14

BOSTON, USA

The red figures 3.17 beamed from the electronic alarm clock. John’s sleep was sporadic, restless. His tired limbs were a tense knot against the mattress. He looked at Charmaine, lying with her back to him, the slender smooth crest of her body wrapped under the blankets visible in the greyish blue dimness of the early hours.

John slipped noiselessly out of the bed, his bare feet treading on the wooden floorboards as he passed down the stairs to his study. He switched the light on and sat at his desk. He took a silver key from a small wooden box sitting on the polished desktop. He slipped the key into the lock of the top drawer of the desk and opened it. He pulled out a small photo album and opened to the first page. Two neatly groomed, golden-haired girls in matching white dresses, sitting on dark blue fabric with a cloudy background. Angels in the sky.

He placed his finger on Lucy’s face. Her beautiful smile illuminated just as it had the last Christmas they were all together. She had unwrapped and hugged her new bicycle with all the energy an eleven-year-old could muster. That same bicycle would mangle her body when she carelessly turned a corner and rode into her death.

Jessica was practical and reserved like her mother, intellectual. But he could see himself clearly in Lucy. She had been inquisitive like him, her thirst for knowledge unquenchable, reaching out for everything she could grasp, asking endless questions, always with new ideas. She was like the person he had been at his best, before his sense of self had been poisoned by Charmaine.

His eyes then fell on to Jessica, Louise’s child. He moved his finger to her image. ‘I thought losing one child was the end of the world. Now, it seems, I have lost two. And it is too late to go back.’

John gently pulled a leather-bound book from the drawer. He flipped the pages over at random, his eyes resting on his own handwriting. His words. His poems.

Once these lines poured from him, swelling inside him until he freed them with a fluid hand. He had almost forgotten that sensation, the heat that came with deep feeling, the zeal in every living word. He flipped the pages again, running his fingers over the fading ink and so-familiar words.

John closed the book and held it between his two palms, wondering if the energy and emotion caught in the words on the pages could filter back into him. But he remained immune from that world. He finally, softly, placed the book on the desk.

His last two conversations with Simone still haunted him. After their discussion about Nabokov he had reflected on the idea of how immoral it is not to understand the impact of your own behaviour on somebody else. And inevitably he thought of Jessica - so lost to him now but only because of his own actions. He had sunk so deeply into his grief over Lucy’s death that he had been unable to respond to anything and as he wallowed in his despair and anguish, he was blind to the pain of everyone else.

Now he could clearly see how this had affected his other daughter. She had been neglected by him when she was just as devastated and uncentred by the inexplicable tragedy of Lucy’s accident as he was. Rejected when she needed him most, she learnt not to need him at all and turned hard against him. He had tried in these last years to win her back but she resented his efforts as being too little too late. She had been fifteen years old when he left Louise for Charmaine and now, able to make decisions about her own life, she chose not to be around him, made it clear that she didn’t respect him.

And that’s why his last conversation with Simone Harlowe also haunted him. In discussing Remains of the Day they spoke about the great tragedy in the way Stevens chose a life of duty over a life with a family. While he hadn’t put his work first, what he had done, in his smothering depression and desperation, was reach for Charmaine to rescue him rather than reaching for his family. He chose her over them. Charmaine’s deceit about wanting children meant he had lost the promise of a new family and he had turned his back on the one he already had. Little wonder that Jessica couldn’t forgive him.

‘Would you like to come over for your birthday?’ he had rung to ask just three days ago.

‘No. I’m busy.’

‘You should make time to see your old dad.’

‘Why? You never made time for me.’

‘That’s not true, Jess,’ he sighed. ‘I’ve always loved you.’

‘Not as much as you loved your other daughter and not as much as you love yourself.’

This was typical of the way Jessica spoke to him. Her hostility towards him made him feel defeated and deflated. And in the end, because he knew he had made her feel that way, that it was a result of his own failings, it made him want to disappear, to have all the atoms that made him float apart until they melded into the thin air.

He opened the lowest desk drawer and pulled out a large envelope, then searched for his address book across the desktop, finally locating it under a stack of photocopied articles that he had been meaning to read. He opened it and looked for a newer entry. He copied the address under the letters that formed Simone Harlowe’s name. He slipped his treasured leather book of poetry inside, opened the wooden box that had housed the key and pulled out as many stamps as he could find.

On a piece of paper he wrote:

… a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

He slipped the paper into the envelope.

After sealing the package with tape, John walked to the hall. Still in his pyjamas, he huddled into his coat and wrapped a scarf around his neck without letting the book out of his grasp. Once he had checked his coat pocket for his keys, he quietly slipped out of the house and into the night.

The walk to the post box at the corner of his street was no more than a three-minute one but the cold seemed to lengthen the time to twice that. John’s body tensed up from the cutting chill, his bare feet numbed. When he reached the mail box he looked at the name written forcefully across the package. He brought the parcel to his lips. ‘Never lose that passion,’ he whispered. He opened the flap of the post box and listened as the leather-bound emotions of his life dropped to the bottom.

Returning to his house, John pushed his hands deep into his coat pockets, heard the soft scrunching of snow underneath his feet. He could see his footsteps in the fresh snow as he returned to the house, the only one who had ventured out on this cold night. ‘I never could get used to this damn New England weather. Always too cold for my liking,’ he thought. ‘But it’s no colder than my wife. And no colder than my own heart.’

John entered his house as quietly as he left it. Still in his coat and scarf he returned to his study. He searched through the still-open top drawer until his fingers found the small gun. He held the barrel to his temple as his eyes fell to the smile on Lucy’s face on the page in his photograph album. Her name floated on his last breath as he squeezed the trigger.