How will life go on now? How is that possible? She hears a car on a distant road. Why on earth is anybody driving? Where is there to go now? Why is the clock in the hall still ticking? Doesn’t it know it stopped days ago?
On the way to the funeral, Joyce had sat with her in the car. They didn’t speak because there was too much to say. Elizabeth looked out of the window of the car at one point, and saw a mother pick up a soft toy her child had dropped out of its pram. Elizabeth almost burst into laughter, that life was daring to continue. Didn’t they
Perhaps Stephen was right about time? Outside the car window, it moved forward, marching, marching, never missing a step. But inside the car, time was already moving backwards, already folding in.
The life she had with Stephen will always mean more to her than the life she will now have going forward. She will spend more time there, in that past, she knows that. And, as the world races forward, she will fall further and further back. There comes a point when you look at your photograph albums more often than you watch the news. When you opt out of time, and let it carry on doing its thing while you get on with yours. You simply stop dancing to the beat of the drum.
She sees it in Joyce. For all her bustle, for all her spark, there is a part of her, the most important part, locked away. There’s a part of Joyce that will always be in a tidy living room, Gerry with his feet up, and a young Joanna, face beaming as she opens presents.
Living in the past. Elizabeth had never understood it, but, with intense clarity, she understands it now. Elizabeth’s past was always too dark, too unhappy. Family, school, the dangerous, compromising work, the divorces. But, as of three days ago, Stephen is her past, and that is where she will choose to live.
There weren’t many friends at the funeral, though she’d been able to gather a few together. She wonders if Kuldesh would have come if things had been different? Stephen spoke so much about him in the final weeks.
Elizabeth turns the bedside light on again. She won’t sleep. Perhaps she will go for a walk? While there is no one to see her, no one to give her their condolences. She is just thinking that she might come across Snowy doing his rounds, when she remembers. Poor Snowy. Elizabeth starts to weep. For Snowy, and Kuldesh. She will keep her tears for Stephen back for now. They will be of a different order entirely.
The poor fox. Buried up by the allotment, by the radishes that Stephen had become obsessed with in his final days. He was never a gardener, his brain just playing another trick on him.
She can just imagine him, wa–
Elizabeth has never known where moments of inspiration truly come from. The sudden thought that explains things, that shines a light where there once was darkness. The closest she can come to describing it is that inspiration strikes when two completely different thoughts come together, and they suddenly make sense of each other.
Stephen speaking so much about Kuldesh in his final days. ‘Saw him recently.’ Stephen talking about the allotment, and the radishes. ‘Promise you’ll take care of the allotment.’
Oh, you clever man, thinks Elizabeth. Even in the fog you were shining a light for me.
Ever since Elizabeth left the Service, she has had certain protections. Panic buttons, hotlines, in case her past were ever to catch up with her. And, she realizes now, she herself almost certainly has an untraceable number. A Code 777.
She is a fool. The second call Kuldesh had made that afternoon was to her own home phone. To her beautiful Stephen.
Stephen is Elizabeth’s past now, and perhaps one day she might find a way to make that bearable. But perhaps, for a few days longer, Stephen can be her future too.
Elizabeth wonders if it is too late to ring Bogdan. And then she remembers that time has stopped altogether, and that Bogdan won’t be able to sleep any more than she can, and so she decides that she will.
First though she slips on some shoes and a coat, and walks up the hill, just to make absolutely certain. She picks the lock on the allotment shed and, all credit to Ron, there awaits a brand-new spade.
Joyce received the call around twenty minutes ago, and is already up on the hillside, engulfed by her winter coat. Elizabeth and Bogdan were there to meet her, and down below she sees Ibrahim, Ron and Pauline making their way up.
‘I hope I didn’t wake you,’ says Elizabeth.
‘You know you didn’t,’ says Joyce. ‘I was watching
‘Bogdan considers a jacket a sign of weakness,’ says Elizabeth.
