1 The visit
23:25
Maggie stopped rather abruptly in the middle of the street. It was a Soho back street, rough at the edges, anonymous, toughened with time. Few crossed its path: only the lost, or to take a short cut to the Chinatown lights, or to pop into Oli’s tobacconist on the corner, or for a flutter at the bookies, or to go to the place where she was going. It was almost midnight, and the December drizzle was cold and invisible. But this was central London, and it was a special night, and time was marching on, so there were still several pacing passersby: earnestly alone or in straggling groups, lit by the occasional working streetlight, unbothered by the weather and under the clock: tutting, jacketed silhouettes that swerved around Maggie’s red coat and black boots standing in the middle of the dark street.
Maggie didn’t care about them. Consciously, she didn’t care. She noted them, and she noted, too, that she didn’t care. And it was not without a heavy chagrin that she acknowledged, standing here of all places, that there was little she cared about in this new life. In this new, infant life. With the insouciance, came a freedom, and the bitter aftertaste of galling grief. For the dead her that loved and hoped and felt things. Of course, in wear and tear, Maggie van Rooyen was thirty-eight years old. But, in essence, in herself, she’d only really been alive three days.
J March 