In an attempt to spend more time together, Elizabeth had suggested that they go to her nephew’s birthday party and stay the weekend in Manchester with her sister, Vic. Elizabeth adored her two small nephews and Vic in turn was fond of Jamie. Elizabeth had thought a family party might be healing, but in the end she and Jamie argued all the way up the M6 about whether or not they should sell the flat and buy a small house (Elizabeth was keen – she was secretly hoping they might soon have a need for a second bedroom – but Jamie dampened her hopes by arguing it was too acquisitive and bourgeois) and the tiff cast a cloud over the family reunion. Jamie was mostly sullen and distracted from the moment they arrived, and Elizabeth found herself overcompensating by being exceptionally lively and drinking too much. But during the birthday party on Saturday – just as she was acting out an elaborate scene from Toy Story with her nephews – Jamie suddenly seized her round the waist and murmured into her hair, ‘Hey Lizzie, you’re good at this. Let’s get married and have one of our own.’
Elizabeth looked up, puzzled by his change of mood, and in her best Buzz Lightyear voice said, ‘Excuse me, you are delaying my rendezvous with star command.’ But Jamie was looking at her very seriously. It wasn’t a joke. Vic paused in her pouring of lemonade and looked over at them anxiously.
‘Well?’ Jamie said more loudly.
Her nephew, Billy, who was Woody to her Buzz, took off his sheriff’s hat and threw it across the room, frustrated that the game had stopped. He looked up at Elizabeth with a chocolate-smeared mouth, eyes round and impatient. Jamie’s face paled. He looked suddenly young, very like the hopeful blue-eyed boy she’d met on a freezing anti-war march in her first term at York, when he’d offered her some soup from his flask and some socialist leaflets from his rucksack.
But marriage? Did she want to be married? To wear a ring that signalled I belong to someone else? And they’d been so distant with each other recently! She glanced over at her sister, whose mouth formed a small questioning O. Billy tugged at her skirt and she looked down at his sweet face. But oh yes, oh God, she so wanted that! She did want one of their own. She took Jamie’s hand. The hand she knew so well, every contour and lifeline, almost better than her own. How could she not accept that hand? Things would be better if they were husband and wife. She’d go home more. He’d be more communicative. They’d have a baby. Everything that felt wrong now would feel right once they were married.
‘Yes,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Yes. Yes. YES.’
Elizabeth drained her mug of tea and wandered over to the mirror that hung over the fireplace. Her face was unnaturally pale, the fine dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose more pronounced than usual, her lips colourless, her short brown hair standing on end where she’d run her fingers through it, again and again. Hollow eyes were framed by dark circles and looked back at her accusingly: Why didn’t you know? You were meant to be in control. Why didn’t you spot how ill Ricky was? Was it just like it was with Jamie? You simply didn’t notice what was wrong?
Her phone rang and she hesitated, thinking it would be Hutch. It was her mum. Elizabeth imagined her in her Essex kitchen, pottering about in the inappropriate silk robe Elizabeth had bought her when on a shoot in Rome, more suited to a bordello than a bungalow in Frinton-on-Sea. It sat uneasily on her, as did a number of other things Elizabeth had bought on her travels: the sofa throw that she’d brought back from Colombia, or the Costa Rican mugs, or the Galapagos tortoise paperweight. None of it suited the home of a woman who had spent most of Elizabeth’s childhood holidays on the Costa del Sol searching high and low for Branston Pickle and Cheddar cheese. But that’s what parenting was like, Elizabeth imagined: you cherished unsuitable gifts just because your children had thought about you for the briefest of moments while shopping in a South American street market.
And you stood by them no matter what they’d done.
Thoughts of home were comforting and Elizabeth wished she was with her mum now, being made cups of strong sweet tea. Tea had got them through so much over the years.
‘Hello, dear. How are you? I wasn’t sure if you’d be up… Elizabeth, are you still not sleeping properly?’
‘Well…’ Elizabeth realised her mum wouldn’t have seen the news swirling on the internet. She kept the old android phone her daughters had bought her in a knitted sock in her bedroom drawer ‘for emergencies’.
‘Mum, Ricky Clough’s dead! He died last night.’
‘Oh no! Elizabeth! Really? How awful! How old was he?’
It was a relief finally to be able to talk about how terrible it had been, without having to put on a show of being capable and in charge. ‘Oh, Mum, it was so horrible! And do you know, I’m not sure how old he is… I went to his birthday party a few weeks ago and people said it was his fiftieth but I think he was a bit older.’
‘Yes, he looked a lot older.’ Maureen had got to the age where the death of friends was most often the reason for a phone call before breakfast, but news of an unnaturally early death was much less run-of-the-mill. ‘What did he die of, do they know?’
‘We’re not sure. Mum, it was during the show! I was there.’
‘Oh, Elizabeth! Did you see it happen?’
Elizabeth thought of Ricky’s body writhing on the studio floor, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth distorted, his hand gripping her wrist. And then she thought of her mum, running in from the garden on another glorious May morning, dropping to her knees with a small scream and cradling her husband’s head as he grasped hopelessly for his last breaths, his heart clenching itself into an unyielding fist. Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Yes. I’ve got to go to the police station this morning for an interview.’
‘The POLICE? Good heavens! What on earth for? Oh, dear, are you in trouble?’
Elizabeth wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Was she? ‘No, I don’t think so, it’s just that they don’t yet know what he died of… I think they just want to speak to everyone who’d been with him.’
‘Well, I imagine it was his heart. I mean, he didn’t pay much attention to his health, did he? He was quite heavy. And for a man of his age…’ Her mum faltered and Elizabeth thought again of her dad at his office desk, gazing miserably at the Tupperware box of cottage cheese and pineapple chunks her mum had carefully prepared for him, longing for his egg-and-chip lunches of old in the City Road café. Not that it had helped in the end. Fat lot of good that low-cholesterol diet was, Maureen had said, sobbing, as they buried him, aged fifty-four.
‘I guess it’ll be on the BBC News by now.’ Elizabeth reached for the remote.
‘Oh yes, I’ll take a look. But are you okay, in yourself? I mean, I know you’d worked with him for a while but I was never sure if you really – well, you know – liked him? Was he a nice man?’
Elizabeth thought for a moment. ‘No, Mum, I don’t suppose he was what you’d call a nice man.’ Who wants to be nice? ‘But Ricky was interesting. He could be very good company. In his heyday.’ Elizabeth realised how easily she had let Ricky slip into the past tense and tears pricked her eyes again. He was already gone from the present and he would be gone from the future.
‘Well,