Nicci French - What to do When Someone Dies

I lay in bed, peacefully, stolidly awake, for what must have been hours, waiting for the curtain edges to grow light, and then I realized that the shortest day of the year had only just passed and that daylight was still far away. I fumbled for my watch on the bedside table, knocking a lamp over. It was just after five. I got out of the bed, pulled on jeans, a shirt, a sweater, a thicker sweater on top of that, walking boots, then a bulky jacket of the kind you might wear on a trawler and a woolly hat. I left the house and started to walk, not as I had in my waking dream but northwards.

Remember in the summer when we walked out on Hampstead Heath late at night? It was so warm that we had been in T-shirts and it was never entirely dark. From the top of Kite Hill we watched the glow in the sky over in the far east of London, and the office blocks of the City and Canary Wharf glowed wastefully even after midnight. We saw shadows and silhouettes around us, but we didn’t feel threatened by them. They were out walking like us, or even, some of them, sleeping under the stars, by choice or necessity.

As I walked up Kentish Town Road I saw a few other pedestrians, stragglers from last night or early birds heading for work. There were taxis and delivery vans and cars, because the traffic never stops, barely even slackens. But once I turned on to the Heath, I felt as safe as we had felt in the summer. It was too dark and cold even for criminals or mad people, except mad people like me who were just looking for one of the few places in London where you could escape. I walked up the hill so that I could look over the lights of London, distant and abstract and glittering, as if I was flying above it. I went further up the hill and to the right, and walked deeper into the Heath on paths lit only by the moon, finding my way by memory on routes I had taken dozens of times before. The early-morning air felt fierce and good on my cheeks.

Finally I found myself surrounded by the dim skeleton shapes of oak trees. I stopped and listened. There wasn’t even the hum of traffic that you hear everywhere else in the city. I was in the centre of London and yet I was in an ancient forest as old as England. I looked up at the branches. Were they standing out more clearly as the sky turned from black to grey? Was the dawn coming? Sometimes on these winter mornings you couldn’t tell.

I started to talk to you, not because I thought you were somehow present, not in the wind that was shifting the branches, but because it was a place we had been together and that had somehow become a part of us. I told you the story of my life since you had gone away. I told you about my strange behaviour, my madness, my distrust of you and then my belief in you. How it had been so hard, such an effort, how I had wanted to give up.

There was a sudden breath of wind that shifted the branches above me and I wondered what you would have said if you had been there, whether you would have teased me or got cross or said something encouraging, or just put your arms around me and said nothing. Then I told you about the strange things that had happened, the disappearing evidence. I know what you would have said about that. You always wanted to know how things worked. When you didn’t know, you found out. Even once when we had been to the Hampstead fair, you had got into conversation with a sinister tattooed man who ran one of the merry-go-rounds and he had shown you the gears and the machinery underneath. And as I told you all that I realized I had to know, even if I died at the moment I knew. It didn’t matter, as long as I knew, as long as I could tell you.

I looked up at the branches. Yes, they really were standing out more sharply against the greying sky.

I sat on the sofa in Fergus’s living room. Jemma had left the house for the first time since Ruby’s birth to go a few hundred yards down the road for a cup of coffee with a friend, but leaving enough instructions for a week’s absence, and I had come round with croissants and freshly squeezed orange juice for Fergus. There were Babygros over the radiators, congratulation cards and flowers on every surface, and a buggy in the corner. Ruby’s Moses basket lay at my feet, with its downy snuggle of crocheted blankets, but I held Ruby on my lap, her soft head on the crook of my arm, her little bag of body slumped against me. Her eyes were closed and her lips puffed slightly with each sleeping breath she took. I needed to look at her puckered old-woman’s face, smell her musky breath, feel how her hand gripped my middle finger firmly, as if she knew she could trust me.

We had talked about broken nights, miniature nails, eye colour, stork marks, the shape of her nose, the shell of her ear and upturn of her nose.

‘Who does she look like?’ asked Fergus.

‘Not you,’ I said, staring at her features. ‘But she’s got Jemma’s nose and mouth.’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘Maybe your chin,’ I said doubtfully, because he seemed to want me to spot a resemblance.

‘No. She’s got Jemma’s father’s chin,’ he said.

I smiled at him: dear Fergus, Greg’s best friend, father of my goddaughter. ‘This was what I needed,’ I said.

‘Are you all right, Ellie? You seem – I don’t know – very thoughtful. A bit subdued.’

‘I don’t mean to. I’m fine, Fergus. Weary. I didn’t sleep very well. Actually, I came round to tell you that I think I’m going away for a while. I’ve been a bit mad, haven’t I? I feel more peaceful now.’

‘Do you?’

‘I think so. The stages of grief.’

‘If there’s anything I can do…’

‘You already have.’

‘What a ghastly time this has been for you.’

I smiled at him and looked down at the baby in my arms. ‘There’s been one light in all the darkness. A new life among the deaths.’

It would soon be dark again. So much darkness and so little light. I went to Gwen’s house and she let me in. Daniel was there, too, wearing Gwen’s stripy apron and covered in flour. ‘He’s decided to make pasta,’ said Gwen, proudly.

He led the way into the kitchen. There was flour on the floor, the work surfaces and the table. Bowls sticky with dough were piled in the sink and clothes-hangers draped with long strips of gunk hung from the backs of chairs. Two large pans of water were boiling on the hob, filling the room with steam.

‘Do you want to eat it with us?’ Gwen asked.

‘I don’t think so. I’m sure it’ll be delicious.’

‘Have a cup of tea at least.’

‘One cup and then I must go.’

‘Busy?’

‘Busy in my head.’

Daniel picked up one sagging strip of pasta dough and dropped it into the boiling water.

‘Are you using your car at the moment, Gwen?’

‘Not that I know of. I never use it if I can help it. It stands there from one week to the next. I’m thinking of selling it.’

‘If she does need it, she can use mine instead,’ said Daniel, hurling another strip into the pan and jumping back as water splashed over the rim. ‘This isn’t looking quite the way I imagined it would. They’re disintegrating.’

‘Can I borrow it? I’m insured to drive any car. I was thinking of going away.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know. Just for a few days.’

‘But it’s Christmas.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Don’t go away on your own. Come and stay here, Ellie.’ Gwen seemed close to tears.

‘That’s really lovely of you but I need to go right away. Not for long. I’m sure you understand.’

‘As long as you know that there’s always…’

‘I do know. I’ve always known.’

‘Of course you can take the car. Take it now.’

‘Really?’

‘No problem.’