‘I said we could do away with the formal receiving line,’ repeated the firm’s lawyer.
‘I don’t want that,’ said Jane, freshly insisting. ‘Everything will be done properly, as it should be done.’ John would have wanted that, for everything to be done properly. It was important to remember what John would have wanted. Expected. He would have come round soon enough to wanting a baby as much as she did. Had wanted, she corrected herself. Robbed of John and robbed of having his baby. Or was she robbed? Had he provided the specimen Rosemary Pritchard had asked for? She couldn’t remember – there was still too much she couldn’t remember – but if he had there was surely a possibility of it being used, to impregnate her, once the gynaecologist had corrected her problem. Something she had to call Rosemary about as soon as possible: today even, when she got back from the wake.
‘We’ll be there with you,’ reassured Newton.
‘I don’t want everyone around me!’ exclaimed Jane irritably, sweeping her hand to encompass the overcrowded East 62nd Street drawing room. ‘I want you all to understand that I can manage by myself.’
‘Jane, you can’t stand there entirely alone,’ protested Davis.
She couldn’t, Jane at once conceded: it wouldn’t be the proper thing to do. ‘You,’ she decided, looking at the lawyer. ‘You should represent the firm, with the most senior partner…?’
‘Fred Jolly,’ identified the lawyer, indicating a balding, stooped man beside him whom Jane did not recognize, although she knew that she should.
‘Sorry. Of course, with you, Fred.’ She continued looking around the room. ‘If my having some personal support is so important, Hilda can stay close to me: tell me whom I’m meeting, as often as possible. That all right, Hilda?’
‘Of course,’ said Carver’s matronly personal assistant, who had organized this second funeral and who hoped at the actual service she’d manage the control Jane was showing. The reflection reminded her of the sobbing Janice Snow and she had to swallow heavily, tensed against breaking down.
Jane accepted that she might have difficulty retaining some of her thoughts but hoped the receding, blurred images or words were diminishing. ‘But I don’t think I need any support. Certainly not any further nursing, now that you’ve almost stopped those damned drugs.’
‘ I do. I really do,’ challenged Newton, too quickly.
‘What do you think?’ Jane asked the psychiatrist, well enough aware of the bedside disagreement between the two men.
‘You’re nearly off the chlorpromazine now,’ agreed Mortimer. ‘You sure there aren’t any lingering effects?’
‘You’re watching me, listening to me. What’s your professional opinion?’ demanded Jane, as the faces of those looking at her blurred. She was only distantly aware – but aware, which was all that mattered – of the psychiatrist.
Mortimer said: ‘This isn’t a consulting session.’
Jane’s vision cleared. ‘I’ve got live-in staff. And they have all your numbers. This is how I want it to be. How it will be. I appreciate all your care and all your concern. From now on I want to handle things by myself. And by now I mean just that. Now.’ It had been an effort to finish, but she was sure no one had detected her difficulty. She wasn’t being stupid or arrogant. They’d weaned her off the medication because they’d decided she didn’t need it, as she hadn’t needed medication for her father’s funeral. And if she didn’t need medication she didn’t need nurses to sit around and hold her hand. She didn’t need anyone to hold her hand when she said goodbye to the best husband it had been possible to have. Which was the way to think, Jane told herself. Not to sink into a slough of self-pity but to think how lucky she’d been having him as a loving, caring husband for as long as she had. She’d need to spend a lot of time and effort having John’s crypt designed: ensure it was a monument to him. And speak to Rosemary Pritchard. That was the first priority.
As they left the apartment Newton told Mortimer: ‘Now it’s you who’ve made the mistake.’
‘We’re going to be there, keeping an eye on everything,’ said the psychiatrist. ‘There can’t be any problems.’
Alice hadn’t tried to download any more evidence of cross-border invoice padding. She’d filled the intervening day tidying the cabin, eating properly for the first time since she couldn’t remember when – but shunning alcohol – and driving yet again into Paterson to buy what she thought she needed for the funeral. If those hunting her knew her name she had to assume that they also knew what she looked like: had a photograph, even. Which made the need for a disguise more practical than melodramatic. The thought of adopting one still embarrassed her. The dark wig to conceal her blondness scarcely amounted to a disguise anyway. She added to it a hat with a veil longer than that Jane had worn at her father’s funeral and remained unsure about dark glasses beneath it, deciding to wait until she returned to the cabin to make up her mind. The black dress would have benefited from some minimal lifting at the shoulders but without time for alteration – and doubting she’d wear it ever again – Alice hid the problem beneath a black jacket that fitted better.
It was only when she was driving back from Paterson that Alice finally confronted what she had been refusing, until that moment, to bring into the forefront of her mind, where it should have been from the moment she’d acknowledged Jane to be in danger. The obvious, immediate and seemingly only resolution was to involve the police and the FBI protection. But upon what evidence, came the recurring, taunting question. She’d already decided the IRS printouts weren’t sufficient, quite apart from how she’d obtained them. From the attitude she’d encountered the previous day, the FBI wouldn’t respond without considerably more – which she didn’t have – and she’d never get by the desk sergeant in any Manhattan precinct house with accounts of murder masked as accident and accident fulfilling doubtless intended murder.
Jane, unaware of any danger, was the only person who could produce what was necessary to protect herself… what John had been taken back to Citibank to retrieve. Unaware, yet, where – or what – the secrets were that risked further shattering her already shattered life, as Alice was finally reconciled to hers being shattered. Was she thinking only of Jane? Alice asked herself, at last demanding personal honesty. Of course she wasn’t thinking only of Jane. What Jane had access to, as John’s wife, would provide her salvation, too. Was it the most obscene, unimaginably amoral cynicism, even to think as she was thinking? No, refused Alice. Jane’s marriage – Jane’s security, the fulness and completeness of her marriage – had never once been threatened by her affair with John. She’d genuinely, totally honestly, never seen herself competing with Jane. Alice would never expect anyone to believe her: she found it difficult, with total objectivity, to believe it herself. But without ever knowing it, without there ever having been a challenge, Jane had been the one who won. So it wasn’t amoral or obscene or contemptibly cynical to contemplate – although until now, climbing the low foothills at last, she hadn’t allowed herself to contemplate – how she could properly guarantee her survival. Which was all she was thinking about. Survival, for herself and for Jane.