Chapter Sixteen

After Gwen and Dan had left, I did the last of the washing-up and took out a bin-bag full of slimy, smelly party relics. I made a mug of tea and put the TV on, and by the time I got to bed it was after two. It didn’t matter because the next day was Saturday. My plan, if it could be called a plan, was to sleep until I woke and then to go back to sleep. If I left my bed it would be to eat and then I would return to my state of hibernation. Instead, I was woken from strange dreams – grey, hard-edged, dark, slow – by the doorbell. I pulled on a dressing-gown and went down the stairs, muttering to myself like a bag-lady. I was expecting to have to sign for something but instead I found Fergus on the doorstep.

‘Did I wake you?’ he said.

I was still fuddled with sleep. ‘Did you forget something?’

‘No, nothing like that,’ he said.

‘What time is it?’

‘Breakfast time,’ he said, smiling. ‘Can I come in?’

I was genuinely tempted to say no and slam the door. But I stood aside for him, then went upstairs, had a shower and tugged a pair of jeans up over my tired, pale legs. I put on an old sweatshirt of Greg’s and found some slippers in the back of a cupboard. I could already smell coffee.

When I came down to the kitchen Fergus had cleared the kitchen table and laid out mugs and plates. ‘I found a muffin in the freezer,’ he said. ‘I’m defrosting it. Unless you want bacon and eggs.’

‘I don’t even want a muffin,’ I said.

‘Of course you do,’ he said. He took the muffin from the microwave and spread it with butter, then raspberry jam, and put it on a little side plate and gave it to me. He poured a mug of coffee for me and one for himself. He sat down opposite me.

‘Am I that bad?’ I said.

He smiled and sipped his coffee. I felt cross and tired and blurry, and his insistent cheeriness was irritating, like music playing too loudly. ‘We’ve been having a conference,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘The usual suspects. I was the one delegated to come and see you. Well, I delegated myself, really.’

‘It’s the chart, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I should have put it in a cupboard.’

‘We’ve not been looking after you properly,’ he said.

‘Everyone’s been looking after me,’ I said. ‘You came to my birthday party. I’ve been invited to dinner. People have put up with my deranged behaviour.’

‘You’ve not been deranged,’ said Fergus.

‘I’m just going through the stages of mourning: anger, bargaining, denial. Lots of denial.’ I paused. ‘Are they really the stages of mourning or are they the stages of dying? It doesn’t matter. I think I’ve had enough help. Maybe it’s time now to help myself.’

‘I’m not allowed to take no for an answer,’ said Fergus.

‘Says who?’

‘Says me and Gwen and Joe and Mary and no doubt other people as well.’

‘This is since the party?’ I said.

‘Some of it was at the party. But the lines have been buzzing as well.’

‘I wish people would just talk to me.’

‘I am talking to you.’

‘So what’s the plan? Is someone going to take me to the seaside? Are you clubbing together to pay for a massage?’

‘You shouldn’t be sarcastic,’ said Fergus. ‘It’s the lowest form of wit. The immediate plan is for you to eat your muffin, then show me round your house.’

‘You know what it looks like.’

‘Please, eat up.’

I nibbled at the muffin, feeling like a child who had been told off. It was dry in my mouth, hard to swallow. ‘I don’t need all this help,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t need it. He was your friend. You knew him much longer than I did. Losing him must have been as bad for you as it was for me, maybe worse.’

Fergus looked reflective. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever have a friend like him again. I couldn’t. It was something about who’d seen me drunk and being embarrassing, at my low points.’ He smiled. ‘And there were good things as well. Trips, girlfriends… Well, I probably shouldn’t go there. Anyway, this isn’t a competition.’

‘I should be looking out for you,’ I said.

‘First things first,’ said Fergus. ‘That’ll do. That’s enough muffin. Let’s go upstairs.’

As I walked upstairs with him, I suddenly remembered being about seventeen and my mum coming into my bedroom. ‘You’re meant to have tidied your room,’ she would say.

‘I have tidied it,’ I’d say.

‘Well, it doesn’t look like it.’

And so it would go on. It seemed to me that I had spent days and days dealing with my affairs, sorting out Greg’s stuff, generally getting things ordered, but as I saw my bedroom, the junk room and the spare bedroom through Fergus’s eyes, I had to admit that it didn’t look like it. If there are stages of mourning, there are also stages of tidying. The first stage is your basic untidiness. The second stage is deciding to do something about it. The third stage involves getting everything out of the drawers, cupboards and shelves so you can see what you have to deal with it. The third stage necessarily looks much worse than the first. I wasn’t sure about the fourth because I hadn’t yet got to it.

There were piles of Greg’s clothes in the bedroom. The spare room functioned as a sort of office. It had a nice view over the garden towards the plane tree that stood next door. We had never made it a proper office because we’d been going to make the junk room into an office and turn the spare room into a nursery, put up silly wallpaper with clowns on it or something like that. The spare bedroom and the landing were piled high with files, papers, folders and books, some of which were connected with Greg’s work. ‘It looks bad, I know,’ I said. ‘I’m in the process of getting it sorted.’

There was so much I couldn’t say, starting with the supposed excuse that one of the reasons I hadn’t cleared up the house was that I had been down in Camberwell, sorting out Milena Livingstone’s office.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ve already heard about this from one of my spies.’

‘Who was it? I bet it was Mary. If I live to be a hundred and spend the entire time doing housework, I’ll never live up to her standards of cleanliness.’

‘I’m not saying,’ said Fergus. ‘I’m not able to reveal my sources. What I can do is tell you the plan.’

‘The plan?’

‘Are you at home today?’

‘I hadn’t thought of going anywhere.’

‘Good. You might have some visitors.’

‘Who are they? What are they going to do?’

‘I think you’ll recognize them. What they’ll do, basically, is help you deal with this. Some of it they’ll do on site, as it were, but mainly we don’t want to be in your hair. We can take things away, sort them out. If you trust us, that is.’

I stepped forward and put my arms around him and my face into his shoulder, the way babies do when they’re held. I couldn’t see his expression. It might have been horror, for all I knew, but I felt his arms go round me. I stepped back.

‘This is lovely of you,’ I said, ‘lovely of you all. But it’s something I should be able to do myself. And it’s not just that. I want to sort this out, Fergus, obviously I do. But what I don’t want is to have Greg surgically removed from my life. I want his stuff around me. Not necessarily in piles on the floor. But for me to move on, I don’t need to have all this stuff taken out of the house and dumped in a skip.’

‘That’s not what it’s about. We just want to help you deal with it. If it’s a matter of privacy, if you don’t want us nosing through your things, then just say so and we’ll back off.’

‘That’s not what I mean. There’s nothing I want to hide from you guys. It’s too late for that. It’s just that I should be able to deal with it myself. It feels wrong.’

‘It shouldn’t,’ said Fergus. ‘Let us do it for you. When Jemma finally gives up on me, you can do the same for me.’

A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘Is there anything you’re not telling me?’ I asked. ‘Do you all think I need help? I mean psychiatric help.’

Fergus laughed and shook his head. ‘Just us. Honest.’

It still felt uncomfortable to have been talked about, as if a conspiracy had been hatched against me. An hour later Joe, Gwen and Mary arrived, looking a bit sheepish. I told them I felt terrible. This was their weekend. Didn’t they have obligations, people to be with? They hugged me and made apologetic sounds. I wasn’t sure whether it was more difficult to receive help or to give it. I made more coffee and we went upstairs to survey the chaos. There was some discreet muttering.

Joe gave me a friendly nudge. ‘It’s not so bad,’ he said. ‘Just think of it as some decorating that needs doing and we’ve come round to hang wallpaper and paint.’

‘Do you want me to show you what everything is?’ I asked.

‘What we want,’ said Gwen, ‘is for you to go out and do some shopping or have a swim, anything, and we’ll go through everything, and some of it we’ll put in boxes and take away. In a couple of days we’ll bring it back and then, at least, we’ll have been able to sort out one bit of your life. We hope.’

I thought for a moment.

‘I feel I should say no to all this, or feel resentful, but really it’s such a relief.’

‘Then go away,’ said Mary, and I did, though not before I’d rolled up Milena’s chart-in-progress and put it into my bag. There are some things even friends shouldn’t know about.

I swam in the public pool, washed my hair in the showers afterwards and put on some clean clothes. I found a café, ordered a pot of tea and read the newspaper. I walked up Kentish Town Road and bought vegetables and salad. When I got home, they had left. I went upstairs and it was miraculous. Almost everything was gone and everything that wasn’t had been arranged neatly on a shelf or a desktop. Someone must have found the vacuum-cleaner as well, made my bed and done the washing-up. There was nothing for me to do but make myself a salad, then clear up thoroughly after myself, in case someone came back to check.

The next morning Joe rang. He’d gone through Greg’s work stuff and most of it could be dealt with at the office. Anything personal he would drop back later in the week. There was nothing urgent. In the afternoon Gwen came round with a pile of files under her arm, all household papers. She had gone through them, reordered them and, on a piece of paper, she had written a ‘to do’ list: people to be phoned, bills to be paid, letters to be written. She had drawn a star next to the ones that needed to be dealt with immediately. She was being Gwen to me in the way that I was being Gwen to Frances, but I couldn’t tell her that.

I didn’t check my mobile phone the entire weekend. On Sunday evening I phoned Frances and told her I wouldn’t be in on Monday. I wasn’t sure I would ever be in again, but I didn’t say so. On Monday morning I went into the workshop, put on the CD player with something baroque, and began to attend to that man’s rocking-chair. I sanded it down with far too much care, not because I wanted the job to be perfect but because I found it reassuring to be doing something so physical and precise that I couldn’t think about anything else. Almost automatically, in a dream, I continued with the job, and when I woke from the dream, the chair was there, finished and perfect, almost too beautiful to part with.

When I got into the house, I rang the owner of the rocking-chair and said that, after all, I had found time to mend it for him, and he could collect it whenever he wanted. Then I had a long bath and afterwards I remembered I hadn’t checked my answering-machine, as if I’d wanted to keep the world away, just for the moment. There was a message from Fergus. I rang him.

‘Are you home?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘For the next ten minutes?’

‘Yes.’

He hung up. I’d barely got dressed when the doorbell rang. It was Fergus, but he was different from when I’d seen him in the same spot on Saturday morning, distracted, not meeting my eye. He walked straight past me and into the living room. He sat on the sofa and I sat beside him. Without speaking, he took something from his pocket and placed it on the low table in front of us. It resembled a large narrow playing card.

‘I think you should look at that,’ he said.