Poor Margaret indeed. But it was a relief. A relief to speak of death like common gossips for whom it was merely a passing notion, instead of a time bomb in their pockets.
‘What have you heard?’ It was a village in the middle of Exmoor; she could have heard anything.
‘That somebody killed her.’
‘Possibly. Taunton have it now.’ He squeezed her hand, feeling with relief that it was warm and steady, then turned and sat down beside her on the edge of the couch. ‘How are you feeling, Lu?’
It was a question he’d been asking daily in one form or another for nearly three years. Sometimes it came out sounding strange to his ears, other times it was a studiedly casual ‘All right, Lu?’ He could reduce it to a mere questioning look from across the room, which she would answer with a smile or a shrug.
Sometimes he didn’t even have to ask.
Those were the days when he came home to find her curled and gasping in the rib-crunching spasms of the MS ‘hug’, or jabbing at a broken plate and spilled food with the dustpan and brush, her spastic hands that had caused the mess in the first place unable to make it right. Sometimes when he found her like that he pulled the rug over them both on the couch and tickled her arms languorously until she relaxed and finally slept; other times he held her while she shook and cried and slapped at her own failing body with her angry, twisted hands. Jonas had never cried with her – never given in to the self-pity that that would imply.
After she had been diagnosed, everything had changed – at home and at work. He had withdrawn an application for Anti-Terrorism and applied instead for this backwater posting where he was largely autonomous and could fit work around home rather than the other way round. They moved into Rose Cottage, which had been closed up after the death of his parents. Jonas had never wanted to come back but he knew the place; he knew the people; he knew it would be easier to do his job on Exmoor than learn the ropes somewhere new, and that that would make it easier to take care of Lucy.
But sometimes even the comfort of familiarity was not enough to ease his mind. Sometimes – as he gave walkers directions to Dunkery Beacon, or spoke to the parents of a teenager with a half-bottle of vodka and an attitude – Jonas would feel the almost overwhelming urge to jump in his car and race back to check on Lucy. The first time his heart had clenched that way he had given in to the impulse and driven home blindly through winding lanes at 60mph. He’d burst through the front door shouting her name and she’d come running down the stairs of their little cottage in a panic, almost tumbling the last few treads. He’d caught her at the bottom and babbled his usual question, ‘Are you OK?’ and she had thumped his arm for scaring her so.
That was when Lu could still go up and down stairs properly. Jonas wanted to get a loan for a stair lift, but she said she liked the couch and the TV through the days and liked the challenge of inching upstairs on her bottom to the bathroom.
‘Keeps my triceps in shape,’ she’d teased him at the time. ‘Other women pay a fortune for that kind of workout.’
He’d laughed to please her, and left the elephant in the room unremarked upon – that three years previously Lucy Holly could have walked upstairs on her hands if she’d fancied it. She’d been the fittest woman Jonas had ever met. Even straight out of training in Portishead he’d had to work to keep ahead of her on the five-mile runs they’d regularly taken together. Lucy was no gym-bore. She ran, she swam, she rode horses and bikes and, for the first winter after Jonas had got the posting back home on Exmoor, she’d turned out occasionally for the local girls’ football team, Blacklanders Ladies. Jonas smiled a little now at the memory of his petite wife going nose-to-nose with the ref, her eyes flashing and her pony-tail flicking until the cowed man reversed a poor penalty decision in her favour. Once a week for ninety minutes ‘Ladies’ was just a euphemism.
It seemed forever ago.
Just yesterday he’d found her white and drawn and although she’d insisted she was fine, he’d tasted the salt on her lips that told him she’d been crying.
Now – three weeks after the pills – the question he’d got so used to asking was fraught with new fear.
‘Good,’ replied Lucy, bringing him gently back to the present. ‘I’m good.’
He searched her eyes for the truth and found it had already been told. He felt the tension that had been squeezing his guts relax a little.
‘I planted bulbs. Daffs and tulips out front and anemones in the tubs.’
He studied her hand and saw the red-brown earth under her short, practical nails and knew the effort it must have taken for her to organize and complete that task. The bag of compost, the trowel twisting awkwardly in the weak hands and floppy wrists, the effort of breaking into the earth made hard by winter. He almost asked how long it had taken her, but knew it must have been most of the day. Instead he got up and went outside to look for himself. The fact that she didn’t get up to point things out to him was proof of how much it had taken out of her. He came back in, smiling.
‘And then you …?’ He left it hanging for her.
‘… had a nap,’ she finished dutifully and they both laughed ruefully.
‘I got your stuff,’ he said. They called it her ‘stuff’. Her analgesics, her anti-depressants, her anti-convulsants, her anti-virals, her job-lot hypodermics … the list seemed endless and ever-changing, which did not instil confidence in their efficacy. Just saying the names had become depressing – Decadron, Neurotin, Prothiaden, Symmetrel … ‘Stuff’ covered them all and had the power of robbing them of their doom-laden titles.
‘Oh Jonas! On a day like this! It could have waited. It’s only the Symmetrel I’m out of.’
‘No trouble,’ he shrugged, although they both knew it was a thirty-mile round trip through narrow lanes to the nearest dispensing chemist’s in Dulverton. Jonas’s beat included a clutch of tiny villages and had to be covered by Land Rover, but edging out as far as Dulverton when a woman had died in Shipcott was still more than an inconvenience.
Still, he did it, and she appreciated it. That was how they worked at life. They cared for each other.
The very first time Lucy had met Jonas she’d recognized something in him that reminded her of the children she taught in kindergarten. Something that she knew any amount of gung-ho police training would never quite erase from him. There was a softness, a childlike uncertainty, a silly humour in Jonas that meant he would spend the day in riot gear fending off Molotov cocktails and then demonstrate to her at night wearing a pudding bowl and armed with a spatula. When he turned out for Police XV against Army, Lucy watched in embarrassment as Jonas joined his team-mates in a testosterone-packed pre-match ritual of chanting, grunting and chest-beating. Chest-beating! Like gorillas in shorts! Halfway through the spectacle, he’d caught her eye in the stands and they’d both dissolved in such helpless laughter that his captain was still bitching at him at half-time.
Jonas’s dark-brown eyes were too far apart, his nose too long and his mouth too full to be called handsome, but Lucy never could get enough of looking at him and craved more.When they’d first moved into his parents’ old home, she’d looked for photos of him as a boy. When she’d failed to find any, he’d joked about being ‘too ugly to show up on film’.
In her eyes, at least, it was far from true.
‘Who told you about Margaret?’ he asked, even though it didn’t matter.
‘Frank.’
Frank Tithecott. The postman. Of course. The postman and the milkman covered the same area as he did but without the same confidentiality. Jonas was suddenly glad Frank had brought his embarrassment home – at least it had made Lucy laugh for the first time in three weeks.
‘Are you going to be busy with that?’
‘I doubt it,’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t get the impression they’d welcome my assistance.’
‘Then they’re idiots and I hate them all,’ she said sharply, as if Jonas was a boy to be protected from playground bullies, and not a strapping six-foot-four officer of the law.
Jonas rolled his eyes at her sharp words but smiled to show he enjoyed her support, even if it was hopelessly biased. Lucy shifted her legs to make room for him on the couch and Jonas sat down, draped his legs over one end and lowered his long frame gently backwards into her arms. The chores could wait.
The TV was on, the sound down. For several minutes Jonas stroked Lucy’s arms with the backs of his nails as they idly watched a blood-spattered teenager being chased through a house by a man in a mask. Without screams and music it was hypnotically dull and soon their breathing slowed and synchronized in the way they both loved.
Lucy slid a single finger between the buttons of his white uniform shirt and ran it tenderly along a rib. The moment caught her unawares and her eyes burned with sudden tears.
