The Mission Read online

  On her third visit she found it: Mr. C.T.D. Sinclair and Miss J.C. Jeffries, the headline read. The marriage took place between Colin Thomas Dowding Sinclair of Hampstead, son of the late Cameron James Rhys Sinclair and Mrs. Joanne Sheffield Sinclair, and Jennifer Catherine Jeffries, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Austin Jeffries, on…

  She didn’t read the rest. Of Hampstead. He had lived in Hampstead.

  CHAPTER 21

  The doorbell startled Jenny. She was expecting Simon, but since she’d been alone, every noise unnerved her. Father Goodwyn had told her that loneliness and anxiety were normal after the death of a spouse, but she hadn’t expected to feel insecure in her own flat.

  “You look nice,” he said.

  It was the first time a man had complimented her since Colin’s death, and she was surprised the comment came from Simon. “You like my denim?”

  “It’s ruffly.”

  Flowers were sewn in stripes down the front, and there were ruffles around the neck and sleeves.

  He held out a package. “For your birthday.”

  All day she’d heard a refrain in her head: widow at 27, widow at 27. She knew she was only one day older than the day before, but without Colin to celebrate it with her, age had become a weight. She set the package aside. “Simon, ever since Beth told me you’d been hurt, I’ve been afraid for you. Are you okay?”

  “No limp. I’m healing.”

  She put her hand on his arm. “Are you sure? Could I see?”

  He sat down on the sofa and pushed his jeans above his calf. To his surprise, her eyes filled with tears.

  “Simon, if something happened to you, I couldn’t stand it.”

  Her upset surprised him, and the irrational spark of hope he felt irritated him. “Jenny, I’m all right. The sutures have already been removed.”

  She smiled in spite of herself and wiped her cheeks. Anyone else would have called them stitches. “What happened?”

  “Stepped on the wrong stair. The rotten one instead of the solid one. On a raid,” he explained. Wanting to dispel the memory, he suggested that she open her present.

  It was a book with blank pages, stark white. How could she soil them with black ink and black thoughts? “Thank you,” she said, “but Simon – I need a book with instructions. A book that tells me what to do.”

  He accepted the beer she offered him. “You know what to do, I think.”

  “Are you going to tell me to get past it?”

  He set the beer down and took her hand. “Jenny, the battle you’re fighting – I’ve never fought it. And your mission isn’t time bound. Don’t you remember? Sometimes there’s no quick fix.”

  “If my mission is to learn how to live without Colin, I don’t want to.”

  “You’ve no other choice. We’ve all got to play the cards we’re dealt. The only question is how.”

  “No kidding,” she said with bitterness.

  “Look forward, not back. There comes a time when looking back doesn’t hold you back. Until then you’ve got to trust that it will be all right.”

  “I trusted Father Goodwyn. He wanted me to maintain social contact, so I went to Kent and then to Texas. But none of my Texas friends have even lost a grandparent, much less a husband. I felt more isolated with them than I do when I’m by myself.”

  “Jenny, you have the ability to pick yourself up and carry on. I’ve seen you do it again and again.” He released her hand and drained his beer.

  “Psychological stamina. That’s what my old shrink would call it, but I don’t think I have it now.”

  “Resilience, yes. And I believe you do have.”

  “Simon, did you kill people? When you were in the Special Forces in the Gulf War?”

  Her sudden change of subject surprised him, and it was a moment before he replied. “I did what my government asked me to do.”

  “Yes, but did you kill anyone? Was anyone in your unit killed?”

  “Jenny, it was a war,” he said slowly. “I used the weapons I was issued. The enemy used theirs. The winners woke up the next morning.”

  She sighed. She knew he had done brave and dangerous things, but getting a straight answer from him was like pulling teeth. “I’m trying to make sense of Colin’s death. I didn’t worry about him very much, not the way I worry about you. He didn’t carry a gun. He didn’t patrol the streets. He had an office job. He sat at a desk and talked to people or called them on the phone. I never expected him to be in any danger at all. I never expected him to die, and knowing who killed him doesn’t help at all. Anyway, I wondered if you ever got used to it. Death, I mean.”

  He’d lost mates, and he wanted to lose this conversation. “I don’t see how my experience can help,” he frowned. A postcard on the table caught his eye. “Who’s sending you NASA postcards?” he asked, picking it up.

  “Simon – ”

  Dear Colin, it read. I wore your shirt today, the blue one that matches your eyes. He knew he shouldn’t keep reading, but the sinking feeling in his stomach propelled him. I still have all your clothes, except the suit you were buried in. It was my favorite, and I hated to let it go, but I wanted you to look your best. Love always, Jenny. Mute, he looked up at her.

  “Simon, stop looking at me like that. You’re – x-raying me.”

  He had stared, that was true. He tried to soften his gaze. “What’s this?” he asked, the anguish in his voice unmistakable.

  “I want to stay connected to him,” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “Not like this, love. Not like this.”

  “Another beer?”

  He refused to be diverted. “Use the book, Jenny. I can’t be with you as often as I’d like now. As team leader, I have admin duties as well as planning and ops.”

  “And a girlfriend, Beth says. Simon, I’m glad. I wish you the best.” She couldn’t decipher the emotions that crossed his face. He hadn’t hugged her, and she missed that, but he had remembered her birthday.

  CHAPTER 22

  During the summer Jenny tried with varying success to become better acquainted with the tenants on the other side of the building. Wilfred Stanley, the military historian, had bushy eyebrows that drooped over his horn-rimmed glasses. Rumpled, dull, and shy, he would speak a sentence or two and then correct himself before continuing. She imagined him storing in his chipmunk cheeks the tidbits of information he gathered. Gavin Baker was a BBC producer. A fashionably slim man in his forties, he wore expensive jeans that were the epitome of sloppy chic. He raised his eyebrows when he saw her, making her self-conscious about her t-shirts and worn denim. The pharmaceutical products salesman was rarely home. The others were too busy to make a dent in her time.

  British Summer Time made the days seem interminable. Sometimes dark didn’t cover the landscape completely until almost ten in the evening, and Jenny often saw children buying ice cream cones from the truck that traversed the main streets. Unlike Texas, however, it was never too hot to walk. The trees on the Heath shielded and shaded those who passed beneath.

  Once, while walking through back streets on her way to the Heath, a vast, natural park near Hampstead with fields, forests, and ponds, she passed Fenton House, a seventeenth century private home now a property of the National Trust. She paid the nominal fee for admission and was surprised by the number of antique musical instruments displayed there, harpsichords, clavichords, virginals, spinets, and even an eighteenth century grand piano which didn’t seem grand by current standards. Fireplaces must have been the only source of heat, because the attics were the only rooms without them. Almost every room had at least one window seat with a view of the garden below. She suppressed a giggle when she saw what the curator had placed on each chair that was not meant for visitors to use: a pine cone! She hadn’t seen a pine cone since she had left Houston.

  Her admission fee covered tours of both the house and the garden, but in the future, if she wished to see only the garden, entry would require just a deposit of two pounds in the honest
y box. The garden alone was worth far more than that; there were holly trees, apple trees, and a plethora of flowers and flowering shrubs, all beautifully arranged in the landscape. Because it was in bloom, she recognized the lavender. She rested on one of the benches surrounded by yew hedges and decided that she could postpone her Heath visit. She had occupied more than enough time at Fenton House and had felt less lonely there than she often did on the Heath.

  She found a grief support group at a nearby church and attended several sessions, although she didn’t receive much comfort from them. The other widows had been married for many years before their loved ones had died. They had children, and most had grandchildren. When they told her that life had more in store for her, she thought they were insensitive to her grief. Weren’t her feelings of loss and devastation at least as painful as theirs? She stomped home, too angry to be hungry, and started a new list, nearly stabbing the paper with her pen. Why I’m Angry, she titled it.

  1.Because someone killed Colin.

  2.Because the world didn’t stop when it happened.

  3.Because Colin and I will never have a family.

  4.Because the people who should understand, don’t.

  5.Because grief hurts. Sometimes her throat and chest felt tight. When she cried for Colin in the night, her tears burned, and the muscles around her rib cage ached. Her head pounded.

  6.Because I’m so lonely. She had lost more than a husband; she had lost a friend, lover, protector, companion, sounding board, cheerleader.

  She returned to her work at the bookshop. She liked Esther Hollister, the proprietor, an ebullient gray-haired woman who considered each book a personal friend. Jenny kept the computer files up to date and helped with shelving new purchases, but the wailing of the sirens as they approached the nearby Royal Free Hospital interrupted her concentration and reminded her of her trip to St. Mary’s on the day Colin had died. Esther lent Jenny a copy of C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, and told her to keep it as long as she needed. Jenny took it home but didn’t open it. She was living her grief. She wanted to get away from it, not study it.

  Somewhat against her better judgment, she acceded to Beth’s requests and spent some time each week assisting at her school. Since her current energy level could not match that of the children, however, she was forced to limit the hours she volunteered.

  Her family visited over the July 4 holiday to get away from the blistering Texas heat, so unlike the cool, wet days the British summer provided. The World Cup had just ended, and both England and the U.S. had lost in the quarter finals, but her brothers had watched the soccer games in spite of the odd hours of the broadcasts. They all joined Joanne, Colin’s sister, Jillian, her husband, Derek, and their children in Kent. An Australian won Wimbledon, but Jenny and her family celebrated Texan Lance Armstrong’s fourth Tour de France victory. Between meals too sumptuous for Jenny to consume and sports coverage on TV which held her attention only sporadically, Joanne took her aside to visit the graves of their husbands at the family cemetery. Colin’s granite headstone had been delivered, and Jenny cried when she saw it. Beloved husband of…it read, but not Beloved father, and she grieved again her failure to conceive. A broken column had been carved in his father’s stone, to symbolize his early death. Colin’s bore a broken sword, because his life had been cut short. She and Joanne sat for a long time, shoulder to shoulder, hands entwined, neither wanting to leave her husband’s resting place. “I like to think of them being together,” Joanne said. “It helps.”

  Jenny began to use the journal Simon had given her. Her first entry was a list of things she missed about Colin.

  1.His physical presence. Father Goodwyn could talk all he liked about Colin’s spirit, but that didn’t occupy the other side of the bed. Colin had held her, their bodies coming together, then parting. Sometimes they had walked hand in hand. The embrace of grief was too tight, and there was no warmth in it.

  2.His love of travel. He had wanted to show her his country, so they had taken day or weekend trips to Cambridge, to Wales, and to the stone houses in the Cotswolds. In Scotland he had chuckled at her struggle to understand the accent. He had promised future holidays in Switzerland and France.

  3.Trying out new recipes on him. “You’re my guinea pig,” she had said, and he had responded by informing her that because it was against the law in the UK to experiment on human beings, he would be forced to arrest her. She had not resisted.

  4.His smile. His face lit up when he saw her. Now she studied the photos of him, wanting to memorize his features, the fine, straight nose, startlingly blue eyes, wide brows.

  5.The sound of his voice. A deep baritone. He should have been a singer, she had told him.

  6.His thoughtfulness. She still wondered why, on the day of his death, he had bought earrings for her.

  7.The sound of his heart beating. It was the soundtrack when they made love: rapid and pounding, then slowing as it returned to its normal rhythm.

  8.Watching him dress. He was such a handsome man and always so elegantly clothed.

  9.Watching him undress. He was such a handsome man…

  She sighed. She missed the future they would not share, too. He would never grow old with her. His wrinkles would never deepen, and his steps would never slow. Shakespeare had said, “Each substance of grief hath twenty shadows.” She looked at her list and thought, Only twenty? She was just getting started.

  The weeks passed, Jenny trying to deal with her new reality, but nothing she did changed anything in any meaningful way. She opened his drawers, seeking a connection with him, but seeing the cufflinks, coins, and sunglasses in one and the socks and underwear in another, accomplished nothing. His closet was filled with dress shirts, shoes, sweaters, ties, and suits. All she knew was that she wasn’t ready to let any of it go.

  The bed with the new spread was not where Colin slept, and the sweaters and jackets she bought stayed on their hangers while she wore the ones he had given her. No matter when she ate or what she cooked, he was not at the table. She tried to read but after starting the same page five times, set the book aside. When she watched TV, she remembered times when Colin had been more interested in her than in the program, and she had laughed when he put the remote out of her reach.

  She tried to play cards, shuffling a deck and dealing a hand of solitaire. Solitaire, solitary, solitude; she put the cards down, never beginning the game. She opened one cabinet after another in the kitchen and stared at the contents but removed nothing. What next? The bedroom, where she lay down to wait for something, anything, to happen. For the day to turn into night. She felt like making a mark on the wall to keep track of the passing days, the way prisoners did who wanted to document their confinement. She had days when she didn’t cry but no days when she didn’t feel that her heart had been cut in two. She thought of grief as a fist that held her so tightly that its knuckles were white.

  Simon came by occasionally. They often took walks on the Heath, where Simon and Brian had taken early morning runs when they had been part of Jenny’s witness protection team. She still remembered Colin outlining the Gunpowder Plot of the fifth of November, 1605, in which Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators had attempted to assassinate King James I by planting gunpowder beneath the House of Lords. They then reportedly gathered on Parliament Hill to watch the Houses of Parliament blow up. Fawkes was discovered, however, and tortured until he revealed the details of the plot. He was then drawn and quartered, and citizens celebrated the King’s safety. Jenny thought it was a particularly gory episode of English history, but effigies of Fawkes were still burned on bonfires every November.

  Fortunately Parliament had resisted the efforts of developers, who, over the years, had wanted to build cottages and other types of housing on the Heath land. She had always loved the Heath, from the first time Colin had shared it with her. Now, however, the light high clouds and oceanic sky that spoke of carefree days mocked her – she who knew that hopes were destroyed as easily on sunny days as on dr
eary ones – and the lush landscape didn’t enrich her. The poet Leigh Hunt had thought of the Heath as “silently smiling,” but she thought the frequent showers washed away any smiles, the Heath’s and hers.

  The canopies of foliage were so thick along some of the paths that the sun could barely peek through, giving the horseback riders and bicyclists cool outings. Below the highest leafy branches, however, spots on the trunks testified to previous decay or damage from high winds, reminding her that she was not the only battered one. Families spread blankets on the fields near the ponds and picnicked. The voices of children, excited to see a butterfly or to play with their dog, carried on the light breeze. Other than those around the bathing ponds, there were no fences, which she liked, and countless benches. Her new mission: locating every bench and choosing her favorite.

  “It’s hard,” she told Simon, “because there are so many, and because sometimes I walk right by them. Their presence doesn’t register unless I force myself to say aloud, ‘Look right. Look left. Look for the bench.’ See? Here in Pryors Field they’re spread apart. Some overlook the ponds, and others are quite a distance from the path. Many are memorial benches.” She held his arm while they crossed the muddy, uneven ground and showed him the dedications, some with letters nearly worn away. “Sad, isn’t it? This bench memorializes a young woman who died when she was 26.”

  Sometimes they talked the whole way, and other times they were quiet, but she felt calmer from the exercise. Once she asked about Marcia. She knew he was still seeing her. “Do you love her, Simon?” After a long time he said, “I fancy her.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Everything Alcina learnt during the summer months made her angry. Her visits to Hampstead ignited it. The cars people drove, the flats they lived in, all looked luxurious. The women’s handbags and shoes were expensive, and they shopped in the posh boutiques for more. Tourists with cameras and colour in their cheeks strutted up and down the streets, laughing and chatting in their loud voices, their arms heavy with carrier-bags. All with fancy clothes, worn without a care. What did they know of poverty? Of doing without? Of working to exhaustion and still not having enough? They ate their fill in the restaurants and cafés, while some days she had to sneak morsels from the kitchen at Kosta’s to take the edge off her hunger.