Chapter 5 #2
She didn’t want to live there without Damien, for any length of time. The idea was beyond sad – but she thought it was what he would want her to do now, to stay until she could close the chapter properly.
I have to go back, she’d told her father. I have to finish what we started. I need to be there. I can’t explain it. She could have explained, or tried to, but she didn’t have the energy – and anyway, they wouldn’t understand.
I’ll come with you, her mother had offered. I can take a few days’ leave. We’ll go for walks by the sea, just the two of us – but Lydia had said no to that too.
I need to be alone now. I appreciate all you’ve done, but I need you to give me some space. I will move back to Dublin, but I don’t know when that will be. Finally they’d given in and brought her to the station, and she’d taken the train west as she’d done so often in the past.
Three weeks without him.
She pulled her hair into a ponytail and went to the kitchen.
She switched on the radio, and classical music wafted out.
She needed background noise, the silence unnerving her, but music without words was all she could countenance.
No lyrics were possible, no playlist of her favourites, for fear of the memories they’d stir.
In between the music she listened to news bulletins that meant little to her. Reports of crashed planes or erupting volcanoes or wars left her unmoved. What happened in the rest of the world was not her concern.
For breakfast she hard-boiled one of Greta’s duck eggs and chopped it into a mug.
Food was the last thing she wanted. She had to force it into her, pushing past a sickish feeling in her gut – and sometimes it refused to stay down for long – but her fridge was full, and Damien had hated to waste food, so she ate for him.
Three weeks without him.
The sight of Marian waiting at the station instead of Damien had caused more tears, and they’d clung weeping to each other on the platform as travellers had walked around them, looking elsewhere.
Would you not stay with us for a while? Marian had asked on their way to the village.
I don’t like to think of you in that big house all on your own, but Lydia was mindful of Tom who was grieving too, and Jack, who would have to be shielded from the worst of her pain, and she’d said no, she wanted Chance House.
As they’d approached the village, Marian had enquired whether Lydia wanted to visit the grave, and Lydia had said she didn’t.
On the day of his funeral she’d closed her eyes as they lowered him into the hole they’d dug for him, and she hadn’t been back there since.
She couldn’t face the thought of standing by a mound of earth, funeral flowers maybe still piled on it, brown and withering.
He wasn’t there. The Damien she knew, the smiling, positive Damien she’d loved, she still loved, was not lying there.
Three weeks without him.
Glancing through the kitchen window as she ate her egg, she saw that Gareth had arrived and was working in the garden, turning earth over with a fork, stooping every so often to lift something – a rock, a stump – and aim it into his nearby wheelbarrow.
She’d spotted him there several times since her return from Dublin.
He hadn’t rung the bell, had made no attempt to interact with her.
Giving her space, content to potter until she told him what she wanted next.
Maybe he thought the sight of him might help her, might make her feel less alone, and maybe it did a bit, but she didn’t go out to him, not yet.
Further down the garden, Noel the stonemason was working too.
Sorry for your trouble, he’d said, woolly hat in hand, ringing her doorbell a day after she’d got back.
I said I’d do up the shed, cocking his head in its direction, if you still want me to.
His cheeks ruddy from outdoor work, his eyes with no clue what to fix on.
She’d recalled their meeting with him before Christmas, a lifetime ago when she’d been happy.
She couldn’t care less now about the shed, but she hadn’t wanted to turn him away so she’d said yes, he could go ahead, and he’d shown up every day since, recreating the small building stone by stone, and she couldn’t remember if they’d agreed on a price, and it didn’t matter.
Brendan and his team hadn’t returned to the house.
Work had stalled while everyone took a breath, and it waited now in a state of limbo.
Brendan hadn’t been in touch since Lydia’s return, although he would have known from Marian that she was back, and Lydia hadn’t sought him out.
Nobody seemed to know what to do, now that plans had been dashed in the cruellest way.
She would never get used to the absence of Damien, the not-thereness of him. Not in bed beside her when she woke from fitful bouts of sleep, not uncorking a bottle of wine on the evenings he was at home, not humming in the kitchen as he beat eggs for her favourite French toast on Sunday mornings.
His was the name that would never again come up on her phone when it rang.
He was the owner of clothes that still shared wardrobe space with hers, still smelt of him.
Reminders of him were all around – the book he’d been reading on the bedside table, the top corner of page thirty-six turned down; the sad-face emoji that had been his last text to her; his welcome-home sign with its line drawing of a house – but he was truly, shockingly, agonisingly gone.
She called his number now and again, just to hear his voice: Damien here, sorry to miss you. Do leave a message and I’ll get right back. She wished it was longer. She ached to hear him say her name.
Three weeks without him.
She poured tea and sat, the music washing over her, the harmony of it bringing some tiny comfort.
In a corner of the worktop there was a growing pile of the Sunday newspapers whose delivery Damien had organised when they’d moved in.
Still coming, still being pushed through the letterbox on the three Sunday mornings since he’d died, the newsagent obviously thinking Lydia might still want them.
She should cancel them, but she couldn’t bring herself to cut this tie with her old life.
Brona came, as she’d promised, the weekend after Lydia’s return.
She’d arrived in her shiny black Beetle around lunchtime on Saturday.
They’d done a beach walk, all wrapped up, arms linked, not saying much.
They’d reheated something from the fridge for Saturday dinner and opened the wine Brona had brought, and she had mostly talked about the goings-on in Dublin, and Lydia had mostly listened, and then they’d sat by the fire and watched old comedies on Netflix, neither of them laughing.
And when Brona had got back into her car on Sunday afternoon, promising to come back soon before driving off, Lydia had been pierced with fresh loneliness, and the apartment had felt even more hollow, more empty.
Three weeks without him.
An unfilled prescription sat on the kitchen table.
A few days earlier a woman had rung the doorbell.
Avril is my name, she’d said. I’m the local doctor, I met you at Kathleen and Brendan’s house, seeing that Lydia had forgotten her.
She was somewhere in her sixties, empathy in the grey eyes, blue jacket missing a button, the auburn hair probably helped along by Marge in the salon.
She’d brought a brown paper bag of mandarin oranges, and a jar of honey.
Are you eating? she’d asked, and Lydia had said yes, and hadn’t said how little, or the trouble she had in keeping down very much. She hadn’t told her parents about that either, not wanting them to fuss.
Are you sleeping?
Not a lot – so Avril had written a prescription, and Lydia had thanked her and left it on the table. There were yoga poses she could do to encourage sleep – legs up the wall, child’s pose, supine twist, seated forward fold – but she did none of them, and no meditation either.
The benefit of no sleep was that she didn’t have to face reality crashing in on waking, bringing with it a fresh avalanche of loss. Lying awake was ongoing torment, but ultimately less painful – and meditation was simply out of the question, with its power to dig down and stir everything about.
Father Phil dropped by every day, usually in the middle of the afternoon, before darkness fell. He didn’t sugar-coat anything, didn’t tell her that everything would be alright, that she’d get over this.
You won’t get over it, he’d told her. It will always be there, but you’ll learn to live with it, because you have to.
Why do I have to?
For your parents. For your friends. For Damien’s memory.
I can’t imagine ever being happy again. This in a whisper, with tears streaming.
Time is kind, Lydia. Time is your friend. It moves slowly, but it will help you if you allow it, he’d replied.
He never talked about God, or His mysterious ways.
He didn’t urge her to pray. Instead he asked, every dry day, if they could walk to the end of the garden, and together they negotiated the path of boards and stood huddled in their winter coats as the sea moved before them, shimmering and cold, and she breathed it in, and it felt . . . medicinal.
On one of those days, out of nowhere, came the image of a little table on the strip of sand with a wine bottle and two glasses on it, another plan that had never happened, and more tears came, and he gathered her in and she pressed her face to his coat that smelt of gooseberries, and he let her sob into it until she was emptied out.