I lead him out into in the garden and we sit beside each other on the grass in the sun, legs outstretched, with our mugs of coffee. The day is so promisingly warm, the sun is a security blanket that I very much need to get through this conversation.
‘I’m worried if I get wrapped up in you – and, believe me, after last night I know I would – I’ll move straight from this holding pattern of grief into another relationship, without ever having taken any risks on my own. This is hard to explain . . .’
‘You need to travel,’ he explains. ‘You need to make a home somewhere only you and Charlie know. You need Charlie to see you as a happy, independent mother. You need to write your book—’
I do. I need all of that.
‘I don’t expect you to wait for me,’ I say, and it feels like the words coming out of my mouth are launching a personal attack on me. Like I’m kicking an own goal. Tears start to well.
He leans over and kisses the top of my head. I feel like we’re seventeen and saying goodbye after a summer romance.
‘I won’t hold you back from any of the things you need to do,’ he says. ‘They’re all important. Maybe you need an adult gap year. Sell up, travel, write . . . See what the world offers you.’
I can’t deny even the idea of it stirs something new in me. I need adventure. New horizons. Different challenges that don’t revolve around watching a husband die.
‘I need time to catch my breath,’ I explain. ‘This feels too fast. I think I’m a bit behind you. It feels like you’ve had longer than me to get used to the idea . . . while I’ve been so in love with Cam. So obsessed with his memory. So . . . fractured.’
‘Of course you have been. That’s why I never said anything, all this time.’
He is ever respectful of Cam and me because he’s lived this.
‘Kate, it took me years to even consider the real possibility that there could be someone else for me. Someone I’d actually let into my life, instead of endlessly pushing people away. You’re barely two years into life without your husband. Don’t ever feel rushed.’
It would be easier not to feel rushed if he was less amazing. People search their whole adult lives for someone like this.
‘Our entire relationship has been built on my catastrophe,’ I tell him. ‘You’re instinctive with me when I’m struggling, but how will this work when I’m back on top? Are we going to be the same when I don’t need you any more? When I’m driven and decisive and accomplished and successful? Because those are all the things I haven’t had a chance to aim for, and I need them like I need oxygen.’
He nods, as I imagine more about how it would really be. This is all very romantic and ‘whirlwind’ now, but it’s not real life. Not when you have a five-year-old.
‘When we’re competing over whose work is more important or which one of us is taking school holidays off, is this going to feel so charming?’ I ask.
‘It’s got to be better than sitting together in Emergency Departments and at death beds,’ he observes.
‘Lots of couples fall apart when life gets hard. We wouldn’t, because we’ve already made it through the worst. But, Hugh, you haven’t met the woman I want to become. I haven’t met her yet. I’m forty, and I’ve loved one man my entire adult life. I don’t know who I am without Cam, other than the woman who lost her husband. And I don’t want to be that woman any more. I have to stop looking back.’
I haven’t felt this level of clarity, ever. A radically different picture of how my life could be has fallen into view. I can’t un-see it.
‘You’re lit up,’ he says, his eyes a clear grey. ‘This is what I want for you, obviously.’
This is heartbreaking. But unavoidably so. To pursue this with him now, while we’re aware of this pull towards true independence, would set us both up for failure.
‘You need to go,’ he says. ‘Probably as soon as possible.’
Already?
‘Can I take some leave?’ I ask. ‘Organise the house? Shouldn’t I see this film project through?’
He taps my foot with his, on the grass. ‘Look, I know I said you were crucial, Whittaker, but I’m sure I’ll be able to bumble through it without you.’
He makes me smile as we pull ourselves to our feet.
‘Hugh, tell me you understand this is not—’
‘About me, I know. It’s about you. And it needs to be.’
‘Can I have another hug?’ I ask, bereft already without him.
‘Aren’t you terrified of where it might lead?’ he asks, teasing me, as he pulls me into one of those hugs you settle right into, until your breathing and heartbeats sync. With my cheek to his chest, closer than ever, inhaling the scent of his skin with his arms wrapped tightly around me, I want to revoke this entire conversation. I could devote myself to loving him so easily. And that’s exactly the problem.
Neither of us wants to be the first to pull away. In the end, it’s a mutual action and, in the disentanglement, he somehow ends up holding my hand. He brings it to his lips and kisses it, holding the kind of eye contact that conveys a primal connection for the ages.
Find your way to someone who’ll love you just as much as I do.
I think we can consider that done, Cam.
39
The last things to go are the neon sticky notes Cam had used to label things when he began losing his words. I remember the day I came home from work to a house covered in coloured notes. ‘Toaster.’ ‘Clock.’ ‘TV.’ ‘Mirror.’ They were on everything. It must have taken him all day. When I walked in, he searched my face, probably hoping it wouldn’t set me off – we’d learnt that, with grief, the little things are the big things. It certainly winded me, but I held it together.
‘You’ve redecorated,’ I said, and he pulled me into his arms as we looked at the vibrant labels around us and I tried not to cry. There’d been a time years earlier when I’d come home to rose petals scattered all over the house.
After a while, the labels hadn’t worked any more because, in addition to forgetting what things were called, he forgot how to read. I remember him standing in our bathroom after a shower, towel around his waist, hair glistening, studying the toothbrushes.
‘What are these?’ he’d asked me.
‘Read the word,’ I’d prompted.
‘What word?’
It was like selective blindness. Objects right in front of him were invisible. There were no words for him any more and no words for me. I couldn’t see how any person could get by without the alphabet – let alone a literature professor – but gradually words left him altogether and we could communicate only by my imagined ESP. Sometimes I liked to think he understood my thoughts as we looked each other in the eyes. Mostly I hoped he didn’t. The dark circling in my brain by the time Cam had lost the power of speech was not for innocent minds. It would have broken him.