The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey Page B

that she might regard him as a kind of bailiff, come to collect emotional debts, but as soon as he introduced himself Mrs. Green was eager to describe how she had assisted her sister after a stroke. “She couldn’t smile any longer, poor lamb, but when she felt herself going I could see her trying.” The other people he contacted were equally eloquent and forthcoming. No one expressed regrets at having helped a loved one to die; indeed several claimed that doing so had eased their grief. Their quarrels were with a government that tried to make them feel like criminals and the occasional unsympathetic doctor. Much to Sean’s relief no one expected him to give an account of himself; his job was simply to ask questions and listen while people volunteered deeply personal information. The process was almost addictive, he told Dara, when he ran into her at the bus stop.
     
    bigail came back from Hull for four breathless days
    during which, although he thought of little else, he did not find a single opportunity to ask why she had told Valentine about the letter. She made love to him twice, and each time he pictured her ticking it off her list. Then she was gone again, to Bradford.
    Two days later Sean went to interview Bridget Flanigan. A widow who lived in a small village near Cambridge, Mrs. Flanigan was in the unusual situation of having assisted first her mother, and then her husband. Her voice on the phone, however, gave no hint of these wrench-ing choices. She suggested he take the two o’clock train and gave directions to her cottage from the station. The walk, as she’d predicted, took ten minutes. When he reached the garden gate he saw a woman, wear-
     
    ing a man’s shirt, jeans, and Wellingtons, kneeling on the grass, holding a blowtorch to a large metal sculpture: it looked like a tree flying apart. He would have liked to watch her unobserved, but two dogs, one large, one small, started to bark. The woman straightened and, still holding the flaring torch, turned toward him. She was at least a decade younger than he had expected, perhaps in her late thirties.
    “Mr. Wyman, I presume,” she said, turning off the torch and setting it down.“Wait a moment while I get Rollo under control.” She whistled to the larger dog, and seized his collar. “Ignore Suzie.”
    He opened the gate and stepped around the smaller dog. “This is lovely,” he said. “Am I interrupting? Please call me Sean.”
    “No, I was expecting you. I’m Bridget.”
    She released the dog and led the way indoors. In the hall she exchanged her Wellingtons for clogs and removed the shirt to reveal a white blouse. When they were seated on opposite sides of the kitchen table, each with a glass of water, he saw that her thick, straight hair was almost the same color as her lightly tanned arms.
    “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” he asked.
    “Of course not. So where do we start? I feel a little foolish.”
    “Start at the beginning, which I think means your mother. Do you have siblings?”
    “No, and my father died when I was fifteen so it was just Mum and me. She was sixty-three, apparently in excellent health—working as an accountant, sailing at weekends—when she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. At first it seemed more irritating than serious. Then suddenly she had cancer.”
    She described the rapid advancement of her mother’s illness; Sean asked her to spell a couple of the scientific terms.“Even when she didn’t feel rotten, she was so scared that she couldn’t enjoy anything. Over and over she begged us—Kingsley, my husband, and me—to kill her. Of course we said no, and then one day we were driving home from
     
    seeing her, and Kingsley said he thought we ought to listen to her. As soon as he spoke, I knew he was right. I’d been mouthing all these plati-tudes—you’ll feel better soon—but if this was what she wanted, we had to help her.
    “We were passing a small wood on the road back from