‘What the hell are you talking about woman? Call your solicitor now and retract it.’
‘No, Mitchell, I don’t think I will.’
Mitchell waited for her to break but Corrine wouldn’t be bending today, or ever again. Eventually he nodded his head slowly. ‘Okay, Corrine. If you really want to play this game, then let’s play. But by the time I have finished with you, you’ll be begging me to give our marriage a second chance.’
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘You might be losing your looks but you’ve not lost your hearing. Yes, I am threatening you. And you had better be listening.’
Corrine stood firm. Then, to Mitchell’s confusion, she allowed a shallow smile to spread across her face.
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’
‘Remind me, how long have we been Upmarried for?’
‘A little over six months.’
‘So the grace period is over.’
‘Yes.’
Corrine nodded and Mitchell followed her eyes as they made their way to the wall and towards the Audite sensor. ‘So now that I’ve made this legal claim against you, we are already on Level Three and there’s every possibility this conversation is being recorded to use in court as evidence? Either from up there or on this lovely little gadget I’ve been made to wear?’ She raised her wrist to her face and jiggled a Smart bracelet.
Mitchell’s face reddened again. He opened his mouth to reply but he was hamstrung. He narrowed his eyes so tightly that Corrine could barely locate his irises. And, to her satisfaction, he stormed out of the kitchen more incensed than when he’d arrived.
46
Arthur
Arthur clipped the last of the dying forget-me-not plantsfrom the borders of his garden with his secateurs. It was the end of the year’s second bloom and he tipped them from a bucket into the recycling bin then hung up his gardening equipment on wall hooks inside the garage.
Next, he removed a tarpaulin cover from his and June’s beloved old VW campervan, took a step back and gave it the once-over. The last time they had taken it out on the road was the day he’d realized that something was askew with his wife. They had driven to Stowe gardens, a familiar location to them when their dog Oscar was alive, and they’d travel the county searching for interesting places to walk him. But this particular day, June had no recollection of ever visiting it before. Arthur had showed her photographs on his phone of their last trip but her failing memory had only served to upset her. They’d returned home in silence. An official diagnosis was made by a dementia specialist a fortnight later. June had never taken a seat in the vehicle again.
Arthur made his way back into the house then slowly trudged up the staircase and into the bedroom he shared in life, and death, with his wife. He stretched himself across the bed and let his gaze absorb a magnificent sunset from the window. It bathed the room in warm oranges, rich reds and glowing yellows. He stared at the sun for as long as it took his eyes to grow sore. Then he snapped the lids tight and followed the colourful spots on the inside of his eyelids as they floated lazily like paraffin wax inside a lava lamp. Sometimes, when he did this, he imagined that he was lying on a white, Mediterranean beach like those he and June had visited on their winter holidays. Arthur had yet to experience the end of a day as beautiful as those in the Balearic Islands.
He stretched his arm across the bed, as if holding it around someone.
‘Do you remember that bed and breakfast we stayed at in Formentera?’ he asked.
‘The one with more cockroaches than guests? Oh yes,’ June chuckled. ‘You can’t blame me because you booked that one.’
Arthur pulled her head closer to his chest. He had missed her laugh more than any other sound in the world.
He had not heard a peep from his wife after the paramedics removed her body from the house and drove her to the mortuary for her autopsy. But, in the last few days, she had made her presence known again, returning every evening to keep him company.
*
The thirty-week sentence handed down to Arthur by magistrates had not come as a surprise. His solicitor Mr Warner had warned it would go against Arthur if he took his name off the Government’s list of widowers looking for love. But he had made up his mind.
Drinks with fellow singleton Toni had afforded him clarity. She too was being forced to make the best of an impossible situation. However, he could not live as she did. He could not play the system and date regularly to retain his quality of life. He didn’t possess the energy or the mindset to spend his advancing years negotiating a fictitious existence.
When Arthur’s first court appearance made the local news and then national headlines, he’d expected to be lambasted for committing fraud and living with his wife’s dead body. Instead, the media questioned why an elderly firefighter was being prosecuted in the first place. Freedom for All members took on his case, lobbying for the Crown Prosecution Service to drop it.
‘It doesn’t matter who you are or how you served your community,’ Mr Warner warned, ‘the higher your profile, the more it suits their agenda to make an example of you.’
‘And if I married again, would all of this go away?’
‘I couldn’t possibly say.’ But his expression gave Arthur his answer.
