In front of the mirror, I wiped my face with tissues, the floor where he had delivered my sister’s baby in reflection behind me. A rubbish bin overflowing with Jessamine’s cosmetic debris was beside the toilet. I went over and dropped the tissues into it. They fell on top of a foil sheet, shaped for a single tablet. That was the other one thing I never worried about: Patrick being sent out to buy the morning-after pill for someone who wasn’t his wife.
At some point, driving out of London, I realised I had forgotten my coat in the rush to leave and became less certain, as I kept going, that I had closed the front door.
*
For the week after that, I packed the Executive Home, moving through the house filling boxes that, had I labelled them, would have said: Loose cutlery tipped in from the drawer. Can of sardines in oil/birth certificates. A cushion, a hairdryer, a gravy boat wrapped in a duvet cover.
I fed myself blue Gatorade and water crackers from the emptying pantry and slept on the sofa in my clothes.
It snowed the day I left. In the morning, two men arrived in a truck to meet all my removal and storage needs, per the promise painted on its flank. They began loading it while I was still finishing our bedroom. Except for one suitcase, Patrick had left everything behind.
I packed his wardrobe and dresser, then opened the drawer of his bedside table. On top of other things was a book my father had given him for Christmas a year ago, which Patrick had persisted in reading, in spite of it being about poetry, not even actual poetry. I picked it up and opened it to a section marked by some palm cards, their exposed edges bent and soft.
He had been going to say, ‘No doubt my wife will correct me later and insist it was just for the open bar, but we are all here for the love of this uncommon, beautiful, maddening woman – who does not, in my opinion, look a day over thirty-nine and twelve months.’ He was going to say, ‘I wish it wasn’t the case, but everyone knows Martha is the only thing I’ve ever wanted in my life …’ I couldn’t read any more. I slid them back into the book and returned it to the drawer, instead of packing all its contents, I went around the entire cabinet with tape. The men came to the door and I told them I was finished, they could take everything now.
They left and I walked through the house, holding the address they had given me for a storage unit somewhere in London. I knew each dent in the skirting boards, each chip in the doors, all the places on the living room walls where we had once tried to paint over marks left by a previous tenant. Patrick bought paint in the wrong finish and still now, they stood out like a solar system of high-gloss patches in a vast matte universe. The taupe carpet bore the impressions of our furniture, dust sat like strips of grey felt along the top of each non-standard socket, their uses never determined. For seven years, the Executive Home had exuded a sort of psychic hostility, perceptible only to me. I do not know why, in my last hour there, it offered me a sense of home. I went upstairs again to see the box room.
Outside its small window, snow was settling into the boughs of the plane tree’s leafless branches. I locked it open and went back to the doorway, remaining for a moment. A small flurry of flakes blew in, drifted to the floor and melted into the carpet.
*
The agent had let himself into the house and was downstairs in the kitchen with a couple, younger than Patrick and me. He was saying something about quality appliances. I glanced in, unnoticed as I passed on my way to the door, and saw the wife open the oven, screw up her nose and say, ‘Babe, look.’ I closed myself out, put my key through the mailbox and drove away.
*
Past the gates of the Executive Development, I pulled over and parked next to a break in the tall border hedge. I went through it, coming out to the broad expanse of field carved into allotments. It was deserted, the earth was bare and ugly and sodden underfoot. I did not know why I wanted to stop and go in; I had never come by myself before. Without Patrick I couldn’t find the garden that belonged to us, except by running up and down the paths between them, eyes streaming when I went against the wind, hair wrapping around my face when it was behind me.
I saw our shed, finally, and ran over other people’s gardens to get to ours – a square of black mud, and orange leaves submerged in the water that had pooled in the furrows Patrick had dug. Apart from those, and tendrils of old potato plants flattened by rain, there was nothing to show of his work. Winter had erased the hours he had spent here, by himself, or with me sitting and watching him push the spade in with his foot, pull out weeds, things that had gone to seed.