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‘Aiuto!’ she cries. ‘Ambulanza!Someone call an ambulance!’
She holds back the worried crowd with her hands.
‘Lasciaci,’ she begs them. Leave us.
She unbuckles her backpack and lifts Emily out. Cradling their baby against her body, she lies beside her husband and strokes his face. On the floor of the church, their family must make for a tragic tableau worthy of Caravaggio himself. Churches always manipulate the light so well. They can make you think you’re in the presence of God when actually what you’re looking at is paupers’ money spent for the glorification of those in power. Ah well, her husband’s eyes are closed now, his mouth slack against the shining tiles. The baby grizzles. Samantha opens her blouse and lets Emily suck and be calmed. This infant, so tender and mild, this young wife, her old man. Around them, the soft buzz of those who stand observing this scene of aching poignancy: a bereft new wife lying on the floor so as to whisper tender words of reassurance to her beloved husband while their baby suckles at her breast. She puts her lips to his hot, clammy ear.
‘Peter,’ she whispers, pulls her head back so she can see him. She wants him to open his eyes. She wants him to look at her.
His eyelids flicker open. A deep, peaty brown.
She holds his gaze. ‘I know what you’ve done,’ she whispers. ‘And I know what you are.’ She leans further in and, at the risk of a tad too much religious symbolism, plants a kiss on his cheek. ‘Trust me, my darling. Time’s up.’
Peter gasps, reaches out. His eyes are open wide; he is trying to speak. She lowers her ear to his dry, cracking lips, feels his fingers clasp around her arm.
‘But you were the one,’ he croaks. ‘You. You were my—’
Rubber soles, shouts, bustle. A clamour of paramedics.
‘I love you,’ she cries over the shoulder of a man in a white overall. Someone helps her up and guides her and her baby back a little.
Her husband’s legs are all she can see of him, the rest white jackets who bend over him with tubes and plastic lungs. Their briskness contrasts with Peter’s utter stillness, and for a moment she thinks things might have gone too far. She holds Emily to her chest. Sweat runs down her back, tears fall from her chin, roll down her neck. Minutes pass. A paramedic stands back, wipes his gloved hand across his face, a gesture of regret and sympathy she recognises from hospital dramas on the television. A wave of nausea rolls inside her. She knows what this man is about to say, and with a sympathetic knitting of his brow and a sad shake of his head, he says it:
‘Mi dispiace.’
I’m sorry.
‘Oh God,’ she says. Blasphemes, there in the church.
Thirty-Eight
One year later
The dinner is rowdy. Samantha can’t hear herself think, can’t think for laughing, and the food is delicious. A huge pot of veggie chilli, baked potatoes, sour cream and soft, warm tortillas.
‘Sam, this chilli is the best.’ Aisha raises her glass and takes a swig of the cheap Pinot Noir – on offer in the supermarket: buy six, get twenty-five per cent off. They will get through all six bottles tonight, Samantha is sure.
‘Peter never let me make chilli,’ she replies above the din. ‘Said it was for plebs.’
Aisha rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t speak ill of the dead.’
‘I’m not speaking ill, just saying, that’s all.’
They exchange a look, the kind that only close friends can. In moments such as this, Samantha feels she is both here and not here, within herself and without, living her life now and contemplating the life she might still be living had she remained stuck in it. Her life now is as familiar as it is unrecognisable. But the persistent feeling of unease has gone. It began to fade the moment Peter breathed his last.
The decision to ask Jenny and Aisha to move in was easy compared to other, bigger decisions she has had to make. Peter’s house is enormous; their flat was tiny. Samantha was lonely, the idea of a new partner not something she could face for the foreseeable future. They insist on paying rent, but she charges them much less than they paid for the tiny one-bedroom flat, and of course they have their own rooms. Samantha gets to share her home with two funny, generous women, women who were always on her side, even if she didn’t see it at first. Her judgement of character has been ropy; she gets that now.
Her mother came to stay immediately after the honeymoon, to support Samantha in her grief and through the police investigation. It felt natural that she should stay on, and the rent on her little flat gives her a little income. Right now, Mum is wearing a wig that Jenny bought for a fancy-dress party they went to recently at another ex-UCL student’s house – another of Peter’s women, as it turned out. The wig is platinum blonde, and with Mum’s dark eyebrows she looks like old pictures of Andy Warhol, or a puppet, or a politician. Whatever, she looks hilarious, her eyelids are heavy with wine, and she is telling the rest of them that when Samantha was little, she would sleepwalk into her parents’ room and scare them both half to death.
‘You’d open your eyes and she’d be standing right there, pale as a ghost, with her dandelion hair flying about. All she’d be wanting was a glass of water, but honest to God, she used to frighten the living daylights out of us.’ Her mother pulls off the wig and smiles at her daughter. She looks happier than Samantha has seen her in years. She is studying jewellery design and elementary guitar at Richmond College, where Samantha now teaches English to foreign students and basic literacy to people who, for whatever reason, left school without learning to read and write. The work is emotional and hard and utterly without status, but she loves it. It’s poorly paid too, but money is not an issue. On her days off, she writes when she can. Short stories now, not poetry. Recent experience has made her a better writer; it has given her an edge.
They are all really quite drunk. Aisha is regaling the table with her latest attempt at internet dating, or rather, pre-dating: a Tinder exchange with a bloke who, she tells them, fancies himself as a twenty-first-century gigolo.
‘“I’m looking for a woman who isn’t afraid to be dominant”,’ she reads from her phone, and already the women are giggling like schoolgirls. Aisha holds up her forefinger and waits for them to settle down before continuing. ‘“I like the fact that you’re in running kit; it shows you’re not scared of strength. I can help you with that.”’ She looks up, her eyes wide. ‘Like, what does that even mean? But, wait for it, how ridiculous is this? He says, “I also like BDSM and would be delighted with a threesome if you have any attractive friends.”’
An outraged burst of laughter echoes around the table.
‘So,’ Jenny says, her head cocked at a coy angle. ‘When are we meeting him?’
