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The book shows him a mother who put herself before her child. It’s true, she has never been a natural mother. Her lover had died and work became her escape. Did she blame Nick for her lover’s death? Is that why she couldn’t bear to stay at home and look after him? No wonder it has always been so difficult between her and Nick. And Robert has covered up for her, smoothed things over, always been there to support her, tried hard not to make her feel guilty, never criticized her, never judged her. Until now. An image from one of the photographs comes back to him. He tries to push it away and focus on the present, but he sees the past. Catherine showering on the beach, her neck arched, her eyes closed as the water runs down her face and body, a smile on her lips. She is enjoying being looked at. His hand is shaking again and he clenches his fist, pushing it under the table. All the tension he’s buried for years, thoughts he’s never allowed himself to think before, rise up.

He loved her though. If she’d told him about her affair at the time, he could have forgiven her. But not now. He bites the inside of his cheek to stop himself crying. He would have done anything for her. He’d wanted to have more children, but even that he’d given up without a fight. She never actually refused, she just managed to keep coming up with excuses until it was too late. He’d wanted Nick to have a brother or sister; he thought it would take the pressure off him.

A piece of paper lands on the table in front of him. Information he should be reading; details he should be taking in. He picks it up and hides behind it. He has a vague memory of Nick wanting the dinghy, or something inflatable, and they had agreed it was not a good idea. Nevertheless she had bought it for him, when Robert had gone home, and she hadn’t watched him, she hadn’t looked after him, and someone else’s son died to save Nicholas. But whose? Who wrote this book? The girlfriend? A parent? The old man who dropped off the photos? That poor old man. A bastard thing to do, but can he really blame him? Should Robert thank him for what his son did? He should be grateful, though he can’t manage gratitude yet. If
John
, or whatever the fuck his name was, hadn’t been there,
Charlotte
wouldn’t have been so fucking distracted and perhaps she would have stopped their son going into the sea on his own. And if Robert had been there, none of it would have happened.

There’s a throbbing mass in Robert’s head. Another in his stomach. Dark lumps of something he has not felt for years. Jealousy. Not green, but black and dense. He is jealous of this dead youth who had an affair with his wife and saved his child. Who, a long, long time ago, in a faraway land, cut off Robert’s balls without him even realizing it. He wonders how many times Catherine has thought of this boy when she has been with him? How many times has she compared the sex? Does she fake it with him? Sometimes? Always? And Nicholas. Nicholas, who can’t even remember the young man who saved his life – which to Robert makes
John
seem even more heroic. Unsung. A martyr. He flicks through the pages in his head. Robert barely gets a mention. He is a minor character who doesn’t even merit a name. Her husband.

He sinks into himself, drooping like a stakeless plant. The words have stopped. The room is quiet. He looks up. All eyes are on him, but he cannot read them. Are they waiting for a response? Are they watching him with curiosity? What do they see?

‘A lot to think about,’ he says, and is reassured by the sound of his voice, deep and rich. He stands up, his authority here at least still intact. The meeting is over and everyone trickles from the room.

He will get in touch with the family – find out who they are and talk to them. The least Robert can do is let them know that he is grateful for their son’s bravery and to try and make up for his wife’s failings as a human being. First though, he must look after Nicholas, bring him under the protection of his wing. He picks up his phone.

‘Nick? Really enjoyed seeing you the other night … Listen, can we do it again? Are you free tonight? There’s something I want to talk to you about.’

31

Summer 2013

When Jonathan died, Nancy shattered. Her mind shrank into a small, dark thing and all she could think about was our son’s absence. One step at a time, one day at a time, I kept telling her. But I couldn’t reach her. I was no use to her. I remember one day, it was about two months after his death. I’d been waiting for her downstairs. I had persuaded her to come for a walk. It was an achievement even to get her to agree to that. It was mid-afternoon and she was still in her dressing gown. She went upstairs to put on some clothes and I sat in the living room, waiting for her. She was slow – everything she did then was slow. I didn’t want to hurry her because I was afraid that if I went upstairs to chivvy her, she would change her mind. And anyway I could hear her moving around. I heard a drawer being opened, the wardrobe door closing. She was getting dressed; she was heading in the right direction. Then after a while I didn’t hear anything, so I went up.

I expected to find her lying on the bed, but she was in the bathroom. She was fully clothed and had climbed in the bath, which, it turned out, she had run hours earlier. She was lying in freezing cold water, dressed for a walk out with me. Her head was under the water, her eyes and mouth open. I dragged her out. She was heavy, sodden. She told me she wasn’t trying to kill herself. She just wanted to know what it had felt like for Jonathan. She wanted to know whether drowning had hurt. She wanted to find out for herself whether it was as painless as everyone said – whether you passed out before dying. She was angry with me for denying her this almost-shared experience, but she acknowledged the flaw in her experiment: that the fear and loneliness of being swallowed by a vast ocean cannot be replicated by submersion in an avocado-coloured plastic tub in the safety of your own home.

Acute empathy, you could say, had become Nancy’s extreme sport of choice. She was the most empathic of people, and yet even she knew she was seeking the impossible. But still she tried. If anyone was capable of understanding how someone else felt, it was Nancy. There weren’t as many layers between her and the world as there were with the rest of us. She had that rare ability of being able to stand in someone else’s shoes and get inside their skin. There had been many a time, before Jonathan died, when she had tried to help me do the same. If I was angry or upset about something, she would coax me with: ‘Try to see it from their point of view,’ or ‘Try to imagine what they might be feeling.’ And I did try, but I never quite succeeded. Nancy felt too much though, that was the problem.

She stopped working because she couldn’t face being with children any more, so I worked for both of us, to keep life ticking over. A kind of life anyway. We should have sold our house and moved out of London. I should have been tougher, made the decision to do it, but I knew I couldn’t make Nancy do anything she didn’t want to.

Even trying to persuade her to sort through Jonathan’s things was beyond my powers.

One day, I came home from work and found her up in his bedroom, laying out his clothes on the bed. It reminded me of that day in the hotel room in Spain.

‘I’m not getting rid of them,’ she said sharply when she turned and saw me. I didn’t say anything. ‘I just want a sort-through.’

So I watched her folding and stroking his clothes and separating them into piles, which gave me hope that perhaps she was making a start on clearing out his things.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll give you a hand.’

She glanced at me, nodded, and carried on going through his drawers. When I came back I saw that she had started to fill a small suitcase. I put down the tea and sat on the bed, looking round. The room still had remnants of Jonathan’s boyhood: a stuffed dog, balding and scrawny, sitting on top of his bookshelf; an ornate wooden puzzle box that we’d given him one Christmas and where he kept his secret things. I remember feeling a swell of sadness mingled with happiness because I thought I was witnessing the beginning of Nancy’s recovery. Until that point she had refused to touch anything in his room, wanting it left exactly as it was.

‘I’m putting rubbish in here …’ She shook an empty black bag at me. I sipped my tea, put it down on his bedside table and opened the drawer. I smiled at the batteries and loose change; it was almost identical to my own bedside drawer, except for the packet of unopened condoms. I emptied it all into the black bag, shaking it so the condoms disappeared to the bottom. I didn’t want Nancy to see them – there was something horribly poignant about the fact they were unused.

Nancy had taken over the territory of Jonathan’s wardrobe and chest of drawers so I tackled the pine chest at the end of his bed. I opened the lid and saw it was a place he put things he couldn’t find a place for. There were a few old toys, uneaten sweets, chocolate money left over from his Christmas stocking, some bits and pieces from camping trips, tin plates and mugs, a head-torch … there was even a pair of dirty old trainers. As I got nearer to the bottom I found his comics. We’d bought him a subscription to the
Beano
when he was a boy and I thought it might be nice to keep a few. I picked them up, and then saw what was hidden underneath: a collection of pornography – magazines and video tapes. Their titles and covers appalled me and I glanced over at Nancy, but she was absorbed looking through one of Jonathan’s scrapbooks. I shuffled round to the other side of the bed and opened one of the magazines.

‘Jesus!’ The word escaped before I could stop it.

‘What? What is it?’ she said.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ I replied. ‘A bit of stomach cramp, that’s all.’ I sat for a moment, then got up and brought the black bag over to the bed and dumped the lot into it. Nancy looked over with suspicion.

‘It’s got to go, darling – there are mouldy bits of old food in here. Nothing precious, I promise.’ I hid the weight of the bag as I took it from the room and carried it straight out to the dustbin. Thank God it was me and not Nancy who found them. When I returned to the bedroom, Jonathan’s scrapbook was still open on her lap.

‘Look at these,’ she said, and I went and sat down next to her on the floor. ‘I didn’t know they were here. They’re very good.’ She smiled at me with tears in her eyes. She was looking at some photographs which were loose in the back of the scrapbook. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

‘They were taken on a zoom,’ she explained. ‘Look …’ She held one up and I saw it was a close-up of an eye. Another showed the curve of a cheek, so close you could see the veins under skin.

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

‘He was experimenting with his new camera,’ Nancy explained. ‘I bet they were the first photos he took with it.’

‘Who is it?’ I said. She looked through them and smiled.

‘It’s me,’ she said, and held out the pictures, one after the other, moving from the abstract close-ups to the final revelation of her sitting in a deckchair at the end of our garden. He’d taken the pictures without Nancy even knowing he was there, and it pleased her to know he had focused so much attention on her.

There were others too: street scenes around North London; reportage of urban life. Nancy was right, they were good. He seemed to have a talent for it. Like a true photo-journalist, Jonathan had managed to keep himself out of the picture and capture something real and natural. I am sure Nancy had not had the film developed from his camera by then, but I wonder whether it was these photographs tucked into the back of his scrapbook which made her think about it. She must have assumed she’d find some beautiful images that she could have framed and shown off.

I was wrong to assume that sorting through Jonathan’s things was a sign of her recovery. If anything, she got worse after that. She refused to go out. We didn’t see anyone and after a year or so lost touch with all our friends. They gave up. I suppose they thought we had each other. It was about five years after Jonathan’s death when she decided that she couldn’t face seeing me either. For a while at least, she said. She needed time by herself, and I respected that, but I worried about her choice of Jonathan’s flat as her retreat.

We’d been left some money by an aunt and we spent it on that flat in Fulham. We bought it for Jonathan the year before he went travelling. We thought it was a good idea for him to have his first taste of independence closer to home, and he moved in for a short while before he left England. Nancy kitted it out with everything he might need: new pans, bed linen. And we donated things of our own too – things we no longer needed, like Nancy’s desk. She used to go over there and give him cooking lessons: teaching him the skills he’d need to be self-sufficient. It was ready for when he came home and we hoped it would give him the space to decide what he wanted to do. We hoped he might go to university.

After he died, she still went over now and again to clean it. She didn’t tell anyone in the building what had happened. Perhaps she thought that if they didn’t know then she could pretend, at least in that place, that he was still alive. She lived amongst Jonathan’s things, dressing the place as if it was a shrine, fresh flowers in every room. And at first she let me visit her there, then one day she asked me not to come any more. She said it didn’t help her, that I was holding back her recovery. I still telephoned once a week, but after a while even that stopped. She said she would call
me
when she was ready to come home. I only agreed to her demand because she promised she wouldn’t do anything to harm herself, and something in her voice made me believe her. I thought I heard a shift in it, as if she was at last beginning to find some peace. In the end it was someone from the Tenants’ Association who called me, not Nancy. It’s painful for me to know how useless I was to her during that time.

When I got that call I was terrified she’d broken her promise. They said that there had been complaints about the state of the common parts and a smell was coming from the flat. I cursed myself for having been so weak – for not having gone in before and forced her home. I was convinced that when I let myself in with the key I’d resisted using so often, I would find her dead. She was lying on the sofa, her eyes closed, but she was breathing. There was an unpleasant smell. The toilet had been neglected but the main stench came from a full bin liner by the front door. She had intended to take it down, but simply hadn’t had the strength and so it had sat for weeks, leaking on to the floor, its rotting contents almost capable of making their own way down the stairs. She had cancer, she told me. She was matter-of-fact about it, though by then she was in pain, had been in pain for some time, endured it, relished it even. It is what she had been waiting for. The cancer filled the space which Jonathan had left. I hated that flat. When I went back and found her manuscript, it was the first time I had been there since taking her home all those years ago.