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morning, but the soft hairs on the
backs of my arms were up.
    I
have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from
a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small
breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a
weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have
left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my
husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so
precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband,
it was a measured good-bye.
    It
was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying where,
o death, is thy sting? I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet
accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.
    How
to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight ?
That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself
by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the
clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds
fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same
portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind
eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we
really should be laying the plates on top of it.
    Would
my son accept that this is how it was with his father? The
hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never
understood that he was actually going to do it. All I would honestly be
able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting
some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so
serious.
    Charlie
had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before
the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I
heard it quite clearly from the bedroom. Just leave me alone, he said. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it
wasn’t my fault.
    The
trouble was , my husband didn’t really believe that.
    I
found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t
say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made
love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes. More for him
than for me, really. By that stage of our marriage it had become a
maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part
of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful
consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s
not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.
    We
didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed
beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were
embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent
apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight
through the blinds was a dark and florid saffron. It
was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across
the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank
pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few
words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an
opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited
and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was
fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and
Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of
summer where no one took their costume off.
    I
pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the
tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read
somewhere that this