Epilogue #2
Because he had been insisting to her, both on visits and over the phone, that he was going to stop her doing what she meant to do, which was leave her house, her beloved house, to me, her friend.
“Apart from anything else,” she told him, “after we got Lindsay’s money back, she sank quite half of it into doing the place up. So many bathrooms!”
David said he would find a way to stop her if it took the last breath in his body. That’s how much he hates me. He hates me almost as much as Chloe does now. And the only person Chloe hates more than she hates me is David.
It was during the trial it changed. “What?” he’d said, in answer to a question. “My dear man, she’s a cleaner.” If I was going to feel a single flicker of pity for her, it would have been then. I fought the urge.
All in all, both of them look set to serve their long sentences distilling more and more bile and loathing until they corrode themselves from the skin to the marrow. It couldn’t happen to a nicer pair.
While we’re on the subject of pity, I almost felt sorry for David yesterday when Peggy and I visited.
“I have outflanked you,” Peggy said, over the table in the visitors’ room.
David sat back with his arms crossed over his grey sweatshirt, one foot drumming on the floor and a muscle flickering at the hinge of his jaw.
“I’ve outwitted you,” she went on. “I’ve scuppered you.
I’ve wiped the floor with you. Poor floor. ”
“What are you talking about?” he said. “I’ve barely started planning how to get that bloody house off you. Who’s going to argue your case once you’re gone? Eileen? She wants it to stay in the family. For the boys. Who else is there?”
“Oh, it’s going to stay in the family,” Peggy told him, calm and slightly amused.
God, she’s magnificent. I’m planning to be exactly like her when I’m that age.
“It’s all very straightforward. I’ll make a will, of course, to leave some little gifts to friends and to make a bequest to the memorial garden, but my home and the rest of my estate, as is very normal, will go to my spouse. ”
“Your what?” David said. It came out like a bark.
“My wife,” Peggy said. She waggled her left hand with the brand-new, bright wedding ring on the fourth finger.
I waggled mine too. It matches. White gold with a thin band of pink tourmaline running through.
We reckoned pink wedding rings were just right for—as Peggy insists on calling us—two girls.
Usually I wear Kai’s ring on my wedding finger and Peggy wears Richard’s but we swapped them that morning to show David. For effect, basically.
“Thank you for giving us the idea,” I said to him. “With your Aileen story. I never thought I’d get two step-grandsons before I was forty and, let me assure you, I’m going to be a wonderful granny to Edwin and Sean. But I’m going to be a fucking nightmare of a stepmother to you.”
“I’ve made her promise as much,” Peggy added. “For later, when I’m gone.”
It was mostly bravado. She wept bitterly as we drove back from the prison. I don’t know if she’ll ever get over what he did. What he is. But I’m going to help as much as I can.
I smile and lay my book down as she comes in at the French window. “They’ve got ten times more energy than David had at that age,” she says. That’s what she does. She mentions him in a normal way as if it stops some of the pain. “How are you liking Poirot?” she asks, dropping into a chair.
“I prefer the divine Miss M,” I say.
Peggy makes the tsk-tsk sound she always makes when she remembers that amongst Chloe’s other crimes there was this: She took a book and didn’t return it. We’ve replaced it since, but there’s no forgiveness.
Peggy lays her head back and closes her eyes.
“Or perhaps I’ve got ten times less energy than I had back then.
” She does that too: mentions her age, how little time she’s got left, how I must prepare myself for another widowhood.
I can’t bear to think of the day when I lose Peggy again, for real this time.
But I’ll have the children, my two and shares in the other two, and I’ll love all four of them.
All five of them. I rub my hand over my pumpkin stomach, my belly button sticking out like its stalk, and I look ruefully at my ankles.
I was terrified, after that night with David, that I’d find myself pregnant with his child.
Then, when my period came, I cried for three days.
The letter from the fertility clinic in Honolulu arrived just before Christmas.
I have no idea why Kai didn’t tell me. But I’m glad of it.
I couldn’t have coped with the knowledge when I was preparing to lose him.
He did it all on his own, as soon as he found out he was ill.
He banked sperm and paid for four years’ storage.
It was madness to think about paying for another four, halfway round the world.
I went over and had the insemination purely because the thought of them there, frozen in the dark, gave me worse nightmares than the ones I had about the six graves in Lord’s Yard.
Job done, I thought when I got home again. The last of Kai.
When I started being sick in the morning, I convinced myself it was psychosomatic.
The day I did the test, I sat in my new en-suite bathroom and howled.
Poor little baby, little embryo, little zygote it was then.
Welcome to your new existence. Have some cortisol.
Peggy heated me some soup and made me sip it sitting up in bed.
That’s when I listened to Kai’s last recording, for what I thought would be the final time. To feel close while I told him about the baby.
If you’re there, Lindsay, that means I managed to shift this file to somewhere you’re going to find it.
I didn’t want to leave it too long. I wanted to sound like me and I can feel my range narrowing every day.
Anyway. So I died, huh? What a downer. You okay, babe?
I want you to be okay. I want you to be happy.
I want you to meet a nice guy—not too nice, but solid, you know?
He’ll cope with living in my shadow if he gets you thrown in.
And then you and him can get started on those babies we were going to have if it had turned out that way.
Deal? We got a deal? Try not to mind them being basic issue and not the angels we would have made.
Love them anyway. And even if he doesn’t show up, just go ahead and have the babies.
Seriously, Lin. I’m not going to tell you not to mourn. I would be ready to burn the earth to embers if it was me losing you. So, mourn. Grieve. Don’t forget me. But be happy. You’re living for two now, sweetheart. You’re living for me as well as yourself. No slacking.
I try to laugh this time. I’m beyond being angry.
“On it,” I tell him. “All over it.”
I sit watching the counter, feeling stupid for thinking maybe he was going to answer me.
I’m swiping at tears when his voice comes back, making me jump because there’s no buzz, no background noise. Of course not. Kai was too good a technician for that.
I don’t know if I want you to hear this part or not, Lin. You’re in the kitchen right now, washing towels I threw up in. You’re trying to cry quietly and I’m so tired, babe. I’m so sc—
I jabbed at the pause button then and put my hands over my face.
In all the time he was ill, Kai never once said he was scared and only said he was tired in the usual way, after a hospital visit or some other kind of hard day.
This message at the end of the file was the only time I’d heard him tell me he was tired and known he meant tired of life, tired of trying.
But if he could say it—if he could live it—then I had to find the strength to hear it. I jumped it back five seconds and hit play.
—so tired, babe. I’m so scared. But my heart is bursting with love for you.
I am as deeply in love with you today as I was the night we met, the day I proposed, the day I married you.
Remember that day we ate lobster in bed in that stupid little B&B and they charged us for extra cleaning?
I love you today like I loved you then. I’ll love you forever.
“Why didn’t you open with that?” I asked him. “I would have listened to it every day.”
I could hear his voice in my memory saying “Yeah, I think I’ll play the brain tumour card on that one,” and I found myself laughing.
“I can see her!” Peggy says to me, startling me back into the present.
She peers over her reading glasses and points.
“That was a foot, clear as anything. I must say, I still find it odd to know she’s a she but I approve of these unapologetic maternity clothes.
A crop top! I went about like a cross between a nun and a toddler, which makes no sense at all whichever way you slice it. ”
“The boys don’t know where to look,” I say, running both hands over my belly now, trying to settle her. Both feet and both elbows going at once can still make me feel queasy. “Even Bunny’s a bit hot under the collar sometimes.”
“Wait till the breastfeeding starts!” Peggy says. Then she catches herself. “If you want to. I was scolded out of it by Richard’s mother and it was a great sadness. But of course, it’s up to you.”
“We’ll see,” I say. It’s what I say to the boys, my two boys, about some of their wilder plans.
About all of their suggested baby names: Dua, Billie, Kesha, Wing.
Myself, I like Kaila. It breaks open warm and round and it ends light and gentle.
Kaila Hale. Although Billie March is the happiest pair of words ever joined together.
But the boys will not get to name my daughter.
I try to strike a balance between giving them some leeway and keeping them grounded.
The latest is they want the old maid’s room, my dead room, as a gaming centre, because of the soundproofing and the Wi-Fi.
Peggy says she’ll never set foot in it again as long as she lives.
“Which, of course, might not be that long,” she adds, as if it’s an obligation. I pretend I can’t hear her.
“And you’re not going to be doing much audio work with a screaming baby strapped to your chest for the next two years, are you Linds?” Nicky says.
“Babies don’t scream for two years,” I tell him.
“Can we get that in writing?” says Zak. “And can we have the room?”
“We’ll see,” I say again. It’s the most important lesson I can teach them, I reckon—that none of us will ever know what the future holds and that’s okay. “We’ll see,” I keep telling them. “We’ll see.”