walk softly through this life, you hurt others, he thinks. Probably just as well he’s never bothered to.
Looks at his phone. Types: Grace, are you okay? Can we talk?