27

‘Drive me somewhere,’ said Colette, after reading the poem. ‘Drive me somewhere out of this city. Anywhere.’

So they got in the car and drove. They drove the usual way, a long, twisty crawl through suburban streets and shopping centres, until gradually the buildings depleted and green fields emerged. It was a pleasant spring day, a warm, low sun, a yellow sky.

Colette fell asleep in the car, so it was up to Aldous where they went. They ended up at Little Wessingham, the village they had visited many times the previous summer. Aldous parked in the small car park by the pub, two ponies staring at him over the fence, and beyond them the view across the meres to Welwyn Garden City and the Shredded Wheat factory.

Colette woke up shortly after Aldous switched the engine off. She looked around her, laughed at the ponies, then said ‘Why don’t we have a picnic? It’s a beautiful day.’

Aldous hadn’t expected his wife to be so full of energy, but she was soon out of the car and making her way towards the little village butcher’s and the grocer’s next door. There they bought food. There was a chicken pie in the butcher’s, the last pie in the shop. When Colette asked for it she heard a mournful voice behind her say ‘Well goodbye pie.’

They bought a bottle of wine in the grocer’s, and some rolls, and a small fruitcake and some cheese.

Aldous assumed they were going to have the picnic in the car, but Colette wanted to walk into the woods. There was a footpath that began at a stile beside the pub. They crossed this and walked across a field of pasture, made muddy at the start by the trampling of cattle, who were by now lying down in the opposite corner of the field.

Colette walked purposefully, as though to an urgent appointment. Aldous had to rush to keep up.

It was a walk they’d done many times before. They crossed a stile on the other side of the field and followed a winding path through a wood that was vivid with bluebells. The footpath slowly descended, and eventually came out on a bank above a river. Primroses littered the slopes.

They sat on the grassy bank. The river was a thick, swiftly flowing current lush with watercress and trailing green plant life. The view beyond was of the fields rising on the other side of the valley, topped by another wood. In the nearby mulberry bush were several mossy Corrida wine bottles, left as memorials to previous picnics. It was a place they’d begun to think of as their own.

‘Nothing has changed,’ Aldous said, though secretly he was worried about the way the old wine bottles looked so old. In less than a year they had nearly vanished beneath dead leaves and plant stalks.

They talked about the food. They commented on how delicious the pie was, the rolls, the cheese. Interspersed with this would be comments on the beauty of their surroundings, the sprouting mallows and pennyworts by the river. Now and then Colette would suddenly say ‘Look, a kingfisher!’ or ‘A water rat!’ and point to an area of the riverbank. Aldous, however, would only catch the retreating tail disappearing into a hole, or a telltale ripple in the water. But for most of the time they were thoughtfully silent. Until Colette brought the photograph out of her pocket. Aldous was surprised to see it. He’d thought she’d left it in the box. She looked at the picture of her younger self and smiled. Then she turned it over and read again the poem on the back.

‘He could have written it anytime.’

‘Let me have another look,’ said Aldous, reaching out a hand. Colette passed it to him.

‘He could have written it years ago,’ Colette went on, ‘or he could have written it the day before he died.’

‘We were so young then,’ said Aldous. Then, ‘I bet the farm’s still the same. I bet nothing has changed. I bet Mr and Mrs Evans are still there, don’t you think? The National Park authorities would never have given them permission to turn it into a caravan park . . .’

Colette ignored these remarks, which had been prompted by the location of the photograph – the beach at Llanygwynfa.

‘It has his recent voice,’ she said, ‘there’s something fresh about it.’

‘Yes,’ said Aldous, ‘that’s a good word. Fresh.’

After another period of silence, during which Colette continued to reread the poem, she gave a deep sigh and said, ‘Shall we kill ourselves?’

Aldous thought carefully.

‘How?’

‘The river. Do you think I would make a good Ophelia?’

‘Very,’ said Aldous.

‘We’d need something to weight our pockets with,’ said Colette.

Husband and wife looked at each other. Colette was the first to weaken. She began sobbing.

‘It has changed,’ she sobbed, ‘it’s not pretty any more.’ She folded her face into her arms, brought her knees up. ‘It’s not . . .’

‘We’ll find somewhere else,’ said Aldous.

Colette dried her eyes, gasped a little, then took another swig of wine from the bottle.

Then she lay down.

‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said.

The sun was as high as it was ever going to be that April day. Colette went to sleep very quickly. Aldous remained awake, listening to the river, wishing he had a book with him, or something to sketch with. Looking at his wife as she reclined on the grassy bank, her long, painted hair trailing out towards the mulberries, he thought that it would make a very good subject for a drawing. The awkwardness of her pose, the way the thorny strands of the bush seemed to be reaching out for her, as if to consume her. He thought about the painting he would do. Then he lay down and tried to sleep.

But he couldn’t. He didn’t feel tired. He lay as if asleep, however, for perhaps an hour.

Then he felt hungry, and sat up to cut another slice of pie with his penknife. He shooed two flies off the fruitcake, then noticed that a wasp was drowning in the wine. He let it drown. They probably wouldn’t drink any more wine that day.

Colette was in the same position. Aldous looked carefully to see if she was still breathing. There was a faintly discernible rise and fall to her breast. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock. They still had most of the afternoon. Aldous ate his piece of pie, and watched some rabbits in the opposite field.

After another hour Aldous was beginning to feel uncomfortable on the grass. His back was beginning to ache. He stood up and walked around, peed beside a tree, then continued walking in and out of the trees. He clambered down to the river itself, tried to see if he could see any fish or frogs. He couldn’t.

After another half an hour of this he really felt like going back to the car, but it seemed such a shame to wake Colette, she was sleeping so deeply, so peacefully. He decided to give her another half an hour. At four o’clock, if she hadn’t already woken, he would wake her.

So, at ten past four, he began talking to his wife to rouse her. But talking wasn’t enough. He had to shake her, gently at first, then more forcefully.

‘Come on,’ he said, repeatedly, ‘come on. Wake up.’

She opened her eyes, smiled at him, then closed them again.

Aldous thought that his wife must have had more to drink that morning than he realized. She was blotto. Out cold. Dead to the world. It was odd, though. She’d had no more than her usual couple of tumblers of White Horse that morning, then a few swigs of wine, perhaps half a bottle. When further rousing proved useless, Aldous wondered if they should resign themselves to spending the whole afternoon on the riverbank, to allow Colette time to sleep it off.

Then it began raining. The clouds had been thickening steadily since Colette had fallen asleep. The temperature had dropped, and now little bursts of light rain were beginning to fall. Still Aldous couldn’t wake his wife, or elicit from her anything more than a brief opening of the eyes, a murmured ‘go away, let me sleep’, or smile. The rain became heavier. Aldous had to pick his wife up (how light she was), and carry her over to the shelter of the trees. He put her down on a dry bed of golden moss, out of the rain, and looked back at the site of their picnic, a few yards away. The wine bottle was still there, and the remains of the pie in its foil dish, the bags and other paraphernalia. He was about to go and gather them up when he noticed large drips of water falling on Colette, and the volume of the rain increase from a mild hiss to a gravelly roar. He picked Colette up again and carried her through the woods.

He managed to carry her all the way back to the car, although he had to put her down and rest several times. She woke once, and laughed at him, before falling back asleep.

No one was around to see him carry his wife over the stile and across the lane to the car, or see the way she flopped and drooped when he propped her against the side of the car while he searched for the keys, though it was with great relief that he finally settled her in her seat. They were both sopping wet.

Colette didn’t wake on the journey home, though by the time they pulled up outside the house, she was conscious, and looking dreamily about her.

‘Are you alright now?’ Aldous said, ‘are you going to wake up?’

Colette nodded and she managed to walk into the house slowly, but once inside dropped into her armchair and, yawning deeply, fell asleep again.

Aldous unfolded the bed settee and made the bed for her. He carried her into the front room and laid her down to sleep there. She didn’t wake up.

Colette didn’t wake up the next day, not properly. She would wake enough to open her eyes, acknowledge her surroundings, drink some water, but she was asleep again within a few minutes. She said only odd words ‘hallo’, ‘thankyou’, ‘what time is it?’.

It wasn’t until Juliette came round on the second day that Aldous was pursuaded to call a doctor.

Dr Low suggested Colette was suffering from anaemia, and prescribed iron tablets.

‘I told you it was nothing to worry about,’ said Aldous triumphantly to his daughter, ‘just low energy. She’ll soon be fine.’

Juliette wasn’t convinced.

‘She’s not just tired,’ she said, ‘she looks to me like she’s wasting away.’

They tried the iron tablets. They seemed to bring Colette to consciousness for longer spells, though she wouldn’t get out of bed.

Colette had trouble climbing the stairs to the toilet. She insisted that she take up residence of the front bedroom, recently vacated by Juliette and Boris, but still bearing their traces. The coordinated decoration, the screen by the old sink, the carpet.

She had been a little hurt when Juliette and Boris had announced their plan to leave, having taken out a mortgage on an upstairs flat near The Lemon Tree. After all the effort they’d spent on transforming Janus’s old room it seemed rather a waste. But she was glad of the welcoming space they’d left.

‘It’s such a cosy room now,’ said Colette sleepily, ‘such a cosy room.’

When, after a week, Colette had shown no sign of improvement, Juliette called her own doctor. He recommended that she go into hospital.

So Colette spent a week in Hope Ward. The hospital took lots of blood from Colette, and conducted lots of tests. They tested so many things that they seemed to lose the thread of what they were looking for, it seemed to Aldous. Whenever he asked what was the matter with her, the doctors said they were waiting for the results of some tests, or if they’d had results, these results were dependent on other tests. After a week Aldous was no clearer on what was wrong with his wife.

In hospital she seemed to improve. She was sitting up and talking.

‘They’ve been telling me off about my drinking,’ she said, in an amused, almost pleased way. She seemed pleased that they were interested enough to notice.

Colette had stopped drinking. She had also stopped taking sleeping pills.

When she came home from hospital, she was back to her normal self for a few days, but the tiredness gradually came back. She had to retire to bed again and this time she seemed to fall into a deeper state of weakness than before.

She remained in bed for nearly a month. Because she had been in hospital, Aldous felt that the medical route had been followed to a dead end. They either had forgotten about her or had decided there was nothing that could be done.

Aldous, in the meantime, was taking on a full-time nursing role. He had to do everything in the house, the shopping, cooking, washing, cleaning as well as tending to his wife’s needs. When he phoned the hospital again, they sent around a home help, a brisk woman full of unwanted advice, who offered to clean the house one afternoon a week. It was Myra who eventually persuaded Aldous to call an ambulance. She hadn’t seen Colette for several weeks, and the physical changes in her appearance were more apparent to her.

‘She looks as though she’s turning into a reptile,’ she said.

Further tests were conducted.

This time the results were more decisive. The doctors declared that Colette was suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. She was put in an intensive care unit where she was fed with drips and her body condition monitored by a little assembly of machines. One of the doctors explained that she had only ten per cent of working liver left.

‘It’s a funny thing about the liver,’ the young doctor explained, ‘it withers away bit by bit, and you don’t notice because it can carry on functioning perfectly, even down to about twelve per cent. But less than that and it suddenly throws in the towel. So, in other words, you get no warning. Half your liver could be dead and you wouldn’t know anything about it. I’m afraid your wife’s down to the very limit of her functioning liver. Her recovery will depend on very careful control of her diet, and how she responds to treatment . . .’

After two days in hospital she suffered a stroke.

She lived for another five days.

During this time Aldous and the children visited frequently. Colette didn’t appear to comprehend anything that was said to her. When she spoke it was to utter incomprehensible, or seemingly meaningless, phrases.

‘Some terrible things have come out of the Matto Grosso,’ she said, quietly, as she twisted and turned. She appeared restlessly energetic in her bed, which had bars around it to stop her falling out. She constantly writhed in her white sheets, and her red hair was large, glossy and ruffled. She didn’t appear to be in any discomfort, just restless. Her hands had been bandaged to stop her scratching her face. She constantly bit at these bandages in an attempt to remove them. Over the days she talked more, though her words still contained no sense. She seemed to recognize Aldous, and would frequently hug him.

‘Orpheus and his lute,’ she said. They were the last words Aldous heard her say. She suffered a second stroke that night, and died.

When the phone call came, Aldous felt a curious sensation of strength. Of emboldenment. He insisted on viewing her body. The children went as well. He was glad they did because she looked beautiful, and in her motionlessness, peaceful. It was as though she was relishing stillness, in the way that athletes do when they’ve finished running, or a mountaineer when he reaches the summit and lays himself flat to bask in thin sunshine.