It took me a few moments to realize that a window in the front of the house was open. A chill wind blasted through the room. How had I managed to leave that window open? I chastised myself for yet another random act of forgetting. I couldn’t be trusted.
The stubborn window wouldn’t close. It was always stiff, I reminded myself. Growing angry at my dwindling strength, I tried to position myself more strategically behind the sofa to heave down on the window frame. It was then my slippered foot arched awkwardly over some unseen object. I looked down and found a screw on the floor and beside it some chips of wood. Only then did my addled mind register that I hadn’t been the one to leave the window open. It had been forced. I now saw a single broken lock on the floor, marks on the window frame where it had been jemmied up. An intruder. An attempted burglary. But he hadn’t got in. The higher locks had held, and only a wraith or an infant could have squeezed through that foot of open space.
I poured coffee. My hand was shaking. It was him. I knew it. He was trying to come back. To come in. To break in. He should have asked. I would have unlocked the door.
Superstition. I knew I was being superstitious. I was also convinced. It was a sign. A portent.
I rang my son. He lived further away than my daughter, but he wasn’t a reader of Wuthering Heights. He told me I had to call the police, at least to register the attempted break-in. And to call our builder, ever a friend in need, who would come and fix the lock. I did all that, but I was nonetheless convinced that John was trying to break in, to come home. Whether it was because he missed me or wanted to chastise me – or both simultaneously – was the quandary.
FRIENDS WERE WONDERFUL through those days. They brought warmth and food. The fridge was piled high with delectables. We talked. We hugged. We drank a little. I don’t know if they could see just how crazy I felt. I tried to smile. I was grateful to them. Grateful to my splendid children who came and sat, sometimes stayed, sometimes even had us all laughing at our ghosts.
Saturday, 5 December, the day of the funeral, dawned as grey and grim and cold as a funeral day proverbially must. The large chapel at Golders Green Crematorium was filled to capacity. I know who spoke. I had invited them. They were our nearest friends, John’s closest colleague in Cambridge, his two brothers, the children and their partners, one of whom read a text sent by a dear mutual friend at Harvard, who couldn’t be there. I know everyone spoke with eloquence and grace. They spoke with tenderness and, in the case of our daughter and son, with great courage. But I could concentrate on little that was said and remember next to nothing. Quite unlike the other occasions on which I have been in that chapel, when the well-chosen words of tributes resonated for weeks.
It was clear he was loved, admired, honoured. Whatever the noise in my head, I was pleased about that. Moved. I wanted to say a few brief words. Perhaps I wanted to say them in order to prove to him, to everyone, most of all to myself, that I was worth more than the lowly role to which I had been assigned.
The voice in my head, which had done much of the assigning, was punishing: it interpreted all this as a callow call for attention. A stupid self-aggrandizement.
Months later, I came across a passage from William James’s The Principles of Psychology that made some sense of my overarching need for what convention might dictate as an unwifely visibility. James writes:
No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof … If every person we met ‘cut us dead,’ and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the cruellest bodily tortures would be a relief; for these would make us feel that, however bad might be our plight, we had not sunk to such a depth as to be unworthy of attention at all.
For some reason, on that occasion, the usual invisibility that attends the ageing woman’s life felt akin to annihilation.
I talked for a brief moment about the John-shaped hole in my life and read a poem by Adam Zagajewski that evoked something of him, at least for me.
Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve.
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers.
We haven’t risen yet to the level of ourselves.
I was facing him in the coffin as I read. I had the distinct feeling that if he didn’t like what I said he would sit up. I recall being worried about any revealing verbal slips I might make. I was frantic about the fact that he would soon be turned to ash. Was ash worse than the stony implacable effigy he had become in my mind? Or the phantom intruder? The night before the funeral I had worked out that the day on which he had uttered the words that had etched themselves into my mind, like a festering scar, was precisely thirty-two years after we had met.
Periodically, I would remind myself that his last words to me were simply an indication that, like so many wives, I had grown into my husband’s mother: it is mostly mothers after all who deal with babies’ smelly mess. Freud’s words in his essay on ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, an essay John liked to cite, often came to me: ‘But it is in vain that an old man yearns for the love of woman as he had it first from his mother; the third of the Fates alone, the silent Goddess of Death, will take him into her arms.’
The human condition doesn’t really help all that much when one is being all too human. I had thought, once the funeral was over, I would be less crazy, less alert to the perpetual babble of those inner voices, less susceptible to rage, those racing, chattering demons in my mind, that were so hard to outrun. The Furies, the ancients called them.
I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have let the need for activity take me to his desk.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN a few days before the funeral. I needed to find his will so that all the formal matters of death and the state could be sent on their way. He had told me it was in his desk.
I had never particularly liked that desk, heavy and stolid and post-war, but he was attached to it. It had belonged to his father. In all our years together I had rarely looked inside it and then only under instruction about where and for what.
I started to rifle round. I realized I was nervous. I may have written the occasional thriller, but outside books, I have a deep sense of privacy. Or at least I do in the normal course of things. I never rifled through my children’s diaries, and though I once read some letters I had found in the back of a cupboard that turned out to have been from an early girlfriend to my son, I felt ashamed doing it, as if I had turned into my own mother, a constant rifler. Or maybe, much as I want to know, I’m simultaneously frightened of finding things out, as if a trap lies at the end of every dark, twisting corridor.
He must have known that, since I didn’t need to do much rummaging. The first thing my eyes fell on in the very top drawer was an envelope full of photographs. I love photos. I picked it up, looking forward to a break from the duty of locating a will. The anticipated baby pictures didn’t materialize. These images were of a woman in a variety of fetching poses and smiling to the camera or the person holding it in the way one smiles only to intimates. I knew that woman. I knew that photographer.
I sat back and tried to take a deep breath. It caught on something. Maybe it was fury. The kind you can’t swallow. The kind that doesn’t let you breathe. I now started to look in earnest, pushing things aside, prodding, hating what I found, hating myself, hating him. I opened his wardrobe and started to heave out his clothes.
Some nine years before, we had split up. He was in the midst of what can only be called a mid-life crisis and passionate about a young woman. He was also crazy, crazier than any adolescent in the grip of lust and jealousy. Undone by it. The part of me that writes understood. This was another form of everyday madness, more familiar than so many others. He was a man obsessed.
I would have been