She was playing with great vigour. Con brio. It sounded almost perfect to her ears. How extraordinary, how wonderful that she had become so proficient at such a difficult piece. It was as if this, and this only, had been her life’s work. She finished with an enormous flourish.
“Hello, you,” Teddy said, coming into the room. “Fancy a cup of tea?” He was carrying a tray, Viola trotting at his heels. “Shall I help you into an armchair?” He was fussing. He put the tray down and led her to a chair by the window. “You like this one, don’t you?” he said. “You can see the birds on the bird table.” She wished he wouldn’t stare at her like that, as if he was trying to see something behind her eyes. He settled her feet on a footstool, her tea on a table by the side of her. Tea in a beaker. Cups and saucers had suddenly become fiddly, confusing.
“Do you want a biscuit, Mummy?” Viola was hovering at her elbow. “Chocolate bourbon or pink wafers?”
“Or there’s some of Win’s cake left,” Teddy said. “It goes on without end. It would have done better than the loaves and fishes for feeding the five thousand.” Nancy ignored both offers. She was feeling rather annoyed that neither of them had congratulated her on her magnificent playing. (Bravo, Mrs. Todd!) Yet her triumph with the Chopin was fading already. The bees were making her sleepy, all that buzzing. Honey was oozing through her brain.
Time folded in on itself. Where had Teddy gone? Wasn’t he here a minute ago? It felt as if everyone had just left the room. Or perhaps it was Nancy herself who had left the room. But there was no room, there was only something she didn’t have a name for. Nothing. And then there wasn’t even that. And then the bees took flight and blessed her in farewell and Nancy stopped. Dead.
A stiff whisky, that’s my prescription. Pour one for me too.” Their GP, Dr. Webster, who was “looking forward to retirement, a bit of golf, some watercolour painting.” He was the old-fashioned sort. He had given his blessing to Nancy when she refused the operation and had been generous with the morphine and held back on homilies.
A crisp October morning. Spider webs were spangled across the plants in the garden. It was going to be a beautiful day.
Bobby, their Labrador, paced between the rooms, confused by the upset in his regime. Routine was the first thing to be discarded by a death.
Teddy poured the whisky and handed one to the doctor. He raised his glass and for an odd, rather awful moment Teddy thought he was going to say, “Cheers,” but instead he said, “Let us toast Nancy,” and it was still odd and rather awful, but made sense somehow, and Teddy raised his glass and said, “To Nancy.”
“ ‘From this world to that which is to come,’ ” Dr. Webster said, surprising Teddy with Pilgrim’s Progress. “She was a good woman. Such a bright mind, and a kind nature.” Teddy downed the whisky in one, he wasn’t ready for eulogies. “You should call the police,” he said.
“Now why on earth would I do that?”
“Because I killed her,” Teddy said.
“You helped her on her way with a little extra dose of morphine. If that was a crime I would be serving several life sentences.”
“I killed her,” Teddy said stubbornly.
“Now listen to me. She was a few hours away from death.” The GP looked alarmed, Teddy noticed. It was him, after all, who had been so generous with his liquid-morphine prescriptions over the last few weeks for her awful headaches. “Nancy was in distress,” the doctor continued. “You did the right thing.” He had visited Nancy the previous evening and given his opinion that it “wouldn’t be long now,” and added, “Do you have enough morphine?”
Enough, Teddy thought?
He had been in the kitchen, making a shepherd’s pie, when he heard the terrible cacophony coming from the living room. Before he could run through to investigate, a tearful Viola appeared in the kitchen and said, “There’s something wrong with Mummy.”
Nancy was bashing at the piano keys as if she was trying to destroy the instrument. Her hands were clawed almost into fists and when he had taken hold of them in an effort to quieten her she had looked at him with a strange, lopsided smile on her face and tried to form words. It seemed important to her that he understood, but it was Viola standing beside him that translated her spastic mumble. “The Heroic,” she said.
He led her gently into an armchair by the window and they ministered to her with tea and biscuits, but when he looked into her eyes he knew that the thing she had feared the most had happened to her. Nancy was no longer Nancy.
He had helped her to bed early but she had woken before midnight, moaning and calling out, whether from pain or distress he couldn’t tell. Both, he supposed. The shell, the shade of the woman who had once been his wife was shouting out nonsense, not even words—just barks and growls like an animal.