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  “I’m afraid so. It was your husband’s express wish. I am sorry.”

  He says no more and it is clear that the matter is closed. Martha, the mother-in-law who already blames her for the break up of her son’s marriage, will see the invective that is Stephen’s legacy to her.

  But there is more. Ed takes off his specs and leans back in his chair with something akin to a sigh.

  “I’m afraid, Joanna, that there is another duty that I must perform.”

  She just looks at him, no idea where this is leading.

  “Stephen left me with a specific duty. I have in my possession a number of further letters, addressed to you and to the children …”

  “What?” she interjects, leaning forward in her chair, instinct to protect the children her first reaction.

  Geraldine’s brow furrows and she too leans forward ever so slightly in her seat.

  “Letters to you and to each of the children,” Ed repeats, unperturbed by the interruption as he quietly relays his information, as his duties require him to do.

  “You will give them to me?” she half asks, half demands.

  “It is not as simple as that, Joanna,” he responds, apologetic almost.

  She looks at him, a sense of what is to come silencing her.

  “There will be letters held here in my safe until specified dates. They will be released to you or to the children according to Stephen’s wishes.”

  “Can he do that?” she demands, angry now as she feels the impact of this control from beyond the grave. Because that is what it is – control. She is sure of that.

  “I am afraid so. I did check this out when he wrote his will, a few weeks ago. And I tried to dissuade him. But he just laughed it off then and said it was purely a precaution against anything like an accident happening to him.”

  “So you do not know what is in these letters?” Joanna searches Ed’s face as if it will reveal the letters’ contents.

  “No. All I know is that they cannot contain any issues to do with money. All the financial assets are accounted for and, as you know, you have inherited the house and the little amount of capital that there was.”

  “And there is no point in contesting these letters?”

  Ed shakes his head.

  “I would not advise it, Joanna. At the end of the day, all any of you need to do is chose to ignore these letters. It will be a matter for your own judgement. Contesting a will is expensive and you do not want to use what capital you have on this. That would be my advice, anyway.”

  Until this point, Joanna has been thinking that she has faced the worst and that it is therefore a bit like a damp squib, an anti-climax after so many weeks of waking in dread fear of the contents of the suicide note to which she and the children would be exposed. It was a sickening, punitive and blaming letter but the children are protected from it. They need never know of the invective it contains and the lurid description of Joanna’s sexual failings as a wife. Martha and Jake, Stephen’s brother, will read it - but so what? Now, these other letters exist and she knows that they are now going to hang over the future like the sword of Damocles.

  Ed comes in again, as if reading her thoughts about the letters.

  “We don’t need to worry about this for now. Maybe not at all.”

  She is tired and she accepts his kind look with a vaguely distracted smile.

  She rises with Ed at a silent moment of mutual recognition that for now there is nothing more to discuss. She shakes his hand in a gesture more of protocol than of friendliness, avoids the politely penetrating look that the secretary gives her before she opens the door and exits into the outer waiting room. Geraldine follows quietly behind her. Only outside, does Joanna turn to look at her friend, who stands, waiting for friend’s

  first reaction. A few inches taller than she is, Geraldine has the quiet, composed demeanour of someone who works with people in crisis on a routine basis.

  “I am so glad you were there,” Joanna says. “That was terrible.”

  Geraldine squeezes her arm.

  “You can begin to put this behind you now,” she says, looking straight at Joanna.

  “But the letters…” Joanna starts. But she is interrupted.

  She recognises the man who approaches her as she exits from the city centre suite of offices. It is a local newspaper reporter. How did he know that she would be here? What possible interest can the press have in her? Are Martha and Jake behind this unwanted intrusion?

  The young man is short in stature and will be in his mid twenties. She has seen him from time to time at the hospital. He confronts her now with that breach of the ordinary boundaries of social politeness that only journalists can effect. Even with her social work background, this takes Joanna off stride, albeit momentarily. He asks what the suicide letter said. She is wise to being caught off guard, though, and just says that it is a private matter. The reporter protests that Stephen Rodgers was a well-known and highly respected member of the local medical profession. That makes his suicide a matter of interest to his paper’s readership. But he has to be satisfied with this – he can see that Joanna has no intention of divulging anything or of falling for trick questions. Ignoring the man’s physical proximity, she brushes past him, silently challenging him not to intrude on her any further than he has already. Geraldine uses her presence to follow Joanna and to simultaneously block the young man from following. It is done neatly and without aggression and it is effective. The young man lets her go and they head for the car park.

  She needs to find somewhere quiet to reflect before she returns to tell the children about the day. Geraldine senses this and lets Joanna go without protest.

  Chapter 7

  She drives from the car park and overcomes the temptation to go back to that tree. This is not the day for any tribute to Stephen. It is a day for thinking about the letter left on the car seat that fateful day and, now that she knows the contents in detail, about what she will tell the children later on. The other letters can wait. In that instant, she decides that they do not need to know about any of this.

  A fast-food drive-in, once her dreaded haunt when her teenagers were younger and at the stage of craving junk food, provides an anonymous haven and she parks, goes in and orders chicken pieces and salad, the least worst thing on the menu in terms of her token attention to her cholesterol level and diet.

  Amid the din and mess of lunchtime fast eating, she thinks over the content of the letter. She is glad that it remains and will remain in Ed’s file, as she would refuse to take charge of it even if offered the opportunity to have it. This is something that she will not show to the boys. It may well be etched on her mind, but she does not need its physical presence in her home.

  Sitting and picking at the apology of a salad, she seethes with impotent rage at her dead husband. Stephen has indeed placed the blame for the breakdown of his marriage on what he describes as her over-keen interest in her women friends. The letter made that clear. That, plus her propensity to drink to excess on social occasions, he claimed, led him to conclude that there would be no future to their relationship once the boys were up and away.

  “Sanctimonious bastard,” she mutters under her breathe as she recalls the point in the letter where Stephen avowed how he was devoted to the boys and went out of his way to compensate them for the failings of the marriage. And when Lou was born, he thought the world of her. That was not enough, though, to keep him in the marriage. It was not enough, he railed in the letter, when her sexual fantasies were elsewhere, even if she was not actually acting them out for real.

  So he quit trying to be a father in an ordinary family and got out whilst there was still time for him to make a new life. But when he left Joanna, the letter went on, he still loved her and could not settle to anything new. So he became desperate and saw no way out but to take his life. His career was suffering and he had to admit to now using too much alcohol himself. But at least, he was normal. The boys were old enough now to make their wa
y in life. He had been gone from home long enough for Lou to be all right without him after his death. Joanna was, if nothing else, a good mother but he could not protect the kids from her being abnormal. He was not unbalanced, he asserted in the letter, writing this in capital letters and thereby, to Joanna’s mind, proving the contrary. He had thought about this for some time. He was in sound mind and it was not a suicide attempt to gain attention. Real suicide is not like that. Sex with her was like sex with someone who was not there. There was no way out of the fact that he loved a woman who was not truly available to love. And he could not live with that. He preferred death.

  There was more in the letter; more of a personal and sexual nature that she cannot think about yet. She cannot tolerate the thought that Martha will read all that – or that Stephen planned it this way. ‘Bastard’ is all she can think. She feels rage against the man for the impotent position in which he has left her. She may feel all the other good emotions again that she felt for him in the past and at the funeral. But today, there is only rage. If she cared, which she does not, she would be upset that there will now be no rapprochement between her and her former in-laws. And there will be more nastiness. She is sure of it. Not for one second does she believe that there will be kindness in the, as yet undelivered, letters.

  Damn Stephen and that letter. It was the rationalising letter of an irrational mind. She knew that but she said nothing to Ed. She did nothing to protest the unfairness of the letter. She was right to simply hand it back without a word. At very least, she maintained her personal dignity.

  After the first wave of relief that, at least, the nature of Stephen’s death was without doubt, Joanna is still numbed by the injustice of all that the letter contained. How can she begin to put this behind her? How can she confront Stephen, Stephen who has left this damning legacy of their marriage for her to carry? At this moment she hates him as much as Martha, she is sure, hates her.

  The sad thing is that she never hated him before this. She was angry at his suicide and thought it was cowardly, yes. She had a tempestuous relationship with him throughout the years after the honeymoon period of their relationship was over. But she was passionate about him, always, whilst they were together. For so long, she looked up to him, almost as a father figure as well as a lover, friend and father to their children. He just could not understand. That was the root of the problem. He could not understand. And there was nothing she could do to make him.

  Then, when he left, she was as much distressed as he was. She did not want that separation to happen. It was she who pleaded with him to stay, partly for the boys, largely for Lou, but for herself too. They had a complex, dynamic relationship and as far as she was concerned, he simply walked away from it.

  Even after he left and came back to visit, the reason always ostensibly something to do with the children, she and he would find themselves alone after the children were in bed and having sex on the sofa downstairs like a pair of secret teenage lovers. It distressed each of them for different reasons – she feeling that she was being used as a receptacle in the absence of any other one being available; he tormented by the ambivalence behind his decision to leave in the first place. But the one thing that he wanted to change in her was not in her gift.

  So it limped along like this till that evening, a few weeks before his death, when he came in and found her with her Gang. All they were doing was eating and drinking round the kitchen table, but the hilarity and obvious depth of the feelings amongst these close women friends was more than he could bear. Or so she supposes now. He certainly left that evening after a hushed row in the corridor between them over the kind of situations she was exposing his children to. She did not mince her words in retaliation, challenging him to say the words that were in his mind. He chickened out, in silent, white rage. Then, next time he was round, he asked to stay for that glass of wine and she refused because she was once again going out with her woman friends. That was more than he could bear. He just walked away.

  And those were the last two times she saw him alive. They must have triggered his suicide. She knows this now. Yes, she triggered it but that does not make her responsible. Does it?

  She looks around her now in the crowded fast-food restaurant at the so-called ‘normal’ people to her left and right, feeling that dreadful sense of being different and that simultaneous sense of her absolute right to be truly herself. She has every right to lead what they call these days ‘the authentic life’. She is different. She knows that. But it is her right to be so. She feels as defiant here as she did that evening in her hallway with Stephen.

  And it is these two senses in combination that bring Moira’s words back to her now – she is different. And that is fine by her. “You will survive this time.” That’s what Moira, said, isn’t it?

  “And,” she thinks as she wearily picks up her cardboard plate and mug and deposits them in the chute, “I will survive. I will for my sake as well as for Jeremy and for Daniel. Especially for Daniel. And I will survive for Baby Lou.”

  As she finally deposits her tray of neglected food and heads for her car, she feels heavy and alone – as if the notion of fighting to survive is much more the reality than that of leading a positive, authentic life. She is burdened and she knows it.

  Lou is the first home today, bursting into the house with her usual excitement to tell her mother about the day’s events. Almost immediately, Daniel follows his sister, his whole demeanour still cautious and somehow suspicious. Daniel knows that he has to wait for his brother’s return home before the family can hear Joanna’s news. All she will indicate is that things are OK. Her eldest arrives about fifteen minutes after the other two, just as the hubbub of listening to the accounts of school is dying down.

  The two boys, of course, are desperate to hear what happened in her meeting with Ed. All that Lou knows is that Mum has been at an important meeting. She is too young to be troubled by the aftermath of Stephen’s death. Suffice it that she has to grow up knowing that she has lost her father.

  “What happened?” Jeremy asks, his main fear that his mother will be blamed for his father’s death showing in his face.

  “It was definitely a suicide letter. Your father was just not well in the last days of his life,” she says, finding the softest words she can to describe Stephen’s mental illness. “He was off balance, I suppose.”

  They look at her, expressionless, waiting for more. Lou watches, knowing that this is important without fully appreciating why.

  “The good news is that Ed was very kind. He was very sympathetic. Mind you, I don’t think Gran Martha will think much of me when she reads the letter. Nor your Uncle Jake.”

  They know just a bit already about the letter. She has forewarned them that Stephen has blamed her for the break up of the marriage and for killing himself. They know because they had one of their family conferences at the weekend in preparation for today. Daniel is clearly feeling vindicated over his first reaction to his father’s death, now that he knows at least something of the letter contents. But he had the insight to recognise at the weekend that there is still a difference between who was to blame and what his father did as a result of the separation. In his straightforward way, he was able to say that he knows his Dad was not well. Joanna, as he sometimes refers to his mother, was not to blame because his father ‘lost it’ and killed himself. Jeremy said little, but his allegiances have always been towards his mother. He is his mother’s protector. In the past, he saw his father’s simmering anger too often - that and his and his ability to fly off the handle - to think that his mother was solely to blame, no matter the problems in the family. He has always taken the view, since it became clear that separation was inevitable, that it ‘takes two to tango’.

  Neither of the boys knows anything, of course, of the sexual conflict between the adults. But they do know that their father could be a very jealous man. Even Daniel acknowledged that at the weekend. So the family conference, a conference that did not involve
Lou, went some way to easing the crisis of reactions that happened on the morning of Stephen’s death.

  “There is more, isn’t there?” Jeremy wants to know now, his instincts picking up that Joanna has said virtually nothing that they did not know already.

  “A newspaper reporter tried to get me to say something, but nothing will be printed, I don’t think. Nothing very much ever is printed about suicide.” She sees relief in both boys and she silently confirms her earlier decision to say nothing about the letters that they will receive at some later dates. They do not need to live with that knowledge. When it happens will be time enough. Both boys need to get on with life and to leave the pain of all this behind as best they can. No, she will not tell them.

  Then, suddenly refocusing on what she said earlier about Martha and Jake, Daniel comes to her side and, to her surprise, gives her a hug.

  “Don’t worry, Mum - about Gran I mean. We are one for all and all for one, aren’t we? Just as usual.”

  Joanna beams a smile of affection and gratitude at her son and hugs him in return.

  “You will want to go on seeing Gran and Uncle Jake, though, won’t you?” she asks, not prepared to let there be any rift between the children and their relatives, simply because she and they are now likely to be totally estranged.

  The set of relationships has been significant over the years between the children and Stephen’s family and even if Gran Rodgers was a pest of interference at times, the children have always been fond of both her and Jake. Married and then divorced when he was caught having a fling with a neighbour, Jake has paid at least token attention to his role as an uncle. They have lost enough in losing Stephen, without losing their grandmother and uncle as well, even if the boys at least are not too bothered just now about their relatives. It is Lou they all feel for in this and she still has that innocent affection for them that comes of not knowing any of the adult facts. When Daniel replies, he seems doubtful.