Prologue
From above, Maggie looks to have everything under control. She deposits the tablets onto the dinner plate with her usual fastidious care. If anything, she moves through the motions of breaking the coated capsules free from the foil with even greater precision than usual, tipping the blister slowly so as to enjoy the sharp clanging sound that announces each one hitting the ceramic. Anything to break the silence.
When she has eight in front of her, Maggie retrieves from the sideboard her glass of water, untouched since lunch, and checks the oven setting one last time. Chicken pie, ready-made, so it will be twenty-five minutes. Plenty of time to finish up here. She pulls out a chair and takes a seat at the kitchen table, her back to the door. There is a sheaf of bills in front of her, all settled but spilling over untidily. Maggie reaches into her handbag and fishes out her most treasured gift, a paperweight fashioned from a rock, decorated especially for her, and places it on top of them.
Mess contained, she clicks her pen. A rollerball, one of the few with ink in the desk drawer of no return, with a smooth glide that seems unlikely to reignite the claw-fisted cramp a week writing in Biro has induced. Her script is as neat and sharp as ever as she finishes her last sentence to Frank. If there is any fragment of doubt in her mind, there are few visible signs. Maybe a little wobble on the comma, if you look closely.
Maggie shuts the red leather planner, and without further ado, she gathers the pills in her hand, drops them on her tongue, and takes a small sip of the water, casting her head back in the extravagant swallowing gesture she developed in her teenage years and has never quite outgrown in the half century since.
At first, nothing occurs. Without moving from her seat, she goes back to trimming the beans, pushing the ends and their peculiar fibrous tails to the corner of the chopping board. The waves of relaxation arrive after a minute or so. Maggie’s slicing begins to slow, her right hand trembling on the cutting knife.
Just seconds later, she slumps forward. Fortunately, it is far too swift to process, her head suddenly dropping in the way it always would during the French-film marathons Frank lined up for wet Sunday afternoons. It is a shame he is not there to cushion the fall this time.
And this time, there is no chance she will jolt back awake.
In his study, Frank fixates on the screen in front of him. The end is in sight: a knight, a bishop, and a pawn, all controlled by the computer, on a beginner’s setting, no less, pen in his last bastion of hope—his queen. All those academic achievements, and still he has yet to progress past level two. It gives a whole new resonance to his most favorite of phrases: Persistence is key.
In the past, when Maggie called him for supper, he would be so engrossed in his strategy that he couldn’t register the sound of her voice, let alone shut down his game. Once she had plated up, Maggie would come and retrieve him herself, resting her hands on his shoulders and stroking between the blades with her thumbs until the checkmate screen inevitably appeared. “Next time!” she would say, to buoy Frank back up. The algorithms might be stacked against him, but Maggie could never stand to see him disappointed.
Today, however, there is nothing quite so kind to rouse him. When the fire alarm cuts through his consciousness, his surprise is more that it still works than that it has gone off. Maggie has never been a very attentive cook, though at least it means they don’t have to go through the ceremony of testing the smoke-detector battery with a broom handle every three months. What’s more, their early years together were marked by a string of now-infamous culinary defeats: the Lopsided Trifle of ’78 (the fifth or sixth date); the Concrete Cranachan of ’79 (a title that earned him a night in the spare room); Gastroenteritis-gate at a birthday party hosted in their wildly unkempt back garden (fortunately only attended by forgiving close friends). Once the aftereffects had subsided, each one, miraculously, made him fall a little deeper in love with her.
The alarm is shrill and insistent enough by now to cause him to exit his game and, after a minute wondering whether Maggie is already on to it, to go and tackle the bugger himself. He can smell the smoke before he sees it. Ahead, in the oven, something has burned, been forgotten perhaps while Maggie takes one of her increasingly frequent lie-downs. Turning off the dial with one hand, he reaches for the souvenir tea towel looped on the door handle to begin to disperse the smoke. It is thicker than he first thought, and even Cornwall’s finest dishcloth isn’t going to cut the mustard. Fresh air. That is what he needs. It is only when he moves to open the door that he sees Maggie.
It is not the empty pill packet at her side that gives it away. Nor the spilled water glass, nor the vegetable detritus sprayed around her wrists. It is the pain in his chest. It is the carpet being pulled from under him, the walls giving way, the ceiling caving in—every awful infrastructure analogy unfolding as he realizes what Maggie has done.
He touches her wrist in the hope of finding something there: a flutter, a twitch, anything. Maybe it isn’t too late.
His hand hovers over the telephone cradle. He has never been good with calls, and there is a moment when it is touch-and-go whether he will back out altogether.
“Hello, emergency service operator. Ambulance, fire, police, or coastguard?”
Silence.
“Hello, emergency service operator. Ambulance, fire, police, or coastguard?”
Silence.
“May I remind you that making a call to the emergency services as part of a joke or prank is an offense and a risk to lives?”
“A-a-ambulance,” Frank manages, just in time, the vowels rattling in his throat before tumbling out in a barely audible torrent.
“Sir, you will need to speak up for the ambulance operator. I’ll connect you now.”
“Ambulance service. What’s the address of the emergency?”
“Forty-three Digby Crescent, Oxford OX2 6TA.” Frank’s voice sounds hoarse, unfamiliar, so unlike how it has sounded to himself, these past few months.
“Can you tell me exactly what has happened?”
“It’s my wife, Maggie. She’s . . . she’s taken too many of her pills, her sleeping pills.”
“We’re sending someone now. Is she conscious, sir? Can you feel if she has a pulse? Any sign of her breathing?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I can’t say for sure.”
“Sir, do you have an idea of whether this was intentional?”
Silence.
“Any additional information you can provide at this stage may prove invaluable to our response. Has your wife recently mentioned any desire to harm herself? Any previous depressive episodes?”
“Well . . . the thing . . . the thing is, we haven’t spoken for a while. I mean, I haven’t spoken to her for a while . . . It’s been . . . nearly six months.”
Her Silence
Chapter 1
There is nothing as unsettling as the hospital waiting room. The banks of plastic chairs with their picked and pinched vinyl covers, the quiet hum of the vending machine, the collective intake of breath when the intensive-care consultant comes in with news, more often than not directed elsewhere—it’s as if every aspect of it is designed to keep you on edge. And that’s before you consider why you are there in the first place.