Capital

half-ran downstairs. Her heels made a skidding, skittering noise over the floor. It was too much for her, Zbigniew saw; she wasn’t a bad person doing a bad thing, she was just lost, didn’t know what to do.
    As he thought: she doesn’t know what to do, Zbigniew came back from his holiday. It had been short but he had enjoyed it. Now he was thinking about Davina again; or not thinking about her, just remembering how it was. Her way of pretending that nothing had happened, while the fact of what had happened sat in the room between them like a rotting corpse. The complete lack of any way out, that he could see or imagine; her expression sometimes, when he caught her looking at him with a look that was like the look a dog gave its master, needy, abject, beaten, eager. The way all talk between them had taken on a falsity, so that even the smallest of small talk was like a perfumed fart.
    Zbigniew, standing on the landing, heard Mrs Leatherby go all the way downstairs into the kitchen, then heard another door close. She had gone out into the garden. He was alone in the house, except for whatever or whoever was behind the bedroom door. It was like a horror film: the creature behind the door . . . And then for no reason he could name, Zbigniew went to the door and put his hand on the handle. It was wood, and warm to the touch. Very slightly loose, too; not fitted quite correctly; another piece of work. He took out his notebook, made a note, and then folded the book shut and slipped it into his jacket pocket. He turned the door handle for the moment, telling himself that he was checking the condition of the handle, seeing how smooth it was, how well the door had been fitted, but knowing that what he would do next was what he actually did do, turn the handle past the point of release, and then gently push the door so that it moved, with a faint creak. The door swung open. There was a smell of alcohol-based disinfectant.
    An old woman was lying in the bed. She was lying against the wall with the wooden bedstead against the window, looking towards him. He was on the point of apologising, and then he realised that although the woman’s eyes were open and she was apparently looking straight in his direction, she could not see him. It was as if he was invisible to her. Zbigniew had seen that look in the eyes of animals: a cow could look at you with a depth and intensity that was explained only by its absence of mind. That was the look in the old woman’s eyes. The power of presence combined with the power of absence. He realised that she must be Mrs Leatherby’s mother, and also that she must be dying.
    She looked at Zbigniew – if she was really looking at him, and not just lying with her eyes open in his direction – for about a minute. Then she slowly closed her eyes. Zbigniew felt his breath catch: perhaps she had just died, right here, right now! What could he do? What should he do? What was his responsibility? But no; that wasn’t what happened; dying people didn’t close their eyes like that, as if they were going to sleep. She hadn’t just died. She would soon, though, that was clear.
    It was something Zbigniew was never to forget: the smell, the feeling of the close, over-warm air of the bedroom, the presence of the old woman who had already gone some distance over to the other side and was partly not-there, and with it the sense of another presence in the room. Zbigniew was no believer, not in anything; but he found himself believing, for the first time, in death. Death was not just an idea, or something that happened to other people. He would die one day, just as this woman was dying, and he would die, as she did, alone. Even if there were people who loved him all around, he would die alone. It is a thought, a realisation, that comes to many people for the first time in the small hours of the morning, but for Zbigniew it came right there in the middle of the afternoon, in the bedroom of 42 Pepys Road.
    That night, Zbigniew broke up with Davina, definitively. He left no room for the possibility that they might get together again. He was as gentle as he could be, and also as final. It was over.

57
     
     
    Mary wasn’t sure what to make of the specialist cancer nurse who came to stay at the house when her mother was dying. It didn’t help that she kept forgetting her name. She was called Joanna but Mary had some sort of mental block about it: she got the Jo but kept landing on Josephine, Joan, Jody, Jo,