Free Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson

impossible beauty of it.
    On returning from the public library one evening, I opened the front door and called up the stairs as usual, but there was no response, nothing except the patient tick-tick-tick of the boiler and the creak of the bottom step beneath my foot. Outside, the shops had already shut and the street was quiet. It was the summer before I went to university. I would have been eighteen.
    I was standing by the fridge drinking a glass of juice when I became aware of a breathy, repetitive sound coming from behind me. At first I thought a mouse had worked its way into the kitchen wall, but then some instinct sent me hurrying round the corner into the store-room where I found Victor in the shadows by the washing-machine, with his face in his hands. I asked him what was wrong. He shook his head. I reached out and touched his shoulder. His whole body was trembling. I thought of how machinery behaves when it’s about to break down – all that pitching and staggering, all that vibration. Head still bowed, he turned towards me. I took him in my arms and held him. Victor. My father. I felt something cold land on the back of myhand and realised he was crying. Then the words came, heaved out of him like sobs. Jean had died, he told me.
    He stood in my arms until the light began to go.
    His wife had already died once, years before. Now, though, she had died again, and this time she was gone for good. This second death was final, unambiguous, and left no room for hope. Had she suffered? Had somebody cared for her towards the end? Had she wanted to speak to him? He would never know. The gap that had opened up between them would never be closed.
    I remember asking how he had found out. After all, it had been a decade since she had been taken from him. Being an adult, she would have kept her name, but her tracks would have been well covered. And even if he had been able to trace her, the law expressly forbade any contact.
    â€˜I felt it,’ he said.
    Waking from a nap, he had somehow known that, at that moment, the woman he had always loved had ceased to breathe. The knowledge reached him with such force that he had jackknifed into an upright position, his heart beating so fast, so loudly, that he imagined he heard footsteps in the street below, a heavy person running.
    I asked him if anything like that had ever happened before.
    He shook his head. ‘No.’
    He didn’t think to question the information, though. For him, it had the incontrovertible power of a divine message or an oracle. It couldn’t be verified, neither could it be disproved. Later, I saw that his behaviour had a distinct emotional logic to it. In sensing his wife’s death, he had reclaimed her as his own.
    Not that it was much comfort to him. He locked himself into his room and refused to come out. I would hear him weeping at all hours of the day and night. He wouldn’t eat the meals I prepared for him. He even stopped listening to the radio. And Marie couldn’t help. She had troubles of her own.
    She had moved back into the house on Hope Street only a few days before. While working for a law firm in the capital, she had fallen in love with one of the senior partners, a married man more than twice her age. She became pregnant by him, butsubsequently lost the child. Not long afterwards, he embarked on an affair with his new secretary. Marie resigned. One Sunday morning she appeared on the doorstep with a suitcase, her complexion pale, almost soggy, her hair oddly lacklustre. I remember how frail she felt when I hugged her, as if all the spring and verve, all the resilience, had gone out of her. Less than a week later, Victor woke from his afternoon nap and the period of grieving began.
    Marie took a job at the local supermarket – the same shop, ironically, where we had once been mistaken for lovers. She wore a pink-and-white-striped uniform, her name printed on a plastic badge pinned over her left breast, and she dyed