I put my hand on Sylvia’s shoulder, unable to imagine the terror she must have felt while she waited for the ambulance to come.
“Did Dad regain consciousness at all?” Mark asked.
Sylvia gave a jerky nod. “Only briefly. He said . . . he said, ‘Oh, Sylv.’ That’s all. Then he . . . went back to sleep. And I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I’ve cooked him that I shouldn’t have. All the cakes and the fried breakfasts. You know your dad. Always has thought salad is . . . for . . . rabbits.”
He did. I could even hear him saying it. If I was meant to eat lettuce, I’d have a twitchy nose and a white tail on my backside.
“But I should have made him eat it, shouldn’t I?” Sylvia was saying, hands up to her face as she sobbed. “I shouldn’t have listened to him. Stupid sod.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Mum,” Mark said.
“No,” I agreed. “Richard is his own person.” His own lovable, dependable, funny, loyal person. God, he had to come through this. He had to come through this and moan about the sudden lack of cooked breakfasts. I imagined one of us presenting him with a fake rabbit’s tail as a gag Christmas gift.
“They’re right, Mum,” said Rosie. “It’s not your fault.”
But Sylvia only shook her head, swiping her tears away with the backs of her hands. “I’ve been sitting here racking my brain, trying to think whether there’ve been any signs of anything wrong. There would be, wouldn’t there, if he’s got a bad heart? But the only thing I can think is he’s been tired lately. More tired than usual. I put it down to his age. But sixty-eight isn’t old, is it? Not these days.”
“Shh, Mum,” Mark said. “This isn’t doing anyone any good. Dad wouldn’t want you to be saying these things, thinking these things. You know he wouldn’t.”
Sylvia’s voice came out on a wail. “I know. I just don’t know how to stop.”
She had her hands over her face now, openly sobbing, and my throat was closed up, clogged by a dam of tears. I’d never seen Sylvia like this. She was always so in control in a crisis. So practical. Saying things like, The sun will come up in the morning, you’ll see. Like the time Mark wrote off his first car, or Rosie fell out with a boyfriend and thought the world had ended. But when I thought of her saying it, I saw Richard standing right beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder, telling us, Your mother’s right, you know. They were a team. They always had been.
“Do you want a cup of coffee, Mum?” Mark was asking, probably feeling as helpless as I did, casting about for something, anything, he could do to help. “Or a glass of water?”
Sylvia pulled herself together with a supreme effort. “Thanks, love. There’s a jug of water over there. The nice nurse brought it. You can get me some if you like.”
She rummaged in her bag for a packet of tissues, but it was a new pack, the tissues tightly jammed inside, and her fingers were shaking too much to be of much use.
“Here, let me.” I took the packet from her, sliding a tissue out.
“Thanks, love,” she said, giving my arm a squeeze, then blowing her nose.
After Mark had brought Sylvia a cup of water, he strode to the door to look out along the corridor, shoulders hunched, spine stiff with anxiety. My hands ached with a need to go over and smooth the planes of his back. To massage the tension from his muscles. I so wanted to nuzzle into his side and whisper, “It will be all right. He’ll come through this.”
But I couldn’t do any of those things, not the way I wanted to, so instead I sat next to Sylvia and thought of the three of us back at Ely—me, Mark, and Rosie laughing our heads off about Milo and the Kama Sutra. Me being so bloody entertaining. Enjoying the peace and quiet without the girls.
And all the time, Richard had been fighting for his life on the cold, hard earth in his garden, and Sylvia had been dealing with it all.
It wasn’t right. Shouldn’t even have been possible. You ought to have known if someone you loved so much was in such grave danger. Got a sign or something. Felt the pain like a javelin in your own chest.
My phone began to ring suddenly—a jaunty jingle of a ringtone that seemed wildly inappropriate for the occasion. Michael Bublé’s “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” downloaded in a dull moment to try to entertain Jaimie’s girls.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, getting to my feet.
“It’s all right, love,” Sylvia said. “It’ll be your Jaimie, checking up on you. You answer it.”
But I didn’t want to speak the words I would have to speak in front of Sylvia and the others. And I certainly couldn’t bear to leave the three people I loved most in the world to go up the corridor to talk to Jaimie in private. So I rejected the call and switched my phone off. Mumbled something about speaking to him later.
And in any case, just then Mark said, “Someone’s coming,” and stepped back from the door.
It was the surgeon, still dressed in his scrubs, and I knew what he was going to tell us straightaway, even before he opened his mouth, because it was there in his eyes. In the terrible fatigued droop of his body.
Every particle of moisture left my mouth. My hands began to tingle.
Sylvia was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No.”
When the surgeon began to speak, Sylvia covered her ears so she wouldn’t hear his words. But the rest of us heard them. Every agonising one of them.
“I’m so very sorry, Mrs. Groves. Your husband had another heart attack on the operating table. We did our very best to revive him, but I’m afraid . . . we weren’t successful.”
Richard was gone. It wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be possible. Except that it was, wasn’t it? Because it had happened.
After the surgeon left, we held each other, the four of us, sobbing brokenly, utterly stunned and heartbroken.
Finally, Sylvia pulled away, voicing what we were all thinking. “However will we do life without him?”
I didn’t know. I couldn’t imagine. As I leant against the warm support of Mark’s shoulder, I only knew that I didn’t want to.
13
We couldn’t bury Richard until the New Year because everything but grief stops for Christmas. I stayed at Sylvia’s house for a couple of nights—so did Mark and Rosie. None of us really tried to sleep, not that first night, anyway. I spoke to Jaimie on the phone, but afterwards I couldn’t remember what we’d said to each other. I felt frozen, I think. Numb. Nothing made sense. I knew he asked me when I’d be coming home, but I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know, not exactly.
“Don’t worry,” I promised. “I’ll be back for Christmas Day.” Although it seemed the most unlikely thing in the world to be saying.
The day Mark went with Sylvia to register the death, I left my car at Sylvia’s house and took the train into London. Rosie was taking compassionate leave from work but had to go in to see to a few things, so it seemed as good a day as any for me to go to my flat to see what sort of a state my tenants had left it in.
Dalston is twenty minutes by bus from Liverpool Street Station. I sat on the top deck and looked out at the passing streets—at the bustle of the last-minute Christmas shoppers; a man dressed as Santa ringing a bell as he collected for charity; an optimistic display of sleds outside a shop, waiting for the snow we hadn’t had for years in the UK. As we got closer to my stop, I spotted Dalston Vets. What was going on in there right at this moment? Had any puppies uncovered hoards of Christmas chocolate and made themselves ill on it? Or eaten a Christmas ornament or a strand of tinsel? Very probably. There had always been some Christmas emergencies to deal with when I worked there.