“. . . Ah . . . we can get you a new skirt,” Conall said, trying to hide his mortification beneath a veneer of jolliness. “A whole new wardrobe.”
“Most kind. But that wouldn’t banish the cluster of bumps under my left arm. Or those behind my knees.”
That wiped the fake smile off Conall’s face good and proper. He gazed anxiously at Katie. Was Jemima serious? Katie returned Conall’s beseeching look and gave a small shake of her head: she hadn’t a clue what was going on.
“I see I have embarrassed you,” Jemima said. “For that I apologize. And I see that you doubt me, but I assure you I am deadly in earnest.”
In response to their stunned silence, she repeated, “Deadly in earnest.”
“I see . . .” Conall sounded stumped. “So how can we help you?”
“You can’t.”
“No such word as can’t.” Conall began rummaging for his phone. “I’ll find a doctor.”
“He really is quite the Mr. Fix-it.” Jemima smiled at Katie, who wasn’t finding this at all amusing. “He’ll be ringing that long-suffering Eilish, I’ll wager. Find a new door, Eilish! Find a cancer specialist, Eilish! Poor woman. Conall, put that confounded contraption away. I’m beyond the help of a doctor.”
She reached out to touch Conall’s BlackBerry and, as she did, her body twisted, lifting her skirt and revealing alien-like clusters of lumps and bumps, like mini mountain ranges, behind each knee.
Jesus Christ, Katie thought. Jemima certainly wasn’t exaggerating.
She stared at Conall and the look on his face said that he had gone beyond shock. “Right! That’s it!” Conall knew when he was in over his head. “I’m ringing an ambulance!”
“Absolutely not,” Jemima said, in ringing tones. “Absolutely not! I forbid you.”
To his great surprise, Conall found he was afraid to defy her.
“It’s far too late,” Jemima said.
“No.” Conall was having a series of speedy visions, of Jemima being wheeled into surgery, of Jemima having infusions of magic drugs, of a hundred different ways the doctors could fix her. Agitatedly, he flipped his BlackBerry from hand to hand.
“Far too late, dear heart,” Jemima repeated.
“We can’t just do nothing.” He thought he would burst with f rustration.
“Yes, we can,” Jemima said. “A good lesson for you to learn, Conall. Sometimes nothing is the very best thing one can do.”
“But why didn’t you do anything before now?” Katie exclaimed.
Why hadn’t Fionn insisted she got help? And why hadn’t Fionn told her that Jemima was sick?
Jemima looked ashamed. “Would you think me a coward if I admitted a reluctance to endure chemo again? It was deeply unpleasant. I’m eighty-eight, and it’s been a good life, except, of course, for the dearth of gossip.”
“But what about the pain? Aren’t you in pain?” Conall asked.
“Oh, pain,” Jemima said dismissively. “Everyone is so frightened of pain. But how else is one to know one is alive? Conall, please put away your phone and hold my hand again, I was so enjoying that.”
Reluctantly, Conall settled down again on the floor and Jemima extended her hands to be held.
“Why are you telling us this if you won’t let us help you?” Conall asked.
“Don’t be frightened, Conall. To all things there is a season.”
“That’s not answering my question.”
Jemima laughed.
“And neither is that.”
“Is there someone, people, you’d like us to ring?” Katie chose her words carefully. Jemima was clearly very sick, far sicker than they’d known when she’d done her little swoon downstairs in Matt and Maeve’s, and she wasn’t showing signs of getting up off the divan any time soon: how appropriate was it that herself and Conall were the ones by her side? Jemima knew Katie fairly well, but Conall was practically a total stranger. “To be here with you?”
“You’re the two I want.”
Why? “Well—” and Katie had to force herself to be brave—“at the very least Fionn should be here.” That meant Katie would have to try to find him, and she didn’t want to because she might bump up against all kinds of painful stuff.
“I sought opportunities over these past few days to tell him, but we were always interrupted.”
“You mean . . .?” Jesus Christ. Fionn didn’t know. “Conall, quick, give me your phone, mine’s upstairs.”
With fumbling hands, Conall passed it over and Katie left a quick, terse message for Fionn. “You need to come home right now. It’s urgent.”
“I wanted to kill myself too,” Maeve said suddenly.
Matt looked aghast. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Matt stared up at her, his shoulders bowed, his eyes dead. “Christ, what a shambles,” he said, with terrible weariness. “You wanted to kill yourself. I actually tried to. I suppose the real miracle is how we managed to keep going for so long.”
“It’s been . . .” Maeve had to stop. “I can’t think of the right word. A nightmare wouldn’t describe it, it wouldn’t come close.”
“Nightmares end.”
“And this just went on and on. Sometimes, when I was a kid, I used to think about my life and wonder what was going to happen, because they always said that bad stuff would happen to everyone at some stage. And I thought about things, you know? Trying to prepare myself. But I never thought about this. I never thought I could be raped. And I never thought I’d feel so . . . so . . . I had no idea that anyone could feel this bad for so long.”
“Sweetheart . . .”
“And I’m sorry, Matt. It was very hard for you, I know that. You just got caught up in someone else’s stuff. You didn’t bargain on any of this when you married me.”
“I loved you.”
“It was too much for us, though. We’re only human. Both of us suicidal, that’s not a good sign.”
He gave a weak smile.
“How do you feel now?” Maeve asked. “Still not able to go on?”
“Not the way we were.”
“Me either. Come on, you can help me pack your stuff.”
In the bedroom, Matt slowly gathered his shoes from all the places they’d landed and lined them up on the floor.
“It’s probably better if the clothes go in first,” he said.
“Grand.” She opened one of Matt’s drawers, gathered an armload of clothes and dumped them in the case. And the memories hit her. It was the smell, she realized. A cloud of it had risen from the impact of the clothes. She could smell their honeymoon—sea salt and sandalwood and moist fecund air—as if they were there right now. Wasn’t it unbelievable that the residue had survived so strongly for three long years? Dried rose petals were still strewn in the bottom of the case and she picked out a couple.
“Remember these?”
“Oh, I do.” Matt’s eyes sparked briefly at the memory. “It was every night after dinner, wasn’t it?” They’d come back to their room and find that some mysterious person had used handfuls of rose petals to draw a big red heart on their duvet.
“And in the beginning we thought it was so romantic.”
“Ah no, I always thought it was cheesy.”
“No, you didn’t, Matt, you loved it!”
“Wellll, I guess I thought it was nice that someone would go to the trouble.”
“But then we started getting ungrateful, d’you remember? And we’d be saying that the hearts were getting smaller and more crooked.”
“And the petals would get into the bed—”
“—and we used to be finding them in all kinds of places,” she said.
“All kinds of places,” he repeated.
“And do you remember the bath the butler bloke ran us?”
“No . . . Oh yes! That’s right. More bloody petals!”
“And we were covered with them and we couldn’t get them off us—”
“—and t
hey’d gone black from the water so we looked like we had Kaposi’s sarcoma.”
And even that hadn’t put them off drying each other with elaborate care and having sex for about the hundredth time. It was amazing, really, Maeve thought, just how much sex they’d had during those two weeks. Almost as if they’d known it was all going to come to a sudden stop and that they’d better make hay while they could.
“We were so happy then,” Maeve said. “Like, we were, we really were, weren’t we? I’m not making it up?”
“I felt like the luckiest man on the planet. I’m not joking. You were everything I ever wanted . . . No, it’s more like you were everything I hadn’t even known I’d wanted and I was so scared that I’d never get you.”
“And look at how it ended up. Three years later you try to kill yourself.”
The shock of it hit her afresh and a storm of crying overtook her.
“Maeve, please, it was only because I thought you’d be better off without me. I thought I was no use to you.”
“Yeah? Well, you were.”
She snatched hold of him and held tightly on to his body, pressing herself against the solidity, the realness, the warmth, the life in it, feeling his heartbeat and her own.
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” she whispered. “It was worse than anything else that’s happened in the last three years. Miles worse.”
“Come on, come in, your letters are in the kitchen. I’ve no time for chat, I’m in the middle of watching—”
Softly, Oleksander Shevchenko asked, “And do you find my bed comfortable?”
Lydia had almost turned away, but at this impertinence she twisted back to him, a sharp put-down in her mouth. The neck of him. Nothing but men being necky recently.
“My bed . . .?” he insisted, his expression full of sauciness. “To your likingk?”
“Actually,” Lydia stared him right in the eye, “your bed is to my liking.” She could more than hold her own with random sauce-merchants.
Wait a minute! Their heart currents are going berserk, right here on the doorstep, with flashing lights and the sound of applause, like a fruit machine when someone hits the jackpot.
But is it enough? Is there time? Can they fall in love and have sex in the next twenty-two minutes? Because that’s all I have left.
Then—no, no, don’t—Lydia remembered the girl who had come looking for Oleksander, she remembered the promise she had made that if Oleksander ever showed up she was to give him her phone number. As far as Lydia was concerned, a promise was a promise. “Someone came here looking for you.”
Fear shot across Oleksander’s face. “Big mens with guns?”
“No, a girl.”
“I vos jokingk.” He sighed with abrupt gloom. “Ukrainians are a joke-loving people. Like you Ireesh, we, as you say, love the craic, but the language barrier . . . I joke, joke, joke all the day long but Ireesh do not understand.”
“Come on, do you want the letters or not?”
He followed her into the kitchen, where she hunted for the pile of post.
“The girl who came?” he asked. “It was Viktoriya?”
“No,” Lydia said thoughtfully. “Not Viktoriya, nothing like Viktoriya. Siobhan, I think her name was, an Irish debt-collector, looking to give you a court order.”
He looked terrified. “But I hev not . . . I did not . . .”
Lydia let three seconds pass. Four. Five. Then she said sweetly, “I vos jokingk.”
“Ah! Having the craic with me!”
“Having the craic, just as you say. I heard you love it.”
Oh, this pair are perfect for each other, simply perfect! Eyebrow-raising and defiant expressions and much sexy eye contact. If I could just steer them toward the bedroom . . . Lydia wouldn’t give me any crap about not sleeping with a man less than ten minutes after they’d first met. For spontaneity, for catching life by the balls, she’s my girl.
“Yes, it was Viktoriya who came.”
Never mind Viktoriya! Forget her, forget her!
Oleksander’s face lit up. And promptly fell. “I do not hev phone number.”
“It’s okay, she wrote it down. And she said to tell you something . . .” What the hell was it? “A man. The man—”
“From Department of Egriculture?”
“That’s the one. She said to tell you he smelled of cows.”
Oleksander laughed softly to himself. “Bed smell, huh?”
“Unless you like the smell of cows, I suppose. Here it is.” Lydia had located Viktoriya’s note. “And here’s your mail.”
20 minutes
The only sound in the room was the ticking of a big wooden clock. Jemima’s eyes were closed in peaceful silence and Katie, Conall and Grudge lovingly watched over her. Katie had let go of any thoughts of making an escape and, from the calmness she could feel off Conall, she knew he’d obviously given up on his frantic notions of life-saving surgery and last-minute chemo. The room was so still and tranquil that Katie began to eddy down into a pre-sleep state and was brought back to the now when Jemima spoke.
“I’ve had a good and happy time on earth,” she said.
“What more can you ask for, really?” Conall said.
“Death is only sad if one hasn’t lived one’s life.”
Death? Death? Katie and Conall looked at each other.
“I’m entirely ready to go.”
Did she mean she was planning to die now?
“Yes, dears.”
Right now? Right here?
“In the next few minutes. And I want to be here, in my own home, with both of you here with me.” Katie and Conall shared another look.
I say we should let her have her way, Conall’s eyes said.
So do I.
Will we forget about ambulances and all of that?
Let’s just do what she’s asking and . . .
. . . Let’s just go where this takes us.
But how did it get so serious so quickly?
“This hasn’t come upon me suddenly,” Jemima said. “The presence of death has been in this house for weeks.”
That’s when I realize that, actually, she hasn’t got the wrong end of the stick; there has been a presence here. Other than mine, I mean. Those times when I was so good I scared myself—that wasn’t me at all. That was our friend, the Grim Reaper, the old buzz-wrecker himself.
It’s often the policy: one in and one out.
In quiet harmony, Maeve and Matt filled the suitcase with Matt’s clothes. Oddly, the longer they packed, the less likely it seemed that he was leaving.
“I’ll be back in a second,” he said to Maeve.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m a bit cold.”
“If you will go cutting your wrists . . .”
“I’ll never do it again.”
“You’d better bloody well not.”
“I know it’s August but do you mind if I put on the heat?”
She thought about it. “Let’s get into the bed for a while. It’s probably warmer there.”
They shoved the suitcase to the floor and most of the things they’d packed fell out, then they lay fully clothed on the bed and threw the duvet up in the air, letting it fall and wrap itself softly about them. Maeve twined her legs tightly around Matt and briskly rubbed his back, his shoulders, his arms. “Any warmer?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Listen, I’ve an idea!” Matt said suddenly.
“What is it?”
“We could get a kitten. Or a puppy.”
“A puppy?” Maeve said slowly. “No, it would be jealous.”
Lydia handed Oleksander a small bundle of envelopes. “Tell me where you live now, give me your address.”
He tilted his head and gazed at her with quite naked sauce. “So you can visit and see my new sleeping place?”
Lydia wore an expression of polite irritation. I’ ll see your naked sauce, her look said. And I’ll raise you a provocative
stare.
“So I can send your stuff on,” she said. “And stop you calling around, interrupting me watching Michael Palin.”
Now, now! Do it now, get on with it now! Sex and plenty of it! My life depends on it!
15 minutes
“Be kind to each other,” Jemima murmured, closing her eyes.
“Who?” Conall asked. He just wanted to be sure.
“You two. You and Katie.”
“Okay.”
Jemima’s breathing became quieter and the fall and rise of her chest softer and weaker until it became invisible. Conall was—well, he didn’t know exactly how he felt, except that he was no longer scared, the way he had been a while ago when Jemima had revealed how sick she was. He no longer needed to make phone calls or organize the unorganizable or run away. He was prepared to sit on this violently patterned rug, sit here for as long as it took, holding the hand of a dying woman.
How weirdly coincidental that, for the second time in a day, he was right up against the thin membrane that divided life and death. But this time was different, this time felt strangely beautiful.
Oleksander leans closer to accept the letters. His face is so close to Lydia’s that he’d barely have to move to kiss her.
I’m telling you, the air is hopping with sex! One kiss and they’d be overtaken by passion; there’s so much of it fizzing and popping between them. One kiss, that’s all I’m asking for and the rest will take care of itself.
But Oleksander laughs softly, then lounges out through the door and down the stairs.
He’ll be back. But not in time for me. Bollocks.
“So your man Conall actually broke down the door?” Matt asked.
“And took complete charge. Shouting orders left, right and center and everyone hopping to it. Are you warm yet?”
“No. Keep rubbing.”
“We’ll have to do something to thank him.”
“We will. Any ideas?”
“Yes.”