Giles Blunt: The Fields of Grief

‘Well, it’s a shock, I mean, mon Dieu . You imagine I’d just hand her the key to the roof and say, “Ta-ta, darling. Have a nice suicide while I just pop out to rehearsal”? Please.’

The woman paused, tossing her head back and looking up at the ceiling. Then she levelled a look at Delorme with dark, theatrical eyes. ‘Put it this way,’ she said. ‘I stand here thunderstruck, but at the same time, out of all the people I know – and I know a lot – I’d say that Catherine Cardinal was the most likely to kill herself. You don’t get hospitalized for a simple case of the blues, you don’t get slapped into the ward for a slight disappointment, and you don’t take lithium for PMS. And have you seen her work?’

‘Some,’ Delorme said. She was remembering an exhibition at the library a couple of years ago: a photograph of a child crying on the cathedral steps, an empty park bench, a single red umbrella in a landscape of rain. Photographs of longing. Like Catherine herself, beautiful but sad.

‘I rest my case,’ Ms Cathcart said.

Just as Delorme’s inner magistrate was condemning her for displaying an unforgivable lack of sympathy, the woman exploded into tears – and not the decorous weeping of the stage, but the messy, mucus-y wails of real, unrehearsed pain.

Delorme went with Dr Claybourne to the ambulance, where they found Cardinal still sitting in the back. He spoke before they even reached him, his voice thick and oppressed.

‘Was there a note?’

Claybourne held it out so he could read it. ‘Can you confirm whether this is your wife’s handwriting?’

Cardinal nodded. ‘It’s hers,’ he said, and looked away.

Delorme walked Claybourne over to his car.

‘Well, you saw that,’ the coroner said. ‘He identifies the handwriting as his wife’s.’

‘Yeah,’ Delorme said. ‘I saw.’

‘There’ll have to be an autopsy, of course, but it’s suicide as far as I’m concerned. We have no signs of a struggle, we have a note, and we have a history of depression.’

‘You spoke to the hospital?’

‘I got hold of her psychiatrist at home. He’s distressed, of course – it’s always upsetting to lose a patient – but he’s not surprised.’

‘All right. Thanks, Doctor. We’ll finish canvassing the building, just in case. Let me know if there’s anything else we can do.’

‘I will,’ Claybourne said, and got into his car. ‘Depressing, isn’t it? Suicide?’

‘To put it mildly,’ Delorme said. She had attended the scenes of two others in the past few months.

She looked around for Cardinal, who wasn’t by the ambulance any more, and spotted him behind the wheel of his car. He didn’t look like he was leaving.

Delorme got in the passenger side.

‘There’ll be an autopsy, but the coroner’s going to make a finding of suicide,’ she said.

‘You’re not going to canvass the building?’

‘Of course. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.’

Cardinal dipped his head. Delorme couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. When he finally did speak, it wasn’t what she was expecting.

‘I’m sitting here trying to figure out how I’m going to get her car home,’ he said. ‘There’s probably a simple solution, but right now it seems like an insurmountable problem.’

‘I’ll get it to your place,’ Delorme said. ‘When we’re done here. In the meantime, is there anyone I can call? Someone who can come and stay with you? You shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.’

‘I’ll call Kelly. I’ll call Kelly soon as I get home.’

‘But Kelly’s in New York, no? Don’t you have anyone here?’

Cardinal started his car. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.

He didn’t sound all right.

‘Do those shoes hurt?’

Kelly Cardinal was sitting at the dining-room table, wrapping a framed photograph of her mother in bubble wrap. She wanted to take one to the funeral home to place beside the casket.

Cardinal sat down in the chair opposite. Several days had passed, but he was still stunned, unable to take the world in. His daughter’s words hadn’t organized themselves into anything he could decipher. He had to ask her to repeat herself.

‘Those shoes you’re wearing,’ she said. ‘They look brand new. Are they pinching your feet?’

‘A little. I’ve only worn them once – to Dad’s funeral.’

‘That was two years ago.’

‘Oh, I love that picture.’

Cardinal reached for the portrait of Catherine in working mode. Dressed in a yellow anorak, her hair wild with rain, she was burdened with two cameras – one round her neck, the other slung over her shoulder. She was looking exasperated. Cardinal remembered snapping the photo with the little point-and-shoot that remained the only photographic apparatus he had ever mastered. Catherine had indeed been exasperated with him, first because she was trying to work, and second because she knew what the rain was doing to her beautiful hair and didn’t want to be photographed. In dry weather her hair fell in soft cascades to her shoulders; when it was raining it went wild and frizzy, which pricked her vanity. But Cardinal loved her hair wild.

‘For a photographer, she sure hated getting her picture taken,’ he said.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t use it. She looks a little annoyed.’

‘No, no. Please. That’s Catherine doing what she loved.’

Cardinal had at first resisted the idea of having a photograph; it had struck him as undignified, to say nothing of the fact that the sight of Catherine’s face tore his heart open.

But Catherine thought in photographs. Come into a room when she was working and before you could open your mouth she had taken your picture. It was as if the camera were a protective mechanism that had evolved over the years solely to provide a defence for elusive, breakable people like her. She wasn’t a snob about photographs, either. She could be as ecstatic over a lucky snap of a street scene as over a series of images she had struggled with for months.

Kelly put the wrapped picture into her bag. ‘Go and change your shoes. You don’t want to be standing around in shoes that don’t fit.’

‘They fit,’ Cardinal said. ‘They’re just not broken-in yet.’

‘Go on, Dad.’

Cardinal went into the bedroom and opened the closet. He tried not to look at the half of it that contained Catherine’s clothes, but he couldn’t help himself. She mostly wore jeans and T-shirts or sweaters. She was the kind of woman, even approaching fifty, who still looked good in jeans and T-shirts. But there were small black dresses, some silky blouses, a camisole or two, mostly in the greys and blacks she had always preferred. ‘My governess colours,’ she called them.

Cardinal pulled out the black shoes he wore every day and set about polishing them. The doorbell rang, and he heard Kelly thanking a neighbour who had brought food and condolences.

When she came into the bedroom, Cardinal was embarrassed to realize he was kneeling on the floor in front of the closet, shoe brush in hand, motionless as a victim of Pompeii.

‘We’re going to have to leave pretty soon,’ Kelly said. ‘We have an hour to ourselves there before people start arriving.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Shoes, Dad. Shoes.’

‘Right.’

Kelly sat on the edge of the bed behind him as Cardinal started brushing. He could see her reflection in the mirror on the closet door. She had his eyes, people always told him. But she had Catherine’s mouth, with tiny parentheses at the corners that grew when she smiled. And she would have Catherine’s hair too, if she let it grow out from the rather severe bob of the moment, with its single streak of mauve. She was more impatient than her mother, seemed to expect more from other people, who were always disappointing her, but perhaps that was just a matter of being young. She could be a harsh judge of herself, too, often to the point of tears, and not so long ago she had been a harsh judge of her father. But she had relented the last time Catherine had been admitted to hospital, and they had been getting along pretty well since then.