‘Okay.’ Elizabeth wasn’t sure what she meant. She just knew that here, in the sable saltiness of the ocean, she felt as if she could do anything – nothing could faze her at this moment.
‘I wonder what Eric would say now?’ Jo smiled and suddenly they were both laughing their heads off like lunatics. For once, he’d have been completely lost for words. The notion that his respectable wife would be out swimming in the altogether in the moonlight; it might very well have been enough to shock him into sobriety.
The beach was completely empty, apart from a few circling gulls who probably thought they were wholly mad. Elizabeth laughed again; perhaps they were right – maybe she had finally tipped over into a state of happy lunacy, but she didn’t care. For the first time in far too long, she felt what it was to be truly blissful.
Part 1
April
1
Elizabeth
It was a week since Eric’s funeral – over thirty years of marriage and she thought she knew him inside out, but even now, beyond the grave he had tried to hide the truth from her. Elizabeth had come to Shanganagh Cemetery not to pay her respects on this overcast morning. No, rather she had made the journey because it was time to let Eric know exactly what she thought of him. The night had brought in howling winds, sheet lightning and a cacophony of thunder and rain that she thought might wake the dead. There was no sleeping for Elizabeth, or probably, she figured for anyone else in the village. She had wandered through the house, moving from one gloomy room to the next, waiting for the storm to move off so she might shake off the uneasy feeling of unrest that wouldn’t let her close her eyes.
Then, at around four o’clock, she decided to go down and take a look about the surgery. It was strange being down here without Eric. Somehow, his presence had remained here more than anywhere, still dominating everything. Thea Gilchrist – the locum, who’d filled in for the last few months, had been little more than an uncomfortable question mark. Elizabeth moved from the small waiting room, past the shadowy cubbyhole reception desk and into Eric’s surgery. She flicked on the light and listened while there was a crackling tickle, as if it was annoyed at being woken at this unearthly hour.
For a moment, she felt a rising note of panic. What if there was a power cut? What if she was left here in the dark, trying to grapple her way back through the narrow corridor and rickety stairs into the main part of the house. The storm seemed to be heightened down here. Of course, it was little more than a converted entrance to the larger outbuildings that ran along the side of the property. Eric had considered it more convenient to roof and fit out this mean little space, while at the side of the house, a long line of stone buildings ran into a huge coach house at the bottom of the garden. Of course, like the house, time had worn them down and they stood slowly crumbling over the years. Who wants every Tom, Dick and Harry in the back garden? he had mumbled and so he spent his working life with electric heaters hissing out dry heat and walls that smelled damp no matter how often he insisted that a fresh coat of paint could cure anything.
Elizabeth wasn’t sure why she did it, but it seemed as if somewhere she was answering a question; she walked behind Eric’s desk and sat in his chair. Any longing to feel his arms around her had long gone between them, if it had ever been there to begin with. It was a strange thing though, sitting here, looking about the room from his perspective; it made her miss him in a way she hadn’t felt before. It reminded her of when they had first married and she had admired him, not just because he was handsome, but because he had saved her. There had been something about him, a kind of presence that had as much to do with him being a doctor as it had with any other quality. The whole notion of him holding people’s lives in his hands, that within his understanding lay the answers to living and dying, to being well and being ill, to making people in so many ways feel better in themselves.
That was the part that she’d never really been able to articulate, but sitting here, she had a feeling that maybe it was not all as clear-cut as she’d imagined. It was a responsibility – she could almost feel it pressing in on her from all sides. Perhaps it was enough to drive you to drink, even if you hadn’t already been predisposed to it.
She sighed deeply. There was no point thinking of these things now. The time had passed where understanding could do very much to change how things would pan out. Then, something small and silver caught her eye. A key? A silver glinting stem poking out from underneath the corner of the half file unit crouched beneath the desk. She bent down, a little gingerly and picked it up. Elizabeth looked at it, for a moment, supposing that it had just dropped from the desk, but then she remembered Thea Gilchrist calling to the house one evening, looking for a key. She had gone away without it. For one thing, Elizabeth hadn’t the foggiest about any keys and for another, Eric, with a grumbling menace had told her that cabinet was no concern of hers.