The Most Good and Generous of People

They started on him at the funeral.

As Guy watched Lucy's coffin disappear through the ruffled blue curtains, he felt a tiny movement of heads, an imperceptible turning of eyes in his direction. For want of exhibiting some kind of reaction or emotion, Guy lowered his eyes to the floor. This did the trick. Beneath the sound of the organ, playing a slightly jaunty tune to mark out this secular ceremony's separation from religion, Guy heard two murmurings over his shoulder. One of them, certainly, would be Rachel.

He knew that what they really wanted was tears, but he didn't think he could manage to squeeze them out.

Guy had not been affected by this problem in the immediate aftermath of Lucy's death. It had been easy for him to refuse all interviews from the press and TV stations. He watched his parents on the television tell reporters that he was 'too caught up in his grief for interviews' and that seemed to be enough for their headlines. The days between the accident and he funeral he spent happily shut away in his bedroom reading books, whilst his parents fussed around downstairs and cooked meals for him. Then he ate the food at his dinner table in front of them, in an uninterrupted silence, before disappearing back upstairs. Guy had the impression his parents were quite comfortable with this situation – they got to spend time with their only child but with the added bonus of being actively discouraged from talking with him. They seemed happier than he had seen them in ages. They hadn't liked Lucy much, either.

But as he watched the reporter on television, standing outside of his house repeating his mother's words in a sombre tone, he realised this was setting people's expectations too high. He would rather have been a husband who was 'coping well with such a terrible accident', not one who was 'too caught up in his grief'. 'Caught up' implied that he would have to let it all go at some point. He had no idea what it was he was supposed to be holding of which to let go.

At the funeral reception Guy found himself in a corner with Rachel. She had never really liked him, and the feeling was mutual. But he felt a certain ease in being around her, because she was obviously upset by Lucy's youthful death, and it helped to take on a comforting role as a cover for his own pretence of grief. Each time he anticipated an awkward moment he pulled her into a hug and threw his head over her shoulder, to look like he was hiding his tears in a failed masculine concealment of his emotions. He wiped a dry eye as they loosened their clinch.

Guy would have much preferred to share an emotional embrace with Marie, Lucy's other oldest friend. He hovered around Marie at various points of the afternoon, but opportunities for physical contact were limited. When Guy caught her attention on this third visit to the finger buffet (whilst slightly worried that his obvious appetite was not becoming of a grieving husband) his hands were full of food. Whenever he came across her in the garden where he spent much of the afternoon cheerfully chain smoking now there was no one to admonish him, the danger of burning Marie's flammable-looking dress prevented any consoling hugs. In any case, Marie only wanted to talk, or rather wanted Guy to talk. Are you okay, she asked each time she encountered him, and was never satisfied with his answer in the affirmative. He did not mind the attention, for he had always been attracted to her, but he could not meet her eye for fear of her seeing through him.

Marie repeated the same question when visiting him at home every day or so in the following weeks. Guy had wanted to return to work immediately, but his work had forcefully insisted upon his taking a month's compassionate leave, preferring the loss of his work to the embarrassment of dealing with his presence in the office. He eventually managed to argue this down to two weeks. On each of her visits Marie seemed to feel no need to greatly vary the wording of her question. It was simply, 'Are you okay, Guy? Really?', the variation coming only on the tonal emphasis of 'okay'.

He saw that this would carry on so long as he continued to appear okay. For he knew that what Marie really meant was, 'Do you really think this is appropriate behaviour in a man who has just lost his wife in a freak accident?', and he knew the answer to this, for Marie and Rachel and everyone else except perhaps his parents, was no. Tears were required, and sobbing, which they would know how to deal with. A small breakdown, where Guy required occasional, but not full-time care, would have suited perfectly.

The problem was that Guy was really not that upset. Yes, he was sorry that Lucy was dead. He would not wish this kind of accident on anyone, although he felt like pointing out that it was obvious death had been instantaneous and Lucy had suffered no pain. Likewisse he was sorry that her parents and her friends were upset. But for himself he felt nothing but relief. If his true feelings had been somehow revealed he would have publicly claimed that he felt ashamed to feel any kind of relief, but even this he knew would be a lie. He felt great.

He revelled in being now able to saunter round their flat free from the constant fear that he was doing something which would irritate Lucy. And the absence of this fear highlighted just how miserable he had been for most of the years of their marriage. Possibly Lucy was also happier, now that she was dead. She certainly hadn't seemed to be happy when living with him, and he sure as hell hadn't been happy living with her. Things had improved all round.

Even better was that he now didn't have to go to any more of those frequent dinner parties at which Lucy, around the time of dessert, would squeeze his arm and smile at him affectionately in front of her friends, in a way she never did in private. To which he was obliged to respond in kind to avoid later tears of recrimination on the subject of how he didn't really love her. And there was no more listening to her laments at her misfortune in marrying an accountant.

But despite Guy's persistent steadfastness in the face of his loss, Marie continued her visits to his house, waiting for the outpouring of grief, waiting for the signal that meant she could then start to wind her condolences down. Guy felt bad viewing Marie's motives in this way, for he liked her and would have liked to make the situation easy for her. On the other hand he didn't want to give her what she wanted and thus her visits to gradually stop, for he was becoming besotted with her. His obsession seemed unavoidable. A single, beautiful woman came to his flat almost every day, sat with her knee touching his on the sofa, and held his hand. It made Guy almost cry with frustration.

But just as Guy wondered if he dare try to seduce her, ready with an excuse about his fragile emotional state should she rebuff him, Marie's questions about his feelings began to get more pointed and more urgent. She almost demanded that he tell her exactly how he felt. And one afternoon, three days before Guy was meant to return to work, she took her hand out of his, and he knew that she had got tired of waiting for his breakdown. He desperately needed something else, something to keep her there. So on the spur of the moment, quietly and with his eyes averted, he concocted his story for her. His revelation that just before Lucy had died Guy had discovered she was having an affair, and as a consequence he had been terribly emotionally confused since her death.

It was perfect. Marie asked him if he was sure, because she had known nothing about it, but Guy said that Lucy had admitted it to him when he caught her out. He claimed to be too distressed to go into detail, and naturally rather than ask further she slid her hand back on top of his. Guy almost laughed out loud at the simplicity of the ruse, and the ease with which all her questions could be answered: yes, he was certain, Lucy had confessed; no, she hadn't said who the affair was with; no, he had no idea how long it had been going on, perhaps it had been most of the time they were married. You always seemed so happy together, Marie said, to which he gave a world-weary shrug.

The only aspects of the affair where Guy would go into detail were about his and Lucy's sex life, for he could see the advantages of having the subject of sex in the ether, sitting with his hands in Marie's once again, their knees touching. Now, he realised, was the time for his breakdown. He opened a bottle of wine, and made Marie drink glass after glass with him as he recounted Lucy's countless imaginary evasions and deceptions. He felt wonderful. At the end of their second bottle of wine all the frustrations of his marriage had flowed out of him, contained in the monstrous alter ego of his unfaithful wife. And as he drained his glass and fell upon Marie with a clumsy kiss to her right shoulder, she, burdened by a combination of alcohol and guilt-by-association, was powerless to resist.

It was only the next day, after Marie had hurriedly left, that Guy began to feel a hint to remorse towards Lucy. He knew that Marie would have to tell Rachel and therefore everyone about Lucy's infidelity (if not that she had subsequently had sex with the bereaved husband). He pondered the ethics of besmirching the memory of the dead, even if the dead were a person that everyone had liked because she kept her vicious side so well hidden. Wasn't he just balancing history by giving her a different vicious side, one that was easier to explain and understand than an indescribable boredom in her life that she had taken out on him?

But as the weeks went by, and the embarrassed condolences tinged with unspoken knowledge of Lucy's alleged behaviour tailed away, he started to feel more warmly towards his absent wife. And when his parents repeated their bizarre, ambiguous consolation that perhaps everything was for the best in some strange way, Guy found himself wanting to defend her memory. And he began to think that his ambitious but talentless wife, would perhaps have enjoyed her current, now permanent reputation as a decadent lover.

To anyone who was brave enough to air the subject of the affair in his presence, he invoked the characteristics of Lucy's to which he had once been attracted. And he found himself growing closer to his dead wife, to understanding and contemplating the pain of her life, in a way that he had never been able to do when she was alive.

Four months after her death, Guy began to socialise again, impressing upon his friends and relatives that he was now 'coping well'. The friends and relatives breathed silent sighs of relief, and never mentioned Lucy again.