“I don’t mean to. What I mean is that coming here is like looking through a window at a garden I’d love to go into and that maybe I will someday. But for the moment I’m not giving myself permission to be normal, quite the opposite. I’m giving myself permission to be abnormal. I’m going to stick with my charts and my conspiracy theories and I’m not going to play the part of the grieving widow who’s accepting and passive and basically invisible.”

Judy shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “These aren’t just roles you can choose between. You can’t put off healing as if it were a foreign holiday.”

I thought for the moment. “Maybe I’m on holiday now,” I said. “A holiday from being normal and nice and what everybody wants me to be.”

“It’s called grief,” said Judy.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “The grief comes later, when I know what I’m grieving for.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

There were some things, however, that I couldn’t put off, no matter how much I wanted to. “I’m dreading it,” I said to Gwen on the phone, just before I left. “Why am I dreading it quite so much? It’s almost like a phobia.”

“Then don’t go. Say you’re ill.”

“I might as well get it over with.”

I’d seen Greg’s mother and father at the funeral, and spoken to them briefly twice since then, I’d erased several of their messages from my answering machine, along with some from his brothers and his sister Kate. I had tried not to think about them because I knew that, whatever I was going through, it was probably worse for them. No parent should ever bury a child. Greg was their firstborn. However they had treated him when he was alive—his father had patronized him, bullied him and lost his temper with him, while his mother had compared him unfavorably to his more conservative and prosperous siblings—they had loved him in their fashion. And presumably it made it still more painful to have lost him before they had had a chance to become reconciled. Their last words (Paul had accused Greg of being part of the selfish generation who hadn’t even given his parents grandchildren yet) had been bitter and heated.

They were waiting for me at Bristol Temple Meads station, and I climbed into the back of the car before leaning forward to kiss their cheeks and hand over the flowers I’d bought.

“You’re a bit late,” said Paul, starting the car and fiddling with his rearview mirror, so that for an instant I found myself gazing straight into his slightly bloodshot eyes.

“The train was delayed.”

“You’d have done better to drive.”