‘London.’
‘Do you know where though?’
‘No. He’s probably got the flat back.’
‘He’s getting it back but for now he’s at Winsome and Rowland’s.’ Ingrid looked grave.
I asked her why that mattered. ‘Winsome and Rowland are away.’
‘But Jessamine’s there.’
I laughed and said if there was one thing I had never worried about, it was Patrick being with someone who wasn’t his wife.
Even though I had made him leave, and punished him relentlessly for months so that he would, and I had told him that I did not love him any more – calling it out after him as he walked out of our bedroom for the last time – I felt as if I had been shoved when Ingrid said, ‘But Martha as far as Patrick is concerned you’re not his wife.’
36
INGRID MADE ME wait while she searched in a drawer for her key to Belgravia. ‘In case, in case.’
I had already accepted a muesli bar and a bottle of water and a three-disc self-help audio book that she’d turned up in the drawer first. In 21 days, I could master the art of self-forgiveness.
I told her I didn’t need the key. ‘If he isn’t there, I’ll just go home. There’s no other reason to go in.’
‘Yes there is. You might need the bathroom or something.’
She found it and held it out. When I wouldn’t take it, she grabbed my hand and tried to close my fingers around it.
‘What the fuck is that?’ She was holding my thumb.
‘The Hebrides.’
‘Right. Of course it is. Please can you just put this in your bag?’
I took the key so she would stop talking about it.
*
Patrick wasn’t there. I knocked and waited on the steps outside my aunt’s house until my face ached and my hands went numb inside my pockets. I went back to the car and sat, with my coat on, for an hour. The square was deserted. Nobody came and went. It had only been six weeks since Patrick left but, within days, time had acquired an unreal quality and my loneliness became so total that now – sitting in the car – it seemed to challenge the existence of things.
Another hour passed. Still nobody came. I began to feel delirious. There was only cold. I Googled ‘hypothermia in car’ but while my fingers were trying to find each key, my phone died and that was why, I told myself, I needed to go inside. But it was a compulsion to see, if not Patrick, then something of his. After weeks alone, culminating in these two hours in the car, seeing nothing out the window except darkness and an absence of human beings, even he no longer seemed real.
*
Everything was wrong inside. I stood in the foyer with Ingrid’s key in my hand, unnerved.
It was Winsome’s rule that personal effects were not allowed in public areas, but Jessamine’s things were everywhere, her shoes kicked into all corners of the foyer, clothes in piles down the length of the hall. I took my coat off and went into the formal living room. There was a wine bottle and two glasses, empty except for brown sediment in the bottom, sitting directly on a walnut end table.
One year, drunk on Christmas Day, my mother told everyone that when Winsome died, her ghost would return to haunt the formal living room terrorising us all with cries of ‘Wet on wood! Wet on wood!’ and invisibly shifting coasters through the air. I went over and picked up the glasses to take down to the kitchen, collecting other things as I moved through the room, last of all a phone charger and a pink plastic bottle of nail polish remover. That my cousin would put a cosmetic solvent on the lacquered lid of her mother’s piano felt like the totality of her nature. I wanted to leave. But nothing I’d collected in there or as I progressed towards the kitchen stairs belonged to Patrick. I left it all heaped at the entrance and went back to the main stairs.
His suitcase and things he must have acquired since leaving were in boxes, stacked outside Oliver’s room, the boxes taped shut and numbered, I knew, to correlate with a spreadsheet that would describe the contents of each. I didn’t open them. The numbers were handwritten. That was enough.
On the way back to the stairs, I went into Jessamine’s room to use her bathroom. Patrick’s watch was on her bedside table beside a water glass and a purple hair elastic with blonde hairs stuck in the metal bit. I went over and picked it up. I felt sick, not because it was there. Only because of its intrinsic familiarity, the weight of it as I turned it over in my hand and the recollection that came with it, of the particular way he put it on, the first time I’d seen him do it. I did not feel entitled to the memory. Patrick wasn’t mine. I put the watch down and went into the bathroom.