The Love of My Life(9)

‘She looked upset. It’s none of my business, of course, but I do hope she’s all right.’

Emma hasn’t mentioned this.

‘She was nervous about her scan results,’ I improvise, because I don’t want one of my colleagues to know more about my wife than I do. ‘We’re seeing her haematologist this afternoon.’

I start a message to Emma, to check she’s OK, when Sheila pipes up again: ‘She was at Waterloo Station.’

‘Yeah. She works down in Plymouth two days a week,’ I say, without looking up. Sheila knows this. We were talking about Emma’s huge commute just a few days ago.

‘That’s why I was surprised to see her at Waterloo – don’t trains to Plymouth run from Paddington Station?’

I stop messaging and think about it. ‘Actually, you’re right,’ I admit. ‘She was doing fieldwork in Dorset yesterday. Hence, Waterloo.’

Oddly, Emma didn’t mention her trip last night, so I’d forgotten to ask how it went.

‘Oh, lovely,’ Sheila says. Her voice is friendly now, as if it’s just me and her in the pub. ‘Where in Dorset? I love that coastline.’

This is not only irritating, but most unlike Sheila.

‘Wherever it is that her friend’s collecting phytoplankton samples,’ I say. ‘I can’t remember where.’

‘Probably out from Poole Harbour,’ Sheila says, nodding.

What? How does she know about bloody phytoplankton, on top of everything else?

‘It was quite late in the morning,’ she adds, going back to her screen. She gives me a curious sort of a smile – something not far from sympathy – and then returns to her screen.

Jonty looks up from his desk. He’s noticed too.

What is she up to? Sheila and I often discuss Emma in the pub, in wider conversations about family lives, but this is different. I feel like I’m getting a glimpse of the interrogator she once was. (There’s no way she was doing a desk job at MI5.) She’s polite and friendly; but there’s an implied meaning that I neither like nor understand.

‘She said something about how phytoplankton do a daily migration to deep waters,’ I say, eventually. ‘I guess she was waiting for that to happen.’

I don’t offer that Emma’s been struggling with timekeeping lately – sometimes a warning sign of her depressions – but it’s no matter. The conversation seems to have reached its conclusion.

At 3 p.m. I get up to leave for the hospital, and nobody knows quite what to say to me. ‘All the best,’ Sheila calls, as I go. ‘I’ll be thinking about you both.’





Chapter Five


LEO


I don’t like hearing people complain about the NHS, but as we wait forty, fifty, sixty-five minutes to be called into Dr Moru’s office, I sink into fury. I try to read a former MP’s obit one of our Westminster contributors has sent in, but I’m too anxious and angry to concentrate. A silent television suspended over the waiting room shows us footage of absolutely nothing happening at Jeremy and Janice Rothschild’s house, a handsome Georgian terrace in Highbury.

Beside me Emma sits quietly, also studying her phone.

She’s got nearly two inches of hair now. She’s always had it short; short and wavy, sitting just at her jawline, but many months will pass before it’s that length again. Today, she wears it with a slim black grip. She is beautiful. Even after months of toxic medications, of killer beams fired into her body, of endless blood tests and tears and phone calls and quiet terror, she is still beautiful.

I lean over to tell her this, but my eye is caught by her phone.

‘What the fuck?’ I whisper.

She’s on Amazon, looking at coffins.

‘I want a wicker coffin,’ she whispers back. ‘If I die. And a natural burial.’

I stare at her phone, transfixed. The wicker coffin she’s looking at retails at just under ￡500 and is pictured in a sunny bluebell wood, with a posy of wildflowers on top.

‘Emma, no!’ I say. ‘Stop it!’

‘It’s lined with organic cotton,’ she says defensively. ‘Anyway, I’m going to be fine. This is merely research.’

‘Emma,’ I whisper, rubbing my forehead. ‘Please, don’t.’

‘We all die eventually. It’s much better to die with your ducks in a row.’

‘I . . . OK. Do what you need to do.’

A hot hollow opens in my chest. I really could lose her.

Emma, probably sensing this, puts her phone away and tucks her hand into mine, but I can’t stand it anymore. I march up to reception, ready to explode, just as her name is called.





Chapter Six


EMMA


The problem with lying to your husband is that it changes everything and nothing.

I love Leo. Not in a part-time or conditional way; it’s the real deal, an essential love, as much a part of my biological function as my liver and spleen. I love his Leoisms: the strange snacks he makes for himself, the meticulousness with which he folds clean clothes, the hours he spends trying and failing to play the opening bars of Bruce Hornsby’s ‘The Way It Is’ on my grandmother’s old piano. The way he looks at me across his long nose, in bed, and makes up filthy limericks as if he’s reading the shipping forecast.