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showered. Andrew
watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days.
Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if
the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float
feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed
against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t
say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he
was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen
expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very
peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say
something, but that I was running late and turned away.
    I
arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on
Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from
Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland
network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of
us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal
wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I
stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One
would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position
that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But
my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure
I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the
silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame. On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human
obligation. On the other hand, the madness of being
the first in the crowd to move.
    I
smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.
    As
soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human
obligations. London is a beautiful machine for doing that. The city was bright,
fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue,
and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our
building was the magazine’s name, NIXIE , in
three-foot-high pink neon letters. I stood outside for a moment, taking a few
deep breaths. The air was still, and you could hear the neon crackling over the
rumble of the traffic. I stood with my hand on the door and wondered what
Andrew had been about to say, just before I left home.
    My
husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the
day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our
honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank
rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the
sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved
Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of
the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is
how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I
asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said, Yeah, was it blue? I said, come on Andrew, you’re a pro, you can do better than that. And Andrew said, Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of
ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the
wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark
malevolent indigo.
    He
hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even
as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.
    Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea?
It was because I spent two weeks with my head—
    Well,
where my husband’s head was is between me and him.
    We
both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie,
was conceived.
    I
pushed open