Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I managed to say, and dashed out.

I told myself I mustn’t go back, but it had become an addiction. I had to go back, just to look through the rest of Milena’s emails. I arrived home in a restless and agitated state. My answering-machine was flashing but I didn’t bother to listen to the messages. I made myself a cup of tea and drank it while I paced round the house. I opened the fridge and had one of the liquid yoghurts Mary had brought. She said it would be good for my digestion; it tasted of coconut and vanilla and coated my tongue. I went into my neglected little garden. Darkness was drawing in, giving everything a mysterious air. I noticed the drifts of sodden leaves on the lawn, the nettles growing up against the back wall. There were a few yellow roses left on the bush by the back door. The bedraggled little blackbird was singing its heart out in the gloom. I reminded myself that I still had time to plant bulbs for spring. The previous autumn we’d planned snow-drops, winter aconites, daffodils and red tulips. Greg had loved tulips – he said they were the only flowers that were as beautiful dying as they were unfurling. I realized that I no longer had any difficulty in thinking of him in the past tense. When had that happened? On what day had he slipped between the cracks of memory to lie with other departed people in the deeper places of my mind?

Back in the house, I laid my two charts on the kitchen table and looked at them, my brain tingling uselessly. I took my notebook out of my bag and stared at the two addresses. What should I do now? The phone rang and I didn’t answer it. I waited to hear the message but there wasn’t one. Then it rang again, but still I didn’t answer. It rang yet again. It was like a game of chicken. Finally I gave up and answered.

‘I knew you were there.’ It was Fergus.

‘Sorry, I was tired.’

‘I wanted to ask you for supper. Jemma’s put a chicken in the oven, I’ve lit a fire.’

‘As I said, I’m a bit tired.’

‘If you don’t come, we’ll put the dinner in the car and drive over to you. And if you don’t let us in we’ll eat on your doorstep and embarrass you in front of your neighbours.’

‘All right, all right, I’ll come.’

‘I’ll come, thank you.’

I laughed. ‘Sorry for being so rude. Yes, thank you for asking me.’

Jemma was very, very pregnant. Every so often she winced as the baby kicked her. At her invitation, I put my hand on her belly and felt it writhing and jabbing. She told me it kept getting hiccups.

‘There are so many things people won’t say to me,’ I said, after two glasses of wine.

‘What do you mean?’ Fergus leaned forward to top up my glass but I put my hand over it.

‘Well, for example, you two don’t talk to me about the baby unless I press you. You think it might upset me – because of Greg, because we never managed it and now it’s too late. And of course it upsets me, but it’s not as if I forget about it until you remind me. It’s much better to say things, otherwise I feel shut out from life. Mary used to go on about Robin at every hour of the day – his snuffles, his nappies, the way his fist closed round her finger – and now she barely mentions him. Gwen used to tell me about her love life. Joe would regularly complain to me about having a cold or some bloody rich client. Not any more.’

‘In that case,’ said Fergus, glancing sideways at Jemma for her approval, ‘we wanted to ask you something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you be its godmother?’

‘Godmother?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, that’s not really the point.’

‘Neither do I.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Of course I’ll be its godmother! I’d love to.’ I was crying, tears sliding down my cheek and into my mouth. I wiped the back of my hand across my face and held out my glass for more wine. ‘Here’s to whoever-it-is.’

‘Whoever-it-is,’ they echoed.

Fergus got up and hugged me. ‘I’m so sorry about everything,’ he whispered.

I shrugged.

When I got home, I had decided what to do. It would have been easy to send emails from Milena’s account, simply replying to the messages she had received from old lovers, but that felt too risky. Even if I stayed anonymous, it would have to be sent by someone who knew Milena’s password. It might even establish a connection with Milena’s computer or her office. The safest idea seemed to be to set up a hotmail account for myself. I had no idea how easy it was to trace emails, but I probably wasn’t dealing with computer experts here. Creating the new email address, I simply jabbed randomly at the keyboard and ended up with j4F93nr4wQ5@hotmail.co.uk. I entered my first name as J and my second name as Smith. As a password I wrote out a sequence of numbers and upper- and lower-case letters. When I was done, I sent myself an email, just to check. There was just ‘J Smith’, the subject line, the date and time and the address. That seemed safe enough.

I entered the first of the email addresses I had retrieved from Milena’s computer, wrote ‘re’ beside ‘subject’, and then, after a few moments’ thought, typed: ‘Dearest Robin, I am LONGING to see you and…’ I tried to think of a plausible name. ‘Petra’. No – wasn’t that a dog’s name? And a tourist destination. ‘Katya’. Sounded a bit exotic. I realized I was thinking of names that sounded too like ‘Milena’. I looked at the books on the shelf. ‘Richmal’. Hopeless. ‘Elizabeth’. Was anyone called that any more? ‘Eliza’. ‘Lizzie’. ‘Beth’. ‘Bessie’. They all sounded ridiculous. Anyway, what did it matter. ‘Lizzie’ would do. And then I remembered. No, it wouldn’t do. The name needed to start with a J. Jackie then. ‘Jackie again after all this time. Ring as soon as you arrive, love Jackie xxxxx PS I hope this is your email address and if it isn’t will whoever is reading it let me know!!!!!’

I read it over and then again. I pressed send and it was gone. I wrote the same message to the second address as well and sent it. I thought of when I was a child and sometimes I had been afraid to post a letter because when I pushed it through the slot and heard it fall, I would realize it was still there, a few inches away, but lost to me, beyond change or recall.

The next morning, when I arrived at the office, Frances was talking on the phone. She was preparing a party for a firm of City lawyers that was being held in an old warehouse by the river. As I switched on Milena’s computer, she slammed down the phone and strode over to me. ‘They want a Shakespearean theme,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Can’t you just hire some young actors?’ I said. ‘They can walk round with the canapés and say lines from Shakespeare. About cakes and ale and, well, there must be some other references to food.’

‘And they want Elizabethan food. I mean, honestly! I had this ridiculous woman on the line just now and I said, “What do you mean by Elizabethan food? Carp? Pike? Capon?” She said, “Oh, no. They just want normal food with an Elizabethan twist.”’

There were shelves of books and magazines in the office for just such a crisis and Frances started to rummage through them, speaking half to herself and half to me. I went to my new account. My new email address and password were impossible to remember. I had to copy them painstakingly from the piece of paper on which I’d written them.

‘What exactly are sweetbreads?’ said Frances. ‘Some kind of gland, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not sure if they’re right for finger food,’ I said. I had to make an effort to keep my voice level because I had noticed there were two messages for me. The first was welcoming me as a new account holder. The second was from ‘gonefishing’.