The Image in the Water Read Free Page B

supposing that when it came it would be fatal. He had died quickly and she hoped without more than a few seconds of pain. He had died before his powers began to crumble, while he was still doing well the job which he enjoyed. That evening in the Cotswolds he had known that his wife was comfortable by the fire downstairs and that his daughter was on her way through the winter evening to see him.
    Louise had felt a moment of desolation in the newly built raw, red brick crematorium on Highgate Hill when Simon’s body in the impersonal coffin slid through the curtain into the fire. Her own body for a few seconds had seemed torn apart at the knowledge that she would never again quarrel with Simon, organise a week or a holiday with Simon, buy a shirt for Simon, sip morning tea with him in bed, see him patiently waiting for her at the foot of the stairs. But that pain had passed quickly and was replaced by this miraculous crop of memories, which she was still bringing to harvest. Sometimes nowadays she had to force herself away from memories. She made herself go and sculpt in the studio in Wandsworth, which Simon had hardly ever visited. She entertained Julia’sfriends, whom Simon had never met. She even toyed with the idea of selling the house in Highgate and living somewhere where Simon had never set foot. She knew that he had valued her independent spirit and would have approved of all these acts of recovery through separation.
    But today in the Abbey, when the nation was remembering its prime minister, she might indulge herself in memories of the man she had married. Politics had been there all the time. At first she had resented this bitterly. During the first years of marriage she had fought against each evening destroyed by a late vote, each weekend conference, each dull dinner made worse by speeches. Latterly she had continued to fight, but more as a matter of habit than in hope of victory. She no longer expected to drive politics out of Simon’s life or even to loosen its grip. Indeed, in these later years she had dreaded the task of living with him once his political career had ended. She could not imagine how either of them would fill the void.
    Was the close of the anthem too calm, even sentimental? But that was how she felt that morning. All was well, particularly with her. No one else in the congregation, not even Julia, shared with her the particular heap of small recollections that added up to a sound marriage. When she met him Simon had been short of money. Little habits from that time had stayed with him. He turned off lights when they left a room. He kept the tawdry razors issued by airlines and soap from hotel rooms. He entered a running total on the stub of their joint cheque book, source of many misunderstandings. She had tried to tease him out of some of these habits, and now was glad that she had failed. Hide-and-seek with Julia and her friends in the Highgate garden, the tie she had bought him each year for the Party Conference, a slope of olives inTuscany, the exercises he did in the bedroom each morning, walking together through the first sparkle of autumn frost on the lawns at Chequers – this jumble of unrelated snapshots was hers alone. It was useless to explain marriage to the young, for they thought of it only in terms of sex and children. Sex they had without marriage, and often nowadays children too. But they missed the point. Sleeping together and bringing up children were not great matters in themselves. They helped, along with a mass of other events, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to create a familiarity between two human beings that went beyond anything else in life. Familiarity, that was a feeble word. Comradeship, alliance, teamwork, harmony, oneness – none of these was quite right either, but Louise knew exactly what she meant. Now death had parted her from Simon. They had always known that death, and death alone, had that right.
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