he breathed. She screamed and leaped away from the window. ‘It’s only me. I’m sorry, I thought it’d be a good surprise.’
He’d expected her to push up the sash and put her arms around him, but instead she glanced over her shoulder, held a hand up in conciliation to someone behind her.
‘It’s all right, Ed,’ she said, throwing up the sash window. Heath felt winded. What about Scotland?
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ said Ed. Even in his fury, Heath had room for a pulse of satisfaction that he’d been Ed’s first guess. He liked the idea of being at the forefront of Ed’s mind, wandering around in there with mud on his boots.
‘For God’s sake, Heath.’ Ed was still in the same outfit from the Instagram photo, and Heath had the feeling he’d somehow been tricked into visiting the Grange. ‘What is it with you and windows?’ There was something in Ed’s tone Heath hadn’t heard before. Usually he at least managed to feign civility for Cat’s benefit, but now a trembling dimple in one cheek suggested he was trying not to laugh at him.
His fingertips tingled. Something was very wrong.
‘What’re you doing here, Heath?’ said Cat.
The truth – that he had come here to claim her – sounded ridiculous now, even in its diluted version: ‘I had to see you, that’s all.’
She looked – was that pity?
‘All right!’ said Ed. ‘I’ve put up with your Jeremy Kyle crap out of politeness, but enough’s enough. You can’t just keep turning up here. I won’t have you upsetting Cat in her condition.’
In her condition. Cat’s glow: Ed’s newfound confidence. Heath went very cold, then very hot. She had the grace to drop her eyes, at least. ‘Due in February,’ she said. ‘Don’t look like that. I want you to be happy for me.’
But he had dropped his sports bag in the shrubbery. He was back at the Heights in nine minutes, a personal best. Izzy was still awake, after making her own raid on the drinks fridge, so he took her to bed for the first time in months. It was simple mechanics, drainage and release: it had to go somewhere, and Izzy was so grateful she cried.
February
Heath spent Valentine’s eve closing a deal for his next development with a new contractor. They’d be building in Hertfordshire on the edge of a nothingy plain they thought was real countryside. It would be his biggest project yet, and it got him away from women. It was bad enough seeing Cat’s body changing on a screen, without her parading the real thing in front of him. The men celebrated their signatures with dinner in the hotel restaurant. During the meal he’d left his phone charging behind the bar, on silent. After they’d shaken hands and parted, he retrieved his phone, and, in the second it took to register the twenty missed calls from Izzy, her number flashed up again over Cat’s picture.
‘I don’t know how to tell you this,’ she started, and he knew. He staggered into a wall as though he’d been shoved. ‘I’m with Ed now,’ sputtered Izzy. ‘Detached placenta. The doctors did what they could, but it was too late. The baby was a little girl. They’re calling her—’ He threw the phone at the far wall. The screen shattered Cat’s face into shards, then went black.
He bypassed denial and went straight to guilt. He should never have left her. He should be with her, holding her hand, catching her soul before it slipped away for ever. The impulse propelled him to his feet, but the vertigo lurch told him he wouldn’t get a mile up the motorway before he lost his licence or worse.
Anyway, he couldn’t trust himself to be in the same county as the child.
‘Triple whisky,’ he said to the barmaid, after she’d picked up the mess of silicone and glass. She bit her lip.
‘I’m not supposed to serve …’
Heath slid a fiver her way. ‘Charge the drink to the room, and that’s for you.’
She was a good listener, Lenka or Lilja, or whatever her name was, keeping the drinks coming, and nodding in all the right places when he talked about Cat.
‘I mean, what kind of hospital lets a woman die like that in 2017? More to the point, what kind of man allows that to happen to his wife? Put another double in there, that’s a good girl.’
He woke himself up the next morning by calling her name. The twist of his mouth opened up a deep scratch from the night before. There was vomit on the floor, and a single artificial fingernail snapped on the bedside table. Everything after Izzy’s phone call was a blur. He remembered the bar, note after note after note changing hands, and then his own slurred apology, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry, and a soft accented voice; I don’t want anything to do with this, you’re seriously messed up, you need help.
March
Ed sent a ‘polite request’ that Heath stay away from the funeral. It’s immediate family only, he’d said. I’m sure you’ll understand. A pathetic attempt to have the last word. Immediate family. What else was Heath if not that? They were each other, so where did that leave him now?
She was buried where she’d got married, the pretty, if weather-beaten, little church on the hill. The sky was a glowering pewter that matched the lead on the roof. Heath parked his old site van at an angle on a grass verge, and slung his tool bag on a random overgrown grave. It announced his intentions before he understood them himself.
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