Afterwife (7 page)

She felt a wave of relief. It wasn’t just her. “Do you talk to her?”

“Doesn’t talk back” was all he said, turning to face the window despondently. The sky was a cushiony blue above the rooftops now, framing the crow’s-wing black of his shoulder-length hair. “But the bond between her and Freddie was so close, so…so umbilical that maybe she can connect with him.” He shook his head, closing his eyes again. “I’m going back to the studio Monday.”

It took a moment to sink in. “Already?”

“I need to do something.” Ollie started rolling another cigarette. “Anyway, there’s no one else who’s going to do it.”

“What about Freddie’s pickup times and stuff?” Jenny didn’t really know what childcare was involved but she’d heard Sophie talk about it often enough, the endless deadlines. It had always struck her as an enormously complicated business requiring military planning.
The reason Sophie hadn’t been able to go back to work was because Ollie worked such erratic and long hours, sometimes not leaving the studio until late evening. How on earth would Ollie, not the most practical of men, fill her shoes?

“Don’t worry, Jenny. I’ll sort it.”

“I’ll help you all I can. Happy to take him swimming, whatever. I mean, I’d love to, if you want me to,” she stuttered, suddenly worried that she might be intruding. “I wish I could do more, Ollie. I wish I lived closer.”

Ollie got up and walked slowly to the fridge and pulled out a beer.

Should she say anything about the drinking? No, no, she shouldn’t. Not now. Let it go. “Is there anything I can help you with today? Like now, as I’m here? I feel like I should be doing something.”

He snapped the can and looked at her sharply. “Maybe you can explain that list on the table.”

“Sorry?” She started at the change in the tone of his voice.

“That piece of paper on the table.”

She bent forward, peering at the crumpled square of paper, Sophie’s large, rounded writing. “What is it? A to-do list.” She smiled. “Sophie was queen of the to-do list.”

Sophie used to say that without her to-do lists she’d be the most disorganized mother in the world. Jenny never believed this. Sophie had always had a knack for the domestic. Although she was often late—she made being late glamorous rather than just annoying—she always knew where she was going, where she needed to be. She didn’t forget stuff. Like smear tests, or her grandmother’s birthday. She organized and decorated any environment she was in for more than ten minutes, whether that was a tent—Sophie camped with battery-powered fairy lights—or her room at university, which had boasted nondead orchids, sidelights dangerously draped with Indian silks, black-and-white professionally framed photographs and a dressing
table with little white china-lidded pots for her cotton wool, all of which had seemed impossibly chic at the time. Jenny had taken her own makeup off with wet cheap toilet paper and the only decoration on her walls consisted of her lecture timetables.

Jenny smoothed the paper with the edge of her hand and began to read.

“Speak to Jenny about
it
?” She frowned, puzzled. Why the glum smiley? “No, no idea, sorry.”

He frowned. “The lobotomy. She says lobotomy. Was she so bloody bored with her life, Jenny?”

“No!”

“She was frustrated. I hate that.” He twisted his hands together. They were hands that she’d seen dance along piano keyboards at parties involving mojitos and improvised renditions of “Bennie and the Jets” in happier times. Today, for some reason, they looked broken.

“Look, Sophie had a good brain on her.” She tried to sound calm and composed and rational but inside she was panicking. She remembered the question in the churchyard, a question, thankfully, he’d not asked again. But she felt it looming. “She was one of those women who could have done anything. And she chose her family. That was
what she wanted. You. Freddie. This. Exactly this. She was so happy, really happy. You two had what everyone wants, Ollie. I knew her, Ollie. I knew her better than anyone. And I know she loved you and her life here more than anything.”

He leaned against the fridge and letter fridge magnets scattered onto the floor. “I just keep looking for…for proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“I don’t know. Something. Something…” he said, his voice drifting off, making the hair lift on Jenny’s arms.

S
he closed the door of number thirty-three with some relief and strode off purposefully toward Muswell Hill Broadway in search of a deli, freshly fallen snow squeaking under her feet. She wondered again what it was that Sophie had wanted to talk to her about. Why the glum smiley? It must have been something bad. Something important, for her to underline it. How incredibly frustrating that now she’d never know.

The Broadway was as it always was, the armada of expensive baby buggies, the glittering shop fronts selling knitted toys and organic beauty creams, the steaming lattes and cinnamon cakes. One second she was finding the familiarity of the street comforting, the next she was winded by loss. She realized there was no one else she could meander along a high street with in the way she did with Sophie. And for this reason only, just one reason among millions of others, she’d miss her forever.

Sophie had loved shopping for its own sake. She’d loved a bargain. In their twenties they’d spent many weekends meandering around Camden Market, Portobello and Brick Lane. She was a collaborative shopper, as happy to find something for Jenny as she was for herself. She adored buying presents, spending money. Her eyes would glow with pleasure as she handed over a wodge of notes or a
credit card, whereas spending made Jenny anxious; she’d been brought up to think she should save and had been the proud owner of a post office account that had earned about twopence a year interest since a small child. While browsing with Sophie was always fun, it sometimes got out of hand. Sophie made her buy things she didn’t often wear. Sparkly things. And there was that time she’d got trapped in a dress. Sophie, being Sophie, had insisted she try on a vintage creation—by an acclaimed designer she’d never heard of—with a strange twisty cut and smocking, in a frighteningly cool shop with unfeasibly thin shop assistants in Notting Hill. The dress, despite its age, was completely unaffordable and, in Jenny’s uninformed opinion, hugely unflattering. It was also impossible to escape from. It took two shop assistants and twenty-three minutes to free her from the dress. Sophie had officially peed herself laughing.

Things changed when Freddie reached school age and Sophie and Ollie had, bafflingly at the time, left the gritty grooviness of Kensal Rise and settled in the suburbs, muttering darkly about schools. How could a good school compensate for not having a Tube station? She didn’t get it. After that it had become harder to meet up, especially in recent years. Their lunches would no longer spill into the afternoon with the same abandon. There was always the school run, playdates, football lessons and a seemingly endless list of deadlines and responsibilities, none of which involved ingesting Bloody Marys or getting trapped in dresses. Having given up work at the small event organizer that demanded such long hours to look after Freddie, Sophie no longer earned her own money and felt that she wasn’t justified in spending Ollie’s money on the utterly frivolous, although of course the odd splurge still went under the radar, and Sophie was quite happy to throw money at furniture, as well as endless “finds” on eBay.

Relying on her husband’s income had struck Jenny as an uncomfortable dynamic. How she’d hate to have to rely on Sam’s. But
Sophie, of course, took it in her breezy stride. She still had funds from her single working years to fall back on, as well as friends with discounts in the fashion industry, and an eye that could whip up showstopping outfits out of the most unlikely sartorial components: Doctor Who scarves bought secondhand from the school Christmas fair, holey jeans exposing a tanned knee, a furry gilet from Topshop and one of Ollie’s old The The tour T-shirts from the early nineties. She once accessorized her yellow gingham bikini with a boa made of slimy seaweed on a beach in Cornwall. Needless to say she looked amazing.

Jenny pushed open the heavy glass doors of the deli into a fog of noise and smell and warmth—frothing milk machines, the hushed gossiping of huddled mothers, the sound of babies burping up milk, the smells of cake, coffee and suede boots dampened by the snow—and pushed her way past the buggies to the salad and deli dishes behind the gleaming glass counter. Having glimpsed the interior of Ollie’s fridge—beer and milk—she placed a generous order of food with the pretty ginger girl behind the counter.

“Jenny?” said a voice behind her. “It is Jenny, isn’t it?”

She turned. A swathe of pink sweater was emerging from the back of the queue. A frizzy halo of brown hair held back in the jaws of two enormous tortoiseshell plastic hairclips.

“Suze?” It was the woman who’d done the speech before her at the funeral. The booming voice. That hair.

“You look totally different out of your funeral outfit!” Suze lunged forward. It was a full-on kiss on the cheek, tea wet and compounded with a hug so that Jenny found herself spluttering into the bobbly cerise sweater. As she did so she came eye to eye with a ginger-haired baby strapped to Suze’s back in a sling.

“Here, Lucas!” Suze yanked a fluff-haired blond toddler back by the strap of his denim dungarees. “Stay here or no muffin.” The toddler looked outraged.

“Wow! How amazing to meet like this,” said Jenny, weakly. “How are you?”

Suze rolled her eyes. “Don’t ask. You know what it’s like with young kids. I feel like I’m losing control of the monkey cage at the zoo.”

Monkey? Zoo? What on earth was she talking about? She kept having this problem, not getting stuff. Like everything was happening under water.

“Night feeding problems,” explained Suze, reading her lack of comprehension. “The reason I look seventy-five.”

Jenny smiled, nodding politely, not wanting to encourage further expounding of Suze’s tiredness. She’d noticed this a lot about people with kids: they spent hours talking about tiredness. The Eskimos’ dozens of words for snow had nothing on a mother’s vocabulary for tiredness.

“Don’t look at your mama like that!” Suze smiled and squeezed toddler Lucas’s cheek. He muttered something ungracious about the muffin and ramped up the cross look. Suze turned to her. “How old are yours?”

“I don’t have any kids myself. I’m just up here seeing Ollie and Freddie,” she said quickly, feeling like she should explain herself. After all, what the hell was she doing in Muswell Hill if she
didn’t
have kids? She wished the girl behind the counter could be a bit more slapdash and shove the food into the brown cardboard boxes so she could leave now.

“Ah.” Suze’s eyes narrowed. “Ollie. How
is
Ollie?”

“Well…” Jenny hesitated, not wanting to gossip about Ollie behind his back but not wanting to gloss over the situation either. “Could be better, obviously.”

“Poor, poor man. Well, at least he’s got his mum living with him. Thank God for mothers, eh?”

“She’s gone back home, actually. I think he wanted a bit of space.”

“Oh, has she?” Suze’s face brightened. She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Between you and me, Jenny, I’ve tried to help out a few times in the last few weeks and I’ve always found the mother a bit of a, well, a bit of a brick wall, to be perfectly honest. She doesn’t seem to want anyone else getting too close.” She shook her head, as if trying to stop herself from saying more. “So how’s Ollie coping
alone
?” She drew out the words slowly, as if hinting at the comprehensive length of answer she expected in reply.

“Well…”

“As Tash suspected.” Suze shook her frizz. “She had a peek through the letter box on Tuesday and said the hall looked like a festival site.”

“He’s not that domestic at the best of times,” she said and then felt disloyal.

“And as soon as he goes back to work…”

“Next week. He’s going back next week.”

“Next week! Blimey,” Suze exclaimed, oblivious to the surge of lunchtime diners trying to get past her to the till. She grabbed the sleeve of Jenny’s coat urgently. “This is fate, you know, me and you, meeting like this. Fate!”

“Er, fate?” She didn’t like the idea of fate anymore. It had pulled some nasty tricks.

“I actually tried to phone you last week, but of course, I’d lost your number.” Suze slapped her temple hard with the side of her hand. “I changed handbags and…Oh, I won’t bore you with the details.”

Jenny smiled politely. Alarm bells started to ring.

“It is time, Jenny,” Suze announced as her baby regurgitated something onto her left shoulder.

She now had absolutely no idea what Suze was talking about. “Time for what, sorry?”

“Sophie’s girls to come together.” She rubbed at the milk stain
on her shoulder with a wet wipe that she’d plucked from her handbag. “I’ve always said we need a Help Ollie committee and, you know what?” she added determinedly. “We’re going to start it!”