her gaze on the kitchen table and tries to respond when it seems appropriate until her mother turns to face her and says something that catches her full attention.
‘If you need something to do, we could start clearing out Greg’s clothes and things.’
Emily is horrified at the suggestion. ‘Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, not yet.’
‘Well, I could do it for you.’
‘No! Don’t do that, Mum. I’m not ready. He…’
Emily had been about to say that Greg might still come back, but she closes her mouth as Josephine places a mug of tea in front of her. The tea looks as if it has been made without a single teabag. Emily blows gently across the steaming cup and sips at the hot drink. Her hands are unsteady, so she puts the mug down, making a face as she does so. The tea tastes as disgusting as it looks. She is staggered by her mind’s ability to think like this when she has just lost her husband. I’m a widow, she reminds herself, but it hasn’t sunk in yet.
‘That’s all right,’ Josephine says. ‘All in good time.’
Emily smiles weakly and asks her mother for some water to take her tablets. She holds the cool glass to her head for a while and closes her eyes. In her mind, she sees an image of herself as a patient, not in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Headington from which she has just been discharged, but in the hospital of her nightmares. The one she stayed in for just one week as a child. It was a long time ago, but the memory still haunts her. She opens her eyes again to make the image disappear.
Just then the phone rings, making Emily jump. Her mother rushes out to the hall, unsteady in her high heels. Then she teeters back into the kitchen with the handset pressed against her ear.
‘Well, I don’t know if she’s well enough to talk…’ Josephine’s voice trails off as Emily nods, holding out her hand for the telephone.
‘Hello? Emily Klein speaking.’
‘Sergeant Campbell, here.’ Emily immediately regrets taking the call. She has had a strong mistrust of the police ever since she was a teenager. And she has already taken a strong disliking to Campbell. ‘PC Constable and I would like to ask you a few more questions, if we may, about the crash,’ the sergeant continues, sounding almost friendly, much to Emily’s surprise.
‘Yes?’ she says expectantly. She starts to chew one of her nails.
‘Not now. Tomorrow. If you’re not feeling up to coming in to the station, we could come to your house. At three p.m.-ish?’
‘Fine,’ Emily hears herself agreeing while a knot of anxiety twists in her stomach. ‘What sort of questions?’
‘Just corroborating the statement of an eyewitness to the incident. It would be easier to do it in person. Tomorrow at three.’
‘OK. I’ll see you then.’ Emily tries to keep her voice even, but she can hear it quaver. Hopefully, Campbell can’t. ‘Do you need the address?’
But the sergeant, true to her original form, has already hung up. Emily becomes aware of the metallic taste of blood in her mouth and realises she has bitten her nail to the quick.
Why did Campbell say ‘incident’? Emily wonders disconcertedly. Surely she’d meant ‘accident’?
‘Was that the nasty ginger policewoman you told me about?’ Her mother doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘What did she want?’
Emily is still asking herself the same thing. ‘She and her colleague want to ask me some more questions,’ she says. ‘They’re coming round tomorrow afternoon.’ She picks up her mug and holds it to her lips, but she can’t bring herself to drink any more of it.
Emily wants her mother to reassure her; she wants her to say that this is normal police procedure after a traffic accident. After all, Greg died in this crash. And Emily was driving. She has been trying to shut that thought out, but she knows the grief and guilt will catch up with her.
Instead Josephine says, ‘I thought you couldn’t remember what happened. What’s the point in bothering you about it?’
‘Sergeant Campbell said she wanted to follow up a report by a witness.’
‘I still don’t see how you can help with your amnesia.’
Josephine pulls out a chair and sits down opposite her daughter at the kitchen table.
‘I’m not really suffering from amnesia, Mum,’ Emily says, avoiding her mother’s eyes and staring instead at the mark left by her mug on the table. She puts her mug down, placing it exactly inside the wet circle. ‘I’ve just blanked out the accident itself and what Greg and I were argu…um…talking about. That’s all.’
‘What did they say about that at the hospital? Will you get your memory back?’
‘I haven’t lost my…’ Emily begins, but gives up mid-sentence. Unbidden, the image of her car about to crash into a tree replays in Emily’s mind. She blinks and focuses on her hands gripping the mug. ‘They said it might be due to the concussion, or, more likely, the emotional trauma of the accident. I may never remember exactly what happened in the car. According to the doctors, that may be just as well.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s not the first time you’ve forgotten something important.’
Emily snaps her head up and looks into her mother’s cold, blue eyes. They appear magnified behind her glasses, but Josephine’s expression is inscrutable. Emily thinks she knows what her mother was referring to with that barb, but she doesn’t know what reaction she was hoping to provoke, so she ignores it.
‘And it’s not the first time the police have questioned you about a suspicious death.’ Emily is still holding her mother’s gaze and it takes her a split second to realise Josephine hasn’t spoken. This remark has come from a voice in her own head. Deep down, this is what she’s afraid of. What if Campbell and Constable don’t think it was an accident? If they find out anything about my past, anything at all, they won’t believe me, no matter what I tell them, she thinks.
Emily sighs. She feels irritable and overwhelmed. Her mother opens her mouth to say something, but Emily doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want to talk any more.
‘Mum, I think I’ll go and take a shower and then sleep for a while,’ she says, adding, ‘if that’s all right with you.’
‘Yes, that’s fine, Emily. I’ll potter around down here and make something for dinner later.’ Josephine slurps her tea loudly. Then she gets up to busy herself in the kitchen as Emily leaves the room.
Minutes later, as Emily lathers her body with soap under the scalding jet of the shower, she wonders how long her mother plans to stay. She immediately berates herself. Her mother is trying to be helpful. And, anyway, does she really want to be alone right now? As she rinses the shampoo from her hair, a line from the end of Perfect Blue Buildings, one of her favourite songs by The Counting Crows, comes into her head. But she can’t think of the tune.
Stepping into the master bedroom from the en suite bathroom, she notices Greg’s red jumper. It’s slung over the back of the antique chair next to his side of the bed. He wore it recently when they went out as it was rather chilly for a
