Bleeding London

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Anita rubbed her eyes, turned away from the screen and experienced what she would later describe as a failure of the emotions. So that was meant to be the answer, was it, the supposed ‘reason’ for Stuart’s new-found serenity? He was content because he had no more worries, and he had no more worries because he had decided to kill himself. He was on the way to a suicide. He was indulging his own mortality.

She was unsure what her reaction should be. She knew she could have been furious. Suicide wasn’t at all the simple, easy thing that Stuart had described. It was always a big, ugly explosion in the life of those who were left behind. How could he do that to her? How could he abandon her? The simple way out for him would be impossibly difficult for her. And how could he find her so easy to abandon? Their marriage wasn’t plain sailing, but leaving your wife behind should be a cause for some regret, some pain. Her existence might not be enough to keep him here, but it ought surely to be enough to make the leaving that much more difficult. Yes, she might have reacted that way.

And she knew that she might have felt sorry for him. Anyone who contemplates suicide must, by definition, be in terrible pain. She genuinely did not want Stuart to be in that state. How could she not be saddened? How could she not feel a sense of guilt that her own love and concern weren’t sufficient to staunch that pain?

Or perhaps she could have felt worse still that she’d had no inkling of how Stuart was feeling, of what a desperate state he was in. She might have recognized this as a failure in herself, as an inability to know what her husband was feeling, and worse, an inability to be able to do anything about it.

She might have had her own suicidal feelings. She might have felt like a murderess. She might have looked at that last entry and been terrified. The tomorrow to which it referred was now upon them. Stuart was out there somewhere in London, concluding and completing his task; looking for trouble, for a way out, for someone to kill him. She might have feared that London was only too full of such people. And she might have thought it was not too late. She might have thought that she still had time to save him. She might have got in her car and driven wildly, recklessly, hopelessly, across the city, trying to find him and save him.

But in the event she felt and did none of these things. She felt no anger, no sympathy, no guilt, no sense of failure. She simply went back to the computer, checked the list of files in order to make certain that she’d found them all, printed them out, and sure enough she had. The full story, such as it was, was in front of her. She gathered the printed sheets together, stacked them neatly on the desk, lined up the edges carefully. So there it was, her husband’s secret diary, his great unfinished work, his confession and suicide note, and she realized that she didn’t believe a word of it. She looked at her watch. She calculated that he’d be home soon and she’d be more than ready for him.