The call came a week ago. I was on my way out of court. I was meeting Seb for a drink at Waterloo before we caught the train home together. It was Friday. We always try to meet at the station on Fridays after work. On average, we achieve this twice a month, if I’m honest, sometimes once. A shared bottled of Pinot Grigio in a busy station is what passes, what has to pass, for a date just at the moment. There’s a bar called the Cabin on the upper level, where you can drink and talk and watch the train timetable on a television screen and we know we can make it to our platform in three minutes. It’s our way of being together for as many minutes and seconds as we can, and that we still want to do this is, to me, romantic. The train ride also counts. Once home, domesticity will, we know, swamp us, and by the time we are alone again, our last remaining drops of energy will have been spent on the girls.
So when the call came, I was on the Strand. A GBH case had taken less time than I’d anticipated, and I was considering texting Seb to tell him I was heading back to chambers and that I’d see him later at home. I took my phone out of my coat pocket, and at the sight of my brother’s name, my body tingled with presentiment. I just knew, as they say.
‘Graham,’ I said.
‘All right.’ The T hissed; my blood chilled.
‘Is it Mum?’
‘Yeah.’
You can prepare yourself for a moment you know is coming. You can make plans, even rehearse it in your mind. I knew my mother was dying. She had been transferred to the hospice a month earlier. I had travelled north the previous weekend, said goodbye just in case. I truly believed I’d made my peace with the inevitable. But now here was Graham telling me that he had held her hand and that she had taken ‘this big breath, a big gasp, like’, then closed her eyes, sending one tear trickling down each side of her face into her near-white hair.
‘And then she let go,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘And that was it, like. That was it.’
My brother doesn’t say much, but he had known, without me asking, that I would need every detail, second by second, and he had given it his best shot. It was his way of including me in the immense and private privilege of our mother’s last moments.
‘Thanks for calling,’ I said, which seems ridiculous to me now, like thanking someone for reminding me of a hair appointment or a delivery. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Yes. I’m meeting Seb.’
‘Good. Tell him I said all right.’
‘OK. Talk to you tomorrow.’
I had prepared. But there is no preparation. Nothing can or will help. Any plans you make for yourself and how you will behave will be forgotten. You will be alone, not with loved ones, as planned. You will be alone on the street and you will be crying like you told yourself you would not, and you will descend into precisely the red, snotty mess of your fears, blowing loud sobs into a crowd of strangers, there in your suit and your high-heeled shoes – the armour you were foolish enough to think would protect you. And you will find the sight of so many people carrying on as if nothing has happened so surreal, so fucking offensive, frankly, that you will have to stagger into a side street and find a wall to lean on while you get yourself together enough to text your husband.
Mum’s gone.
Seb would still be at work. I wasn’t sure if he’d even have his phone with him; tried not to let that thought fill me with panic. But he rang immediately.
‘Hey. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I managed.
‘Where are you?’
‘The Strand.’
‘All right. I can be there in half an hour, three quarters.’ He paused, enough to sense that I couldn’t speak. ‘First one there gets the drinks. I’m on my way, Nick. I’ll see you soon, all right? Walk there. Take the air, look at the beautiful city. Do you want me to stay on the phone?’
‘No. No, I’m all right. I’ll see you there.’
If you were walking across Jubilee Bridge that day, you would have seen a very smartly dressed woman with a great haircut weeping snottily into a shrivelled tissue. Perhaps you would have smiled your sympathy and looked away. But she would not have seen you. That day she didn’t even remember to look at the view: the South Bank Centre, the London Eye, the glorious sweep of the capital’s riverside. And when she arrived at the bar, she had no idea how she had got there.
Seb was already sitting on the red leather couch at the back. Bottle of white in a silver wine cooler. This didn’t make sense; I’d been nearer to Waterloo than him, but now I think about it, I think I must have wandered about in a daze for a bit. I have a memory of looking at lipsticks in Boots that can only have been that afternoon, a shop assistant asking if she could help me. I never buy lipstick in Boots. The way Seb looked at me as I made my way through the bar was enough to make tears come again. I blinked them back and sank down beside him. He kissed the top of my head.
‘Petes,’ he said.
Story on that: my brother’s nickname for me is posh twat. I’m not, not really, but everything’s relative. When I first met Seb at a juvenile court case long ago, I told him this and it amused him. I don’t know what you’re laughing at, I said. You’re a much posher twat than me. Posh twat became PT, which became Petey, which became Petes. There.
I let Seb hold me while I cried into the new cashmere jumper I’d bought him for Christmas, the one he said was too expensive for a social worker but which he’d not had off his back.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘This jumper’s dry-clean only,’ Seb replied, which made me laugh while, with the discretion of a priest, a waiter slid a stack of white paper napkins onto the table.
I took one and pressed it to my face. ‘It’s all right, I cried most of my mascara off on the Strand.’ I met his eye. ‘Don’t say anything kind.’
‘All right. Shall I tell you I was called Shrek four times today?’
I laughed, tears spilling. Seb isn’t ugly, but his ears stick out and his nose is, how can I put it … kind of rickety. Like a contraption that would straighten if you were to wiggle it. We have both broken our noses, actually, though mine was only a hairline fracture, with no lasting disfigurement. And of course Seb’s was broken by a slope at St Anton whereas mine was broken by a fist. His eyes aren’t all that fantastic either, to be honest. With Seb, it’s all about the smile. Think ice caps melting. Think jelly legs. Think this is probably my subjective opinion.
He had filled my glass, was now topping up his own, saying nothing.
‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ I said.
‘I know you will.’ He moved closer along the couch until our thighs touched. He tightened his arm around me and kissed my hair, and I was more grateful for him in that moment than I had been in a while. He is so kind that I forget it. That he would only ever lay his hands on me in affection or desire is something I don’t think about. But I gave silent thanks in that moment for the fact that I’d married a man so unfailingly kind that I have the luxury of letting it slip my mind.
We made short work of the bottle and the just one more large glass each for the road. Once home, once the nanny had left, I was still tipsy enough to tell the girls that their grandma had died without making too much of a mess of it: delicately normal, not scary, amounts of crying. We huddled together on the sofa and had what my mother would have called a right good weep. They didn’t see their nan that much, but they loved her and spoke to her every week on the phone. Seb went for fish and chips. And that was how the immediate aftermath went: a good weep; fish and chips; Carol anecdotes and teary laughter. It was exactly what Mum would have wanted.