other.’
Connie smiled. ‘I’d like that too. But I am home.’
The evening was finally over. Connie walked the empty side-roads back to her house, the way ahead a pale thread between black walls of dense greenery. It was a still night, and she brushed the trailing filaments of spiders’ webs from her face.
When she reached home, she saw that there was a small, motionless figure sitting on a stone at the point where her path diverged from her neighbours’. The figure took on the shape of Wayan Tupereme.
‘Wayan? Good evening.’
He got to his feet and shuffled to her in his plastic flip-flops.
‘I have a grandson,’ he said. ‘Dewi had a son tonight.’
Connie put her hands on his shoulders. The top of his head was level with her nose.
‘That’s wonderful news. Congratulations.’
Dewi was his youngest daughter, who had married and gone to live with her husband’s family. Wayan and his wife missed her badly.
He nodded. ‘I wanted you to know.’
‘I’m so pleased. Dewi and Pema must be very happy.’
‘We all are,’ the old man said. ‘We all are. A new baby. And a boy.’
‘Nearly there,’ Bill said unnecessarily, but in any case Jeanette’s head was turned away from him. She seemed to be admiring the bitter green of the hawthorn hedge and the froth of cow parsley standing up from the verge. It had rained earlier in the day but now the sky was washed clear, and bars of sunshine striped the tarmac where field gates broke the line of the hedge. ‘Nearly there,’ he repeated. Conscious of the bumps in the road, he tried to drive as smoothly as he could so she wouldn’t be jarred with pain.
Their house was at the end of a lane, behind a coppice of tall trees. Jeanette had found it, two years after Noah was born, and insisted that they buy it. Bill would have preferred to be closer to town but in the end he had given way to her, and he had to concede that she had been right. They had lived there for more than twenty years. Noah had grown up in the house, had finally left for university and then gone to live in London; Jeanette and he were still there. It would be their last home together. Lately they had talked about moving, maybe into town, to a minimalist apartment with a view of the river, but it had been just talk.
He swung the car past the gateposts and stopped as close as he could to the front door. Jeanette did turn her head now, staring past him and up at the house. It had a steep tiled roof with mansard windows that had always made him think of eyes under heavy lids. A purple-flowered clematis and a cream climbing rose grew beside the front door, the colours harmonising with the dusty red brick of the house. Bill didn’t know the names of the varieties, but Jeanette would. She was a passionate gardener.
He turned off the ignition and the silence enveloped them. He took his wife’s hand and held it. He wanted to crush it, to rub his mouth against the thin skin, somehow revitalising her with his own heat, but he didn’t. He just let her fingers rest in his.
Jeanette’s eyes were on him now.
‘Are you ready to go inside?’ he asked.
She nodded.
He helped her out of the car and she leaned on his arm as they made their way. Once they were in the hallway she indicated that she wanted to stop. The parquet floor was warmed by the late sun, the long-case barometer indicated Fair, there was a pile of unopened post on the oak table next to the big pot of African violets.
‘Good to be home?’ Bill asked.
– Yes, Jeanette said. – Thank you.
But he could feel the rigidity of her arm, and her neck and her spine. Her fingers dug into his wrist. Gently he urged her forwards, thinking that he would establish her in her chair beside the French windows so that she could look out into the garden while he made her a cup of tea. She let him lead her but instead of sinking into her chair she stood and gazed at the room. It looked as it always did.
Her sudden movement startled him.
Jeanette broke away and snatched up a stone paperweight that stood on the glass-topped table. She raised her thin arm above her head and brought it down. There was a crack like a rifle-shot as the glass shattered. She lifted the paperweight once more and smashed it down again, this time catching the rim of a porcelain bowl and sending it spinning to the floor. Jeanette swung the paperweight a third and a fourth time and the tabletop shivered into a crystalline sheet. She kept on and on, her arm pumping in a series of diminishing arcs until she had no strength left.
Appalled, and with a shaft of pain in his own chest that left him breathless, Bill tried to catch her wrists. She threw the paperweight away from her and it thudded and then rolled harmlessly on the rug. She clenched her fists instead and pounded them against Bill’s chest. Her mouth gaped and her head wagged and gusts of ragged sobbing shook her body.
Jeanette had been deaf since birth. The sounds she was making now were shapeless bellows of anguish.
He managed to catch her flailing arms and pin them to her sides.
‘I know,’ he crooned. ‘I know, I know.’
She was gasping for breath, tears pouring down her face and dripping from her chin. She was too weak to sustain the paroxysm of rage. It subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving her shuddering in his arms. Bill stood still and held her, smoothing the tufts of her pale hair. When he thought she could bear it he took out his handkerchief and dried her cheeks. At length he was able to steer her towards the chair and she sank down. He brought up the footstool and sat close against her knees.
Her wrists and fingers were limp now. It cost her a huge effort to speak.
– I don’t want to die.
Her words came as loose, blurted outbursts. Bill was the only person she trusted to decipher what she said. Even with her son, she preferred to use sign language for almost everything.
‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You aren’t going to die yet.’
Jeanette gazed into his face, searching for the truth.
She had always told him, from when they first knew one another, that he was easy to lip-read because he had a generous face. Some people were costive, keeping their lips pinched in and biting their words in half as if they were coins they were unwilling to spend, but not Bill Bunting.
– No?
‘No, you are not,’ he said firmly.
The oncologist had told them that she might have six months. It could be rather less, just conceivably more, but six months was what he thought they should allow.
Her head drooped.
– I’m sorry, she said.
‘It
