Walking with Ghosts

he couldn’t.
    She’d explode then, tell him to get himself back here. And the anger would consume her, because who the hell did he think he was getting himself shot like that? How could he, how dare he take that kind of risk with her life, her future. She was abandoned. A woman deserted. He’d gone out and got himself killed rather than face up to his responsibilities. He’d died rather than love her. He couldn’t love, not really. Because love doesn’t die, not ever. Love goes on and on for ever. And he’d died, and taken all the love away, and it wasn’t bloody fair.
    Guilt.
    Guilt because of the anger. Gus hadn’t wanted to die, hadn’t committed suicide. He was killed by a psychopath Without warning. He hadn’t wanted that. No one volunteers to be shot in the face.
    Only...
    Sitting alone in that house it felt as though she’d been deserted.
    Ambivalence, then. Give guilt another name.
    Because that’s what it is. The thought was always fleeting. She didn’t see it coming, but suddenly it’d got her. It was a feeling of triumph. Triumph because she’d survived, and he was dead.
    She didn’t want that thought. That feeling. But it kept coming back. She didn’t want to be the survivor.
    Whichever way she turned there was guilt.
    Or there used to be. That didn’t happen any longer. Marie grinned in the shower, threw up her head and laughed. What had happened in the end was that she had identified herself with Gus. She’d become a PI herself. Taken his place. Contracted the disease that had killed him.
    She hadn’t idealized or denied him. What she’d done was something in between. When they’d lived together she’d allowed Gus to take over parts of her personality. And when he’d died she’d lost those parts of herself. To have lost Gus would have been a disaster difficult to cope with, but to have lost him and at the same time be unable to recognize her own self, that was unbearable.
    But through grieving, through mourning she’d learnt something. The fundamental crisis of that whole period, that whole episode in her life had not been the loss of her husband, the loss of Gus. No matter how much she missed him, and sometimes still she did miss him terribly, the fundamental crisis for Marie had been the loss of self, and in identifying with Gus now, she had regained that self.
    ‘Why revisit all that?’ she asked herself as she switched on her hair dryer. But she knew why. Meeting J.D. was one of the reasons, having him in her bed invited all those images back. And then Geordie and Janet getting married was bound to remind her of her own marriage.
    But thoughts of Gus would always return. Not obsession-ally, not now, and not particularly often. They would return from time to time, and she would live with them, because her time with him had been a formative time, and something she thought would last for ever.
     
    Marie got a window table in Betty’s and told the waitress she didn’t want to order yet. She’d arranged to meet Janet there, and after coffee she’d help her choose a dress for the wedding tomorrow. The investigation of Edward Blake had been shunted into the background for the duration. Real life had taken over.
    Janet arrived looking as cool and collected as always. She had let her hair grow over the last months and had it worked up in a girlish style from the fifties. Marie thought she looked like Catherine Deneuve in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. Geordie was getting a real peach of a woman. And then some, because Janet wasn’t just a pretty face.
    ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, placing several packages down by her chair. ‘We were buying the ring. Geordie wanted me to get white gold, and it took me ages to talk him out of it.’ She sat down and looked round for the waitress. ‘I hate that kind of thing, don’t you? Then, when I’d convinced him it wouldn’t suit me, he wanted me to get something studded with little stones. He said conventional wedding rings looked like curtain rings, and I said, “Yes, that’s what I want. I don’t want something that’s gonna stand out. Look at my fingers, they’re really long and thin, I don’t want to draw attention to them.” ’
    ‘They look like pretty good fingers to me,’ Marie said. Janet made a face. ‘That’s what Geordie said. But I’ve got to wear this ring, with a bit of luck for the rest of my life, and I want to be happy with it.’
    ‘So what did you get?’
    ‘Looks like a curtain ring,’ Janet