‘Forlorn’, thought Zagonella as she took another piece of shortbread from the packet and dunked it into the warm brown liquid in her cup, was easily the saddest word in the English language. First, it was the way it captured the exact moment when hope dissolved like a biscuit in a hot drink. ‘Crestfallen’, of course, attempted much the same trick but rather evoked the comic image of a cockerel’s crown flopping sideways. And then there was the sound of it, two falling notes, the second one longer and deeper and sadder even than the first as the devastation of a once shining dream was realised.
And forlorn had indeed been the expression on poor
Everarck’s face after he’d told her in a state of great triumph and agitation
about this dodgy-sounding start-up so-called Court, which she imagined being
run out of a van with the engine constantly running, and then she’d told him
what she thought of it.
‘A silly game for silly boys,’ is what she’d said in
the face of his glistening hopefulness, which was in fact Everarck’s own face, ‘I
told you already that you do all these things just because you care so much
about what other people think of you, all because you have no idea what to
think of yourself. You’re a clever man, Everarck, but you waste it. You waste
it on stupid things like this.’
And then Everarck had looked forlorn, and she’d
regretted every word just as much as she’d been convinced that each one was
necessary before she’d said it.
What was it about ‘forlorn’ that made her so sad? As she
wondered, another face came to her, one from long ago that she could remember
looking up at, from a distance, on an old man, instead of a young one. There
had been a man who had rushed to greet his wife and give her a hug out of the
sheer pleasure of seeing her again, for the 16,000th time in their
long marriage, but who had forgotten – again – that she no longer took pleasure
in these embraces.
With the benefit of years and studies in psychology,
Zagonella understood that her grandmother felt betrayed by her grandfather’s
forgetfulness, that she was always angry with him, and that even the odd
moments when he recognised her without assistance were, to her, just as
symptomatic of his disease as the moments when he didn’t. Even so, the memory
of her grandmother standing bolt upright as her grandfather hugged her, and
just that same transformation of happy anticipation to confusion to realisation
to sadness like a snowflake melting in the palm of your hand; that memory,
every time it came to her, was a bullet through the heart.
And here she was, working in this hospital which
specialised in mental illnesses, trying to cure that bullet wound every day of
her life. And there she was with this man, this half-man, half-boy, sweet and
innocent, unworldly and talented, rudderless and impulsive. She loved him, and
she could not wish she didn’t, but what was she supposed to think; what was she
supposed to do when he presented her with this contract, its incomprehensible
black on glaring white, and she’d snatched it from his hand and flicked back
page after page until she got to the last and found his strange squiggly
signature sitting at the bottom on its hard horizontal line? Just what, in the
name of God, was she supposed to do?
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