‘No! Of course not. I . . . I don’t know,’ she says, her mind racing. ‘I meanno. Definitely not. Of course it isn’t real. This is someone who’s got into his emails or . . .’
‘People can clone email addresses now, can’t they?’ Teddy directs this at the youngest of them. Ivy nods half-heartedly.
Audrey suddenly looks determined.
‘Call him,’ she tells Paula. ‘See if it really is him. You’ve still got his mobile phone number, haven’t you?’
‘I can’t,’ she shakes her head. ‘Tilly cancelled his contract. She sorted everything, shut everything down. His email was the only thing I had left. The only way I had left to . . . speak to him.’
‘OK, well . . .’ Audrey waves her hands, searching for an answer. ‘I don’t know, let’s maybe send him a Zoom invite!’
‘Teams is much better,’ Teddy says smoothly.
‘Nonsense!’ Audrey says as Teddy pulls a face.
‘Listen to me, old woman, Zoom has a forty-minute cut-off. Teams has thirty hours! It’s very obviously the superior video chat tool.’
‘You’re a video chattool,’ Audrey mutters, grabbing for the computer. ‘And do we think it’ll take longer than forty minutes to ask John if he’s really alive?’
Paula feels so far away. Her friends’ voices sound a million miles away. Like strangers shouting across the water.
Audrey starts tapping away at the keyboard. ‘We’re doing Zoom because that’s the one I know.’ She glares at Teddy. ‘Stop trying to make me learn new things.’
The whirring of the computer sounds strange and alien as Paula stares down at her left hand. At the plain gold band still sitting there, stuck on that finger. She hasn’t eventriedto take it off.
Is John alive? He can’t be. So who’s done this? And why?
There is a fraught silence as Audrey presses send on the video invite email, and Ivy sits heavily back down beside Paula.
‘There’s no way, right?’ she says almost in a whisper. ‘You identified the body, didn’t you? You saw him?’
Paula looks at her, trying to ground herself in Ivy’s sweet, young face. She feels so far away, so frightened. Then she shakes her head. ‘Well, no, they never asked me to . . . He died so far away. In Austria. On a work trip. They said it had all been sorted out over there. They never asked me . . . He was with a work colleague. They said his body had been identified. It was too . . .’ She’s stuttering. She takes a deep breath, trying to level her thinking. ‘They had him cremated over there. They said it was simpler. It was a man with a nice voice . . . They sent over paperwork. There was a lot of paperwork! It was real . . . It couldn’t be . . . I can’t . . . I don’t understand how . . . I had . . . paperwork.’
Teddy shakes her head slowly. ‘Was there a death certificate?’
‘Yes!’ Paula says, then swallows. ‘Or . . . I don’t know . . . I think so. There were a lot of documents.’ She shakes her head, trying to remember. ‘I couldn’t understand a lot of it. I know Tilly was chasing things, but . . . I don’t know.’ She finishes lamely, ‘I thought there was.’
‘Leave her be,’ Ivy murmurs at Teddy and there is steel in her tone. ‘This can’t be real. Stop putting mad ideas in her head. Of course this email isn’t from John, that would be . . . insane! This isn’t . . . It can’t . . . There’s just no way . . .’
‘Holy cow,’ Audrey interrupts, breathing hard from behind the computer screen. ‘It says someone has requested to join the Zoom meeting.’ She looks up, blinking hard at Paula. ‘Do we accept?’
32
‘Hello, Paula, love.’
John says this with such joviality, so seemingly oblivious. He leans into the camera, those familiar nose hairs magnified by his close proximity. ‘You look very tanned. Off somewhere enjoying my money, are you?’
Paula stares at him with abject horror.
How is this possible? She says this over and over, but only in her head. Although it more than warrants saying out loud.
John is alive. He’s right there in front of her on the screen, looking the same as ever. He’s really alive. He’s alive, right here, right now.
But not just right now. He was alive all this time. He was alive.
He grins, continuing, ‘I’m glad to see the house is still here,’ he looks about him, and Paula notices for the first time that he is sitting in their kitchen. At their kitchen table in their home. He’s in Surrey this very second, back in the place where they spent thirty-three years. ‘I was half expecting you to have knocked it down and built some fancy-pants mansion in its place!’ He laughs, then frowns. ‘You could’ve at least got the new ceiling stain sorted.’ He sighs. ‘I thought youmight’ve sold up.’ Still, Paula says nothing as he carries on, ‘But that was never reallyyou, was it, Paula? Not one for the flashy things, are you? Lucky for me, or there might not be any of that twenty-one million left, eh?’
She still doesn’t answer and this time he sighs with frustration.
