Free Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney Page B

we saw it and decided to buy it, and when I arranged for it to be delivered that particular Monday morning. Miles has never seen it; he will be pleased that it has replaced the carved wooden African drum he disliked so much. In fact it wasn’t a large drum but the suitcase of a former Queen of the Cameroons, packed and carried by her slaves, intricately carved out of some exotic black wood that gleamed even in the dark. Miles thought it had bad karma, that it filled the air with sinister intent. Please get rid of it, Mum, he said, it’s malign, it’s not right here, it isn’t meant for this house. It’s as though it holds a curse, he said. Too painful to think about that now. I walk through to the kitchen and open the fridge and find a glass bowl full of sliced oranges in caramel syrup – they would have been served with my home-made cardamom ice-cream at the lunch party that was interrupted six weeks ago, but Ron saw the guests out after I’d taken the call. How strange that the oranges have lasted; I suppose the caramel syrup preserves them. The ice-cream is in the freezer untouched, a family favourite and certainly still edible, but I scoop both oranges and ice-cream into the bin. I don’t want them in the house.
    Outside, the garden has changed from the last bleak bare bones of mid-March to freshest early summer. Everything has come into leaf, a wild palette of greens touched here and there by late flowering tulips and the earliest roses just beginning to bloom. Will, Claudia and Marina are here, Ron has put champagne on ice for us all, and as we sit outside in the cool scented evening we drink a toast for Miles. His absence is ringing through the house and we each have the same urgent need to include him, keep him here with us, not let him go. There is so much to talk about, not least the events of the day, but I am wondering why Ron isn’t having a whisky – I know he prefers it to champagne but he has poured himself a glass of wine instead. Miles enjoys whisky as much as Ron does and a ritual has evolved whereby he gives Ron a special bottle to try out every Christmas and whenever he is home they sit down to a glass or two together and put the world to rights. I ask Ron if he wouldn’t prefer a whisky and he says, No, I don’t feel like one. He looks away down the garden, lost for a moment, then turns back to me and says, I don’t think I’m going to have another whisky until I can drink it with Miles. I reach across and hold his hand; for such a powerful and complex man Ron can be as transparent as a child. We fall to silence. The garden walls are high, the world shut out beyond them; this place will be a retreat for us all.
    Despite the horror of those weeks in Innsbruck, the dread-filled walks to the hospital twice a day and the inert, profoundly damaged Miles we encountered every time, I had guessed they might be halcyon days. While different members of the family came and went and I remained in the quiet town with its clean cobbled streets and Tyrolean propriety, we were a family together in a bubble of privacy, isolated by our shared grief and protected by our anonymity. We had no need to present ourselves or explain our situation.
    Back in London we are a family that has been visited by disaster, marked out, different. I could be a foul black crow. Limping with my scabbed feet, dragging a broken wing behind me, eyes glittering, my wound an open gash; I leave a trail. I go out to parties, meet my friends, and that is what I am. They see me coming and part silently, afraid. What can they say?
    Grief, I discover, changes you. I have become different, outside and inside: outside, because I am now an object of pity and horror, no longer safe; inside, because my terrible new sensitivity has destroyed tolerance – there is no room left for it. Friendship is put to the most severe of tests. I cannot bear to think how often I may have failed my