Nicci French: What to do When Someone Dies

The inquest was set for ten o’clock on Tuesday, 15 October, in the coroner’s court off Hackney Road. I was to attend and, if I wanted, I could ask questions of the witnesses. I could bring family and friends if I wished. It was open to the public and to the press. After the inquest, Greg’s death could be registered, I could collect the appropriate forms, E and F, and could set a date for the funeral.

I asked Gwen if she and Mary would come with me. ‘Unless it’s difficult for Mary to arrange childcare,’ I added. Mary had a young son, nearly a year old now. Until Greg’s death, the conversations between us had been dominated by nappies, first smiles, teething problems, cracked nipples, the swamping pleasures of maternity.

‘Of course we’ll come,’ said Gwen. ‘I’m going to cook you something.’

‘I’m not hungry and I’m not an invalid. Does everyone think she was another woman?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What do you think?’

What did I think? I thought I couldn’t survive without him, I thought he had abandoned me, I thought he had betrayed me. I knew, of course, that he hadn’t. I thought when I woke up at night that I could hear him breathing in the bed beside me, I thought a hundred times a day of things I needed to say to him, I thought I could no longer remember his face and then it returned to me, teasing and affectionate, or scorched into its death mask. I thought he should never have left me and it was his fault because he had chosen to go with her, and I thought, too, that I would go mad with not knowing who the woman was and yet if I discovered I should very likely go mad as well. Mad with sorrow, anger, or jealousy.

‘I’ve heard he was having an affair.’

My sister Maria’s voice sounded solemnly sympathetic. I could hear her baby crying in the background.

‘You’ve got to go.’ I banged the phone back into its holster.

An affair. Like death, affairs happen to other people, not me and Greg. Milena Livingstone. How old was she? What did she look like? All I knew about her was that she had a husband who had identified her body at the same morgue as Greg was in. Perhaps she’d been lying in the drawer above him. In death as in life. I shivered violently, feeling nauseous, then went upstairs to my laptop and turned it on, then Googled her name. There aren’t many Milena Livingstones around.

I clicked on the first reference and the screen was filled with an advertisement for a business, though at first I couldn’t make out what it was. Something about everything being taken out of your hands and no detail left unattended to. Venues. Meals. I scrolled down. It seemed to be a glorified catering and party-arranging business for people with lots of money and no time. A sample menu. Tuna sashimi, sea bass marinated in ginger and lime, chocolate fondants. And here, yes, were the people who ran it, the hostesses.

Two photographs smiled at me from the screen. The face on the left was pale and triangular, with dark blonde hair cut artfully short, a straight nose and a restrained smile. She looked attractive, clever, classy. It wasn’t her. No, it was the other one, with a tawny mane (dyed, I thought spitefully, and I bet she tosses it back all the time with one ringed hand; I bet she pouts), high cheekbones, white teeth, grey eyes. An older woman, then. A rich woman, by the look of it. A beautiful woman, but not the kind of beauty I’d ever expected Greg, who had fallen so heavily for me, to fall for. Milena Livingstone had a glamorous, artful look to her; her eyebrows were arched and her smile knowing. She was sure to have long, painted nails and immaculately waxed legs. A man’s woman, I thought. But not my man. Surely not Greg. Bile rose in my throat and I turned off the computer without looking through any more references and went into the bedroom where I lay face down on my side of the bed. It was almost dark outside; the nights were getting longer and the days shorter.

I don’t know how long I lay there like that, but at last I got up and went to the wardrobe. Greg’s clothes hung on the right-hand side. He didn’t have many: one suit that we’d bought together for our wedding and he’d hardly worn since, a couple of casual jackets, several shirts. What had he been wearing when he died? I screwed my eyes shut and forced myself to remember – dark trousers and a pale blue shirt; his favourite jacket over the top. That was it: his non-accountant’s accountant’s outfit.

I started systematically to go through everything in the cupboard. I felt in each pocket, and found only a receipt for a meal we’d had in an Italian restaurant two weeks ago. I remembered: I’d been upset and he’d been patient and optimistic. A crumpled flyer for a jazz night that had been put under our windscreen wipers a few days ago. I pulled open the drawers where he kept T-shirts and underwear, but I didn’t discover any lacy women’s knickers or incriminating love letters. Everything was as it should have been. Nothing was as it should have been.

I stood in front of the mirror, examined myself and found myself wanting. I weighed myself and realized I was shrinking. I boiled myself an egg, broke open the top, then dabbed my spoon into the yellow yolk. I made myself eat half of it before I felt so sick I had to stop. I had stomach cramps, a grim, familiar backache, so I ran a bath and lowered myself into it, hearing the phone ring. I couldn’t bear to answer it and heard Mary’s voice saying into the answering-machine that poor little Robin was running a fever, she’d be round as soon as she could. I lay in the hot water and closed my eyes. Then I opened them and watched a curl of red blood run out of me and spread, then another.

So.

It wasn’t to be, after all. Once again, as with all the other months of trying and hoping and praying, I wasn’t pregnant, and Greg had died in his car with another woman and left me alone, and what on earth was I going to do now?

It was drizzling. Gwen and Mary arrived early, when I was still in my dressing-gown trying to decide what to wear. The pair of them were dressed in almost identical clothes, and I could see they’d been aiming for the casual but smart, sober but not sombre look I was intending for myself. Mary had brought some Danish pastries, which were warm and sticky in their paper bag, and I made us a big pot of coffee. We sat round the kitchen table, dunking the pastries, and I was reminded of when we were students together, sitting just like this in the kitchen of the house we’d shared together in our final year.

‘I’m so glad the two of you could be here,’ I said. ‘It means a lot.’

‘What did you think?’ said Mary, heatedly. Her face was flushed with excitement. ‘That we would let you go through this alone?’

I thought I might cry at that, but I didn’t, although grief felt rather like a fishbone that was gradually working itself loose in my throat. I asked Mary how her son was and she replied in a constrained, self-conscious way, very different from the eager assumption she had made in the past that I would be interested in every belch and gurgle he made. I had crossed into a different country. No one felt able to have an ordinary conversation with me, no one was about to tell me their petty anxieties and daily fears in the way they would have done a week ago.

I went upstairs and chose my clothes: black skirt, stripy grey shirt, black woollen waistcoat, flat boots, patterned tights, hair tied back. I was so nervous that it took me three attempts to thread my earrings through the lobes of my ears; my hands trembled so that I smudged my lipstick. I felt as though I was about to be put on trial: what kind of wife were you, anyway, that your husband was with another woman? What kind of fool, that you never had the slightest idea?