He moved to the bedroom. Ridiculously, they were babes in arms without Denton there to sort them out, so their bed was badly made, and consequently the impression of her head was still in her pillow. He turned from this and forced himself over to the chest of drawers. Their wedding picture accosted him: hot June sunshine, the fragrance of tuberoses, the sound of Schubert from violins. He reached out and toppled the frame so it fell facedown. There was fleeting mercy when her image was gone and then quick agony when he could not see her so he righted it again.
He dressed. He gave the procedure the sort of care she herself would have taken. This allowed him to think about colours and fabrics for a moment, to search out shoes and the proper tie as if this were an ordinary day and she still in bed with a cup of tea on her stomach, watching to see he didn’t make a sartorial faux pas. His ties were the thing. They had always been. Tommy darling, are you absolutely certain about the blue one?
He was certain of little. He was certain, in fact, of only one thing, and that was that he was certain of nothing. He went through motions without complete knowledge of making them, so he found himself dressed at last and staring at himself in the mirrored wardrobe door wondering what he was meant to do next.
Shave, but he couldn’t. The shower had been difficult enough, labeled as it was “the first shower since Helen” and he couldn’t do more. He couldn’t have more labels because he knew the very weight of them would kill him in the end. The first meal since Helen, the first tank of petrol since Helen, the first time the post dropped through the door, the first glass of water, the first cup of tea. It was endless and it was burying him already.
He left the house. Outside, he saw that someone-most likely one of the neighbours-had left a bunch of flowers on his doorstep. Daffodils. It was that time of year. Winter faded to spring and he needed desperately to stop time altogether.
He picked up the flowers. She liked daffodils. He’d take them to her. They’re so cheerful, she’d say. Daffodils, darling, are flowers with spunk.
The Bentley was where Deborah had carefully parked it, and when he opened the door, Helen’s scent floated out to him. Citrus, and she was with him.
He slid into the car and closed the door. He rested his head on the steering wheel. He breathed in shallowly because it seemed to him that deep breaths would dissipate the scent more quickly, and he needed the fragrance to last as long as it possibly could. He couldn’t bring himself to adjust the car seat from her height to his, to sort out the mirrors, to do anything that would erase her presence. And he asked himself how, if he couldn’t do this much, this very simple and essential thing because, for the love of God, the Bentley wasn’t even the car she regularly drove, so what did it matter, then how could he possibly walk through what he had to walk through now?
He didn’t know. He was operating on rote behaviors that he hoped could carry him from one moment to the next.
Which meant starting the car, so that was what he did. He heard the Bentley purr beneath his touch and he reversed it out of the garage like a man performing keyhole surgery.
He glided slowly along the mews and into Eaton Terrace. He kept his eyes averted from his front door because he didn’t want to imagine-and he knew he would imagine, how could he help it?-what Deborah St. James had seen when she’d walked round the corner having parked the car.
As he drove to the hospital, he knew he was taking the same route the ambulance had taken when bearing Helen to Casualty. He wondered how much she’d been aware of what was going on around her: drips being established, oxygen seeping into her nose, Deborah somewhere nearby but not as close as those who listened to her chest and said her breathing was laboured on the left side now, nothing going into a lung that had already collapsed. She’d have been in shock. She wouldn’t have known. One moment she’d been on the front steps, searching out her door key, and the next she’d been shot. Short range, they’d told him. Less than ten feet away, probably closer to five. She’d seen him, and he’d seen the shock on her face, the surprise to find herself suddenly vulnerable.
Had he called her name? Mrs. Lynley, have you a moment? Countess? Lady Asherton, isn’t it? And she’d turned with that embarrassed, breathless laugh of hers. “Drat! That silly story in the paper. All of it was Tommy’s idea, but I expect I cooperated more than I should have done.”
And then the gun: automatic pistol, revolver, what did it matter? A slow, steady squeeze on the trigger, that great equaliser among men.
He found it difficult to think and even more difficult to breathe. He struck the steering wheel as a means of bringing himself round to the moment he was in and not one of the moments already lived through. He struck it to distract himself, to cause himself pain, to do anything to keep from fracturing beneath everything that assaulted him from memory and imagination.
Only the hospital could save him, and he hurried in the direction of its refuge. He wove round buses and dodged cyclists. He braked for a crocodile of tiny schoolchildren on the kerb waiting to cross the street. He thought of their own child among them-his and Helen’s: high socks, scabby knees, and miniature brogues, a cap on his head, a name tag fluttering round his neck. The teachers would have printed it for him, but he’d have been the one to decorate it any way that he liked. He’d have chosen dinosaurs because they’d taken him-he and Helen-to the Natural History Museum on a Sunday afternoon. There he’d stood beneath the bones of the T. rex with his mouth agape in wonder. “Mummy,” he would have said, “what is it? It’s tremendously big, isn’t it, Dad?” He’d have used words like that. Tremendously. He’d have named constellations, he’d have known the musculature of a horse.
A horn honked somewhere. He roused himself. The children were across the street now and on their way, heads bobbing and shoes scuffling along, three adults-fore, mid, and aft-keeping a careful eye on them.
Which was all that had been required and he’d failed: keeping a careful eye. Instead, he’d as good as provided a map to his own front door. Photographs of him. Photographs of Helen. Belgravia. How difficult could it have been? How tough a proposition even to ask a few questions in the neighbourhood?
And now he reaped the result of his hubris. There are things we don’t know, the surgeon had said.
But can’t you tell…?
There are tests for some conditions and no tests for others. All we can do is make an educated guess, a deduction based on what we know about the brain. From that we can extrapolate. We can present the facts as we know them and we can tell you how far those facts can take us. But that’s it. I’m sorry. I wish there were more…
He couldn’t. Think about it, cope with it, live with it. Anything. The horrible day after day of it. A sword piercing his heart but neither fatally, quickly, nor mercifully. Just the tip of it at first and then a bit more as days became weeks became the necessary months in which he waited for what he already knew was the very worst.
A human being can adapt to anything, yes? A human being can learn to survive because as long as the will to endure remained, the mind adjusted and it told the body to do the same.
But not to this, he thought. Not ever to this.
At the hospital, he saw that the journalists had finally dispersed. This was not a twenty-four/seven story for them. The initial incident and its relationship to the investigation of serial murders had mobilised them at first, but now they would check in only sporadically. Their focus would be on the perpetrator and the police from this point on, with passing references made to the victim and canned footage of the hospital used-a shot of a window somewhere, behind which the wounded was ostensibly languishing-should that be required by the producers. Soon even that would be considered a rehash of a twice-told tale. We need something fresh and if you haven’t got a new angle on this situation, bury it inside. Page five or six ought to do it. They had, after all, the meat of the matter: scene of the crime, press conference from the doctor, the image of himself-nice, good, a suitable reaction shot-leaving the hospital earlier in the day. They would be given the name of the press officer from the Belgravia station as well, so that was it, really. The story could just about write itself. On to other things. There were circulation figures to concern them and other breaking news to bolster those figures. This was business, merely business.