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There were volunteers to do that: Helen’s sister Pen, his brother, St. James. Even Helen’s father although it was easy to see that the poor man’s heart was in shreds and he’d be no help to anyone while his youngest daughter was where she was…as she was. So at first he’d said no, he would stay at the hospital. He couldn’t leave her, they must see that.
But finally, sometime in the morning, he consented. Home for a shower and a change of clothes. How long could that take? Two constables ushered him through a small gathering of reporters whose questions he neither understood nor even heard very well. A panda car drove him to Belgravia. He dully watched the streets roll by.
At the house they asked did he want them to stay? He shook his head. He could cope, he told them. He had a live-in man in the house. Denton would see that he had a meal.
He didn’t tell them that Denton was off on a long-awaited holiday: bright lights and big city, Broadway, skyscrapers, theatre every night. Instead, he thanked them for their trouble and took out his keys as they drove off.
The police had been. He saw signs of them in the scrap of crime-scene tape that still clung to the narrow porch’s railing, in the fingerprint dust that still powdered the door. There was no blood, Deborah had said, but he found a spot of it on one of the draughts-board marble tiles that comprised the top step just before the door. She’d been so close to getting inside.
It took him three tries to get his key properly in the lock, and when he’d managed the whole operation, he felt light-headed. He expected the house to be different somehow, but nothing had changed. The last bouquet of flowers she’d arranged had lost a few petals to the marquetry top of the table in the entry, but that was it. The rest was as he’d last seen it: one of her winter scarves hanging over the railing of the stairs, a magazine left open on one of the sofas in the drawing room, her dining-room chair sitting at an angle and not replaced the last time she’d sat upon it, a teacup in the kitchen sink, a spoon on the work top, a binder of fabric samples for the baby’s room on the table. Somewhere in the house, the bags of christening clothes were probably stowed. Mercifully, he did not know where.
Upstairs, he stood beneath the shower and let the water beat upon him endlessly. He found he couldn’t exactly feel it, and even when it struck his eyeballs, he didn’t blink nor did he feel pain. Instead, he relived individual moments, silently imploring a God he could not say he believed in to give him a chance to turn back time.
To what day? he asked himself. To what moment? To what decision that had led them all to where they now were?
He stood in the shower until there was no hot water left in the boiler. He had no idea how long he’d been there when he finally emerged. Dripping and shivering, he remained undried and unclothed till his teeth were castanets in his skull. He couldn’t face walking back into their bedroom and opening the wardrobe and the drawers to search out clean clothes. He was nearly air-dried before he summoned the will to pick up a towel.
He moved to the bedroom. Ridiculously, they were babes in arms without Denton there to sort them out, so their bed was badly made, and consequently the impression of her head was still in her pillow. He turned from this and forced himself over to the chest of drawers. Their wedding picture accosted him: hot June sunshine, the fragrance of tuberoses, the sound of Schubert from violins. He reached out and toppled the frame so it fell facedown. There was fleeting mercy when her image was gone and then quick agony when he could not see her so he righted it again.
He dressed. He gave the procedure the sort of care she herself would have taken. This allowed him to think about colours and fabrics for a moment, to search out shoes and the proper tie as if this were an ordinary day and she still in bed with a cup of tea on her stomach, watching to see he didn’t make a sartorial faux pas. His ties were the thing. They had always been. Tommy darling, are you absolutely certain about the blue one?
He was certain of little. He was certain, in fact, of only one thing, and that was that he was certain of nothing. He went through motions without complete knowledge of making them, so he found himself dressed at last and staring at himself in the mirrored wardrobe door wondering what he was meant to do next.
Shave, but he couldn’t. The shower had been difficult enough, labeled as it was “the first shower since Helen” and he couldn’t do more. He couldn’t have more labels because he knew the very weight of them would kill him in the end. The first meal since Helen, the first tank of petrol since Helen, the first time the post dropped through the door, the first glass of water, the first cup of tea. It was endless and it was burying him already.
He left the house. Outside, he saw that someone-most likely one of the neighbours-had left a bunch of flowers on his doorstep. Daffodils. It was that time of year. Winter faded to spring and he needed desperately to stop time altogether.
He picked up the flowers. She liked daffodils. He’d take them to her. They’re so cheerful, she’d say. Daffodils, darling, are flowers with spunk.
The Bentley was where Deborah had carefully parked it, and when he opened the door, Helen’s scent floated out to him. Citrus, and she was with him.
He slid into the car and closed the door. He rested his head on the steering wheel. He breathed in shallowly because it seemed to him that deep breaths would dissipate the scent more quickly, and he needed the fragrance to last as long as it possibly could. He couldn’t bring himself to adjust the car seat from her height to his, to sort out the mirrors, to do anything that would erase her presence. And he asked himself how, if he couldn’t do this much, this very simple and essential thing because, for the love of God, the Bentley wasn’t even the car she regularly drove, so what did it matter, then how could he possibly walk through what he had to walk through now?
He didn’t know. He was operating on rote behaviors that he hoped could carry him from one moment to the next.
Which meant starting the car, so that was what he did. He heard the Bentley purr beneath his touch and he reversed it out of the garage like a man performing keyhole surgery.
He glided slowly along the mews and into Eaton Terrace. He kept his eyes averted from his front door because he didn’t want to imagine-and he knew he would imagine, how could he help it?-what Deborah St. James had seen when she’d walked round the corner having parked the car.
As he drove to the hospital, he knew he was taking the same route the ambulance had taken when bearing Helen to Casualty. He wondered how much she’d been aware of what was going on around her: drips being established, oxygen seeping into her nose, Deborah somewhere nearby but not as close as those who listened to her chest and said her breathing was laboured on the left side now, nothing going into a lung that had already collapsed. She’d have been in shock. She wouldn’t have known. One moment she’d been on the front steps, searching out her door key, and the next she’d been shot. Short range, they’d told him. Less than ten feet away, probably closer to five. She’d seen him, and he’d seen the shock on her face, the surprise to find herself suddenly vulnerable.
Had he called her name? Mrs. Lynley, have you a moment? Countess? Lady Asherton, isn’t it? And she’d turned with that embarrassed, breathless laugh of hers. “Drat! That silly story in the paper. All of it was Tommy’s idea, but I expect I cooperated more than I should have done.”
And then the gun: automatic pistol, revolver, what did it matter? A slow, steady squeeze on the trigger, that great equaliser among men.
He found it difficult to think and even more difficult to breathe. He struck the steering wheel as a means of bringing himself round to the moment he was in and not one of the moments already lived through. He struck it to distract himself, to cause himself pain, to do anything to keep from fracturing beneath everything that assaulted him from memory and imagination.