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‘I can’t,’ he replies. ‘I wish I’d never left the house in the first place.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘It feels like it is. I just… I just want to stay here for the moment.’
With Naomi, he is listless, almost mute. He expects her to become angry, but she confounds him with her patience, her seemingly bottomless empathy, her sensitivity.
‘I understand,’ she says, over and over again, sometimes putting forms in front of him to sign, sometimes asking to borrow his thumb for the app. ‘One hundred per cent. You’re not yourself, babe. Don’t you worry – you just take your time.’
He sleeps a lot. When he speaks to Miranda, he likes the sound of her voice, the normality with which she asks if he’s OK, if he needs anything.
‘Naomi has it covered,’ he says. ‘She’s doing the shopping, the cooking, everything.’
Miranda fills him in on any funnies that Betsy has said that day, as well as the progress they’re making on a luxury villa over in Colyton. It helps take his mind off things.
Naomi takes care of the funeral arrangements, shows him a photo of the coffin she has chosen, the flowers, the supermarket delivery for the wake. She lifts everything out of his hands as if to her it weighs nothing at all, and he is grateful.
‘We should sell the house,’ she says one afternoon when she has managed to persuade him out for a walk. ‘I can take care of the whole thing. It’ll sell in minutes; a property like that, in that location.’
‘But I thought we could live there. We could, you know, raise our kids there?’
‘Oh my God, no, Sam. I can’t live in the house where Joyce was… Are you seriously saying you could?’
He shakes his head. ‘I suppose not, not now you say it like that.’
‘And it needs hundreds of thousands spending on it. Tens of thousands at least. It’ll be a lovely project for someone who doesn’t have bad associations with it. Everything needs updating – kitchen, bathrooms, everything. You don’t want the kids growing up with draughty windows, do you? Dodgy electrics, inefficient heating? No, we need something modern, something clean – like my place but bigger. Here in Lyme if you prefer, or we could look further out. Tell you what!’
She squeezes his arm, excited now. Part of him bristles at her good mood. It is only nine days since Joyce died. But she is doing this for him, he reminds himself, to try and raise his spirits, give him something else to focus on, and he loves her for that. Of the two of them, she has always been the more forward-driving.
‘Go on then,’ he says. A smile fights to turn up the corners of his reluctant mouth.
‘If we sell Joyce’s place quickly, then when we get married you can move in with me. You know we said we’d do things the old-fashioned way? Well, you could carry me over the threshold when we get back from honeymoon. That way we can bank the cash and really take our time choosing. And when we find the perfect place, we won’t be in a chain, so we’ll have an advantage. It’s so competitive round here, especially since the pandemic. Everyone wants to move to the coast now, don’t they? And we’ll be in pole position. It’ll be a lot less stressful, trust me. I can ring round the estate agents, get them to notify us first, tell them we’re in a position to proceed immediately. It’ll give us the edge.’
‘You’re so good at all that stuff.’
She giggles. ‘Me and my spreadsheets are a force to be reckoned with. And you’re too shaken up. You’re vulnerable. I can help you by organising things for our future. You don’t have to worry about any of it, OK? Not one thing. My stars said, “Start as you mean to go on” today, so that’s what I’m doing. You just focus on getting better.’ She stops, kisses him on the mouth. It is the first proper kiss since before that terrible night, and it makes him want to cry, to curl up in her arms and let her take over.
‘You’re wonderful,’ he says, hugging her tight. ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
Because she is. She has stepped in like a guardian angel when he was at his lowest, and when he tells her this, she laughs and says he doesn’t even know what else she’s done yet, that she’s been saving it for a surprise.
‘What? What surprise? What have you done?’
She looks up at him, her head to one side, and plucks something from his sweater. ‘Joyce wouldn’t have wanted you to be sad, Sam – you know that.’
‘I do. I do, but—’
‘She had a good life. A long life.’
‘I know. It’s just—’
‘Sam, listen. Listen to me. D’you remember when we were gardening that time? Well, she told me that now she’d met Tommy, her life was complete. She felt like she could go quite happily.’
‘She said that?’
‘Totally.’
‘I didn’t know she felt like that.’
