Gold Digger

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Picture: The back of a big, empty house at night, seen from the back through mist and fog: a gloomy scene, with a message about how money doesn’t make happiness. Amateur painting, circa 1890. Not really worth keeping except that it gave such a false impression of the inside of the very house that housed it.

‘Come on Thomas, come upstairs and look at the view,’ Di said. ‘Look at the clouds.’

She hugged him closer.

‘I’ll keep you warm,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me? There’s this painting I want you to see. Thomas?’

The warmth of him, the glorious warmth was fading by the minute. She was sitting in his lap with her arms around him, cradling his head with its shock of thick white hair, talking into it, nuzzling it like a cat. She stroked his profile, a beak of a nose, the handsome, furrowed forehead suddenly smoothed and by that token, the very lift of his face, she knew he was dead. She had known the imminence of his death from the moment he came in, gave her the flowers and then sat in the chair and closed his bright blue eyes: she had known it for months of illness, and all the same, when it happened, it was incomprehensible. Because he was still warm, and she was realising, slowly, slowly, that most of the warmth came from her.

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