Hester's Story Read Free

He’s dead, Hester. Adam died yesterday from a heart attack. He didn’t suffer any pain, apparently. He was working. In the library of the New York house, because they’re always over there for Thanksgivingand Christmas, aren’t they? I’m so sorry, darling Hester. So sorry …’
    ‘Yes,’ said Hester. What else could she say? She felt as though all the words she used to know had flown out of her head. Edmund sounded on the verge of tears himself. It reminded Hester of how upset he’d been on the one occasion when they’d really quarrelled. She found that she was clutching the receiver so hard that her wrist and her fingers hurt. Breathing had suddenly become almost impossible, a matter for the utmost concentration. I must say something to Edmund, she thought. He was Adam’s best friend.
    ‘Edmund, I don’t know what to say. I’m so, I’m so …’ she managed to stammer, after an effort to move her mouth into the right shape. ‘You must be very sad. Would you like to come up here?’
    ‘I’d have adored that, Hester, but I’ve got to stay here for a couple of days … they’re doing one of my symphonies and I can’t miss it … and then of course there’s the funeral. I have to go to that. But I’ll come straight to Wychwood afterwards. Is that all right? I could get there on the second of January. How does that sound?’
    ‘Oh, Edmund, do come as soon as you possibly can. I can’t talk now, because I’ve got some wretched journalist coming to interview me about this year’s Festival.’ She laughed, but with no mirth in the sound. ‘It’s the last thing I feel like doing now.’
    ‘I’ll be there soon, Hester. Will you be all right? I’ll be thinking of you.’
    ‘I’ll be fine. The show must go on, right? I’ll see you soon. Goodbye.’
    Is this me, uttering such clichés, Hester wondered. The show must go on . I don’t care, she thought. This cliché is particularly comforting and also true. Shebelieved it. What would become of her if the show didn’t go on was too dreadful to think about.
    The funeral. Virginia would be seeing to it now. Death made a horrifying amount of work. There were so many arrangements, so much to see to – perhaps, she reflected, precisely in order to occupy people who otherwise would want to do nothing but crawl under their blankets and howl and howl like wounded animals.
    She tried to recall Adam as he used to be, long ago in the days when he was her lover, but so many images flickered through her mind that a kind of nausea washed over her. Other pictures came and went but the one she kept returning to was that of his dead body. All she could bring to mind was closed eyes and pale skin and white limbs stiff under a cold sheet – not the man whose body she used to know as well as she knew her own.
    Hester put the phone down and walked to the window. She pressed her forehead against the glass, and looked out at a garden that was nothing but frost-whitened lawn and shrubs, and leafless trees making strange shapes against the grey sky. Dying isn’t the worst thing, she thought, and found that she was trembling. Being buried, that’s worse. The idea of burial, the notion that there he would be, real flesh, real bone, gone and underground forever was, as it always had been, an unbearable thought. Hester took a deep breath. It had been years since Adam was anything to do with her. She’d been sure that she’d left him and all the love she used to feel for him far behind, but now that he was dead she wanted to call his name, cry it out aloud, and found that she couldn’t.
    Her hands were icy cold in the warm room. I must call Ruby. I can’t be alone. But I can’t … I can’t tellher. The journalist is coming any minute now. I must pull myself together.
    She was brought out of her confusion by Siggy. An enormous ginger and white tom, with gooseberry coloured eyes, he’d chosen this moment to leave the window sill and jump on to Hester’s writing