Chapter Two #2
The counter-argument was that a new home would give her something to think about other than her grief and how much she missed Hugh. And there was something tempting about living somewhere that had been saved by a developer from falling into total disrepair.
Could Hope Hall save her, she’d wondered as she’d driven towards the stately building that was cradled in scaffolding while work was being carried out to return it to its former glory?
And could she really see herself living here, in what the sales brochure referred to as an unrivalled idyll of luxury?
Of waking early to go jogging around the grounds and along the river.
Of going for woodland walks and breathing in the fresh country air.
‘I think you’d like it,’ Hugh’s voice had whispered to her in the car that day. ‘I know I would.’
More than two years on since Hugh had died, and she still occasionally heard his voice in her head. Now and then she still found herself laughing over something and thinking, I must tell Hugh that, he’d find it funny too. Then she’d remember and feel the weight of her grief all over again.
Then there were those times when she realised she had gone a whole day without thinking about him. It felt such a betrayal.
Her parents told her she was still in the early stages of grief, but was she? Shouldn’t she have found a way to be free of her grief by now?
‘But it takes time,’ her mother told her. ‘You’re doing won-derfully well, darling.’
She didn’t think that was true, not when some days she wanted to lash out and hurl blame at someone. But she never did. Instead, she internalised it.
She recognised the same symptoms in her mother-in-law.
The woman was in so much pain. She had lost her only child.
Her most treasured son. She never actually came right out and said it, but Nina knew that Hilary as good as blamed Nina for not preventing this awful thing from happening.
Nina willingly let Hilary spray-gun her angry grief at her, because why not?
It somehow made her feel better knowing that she was doing this for Hugh’s mother.
Keith, her father-in-law, regularly apologised to Nina for his wife’s behaviour and she always told him it was okay, she could handle it.
Her relationship with Hilary had never been what you would call close; they had each tolerated the other for Hugh’s sake, a state of affairs as old as time when it came to in-laws.
But Nina accepted that it wasn’t personal; Hilary would have treated any daughter-in-law the same way, as not being good enough, or not caring enough.
At the funeral, Hugh’s family had far outnumbered Nina’s. Hugh’s father had three brothers, all of whom had large families. Hilary had two sisters, and they too had produced a brace of children to add to the family tree.
‘We’re a wildly fecund bunch,’ one of the many cousins once said to Nina. ‘We breed like bloody rabbits!’
Hilary had been within earshot and had visibly winced, perhaps because she had only produced the one child and not a brood, or maybe because she found the word fecund distasteful.
The funeral had passed in a blur for Nina; she had nodded her head, shaken hands, and said what she was expected to say, but she had behaved robotically, just going through the motions of what was required of her.
Her friends and her mother and father had been with her, along with her brother – her sister-in-law was minding their two children – and they had formed a protective shield of love and support around her.
At the end of it all, when the coffin had slid through the curtains and out of view and Hugh’s beautiful body would then be turned to ash, Nina had wanted to go over to Hilary and say, ‘I know how much you’re hurting. I really do. It’s the same for me.’
But she didn’t dare, not when it might break the dam of Hilary’s emotions. It might make Hilary throw it back in Nina’s face, spitting out the words – ‘You’ll never understand how I feel! Never!’
A few days after the funeral, Nina’s brother and his family flew back to San Francisco, but Mum and Dad stayed on to be with her.
Eventually the time came when Nina knew they had to go, it was time for her to stand on her own two feet and get on with life.
Selfishly she wanted to be alone, or more accurately, to be alone with Hugh.
She wanted to be able to talk to him, to come home from working in the gallery and tell him how her day had gone, just as she’d always done when he’d been alive.
She wanted to lie in bed at night imagining him there beside her, breathing in the smell of him.
Every night she took his favourite bottle of cologne and dabbed a few drops of it onto his side of the bed.
Parking her car in her allotted space in front of the garage block, she crossed the gravelled courtyard, tapped in the passcode to let herself in at the side entrance, then after collecting her post from the mailboxes in the oak-panelled entrance foyer, she climbed the thickly carpeted stairway to her apartment.
Once inside, she kicked off her shoes and went from the hallway with its white marble floor to the large open-plan kitchen, which was flooded with late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the large leaded bay windows.
She put her laptop bag and handbag on the central island unit and went over to the kettle to make herself a mug of camomile tea.
While she waited for it to boil, she sat on one of the window seats and flicked through the mail for anything that looked important or interesting.
A good-quality envelope with her address written by hand on it looked and felt very much like an invitation.
She opened it and saw that she was right.
The youngest of Hugh’s cousins on his mother’s side of the family, Fabian Irving, was marrying and the honour of Nina’s presence was requested to join in with the service and the reception, when there would be dinner and dancing.
There was no mention of a plus- one; the invitation was solely for Nina.
Part of her was grateful, it meant that the memory of Hugh was being respected. But then it would be unthinkable to the family that Hugh could be replaced in any way.
Yet hand in hand with that gratitude was a small glint of annoyance. Was she expected to remain a widow for the rest of her life, never to attend another function with somebody else at her side?
As the kettle clicked off, she rose from the window seat and went over to make her drink.
She was being overly sensitive, she told herself, while filling a mug and then dunking a camomile teabag into the water.
The invitation had been sent with all the right motives, because really there was no need for Hugh’s family to include her in any of their big occasions, or get-togethers.
It was a kindness on their part to invite her.
As kind as they were, she sometimes wished she could cut the tie.
Whenever she was with his family all they wanted to do was talk about Hugh and recall the times they’d spent with him.
How for the much younger ones he’d been their hero, the one they lived up to.
For the older ones, they had endless stories about pranks they’d pulled off together, invariably instigated by Hugh.
They didn’t seem to realise how painful it was for Nina to listen to their tales.
Was she wrong to want to cut the tie? But if she didn’t, how could she ever move forward when they gave the impression that they didn’t want her to?
Hugh’s mother would be appalled at the very idea of Nina ever meeting someone new.
Not that there was any danger of that happening anytime soon.
Which was why she had been silly to be annoyed by the omission of the words plus one on the wedding invitation.
Taking her drink over to the window seat, she resumed the task of dealing with the rest of the mail. That was when she found the letter from the clinic in Cambridge where she and Hugh had been undergoing IVF. Opening the envelope, she unfolded the letter and braced herself.
She had known this day would come and that she would have to make one of the most important decisions of her life, but she still wasn’t ready. It was never meant to be like this. She and Hugh were supposed to do this together and only when they were absolutely sure they were doing the right thing.