Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
ANNA
There’s no pretty way of saying it: I was drunk at my husband’s funeral.
In the two weeks since Gray’s death, I’d woken up each morning with a sense of leaden dread, realising simultaneously that, one, I had a fucking shite hangover and, two, Gray was dead.
Again. It was as if, each time, the knowledge that he had died and that I had a pounding headache and a mouth that tasted like the inside of the kitchen food-waste caddy descended on me as freshly, as horribly, as if I hadn’t known it before.
It had started the morning after he died.
Well, strictly speaking the morning after that, because the first morning I had been stone-cold sober, thanks to some premonition that I might have had to get up in the middle of the night and drive to the hospice to see him for the last time.
But the day after that, the nineteenth of June, was what I think of as the first of the death hangovers.
I was woken by Lulu coming into my room – the spare bedroom, still; I didn’t know when, if ever, I’d be able to face moving back into the room I’d shared with him.
‘Mum,’ she whispered. ‘Mum? Are you awake?’
I was now. ‘What time is it, darling?’
‘Half past six. I couldn’t sleep.’
There was no point admitting that, thanks to a couple of hefty belts of twenty-year-old Armagnac after the children had gone to bed, I’d slept like the dead. So to speak.
‘Come here, sweetie.’ I pushed the duvet aside and Lulu got in next to me, snuggling up like she hadn’t done in years. She was wearing the knickers and crop top she’d slept in; she smelled of yesterday’s deodorant, and her skin was like warm satin under my fingers.
‘Mum? Remember how Dad used to blow his nose after he showered every morning?’
Did he? Maybe he did. The sounds of Gray’s morning ablutions had become so familiar, such an invisible part of the fabric of my days, I hadn’t noticed them in a decade or more – only this year, when he’d sometimes been sick in the mornings and I’d say, Jesus, are you okay?
And he’d say, Think so. Fucking acid reflux again.
Should you see a doctor?
Nah, I’m all right.
So long as you’re not pregnant.
Ha – chance would be a fine thing.
‘Every morning, like a foghorn,’ Lulu was saying. ‘When I was little, it was just a noise Dad made. Then I started thinking, Gross! If I had a friend for a sleepover I’d be like, God, how embarrassing. And I woke up this morning and I realised I’ll never hear it ever again.’
She started to cry, and I pulled her close and held her, perversely glad that my banging head and churning stomach were distracting me for the time being from the other, deeper pain I knew would descend eventually.
Somehow, we got through that day. The kids were off school.
Sarah came over and made mushroom omelettes for lunch because she said we needed to eat.
There were calls to the undertakers. A huge flower arrangement came from Gray’s work, with a card signed by all the staff that made me cry.
Orla brought round a vegetable lasagne, and I found myself thinking that if I had to cook dinner, I’d have an excuse to have a glass of wine.
But putting Orla’s stoneware dish in the oven and making a salad counted as cooking, I told myself two hours later, cracking open a bottle of rosé.
The following Monday, the children went back to school. Cathy and Sarah were on top of the funeral arrangements. My mum, who’d stayed for the weekend, had gone back to Herefordshire because she said she couldn’t leave the dogs with Dad any longer.
The flood of sympathy cards had slowed to a trickle by then, but when I heard the familiar rattle of the letter box and the thump of paper landing on the doormat, I still assumed that the postman had brought today’s instalment – like having taken out a subscription to a particularly grim periodical, I thought, and not being able to cancel it until the introductory offer period was over.
I walked upstairs from the kitchen, where I’d been sitting staring vacantly out at the garden wondering whether eleven o’clock was too early for a drink, and picked up the stack of mail from inside the front door.
There were a couple of leaflets from curry restaurants on nearby Brick Lane, an official-looking letter from Gray’s bank – which I’d wait to deal with until Cathy or Sarah was with me for moral support – and four plain white envelopes, their contents slim and rigid.
Cards, of course. I ripped open the first one, glanced at the tasteful image of a pond at sunset and read the stilted, careful words of sympathy inside, from the mother of a child Lulu had been best friends with in primary school.
The second was similar, from the family of Jack Isaacs, who used to live in the flats near Damask Square.
The third was hand-painted, a watercolour of the front of our house before we’d begun the renovations.
Although the edges of the paper were worn and curling and the paint faded, I could see the skill that had gone into its creation.
I opened the card.
Dearest Anna
I painted this years ago and I suppose I intended to give it to you and Gray, but it slipped my mind.
I was so sorry to hear of his death. He was the sweetest, funniest man and you and the children must miss him desperately.
I am thinking of you and hope we can see each other when I’m back in London.
Perhaps this will remind you of happier times.
Much love,
Beatrice
Orla’s daughter. A typical Beatrice gesture – a mixture of care and thoughtlessness, emotion felt sincerely but expressed clumsily. It made me sad that Gray would never see the painting – he would have loved it.
I walked back downstairs and propped the painting up on the mantelpiece to show the children, then turned to the final envelope, feeling an immediate jolt of shock. On it was handwritten not my name, but ‘Nigel Graham’.
No one had called Gray ‘Nigel’ since the officiant on our wedding day.
I remembered asking him on our first date if Gray was a nickname, and if so what his actual name was.
‘Humphrey,’ he’d said.
‘Oh, come on. Really?’
‘Okay. Aloysius.’
‘Stop it!’
‘Sorry. It’s Percival.’
Then our drinks arrived and we’d changed the subject, and it hadn’t been until our first holiday together, when I saw it in his passport, that I found out.
When I asked him about it then, he’d laughed, half-embarrassed, and said, ‘Come on, Anna. If you were called Nigel, wouldn’t you change it as soon as you could? ’ And I’d had to admit that I would.
But whoever had sent this card still knew Gray as Nigel.
I slit open the envelope with a kitchen knife, not tearing it with my thumb as I had the others, and took out the card inside. No tasteful pond here, no muted watercolours on cartridge paper or tree clad in autumn foliage.
It was a white card embossed in silver. The number 25 was in the centre, surrounded by hearts and champagne flutes, their bubbles merging with the sparkly hearts and drifting towards the top of the page.
A silver wedding anniversary card. Except Gray and I had been married for only eighteen years and known each other for just twenty-one.
My hands were shaking as I opened it. The writing inside was elegant, written in royal-blue ink from a fountain pen.
Nigel
You might prefer to forget, but I haven’t. I think of you every day and hope you’re embracing them all in health and with happiness.
Love you still
J
The words shocked me like a kick to the stomach. Someone who loved Gray – who had loved him when he was Nigel. Whose love had begun or been consummated or formalised twenty-five years before. A woman whose name began with J, who Gray had never mentioned to me, not even once.
Someone – I found myself rummaging through Gray’s work bag, finding a spiral-bound notebook and laying it open on the kitchen table next to the card to make sure – whose handwriting bore a striking resemblance to Gray’s.
I checked the back of the envelope, but there was no return address. I studied the postmark and saw that the card had been posted in Edinburgh, a city I couldn’t recall Gray ever having visited.
I needed a drink.
I was alone with Augustus, and cats don’t judge, so I made a gin and tonic and went and sat in the garden.
Never again, I thought, would I hear Gray say, We should give that shed a sand and a coat of paint.
When he said, We should… like that, it meant one thing: it was a job that was officially his, which he was delegating to me but which I would passive-aggressively not do, and so it wouldn’t get done.
He’d first said it about the shed three years ago; it was still unpainted and now was likely to remain so.
I’d never be able to ask him who J was and why he meant so much to her that she had thought of him every day for twenty-five years.
What must that be like? I wondered. Would I look back twenty-five years from now and realise I had thought of Gray every single day?
Would I still feel this edge-of-a-cliff, terrifying grief, which switched without warning to anger?
Did J, whoever she was, think of Gray with that same impossible, conflicting mess of emotions?
The only thing that got me through those days was the prospect of dulling the ache each evening with several glasses of wine, so that at least I would be able to sink into oblivion for six hours, even if on waking my head throbbed, I felt sick and the fresh reality of Gray being gone hit me just as hard as it had the previous day.
On the day of Gray’s funeral, when Sarah arrived at half past nine in the morning, she found me in the kitchen pouring a gin and tonic.
‘Anna!’ She looked at me with horrified pity. ‘What are you…?’
‘Just got to take the edge off,’ I muttered. ‘It’s Gray’s funeral, after all. It’s what he would have wanted.’
I took a sip, the alcohol hitting me like a brick concealed inside a pillow.
‘Are you okay, love?’ My sister moved round the kitchen island so she could see my face. ‘I mean, of course you’re not okay, but… Is this…?’
‘I’ve been hitting the booze too hard,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not forever. Just until today. It’s not a thing. Don’t worry.’
She looked at me, concern written on her face as blatantly as a graffiti tag. Then she reached out and squeezed my shoulder before hurrying upstairs to check that the kids were up.
I finished my drink and went upstairs to get ready.
On the floor above, I could hear Sarah speaking gently to Barney and the shower running.
I showered myself, put on some slapdash make-up and dressed in the floral silk wrap frock Gray had always liked.
I’d lost weight since I wore it last, and I had to secure the neckline with a safety pin.
‘Mustn’t get your tits out at your husband’s funeral,’ I muttered to myself. Not that it mattered. Not that anything really mattered, except putting one foot in front of the other for the next few hours, until it was tomorrow and I could start afresh, scrape my life together and carry on.
‘Standing room only,’ I said, stepping through the chapel doors half an hour later.
The interior was dark after the brilliant sunshine outside, but I could see rows and rows of people, squeezed shoulder to shoulder on to the padded seats.
More were standing outside, where a PA system would broadcast the service, and still more would be joining via a Zoom link.
It had all been arranged. Probably some of it by me – I couldn’t remember. It must have been me who’d issued the instruction not to wear black, because Gray had always liked bright colours – so it was my fault that entering the chapel felt like stepping into a kaleidoscope.
Richard held my arm and steered me to the front row of seats, and I took my place between Lulu and Barney. I could smell flowers, but not see any – we’d asked for donations to the hospice instead. It must be my perfume, the Ana?s Ana?s I’d worn on our wedding day and never used any more.
I closed my eyes and kept them closed while the celebrant went into her welcoming patter.
I opened them when Carl came up to the front to read ‘Dirge Without Music’.
He must have responded to my email asking him to do a reading and suggested that, but I couldn’t remember agreeing or ever having read the words until I saw them printed on the service sheet I was holding.
‘More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world,’ he read.
I wondered if Gray had felt that way about Laurel. I wondered if he’d ever bought her roses. I hadn’t seen her in the chapel when we came in – but then it was so dark I hadn’t seen anyone distinctly.
I found myself hoping she was there. Gray would have wanted her to be there.
At last it was over. Lulu had started to cry about halfway through and was gripping my hand, a soggy tissue pressed against my palm. Barney’s face was blank, as if he’d never be able to feel anything ever again.
I needed a wee and another drink, equally badly.
I stood up, relieved to find that I could walk quite steadily back through the rows of faces, some contorted with weeping, some grave and still, some wearing careful, supportive smiles.
I was okay until I got outside, and then the sunshine hit me, my eyes went funny and I felt my legs disappear from underneath me.