Breathe Out Slowly

Chapter 1: The Envelope

The envelope had been propped against the clock on the bureau for two years, and Ruth Ainsley had walked past it, dusted around it, and politely ignored it every day of that time, the way you ignore a guest who has overstayed. It was a cream envelope, the cheap kind from a supermarket multipack, and across the front, in her husband's cramped, doctorly scrawl, were five words: For Ruth. Second anniversary. Not before. Tom had written it in the hospice, in the last good week, with the morphine making his handwriting wander across the paper like a drunk on a pavement. He had handed it to her with the ceremony of a man bestowing a knighthood. "Not before," he'd said. "You'll want to. You'll cheat. Don't." She hadn't cheated. She had, to her own surprise, kept her word. On the fourteenth of November, a Saturday, exactly two years to the day after the funeral, she sat down at the kitchen table in the little stone cottage in Warkcombe, with a mug of tea going cold at her elbow and the North Sea grumbling at the bottom of the garden, and slit the envelope with a butter knife. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, torn from a notepad. It said: Ruth, If you're reading this, it's been two years, and I'd put money on you being exactly as stubborn as ever, sitting in the kitchen, in your dressing gown, with the heating off to save money. Put the heating on. I've been lying here making lists. You know I can't help it. These are my instructions. You may ignore all of them, but you won't, because you never could resist a list. 1. Swim in the sea in November. 2. Eat chips on the pier, even in the rain. 3. Do not sell the kettle. 4. If somebody makes you laugh, let them. 5. Don't you dare be lonely out of loyalty to me. I was a perfectly adequate husband, not a saint. P.S. I was never any good at breathing out slowly. You always were. Teach somebody. All my love, always, T. Ruth read it three times. Then she put it down on the table, and put both hands over her mouth, and made a sound that was half laugh and half something she had no name for. She sat there for a long time while the kettle, which she had not sold, ticked quietly on the counter as it cooled. Number one, she thought, absurdly. In November. In the North Sea. You utter, utter fool. But she had, as he said, never been able to resist a list.