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morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my caped crusader, I breakfasted him, and I ran him down to his nursery’s Early Birds club. Back at the house, I 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 AM 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—even a sympathetic touch on his shoulder would have been enough. But my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Perhaps a few of them wanted to reach out to the man too, but we were all squeezed in too tight to move. The sheer number of well-meaning people made compassion awkward. One of us would have had to push the others aside, and make an example of ourselves, which wouldn’t have been terribly British. I wasn’t sure I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the silent gaze of others. It was awful of me not to help the man but 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 above ground, 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 colour 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 colour 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 splendour of