The Love of My Life(14)
Emma had taken my hand and led me off down the road. ‘I told you I wanted her to help out,’ she said, gently. ‘When the baby came.’
What she had actually said was that she was worried about her postnatal mental health, and that she’d like to have Jill on standby in case things got bad. There had never been any mention of Jill moving in.
Jill stayed for two weeks after Ruby’s birth. There we were; shell-shocked, exhausted, having to squeeze around a third party in an already tiny space. Ultimately, I think Emma regretted inviting her, too – as the postnatal depression rolled in like a combat tank, it was me she clung to, not Jill.
In the end I had to chalk it up to some intense expression of friendship I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand. Sympathy for Jill, perhaps, who had apparently longed for a baby herself. Maybe a pact they’d made as young women. Either way, it was no time to start an argument with Emma. Jill eventually returned to her flat and I said nothing.
Jill and Emma’s monthly rendezvous is tonight, so I’ve retreated to our tiny study to get on with Emma’s stock. It will take time to turn the grief-stricken passages in my notebook into something publishable, but I have whiskey and fig rolls and at least two more hours before Emma will be home.
Our house is sheathed in a thick veil of foliage, which I am quite certain is causing damage to the fabric of the building, but Emma refuses to do anything about it. Through the ever-narrowing frame hanging around our window, I see a silky mauve sky, from which light is fading fast.
I reread the opening section, rolling one of Ruby’s marbles around my desk.
Marine ecologist and television presenter Emma Bigelow, who has died at the age of ??, was an enthusiastic collector of abandoned dogs, and widely credited with putting Britain’s coastal ecosystems on the popular conservation map.
She was a role model for women in marine biology, winning awards and fellowships that had for decades prior been reserved for men. ‘Worth twenty of the insipid corvid-worshippers that normally front this sort of programme’ (The Times; October 2014), Bigelow presented two series of the BBC’s popular This Land, from 2013–15. An anonymous Instagram account was set up after the first series, dedicated to clips of her trademark windmill-like gesticulations. Bigelow was delighted.
After two series Emma Bigelow returned to her teaching posts at the University of Plymouth and University College London. ‘I’m more sea squirt than I am human,’ she said at the time, ‘so I’m very happy to be back in the intertidal zone, although I’ll miss the free lunches terribly.’
I haven’t mentioned that she said this to me in floods of tears, or that when she did so I was running around beating my chest, threatening to sue the BBC for unfair dismissal.
Emma Merry Bigelow was born into the peripatetic life of a military child, stationed variously in Plymouth, Taunton and Arbroath. Her father was a Royal Marine chaplain and her mother, who died shortly after Bigelow was born, a Classics graduate.
I stop reading.
I’m not satisfied with this.
Good obit writers sound like they knew the deceased: it’s what we’re paid to do. But those of us who spend our lives reading them – who discuss them on nerd forums and go to obit conferences, who read the obit books and articles and compilations – we can tell the difference. Had I not written this myself, I would have put good money on the writer of this obit never having met Emma. None of her unique magic is here.
While I think about how best to fix this, I make a list of the details I need to check.
Did Emma go straight into her master’s after her undergraduate degree?
What were Emma and her dad’s exact movements when she was a child? (I know her father served with several different Marine commandos, but I’ve no idea which ones, or when.)
How exactly did her mum die?
John Keats is asleep in the Queen Anne chair behind me, even though he’s banned from the furniture. I watch him sleep, one paw twitching like a tired eye, and weigh up the pros and cons of just texting the list of questions to Emma, with an apologetic note blaming Kelvin.
It takes seconds to reject the idea. She’s reopened the door on life; the last thing she needs is a reminder of her own mortality. Just this morning she went running, and afterwards sent me a picture of her shiny red face. I AM ALIVE! she wrote. FUCKING ALIVE!
I’m also far too ashamed to admit to her that I don’t know exactly how her mother died. She’s only ever said it was a birth complication, and it’s never felt right to drill down for details she hasn’t offered.
Emma has a plastic folder of important bits called FOLDER OF IMPORTANT BITS. I’ve never looked inside but I imagine it’s exactly the same as my own box file: birth certificate, degree, letters, that sort of thing. The folder lives at the top of her filing cabinet, which she keeps locked, but I give the door a light nudge anyway. This would be a far easier means to the same end.
The door rolls quietly upwards. It makes the tiniest hair-split noise, but it’s enough to wake the dog. He and I both stare inside.
I can’t remember the last time I saw the inside of this cabinet. Emma never leaves it unlocked; she’s terrified of a burglar making off with her non-computerised research. If we go abroad she comes down here to get her passport out personally: you’d just forget to lock it, she always says, which is absolutely correct.