Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

‘Meet Dan,’ said Gwen, appearing beside me. ‘Dan, this is Ellie.’

He was big and shy, with a quiet, rumbling voice. I liked him at once for the way he looked at Gwen.

‘Josh is about to light the rocket,’ said Gwen, tucking her arm through mine. ‘Come out and see it, and then I’ll send everyone home. Right?’

‘Right,’ I agreed, for suddenly I felt desperately tired and dejected. And lonely, too – lonelier now, in this crowd of too-eager friends, than I ever did when I was alone.

‘But I’ll stay and clear up. We can get a takeaway or something if you want. So steer clear of that cake for the moment.’

That was the best bit of the party: after everyone had left and the glasses were washed, the empty bottles put out for collection, sitting at the kitchen table with Gwen and her nice new man, eating curry out of foil cartons and not having to make an effort any more. There aren’t many people you can just be silent with.

At several points, I nearly told Gwen I had stolen her name and was passing myself off as an unsettled-maths-teacher-turned-office-assistant to the business partner of the woman who had died alongside Greg. But I stopped myself. It made me sound crazy.

After Gwen and Dan had left, I did the last of the washing-up and took out a bin-bag full of slimy, smelly party relics. I made a mug of tea and put the TV on, and by the time I got to bed it was after two. It didn’t matter because the next day was Saturday. My plan, if it could be called a plan, was to sleep until I woke and then to go back to sleep. If I left my bed it would be to eat and then I would return to my state of hibernation. Instead, I was woken from strange dreams – grey, hard-edged, dark, slow – by the doorbell. I pulled on a dressing-gown and went down the stairs, muttering to myself like a bag-lady. I was expecting to have to sign for something but instead I found Fergus on the doorstep.

‘Did I wake you?’ he said.

I was still fuddled with sleep. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ he said.

‘What time is it?’

‘Breakfast time,’ he said, smiling. ‘Can I come in?’

I was genuinely tempted to say no and slam the door. But I stood aside for him, then went upstairs, had a shower and tugged a pair of jeans up over my tired, pale legs. I put on an old sweatshirt of Greg’s and found some slippers in the back of a cupboard. I could already smell coffee.

When I came down to the kitchen Fergus had cleared the kitchen table and laid out mugs and plates. ‘I found a muffin in the freezer,’ he said. ‘I’m defrosting it. Unless you want bacon and eggs.’

‘I don’t even want a muffin,’ I said.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. He took the muffin from the microwave and spread it with butter, then raspberry jam, and put it on a little side plate and gave it to me. He poured a mug of coffee for me and one for himself. He sat down opposite me.

‘Am I that bad?’ I said.

He smiled and sipped his coffee. I felt cross and tired and blurry, and his insistent cheeriness was irritating, like music playing too loudly. ‘We’ve been having a conference,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘The usual suspects. I was the one delegated to come and see you. Well, I delegated myself, really.’

‘It’s the chart, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I should have put it in a cupboard.’

‘We’ve not been looking after you properly,’ he said.

‘Everyone’s been looking after me,’ I said. ‘You came to my birthday party. I’ve been invited to dinner. People have put up with my deranged behaviour.’

‘You’ve not been deranged,’ said Fergus.

‘I’m just going through the stages of mourning: anger, bargaining, denial. Lots of denial.’ I paused. ‘Are they really the stages of mourning or are they the stages of dying? It doesn’t matter. I think I’ve had enough help. Maybe it’s time now to help myself.’

‘I’m not allowed to take no for an answer,’ said Fergus.

‘Says who?’

‘Says me and Gwen and Joe and Mary and no doubt other people as well.’

‘This is since the party?’ I said.

‘Some of it was at the party. But the lines have been buzzing as well.’

‘I wish people would just talk to me.’

‘I am talking to you.’

‘So what’s the plan? Is someone going to take me to the seaside? Are you clubbing together to pay for a massage?’

‘You shouldn’t be sarcastic,’ said Fergus. ‘It’s the lowest form of wit. The immediate plan is for you to eat your muffin, then show me round your house.’

‘You know what it looks like.’

‘Please, eat up.’

I nibbled at the muffin, feeling like a child who had been told off. It was dry in my mouth, hard to swallow. ‘I don’t need all this help,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t need it. He was your friend. You knew him much longer than I did. Losing him must have been as bad for you as it was for me, maybe worse.’

Fergus looked reflective. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have a friend like him again. I couldn’t. It was something about who’d seen me drunk and being embarrassing, at my low points.’ He smiled. ‘And there were good things as well. Trips, girlfriends… Well, I probably shouldn’t go there. Anyway, this isn’t a competition.’

‘I should be looking out for you,’ I said.

‘First things first,’ said Fergus. ‘That’ll do. That’s enough muffin. Let’s go upstairs.’

As I walked upstairs with him, I suddenly remembered being about seventeen and my mum coming into my bedroom. ‘You’re meant to have tidied your room,’ she would say.

‘I have tidied it,’ I’d say.

‘Well, it doesn’t look like it.’

And so it would go on. It seemed to me that I had spent days and days dealing with my affairs, sorting out Greg’s stuff, generally getting things ordered, but as I saw my bedroom, the junk room and the spare bedroom through Fergus’s eyes, I had to admit that it didn’t look like it. If there are stages of mourning, there are also stages of tidying. The first stage is your basic untidiness. The second stage is deciding to do something about it. The third stage involves getting everything out of the drawers, cupboards and shelves so you can see what you have to deal with it. The third stage necessarily looks much worse than the first. I wasn’t sure about the fourth because I hadn’t yet got to it.

There were piles of Greg’s clothes in the bedroom. The spare room functioned as a sort of office. It had a nice view over the garden towards the plane tree that stood next door. We had never made it a proper office because we’d been going to make the junk room into an office and turn the spare room into a nursery, put up silly wallpaper with clowns on it or something like that. The spare bedroom and the landing were piled high with files, papers, folders and books, some of which were connected with Greg’s work. ‘It looks bad, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m in the process of getting it sorted.’

There was so much I couldn’t say, starting with the supposed excuse that one of the reasons I hadn’t cleared up the house was that I had been down in Camberwell, sorting out Milena Livingstone’s office.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already heard about this from one of my spies.’

‘Who was it? I bet it was Mary. If I live to be a hundred and spend the entire time doing housework, I’ll never live up to her standards of cleanliness.’

‘I’m not saying,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m not able to reveal my sources. What I can do is tell you the plan.’

‘The plan?’

‘Are you at home today?’

‘I hadn’t thought of going anywhere.’

‘Good. You might have some visitors.’