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Beth hesitated at the top of the sloped driveway. The house was set back from the residential road, unnoticeable unless you looked down the incline and then only visible if the trees were as bare as they were now. She’d only been inside it twice, on the occasions the agent had showed them around. The rest of the time it had existed as an image on the laptop, a seemingly unattainable goal that had fallen into their hands when the previous buyer had decided to retract his offer.
The poplar trees still had some foliage when they’d viewed it. It had been a calm, unseasonably sunny day, and they’d both known they were going to make an offer on the place before they’d reached the front door. It had felt right, the undeniable setting for the next phase of their lives. How could they have shared such a potent feeling when they weren’t destined to unlock the front door together?
Her father had paid a removals company to shift everything there from Edgeware while she’d been hospitalised. He’d said it would work out to be very expensive storage if she didn’t make a decision on the property soon.
She wondered what Luc would have wanted her to do. Keep the house they’d fantasised about? He’d thought they would be safer here. The incident with the hoodie had left him shaken, and he’d believed a new start was the answer. Beth had known there was nowhere they could move that would offer the sort of security he yearned for, though.
But he’d always been more practical than romantic and would appreciate that one income wasn’t going to pay the bills here, understand she had no choice but to let it go. Beth wished she had some religious faith as she tried to decide what he’d prefer her to do. But it was just about her future now. She had to sell.
Beth looked down at the keys in the palm of her hand. They’d been sitting in the agent’s drawer for a couple of months. Last year, they’d been the symbol of everything that was important to them. Now they were two irrelevant pieces of metal.
She walked down the track to the new building that now belonged only to her and recalled the conversations she’d had with Luc about the solar lights they would fit to guide vehicles to their front door in the dark. She’d been surprised when Luc had showed her the modern home he’d found online. He was usually such a traditionalist. They’d studied the spec from the agent until it was dog-eared and covered in wine and coffee stains, pored over the dimensions and made interior décor plans before they’d even had their offer accepted. Part of her had sensed it was too good to be true when they had.
She rounded the shrubbery, and the taupe stucco and white trim facade waited in silence. Beth halted a few feet from the front door and caught her sombre reflection in the blackness of the downstairs window. It felt wrong, her entering this place without Luc, and she almost turned on her heel and walked back out. But she had to locate the documents she needed, and they were stored in boxes somewhere inside.
A police car, siren blaring, shot past on the road above and barged into her thoughts. Beth stepped up to the door and slid the key into the lock.
The door opened almost soundlessly, the seal sucking slightly as she pushed in. The long hallway where she’d last stood with Luc smelt strongly of furniture polish. She remembered how he’d quietly chuckled at her spraying the radiators with it whenever someone came to their house for a viewing.
Beth left the door ajar as if she might need to make a quick getaway. The hall was longer than she remembered. All the doors to the pristine and empty rooms were sealed. She didn’t want to go in any of them, just locate the place where the boxes were stacked. She tried the rear lounge.
Opening the door to the expansive space, Beth was relieved to find the crates against the back wall. Luc’s neat and square handwriting was on all of them.
“IMPORTANT!”
That was the one with all their documents in it. The noise of her ripping the tape from the flaps sounded deafening as it bounced off the blank walls. She found the box file she needed inside, the one with all their insurance documents neatly collated. That was Luc’s organisation, not Beth’s. She’d had a turn handling the paperwork for a year, and they’d been badly penalised for late payments. Luc had taken charge of the admin after that.
She extracted the folder inside it and checked everything was in order. She had as long as she needed, but it still felt as if her visit was against the clock. Temporarily, the property was hers, but she couldn’t shake the sensation she was trespassing.
When the small blue envelope fell out, she momentarily wondered what it was. She picked it up off the brand-new vellum brown carpet and recalled the contents. It was their digital legacy – online details to be passed on in the event of their deaths. Beth had thought it ludicrous, but Luc had told her that people getting locked out of their deceased family member’s accounts and photo archives was a common problem. He’d asked her to make a note of her personal passwords and he’d added his before sealing them in the envelope.
Luc had meticulous contingency plans for everything. Since his father had died, Luc didn’t trust the world to make adequate provision for him. It wasn’t an unexpected death. His father had been hospitalised for seven long months before an eleven year-old Luc had arrived with his mother to find a new patient occupying his bed. They’d known he could no longer swallow and had been waiting out the inevitable, but watching his father reach that point had made Luc’s mind up.
There had been a fifty percent genetic chance that his father would develop Huntington’s disease. He’d begun to exhibit symptoms at thirty-eight. Luc had watched him degenerate for nearly two years, nineteen painful months of watching his spasms and convulsions. They’d buried him under a hazelnut tree in the family plot in Quincampoix. Fifty percent chance or not, Luc hadn’t wanted to be responsible for passing on the same fate to his children. He wouldn’t even consider new mitochondrial replacement IVF treatment, didn’t believe children should have anything but their parents’ genes.
He’d told Beth he’d understand if she didn’t want to take on the spectre herself. Beth had stayed, thinking she could change his mind, but he’d remained intractable. Like his father, he’d refused to take a test to see if he’d inherited the faulty gene. He didn’t want the sentence.
Beth had told him to consider how his life would change if he found out he hadn’t. Luc had said she should consider how it would if he had. They’d fought frequently about it. It had been hard for her to argue without seeming selfish, but the truth was, part of her didn’t really want to know if she would one day have to lose him. Now she had, and Beth wondered again how much time they’d wasted quarrelling over it
As he approached the age at which his father had died, he knew the risks became greater. But its advent only amplified his already boundless energies. And when he wasn’t pouring them into the company, he was working them off on the track. Beth believed he was always trying to outrun the spectre. Luc said he forgot himself when he ran.
It was why being with him had always been so energizing. He didn’t live every day as if it was his last, but he intensely respected every minute that enabled him. Trimming the fat was his philosophy. He always maintained that, even if he became a victim of his genes, cutting the corners meant he could live a life as full as anyone’s.
He’d done that way before he was thirty. Like his father, his aptitude was for engineering but, unlike his father, he also had a head for business and had effortlessly spliced the two. But Avellana had been the product of his talent and other people’s investment, and his rewards were still entrammelled with multiple shareholders.
It was a highly competitive and ruthless sector, but Luc had worked tirelessly to put Avellana at the cutting edge of 3-D modelling and steel detailing, and had brought in business from some of the biggest industrial-fabricating giants, internationally as well as in the UK.
The stockholders knew the organisation couldn’t function without him. Luc had hated dealing with the politics. He left that to Jerome Macintyre, his partner who had provided a critical percentage of the capital that had enabled Avellana to succeed. He’d had a fractious relationship with him from the early days, and Beth felt that Jerome had dug his claws deep into Luc and had been clinging on for dear life ever since.
They socialised with Jerome and his wife, Lin, who also worked as the company development executive. It was a nebulous title and Beth had never really understood what her role was. They were a couple that seemed to live a lavish lifestyle disproportionate to the tangible contribution they actually made to Avellana.
Luc and Jerome had been firm friends as well as partners but, as the business had grown, the gulf between Luc’s hands-on management and Jerome’s constant need to expand had divided them.
It would all have to be dealt with. She was sure Jerome would attempt to make the process of handing over Luc’s stake as painless for her as possible, and part of her wanted it to be just that. But she owed it to Luc to ensure that Jerome and the executive board didn’t effortlessly appropriate the fruits of his ingenuity, and that meant another battle ahead.
Jerome had already phoned her mother’s house to make enquiries about her well-being, but she knew exactly what his agenda was. The pressure to meet would have been mounting even before Luc’s funeral.
Jerome and Lin had been in Rouen while she’d been oblivious. They’d seen Luc’s coffin committed to the flames, and Beth imagined they both would have considered their livelihood being cremated inside the coffin. But she envied them. Whatever their thoughts had been, they at least had the opportunity to bid Luc farewell.
The one person who loved him the most had been absent. Her mourning had been deferred. Until when, though? Would she always feel this way, Luc’s loss permanently on the periphery of her emotions?
She turned the envelope over in her fingers and then slid it back inside the folder. She looked out of the floor-to-ceiling doors at the overgrown lawn and the old teak bench from Edgeware that his father had carved, still wrapped up in its cellophane packaging on the decking. She had to leave. Every corner presented her with a space they’d planned to fill.
Beth hurriedly flicked through the other papers in the box file but didn’t read anything. She shut it, took the whole thing with her to the front door and only breathed when she got outside.
