A Woman on the Edge of Time Read Free Page A

them.
    The sun is shining, and my annoyance soon ebbs. I am happy to be here — happy that the girls are outside riding bikes, happy to be doing something with my hands rather than my mind. I fetch the bike tools and a bucket of water, and use the tyre levers to free the first tyre from the rim. I find the puncture, but when I open the repair box the glue has hardened. I go inside to find another kit. As I turn to walk back out, I notice a red light blinking on the phone.
    It is probably an old message, probably nothing to do with us, but it is hard to ignore, and I walk over and press the button and hear my father’s voice — or rather a strangely crumpled, strangely affected, version of his voice.
    My first reaction is embarrassment that he should be speaking like this, should be expressing his emotions so unnaturally. Though even as I am thinking this I am taking in what he is saying. ‘The worst news,’ are his words. ‘Call me.’
    I glance instinctively out into the garden in search of my daughters. The worst news would be something happening to them. I cannot see them, but I can hear their cheerful voices as they ride around the tennis court.
    By now, though, I understand that this is serious. The worst news must mean — and though I do not allow myself to finish this thought, a roulette wheel is turning in my head as I dial my father’s number.
    Normally it would be my father, who is in his mid-seventies, who has had two heart bypasses, I would be worried about, but it can’t be him.
    Perhaps, I think, it is his brother, who also has heart problems, though before the idea is halfway through my mind I know it is not.
    â€˜Dad?’ I say, when he answers the phone.
    â€˜Simon’ is the name he utters, that his words fall on. Not my daughters — his son. Not his brother — my brother.
    A seizure, I hear him say — Simon has suffered from seizures in the past. Earlier this morning, he says. His body was found in the street near his house.
    When I have put down the phone, I stand in the watery air. How long has it been since I came in to look for the glue? A minute? Two?
    What I am aware of feeling at this moment is not shock or grief or even disbelief, so much as a lack of interest in what I’ve heard. I do not want to know this information. What has it got to do with our weekend at the Barn? I want to continue the day as we have planned, for Judy to return with the shopping, for us all to cycle down to the beach. The sun is still shining outside, after all. No one has died down here.
    Although I have told my father we will head back to London straight away, I walk out into the garden with the glue. Judy won’t be back with the car for a while, and I have a job to do here, a task to finish. I have marked the puncture spot, and I find the hole and rub it down and smooth a circle of glue over it.
    I don’t remember much about the journey back except that I insist we stop to buy sandwiches, and that everyone gets what they want, even if it means going to two different shops. I remember, too, Judy saying at some point that at least my family knows how to deal with death, and looking at her in surprise.
    At my father’s house, we learn what happened. Playing football the previous evening, Simon felt what he thought was indigestion, and when the pain was still there in the morning he went out to run it off. An hour later, a policewoman rang on his door. His wife had to stay with the two younger boys, and his oldest son, Rafi, who is fifteen, volunteered to go the hospital to identify his father.
    I ask if anyone else has seen the body, and when they say no, I say that I want to go. I am not sure why I am so insistent, but I am almost giddy at the thought. Perhaps I think that as Rafi has seen him, I must, too, that I can take the burden of what he has witnessed from him. Perhaps it is simply that I need to do something, though later it will occur to me