They’d had three attempts at embryos being transplanted into her womb, all of which had failed, when Hugh started tosuffer a series of debilitating headaches. Initially he’d put it down to overdoing it at the law firm where he worked – he’d been in the office all hours and poring over documents at home until the early hours – but then he’d collapsed in the office and an ambulance had been sent for and a call put through to her at the gallery.
After a series of tests and MRI scans were carried out, the wordsbrain tumourwere uttered. Quickly followed byinoperable.
They had tried to cling to the only thing they could: denial. The experts were wrong. The tests were inaccurate. The scans were mixed up with those of another patient. This couldn’t be happening to them. How could a man as vital as Hugh – as invulnerable as Hugh – be felled by something like this? Only a few weeks ago he’d been skiing with friends in Val D’Isere, returning home boasting about the black runs and off-pisteskiing he’d done. This was a man who played squash and tennis as often as he could. A man who was looking forward to being a father and who was prepared to do whatever it took to do that. Only for a brain tumour to shatter every one of their dreams.
By the time Nina had driven out of Cambridge and had passed through Grantchester and the village of Farleigh Fen, she realised she had been driving on autopilot and was now just minutes away from Hope Hall.
Her new home.
Her home without Hugh and where she’d hoped to turn the page and start a new life.
It was the name of Hope Hall that had initially caught her attention and prompted her to contact the selling agent. By the time she had arranged an appointment to meet with the developer on-site she had convinced herself that an apartment here, by virtue of its name, could be a place of hope for her, somewhere that would help her to move on.
Driving between the majestic stone pillars either side of the entrance to Hope Hall, Nina recalled that first visit here and the mix of emotions she’d experienced. She’d felt a glimmer of excitement, something she hadn’t felt in a while, but also apprehension. Could she really leave the home she and Hugh had created together in Cambridge, and which was packed full of memories of him?
The counter-argument was that a new home would give her something to think about other than her grief and how much she missed Hugh. And there was something tempting about living somewhere that had been saved by a developer from falling into total disrepair.
Could Hope Hall save her, she’d wondered as she’d driven towards the stately building that was cradled in scaffolding while work was being carried out to return it to its former glory? And could she really see herself living here, in what the sales brochure referred to asan unrivalled idyll of luxury? Of waking early to go jogging around the grounds and along the river. Of going for woodland walks and breathing in the fresh country air.
‘I think you’d like it,’ Hugh’s voice had whispered to her in the car that day.‘I know I would.’
More than two years on since Hugh had died, and she still occasionally heard his voice in her head. Now and then she still found herself laughing over something and thinking,I must tell Hugh that, he’d find it funny too. Then she’d remember and feel the weight of her grief all over again.
Then there were those times when she realised she had gone a whole day without thinking about him. It felt such a betrayal.
Her parents told her she was still in the early stages of grief, but was she? Shouldn’t she have found a way to be free of her grief by now?
‘But it takes time,’ her mother told her. ‘You’re doing wonderfully well, darling.’
She didn’t think that was true, not when some days she wanted to lash out and hurl blame at someone. But she never did. Instead, she internalised it.
She recognised the same symptoms in her mother-in-law. The woman was in so much pain. She had lost her only child. Her most treasured son. She never actually came right out and said it, but Nina knew that Hilary as good as blamed Nina for not preventing this awful thing from happening. Nina willingly let Hilary spray-gun her angry grief at her, because why not? It somehow made her feel better knowing that she was doing this for Hugh’s mother.
Keith, her father-in-law, regularly apologised to Nina for his wife’s behaviour and she always told him it was okay, she could handle it.
Her relationship with Hilary had never been what you would call close; they had each tolerated the other for Hugh’s sake, a state of affairs as old as time when it came to in-laws. But Nina accepted that it wasn’t personal; Hilary would have treated any daughter-in-law the same way, as not being good enough, or not caring enough.
At the funeral, Hugh’s family had far outnumbered Nina’s. Hugh’s father had three brothers, all of whom had large families. Hilary had two sisters, and they too had produced a brace of children to add to the family tree.
‘We’re a wildly fecund bunch,’ one of the many cousins once said to Nina. ‘We breed like bloody rabbits!’
Hilary had been within earshot and had visibly winced, perhaps because she had only produced the one child and not a brood, or maybe because she found the wordfecunddistasteful.
The funeral had passed in a blur for Nina; she had nodded her head, shaken hands, and said what she was expected to say, but she had behaved robotically, just going through the motions of what was required of her. Her friends and her mother and fatherhad been with her, along with her brother – her sister-in-law was minding their two children – and they had formed a protective shield of love and support around her.
At the end of it all, when the coffin had slid through the curtains and out of view and Hugh’s beautiful body would then be turned to ash, Nina had wanted to go over to Hilary and say, ‘I know how much you’re hurting. I really do. It’s the same for me.’
But she didn’t dare, not when it might break the dam of Hilary’s emotions. It might make Hilary throw it back in Nina’s face, spitting out the words –‘You’ll never understand how I feel! Never!’
A few days after the funeral, Nina’s brother and his family flew back to San Francisco, but Mum and Dad stayed on to be with her. Eventually the time came when Nina knew they had to go, it was time for her to stand on her own two feet and get on with life. Selfishly she wanted to be alone, or more accurately, to be alone with Hugh. She wanted to be able to talk to him, to come home from working in the gallery and tell him how her day had gone, just as she’d always done when he’d been alive. She wanted to lie in bed at night imagining him there beside her, breathing in the smell of him. Every night she took his favourite bottle of cologne and dabbed a few drops of it onto his side of the bed.
Parking her car in her allotted space in front of the garage block, she crossed the gravelled courtyard, tapped in the passcode to let herself in at the side entrance, then after collecting her post from the mailboxes in the oak-panelled entrance foyer, she climbed the thickly carpeted stairway to her apartment.
Once inside, she kicked off her shoes and went from the hallway with its white marble floor to the large open-plan kitchen, which was flooded with late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the large leaded bay windows. She put her laptop bag and handbag on the central island unit and went over to the kettle to makeherself a mug of camomile tea. While she waited for it to boil, she sat on one of the window seats and flicked through the mail for anything that looked important or interesting.
A good-quality envelope with her address written by hand on it looked and felt very much like an invitation. She opened it and saw that she was right. The youngest of Hugh’s cousins on his mother’s side of the family, Fabian Irving, was marrying and the honour of Nina’s presence was requested to join in with the service and the reception, when there would be dinner and dancing. There was no mention of a plus- one; the invitation was solely for Nina.
Part of her was grateful, it meant that the memory of Hugh was being respected. But then it would be unthinkable to the family that Hugh could be replaced in any way.
