She caught his hand and kissed it crossly. ‘You bloody fool,’ she said. ‘Why are you saying all this? You’ve gone and ruined my mascara.’ She flopped down beside him, her body along his, and buried her face in his chest.
‘Will you ring Clifford for me? The number’s in my address book. Clifford Menks.’
She raised herself up on her elbow. ‘Innes, listen to me. You have to stop talking about this. I don’t like it one bit. You are not going to die. Or, at least, not any time soon.’
He smiled a lopsided smile. ‘I know. But ring him anyway, for me, will you? There’s a good girl.’
Innes died that night. His pleurisy developed into pneumonia. He died at around three a.m., of a fever and breathing difficulties. There was no one with him at the time. The nurse on duty had gone to fetch a doctor; when she returned with one, it was too late.
That Innes, the love of her life, had died alone: this, Lexie would never get over. That she had been sleeping, across the city, in their bed, at the time he drew his last breath, at the time his heart stopped its pulsing. That the doctor hadn’t been where he was supposed to be but taking a nap in a different room down the corridor. That they had tried to resuscitate him but failed. That she wasn’t there, that she didn’t know, that she couldn’t be with him and never would be again.
No one told her, of course. She was the illegal, unrecorded mistress in all this. She arrived at the hospital at two p.m. sharp, jaunty, with a bunch of violets, a newspaper, two magazines, his favourite cashmere scarf. Two nurses headed her off and took her into a room; one was the sister she’d met on the first night.
‘I’m sorry to tell you,
Miss
,’ she leant on that word, she wanted Lexie to hear that she knew and perhaps had known all along, ‘that Mr Kent died last night.’
Lexie thought that she was about to drop the magazines. She had to clutch at them, at their slippery covers. She said, ‘He can’t have.’
The sister looked at the ground between them. ‘I’m afraid he did.’
She said, simply, ‘No.’ She said it again. ‘No.’ She put down the violets, very carefully, on a table. The magazines and newspaper she placed next to them. She was aware of thinking that she needed to behave well, that she ought to be polite. On the table, she noticed, there was a glass vial of some kind, a pair of tongs, a lid that didn’t appear to fit the vial.
‘Where is he?’ she heard her voice say.
There was a silence behind her so she turned. Both nurses were looking vaguely embarrassed. ‘His wife . . .’ one of them began, then stopped.
She waited.
‘His wife came,’ the sister said, still avoiding her eye. ‘She has made all the arrangements.’
‘Arrangements?’ Lexie repeated.
‘For the body.’
Lexie could see this scene clearly in her head. Gloria arriving at the ward. Or would he have been moved to another room? Yes, they did that, didn’t they, in hospitals, stripping the bed as soon as possible for the next person? Innes would have been taken, then, to a morgue, she supposed, or a room somewhere. She pictured Gloria arriving at the morgue – which in her mind Lexie placed in the basement – her heels tap-tapping across the floor, her hair swept up, rigid, her hands encased in gloves, her pallid child behind her. She would have examined the body – which was her body, Lexie’s body, the body of her beloved, her darling – with those glacial eyes of hers. Lexie could see her doing this with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, more for effect than anything else. Would she have worn a hat with a veil? Almost definitely. Would she have lifted the veil to look upon her husband for the last time? Almost definitely not. Would she have touched him, laid a hand upon him? Lexie doubted it. How long had she spent with him? Would she have spoken to him? Would the child? Then Lexie could see her leaving, moving into another room where she would request to use a telephone, where she could begin making her arrangements.
‘May I see him?’ Lexie asked the nurses. She was moving to gather her things, readying herself, when she became aware of their silence. She listened to it. She felt it. She tested its length, its breadth. She could have put out her tongue and tasted it. ‘I want to see him,’ she said, in case they had not understood, in case they had not heard her, in case it was not quite clear. She even said, ‘Please.’
The sister made a movement with her head that was somewhere between a shake and a nod. And something seemed to break in her then because her voice was suddenly kind. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Family members only.’
Lexie had to swallow. Twice. ‘Please,’ she whispered this word, ‘please.’
The nurse shook her head this time. ‘I’m sorry.’
A noise came out of her then, something like a shout or a cry or a sob. Lexie clapped her hand over her mouth to stop it. She knew she had to stay in control because there were things she needed to know and if she cried as she wanted to she would never get to find out these things and somehow she knew this was her only chance. When she was sure the noise within her had been pressed down, for now, she spoke again. ‘Can you tell me this?’ she said. ‘Just this. Is he still here or did she take him away?’
‘I can’t say,’ the sister said, after glancing at the other nurse.
Lexie leant towards her, as if she was able to detect a lie just by smell. ‘You can’t say or you don’t know?’
The other nurse made a slight movement. ‘I believe . . .’ she muttered, then stopped. The sister frowned at her. The nurse shrugged, glanced at Lexie, then drew breath and said, ‘I believe Mr Kent’s body was taken away earlier today. Around lunchtime.’
Lexie nodded. ‘Thank you. I don’t suppose you know where?’
‘I don’t.’
And Lexie believed her. And because there was nothing left for her in the building, she began to leave. She picked up the violets, she transferred them to the hand still holding Innes’s scarf, and how incredible it was to see it still there; it was like an artefact from another age. It seemed impossible that it was only an hour or so ago that she had selected it from their cupboard for him to wear, impossible that there had been a time so recent that she did not know he had died.
He had died.
She looked at the nurses and already her vision was beginning to swim and melt with tears. ‘Thank you,’ she said, because she meant to remain composed, to hold herself together, until she was away from there, and she opened the door and stepped through. She could not look at the door to the ward, she could not look towards the bed where he had lain, where they had lain, only a few hours before, and where he had died, without her. She pushed herself through the hospital air into the corridor, she walked down it and out into the city, alone.
PART TWO
L
exie sails along Piccadilly, bag slung over her arm. Felix finds himself weaving behind her, in her wake, dodging the crowds. Decked out in large sunglasses and a startlingly short coat, Lexie is attracting more than perhaps her fair share of admiring glances. As she reaches the gates to Green Park, Felix catches up with her and takes her by the arm, pulling her to a stop. ‘Well?’ he says.
‘Well what?’
‘Are you coming to Paris or not?’
She rearranges the collar of her coat – really it’s too much, covered with black and white squiggles that make Felix’s eyes ache; wherever does she find these things? – and tosses her hair over her shoulder. ‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she says.
Felix takes a breath. She is, without doubt, the most infuriating woman he has ever known. ‘Hasn’t anything I’ve said made an impression on you?’
‘I’ll let you know,’ she says, and her sunglasses flash as she turns her head away to look down the street.
He is seized with an urge to shake her, slap her. But she would no doubt slap back and his face is becoming more and more recognised: he can tell by the way people look at him, quickly, then away. He really could not be involved in a public brawl on Piccadilly.
‘Darling,’ he says, and he pulls her towards him, trying to ignore the fact that she immediately withdraws her arm, ‘listen to me, the very last place I’d like you to be is in the middle of a riot. But if you came with me you’d be safe. And I could introduce you to people. The right kind of people. Maybe it’s time.’
‘Time for what?’
‘To ...’ Felix circles his hand in the air, wondering where he is going with this ‘. . . to widen your scope a little. Professionally speaking.’
‘I have no desire,’ she snaps, ‘to widen my scope. Whatever that may mean.’
He sighs. ‘Look, the point is, you wouldn’t have to come for work. You could just come.’
Her sunglasses flash again as she looks back at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You could come . . . with me.’
‘In what capacity?’
‘As my . . .’ He realises he is on shaky ground now but something forces him on. ‘Look, I can put you down as my secretary, there won’t be a problem, a lot of people do it and—’
‘
Your secretary?
’ she repeats. More glances from around them. Do these people know who he is? It’s impossible to tell. ‘You seriously think I might agree to that, to drop everything and just—’
‘All right, all right,’ he says soothingly, but Lexie, as ever, is unsoothable. ‘Not my secretary. That was a bad idea. How about as my—’
‘Felix,’ she says, ‘I’m not coming to Paris as your anything. If I come it will be as a journalist. In my own right.’
‘So you might come?’
‘Perhaps.’ She shrugs. ‘Someone on the news desk this morning was asking me how good my French was. They want civilian stories. Interviews with the ordinary people of Paris. That kind of thing.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘The phrase “a female touch” was mentioned twice, of course.’
‘Really?’ Felix is at once excited and relieved but tries to show neither. ‘So you wouldn’t be out on the barricades?’
She removes her sunglasses with a flick of her wrist and regards him with narrowed lids. Felix, despite himself, despite their argument, which has now lasted an entire lunch, feels a stirring in his groin. ‘I’ll be wherever the ordinary people are. Which I believe, in a state of emergency such as this, is everywhere, barricades included.’
Felix considers his options. He could continue the argument – he and Lexie are practised at arguing with each other, after all – or he could forget their disagreement and ask her back to his flat. He places an arm on her sleeve, taking a surreptitious look at his watch. He then gives her a slow, deep smile. ‘How much time do you have?’ he says.
How to explain Felix? When Lexie first met him, in the mid sixties, he was a correspondent for the BBC. He was just graduating from radio to television. He had the exact looks for television then: good-looking but not distractingly so, tanned but not too much, blond but not too blond; he dressed well but not too well, his hair parted in the right way, in the right place. He specialised in war-zones, disasters, acts of God, the kind of bombastic reportage Lexie disliked. An army from a large, powerful nation drops bombs on a small Communist state: call for Felix. A sea rises up and engulfs a village: call for Felix. A dormant volcano rouses itself, a fleet of fishing boats is lost in the Atlantic, a fork of lightning strikes a medieval cathedral: Felix will be on the scene, usually in some dangerous spot, often in a bullet-proof vest. He liked to wear them. His voice was firm, serious, assured: ‘ This is Felix Roffe, for the BBC.’ That line, delivered with an assertive nod, always concluded his reports. He pursued Lexie with all the determination, charm and focus with which he pursued natural disasters, political tyrants and a photogenic yet suffering populace. They were lovers, intermittently, for several years. They were in a constant state of flux, Felix and Lexie, separating, reuniting, parting, coming back together, over and over. She would leave, he would follow, he would draw her back, she would leave again. They were like clothes invested with static, adhering to each other but with an uncomfortable, aggravating friction.
They had met, some months prior to their argument on Piccadilly, with a single word, a single shout. His. ‘
Signora
!’
Lexie looked down from her vantage-point of a balcony, three floors up. The street was swirling with bubbling brown water, on which floated tree branches, chairs, cars, bicycles, street signs, strings of washing. The shops and apartments at street-level were engulfed, obliterated, the shop signs – FARMACIA, PANIFICIO, FERRAMENTA – just visible above the lapping scum of flood water.