She saw Addison first, standing solemnly before her eyes, then she registered the policeman in uniform who was looking at his feet.
Riva just stared at him, already knowing, her body beginning to shake.
‘I’m so sorry, madam,’ the policeman said, finally glancing up.
She took a step back and tried to shut the door.
Addison moved towards her, held the door open.
‘Bobby,’ she whispered. ‘Not Bobby. Please … not Bobby.’
‘A direct hit,’ the man was saying.
She ran for her coat. ‘I have to go to him.’
Addison stopped her. ‘No, Riva. No.’
She couldn’t stop the tears nor the low groan that emerged of its own accord. She heard Addison talking to the man and she walked away. This was not happening. It could not be happening. The policeman and Addison followed her inside.
‘When?’ she asked as a feeling of icy unnatural calm took over.
‘About two hours ago,’ the policeman said.
‘His body?’
Addison’s look was anguished. ‘You know how it can be.’
Riva knew. During the worst of the siege, she had seen the broken bodies. The pieces of people. The pieces of families. Had seen them so indistinguishable from rubble that only a hand or a foot was left. Had seen it all and yet they’d all believed the bombing was over and done with. How could this be? Bobby. Her Bobby. She couldn’t comprehend it.
Once the policeman left, she crumpled onto a rug and Addison let her lie, just sat on the sofa, his hands resting on his knees, his head bowed. When she looked closely, she saw tears rolling down his cheeks. She went to him, and they sat together, both of them trembling in disbelief.
During the following days and nights, grief tore her apart. They had not even been married for eight months. She had thought she’d felt grief the time he had left her to marry someone else. It had been nothing of the kind. Notwhile he still lived and breathed. Loss, yes, betrayal too, and anger. But not the grief, the utterly corrosive grief that comes with the impossible knowing that the person you love above all others no longer exists. Does not have a body. Cannot ever walk or talk or breathe, or eat, or make love again. She circled the apartment, unable to keep still, praying that one time she might glance back and he’d be sitting there and smiling. She longed for his touch. Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. Just the brush of his hand against her cheek as he passed her as she sat lost in a book. That would be enough.
‘Why Bobby?’ she shouted at the walls, his chair, their bed. ‘Why?’
Silence. There was no rule for death. No formula for surviving the pain as time slid between day and night. No respite.
Addison let himself in one morning. ‘I’ve arranged the funeral. I hope that’s all right.’
She recoiled, hating to think of it. ‘I don’t think I can be there. I’m so sorry. But few people knew we were married, and I would weep, and people would gawp. Bobby wouldn’t have wanted that.’
‘Of course. I’ve informed his mother. Travel is impossible so she won’t be here either. We can talk about the headstone later.’
Riva nodded and Addison left.
The headstone! She didn’t want a headstone. Bobby’s death wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Her memories rose and dissolved with the beating of her heart, with the pulsing of her blood, with her ragged uncertain breath.She didn’t sleep, didn’t see how she could ever sleep again. She even dragged up memories of her old life in Paris. Would she ever go back there? She doubted it. This was where she belonged now. Here, where Bobby was everywhere and nowhere.
She held wordless conversations with him and in the weirdest way she felt as if she’d known that this was going to happen. Somehow. That there had been an inevitability about it she couldn’t explain. His return. Their marriage. The depth of their love, the depth of her pain. She cried and fell to her knees, her world and her life in pieces.
When the time came for Simon Wilson-Browne, the solicitor, to sit in Addison’s living room to read the will, Riva sat up straight on a hard-backed chair, digging her nails into her palm to prevent herself from crying.
‘Sir Robert has left you almost everything, Mrs Beresford,’ Wilson-Browne said after a few moments and then read the exact wording in the relevant clauses.
She heard the words, but distantly as if happening in another room and spoken to another version of herself. ‘And his mother?’ she eventually asked, glancing at Addison.
He nodded. ‘Taken care of. The house in England is already in her name and she has her own private income. Bobby saw to that when he became a pilot.’
‘I’m glad.’
