The Other Hand Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 countlessforetellings, 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 sort of behavior would