The Night Following by Morag Joss

but made do with that checked tie we nearly quarreled about. It
IS
too purple but it does the job.

Nothing I can do about the shirt collars, they gape a bit. These days a sweater on the baggy side still passes muster, I suppose.

At least there’s plenty of it, the cruise stuff, so I needn’t brave the dials on the washing machine just yet. All gobbledy gook to me. I never saw so many clothes. Maybe you had in mind not just the cruise on the
Belle Aurore Atlantis
but the first couple of months in Oz as well, just in case our shipped crates didn’t arrive, or worse, went AWOL. You’re good about things like that. I may not have said so.

Bye for now

A

later

It’s raining tonight. Wonder what rain’s like when you’re out at sea. It’s only now we’re not cruising the ocean wave I wonder we ever thought we’d get away without mishap, small or great. We had a nerve, thinking we could pull a stunt like that, a six-week cruise and a new life waiting. Got rather upset with this line of thinking so resorted to reading.
     
    I read about the accident in the paper, holding myself tight, my heart bumping against my folded arms.
    There was a poetic touch in the way the story of the FATAL HIT AND RUN was told. The paper reported that the scene of the incident was in the heart of idyllic countryside, in an area of outstanding natural beauty. There were two photographs of it: pre-outrage, innocent as a calendar, and afterward, tainted by a cordon of police tape and mounds of flowers in cellophane. “The horror scene”burgeoned treacherously with spring blossom and daffodils, a death trap masquerading as a beauty spot. The implication was that dying somewhere beautiful might have made a difference to childless, recently retired English teacher Ruth Mitchell (61) of 27 Cardigan Avenue, Monkwell Down, and her devastated husband, Arthur (68).
    The article didn’t suggest which way the difference might have gone, whether death’s random visitation upon that particular place would forever after sully its beauty or whether the place’s beauty had assuaged, if only momentarily, the bane of death. It did not ask what message about a life might be carried in the very last thing the eye beheld. I wanted to know, if that final blink closed on one last imprinted image of beauty rather than of ugliness, would a person reach a conclusion, just as she was leaving it, about the relative aggregations of glory and squalor in the world? It seemed important.
    The
West Wiltshire Gazette
did not speculate. It dwelled instead, naturally, on what kind of monster was responsible for such a crime. It seemed almost odd that I did not read my name in the same sentence as “the perpetrator of this callous and evil criminal act”and I found myself whispering,
it’s me.
    I stared again at the two photographs in the paper. Suddenly I was back there, on that April afternoon. I retched and started to sweat; I saw again the hideous colors of the day and the burning sunlight, I felt the deep heavy jolt as the car struck her, and her fall to the ground. I heard the silence. I saw her on the road as only I had seen her, blood pumping from her dead brain and the crows gathering to feast.
    I forced myself to read to the end of the article. The police were appealing for witnesses and “pursuing every lead.”Why wouldn’t they come here, and find the Saab locked in the garage? I wanted them to come. I wouldn’t lie. Confession is supposed to relieve everyone, especially the guilt-laden. But even if the next headline on the front page of the
West Wiltshire Gazette
was FATAL HIT AND RUN: DOCTOR’S WIFE GUILTY, would it bring relief, would it make any difference at all?
    The piece ended with another photograph of the couple as young teachers: DEDICATED TO YOUTH WELFARE: RUTH AND ARTHUR AT OVERDALE OUTDOOR EDUCATION CENTER, followed by an unpoetic paragraph about cycling fatality statistics and safety helmets.
     
     
       I slept in my clothes, and woke up,