Gregory rang Heavenly Travel in the late afternoon and asked to speak to Angela, but she wasn’t at work. She was sitting on the end of the bed in the dark. She was holding hands with Christopher and looking out of the window on to the new white snow world. They were both naked. Christopher’s semen was drying between her legs. Angela was talking about Gregory.
“I’m not going to say I didn’t love him Chris, I did love him, but it was nothing like this.” Christopher squeezed her hand, but didn’t look at her. She had asked him not to. She had also asked him not to talk about their dead baby.
“But I can’t leave him.”
“You can’t go home to him now, ”said Christopher. “Ring him up and tell him you’re going to come and live with me, in this house.”
“I can’t do that!” She almost laughed.
“We love each other don’t we?” Christopher was puzzled now. What was stopping her from leaving a man she didn’t love, and going to live with a man she did love?
“Yes, we love each other,” she answered, “But I can’t just walk out on seventeen years of marriage, not just like that, can I?”
Christopher didn’t see the problem. He didn’t know Gregory and he didn’t want to. He wondered if he ought to tell Angela about this premonition he had of his own death; there might not be time to worry about Gregory’s feelings. He turned his attention back to her. She was talking about mortgage payments and joint savings accounts, and a shared pension plan and a holiday that she and Gregory had planned in a hotel for January in Barbados. He saw that, apart from himself, his body, he had almost nothing else to offer her.
Angela knew that she was gabbling, but she couldn’t stop herself from talking about money and her financial responsibilities, which she saw as an invisible web, entangling her and preventing her escape. In her mind’s eye she travelled through the rooms of her house, noting their comfort and warmth, feeling the soft carpets under her feet, fingering the thick texture of the heavy curtains, the dark solidity of the furniture. She’d worked on the garden until there was a green lushness there that delighted her every summer. How could she leave her grapevine, or the sweet-smelling jasmine that framed the kitchen window?
She saw a policeman at the door breaking the news. She saw herself weeping over Gregory’s grave. She saw herself and Christopher in the garden, sitting at the iron table on the terrace, drinking wine in the fading light.
“I’ll come to you when he dies,” she said.
“I hope he dies soon, then,” said Christopher. And he let go of her hand, and began to get dressed. It was time to walk the dog.