Page 11 of The House of Hopes and Dreams
By the time we turned into the drive, the short December day had already descended into cold darkness, but there were no welcoming lights switched on in the porch to greet us, as there would have been if Julian had been at home.
I felt the first unsettling intimation of catastrophic change, and suddenly I didn’t want to go in.
‘They’ll probably be in the kitchen,’ Molly said encouragingly as I got out and hesitated, shivering in the cold air. ‘I’ll come in with you.’
I’m sure she guessed how I felt and realized how hard this first meeting with Nat – and his unknown wife – would be, yet I was still convinced that this tragedy would finally bring us together, because surely he would be feeling as devastated as I was?
We dumped my bags in the hall and she’d been right about where they were, because we could hear voices from the kitchen – Nat’s low, even tones and a high-pitched female twittering that must be his wife, Willow. They suddenly ceased talking as Molly pushed the door fully open, letting light and warmth flood out into the hall.
‘Here’s Angel – didn’t you hear the car?’ she said, in her best, brisk Nurse Molly manner. ‘I hope you’ve got the kettle on, because she’s freezing.’
Two faces looked back at me, though my eyes were immediately drawn to Nat, sitting at the long oak table, because he was a smudged and pale imitation of his father, like the last lithograph in a too-long print run.
‘Oh, Nat, I’m so sorry about Julian!’ I exclaimed. ‘It seems so much worse that he … he should have gone when I wasn’t here, too …’
I faltered to a stop, my initial impulsive move towards him to offer a comforting hug stifled at birth, for he made no move to rise to his feet and his expression remained cold and remote.
‘You’re finally back, then,’ he observed brusquely.
‘I told you she was getting the first flight back she could,’ Molly reminded him. ‘She’d have been here sooner, if she hadn’t been out of phone contact when it happened.’
‘Yes, and I feel so bad about that, but it’s a busy time of the year for the Caribbean, so I was lucky to get this cancellation,’ I gabbled, only half aware of what I was saying, for this was so not the scenario of my homecoming I’d envisaged. ‘Otherwise, I’d have had to wait till my original flight back on Monday.’
‘There was no rush anyway, Monday would have done,’ he told me, and I looked at him blankly. The feeling of being trapped in a nightmare that I’d had since Molly had first broken the news to me was increasing by the moment.
‘What a stupid thing to say!’ Molly told him forthrightly, putting her arm around me. ‘Of course she needed to get home as soon as she could.’
He shrugged. ‘She chose to go on holiday and leave him on his own.’
‘But heinsistedI go to Antigua even though I didn’twantto leave him,’ I said.
I choked, looking at him for some sign of empathy that didn’t seem to exist. ‘Oh, Nat, it really does feel so much worse because I wasn’t with him when it happened.’
Willow, a tall, slender creature with smooth margarine-yellow hair framing her long, beaky face, regarded me curiously out of pale-blue eyes. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference whether you were here or not, you know. The doctor said he just dropped like a stone and that was it.’
‘Oh, tactfully put,’ Molly snapped sarcastically, and Willow flushed.
‘Well, it wouldn’t have made any difference, would it, Nat?’ she appealed to her husband.
‘None at all.’
‘But it would have made a difference tome,’ I told them. ‘Besides, I could have helped you to organize everything. Molly told me you’ve booked the funeral, but we’ll need to discuss the service and—’
‘It’s next Tuesday. It’s all fixed,’ Nat said flatly.
‘Oh … I suppose it’s at the village church? I know Julian wasn’t aregularchurchgoer, but he did like to slip into evensong and—’
‘No, it’s at the crematorium, though the vicar’s doing the service,’ Nat interrupted. ‘We were lucky they could fit it in so quickly, this close to Christmas.’
‘But Julian and I discussed it once and he wanted to be buried here in the village churchyard – we both did.’
Nat gave me a savage look, so clearly expressing his wish that he could inter me there immediately, that I was quite taken aback. It was blindingly clear that the tragedy, instead of healing old wounds and bringing us together, had instead made him even more inimical towards me, though I had no idea why that should be.
In any case, right at that moment I was too jet-lagged, exhausted and emotionally drained to deal with it. In fact, I turned so dizzy that I might have fallen if Molly’s arm wasn’t still around me.
‘You look pale. You’d better sit down,’ suggested Willow, as if she was the hostess in my own kitchen, and even in my present state I was starting to be irritated by the way her fluting voice went up at the end of every sentence as if it was a question.
I ignored her, for the first time taking in the alien signs of their occupation: the strange coats on the rack behind the door, a raspberry-pink Mulberry Bayswater handbag occupying the top of the dresser. Willow was drinking out of Julian’s mug, too, the one with the Chartres Cathedral window roundel on the side.
