A Question of Love
ISABEL WOLFF
A Question of Love
For Alice,
Freddie and George
‘A pound of knowledge is worth an ounce of love.’
John Wesley
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR A QUESTION OF LOVE:
‘A very good morning to you,’ said Terry Wogan, his voice as smooth as Guinness. ‘It’s ten to eight, and, if you’ve just tuned in, then a warm welcome to the show.’
‘Thanks,’ I murmured as I opened Nick’s small mahogany wardrobe and surveyed his clothes with a sinking heart. To the left were his suits—two woollen ones, three linen, and some casual trousers. To the right were ten or twelve shirts. I ran my hands over them, masochistically imagining, for a moment, Nick’s chest filling them, then I stopped at the dark blue silk one with the short sleeves. Patterned with tropical fish, and now faded, it had been his favourite. He’d worn it on our last holiday, four years ago.
‘Now,’ Wogan went on in that cheery way of his. ‘Here’s a song I’ve always been fond of…’ I heard the opening bars, and flinched. ‘…“Just When I Needed You Most”.’
I pulled out Nick’s shirt, then pressed it to my face. As I inhaled the masculine aroma mixed with the faint scent of the sea, I remembered him wearing it in Crete. He was standing on our hotel balcony, his face alight with laughter, his glass of retsina uplifted as though he hadn’t a care.
I miss you more than I missed you before…
Breathing slowly to steady my nerves, I set to work.
Now where I’ll find comfort, God knows…
I removed the shirts, put them over my arm, then carried them down to the spare room.
Because yo-oo-ou…left me, just when I needed you most.
‘Yes, Nick,’ I whispered. ‘You did.’ As I opened his father’s old wooden trunk and placed them inside I wondered what other women in my position might have done. Many would have taken their husband’s clothes to Oxfam long ago—but I couldn’t. Somehow it just didn’t seem right.
‘Now…’ I heard Wogan say as I went back into the bedroom and unhooked Nick’s suits from the rail. ‘Here’s a question. A bit of a trick question, really. Do you know what day it is?’
‘Wednesday,’ I replied, as I laid the suits on the bed. ‘The ninth of February.’ My hands shook slightly as I buttoned up the jackets.
‘It’s the first day of Lent.’
‘So it is.’
‘A day, traditionally, for a little sober reflection, and of course a day for giving things up. So what are you all giving up for Lent then, hmm…?’
I carried Nick’s suits into the spare room and put them in the trunk, carefully folded between sheets of newspaper.
‘Chocolate?’ I heard Wogan ask as I stood up, back aching slightly. I glanced into the garden. A light snow was falling. ‘That would be a tough one now, wouldn’t it? Or maybe booze?’ I returned to the bedroom, lifted Nick’s jumpers out of the chest of drawers, then put those in the trunk as well. ‘Fast food, maybe? Or sweets…?’
Now I took out his shoes, then carefully unthreaded his ties from the rack. I fingered the blue and gold cashmere one he’d worn for our wedding and was nearly felled by a wave of grief.
‘Swearing?’ Wogan persisted. ‘Smoking? Reading
OK!
and
Hello!?
Come on now everyone—let’s give it some serious thought, shall we? What are we all giving up for Lent?’
I looked at our wedding photo over the bed, then reached up and took it down. ‘What am I giving up? That’s easy. My past.’
You have to try and get over things don’t you? You have to move on, or, rather, ‘let go’ as they say in the popular jargon. And so, at long last, I am. I’ve finally put Nick’s things away because I no longer want to live with a ghost. But, although I know it’s something I have to do, at the same time it still feels wrong. As though I’m somehow denying that Nick ever existed or, that for six years, we had a shared life.
The hardest thing of all has been the answerphone. In three years I’ve never changed the message—I couldn’t bring myself to—but now, at long last, I have. So, as from this morning, callers will no longer hear Nick politely saying,
Hello, we’re sorry we’re not here…
—that used to freak people out. Now they’ll just hear me, on my own.
Hi—you’ve reached Laura
…I say with casual cheerfulness, as though I’m publicly acknowledging that he’s gone.
This is something my sisters have been urging me to do for ages. ‘It’s
unbearable
!’ my elder one, Felicity, would exclaim every time she came round. ‘You can’t carry
on
like this, Laura! The flat’s a mausoleum! You’ve got to accept what happened and move
forward
!’ My younger sister, Hope, who’s more restrained, would just say, ‘If you’re still not ready to change things, then…
don’t.
’ But in January I finally decided that I was. My New Year resolution was to redecorate the flat—that’s made a big difference to the feel of the place—and to put away all of Nick’s stuff. I haven’t disposed of his things—that seemed callous—I’ve simply hidden them, so that the outward evidence of his life here has gone. His computer, his books, his pictures and now his clothes, are all packed away in the spare room, out of sight. In one way it feels like a liberation, in another, like a betrayal. But, rationally, I know that it’s not.
I miss Nick. And I still feel angry with him. They say that’s a common reaction—especially if you’re young. Of course it’s got easier, over time. I’ve got used to it—I’ve had to—but even now, I can still be tripped up. Whenever a letter arrives for him from someone who still doesn’t know, for example, and I have to write back and explain. And the way my neighbours sometimes react can upset me. This morning, for instance.
I was coming out of the flat at about nine thirty, on my way to work. For the first time in ages I was feeling energized and optimistic, ready to move forward. And I’d just locked the front door when I saw Mrs French from over the road leaving her house with her shopping trolley, on her way to Portobello. So I smiled at her, and she smiled back, but, as usual, her smile was tinged with sympathy and I almost heard her compassionate ‘tut-tut’. And I realized that being, as I still am round here, an object of pity and curiosity, is going to make moving forward quite hard. Take Mrs Singh, next door. She’s the same. Whenever she sees me she comes up to me and lays her hand on my arm, and asks me, very sweetly, if I’m ‘all right’. And I always reply, as nondefensively as I can, ‘Yes, thanks. Of course. How are you?’ I don’t like it, but I can’t blame them because they remember Nick, and this is a gossipy little street, so I’ve become ‘that poor girl at number eight’.
Dunchurch Road is at the far—unfashionable—end of Portobello just off Ladbroke Grove. Many of my neighbours have lived here for years, and not all of them are as charitable as Mrs French and Mrs Singh. Twice now in our tiny local supermarket I’ve overheard that hatchet-faced woman from number twelve telling the manager in a loud, authoritative whisper, that I must have ‘driven him to it, poor man’. But then, when it happened, I know that there were a number of unpleasant theories doing the rounds. Some people blamed me—I don’t know why as Nick and I were very happy, thank you. Others thought he must have lost it with the emotional stress of his work. The most generous view of it was that Nick must have got himself in such a terrible mess that he just couldn’t make sense of his life. What that mess might have been, in the absence of any firm evidence (and, believe me, I looked), was open to conjecture of the most lurid kind. But I suppose it was inevitable that there’d be rumours, not least because it got in the papers because of Nick’s job. So, one way or another, I’ve had a lot to cope with; but now, as I say, I’m determined to move on, and to leave this sad phase of my life behind.
So, disconcerted by my encounter with Mrs French, I did some positive thinking to lift my mood. As I walked up Portobello—the sleety snowflakes whirling and eddying against my face—I reflected that work-wise at least, things have improved. As I passed the tattoo parlours and the halal butchers I reminded myself of how hard my financial position had been. There’s no insurance payout in cases like mine, and Nick had left his affairs in a mess. On my TV researcher’s salary I’d struggled to pay the mortgage alone, and, in my situation, I wasn’t able to move. The Halifax gave me three months’ grace, my family helped, and my boss, Tom, kindly gave me a rise. Now, as I passed the stalls selling cheap pashminas and tie-dye shirts, I remembered how, even so, I’d accumulated huge debts—but how I’d then found a good way to make ends meet.
Last March I saw an article in
The Times
about a company called InQuizitive which compiles quizzes for pubs. It mentioned that they were looking for freelance question-setters so, being a general knowledge junkie, I got in touch. I knew it was something I could easily do and, apart from the cash—£2.50 per question—it distracted me from my distress. Every evening after work I’d sit there with my reference books, totally absorbed, making up questions. ‘Who designed the first petrol-driven car?’ (Karl Benz). ‘What is stored in a mattamore?’ (Grain). ‘How many squares are there on a Scrabble board?’ (225). ‘What is the capital of Ukraine?’ (Kiev). I enjoyed it. It was relaxing, and yet at the same time it gave me a buzz. And now, as I turned left down Westbourne Park Road, I thought, as I often do, about how that one newspaper article had changed my life…
One Friday afternoon last June I’d been in Trident TV’s tiny ‘boardroom’ with Tom, who owns the company, and Sara the other full-time researcher—we’re a very small company—and we were bouncing around ideas for new programmes to pitch at the broadcasters.
‘Things are very tight, money-wise,’ Tom had begun, as he twanged a rubber band between thumb and forefinger in the slightly distracted way that he does. He narrowed his blue eyes, as though drawing on one of his occasional cigarettes. ‘So I think we may have to do something a little bit more…commercial,’ he continued with slight disdain. I’d been with Trident for five years then—right from the start, when it was just Tom and me—and we’d done some quite heavyweight stuff: two series about the first world war for the History Channel, for example; a drama-documentary about Helen of Troy for BBC Two, a four part series on the ethics of bio-technology, and a half-hour programme about the Turin Shroud. We’d also done a few corporate videos, to pay the bills, but we’d become well known for our factual work.
‘It’s very nice being nominated for the Baftas and all that,’ Tom went on. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘But what we
really
need now, is a money-spinner.’ My heart sank. I liked the kind of serious-minded programmes we did. I’ve never wanted to do cookery programmes, or silly lifestyle shows or pander to lowest common denominator taste. Tom slowly swivelled his chair from side to side. ‘So…?’
‘A money-spinner?’ I repeated.
He winced. ‘Yes—not least so that we can have a bit of a refurb round here—’ he glanced at the floor—‘this carpet must be due for its bus pass. So…any ideas for something a bit more…popular?’ He looked at me.
‘Well…how about…“Celebrity Wifestyles”?’ I suggested. ‘Or “Maisonette Makeovers”? Or “Bungled Bungalows” or, erm…“I’m a Nonentity, Get Me Into Here”?’
Tom fired the rubber band at me. ‘There’s no need to be facetious, Laura. I’m not suggesting that we start making
crap
.’