Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson Page B

us
, Victor would tell me over the phone with undisguised glee.
We’re hopeless cases.
The way things turned out, though, Victor needed less protection than I had imagined.I had only been at the Ministry for eighteen months when he succumbed to a massive stroke, his death occurring unexpectedly, and in slightly unusual circumstances.
    Marie called me one Tuesday evening, and I caught a train to the coast the following day, but I didn’t hear the full story until after the funeral, when everyone had gone home. I sat at the kitchen table, the jagged line of the cliff-edge showing halfway up the window. Marie opened a bottle of gin and poured us both a drink. She told me how she had woken early on the morning of Victor’s death, and how the silence had a quality she didn’t recognise. When she drew the curtains, she was almost blinded by the whiteness of the world outside. Snow had fallen in the night, three inches of it. To the east, the cliff rose in a glistening curve, smooth as a sugared almond. She went into Victor’s room to tell him, but he wasn’t there. Though she could just make out the imprint of his body on the counterpane, evidence of a nap the day before, it didn’t look as if the bed had been slept in. She searched the cottage from one end to the other, upstairs and down. She couldn’t find him anywhere.
Perhaps he’s gone into the village
, she thought. And then she thought,
Perhaps he’s gone on a journey.
After all, he’d done it before. He was always threatening to up sticks, make tracks. He peppered his conversation with words like ‘vamoose’ and ‘skedaddle’. He was capable of almost anything, she said, in his wild old age.
    â€˜What do you mean, he’d done it before?’ I asked.
    But Marie didn’t appear to have heard me.
    She found him later that morning, she said, in the back garden. She had come across two shapes lying on the ground, one long and vaguely cylindrical, the other smaller, squarer. She approached the small object first. It seemed safer. She bent down and began to brush the snow away. A piece of pale-green leather showed beneath her fingers. The book of shoes. She knew then what the other shape was. Rising to her feet, she circled him slowly, as though he was asleep and she was trying not to wake him. She couldn’t quite believe he was under there. Then, as she stood uncertainly beside him, she heard a quick, stealthy sound and, looking down, she saw that the snow had slipped, revealingthe rim of an ear, already bloodless, and some brittle wisps of hair.
    â€˜Weren’t you frightened?’ I asked.
    â€˜I screamed.’ She grinned at me. ‘Have you ever screamed after it’s snowed? It’s the strangest thing. You feel like you’re in a box. The kind of box a ring comes in, or a trumpet. A box lined with velvet.’ Something lifted in her just then, and she became Marie again, Marie as she had been when I first saw her, framed in the living-room doorway of the house on Hope Street, mischievous, carefree. Then it dropped again, whatever it was, and she turned back into a woman I didn’t really feel I knew. ‘I screamed,’ she said a second time, her voice without inflection now, ‘but there was no one there. A ship on the horizon. A few gulls.’
    Later, when we’d finished the bottle, I watched her run her index finger along the table, following the grain in the wood. Outside, the wind swirled against the walls. I was almost sure I could feel the cottage rock on its foundations.
    â€˜What will you do?’ I asked her.
    She shrugged. ‘Stay here.’
    â€˜Won’t you be lonely?’
    â€˜I’d be lonely if I moved,’ she said.
    At least no one would bother her, I thought as I travelled back to the city the next day. My head ached, and my mouth was strangely perfumed from all the gin I’d drunk. It had been a good funeral, though. People