cherry blossom in the street was showering dusty blooms, leaving a pale pink underlay on the pavement. She reached for her mobile to check her messages. The blank screen was a stark reminder of how changed things already were and brought with it a fresh wave of grief. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d woken to a morning with no texts. Especially none from Ricky. He’d spend his nights sending her random ideas for the shows, feverish thoughts – and the occasional ridiculous demand. There had been middle-of-the-night phone calls as well, always in theory about some urgent piece of show business, but quite often giving way to monotone, paranoid monologues, where he lectured her on the failings of her production team.
There was no text from Hutch, either. Over the last few months, he’d sometimes send her funny, sexy, late-night messages – usually comments on the poems she was making him read (‘I’ve got that old letch John Donne in bed with me tonight. Unruly son. He’ll do/ But he’s not you.’) Elizabeth didn’t always respond to these suggestive texts; she was uncomfortably aware that they were sometimes sent when he was hiding in the bathroom or lurking in the shadows of his back garden. But there was nothing today. It was possible that he still hadn’t seen any of the gossip circulating on social media, and she hadn’t called or texted to tell him the news last night. She’d felt too drained somehow, too tired, too sick; she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Over the last few weeks – since Ricky’s party – she’d felt that in every conversation with Hutch she was dancing on eggshells.
She pulled on a jumper he’d left in her room the night before last, when he’d told her that he loved her and she’d allowed herself to believe the world was still rich with possibilities. She wandered barelegged into the tiny kitchen, opened the fridge door and drank milk straight from the bottle. Then she leaned against the long sash window, gazing down at the street, where a road sweeper was wheeling his barrow of blossoms while jabbering away on his mobile in Polish. The jumper still smelled of Hutch and she hugged it round her, closer. Ricky dead! How was that possible? The man who had seemed so much larger than life!
Elizabeth knew something about loss. She knew that things can be snatched away when you’re least expecting it, perhaps when you’re still not grown up, not fully the person you’re going to be. That you might get a phone call in the wrong place or at the wrong time of day and that moment will not only change your life, it will change your entire view of life. Elizabeth was seventeen when her dad died out of the blue. She was at school and she had to go and see the headmistress, who sat on the wrong side of the desk and looked very sad. She handed her the phone and Elizabeth could hardly recognise the voice of her mother, cracked and hoarse, the terrible words strangled in her throat. The school organised a taxi to take her home and Elizabeth knew even then, in the back of the cab, that she’d just learned a lesson many people escape ever having to learn: that the world can be very fragile and your grip on it uncertain.
Elizabeth made some tea and forced herself to eat some dry toast. She was always astonished to find her kitchen empty of anything resembling butter or jam. She knew these things had to be purchased with forethought from a supermarket – she just never seemed to have the forethought. Jamie, when he’d lived with her, had been good at keeping up the supplies, religiously filling out the Tesco order online, taking care to seek out all the organic options, replacing Elizabeth’s Jammie Dodgers with nourishing seeds and nuts. At times like these, Elizabeth hated living alone. She didn’t want to be by herself, this morning of all mornings. She missed the lie-ins, the cuddles, the cups of tea in bed, the cleaning of teeth side by side, spitting in unison into the basin. She missed Jamie.
Jamie! The day that should’ve been her happiest – her wedding day – was a year ago, almost to the day. Another terrible May day.
When Elizabeth told her mum the date of her wedding six weeks beforehand, the corners of Maureen’s mouth had drooped and she’d murmured, ‘Marry in May and rue the day.’ Elizabeth had been furious. But later she had to acknowledge that her mum, through some spooky umbilical instinct, seemed to know something then that Elizabeth barely knew herself.
The whole wedding had been a whirlwind, although she and Jamie had met in their first week at uni and had shared a flat for the last ten years. Elizabeth had assumed they’d just continue to live together and then – quite soon, she hoped – have a baby. Jamie had often described marriage to her as an outmoded, patriarchal, state-imposed institution and as a full-time feminist, Elizabeth felt that she ought not to feel excited about the idea of a day when everyone would treat her like a fairy-tale princess. (Although she and Lola did quite often find themselves poring over wedding dresses in Hello!, and she had really quite well-developed ideas about what she would wear, in the very unlikely event that the occasion might arise.)
So the proposal, when it came, caught her completely off balance. She’d been up to her eyes producing the latest series of Saturday Bonkers and was out of the door early in the morning and always home late. She and Jamie were hardly ever in the flat at the same time. He’d grown exasperated with her job, her hours, the Ricky Clough antics. He worked for a charity which educated women in Ethiopia about the spread of HIV and he quite often travelled abroad. He’d shown Elizabeth photos of the prostitutes lining the road to Djibouti, a long ribbon of tarmac known as HIV Drive, and she’d often wondered what those women in their brightly coloured kemis and embroidered shawls thought of her blond, earnest boyfriend, in his button-down denim shirt, squatting in the dust talking to them about condoms.
In an attempt to spend more time together, Elizabeth had suggested that they go to her nephew’s birthday party and stay the weekend in Manchester with her sister, Vic. Elizabeth adored her two small nephews and Vic in turn was fond of Jamie. Elizabeth had thought a family party might be healing, but in the end she and Jamie argued all the way up the M6 about whether or not they should sell the flat and buy a small house (Elizabeth was keen – she was secretly hoping they might soon have a need for a second bedroom – but Jamie dampened her hopes by arguing it was too acquisitive and bourgeois) and the tiff cast a cloud over the family reunion. Jamie was mostly sullen and distracted from the moment they arrived, and Elizabeth found herself overcompensating by being exceptionally lively and drinking too much. But during the birthday party on Saturday – just as she was acting out an elaborate scene from Toy Story with her nephews – Jamie suddenly seized her round the waist and murmured into her hair, ‘Hey Lizzie, you’re good at this. Let’s get married and have one of our own.’
Elizabeth looked up, puzzled by his change of mood, and in her best Buzz Lightyear voice said, ‘Excuse me, you are delaying my rendezvous with star command.’ But Jamie was looking at her very seriously. It wasn’t a joke. Vic paused in her pouring of lemonade and looked over at them anxiously.
‘Well?’ Jamie said more loudly.
Her nephew, Billy, who was Woody to her Buzz, took off his sheriff’s hat and threw it across the room, frustrated that the game had stopped. He looked up at Elizabeth with a chocolate-smeared mouth, eyes round and impatient. Jamie’s face paled. He looked suddenly young, very like the hopeful blue-eyed boy she’d met on a freezing anti-war march in her first term at York, when he’d offered her some soup from his flask and some socialist leaflets from his rucksack.
But marriage? Did she want to be married? To wear a ring that signalled I belong to someone else? And they’d been so distant with each other recently! She glanced over at her sister, whose mouth formed a small questioning O. Billy tugged at her skirt and she looked down at his sweet face. But oh yes, oh God, she so wanted that! She did want one of their own. She took Jamie’s hand. The hand she knew so well, every contour and lifeline, almost better than her own. How could she not accept that hand? Things would be better if they were husband and wife. She’d go home more. He’d be more communicative. They’d have a baby. Everything that felt wrong now would feel right once they were married.
‘Yes,’
