Sheila was the first to leave the commune, after a row with Neil which began when he announced he was going to give up his PhD and do a law conversion course. And then once I’d gone back with the children to live at Fred Harper’s again, the others moved out quickly: that house must have been a dreadful place for all of them, we never got the stains out of the kitchen floorboards. I don’t know how I ended up with the white stone; it’s on my coffee table now, in a wide blue-glazed bowl by a ceramicist whose work I like, kept among other stones collected on family holidays later. Perhaps Lukie brought it with him. It would have seemed a powerful totem to him after he’d watched us passing it from hand to hand, adults so solemnly absorbed in the game they were playing.
None of the others ever knew about my relationship with Andrew; Sheila may have guessed something but she’s never asked me. About a year after Nicky died, Jude and I met up for a night out (she was renting a room from friends, Daphne had moved back temporarily to live with her parents). My mother had Luke and Rowan to stay: everyone was conspiring to cheer me up or take me out of myself. And somehow it happened that at the end of the evening Jude and I ended up in her bed together. We’d both had a lot to drink. It was the only time I ever made love to another woman. Jude hadn’t been harbouring a secret passion for me, the thing just came about out of her kindness; she was consoling me — and consoling herself. She felt responsible, because of Baz. She lit a scented candle in her room and her clean bed linen was patterned with ferns; it was easy touching the cool skin of her body which I knew because it was like my own but not quite like. We didn’t speak much but her light voice and northern vowels were caresses in themselves, inconsequent and soothing. In the dark under her duvet something was unblocked in me: a flood of responsive desiring, to begin with, which took me by surprise. I’d been quite numb and dry for a year, I’d thought sex could never touch me again.
And letting myself fall down into the slippery, brilliant whorls and corridors and intricacies of it, I got back my memories of Nicky too. I’d thought I’d lost these as my punishment — but they had been saved up all the time, in my body. Nicky had had a gift for sex, like his gift for drawing: attentive, inventive, easy, skilful. I think of him now like a shepherd boy in a poem, or a boy lover in a Watteau painting, with a lute. He had actually liked me — liked the clear, light, energetic person he saw in me. (I think over time I’ve become more like that person.) Sex with him hadn’t been at all like conquest; Andrew was wrong, it didn’t always have to do with submission and overwhelming. Actually Nicky was a better lover; or put it this way, he roused up more pleasure in my body than Andrew ever achieved. (But I have to reckon with the truth, too, that it was Andrew I had wanted more.)
I was packing to leave, to go and live with Andrew, when it happened. (Andrew had decided that living with me — and with Lukie and the coming baby — would save him from himself.) Lukie was at nursery. Nicky was hung-over, drinking coffee in the kitchen; he’d been out with his workmates the night before. I hadn’t told him, but I was going to tell him as soon as he came upstairs. The words were ready in my mouth (I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry); resolved, I was listening out for his quick step, taking two stairs at a time as he always did. Afterwards I went over and over this in my thoughts until I was nearly mad (because he was dead, I couldn’t help attributing omniscience to him): but really I don’t think he knew that I was going, or about Andrew. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was. If I’d decided to tell him half an hour earlier, he’d have died knowing. We were separated from that different story by a tissue-thin sliver of time, mere accident.
Waiting, I confused my dread with the heavy child inside me making it so difficult to move around, reach down, get out my suitcases from under the bed, empty my clothes out of the drawers. Outside the windows the day was stifling hot under grey cloud; sweat ran on the back of my neck and under my arms and between my breasts. Someone arrived at the front door and Neil opened it: I thought it might be Andrew already but it was Baz, I recognised his voice — always reasonable and temporising to begin with. We’d all thought he’d left Bristol, he hadn’t bothered us for a while. Neil should have shut the door in his face. Baz pushed past him into the kitchen; Jude came running up into her bedroom. Hearing the raised voices from downstairs, and the remonstrating, made me more certain that I had to leave. I’d begun to take on some of Andrew’s opinions on communal living: it was an indulgent bourgeois whim and I couldn’t wait to get out of it, being mixed up in everybody else’s craziness and stupidity. The atmosphere in the house had soured. It even smelled bad that day, in the heat; we had a cellar that flooded periodically, according to mysterious tides in a river that had apparently been taken underground when the area was developed. Sometimes when we opened the cellar door, foul grey water would be lapping at the bottom of the brick staircase and our buckets and rubber gloves and dustpan would all be afloat.
No one screamed but some alteration in their voices must have alerted me; I went downstairs. The door which opened out of the back of the hall into the kitchen was closed, but it was half glass — the original Victorian glass with a ruby-red border and a clear star at each corner — so I saw most of what happened through that, unreal and stilted as if I was watching a peep show. Baz must have picked up our knife from where it was left on the draining board after washing up: it was only a vegetable knife, a Sabatier that Daphne had brought from home. He was threatening Neil with it, slashing it in the air (‘I’ve seen that sneering look on your face, you fat pussy’), and I remember Neil was pirouetting fastidiously with a tea towel, like a matador with his cape, to get out of its way. In another life, with a different outcome, it would have been funny. Daphne was holding her hand out, calmly and sensibly telling Baz to give the knife to her, and I think he might have done it except that he seemed to hear something — did I rattle the doorknob, was I trying to open the door? Or was it Jude coming downstairs? So instead he spun round to where Nicky must have been coming from behind to try to disarm him, and he stuck the knife into Nicky, between his ribs, with all his weight behind it.
— You all think you’re so bloody special, don’t you?
And that was it. That’s how disaster comes, without any fanfare — though none of us could take it quite seriously for a moment or two, even Nicky, who looked down at his jumper soaking with blood, more surprised than anything. Baz, still holding the knife, seemed as bewildered as the rest of us, and Daphne hit at his hand with the rolling pin which she’d snatched up from the draining board, kicking the knife away into a corner of the room before she and Neil tackled him to the floor. Sheila ran out to the phone box to call an ambulance and the police. Then before the ambulance men could arrive, Andrew was suddenly at the door — and by that time I knew already that Nicky was dead, I’d been kneeling with his head on my lap, holding his hand, and I’d felt the life go out of him. I sent Andrew to pick up Lukie from nursery and look after him while I went to the hospital. And then when I got back from the hospital I saw Andrew just that once more, when I collected Lukie. They’d spent the afternoon together at the zoo. I told Andrew I could never see him again, ever. Never. I wouldn’t listen when he tried to talk me out of it, I never responded when he phoned or wrote to me afterwards, not ever. And I never did see him again. I only had word of him from time to time, through Sheila.