The Good Wife (20 page)

‘But he didn’t wait,’ I cried out, in agony. ‘He didn’t wait for me. He should have waited.’

‘He couldn’t,’ she explained quietly. ‘But we told him you were on your way. We talked to him, even when he was unconscious. Hearing is the last sense to go, you know.’ She laid a hand on my lap. ‘He knew. He knew you’d get here as soon as you could.’ She looked from me to Meg, who was sobbing by the window, and back again to me. ‘It was peaceful.’

‘But he was alone,’ I cried. ‘He shouldn’t have been alone. I should have been with him. I know he would have wanted me with him. He would have minded – ’

‘I held his hand,’ said the sister. ‘I promise you, I did hold his hand.’

When we got home I rang Will at the London flat but the ringing tone went on and on until the answer-machine clicked on.

‘Darling, it was an all-night sitting,’ he explained, when I finally got hold of him. ‘I’m coming down now. I’m just
going to order the car and fling a few things into a bag. I’ll ring Chloë and tell her and, if you agree, I will persuade her not to rush home. I’ll tell her Alfredo would not have wanted that.’

At the back of my mind an old question rose: ‘Are you lying to me?’ I had grown used to it, and I had learnt to understand that it loved the limelight almost for the sake of it. It had become an automatic response to grief, shock and desolation.

My body felt stretched, weightless, attenuated. I realized that I should be making arrangements but I found it difficult to perform even a simple task like picking up the phone. I wanted to weep endlessly, but my tears were plugged now by astonishment that my father had allowed this to happen.

I pulled myself together and rang Sally. ‘Oh,’ she said. Then, ‘I must sit down.’ After a pause, she said, ‘Go over it again.’ A clink of china sounded in the background, and radio music, and other voices that belonged in my mother’s life.

‘It was a heart attack.’

‘I won’t come to the funeral,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could. I will think of him, though.’

At this, I wept down the phone. ‘Listen, Fanny,’ said Sally, ‘you must remember that Alfredo considered you the best thing that ever happened to him. Remember that.’

It was the first really motherly thing my mother had ever said to me, and I wrote it down on the notepad beside the telephone, with the date scrawled at the bottom, because I wanted to make sure I had caught every syllable.

Mannochie came to the rescue. Organizing. Planning.
Cancelling appointments. Chloë was not to fly home – we talked her through what would happen and promised to call her every day. Where did I want the funeral? Burial or cremation? Which hymns? What music? I pulled myself together. Good wives were trained to make things take shape, to make events happen well, to smooth and soothe, and a good daughter followed suit.

Anyway, I had to keep Meg on the level, for she had taken my father’s death badly. ‘I loved him too,’ she said.

‘If you let us down now,’ I told her, tight-lipped and hollow-eyed, ‘then…’ I didn’t finish the sentence but it wasn’t necessary. Meg understood well enough.

The funeral came and went. My father had left written instructions as to what he wished. With Will at my side, I sang the hymns and listened to a reading from Gibran’s
The Prophet
, ‘Open your heart wide unto the body of life’, and shook hands with a great many people.

‘Such a tragedy,’ murmured one.

‘So sorry,’ said another.

But I did not pay them much attention.

Afterwards, the hearse took the body to be cremated. He had left further instructions that I should bury his ashes where I thought fit.

I did not know where was fit.

Afterwards Will dashed back to London, and in the evening Meg helped me to clear up. ‘Fanny,’ she said, more gently than normal, ‘you’ll have to think about the house. I take it you’ll sell it.’

‘Have you been talking to Will?’

She stretched clingfilm over a plate of leftover sandwiches. ‘Maybe.’

‘It’s not his decision,’ I said sharply.

‘Have it your own way, darling.’ She put cups and saucers back into the cupboard. ‘By the way, since you’ve been so busy, I bought the socks for Will.’

‘What socks?’

‘He mentioned he needed some. I’ve put them on your bed. I thought it would help you.’

I stared at her. ‘You needn’t have bothered.’ I could barely articulate the words.

‘No.’ She smiled brightly. ‘But I did.’

I gathered up the plates in silence.

‘I can see I’ve been naughty. Sock-buying is a sin,’ Meg said, and added sadly, ‘Fanny, did you know that your back can be so disapproving?’

‘Can it?’ I whirled round, a plate in my hand, and Meg shrank away. ‘In the name of pity, can’t you see you have Will, more than you should? Is that not
enough?
’

She held out her hand. ‘I didn’t mean – ’

‘Oh, yes, you did, Meg.’ Then I heard myself say, ‘Anything to keep your thumbprint on him.’ And I wondered who this person was that I was turning into.

Meg gave a little gasp. ‘Wrong, Fanny, so wrong. It’s because it makes me feel useful. It makes me feel I have a place.’

The plate slid from between my hands. The sound as it smashed on to the tiled floor cracked through the kitchen. I crouched down to retrieve the pieces… and so did Meg. Our faces were so close and our fingers almost touched as we reached for the same shard of china. ‘You’re upset,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake, leave me in peace,’ I whispered.

Meg straightened up. There was an odd, terrible pause. ‘I think I need a drink,’ she said. ‘A little nightcap. Want some.’

‘There isn’t any in the house.’

‘Oh, no?’

I looked up at her. ‘I don’t want a drink. And you don’t, Meg.
Please
.’

Again, the ghastly suspension of sound. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it under control. I can manage a little one, now and again. I’m lucky that way, not like the others. The doctor says – ’

The sharp edge of the broken plate pressed into my hand, teasing the flesh. ‘Meg, think. You’ve been doing so well.’

‘Precisely.’ Meg went in search of her contraband whisky bottle – her lover, brother, friend and child – and I did nothing to stop her.

I went upstairs to ring Will. With a shock, I realized that a primitive feeling of being protected had vanished with my father. He had left us to patrol the frontline between death and Chloë and it was a busy business.

Somehow, I had to pull myself together to make this family work. That was my business, and what was important. I had to… hold the family. That, and struggle towards resolution as he had.

I made myself walk back downstairs, through the kitchen and up into Meg’s bedroom. She was sitting on the bed, staring at a photograph of Sacha. There was a full glass in her hand.

She did not offer much resistance. ‘Where were you
hiding this and how much have you had?’ I prised it away from her.

She looked up at me. ‘Only a mouthful. I had a bottle in the wardrobe. It was my safety-belt.’

‘Don’t, Meg. I’ll help you. I promise.’

She ducked her head. ‘Why on earth should you?’

I set the glass on the bedside table and sat beside her. ‘My father told me something once. He said, in so many words, that we should take life seriously.’

‘Um,’ Meg said, and tears trickled down her cheeks.

‘He was right. We should take it very seriously. And laugh at it, too, but seriously.’

Meg’s hand crept towards mine and grasped it in a desperate way. ‘Oh, Fanny,’ she said, ‘and there was I thinking what a huge and awful joke life is.’

Will managed to rearrange his ministerial diary and, two days later, we drove over to Ember House. When it came to the point, I could not bring myself to walk through the front door. ‘Will, I can’t go in. Not yet.’

He put his arm round my shoulders and drew me close. ‘Come on, we’ll go round the garden.’

The grass was damp from recent rain, and the garden wore the drenched, drowning look that English gardens often do. I stopped to anchor a rogue spray of clematis by the wall and water showered down on me. Will brushed it off and kept his arm resting on my shoulders.

Soon it began to rain in earnest and he said, ‘We can’t put this off any longer,’ led me gently to the front door and inside. ‘Give me your hand,’ he instructed, and held it fast.

It was strange but even in that short period since my father’s death, the house felt quite different.

Will made coffee and I produced sandwiches. Will ate his hungrily but I only pecked at mine. I was thinking about the house, and how I could not bear to let it go.

‘Will, what do you think about living here?’

He looked thoroughly startled. ‘Live here? It hadn’t crossed my mind.’ He helped himself to an egg sandwich. ‘Fanny, are you serious?’

I knew it was mad and totally illogical, but I whispered, ‘It’s my home.’

Will put down the sandwich. Too late, I realized the implication of my words. ‘But it’s not mine,’ he said. ‘And I rather thought our house was our home.’

‘I don’t want to sell Ember House.’

He held me by my shoulders and searched my face. He seemed puzzled by what he saw, which irritated me. Was it so puzzling to be grieving for my father? ‘If you want me to think about it, of course I will. It’s just not what we planned.’

‘Oh, the
plan
.’ I shrugged him off, and witless with misery, slammed the coffee mugs into the sink.

‘Fanny, what
is
it?’

I stared out of the window and bit down on my knuckle. ‘I can’t get over the fact that Dad did not have me there when he died. It haunts me and I’ll never forgive myself.’

Will stood behind me and put his arms around me. ‘Hush, Fanny, hush.’

His mobile rang in the hall. Instinctively, he moved towards the sound. I leapt to my feet and blocked him. ‘No. Just this once, Will. No phones.
Nothing.’

The phone fell silent. Will put his arms round me. ‘You think I don’t understand, Fanny, but I do…’ The old smile flashed, sweet and loving, and my sore heart lifted a trifle.

Now that I paid proper attention, I sensed a suppressed excitement in Will, a new tension. ‘What are you up to?’

‘This and that.’

‘You’d better tell me.’

‘OK.’ He went and sat down again. ‘Robert stopped me in the corridor. He said that in the next reshuffle the Exchequer was a definite possibility. But, Fanny, I have to get the car tax through.’

Just in time, I stopped myself laughing and pressed my hand to my mouth. I noticed it was trembling.

‘The deal was that if I backed the government on the National Health Bill I opposed, then…’

‘But as a minister you
have
to support the government. It doesn’t matter what you think.’

‘There’s support and support,’ he said.

Once or twice, Elaine and I had discussed power. What was it? In what sort of shape did it come? How did a wife fit around it?
Very snary
, we agreed. Power wraps a person up, as tight as liquor in a bonded store.
Very snary
are the courtiers, the adulation, the chauffeured cars, and the handing over of ideals in return for the commodity called power. Ideals are so much more uncomfortable than sitting warm and snug in the back of the limousine.

‘Well?’ He did not sound as sure as he looked. ‘What do you think?’

I struggled to assemble my thoughts. ‘Can we talk about this later?’

I abandoned Will and the kitchen and fled into the study. My father’s fountain pen rested on the desk where he had last put it down. The red light winked on the answer-machine. I picked up a book from a pile on a chair under the window,
A Disquisition on the Grand Wines of Bordeaux
, and dropped it back.

I grasped the edge of the curtain between fingertips that felt numb. Years ago I had got it wrong. Grief was not like a blade slicing into flesh. No, grief was dull, heavy: it made your limbs drag, your head ache. It mocked those who drooped under its weight, for I could swear my father was in the room. I could have sworn I could hear his voice.

‘After 1963,’ he was saying, and we are talking Bordeaux here, of course, ‘with its vintage of rain and rot and worthless wines, came 1964, badly undervalued because of the previous year. Nature, having taken away with one hand, now gave its lovely rich rounded elegant wines with the other…’

A tiny movement alerted me to Will’s presence behind me. With my back to him, I said, ‘There are so few people to whom one is joined, cell for cell, understanding for understanding. Far too few to lose or to betray.’

‘Fanny, darling, we’d better check over the papers,’ he said quietly.

We bundled up most of them, and conveyed them back to our house. Together, we worked through the obvious ones, stacking urgent bills and letters into one basket, less urgent into another. Finally, we came to a file with ‘Francesca’ written on it.

‘I’ll look at this later.’ I let my hand rest on top of it.

An eyebrow flew up. ‘I see.’

Will was not stupid. He invited me to share his work, his ambition, and I did not want to share the contents of a file belonging to my father.

Even so, I made sure that I opened the file in the privacy of our bedroom. I don’t know what I expected – legal or financial instructions, perhaps – but certainly not a child’s drawing of a house with a tiled roof, a large front door and pathway leading up to it. In front of the house were three figures: a stick man with a black hat, a stick woman with a bright red skirt and, suspended between them, a stick child with a bow in her hair.

It was a drawing I had done at nursery school.

The file also contained an essay written on lined paper. ‘Show the effect on European foreign policy of America’s isolationist stance during the 1930s, giving at least two examples.’ The mark had been C. There was also a poem, handwritten on pale pink paper: ‘Your absence grates on my skin/Which breaks into scarlet rubies/Until a red river slides towards the sea of my grief.’

I pressed my fingers to hot cheeks. The poem, a relic from a failed love affair – all right,
the
failed love affair with Raoul – was unutterably bad, but my father had chosen to keep it. Leafing through the remainder of the file’s contents, I discovered a wedding photograph of Will and me, an invitation for my father and me to the Chevalier du Tastevin dinner, which, once upon a time, I had coveted above all else, and a tiny curl of baby hair taped on to a photograph of Chloë at six months.