About That Night

So the proposal, when it came, caught her completely off balance. She’d been up to her eyes producing the latest series of Saturday Bonkers and was out of the door early in the morning and always home late. She and Jamie were hardly ever in the flat at the same time. He’d grown exasperated with her job, her hours, the Ricky Clough antics. He worked for a charity which educated women in Ethiopia about the spread of HIV and he quite often travelled abroad. He’d shown Elizabeth photos of the prostitutes lining the road to Djibouti, a long ribbon of tarmac known as HIV Drive, and she’d often wondered what those women in their brightly coloured kemis and embroidered shawls thought of her blond, earnest boyfriend, in his button-down denim shirt, squatting in the dust talking to them about condoms.

In an attempt to spend more time together, Elizabeth had suggested that they go to her nephew’s birthday party and stay the weekend in Manchester with her sister, Vic. Elizabeth adored her two small nephews and Vic in turn was fond of Jamie. Elizabeth had thought a family party might be healing, but in the end she and Jamie argued all the way up the M6 about whether or not they should sell the flat and buy a small house (Elizabeth was keen – she was secretly hoping they might soon have a need for a second bedroom – but Jamie dampened her hopes by arguing it was too acquisitive and bourgeois) and the tiff cast a cloud over the family reunion. Jamie was mostly sullen and distracted from the moment they arrived, and Elizabeth found herself overcompensating by being exceptionally lively and drinking too much. But during the birthday party on Saturday – just as she was acting out an elaborate scene from Toy Story with her nephews – Jamie suddenly seized her round the waist and murmured into her hair, ‘Hey Lizzie, you’re good at this. Let’s get married and have one of our own.’

Elizabeth looked up, puzzled by his change of mood, and in her best Buzz Lightyear voice said, ‘Excuse me, you are delaying my rendezvous with star command.’ But Jamie was looking at her very seriously. It wasn’t a joke. Vic paused in her pouring of lemonade and looked over at them anxiously.

‘Well?’ Jamie said more loudly.

Her nephew, Billy, who was Woody to her Buzz, took off his sheriff’s hat and threw it across the room, frustrated that the game had stopped. He looked up at Elizabeth with a chocolate-smeared mouth, eyes round and impatient. Jamie’s face paled. He looked suddenly young, very like the hopeful blue-eyed boy she’d met on a freezing anti-war march in her first term at York, when he’d offered her some soup from his flask and some socialist leaflets from his rucksack.

But marriage? Did she want to be married? To wear a ring that signalled I belong to someone else? And they’d been so distant with each other recently! She glanced over at her sister, whose mouth formed a small questioning O. Billy tugged at her skirt and she looked down at his sweet face. But oh yes, oh God, she so wanted that! She did want one of their own. She took Jamie’s hand. The hand she knew so well, every contour and lifeline, almost better than her own. How could she not accept that hand? Things would be better if they were husband and wife. She’d go home more. He’d be more communicative. They’d have a baby. Everything that felt wrong now would feel right once they were married.

‘Yes,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Yes. Yes. YES.’

Elizabeth drained her mug of tea and wandered over to the mirror that hung over the fireplace. Her face was unnaturally pale, the fine dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose more pronounced than usual, her lips colourless, her short brown hair standing on end where she’d run her fingers through it, again and again. Hollow eyes were framed by dark circles and looked back at her accusingly: Why didn’t you know? You were meant to be in control. Why didn’t you spot how ill Ricky was? Was it just like it was with Jamie? You simply didn’t notice what was wrong?

Her phone rang and she hesitated, thinking it would be Hutch. It was her mum. Elizabeth imagined her in her Essex kitchen, pottering about in the inappropriate silk robe Elizabeth had bought her when on a shoot in Rome, more suited to a bordello than a bungalow in Frinton-on-Sea. It sat uneasily on her, as did a number of other things Elizabeth had bought on her travels: the sofa throw that she’d brought back from Colombia, or the Costa Rican mugs, or the Galapagos tortoise paperweight. None of it suited the home of a woman who had spent most of Elizabeth’s childhood holidays on the Costa del Sol searching high and low for Branston Pickle and Cheddar cheese. But that’s what parenting was like, Elizabeth imagined: you cherished unsuitable gifts just because your children had thought about you for the briefest of moments while shopping in a South American street market.

And you stood by them no matter what they’d done.

Thoughts of home were comforting and Elizabeth wished she was with her mum now, being made cups of strong sweet tea. Tea had got them through so much over the years.

‘Hello, dear. How are you? I wasn’t sure if you’d be up… Elizabeth, are you still not sleeping properly?’

‘Well…’ Elizabeth realised her mum wouldn’t have seen the news swirling on the internet. She kept the old android phone her daughters had bought her in a knitted sock in her bedroom drawer ‘for emergencies’.

‘Mum, Ricky Clough’s dead! He died last night.’

‘Oh no! Elizabeth! Really? How awful! How old was he?’

It was a relief finally to be able to talk about how terrible it had been, without having to put on a show of being capable and in charge. ‘Oh, Mum, it was so horrible! And do you know, I’m not sure how old he is… I went to his birthday party a few weeks ago and people said it was his fiftieth but I think he was a bit older.’

‘Yes, he looked a lot older.’ Maureen had got to the age where the death of friends was most often the reason for a phone call before breakfast, but news of an unnaturally early death was much less run-of-the-mill. ‘What did he die of, do they know?’

‘We’re not sure. Mum, it was during the show! I was there.’

‘Oh, Elizabeth! Did you see it happen?’

Elizabeth thought of Ricky’s body writhing on the studio floor, his eyes bloodshot and his mouth distorted, his hand gripping her wrist. And then she thought of her mum, running in from the garden on another glorious May morning, dropping to her knees with a small scream and cradling her husband’s head as he grasped hopelessly for his last breaths, his heart clenching itself into an unyielding fist. Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Yes. I’ve got to go to the police station this morning for an interview.’

‘The POLICE? Good heavens! What on earth for? Oh, dear, are you in trouble?’

Elizabeth wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Was she? ‘No, I don’t think so, it’s just that they don’t yet know what he died of… I think they just want to speak to everyone who’d been with him.’

‘Well, I imagine it was his heart. I mean, he didn’t pay much attention to his health, did he? He was quite heavy. And for a man of his age…’ Her mum faltered and Elizabeth thought again of her dad at his office desk, gazing miserably at the Tupperware box of cottage cheese and pineapple chunks her mum had carefully prepared for him, longing for his egg-and-chip lunches of old in the City Road café. Not that it had helped in the end. Fat lot of good that low-cholesterol diet was, Maureen had said, sobbing, as they buried him, aged fifty-four.

‘I guess it’ll be on the BBC News by now.’ Elizabeth reached for the remote.

‘Oh yes, I’ll take a look. But are you okay, in yourself? I mean, I know you’d worked with him for a while but I was never sure if you really – well, you know – liked him? Was he a nice man?’

Elizabeth thought for a moment. ‘No, Mum, I don’t suppose he was what you’d call a nice man.’ Who wants to be nice? ‘But Ricky was interesting. He could be very good company. In his heyday.’ Elizabeth realised how easily she had let Ricky slip into the past tense and tears pricked her eyes again. He was already gone from the present and he would be gone from the future.

‘Well, I only really watched his shows because you were working on them, you know.’ Elizabeth’s mother seemed very happy to dump Ricky now that he was dead. ‘He wasn’t really my cup of tea. You know, a bit shouty and well, a bit crude sometimes.’

There had been many versions of this conversation before. Elizabeth sighed. ‘Yes. He wouldn’t have been right for Countryfile. Mum, I’ve got to go – I’ll call you later.’

‘But listen, your sister’s coming down to Frinton tomorrow for the weekend with the boys because Mark’s away. Why don’t you come too? I don’t like to think of you there, alone.’

Elizabeth very much wanted the comfort of home – even her mum’s neat seaside bungalow, with its limited provision of alcohol and pervasive smell of potpourri, and she longed to see Vic. Her sister was a successful divorce lawyer and had built a thriving practice in Manchester redistributing the wealth of Premier League footballers. Their chances to get together for boozy confessions had been much curtailed by Vic’s move up north. It would be good to see her – she had a lot to tell her.

‘I don’t know, I’ll see what the police say… Maybe I’ll come.’

‘Yes, do. And darling, can I tell Maggie? And Judy? I mean, it’ll be all over the news, won’t it?’

Elizabeth could only imagine how distracting this latest piece of information would be to the Zumba class in Frinton-on-Sea. It would surely trump the story of her wedding that wasn’t.

She showered and let the hot water run over her face, streaming down her strained neck, and wondered what not to wear for a meeting with the Metropolitan Police. A pile of discarded clothing in the middle of her bedroom floor included PVC trousers, a pinstripe trouser suit from Kate Moss at Topshop that looked nice and boyish but had a wine stain on the jacket, and a summer dress from Zara that in sunlight was entirely see-through and always made her think of that photograph of Lady Di, standing coyly in the sunshine holding the hands of some toddlers. Maybe too demure? She rather suspected that the penetrating gaze of DI Watson would see through it all.

Elizabeth picked up the pinstripe jacket and stared at it. She remembered where the wine stain came from. A few weeks ago Ricky had invited her as his plus one (she was, after all, technically single) to an exhibition in a private gallery of the animal sculptor David Farrer. After swigging Chablis straight from the bottle, Ricky had bought a life-size papier-mâché head of a white cockerel, for which he paid over the odds on the basis that the gallery would let him take it home right there and then. Between them, they’d carried the cock’s head – and the wine – home to his house in Kensington, stumbling drunk along the streets with Ricky crying to anyone who would listen, ‘I’ve got an enormous cock!’ The next morning she woke as usual to four texts from him, alluding in various ways to his purchase (‘Isn’t it awfully good to have a cock?’ and ‘I’m going to call him Percy’), but the final text said that he’d been disturbed at an unearthly hour by some crowing and so he’d got up and thrown the papier-mâché head into his neighbour’s skip. The texts had made Elizabeth laugh but in the cold light of day she found herself feeling sick and unhappy about his cavalier waste of fine art and money.

Elizabeth sat very still, clutching the jacket, fighting back tears. She thought her memories might drive her mad. She wished she wasn’t alone; she wanted someone to make it go away. She wondered why Hutch still hadn’t called and reached for her phone to check. There was a text, but it was from Matthew and it warned her that all news outlets were about to run the story. By the time she’d settled on a subdued navy blue skirt and a crisp white blouse, she was ready for the 8 o’clock headlines:

News just in of the sudden death of television and radio personality Ricky Clough. It’s thought that he collapsed last night in the studio where he was recording his chat show, and that paramedics were unable to save him. No details have been released as to the cause of death but it is reported that police were also called to the studio premises. We’ll bring you more news on this as it comes in.

Her phone buzzed.

‘Elizabeth.’ Hutch’s voice was early-morning deep and gravelly. ‘Really? He died during the show? Well! Not for the first time, eh?’

Elizabeth wondered if this was what she’d been avoiding: Hutch’s need to say the unsayable. The very thing that attracted her to him in the first place was now the very last thing she wanted to hear. She also realised it was a time of day they rarely spoke. But nothing was usual, today. ‘I’m not up to it, Hutch. Not now. Honestly. It was horrible.’

His voice was softer. ‘Yeah, I bet it was. Poor you. Poor Miss Clumsy. Did you have to take charge?’

‘Yes. Matthew turned up – after it was all over. I tried to do what I could, but you know, the drill, first aid – those things just go out of your head when it’s really happening. He seemed so out of it, almost immediately. I’ve got to go to the police station this morning. But Hutch, none of us saw it coming! I mean, he didn’t seem ill or pissed – not at all! If anything, he was more relaxed. It was just like the old times. We’d got Paolo Culone on – remember, I told you I’d booked him for the show after you and I went to his restaurant? And Ricky was firing on all cylinders, taking him down for his overly poncey food – the stuff he used to do in the past, that everyone loved. It was all going well… until…’ Elizabeth’s voice wobbled dangerously.

‘So it was a heart attack?’

She thought again of Ricky’s bloodshot eyes and violently contorting body. Was that what had happened to her dear dad? A half moan escaped her. ‘I guess it must have been. Oh God, Hutch, I don’t even know how old he was! I mean, officially.’

‘He was fifty-two.’ His voice was flat, certain. He seemed unaware of her distress. ‘He’s exactly ten years older than me. We’re both Aries. And that’s where the similarities end.’ She could hear him yawning. ‘Or should I say, ended.’

‘Hutch! Please.’ Elizabeth refrained from saying that a cruel wit was at least one other striking similarity between the two of them. She was struck by the fact that he was yawning, stretching, drinking coffee – as if waking up to a normal day. All the ordinary morning things she’d never seen him do. ‘Hutch, Ricky knew about the pilot! He knew we were trying out a new show with you. I was so worried about him finding out – but he already knew. So it’s even more extraordinary that he should be so fine in the studio yesterday.’

‘Really? Who told him?’ Hutch’s voice had a sudden sharpness, a hack’s nose for a source.

‘Well, Matthew did actually. The day before, at lunch, apparently.’

‘Did he indeed! That’s interesting.’ There was a pause.

‘You didn’t call or text last night.’ Elizabeth gazed at Hutch’s jumper on her bedroom chair.