What to Do When Someone Dies (15 page)

‘I knew you were there.’ It was Fergus.

‘Sorry, I was tired.’

‘I wanted to ask you for supper. Jemma’s put a chicken in the oven, I’ve lit a fire.’

‘As I said, I’m a bit tired.’

‘If you don’t come, we’ll put the dinner in the car and drive over to you. And if you don’t let us in we’ll eat on your doorstep and embarrass you in front of your neighbours.’

‘All right, all right, I’ll come.’

‘I’ll come,
thank you
.’

I laughed. ‘Sorry for being so rude. Yes, thank you for asking me.’

Jemma was very, very pregnant. Every so often she winced as the baby kicked her. At her invitation, I put my hand on her belly and felt it writhing and jabbing. She told me it kept getting hiccups.

‘There are so many things people won’t say to me,’ I said, after two glasses of wine.

‘What do you mean?’ Fergus leaned forward to top up my glass but I put my hand over it.

‘Well, for example, you two don’t talk to me about the baby unless I press you. You think it might upset me – because of Greg, because we never managed it and now it’s too late. And of course it upsets me, but it’s not as if I forget about it until you remind me. It’s much better to say things, otherwise I feel shut out from life. Mary used to go on about Robin at every hour of the day – his snuffles, his nappies, the way his fist closed round her finger – and now she barely mentions him. Gwen used to tell me about her love life. Joe would regularly complain to me about having a cold or some bloody rich client. Not any more.’

‘In that case,’ said Fergus, glancing sideways at Jemma for her approval, ‘we wanted to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you be its godmother?’

‘Godmother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, that’s not really the point.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Of course I’ll be its godmother! I’d love to.’ I was crying, tears sliding down my cheek and into my mouth. I wiped the back of my hand across my face and held out my glass for more wine. ‘Here’s to whoever-it-is.’

‘Whoever-it-is,’ they echoed.

Fergus got up and hugged me. ‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ he whispered.

I shrugged.

Chapter Twenty

When I got home, I had decided what to do. It would have been easy to send emails from Milena’s account, simply replying to the messages she had received from old lovers, but that felt too risky. Even if I stayed anonymous, it would have to be sent by someone who knew Milena’s password. It might even establish a connection with Milena’s computer or her office. The safest idea seemed to be to set up a hotmail account for myself. I had no idea how easy it was to trace emails, but I probably wasn’t dealing with computer experts here. Creating the new email address, I simply jabbed randomly at the keyboard and ended up with
[email protected]
. I entered my first name as J and my second name as Smith. As a password I wrote out a sequence of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters. When I was done, I sent myself an email, just to check. There was just ‘J Smith’, the subject line, the date and time and the address. That seemed safe enough.

I entered the first of the email addresses I had retrieved from Milena’s computer, wrote ‘re’ beside ‘subject’, and then, after a few moments’ thought, typed: ‘Dearest Robin, I am LONGING to see you and…’ I tried to think of a plausible name. ‘Petra’. No – wasn’t that a dog’s name? And a tourist destination. ‘Katya’. Sounded a bit exotic. I realized I was thinking of names that sounded too like ‘Milena’. I looked at the books on the shelf. ‘Richmal’. Hopeless. ‘Elizabeth’. Was anyone called that any more? ‘Eliza’. ‘Lizzie’. ‘Beth’. ‘Bessie’. They all sounded ridiculous. Anyway, what did it matter. ‘Lizzie’ would do. And then I remembered. No, it wouldn’t do. The name needed to start with a J. Jackie then. ‘Jackie again after all this time. Ring as soon as you arrive, love Jackie xxxxx PS I hope this is your email address and if it isn’t will whoever is reading it let me know!!!!!’

I read it over and then again. I pressed send and it was gone. I wrote the same message to the second address as well and sent it. I thought of when I was a child and sometimes I had been afraid to post a letter because when I pushed it through the slot and heard it fall, I would realize it was still there, a few inches away, but lost to me, beyond change or recall.

The next morning, when I arrived at the office, Frances was talking on the phone. She was preparing a party for a firm of City lawyers that was being held in an old warehouse by the river. As I switched on Milena’s computer, she slammed down the phone and strode over to me. ‘They want a Shakespearean theme,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Can’t you just hire some young actors?’ I said. ‘They can walk round with the canapés and say lines from Shakespeare. About cakes and ale and, well, there must be some other references to food.’

‘And they want Elizabethan food. I mean, honestly! I had this ridiculous woman on the line just now and I said, “What do you mean by Elizabethan food? Carp? Pike? Capon?” She said, “Oh, no. They just want normal food with an Elizabethan twist.”’

There were shelves of books and magazines in the office for just such a crisis and Frances started to rummage through them, speaking half to herself and half to me. I went to my new account. My new email address and password were impossible to remember. I had to copy them painstakingly from the piece of paper on which I’d written them.

‘What exactly
are
sweetbreads?’ said Frances. ‘Some kind of gland, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not sure if they’re right for finger food,’ I said. I had to make an effort to keep my voice level because I had noticed there were two messages for me. The first was welcoming me as a new account holder. The second was from ‘gonefishing’.

Frances walked across the room towards me, reading aloud as she did so.

‘Jugged hare,’ she said. ‘Lobster. This is hopeless. We might as well be cooking larks’ tongues.’

‘You just want little things that have an old-fashioned look to them,’ I said. ‘Quail’s eggs. Bits of bacon. Dumplings. Scallops.’

I clicked on the message.

‘Who are you?’ it read.

I clicked ‘reply’ and quickly typed. ‘I’m Jackie, as you can see. Have I got the wrong address? Who are you?’

I highlighted and underlined the last word: ‘Who are
you
?’ I pressed send.

‘That sounds right,’ said Frances. ‘We can just put Ye Olde English garnishes on the plates. Bits of parchment. Branches of rosemary. Little ruffs. We can hang some tapestries and garlands on the wall. Pickled walnuts,’ she added, warming to the subject. ‘Medlars. Quinces. The problem is, people won’t know what they are.’

‘It’ll give the staff something to talk about,’ I said. ‘In fake Elizabethan language, of course. “Odds bodkins”. You know.’

There was a ping from Milena’s computer. A message from ‘gonefishing’.

‘Who are you?’ it said, same as before. I pressed reply again.

‘Don’t understand,’ I typed. ‘Did you get my last message? Have I got the wrong address? Could you give me your name?’ I pressed send.

I waited one minute, two, but there was no response.

Meanwhile Frances was flicking through another book. ‘Did they have oysters in Elizabethan times?’ she asked.

‘I think so.’

‘I’m a bit wary of shellfish. You don’t want to poison a roomful of lawyers.’

My attention drifted away and I suddenly heard Frances’s voice raised, as if she was trying to rouse me from sleep.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear what you were saying. I was trying to sort something out in my head.’

She looked at me with concern. ‘Are you all right? You’re rather pale.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Maybe a bit tired.’

Frances fussed over me as if she was my granny. She felt my brow with her thin, cool hand. She made me coffee and even asked if I’d like a touch of brandy in it. ‘Now, that might be the thing for the end of the party,’ she said. ‘Did they have coffee in Elizabethan times? They must have had brandy.’

Reluctantly I left my desk and we thumbed through the cookbooks for ideas. We discussed goujons of sole, devilled whitebait, creamed mushrooms and smoked eel, baby tomatoes stuffed with crab, and new potatoes stuffed with caviar. Frances was doubtful about the last. ‘I’ll need to run this past the wretched Daisy at G and C’s,’ she said. ‘This might be a bit steep even for them. I saw some caviar at Fortnum’s the other day. It was about a million pounds a thimbleful.’

As she was talking, I heard a ping from Milena’s computer and suddenly it was as if I was in a dream and Frances’s words were meaningless background noise. I had to force myself to talk normally as she put the cookbooks down and wandered across to the shelves for an exhibition catalogue.

‘Can you give me a moment?’ I said, and walked across to Milena’s computer. I clicked on the new message. ‘Nobody has this address,’ it said. ‘How did you get it?’

I collected my thoughts and made myself take on the character of Jackie, a non-existent person conjured up by another non-existent person. ‘Maybe I got it wrong,’ I wrote. ‘I just wanted your name to see if I’ve mixed it up with someone else. But if it’s a problem, don’t worry about it.’

I sent it and returned to Frances, who had found an old catalogue for an exhibition of Elizabethan miniatures. She smiled and pointed at an exquisitely delicate oval image of a woman wearing a tall hat with a white ostrich feather, a lace ruff, sleeves bunched and embroidered with gold thread and a rigid, richly decorated bodice. ‘She looks like you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to see you in that.’

‘I haven’t the waistline for it,’ I said.

Frances looked at me appraisingly, as if I was a pig she was considering buying. ‘Oh, yes, you have,’ she said. ‘How do you do it? Exercise and good living?’

Not eating, not sleeping, constant anxiety, I thought, but just smiled with what I hoped was rueful modesty. We leafed through the gorgeous catalogue, pausing over men in doublets and ruffs, stockings and breeches; women in cloaks and petticoats, corsets and farthingales.

‘If we can dress some of our young actors in these,’ said Frances, ‘and get them to learn a few lines, it should be magnificent. If we want to be really authentic, we should probably have the women played by men as well.’

‘I don’t think the lawyers would like that,’ I said. ‘When they asked for Elizabethan they were probably thinking of wenches dispensing flagons of ale and behaving bawdily. It might be a gruelling evening for some of them.’

Frances grunted. ‘The drama-school girls we employ are pretty unshockable,’ she said. ‘You know, if they were laid end to end in the garden, et cetera et cetera.’

I heard another ping from the computer and got distracted again. ‘Et cetera what?’ I said.

‘I wouldn’t be the least surprised.’

‘What?’

‘It’s an old joke. I’ve ruined it now. If the girls were laid end to end in the garden. You know. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve heard it.’

‘Dorothy Parker, I think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Excuse me a moment. Someone’s sent me a message.’ I couldn’t pretend to continue a conversation. I walked over to the computer and clicked on the new message.

‘Sorry for being paranoid,’ the message read. ‘It’s a security issue. Just give me your phone number and I’ll give you a ring and tell you my name.’

As I read the message, I felt as if I had immediately, and without warning, become immensely more stupid. I was like a person in a foreign country who just about understood what basic words meant but couldn’t make out what lay behind them, what was implied, what were the customs everybody took for granted. I found it impossibly difficult to assess what the message meant, its implications. Was there any possible way I could give some phone number or other to this person? Was it conceivable that they would ring and tell me who they were and I would know who this lover of Milena’s was?

Suddenly everything was made up of puzzles I wasn’t equipped to solve.

Was it possible that whoever it was believed my message had been a mistake? Could that be a security issue? Was it likely they would go to the trouble of phoning to clear the matter up? My thoughts were slow, trapped in sludge, but in the end, with Frances hemming and hawing and waiting for me on the other side of the room, I decided, no, it was not possible. I had gone too far. I had laid myself open.

My password seemed safe. Certainly it was safe from me, as there was no chance I would ever remember it. But just to be absolutely safe I deleted all of the messages, both those I had received and those I had saved, and then deleted the deletions. If I could have, I would have deleted those as well, but as far as I could tell, they were as pulverized as anything can be in cyberspace.

I rejoined Frances and we made more Elizabethan plans, then went out to lunch where we ate a meal that seemed as far from Elizabethan cuisine as it could have been, all tiny slices of tuna carpaccio and miniature heaps of spicy noodles. But, then, I know nothing about Elizabethan cuisine apart from what I’ve seen in historical dramas on TV. For all I know, Elizabethans might have had delicate side orders of beansprouts with their haunches of venison. We also had a small jug of warm sake which Frances drank quickly and greedily, barely looking at her food before ordering a second. I remembered the vodka bottles in her desk drawer. She talked about whether we could hire a jester from the Comedy Store and wondered whether health and safety regulations would allow flaming torches on the walls, whether we could hire Elizabethan musicians – and what was Elizabethan music like? What about morris dancers? Were they Elizabethan?

‘It’s all about money,’ Frances said thoughtfully, as we lingered over the coffee. ‘If you’re in London and you’ve got money, you can have anything.’ And then she pushed her food, barely touched, away from her and said, ‘Except happiness, of course. That’s a whole different story.’

I didn’t know what to say. In normal circumstances I would have reached across the table and touched her arm, asked what she meant, tried to draw her out. But these weren’t normal circumstances. If she turned to me for support, she would be turning to someone who didn’t exist and, what was more, someone who would leave her before long. So I wrinkled my brow and murmured something meaningless.

‘Would you say you were happy, Gwen?’ she asked, raising her pale, delicate face to me.

‘Oh, well.’ I stabbed my fork into the final sliver of tuna. ‘That’s hard to say. I mean, what’s happiness?’

‘I used to be,’ she continued. ‘It seemed easy once. Or maybe I wasn’t really happy. Maybe I was just having fun. That’s different, isn’t it? I think I used to be very selfish. I didn’t understand that actions had consequences. When Milena and I first met, before we were married, we were a bit like Beth, I suppose – out every night, lots of men, lots of parties, lots of drink. But then it all changed. You reap what you sow, that’s what they say. But I wish I’d understood then what I was sowing. Shall we have a dessert wine?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘If I drink during the day I fall asleep. But go ahead if you feel like one.’

‘No, you’re probably right, and we should get back to work, I suppose. Sorry to ramble on. Sometimes I feel so…’ But she stopped, shook her head as if to clear it, put her spectacles back on, gave me a wry smile. ‘Right. Let’s go and talk doublets and hose.’

When we returned to the office, I felt Milena’s computer drawing me as if I was attached to it with invisible cords. But I didn’t work on the computer that afternoon. I sketched our thoughts for the party into a coherent proposal. It was so trivial and so interesting that I felt regret that this would surely be my farewell to working with Frances. I finished the proposal and had almost cleared my desk when David arrived to collect her. He was in a bad mood and scarcely glanced in my direction. Frances made an apologetic grimace. I muttered an excuse and left.

When I got home, I ran up to the computer without even taking off my jacket. I went through the tiresome business of typing in my new email address and password, copying each character one by one. There was a new message and I clicked on it.

The previous messages had been written above the one before but now the old ones had been deleted. The subject line said, ‘Who are you?’ and the message repeated, ‘Who are you?’