Against Her Nature by Elizabeth Buchan

Author:Elizabeth Buchan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

A week later, after the funeral, Tess returned by herself to the flat in Pimlico.

She stood by the sitting room window, looking out at the window-box she had placed on the sill.

‘If that damn thing falls off,’ George had said, ‘we’ll be done for insurance.’

He had not reckoned – or, at least, she did not think he had – on bits of himself being scattered over a country lane in Northern Ireland. Then, again, perhaps he had. During the past few days, Tess had relearnt the lesson that, in the urgency of living, she had forgotten. No assumption should be cast in iron.

The variegated ivy in the box straggled over the edges and drooped. Tess decided to look at something else. What? What could she possibly look at?

She knew what she did not want to look at. George’s side of the bed. Or the jumper thrown over the chair where he had left it that last weekend. Where next? She certainly did not want to look inside the wardrobe where his suits hung on their hangers. Or on the shelves where his socks slumped in a badly constructed pyramid.

No, none of these things justified her scrutiny – for they induced a pain so serious that, if she relaxed her guard for one second, it made her gasp.

George’s things.

She wandered back and forth from the sitting room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the kitchen. A silence had folded over the flat. Dust had been added to the accumulation from Tess’s desultory housekeeping and a smell peculiar to unlived-in buildings had crept in too – infiltrating under the door, through the window, up the lobby stairs.

The experience of grief is to encounter yourself, she had concluded. In funny ways, too. I didn’t know I possessed nerve ends in unexpected areas of my body and heavy, oh, so heavy, bones. Grieving is to sink into a deep, inner selfishness. I want to say: Thank God it’s not me that’s dead, but I daren’t. Instead, I listen to my own speech scrambled by fatigue into nonsense and I watch my performance on the centre stage.

How I shock myself.

The previous day Jack had phoned on an appalling line. ‘Tess, oh, Tessy, what can I say?’

‘Tell me about Africa,’ she had replied. Just talk to me about something normal.’

‘Nothing is normal in Africa,’ Jack shouted through the static. ‘Famine, plague, drought, fundamentalism, fatalism.’

‘What do you mean?’

But the line was so bad that Tess had given up.

She tried to think about codes, structures, strictures. So far, she had failed to make sense of any of them, except to conclude that she had failed. She had failed to husband her resources sufficiently to see her through . . . this.

George had not been interested in the subject of death. Now that she considered, Tess realized there had been many subjects in which George had not been interested, or that he did not wish to discuss. She sank down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. It tasted disgusting and she stubbed it out.

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