promise. Remember all the grief we had with Tim and how well he worked out? Timmy’s current girlfriend is Sharmila — lovely, v. bright, from Bradford. Her parents disapprove of slacker white boy — ours — so could you invite them to the house and do your charm thing? (Father, Deepak, is keen golfer: both parents vegetarian.) Tim will pretend to hate it when you ask him but be chuffed when it happens.
Your mother’s favorite perfume is Diorissima. Tapes are always a good bet. Anything by Bryn Terfel except
Your godchildren are Harry (Paxton), Lucy (Goodridge) and Alice (Benson). Their birthdays are marked on the calendar next to the fridge. In the present drawer — bottom of study filing cabinet — are gifts marked with their initials which should take you through to the Christmas after next. Simon and Clare’s marriage is a bit shaky, so you might take Harry out and let him know you’re there if he needs you. Don’t forget Lucy’s confirmation in September.
1. How to work washing machine. In emergencies, you may need to know this. See Brown Book. NB: temperature for your wool socks.
2. Bin bag sizes. Ditto.
3. Cleaner — Mondays and Thursdays. Eight pounds an hour plus we help Jean out with bigger bills and holidays. Single mother. Daughter is Aileen. Wants to be a nurse.
4. Baby-sitters — numbers in Green Book.
5. Arnica for bruises (bathroom cabinet).
6. Ignatia for grief (yellow bottle, my bedside table).
7. Postman called Pat (really); paperboy is girl (Chloe). Dustmen come Tuesday morning, won’t take garden stuff. Xmas tips in Brown Book — be generous!
8. After the funeral, the boys could see Maggie, counselor at the hospice. A bit alternative for your taste, but I think the boys would really like her and they may say things to her that they wouldn’t to you for fear of upsetting you, my darling. Kiss them for me and don’t stop just because they get taller than you, will you?
It’s all there, for page after page: the minutiae of the children’s lives, the rhythm of their days. I wince when I think how badly qualified I would be to write such a memo for Richard. On the Birthdays page, there is a stain the size of a cup. Something oily with a scab of flour. Jill must have been baking as she wrote.
Want to read on but prevented by blur of tears. Pick up the
2:57 P.M. In doll-size train loo, remove laddered tights and execute Houdini wriggle into new black pair. Back in the corridor, am surprised to attract a whistle of approval from the steward. Look down and see that black tights have Playboy rabbits picked out in diamante up back of legs. Swear I can hear Jill laughing.
3:17 P.M. ST. BOTOLPH’S, GREENGATE. I arrive in time to hear the vicar invite the congregation to thank God for the life of Jillian Cordelia Cooper-Clark. I didn’t know she was a Cordelia — it suits her, principled and defined by love.
I can see Robin and the boys in the front pew. Robin is so tall that he has to stoop when he bends to kiss his youngest son’s auburn head. Alex is trembling slightly in his new suit, his first suit. Jill told me they’d come up to London together to pick it out; she must have known when he’d wear it for the first time.
We sing “Lord of All Hopefulness,” her favorite hymn. The tune has a Scottish melancholy to it I hadn’t noticed before. As it fades away, there is an outbreak of suppressed coughing and the vicar, a birdlike man with a crest of fair hair, asks the congregation to spend a few moments in silence remembering Jill.
Close my eyes and rest my hands on the back of the pew in front, and instantly I’m back in a wood outside Northampton. August. Two months after Emily was born and James Entwhistle — he was my boss before Rod — had organized a shoot on some country estate for clients. He insisted that I attend, even though I can’t shoot and I was barely capable of remembering where Germany was, let alone schmoozing a bunch of Frankfurt bankers. Anyway, by lunchtime I felt as though I had burning rocks strapped to my chest. Breasts screaming to be emptied. There was only one loo, a portable thing hidden in the trees. I locked myself in the cubicle, undid my blouse and started to squirt milk into the toilet. Breast milk is different from cows’ milk — finer, less creamy, it has the bluish aristocratic pallor of porcelain; when mine hit the green chemical in the steel bowl it made an opaque soup.
But at first the milk was reluctant to come. To keep it going I had to visualize Emily, her smell, her huge eyes, the touch of her skin. Hot and panicky, I became aware of coughing on the other side of the door. A queue was building up and I hadn’t even emptied the left side and the right still to do. Then I heard a woman’s voice speaking quite briskly, a voice which derived authority from its warmth. “Well, gentlemen, why don’t you all run along and avail yourselves of the bushes outside? That’s one of the natural advantages you enjoy over us ladies. I suspect that Miss Reddy’s need of the lavatory is greater than yours. Thank you so much.”
When I got outside about ten minutes later, Jill Cooper-Clark was sitting on a log in the clearing. Seeing me, she waved and from a cooler produced a bag of ice which she held aloft in triumph. “I seem to remember this is the best thing for sore boobs.”
I had noticed her before at corporate events — Henley Regatta, some rain-soaked beano at the Cheltenham Gold Cup — but I had taken her for just another golfing wife: the sort who buttonhole you about tennis court maintenance or how hard it is to get a little man round to deal with the swimming pool.
Jill asked about my baby — the only person connected with work to have done so — and then confessed that Alex, who had just celebrated his fourth birthday, had been her present to herself. Everyone said it was crazy to go back for a third when you were finally clear of all the nappies and broken nights, but she felt she’d missed out on Tim and Sam’s babyhoods by working. “I don’t know, I felt that time had been stolen from me and I wanted it back.”
Because we were in confessional mood, I told her I was afraid of letting myself feel too much. I didn’t know how I could go back to the job without hardening my heart.
“The thing is, Kate,” Jill said, “they treat us as though they’re doing us a great favor by letting us work after we’ve had a child. And the price we pay for that favor is not making a fuss, not letting on how life can never be the same for us again. But always remember it’s us who are doing
There was a sound of gunshots and Jill laughed. She had this wonderful liberating laugh; it seemed to blow away all the stupidity and mean-mindedness of the world. And you know something else? She was the only person who never said, I don’t know how you do it. She knew how you did it, and she knew what it cost.
“Dearly beloved, let us say together the words which Jesus taught us: Our Father, who art in Heaven.”
Jill’s grave is at the bottom of a hill that falls away sharply from the back of the church. At the top are the towering Victorian headstones — plinths and tombs and catafalques heavy with attendant angels — but the farther you crunch down the gravel path and the nearer to the present you get, the smaller and more modest the memorials become. Our forefathers knew they had a reserved seat, even a box, for the afterlife; we put in a tentative request for any returns.
Jill’s spot looks out across a valley. The hills opposite have mascara smudges of fir trees along their ridges,
