I’ve always thought I’d be first. I’m not sure why. He’d get on fine without me, after a while. I know he’d be heartbroken, but he’d get past it. He’s not bad in the kitchen and he’s got plenty of friends who’d rally round. But me, without him? I’m not sure I’d know how to go on. I think I’d just forget to eat lunch, or get out of bed, without him to rally me.
‘Do you want this pie?’ I ask. ‘Or do you not feel like eating?’
I’ve warmed it through and boiled some carrots and green beans, and the smell wafting from the kitchen is thick and meaty.
He appears in the door of the back room. ‘Just a small slice for me, please.’
It isn’t like him. He’s the kind to pile his plate high if it’s something he likes, and there’s nothing he likes more than pie. We don’t say much while we eat. We’ve passed so many meals together, like this, sometimes with the radio on low, sometimes in silence. But tonight the quiet hangs heavy, and I’m looking forward to going up to bed, to putting the day to rest and starting again tomorrow.
I find him in the garden just before seven, sitting on the bench. I sit next to him, follow his gaze.
‘Nice one tonight,’ he says.
There’s just a hint of pink, making the clouds look like candy floss. We watch in silence as the sun inches lower and lower.
When we are in bed, he reaches a hand across the space between us for the first time in a long time. Rests it on my thigh.
‘Seeing Joan today, it made me think,’ he says.
Here it is. The different path his life could have taken, the different wife. Will he actually say it?
‘Oh yes?’
‘Those were good days, when Bill was still alive and Dot was here and the four of us would go dancing together. I’m glad we had those.’
There are tears in my eyes. My brother, Bill, and my best friend, Dot. When it was all laughter and joking and a whole lifetime ahead and we didn’t care if we made mistakes or took the wrong path, because there was an eternity to straighten it all out. And then we learned that there wasn’t an eternity, at least not for Bill, and we all broke in our different ways. Dot disappeared, Arthur was in a hurry to settle down, and I went along with it.
‘Good days,’ I say into the darkness, but I think he’s already asleep.
3
I know the second I wake that he’s gone. He’s lying on his back, looking just as peaceful as usual, but something in the air has shifted. I know that if I reach out and touch him, he’ll be cold. So I don’t do it, not at first. I prop myself up with pillows and I talk to him, like I would on any other morning. I tell him that I slept quite well and I hope he did, too. I even go downstairs and make a cup of tea.
‘Arthur,’ I say, my voice a bit strangled. ‘I really should have called the doctor when you had those chest pains yesterday. I could see you weren’t yourself. But you didn’t make a fuss, did you? You never made a fuss. It wasn’t your way.’
My words are met with silence, of course.
‘Did you know? And if you knew, how long for? Just yesterday, or have you known for a while? Have you felt things caving in? I wish you’d said something.’
I examine that, turn it around, put it under an internal microscope. Do I wish that? What would I have done differently if he’d told me he thought he was going to die? Would I have kissed him, or held him, or thanked him for the years he gave me? Would I have been less snappy, more patient? I’ll never know.
When I touch him, and know for sure, I’ll have to make a telephone call, and the world will come crashing in. So, I’ll hold it off another half an hour. Me and Arthur, me drinking a cup of tea with him in bed. Our last one. It’s been just the two of us for so many years. People don’t talk much about marriages without children, about the intensity of them. No one else in the house to act as a buffer, to force you to come together after an argument. There was a time when it seemed everyone I knew was having children, and then I lost them all to that life. It’s not for the faint-hearted, parenting. Years and years of care and attention. And there was Arthur and me, still just us. Always just us.
When Bill died, it was the exact opposite of this. Mum found him, cold in his bed one Sunday morning at the age of twenty-five. She screamed and screamed. And then I went up the stairs to find out what was wrong, thinking the cat had brought a mouse in or something. She was standing there, in his bedroom, and when I looked at him, I saw that there was nothing there, in his face, and I screamed too. It was violent, a wrench. The way the death of someone young should be, I suppose. But Arthur has had his life, long and mostly happy. He always said he counted himself lucky, to live in a safe country and have a roof over his head. He didn’t begrudge me the things I didn’t give him. The children he never got to meet. Or if he did, he kept quiet about it.
‘Eighty-nine. It’s a good age. And you were still you, right up to the end, weren’t you? No forgetting or confusion or pain. That’s as much as you can hope for, I think.’
I wonder, for a moment, whether he’s watching me. Whether he’s looking down, laughing at me talking to his empty shell of a body. Whether he’s with Bill, or his parents, or mine. And that’s what jolts me into action. I finish my tea and I force myself to put my warm hand on his cold one. It’s a shock even though I know what to expect. It doesn’t feel like him.
The first time he held my hand, we were dancing. Bill and Dot had taken to the floor and Arthur had looked at me a little shyly and tilted his head to ask, and I’d nodded, stepped towards him. We were clumsy together, no grace. But I remember the warmth of his hand, and the size of it, how my hand almost got lost in it, how he smelled clean and like comfort, and I remember feeling safe and protected. Now, in this bed we’ve shared for years, he is not himself. He is gone. His body, which carried him for almost nine decades, is useless and empty.
‘Oh, Arthur,’ I say, my voice catching.
And then I go downstairs and telephone the doctor, because I don’t know what else to do, who else to call. The receptionist says she’ll sort out the forms and send a doctor to certify the death, and tells me that once that’s done I should call a funeral director to ask them to move the body, and I thank her, but then once I’ve put the telephone down I find that I’m sobbing, great gulping sobs that keep coming and coming, likes waves. Because now it’s really true, and they will come and take him away, and what will I do then? Who will I be, without him?
The doctor’s visit is quick and sombre. It’s a doctor I’ve never seen. They’re always changing. When he leaves, he says how sorry he is and I nod an acknowledgement, not sure my voice will hold. Then I fetch the iPad to look up funeral homes in Broughton. There are two, and I call the first one. The man I speak to has a kind voice, and he says they can come for him in an hour’s time. Is that enough? I don’t know what to say because I want him gone and I want him here at the same time. I can’t bear the thought of that body that isn’t him being upstairs in the bed for any longer than necessary, but I’m not ready to be someone who lives alone. A widow. I sigh and say an hour is fine, and then I go back upstairs to tell him.