What to Do When Someone Dies (3 page)

I experienced the hospital mainly as a succession of smells. Near the front desk there was a coffee shop of the kind you find in every shopping centre and high street. I could hear the hiss of cappuccino being frothed. There was a café as well. As we walked, the aroma of frying bacon gradually gave way to the smell of floor polish, air-freshener, then the sting of cleaning fluids, carbolic and bleach, with an under-smell of something nasty. I hadn’t been able to take in the instructions that the receptionist had given us but Gwen led me along corridors, down in a lift to a basement and another reception, with nobody in attendance.

‘There’s probably a bell or something,’ Gwen said.

There wasn’t. Gwen pulled a face. ‘Hello?’ she called.

There was the sound of footsteps and a man emerged from an office behind the reception desk. He was wearing a green coat, like someone at the counter of a hardware shop. He was very pale, as if he spent all his time down there underground, away from the sun. His stubble stood out plainly. While shaving he had missed a patch under his jaw. I thought of Greg shaving, holding his nose as he did the area beneath his nostrils. The man looked at us inquiringly.

‘My friend is here to identify a body.’

He nodded in acknowledgement. ‘I’m Dr Kyriacou,’ he said. ‘I’m a senior registrar. Are you a relative?’

‘He’s my husband,’ I said. I wasn’t ready to use the past tense yet.

‘I’m very sorry for your loss,’ he said, and for a moment I thought he really was sorry, as sorry as you could be when you expressed it every day, except for weekends and holidays.

‘Do you need my name?’ I said. ‘Or his?’

‘The deceased’s,’ said Dr Kyriacou.

‘His name is Gregory Manning,’ I said.

Dr Kyriacou rummaged through some files piled in a metal tray on the counter until he found the one he wanted. He opened it and examined the papers inside. I tried to lean across and see but I couldn’t read anything.

‘Do you have any identification?’ he asked. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a regulation.’

I handed him my driving licence. He took it and wrote something on his form. He frowned. ‘Your husband’s body was badly burned,’ he said. ‘This will be distressing for you. But may I say that in my experience it’s better to see the body than not.’

I wanted to ask if that was really true, even after plane crashes, people hit by trains, but I couldn’t speak.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Gwen asked.

Suddenly I felt possessive of the experience. I shook my head. She sat down and Dr Kyriacou led me along the corridor and into a room that looked as if it were full of filing cabinets with drawers four deep, but with handles like old-fashioned fridges. He glanced at the clipboard he was carrying, then walked to one and turned to me. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked.

I nodded. He pulled open the door and there was a rush of cold air into the already cold room. He drew out a tray. There was a body lying on it, covered with a sheet. Without hesitating he lifted a corner of the sheet. I couldn’t stop myself gasping because now I knew, finally, decisively, that there was no mistake and that he was dead, my darling Greg, whom I’d last seen rushing out of the house, a half-eaten piece of toast between his teeth, so we hadn’t even kissed.

I made myself look closely. His face was blackened by the fire, some of his hair was burned away and his scalp scorched. The only real damage was above his right eyebrow where there were signs of a terrible collision. I reached out and touched some of his hair, then leaned forward and touched it with my lips. There was a strong smell of burning. ‘Goodbye,’ I whispered to him. ‘My love.’

‘Is this Gregory Manning?’ said Dr Kyriacou.

I nodded.

‘You need to say it aloud,’ he said.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and wrote on his clipboard.

Dr Kyriacou took me back to Gwen and then a thought occurred to me. ‘The other person in the crash. Is she here?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I paused. I hardly dared ask the question. ‘Do you…’ I began. ‘Do you know her name?’

Dr Kyriacou rummaged through the files. ‘Her husband came,’ he said. ‘Yes, here we are.’ He looked at the front of the file. ‘Milena Livingstone.’

Gwen looked at me. ‘Who is she?’

‘I’ve never heard of her,’ I said.

Chapter Three

My little house filled with people. Filled with forms, with tasks, with long lists of what I had to do. Friends made me cups of tea and pushed pieces of toast at me that I tried to eat. The phone rang and rang. Gwen and Mary must have set up a rota between them, because as soon as one left it seemed that the other arrived. My parents turned up with an overcooked ginger cake in a tin I remembered from childhood, and bath salts. Joe came with whisky. He sat on the sofa, shook his head slowly from side to side in disbelief and called me ‘darling’. Fergus arrived, his face ashen with shock; he called me ‘sweetheart’. Everyone tried to hug me. I didn’t want to be hugged. Or, at least, I didn’t want to be hugged by anyone except Greg. I woke at night out of dreams in which he was holding me in his warm embrace, keeping me safe, and lay with dry, sore eyes, staring at the darkness, feeling the space in the bed beside me.

I needn’t have worried about what I had to do for at every stage there were plenty of people to tell me. I had become part of a bureaucratic process and was channelled smoothly and efficiently towards the end point, the funeral. But before there could be a funeral, the death had to be registered, and for that, I discovered, there needed to be an inquest to establish the cause of death.

We used to talk about dying. Once, while drunk, we answered a questionnaire online that then provided you with your date of death (me at eighty-eight, Greg at eighty-five), because death seemed ludicrously far away, a joke and an impossibility. If we had ever thought about it seriously, we would have assumed that when it came we would be old, and one of us would be holding the other’s hand. But I hadn’t been holding his hand and someone else had been with him. Milena Livingstone. The name crackled in my head. Who was she? Why had he been with her?

‘Why do you think?’ asked my mother, grimly, and I ordered her out of the house, slamming the door so hard behind her that little bits of plaster flaked to the floor.

‘Why do you think?’ asked Gwen, and I laid my head on the table, on top of all the bits of paper, and said I didn’t know, I had no idea. But I knew Greg. He would never… I didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Tell me about her.’

‘Who?’ Joe looked at me with a grave, attentive expression.

‘Milena. Who was she?’

‘Ellie.’ His voice was kind. ‘I’ve already told you. I’ve no idea. I didn’t know about her.’

‘She wasn’t a client?’

Joe and Greg were partners in their own business. Accountants are supposed to be thin, grey men in suits and glasses, but that certainly wasn’t true of those two. Joe was flamboyant and charismatic. Women always gravitated towards him, drawn by his blue eyes, his wide smile, his air of utter attention. He was rather handsome himself, but Greg and I used to say that the real secret of his charm was that he made other people feel beautiful, special. He was older than us, in his late forties, so he seemed like an uncle or a much older brother. And Greg – well, Greg was Greg. He used to say that if I’d known what he did for a living, I’d never have gone out with him. But I couldn’t have known. We’d met at a party, a mutual friend of a friend’s, and if I’d had to guess, I would have said he was a TV director, a writer, even an actor or a professional activist. He looked raffish and stylishly unkempt; there was a slightly dreamy, unworldly air about him. I was the one who was methodical and practical, whereas he was enthusiastic, untidy, boyish. Certainly not what I thought of as an accountant.

‘No,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve looked through everything. Twice.’

‘There must be an explanation.’

‘Can’t you think of anything?’ This time his kind voice, pushing me gently to acknowledge the obvious, made me shudder.

‘I would have known.’ I glared at him. ‘
You
would have known.’

Joe put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Everyone has secrets, Ellie. Both of us know how wonderful and adorable Greg was but, after all –’

‘No,’ I repeated, cutting him off. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘Who was Milena?’ I asked Fergus.

‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘I swear he never mentioned anyone called Milena.’

‘Did he mention…’ I hesitated. ‘Did he ever say he was… you know?’

‘Having an affair?’ Fergus finished the sentence I couldn’t.

‘Yes.’

‘He adored you.’

‘That’s not the question.’

‘He never mentioned he was having an affair. Nor did I ever suspect that he might be. Not for a single second.’

‘And now?’

‘Now?’

‘Do you suspect he might have been?’

Fergus rubbed his face. ‘Honestly? I don’t know, Ellie. What can I say? You know I was in his office with him the day he died, working on the computers. He seemed completely normal. He talked about you. He never said anything that would make me suspect. Yet he died in a car with a strange woman whom no one seems to have heard of. What’s your explanation?’

The inquest was set for ten o’clock on Tuesday, 15 October, in the coroner’s court off Hackney Road. I was to attend and, if I wanted, I could ask questions of the witnesses. I could bring family and friends if I wished. It was open to the public and to the press. After the inquest, Greg’s death could be registered, I could collect the appropriate forms, E and F, and could set a date for the funeral.

I asked Gwen if she and Mary would come with me. ‘Unless it’s difficult for Mary to arrange childcare,’ I added. Mary had a young son, nearly a year old now. Until Greg’s death, the conversations between us had been dominated by nappies, first smiles, teething problems, cracked nipples, the swamping pleasures of maternity.

‘Of course we’ll come,’ said Gwen. ‘I’m going to cook you something.’

‘I’m not hungry and I’m not an invalid. Does everyone think she was another woman?’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What do
you
think?’

What did I think? I thought I couldn’t survive without him, I thought he had abandoned me, I thought he had betrayed me. I knew, of course, that he hadn’t. I thought when I woke up at night that I could hear him breathing in the bed beside me, I thought a hundred times a day of things I needed to say to him, I thought I could no longer remember his face and then it returned to me, teasing and affectionate, or scorched into its death mask. I thought he should never have left me and it was his fault because he had chosen to go with her, and I thought, too, that I would go mad with not knowing who the woman was and yet if I discovered I should very likely go mad as well. Mad with sorrow, anger, or jealousy.

‘I’ve heard he was having an affair.’

My sister Maria’s voice sounded solemnly sympathetic. I could hear her baby crying in the background.

‘You’ve got to go.’ I banged the phone back into its holster.

An affair. Like death, affairs happen to other people, not me and Greg. Milena Livingstone. How old was she? What did she look like? All I knew about her was that she had a husband who had identified her body at the same morgue as Greg was in. Perhaps she’d been lying in the drawer above him. In death as in life. I shivered violently, feeling nauseous, then went upstairs to my laptop and turned it on, then Googled her name. There aren’t many Milena Livingstones around.

I clicked on the first reference and the screen was filled with an advertisement for a business, though at first I couldn’t make out what it was. Something about everything being taken out of your hands and no detail left unattended to. Venues. Meals. I scrolled down. It seemed to be a glorified catering and party-arranging business for people with lots of money and no time. A sample menu. Tuna sashimi, sea bass marinated in ginger and lime, chocolate fondants. And here, yes, were the people who ran it, the hostesses.

Two photographs smiled at me from the screen. The face on the left was pale and triangular, with dark blonde hair cut artfully short, a straight nose and a restrained smile. She looked attractive, clever, classy. It wasn’t her. No, it was the other one, with a tawny mane (dyed, I thought spitefully, and I bet she tosses it back all the time with one ringed hand; I bet she pouts), high cheekbones, white teeth, grey eyes. An older woman, then. A rich woman, by the look of it. A beautiful woman, but not the kind of beauty I’d ever expected Greg, who had fallen so heavily for me, to fall for. Milena Livingstone had a glamorous, artful look to her; her eyebrows were arched and her smile knowing. She was sure to have long, painted nails and immaculately waxed legs. A man’s woman, I thought. But not my man. Surely not Greg. Bile rose in my throat and I turned off the computer without looking through any more references and went into the bedroom where I lay face down on my side of the bed. It was almost dark outside; the nights were getting longer and the days shorter.

I don’t know how long I lay there like that, but at last I got up and went to the wardrobe. Greg’s clothes hung on the right-hand side. He didn’t have many: one suit that we’d bought together for our wedding and he’d hardly worn since, a couple of casual jackets, several shirts. What had he been wearing when he died? I screwed my eyes shut and forced myself to remember – dark trousers and a pale blue shirt; his favourite jacket over the top. That was it: his non-accountant’s accountant’s outfit.

I started systematically to go through everything in the cupboard. I felt in each pocket, and found only a receipt for a meal we’d had in an Italian restaurant two weeks ago. I remembered: I’d been upset and he’d been patient and optimistic. A crumpled flyer for a jazz night that had been put under our windscreen wipers a few days ago. I pulled open the drawers where he kept T-shirts and underwear, but I didn’t discover any lacy women’s knickers or incriminating love letters. Everything was as it should have been. Nothing was as it should have been.

I stood in front of the mirror, examined myself and found myself wanting. I weighed myself and realized I was shrinking. I boiled myself an egg, broke open the top, then dabbed my spoon into the yellow yolk. I made myself eat half of it before I felt so sick I had to stop. I had stomach cramps, a grim, familiar backache, so I ran a bath and lowered myself into it, hearing the phone ring. I couldn’t bear to answer it and heard Mary’s voice saying into the answering-machine that poor little Robin was running a fever, she’d be round as soon as she could. I lay in the hot water and closed my eyes. Then I opened them and watched a curl of red blood run out of me and spread, then another.

So.

It wasn’t to be, after all. Once again, as with all the other months of trying and hoping and praying, I wasn’t pregnant, and Greg had died in his car with another woman and left me alone, and what on earth was I going to do now?