at his four-year-old Volvo. ‘Get in. Decide on the way home. You’re eating supper.’ Theo had seen too many young people – and not just girls – through the surgery with either the start of, or a fully developed, eating disorder. It was his natural instinct to want to make his son eat. He bit his lip. ‘You really not hungry?’
Finn didn’t reply.
‘You understand you have to eat to give you energy to do things like your climbing … You need to eat the calories in order to have them to spend.’
‘So you tell me all the time.’
Theo took in Finn’s profile as he stared through the windscreen putting his seatbelt on.
‘What would you like?’ he asked.
‘Just some tea and toast,’ Finn shrugged.
‘Tea and toast it is.’ He was in no mood for a spat.
In his son’s room, Theo picked two books up from the floor and placed them on his bedside table. The top one was a young person’s guide to computer technology, his last year’s fixation. The second, a thick tome on the whole question of whether we’re alone in the universe. The laptop, closed on his bedside table, would, Theo knew, be open up to Minecraft, his digital obsession and something he often played with his school friends online.
Theo leaned over Finn’s sleeping form, smoothed his son’s fringe away from his forehead, bent down and kissed his head. He noted the determined line of his chin, even in sleep. He got that from him. Next, the colour of that forelock he had just touched. That was exactly the same shade as his mother’s. He also smelled the faint hue of tobacco from it.
You will be all right, he told himself, as he imagined Finn outside some shopping mall, hanging out with boys Theo didn’t recognize, pursing his lips as he pulled on a cigarette. Or, worse, having the audacity to hang out of his rear bedroom window teaching himself to inhale. You will be able to do this.
In bed, he lay awake for a very long time. Whatever way he tried to settle, he couldn’t. On his right side, he had stared at Harriet’s pile of pillows for at least an hour, until he finally tossed them onto the floor. He moved his own two pillows and himself into the centre of the bed, then got up and rearranged the whole thing as it had been. He didn’t want Finn to see that; to see parts of his mother vanishing from the house, from his bed.
From his left side he thought of sex; it was three months since he’d had sex. Harriet and his sex life had been brilliant; so brilliant that even when he’d known there was something wrong, he had convinced himself it didn’t matter. He sighed loudly, thumped his pillow and turned over again, stared at the narrow strip of light under the door from the landing. Beyond the door was his study, then Finn’s room and, further along, Bea’s room. He thought of her, twenty-three years old, almost the same age as Anna. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that he was wide awake and any hope of sleep was gone.
His watch said 01:35 when he threw back the duvet, removed a dressing gown from a hook on the back of the door and moved silently to his study. There, he switched on the light and removed a book from one of the shelves. He settled himself into the reading chair; a recliner that Harriet had bought for him years ago. The book lay open on his lap. His reading glasses lay on top of the book. She was everywhere. The life that was; the one they had together, was everywhere – in the pillows, in the chair, all around. He should move, he thought, before dismissing the idea as a bad one for Finn’s sake. This was his son’s home – he just needed to get a grip.
Downstairs, he boiled the kettle and made himself a coffee, paced the floors of every room before settling in the front living room. He stood on a dining chair and unhooked each curtain slowly, allowing each one to curl into two separate piles on the floor flanking the window. He got down and stood back. That was better. There was, he told himself, as he attempted to fold the piles into something the charity shop would accept, no point at all to them.
Next he climbed the stairs and, after retrieving a suitcase from under the bed, began to pack Harriet’s clothes. He had no idea of what order she would like them in, what way she would have done it, but they had to go. If anything at all was to be gained by a sleepless night, by the conversation he’d had with her yesterday rolling over and over in his head like a worn-out loop, he had to move on from that day in December. And removing her scent from their bedroom seemed like the best start. It only served as a reminder of his failure, of their failure. He slipped her shirts from their hangers one by one, placed them in the case. He removed her jumpers, already folded, put them on top. Trousers were laid, one crease only, the way Harriet liked them. He filled the suitcase quickly, moved his clothes into the empty space, took his aftershave from the en suite and sprayed it all over the inside.
As quietly as he could, memories of many Christmas Eves in his head, he went to the landing and pulled down the loft stairs. From the top of the stairs he removed a large holdall he and Harriet had used on their skiing holidays. He pushed the full suitcase back under the bed, made sure there was enough room for the holdall on the other side – Harriet’s side. Within an hour he had removed all of his wife’s clothes from the wardrobes they shared, from the drawers she used. He placed his hand on the empty hangers, moved them left to right along the hanging rail, spaced them out to try and hide the stripped reality.
At 03:12, he climbed into bed, knowing he had an early practice meeting at the surgery five hours later. He was exhausted as he pulled the duvet over himself one more time. His head throbbed; a steady pulsing beat. He swallowed two paracetamol, then fell into a restless sleep, where one moment he was skiing with Anna and a holdall full of Harriet’s clothes, and the next, a nameless Frenchwoman’s head was smiling at him from Harriet’s pillow.
Five minutes before he needed to leave the next morning, Theo sat fully dressed on his son’s desk chair. He watched as Finn rubbed the sleep from his eyes and growled like a bear as his hand swiped his phone alarm off.
‘Morning, son,’ Theo said.
‘Dad! You scared me!’ Finn sat up straight, shielding his eyes with an angled arm as Theo switched on his bedside light.
‘There’s been more rain overnight; looks cold and wet out there,’ Theo said, before taking a seat again. ‘I have an early meeting so Bea will take you to school. Wrap up warm.’
Finn slumped back on his pillow. ‘Right.’
‘Finn, I’d like you to sit up, please.’
Something in his tone seemed to make Finn listen. He straightened up, his back against the wooden headboard, his slim pillow bunched behind him. ‘What?’ he asked.
‘Just wanted a word,’ Theo replied as he reached across to Finn’s bedside table and lifted his laptop. Finn’s eyes widened. ‘What?’ he repeated, not before Theo had already noticed something very close to panic in his eyes.
‘I want to show you something.’ Theo spoke as his fingers moved on the keyboard. He kept the laptop on his knee, turned it around to face the screen at Finn. ‘See that?’
His son leaned forward. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘That is something I deal with regularly. That is a smoke-damaged lung. It belongs to a thirty-three-year-old woman with lung cancer.’
Finn was so silent, Theo could hear his breathing. ‘And listen, hear that? That’s you breathing slightly anxiously because you don’t know what to say. That’s your still-healthy lung breathing in and out, doing its job.’ He
