‘I told her that I thought she could make a living from it and that she should give it a go.’ Orla looked at her phone, reading the words she’d sent to Helen. ‘I said, “Go for it! Your gift for photography and your passion for what you do are a recipe for success!”’
‘Did she answer back?’
‘Just this.’ Orla turned the phone back to Luke so he could see the smiley face that Helen had sent in response.
‘Was that her last message to you?’
Orla nodded.
‘Her last message was a smiley face,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘What time did she send it?’
Orla looked at the screen again.
‘At 18:26.’
‘Oh, my God,’ Luke said. ‘That was just a few minutes before the crash. She messaged me at 18:15 so you must have been the last person she messaged.’
Orla’s fingers closed tightly around the phone as if that knowledge made it all the more precious, and then she looked up at Luke, whose eyes were filled with tears.
‘She left the world with a smile,’ he said.
Chapter 7
Luke walked along the beach, still feeling shaken by the revelations on Orla’s phone. He’d seen the way her hand had closed around it after he’d told her that was probably Helen’s last ever message. He knew how she felt because he felt the same way about his phone. There was a little piece of Helen locked away inside it. As well as the texts and photos she’d sent him, there were voicemails too that he was so glad he’d never got round to deleting. They weren’t especially endearing messages – one was a reminder for him to pick up a bag of self-raising flour on his way home, and another revealed the Helen that could be just a little bit moody when Luke had forgotten to do something. He couldn’t help smiling as he remembered that about her. She was so organised and just couldn’t understand his chronic forgetfulness. But even though her message didn’t show her in the best light, it was her voice, reaching out to him from beyond the barrier of death, and it was so precious to him. He knew he could never delete that message.
It was funny, Luke thought, but you even missed all the little things that used to annoy you about a person when they were no longer around, like the way Helen would leave the entire contents of her make-up bag all over the bathroom when she was in a rush to catch her train for work. How Luke missed that now.
As he walked, he thought about the message Helen had exchanged with Orla. So, she’d really been thinking about making a living from her art. She’d made noises about it before, but he hadn’t thought she was serious. Her photography had always been a passionate hobby. She’d never really said anything about turning it into a job. And now she’d never get the chance. The world beyond her little platform on Galleria would never know how very talented she was.
‘Oh, Helen,’ he whispered into the wind, an immense sadness filling his heart at the thought of her dreams coming to nothing. The waste of a beautiful life. Unfulfilled potential. What would she have been able to achieve? Had she been very unhappy in her day job? Luke had known she sometimes found it unchallenging, but she’d never been one for complaining about things. She’d known how lucky she was to have a good, safe job. Perhaps that was part of what had held her there for so long – the fear of letting something safe go and leaping into the unknown. Fear, he thought, could be a pretty powerful jailer.
Unless it was something else. Luke knew it had taken him a good few years to get his own business off the ground and that they’d had to make a few sacrifices along the way. Fancy holidays had been out for a while, and he’d had to make do with repairs to his old van because there wasn’t any way they’d have been able to afford a new one. Had Helen put her own dreams on hold so that Luke had been able to pursue his? The thought had never occurred to him before, but now he felt it like an arrow in the heart. Had he been so selfish as not to have seen Helen’s sacrifice? Had she resented him each morning she’d left for work for that mind-numbing commute to the job she didn’t love?
‘Oh, God!’ he cursed, the sea-blown air carrying his words away so that he imagined them circling with the gulls above, and then he sank down onto the shingle, his head in his hands as the darkness engulfed him again. It came on very suddenly, he’d learned, like a great tsunami. He’d lost whole days to it, and he was utterly helpless to stop it. Then, he’d feel completely drained. He took a moment now as the image of Helen’s sweet face sharpened in his mind.
I’m so sorry, he told her silently.
Don’t be such a loon!
‘Helen?’ He looked up, convinced he’d heard her voice and that she’d be standing right before him on the beach. But, she wasn’t. He had so many moments like that: hearing her, imagining her, feeling her presence. Was that normal, he wondered? Was it some weird kind of coping mechanism? There was nobody you could ask about it. Nobody he knew had lost a spouse. Perhaps it was a fault in him that only death brought to the fore. Perhaps he was weak; he couldn’t face something as big as death so he was trying to somehow bring her back. By imagining that she was still there, however briefly, he was essentially denying death. Of course, those moments were all too brief and the enormity of the truth soon overwhelmed him once more. Helen had gone. She wasn’t coming back. Those fragmentary moments when he thought she was there, when he heard her voice, when he glimpsed her in the corner of his eye, were just in his mind, weren’t they?
He let his gaze settle on the sea, watching the incessant waves rolling in, blue-grey and beautiful, their rhythm gently soothing his soul and helping his mind to still. He welcomed these brief moments that came in-between the bouts of pain and he would try to cling onto them for as long as possible, knowing that the onslaught of grief was just a thought away.
He wasn’t sure how long he sat on the beach for, but it was long enough to start to feel better. Standing up, he brushed himself down and walked into the sand dunes and then along a footpath which led back into Lorford, stopping as he came to the road. He knew his way back to the castle, but there was a grassy track which caught his attention and made him take a little detour. The track widened and he soon saw that it led to the village allotments. He paused for a moment, taking it all in. There were dozens of plots, all neatly fenced with tiny sheds in various stages of dilapidation and chocolate-brown beds ready for planting. Spring greens coloured some of the spaces and there were structures erected in others for the beans and peas of summer. There were compost bins and water butts, and whole cities of canes ready for action. And, rising magnificent above it all was the castle. He took a minute to absorb it all and then he became aware of a white-haired man who was watching him. Luke gave him a brief nod and the older man nodded back.
‘Glad to see you’re up and about now,’ the man said to him as he walked towards the wooden gate at the end of his allotment.
Luke did a double take. ‘Pardon?’
‘Glad to see you’re okay. After . . .’ The man paused. ‘You don’t remember me?’
‘We’ve met?’
‘On the beach.’
‘But I was alone on the beach,’ Luke said, becoming more confused by the minute.