‘Could always ask Adam, I suppose,’ I muttered.
Neil laughed and I began to giggle, my anguish punctured. We couldn’t stop and then I was crying too but trying to hide it because I didn’t want to let him down.
‘Might give the game away,’ he said, his chest still heaving.
Rage flared fresh in my belly. It’s not a game! I wanted to scream at him. It’s your life. It’s my life.
I stood up.
‘Where are you going?’
‘The Internet. Marvellous what you can find.’
It wasn’t, as it happens. There was information about the methods used in the Swiss clinics, doses of barbiturates preceded by a strong anti-emetic to stop the person throwing up the drugs. How would we get those? Anti-emetic. Would travel pills help? Sophie always got car sick and we gave her tablets, which seemed to help – but whether they treated the symptom or the cause I’d no idea.
When I typed suicide and overdose into the search engine it threw up everything from paracetamol to heroin.
Rejoining Neil, I told him what I’d read. ‘So we could try a packet of Joy Rides followed by sleeping pills but (a) we’d have to get hold of the stuff first and (b) if they did a post-mortem it’d be an obvious deliberate overdose.’
I felt giddy talking like this, as if in a fever, the garden gleaming in the sun, the scent of cut grass and the bony claws of death crawling up my spine.
‘We need something that could be accidental,’ he said quietly, ‘in case anyone does get suspicious.’
‘Could shove you downstairs.’ I groaned. ‘I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.’
Neil reached slowly across and put his hand on my knee. I turned his hand over, pressed my palm to his, locked fingers, willing him to leave it now, to shut up.
But he carried on: ‘Or something I could have taken myself, without your help, without your knowing. Then, even if it does come out, you’re okay. There’s no risk.’
‘Something you’re already taking?’
‘Would Zoloft work?’ he asked. At that stage he had been prescribed Zoloft for depression.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Morphine,’ he said. ‘It’s in the breathing kit.’
‘A dose. Not enough to kill you.’
‘Andy Frame will give me some for the pain – the consultant suggested it. It’s also used for breathlessness.’
‘You’re not breathless.’
‘I could be.’ His voice was quiet, delicate.
‘And save it up,’ I said, cottoning on. ‘The syringes-’
‘I think they do liquid, too. To drink. If it’s hard to swallow, to get solids down.’
It seemed so simple. I coveted his equanimity. But there was a backwash of resentment, too, slapping inside me. I gazed at the crimson and yellow splashes of primula, at the buds on the maple. I drank in the sweet, creamy fragrance from the magnolia tree. This, I thought, is what’s hard to swallow. That you want to go and leave me here. You can still talk and laugh and kiss and come. Okay, so we’ll never dance again but you can still breathe and swallow, and yet you want to go.
‘Did you ever consider reneging on your promise?’ Mr Latimer savours the verb though I see Alice’s eyes narrow as she puzzles it out.
‘All the time. I went round and round it in my head, like a maze. I kept hoping he’d die before it came to it. Or he’d change his mind. I dreaded it. I was frightened all the time but I couldn’t see a way out. Most of the time I just pretended it wasn’t really happening. I’d get these panic attacks when I found it hard to breathe, this terrible dread like a paralysis.’
‘Yet you were helping Neil to acquire the medicines you used?’
‘Yes. I thought I was going mad.’
Mr Latimer guides me through the sequence of events, a quadrille of question and answer. Neil’s complaints to Dr Frame and the prescription for liquid morphine. The medicines hidden in his bedside table. One, then the other. More than a month’s supply.
Mr Latimer asks me about the children. I recall one conversation, early evening, Neil in bed resting, me putting clothes away. The banality of it. We’d already agreed to conceal his intention from the children. Knowing how horrific the burden was for me, I could not countenance imposing it on Adam and Sophie. Neil felt the same. It was too much to bear – they were kids.
‘What about afterwards? What do we tell the children?’ I asked Neil.
‘Nothing.’
‘Is that fair?’
He glanced away, then back to me. ‘If we organize it properly, everyone will think I just died sooner than expected. The kids included. If anyone suspects otherwise you could be in trouble. It wouldn’t be fair to ask them to keep that sort of secret.’
I nodded. Neil had redrawn his will and written letters for Adam and Sophie, love letters for them to keep.
At each turn of the dance, Mr Latimer stops to ask me about my state of mind. I tell the court about prowling the house. About the nightmares that waited for me to lower my guard and succumb to sleep. About being unable to share meals because of the way my throat sealed as I raised my fork, nausea gushing through me at the smell of food. How practised I became in hiding my disintegration from the world, from my family, my friends, my clients. Neil was the one who was dying. I was just dropping to bits.
‘On the twenty-sixth of May last year,’ Mr Latimer prompts, ‘there was an incident involving your neighbour Pauline Corby. Can you tell us what happened that day? Perhaps you could start by telling us how Neil’s condition was.’
Dolly perks up, flicking her tongue round, licking her lips. I make a quick assessment of the jury. Half of them have crossed arms, a bad sign, closed, defensive. What they’re about to hear won’t improve matters. What’s important is that they think of me as mad, not bad, and material like this could go either way.
‘Neil had lost a lot of movement in his arms. It seemed to get worse quite suddenly so I was having to do more for him. Feeding and toileting.’
Alice pulls a wry face. Has she known this? An aged parent, a disabled sibling?
‘The neighbours have this cat,’ I go on. ‘It uses our garden sometimes. We tried everything. I was feeling very tired, very tense, and I saw the animal soiling’ – I use ‘soiling’ instead of ‘shitting’ so I won’t offend anyone – ‘in where we have the herbs. I filled a bowl with water and drenched the cat. Mrs Corby had seen me and she came round. She knocked on the back door and said it was outrageous and unnecessary.’
‘And how did you respond?’
‘I lost control. Completely. I was shouting abuse and screaming at her. She threatened to call the police and I – I threatened her with a hammer. I’d been fixing cables to the wall with it. I said I’d hit her with it.’ Stove your fucking skull in, had been the exact turn of phrase.
‘What happened then?’
‘She went back inside.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I got drunk.’ Sat in my workshop and polished off half a bottle of gin. Hiding from Neil, hiding from the children. Wanting to smash something with the hammer but knowing if I started I might not be able to stop.
‘Had you ever behaved with such enmity, such aggression before?’
‘Never.’
‘Looking back now, how would you describe that outburst?’
‘It was out of all proportion. I lost control. I wasn’t myself.’
‘And how did you feel afterwards?’
‘Frightened. Like I was cracking up. I didn’t know what I was going to do next.’
Mr Latimer pauses so they will have a chance to absorb this. Then he makes a move in a new direction. ‘Had you and your husband discussed when he would take the overdose?’
‘No.’
‘You never asked him?’
‘No. I hoped he’d change his mind, or be too scared to go through with it.’
‘What happened on June the fourteenth?’