Under an Amber Sky: A Gripping Emotional Page Turner You Won’t Be Able to Put Down. Rose Alexander
He was tall and looked incongruous and uncomfortable there, like a gangly heron on a tiny perch. All avoided eye contact with Sophie.
‘I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs, um …’ The doctor looked down at the notes in his hand. ‘Mrs Taylor.’ He gulped and fiddled with the stethoscope slung around his neck. ‘I have some bad news for you, I’m afraid.’
‘Bad news! What do you mean? How bad?’ Sophie could hear the panic in her voice. If Matt were disabled, brain-damaged, whatever, she would still love him. In sickness and in health – that’s what she had committed to.
‘Mr Taylor – your husband – came into A&E unconscious and unresponsive. We did everything we could.’
Sophie’s sharp intake of breath interrupted the doctor’s speech but did not seem to reach her lungs and she found herself gasping for air, floundering, drowning.
‘What are you saying? It’s not serious, is it? Tell me it’s not serious.’
‘I’m really sorry. Your husband has – he’s – passed away. I’m so sorry.’
‘No. No. What are you talking about?’ Sophie’s head spun, from the impossible words she was hearing and the lack of oxygen and the disbelief and denial that coursed through her veins. ‘He’s only thirty-two, he was fine this morning –’
‘We couldn’t … It wasn’t …’ The doctor’s words cut across hers. ‘He didn’t ever regain consciousness. I’m sorry.’
‘You mean … you mean he’s dead?’
Everything went black, the room and all that was in it swallowed up into an atramentous darkness. Sophie started to vomit and a cardboard tray was thrust into her hands. Jan was beside her, patting her shoulder, whispering soothing words that Sophie couldn’t process. When she had finished being sick, Jan removed the tray and gave her some water.
‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.’ Sophie was conscious of repeating the words, her voice a harsh, rasping whisper, even whilst she knew they could not be lying.
‘Tell me it’s not true,’ she said, again and again.
But neither the doctor nor the nurse nor Jan did so.
The next few hours were a blur. Her parents, Helena and Tony, came to the hospital, and Matt’s parents, too. All were speechless, stunned. Matt’s mum and dad went to see his body but Sophie didn’t, couldn’t. She couldn’t bear the thought, screamed when they tried to make her, telling her she’d regret not going. What did they know about how she would feel, did feel? Was it their husband, their lover, their soulmate who was lying on a hospital trolley, lifeless?
No one knew what to do. Jan made them tepid tea in plastic cups but she couldn’t stay with them long. Sophie watched her walk away, perhaps towards another grieving family, other bereft relatives, perhaps simply going off shift and heading home. She realized she herself would never walk in that free, purposeful way again. There would never be any point in walking anywhere, ever, if it were always to be without Matt.
A discussion ricocheted back and forth about where they should go, which Sophie was only dimly aware of. Someone had given her a pill to take and she was able to breathe again but everything felt as if it were happening far away, to another Sophie who was just looking on, observing wryly how at sea they all were. Death had been neither expected nor prepared for. Thirty-two-year-olds do not, generally, drop down dead. They were asking Sophie did she want to go to her house, to her flat, or back to her parents’ place in Farnham. Which would be best? Which would she prefer? Fear clenched at her heart and made her blood run icy cold, her breath once more refusing to come, at the thought of home.
What was home, without Matt?
She let herself be guided along hospital corridors and through the sliding exit doors to her parents’ car. There was a yellow ticket pinned beneath the windscreen wiper; her father, in his haste and distress, must not have completed the pay-by-phone parking properly. Sophie looked at it numbly. Could they really issue fines to the bereaved?
She watched as her father detached it from its lodging, barely glancing at it. He placed it, carefully and deliberately, in the breast pocket of the smart jacket he was wearing despite the heat. She opened the car door. Inside, it was solid and capacious, leather seats spotless, seat-wells clear of the detritus of water bottles, books, and discarded newspapers that littered hers and Matt’s. She slid into the back and shut her eyes.
She only opened them as she felt the car drawing out of the parking space and into the exit lane. And then she realized that she was leaving Matt behind and that she’d never see him, ever again, and she began to scream. She screamed and screamed and flung the car door open, hurling herself out of it and running back towards the hospital doors, aware of people stopping and staring, gaping open-mouthed at this mad woman.
She cared not at all. She couldn’t leave Matt. He wasn’t dead. She’d make him come alive again; the power of her need for him would resurrect him. She tore headlong through the traffic and the pedestrians and the smokers gathered around the entrance until she finally got back inside the hospital where she knew Matt was waiting for her, smiling, wondering what all the fuss was about.
The room was utterly silent, hushed in that way of places that have been devoid of life for too long. Sophie wandered around, every sound she made deafening in the emptiness that surrounded her. At the open window, she stood and looked out. The sea lay almost directly below, separated only by a narrow road and fringed by the bushy green of a row of juniper trees. There was no wind and the azure water beyond the dusty tarmac shone glass clear and still. On the far side of the bay, dark mountains rose majestically upwards, towering over the red-tiled rooftops of the clustered stone houses that colonized the waterside.
She watched as an enormous Italian cruise ship plied its way towards Kotor, ploughing the deepest course that curved around the opposite bank and which would bring it right up to the city’s ancient walls. Sophie thought of all the people the ship was carrying, all the lives and futures, all the hopes and dreams of those on board. Were any of them like her, only thirty-two but already widowed? She doubted it, but then could hardly believe it was true of herself.
That Matt was dead was undeniable. They had had the funeral. Everyone had been there – family, friends, people she hadn’t seen since their wedding. People who she hardly knew and wasn’t sure she liked. She hadn’t cared. She knew her husband was gone for ever but still she kept expecting him to arrive, to walk in the room as if nothing had happened, to be by her side as he always had been since they were seventeen years old.
The ship sounded its horn and the reverberations echoed between the enveloping mountains. There would be many tourists in the old town today; even in just five days here, she and Anna had learnt to avoid the place when these vast vessels disgorged their multitudes of linen-clad sightseers. It had been her best friend Anna who had persuaded her to come on this holiday, who had insisted she must begin to get back on her feet. But that was easier said than done when you felt as if you had no feet, had nothing to support you or to propel you forwards.
Nevertheless, Sophie had complied, too numb with grief and pain and sadness to find the resources to do anything else. And despite the heartache, she had been instantly beguiled by Montenegro, its beauty and tranquillity. It felt like a healing place, even though she doubted she ever could be healed. And having come here at Anna’s behest it seemed a small leap now to be, at her insistence, looking around a house for sale. The fact that said house was near derelict merely added to the surreal nature of it all.
Anna had been indulging in a solitary game of ‘spot the property that’s ripe for renovation’ ever since they had arrived and had studiously scrutinized Kotor’s real estate office windows, swooning over what was immaculately restored and exclaiming in astonishment at the low prices of what was not. It had probably been inevitable that, at some point, Anna would succumb to temptation and insist on a viewing. But even Sophie, dazed