‘Thank you for thinking of it and sorting it out. I needed to get away from … To get away for a bit.’
It occurred to her that, fleetingly, whilst absorbed in viewing the house, the grief that she had been imbued with since the day of Matt’s death, that felt so much like fear – shaky, shivery, insidious – had been absent. The beautiful old stone house, with its perfect setting on the frontline to the sea and its captivating views over the expanse of the bay, had driven away her pain, if only momentarily.
Silently contemplating this, she started as something soft and wet landed in her hair, accompanied by a cry of ‘Gophie’ from the back seat. It was toddler Tomasz’s best approximation of her name and clearly designed, like the flying missile, to get her attention. Instinctively, she put her hand to her head to retrieve the object. It was a soggy, half-chewed cheese stick.
‘Thank you so much, Tomasz,’ Sophie said as she showed it to Anna.
A giggle erupted from behind them. Both adults started to laugh and once she’d started Sophie found she couldn’t stop. They were still laughing when they pulled up at the beach ten minutes later.
As they got out of the car, the heat was even more intense than earlier, the sun burning high in the sky. Sophie lifted her face towards it and shut her eyes, relishing the sensation of its rays upon the skin that she knew was pallid and grey from lack of fresh air, good food, exercise, and happiness. Perhaps the sun, here where it shone with such brilliance from dawn to dusk, would sear the loss of Matt out of her soul, enough to begin to live again.
Watching Tomasz play in the sand, building rudimentary approximations of castles, running to the sea and clumsily filling his bucket then slopping most of the water out on the way back, Sophie envied him his childhood innocence, his unsullied experience of nothing but love and happiness. She wished she could step backwards into her own carefree past.
Pulling her phone out of her bag, she forced herself to confront her new worst fear: the consequence of Matt’s untimely and tragic death that she had so far ignored. Keeping a careful eye on the little boy whilst Anna snoozed – she was up so early every morning with him – Sophie opened the email on her phone and read it, properly read it, for the first time.
It was from the solicitor, laying out the details of her finances. Despite a generous death-in-service payment from Matt’s employers, her expenses, mainly comprising their enormous mortgage payments, were far beyond what she could possibly maintain on her teacher’s salary. Everything had been built on the fat pay packet of Matt’s job as a lawyer. They had taken out life insurance when they first bought the flat but had let it lapse; they were both young, fit, and healthy, neither had ever smoked, they exercised regularly, ate well, drank little – why waste the money?
Sophie had preferred to spend it on doing up the flat rather than hand it over to some multinational corporation that would most likely never have to pay out. Home was a sanctuary to Sophie, the place where her world was centred, just as Matt had been the person around whom it had revolved. Now, that home to which she had devoted so much of her time, love, and energy, to which she would return after a tough day in the classroom only to take up a brush and spend a few hours painting a wall or tiling a floor, that home would have to go. She had to face the reality that she couldn’t possibly afford to keep it.
She would soon have nothing left at all to show for her fifteen-year relationship and ten-year marriage, not even a roof over her head.
***
That evening, once Tomasz was in bed and fast asleep, Sophie apprised Anna of the facts of her financial situation. Anna, to whom melodrama and histrionics were unknown, merely shrugged. ‘It’s a flat, bricks and mortar only. You can let it go.’ It was clear that Anna felt differently about what constituted a home. ‘There are plenty of places you could live,’ she went on, and reached out to pat Sophie’s hand. Sophie started to withdraw it but then didn’t. Anna’s patting was comforting. Necessary.
‘I’m sorry for everything that’s happened,’ continued Anna. ‘But you know what. That place will always be you and Matt; it will always remind you of him and you’ll never be able to …’
‘Don’t say move on,’ interjected Sophie, hurriedly. ‘Please, whatever you do, don’t say move on.’ So many people had mentioned ‘moving on’ in the weeks since Matt’s death. She knew she would never move on. She didn’t want to.
‘OK, start again, then. Begin afresh. Whatever you like. But it will be for the best, in the long run.’
The concept of this was incomprehensible. It was completely unimaginable to Sophie that she could ever make a nice, new life for herself. Pain gripped her, squeezing her heart so tight she let out an anguished, pitiful cry. She clasped her arms around her chest and let her head fall forward, her forehead resting on the warm, rough wood of the table, its grains pressing against her skin like branding irons.
Anna leapt up and crouched beside her. ‘Sophie? Are you OK? Are you ill?’
It was a long time before Sophie could answer. When she did, she could not even look up, just shook her head back and forth against that ridged table, imagining that the external abrasions created would match those cutting into her heart. Tears were pouring down her face.
‘I’m not OK. I’ll never be OK again.’
This was the thing about loss, about grief. After the first few weeks of nonstop crying, of feeling that she couldn’t breathe, of being gripped by an iron band of pain that tightened hourly around her heart, Sophie had thought it couldn’t get any worse. But now it was worse because she might be all right for a few minutes or a few hours and then suddenly, out of nowhere and with no warning, she would be seized anew by an unimaginable panic, a terror that winded her and threatened to destroy her. It was the fact that she didn’t know when it would happen and couldn’t stop it when it did that made it so frightening.
Anna patted her shoulder, unconvincingly. They sat in silence for a long moment. Then Anna was patting her again. But Sophie didn’t care. She needed human contact, needed Anna right now as much as she had ever needed Matt. Without her, she might completely fall apart.
‘Sophie, listen carefully.’ Anna was speaking slowly and louder than was necessary, as if Sophie’s grief had induced deafness. ‘When we get back to England, I’ll help you clear up the flat and get it on the market. It’ll be snapped up in no time. You know how hard it is to find property like that in your area. You’ve made it so beautiful; everyone’ll want to buy it.’
Sophie pictured her home, the designer wallpaper that adorned one wall of the sitting room, the copy of the Eames armchair, the stylish vintage Ercol dining table and chairs she’d bought for a song on eBay. Anna was right. What did any of it matter, now?
‘And you know what? This is the first time you’ve cried for days. You are getting better, slowly.’ Anna looked around and gestured towards the bay far below their balcony, black and still in the night-time, and at the encompassing mountains, dark shapes under the star-studded sky. ‘I think this place is good for you.’
Sophie lifted her eyes to look at the view, the lights that sparkled across the water. Closer still, the muffled noises of those in the apartments and houses around them were oddly comforting.
‘You’re never going to be homeless; you can afford something nice, somewhere.’ Anna took a swig of wine. ‘In fact, as I suggested earlier, you could buy the place we saw today. Say goodbye to grey skies and hello to blue ones,’ she continued smoothly, her tone even. ‘You know I believe in fate and I’d say that it was written in the stars that we would happen across that beautiful house, complete with estate agent ready and waiting. It’s meant to be. Your destiny.’
Sophie snorted in ridicule. ‘I don’t