Page 50 of The Art of Loving You

But there wasn’t.

Chapter Eighteen

No.

I dropped to my knees.

No.

Bile stung my throat. I was going to be sick. I swallowed down the saliva that flooded my mouth. Covered my face with my hands desperately hoping that when I lowered them my tired eyes would have deceived me.

They hadn’t.

No.

My tears didn’t come as I glowered at the white marble headstone with a cherub on the top. It was garish and tasteless and Jack would have hated it. And … and … It shouldn’t be there.

‘It’s advisable to let the ground settle for six months after a burial,’ Elaine had said that day at the vicarage when I had brought it up. ‘If not longer. The stone carries a risk of tipping forward otherwise.’

How had this happened? When had this happened? Alice would have mentioned it if it had been here a couple of days ago when she last came.

But I knew from the pretentious swirling letteringexactlyhow this had happened.

Jack Gilbert.

Beloved son of Rhonda and Bryan Gilbert.

There was no mention of me.

None at all.

‘We’re next of kin,’ Rhonda had said. ‘It’s not as though you were married is it?’

But we would have been.

There must be something I could do to get the headstone changed. Removed. It shouldn’t even have been erected. What if it collapsed? What if the plot sank and Jack was left …

No! This time I screamed out loud. If I rang Elaine she’d only tell me I had no legal right to interfere. If I rang Rhonda she wouldn’t care; she’d demonstrated that by this … monstrosity. I bet she and Bryan had bulldozed Elaine into agreeing to have one now so that they could go back to their opposite ends of the country. Back to hating each other. Forgetting they had a son the way they had when he was alive. But that was callous. They had lost a child and they must be heartbroken, but … what about me? My grief? My right to mourn him. Reading the headstone it didn’t feel I had any right at all.

Beloved son.

Jack was so much more than that.

I curled up on the patch of turf that was darker than the rest, the blades of grass not yet integrated with their neighbours, and I wept.

‘So.’ It was some time later before I stopped crying. My earlier positivity had vanished. I was, as Sid would say, wallowing. The sun at its highest in the sky was pumping out the promised heat. I sat cross-legged on my denim jacket, my back leaning against the headstone so I did not have to read it.‘I’m a mess.’ I tugged a daisy from the ground, plucked its petals off one by one.

He loves me. He loves me not.

‘Faith doesn’t want to keep the studio running,’ I sighed. ‘That’s unfair. It’s not that she doesn’t want to but she’s moving away, her and Michael.’ I paused, waiting to see if Jack might answer, if only in my head. Muttering how cross he was that they were relocating again for the sake of Michael’s career when Faith had forged a good life for herself here.

He didn’t.

‘The house is … as it was, I guess, although there was a storm and some of the tiles have blown off the roof. One of the builders said if we don’t patch it up it’ll get worse. It’ll leak. I need to do that much at least but … everything is just sohardwithout you.’ It was the understatement of the century. ‘Alice sent all the tradesmen away because I wasn’t ready to deal with it all. I’m still not ready to deal with it all but the roof needs looking at.’ I leaned towards the ground, my mouth close to the grass. ‘Come back, Jack,’ I whispered conspiratorially. ‘Come back and I wouldn’t tell anyone. I can’t do this without you. Any of it.’

Silence.

I straightened up, feeling dizzy as I did so. I wiped my brow with my arm, wishing I had thought to bring some water with me, some money at least so I could find a shop. I hadn’t even brought my phone so I couldn’t call Mum or Alice to pick me up. I felt so peculiar and it was such a long walk home.

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