I’d seen him in fear of his life, my husband, when they made him fly ten feet off the ground; I’d seen him haunted by frozen tracks in snow. But all through that, he was still himself. Straight after we lost Catherine, he was still himself. But now, as the weeks passed, he was starting to mold himself into a new man. A competent, determinedly cheerful, solicitous consort whose every action, whether it be polishing shoes or kissing his wife, was performed with maximum efficiency and attention to detail.

One should not be misled by the superficial resemblance to the real James underneath. This performance was:

1. Oddly overdone, in the manner of a highly trained double.

2. More importantly, deficient in one vital respect:

   Which is that every time I mentioned our dead daughter or anything that related to her, he sidestepped or deflected or otherwise neutralized my comment.

Example 1.

YVETTE: “Here is this little hat we were given before she was born. Isn’t it pretty?”

JAMES: “Hats like that are very good against the sun. Now, I’m absolutely starving. Is there any cheese?”

Example 2.

YVETTE: “Do you remember that nice family who gave us all those flowers from their garden for the funeral? I saw them today in church.”

JAMES: “Yes, the husband is a great horticulturalist. He wins prizes for his dahlias.”

In this way, time after time, he began to nudge our baby out of the conversation. Couldn’t he just once join me in the moment I was obviously remembering? Give it its due debt of fond sadness? That was all I asked for.

I wrote to Célia. But I couldn’t bring myself to describe James’s behavior properly. I made a remark about him being a model husband, almost too model, but when she wrote back she didn’t comment on it. She probably didn’t hear me. My voice now too small and English perhaps, too wittering. Dying away in those loud broad large Australian spaces.

It was the third example that brought matters to a head.

Example 3.

I was heating up some Camp Coffee mixed with Carnation evaporated milk.

YVETTE: “I do hope this coffee doesn’t give me heartburn. Do you remember when I was pregnant, how sweet things gave me heartburn?”

JAMES: “My father suffered from heartburn until he gave up spicy food. It was a sore loss to him, after all those years in Singapore.”

I took the pan off the gas and set it aside. “James,” I said, “where have you gone?”

He looked genuinely puzzled.

“I’m right here with you,” he said, “I always will be.”