Last night things took a step forward into the dark. I was lying in my bed more awake than a dog. Suddenly in the pitch dark, in those un-peopled small hours, Bet's phone started to ring, I heard it going off above my head. I had got her a second line when she complained I was always on the internet and she couldn't ever make calls. She said her friends could only leave messages, and that I never gave her the messages. So yes, I got her a second line, expensive though it was. The phone sits there beside her bed. Now it was suddenly ringing, and such a jump I gave, like in a cartoon. Chemically, I suppose it was like an injection of adrenalin into the head, I don't know. But it was quite sickening, so sudden and so strange. And it rang and rang, of course it did, because there was no one to answer it. I certainly was not going to go up there into that room in the middle of the night. But then it struck me as odd that it didn't go to message, like it normally did, if Bet was out. I suppose the phone company had discontinued it. Then I had the miserable thought that hadn't I actually phoned the phone company a few weeks ago and asked for the line to be discontinued? If I had, and I couldn't really remember, it must be ringing as a result of some sort of fault. Oh, but, to lie there and hear it go on and on.
Then it stopped. I tried to calm myself, induce myself into feeling relieved. Then the terrible thing happened. Oh, Jesus, yes. I heard it so clearly, above my head, a little muffled because it had to come through the floorboards and the old plaster ceiling, but I heard it, the word 'Hello?' It was Bet's voice.
I nearly lost the grip on my bladder I was so startled. I had a vision in my head of a monster wrapping its coils about me, like an anaconda, and starting to squeeze. An anaconda kills by putting such pressure on the inner organs that the heart bursts. That one word nearly burst my heart. I missed Bet so terribly, but in all honesty I did not want to hear her voice, not like that. The living breathing woman, yes, but not that single word floating down to me, piercing down to me. But then I thought, had there been some awful mistake, had I imagined her dying, or had I buried her alive, and – but I had no time for further madness of that sort, because another word followed, it was my name being called, clear as a bell, 'William!'
Oh, Jesus, I thought, it's for me. Now that in itself was a mad thought. I mean, for heaven's sake, the call could not have been answered, and therefore, how could it be for me?
My name had been called. The voice was just as it always had been, the exact same tone, carrying in it that same pulse of impatience, annoyance that I had given her number to someone, and that they were using her line.
I didn't know what to do. 'What?' I called up, without even intending to.
I couldn't just leave it at that – now here was fresh madness
– I couldn't not respond. I got out of bed feeling like a dead man myself, as if I was now in the realm of the dead, or a story by M. R. James himself that Bet so loved. I went out my door with deepest reluctance and walked along the corridor on my bare feet. If she saw me like that, I thought, she would chastise me, going along without my slippers. I reached the little entry to the stairs to the attics, and went up, step by step.
I got to the landing where I had found her struggling for life, almost expecting to see her there. I flicked the switch but the bulb must have died without me noting it, because nothing happened. There was a murk of moonlight on the landing, a mere soup of light. I had left her door a little ajar so as not to impede the movement of air in the room, as a precaution against mildew. So I went to the door with slow, leaden steps, and stood there a moment.
'Bet?' I said.
Now I was all unhappiness. Whatever chemical is allied to fear
– adrenalin and its sisters – was drenching my brain. My knees were literally weak, and I felt the contents of my bowels turn to water. I wanted to vomit. Years ago as a boy in the slaughter house in Padstow I had seen cows going in a queue towards the gun, and watched them pissing and shitting in terror. Now I was just the same. Part of me longed for her to be inside the room, but a far greater part dreaded that same thing, dreaded it like the living are obliged to dread the dead. It is so deep a law of life. We bury or burn the dead because we want to separate their corporeality from our love and remembrance. We do not want them after death to be still in their bedrooms, we want to hold an image of them living, in the full of life in our minds.
And yet, suddenly, equally, like the first breeze of an enormous storm, I wanted her to be there, I wanted it. I pushed open the door and stepped in, wanting Bet to be there, wanting to take her in my arms gently in a way I had not done for so many, many years, and laugh and explain to her, explain the folly of my mind, and how I thought she had been dead, and please, please now could she forgive me the stupidity of Bundoran, and could we start again, let's go on a holiday somewhere, why, to Padstow itself, to see the old house, and eat at the posh new restaurants we heard about, and have a lovely time -
Emptiness. Of course emptiness.
I think for someone to have seen me then would have been as if they were seeing a ghost – as if I were the ghost. A wild-eyed, foolish sixty-five-year-old man in his dead wife's bedroom, gone daft from grief, looking as usual for forgiveness and redemption the way normal people look for the time. The default mechanism of most every thought of her. Bet -redemption, redeem me, forgive me. When the foul truth is she should have thrown me out.
I was sitting in Roseanne's room thinking all this.
There was nothing of it I could say to her. I was in a patient's room, supposedly to assess her for release, 'back into the community'. One of the inspirations of Mrs Thatcher's regime in England, a Thatcherite fashion one might say that hasn't gone away. Roseanne was sitting up in her bed, with that white mantle thing she wears, that in the half light looks like crumpled wings, the new wings of a butterfly before the blood is pumped into them and, much to the astonishment no doubt of the creature, it can suddenly take wing and fly.
Assess her. It suddenly seemed so absurd I laughed out loud. The only person's sanity in doubt in that room was my own.
Roseanne's Testimony of Herself
We were married in Dublin, in the church at Sutton, it was the easiest thing to do. The priest there was a friend of Tom's, they had gone to college at the same time in Dublin, even if different colleges. Tom had only lasted a few months studying law at Trinity College, but long enough to make friends in the city. Tom could fashion a bosom pal out of an afternoon at the races. Whatever needed to be done, licence, banns, whatever you need to do to marry a Presbyterian woman, was done. I suppose the good people of Sutton weren't too impressed by that particular wedding, but even if it lacked tuck and thunder, there were a few of his other Dublin buddies there, and afterwards we went to Barry's Hotel for two nights, and on the second night we went to a dance at the Metropole, because Tom knew the bandleader there, and we danced together nearly for the first time. For some strange reason, we had rarely danced together in his own dancehall. I suppose that was odd, I don't know. Tom seemed quite content in every way and didn't say a word about not having any of his family there. Jack would have been there only he was in Africa, but he paid for the wedding lunch as a gift to his brother. Tom drank so much whiskey at the lunch he wasn't up to much in the hotel that night, but he made up for it the night of the dancing. He was the nicest lover. That is the truth.
We lay in the dark of the hotel room. Tom had bought a packet of these Russian oval cigarettes at College Green, just beside his old college, and he was smoking one of them. I think I was twenty-five, he was just a little older.
'Do you know,' he said. 'It's very nice up here. I wonder could I ever make a go of it in Dublin?'