Catherine lay rigid in the dark. The fear would pass. She mustn’t give way to it, mustn’t put the light on – that would be cowardly. She was drenched with sweat, but only because of the heat. It was quite normal to sweat in these muggy summer nights.
She reached out her hand and touched the expanse of sheet beside her. She was lying on the very edge of the bed – a habit she couldn’t break. Gerry had always needed space.
And yet they had shut him in a coffin, a hateful claustrophobic box, disguised with pompous flowers. All through the cremation she had felt her fury rising: how dare they coop him up like that; no room for him to toss and thresh; no one to hear if he called out in his sleep.
‘Gerry,’ she mouthed. ‘You’re all right. I’m here.’
But where was he? Not even in his coffin now. If only the vicar was right and there was some peaceful and consoling place, where she could go herself and find him. But she had never believed in an afterlife, not since they had told her (with peculiar forced smiles) that her mother was with Jesus. Even at the age of four, she had known it was a lie. Why should Daddy cry so much if Mummy was safe in heaven? She hadn’t cried – not then. She hadn’t dared. If she wasn’t a good girl, Daddy might die too.
The black nothingness was building up, filling the whole room: a thick, black, smothering duvet pressed against her face. She heard her husband’s panicked cry in the ambulance – or was it coming from her own mouth? It was the last sound he had ever made. But she had continued talking to him, frantically, relentlessly, against the wailing of the siren. ‘Gerry, you’re going to be all right. We’re nearly at the hospital. The doctors will know what to do. Don’t leave me, Gerry. I love you, do you hear?’
She plunged out of bed and switched on every light in the room: the central light, the light above the dressing-table, both the bedside lamps. The dark was still there – beyond the curtains, inside her. She hugged her body to stop it shaking. Just breathe, she told herself. Breathe deeply. Morning will come. It always does. Eventually.
Thank God it was summer. It would be light by five o’clock and she could get up and start the day. Daylight always helped. Just the sense of things happening as they should: dawn breaking, sun rising. You took so much for granted – until it wasn’t there.
The alarm clock said ten to three. Nights were a new land for her: the different shades of darkness, the different sounds. Or no sounds. Silence could keep you awake. Total numbing stillness. She was so used to Gerry’s comforting disturbance.
She ran her hand across the smooth curve of the phone. She couldn’t ring Andrew, not at this hour. He and Antonia had been staying since … since … They’d been marvellous, both of them, but they kept wanting to tidy her up, stop her crying. They had suggested pills, or counselling, and continually looked anxious, which made her feel worse still.
You had to cry. It was a physical necessity, like breathing. She had cried like this just after Kate was born. Post-natal depression, the midwife said. Odd how you cried over birth the same as death. She watched her tears dripping on her nightdress, making blotches on the flimsy pink-sprigged cotton. She ought to be wearing black. There was nothing black in her wardrobe except the new outfit she had bought for the funeral. It had seemed heartless to go shopping for a death, browsing through rails of dresses, posing in front of mirrors.
Kate had worn blue – a respectful blue, drab, like faded ink. She had looked faded altogether and had barely said a word during the whole of her two-week stay.
Perhaps Kate blamed her for the death. And it was her fault in some ways. She should have been stricter over his drinking and his diet; made sure he had proper check-ups with the doctor. And they should have talked to each other more, as they never failed to do in public, with friends, reps, stockists, customers. They could put on a show at parties, even kiss each other at parties, but, alone again, they would revert to their fretful busyness. And she was usually too tired for …
Sex. Such an insignificant word. Too short for all it meant – like death.
‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Stop wallowing in misery. Hundreds of people are far worse off.’ Children killed; whole families wiped out. Death stained every newspaper; darkened every bulletin on radio and television: carnage, earthquakes, terrible diseases. If she couldn’t sleep, she might as well do something useful, rather than cower in the bedroom feeling sorry for herself.
She found her slippers and crept downstairs. It had become second nature to creep, so as not to disturb Andrew and Antonia. They had wanted her to stay with them, but she preferred to be here with Gerry. It wasn’t just his presence. There were actual tangible bits of him still around the house. She had found his nail-clippings in the waste-bin, and laboriously picked out each tiny fragment from the mess of dirty Kleenex. She had put them in an envelope and locked them in the bureau drawer. And then she’d discovered a few stray hairs in his comb and laid them in there reverently as well. She wished she could preserve his smell – that indefinable smell on his clothes which she was terrified might fade. Last night, she had taken his jacket to bed and held it tight against her, stroking the rough-textured tweed, burying her face in it.
She switched on more lights in the hall, wondering how to keep herself busy. She ought to sort out Gerry’s clothes, but she couldn’t even bear to look at them. Or the stack of theatre programmes he had been collecting since the fifties. Andrew had cleared out all his other stuff, and Philip, John and Graham had already closed the business and found safer jobs elsewhere. She could hardly believe the speed of it. A company Gerry had taken ten years to build, dismantled in a month. The three reps were dead as well, in a sense. She had grown so used to them bustling in and out – Philip with his ginger hair, John invariably smoking, Graham’s booming voice. But you could hardly blame them for leaving a sinking ship, especially with the captain gone.
She wandered down the hall to Gerry’s offices – once the dining-room and study. How bare the two rooms seemed, drawers empty, files denuded, desks without their usual clutter. Gerry had occupied the larger room while she worked in the smaller one as his assistant and receptionist, screening calls to protect him from time-wasters and doing the bulk of the paperwork. She sat down at her desk again, fiddling with a stray paper-clip. The room was deathly quiet. She was used to the whir of the printer, the judder of the fax machine, Gerry’s voice barking down the phone. She would never hear his voice again. The thought was like a stab from a knife. There were so many unbearable ‘nevers’. She would never wake in the morning to find him there beside her; never share another meal with him; never see him in her life again.
She made herself get up. Impossible to sit there dwelling on such horrors. Gerry must come back. He must.
She mooched into the sitting-room, which looked unnaturally clean and tidy. She had spring-cleaned it yesterday, at two AM – the first night she had been on her own in the house without Andrew and Antonia. The cards, though, she had left. But they couldn’t sit there for ever, with their infuriating stunted words. Sympathy. You felt sympathy when someone caught a cold or failed their driving test. Loss. You lost spectacles, or keys, or games of tennis. Yet it would be callous to throw them out. People had cared enough to send them. A few had added their own embarrassed messages beneath the printed words; promises of help, sometimes followed up with phone calls and visits. She was actually very fortunate.
She opened the top sideboard-drawer. The cards could go in there until she had decided what to do with them. So many decisions, some she’d simply postponed. What to do with his shaving gear, the ancient razor and splayed-out brush which now seemed unbearably precious. Or the cache of old coins she had found in a tobacco tin, including the lucky sixpence given to him by an actor-friend on the first night of Macbeth. Lucky. She shuddered at the word.
The drawer was full of tablecloths, so she opened the next one down and found another lot of cards – from the silver wedding. Someone must have stuffed them in there while she was at the hospital. She hadn’t even noticed they were gone. How grotesque, she thought, congratulations and condolences arriving within days of each other. She picked up the top one: a silver bow and a huge ‘25’, embossed in silk, looking iced and formal like the anniversary cake. They were going to keep the second cake for Christmas, but she didn’t ever want to see it again. Two was a mockery now. How could she have been so crass as to have seen those twos as her right: two sets of towels, two toothbrushes, two places at the table, a double bed? Now she was a one.
A widow.
Except widows were other people. And older than her, with grey hair and folded hands. Her hands were never still. She had caught Gerry’s resdessness and was constantly seeking things to do.
As she closed the drawer and straightened up, she happened to glance in the mirror. She gasped. Gerry was there, behind her own reflection, smiling at her, clear in every detail. She wheeled round, to touch him, hold him, but her arms closed over nothing.
She began to shake. She must be going mad. How on earth could her husband be there when she had seen his death certificate? She hadn’t actually read it. Andrew had brought it from the registrar, but she had thrust it back into his hands and stumbled into the kitchen, where she’d been preparing lunch for him. She had poured all her concentration into peeling, chopping, simmering, so that nothing else existed beyond the chopping-board and saucepan.
The panic was returning. She sank down into Gerry’s chair, closed her eyes and let the wave break over her; accepting it, submitting, because she had no other choice.
You’re all right, she kept repeating. You’ll be fine – just give it time.
She gripped the chair’s cold leather arm. Gerry’s arm had rested there so often, his fingers drumming impatiently as he sat working on some problem.
You’re not alone, she told herself. You’ve got lovely children, wonderful in-laws. You’re surrounded by kind people.
So why did they all seem dead; the whole street deserted, the world stretching black and barren to infinity?
She dragged herself out of the chair. Stupid to be so melodramatic. She might as well go back to bed for all the good she was doing down here. Yet she knew she would never sleep. She trudged upstairs and drifted into Kate’s old room, picking up the koala bear Kate had had since babyhood. ‘Poor thing,’ she whispered, ‘left all on your own.’
Andrew’s room was next door – or Andrew and Antonia’s now. No shabby ragged bears there, only a magazine of Antonia’s lying on the bedside table. She took it into her own room and sat down with it on the stool. There was still no breath of air. The room was stifling and oppressive, as if all the day’s heat had accumulated here. The alarm clock said five past three. Time had changed, along with everything else. Widows’ time limped and crawled. She leafed through the magazine. Twos again. Everyone in couples: men and women, hand in hand, smiling from advertisements or illustrating stories. Once upon a time …
Suddenly she sat bolt upright. There was a spider by the bed. Huge and black, with long hairy legs. She clutched the edge of the stool, not daring to take her eyes off it. Suppose it scuttled towards her, ran across her bare foot?
Gerry had always dealt with spiders. He actually liked the things. Once, at drama school, he’d had to improvise being a spider and had spent hours observing them. The fascination had lasted, developed into a bond of fellow-feeling. ‘One of your friends!’ she used to joke if she came across a spider in the house, although he knew quite well that she detested them. He would remove them for her, carefully and considerately, with the aid of an inverted jar, and deposit them gently outside. But he wasn’t here to do that. And the great thing was advancing towards her – all legs, grotesquely ugly. She couldn’t kill it. Gerry would never forgive her. She held her breath in terror, willing it to stop moving. And all at once, uncannily, it did stop. She wondered if spiders had minds; whether they could think, or feel; respond. For all she knew, it too could have lost its mate. Death was so random – a careless foot, a weak heart.
She wiped her sweaty hands on her nightdress, watching the spider all the time. It was alone, like her, sleepless, like her, and perhaps just as scared as she was. After all, however big it looked, she was a giant in comparison – a towering monster which could crush it underfoot, destroy it in an instant She thought so much about death these days, the millions of deaths throughout history jumbled in her mind: young men like Andrew bleeding in the trenches, medieval peasants dying in the plague, cavemen savaged by wild animals. She had cried for all of them. And for the dead bird she’d found in the garden yesterday. Even the dead plant in Gerry’s office. It was ridiculous, excessive, but she seemed to feel pain more intensely, especially the pain of weak and tiny things. Like sparrows. Spiders.
She eyed the creature again. It was only inches away, yet she found she could actually look at it without shuddering.
‘If … if Gerry was here,’ she stammered, ‘he’d probably talk to you. He used to do that sometimes, you know, just to wind me up. He’d tell you what a handsome chap you are and what fantastic long legs you’ve got.’
She was using Gerry’s intonation, even his teasing voice. And suddenly it dawned on her that Gerry must have sent the spider. He had seen how panicky she was without Andrew and Antonia, so he’d arranged for one of his ‘friends’ to come instead.
She smiled at the absurd idea, but already she felt better. She might even find the courage to switch off the lights and get back into bed. At least it would be more comfortable than perching on a stool all night.
‘Listen,’ she told the spider, ‘I’m going to get up now, but don’t be frightened, will you? I won’t hurt you, I promise. I only want to turn the lights off, okay?’
She stood up very cautiously and tiptoed past the spider. She would feel a whole lot safer if she put it under ajar, but it might die without air and she couldn’t face another death. Besides, it hadn’t moved since she’d spoken to it, so perhaps Gerry was looking after her and would make sure it stayed there motionless, right on through the night.
‘Good lad,’ she whispered, wondering if it was male. Gerry called them all ‘good lad’, regardless. She climbed wearily into bed and turned off both the bedside lamps.
Even if she didn’t sleep, she and Gerry’s messenger could keep each other company.