doubt he’s forgotten that his mother’s dead. I know he hardly ever mentions her, but this might be a way to help him talk about her.’
Patrick had obviously swotted up on the good guide to grief since my dad died nineteen years ago when his main response, after his patience during the first few months, was, ‘He wouldn’t want you to be sad,’ as though that was the magic bullet for me to pull myself together and get over it.
‘Her birthday’s on a Friday, though. He’ll be at school and you’ll be at work.’
Patrick, the man who never took a day off for Phoebe’s sports day, for her hospital appointments, who moaned if he had to drive twenty minutes at midnight to pick her up from a night out, was suddenly happy to drive three hours to stand by a grave. He said, ‘I’m due a few days off. I’m sure the head will let Victor miss one day. I think it would be good to celebrate her life, make him feel that we won’t forget her.’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ I said.
I knew Patrick was right, but I couldn’t work out why I felt defensive and reluctant. I should have been overjoyed but Patrick’s enthusiasm for ‘Project Victor’ had suddenly taken off in a direction I hadn’t expected. I had the sensation of standing on the side of a track, watching Formula One cars scream past, instead of the horse-drawn carriage I’d expected to come labouring along.
On Friday, we dropped Phoebe at school. My heart softened as she said, ‘I hope it goes OK today’ to Victor. I was just allowing myself a moment of pride at her kindness when she demanded some money to buy dinner in town ‘if you’re not going to be home’. I was ashamed of being relieved that she wouldn’t be spending the day with us.
As we fed onto the motorway, I tried to engage with Victor. ‘How do you feel about visiting your mum’s grave? Would you like us to leave you there on your own and we’ll wait in the car? Obviously, it’s quite a big cemetery, so we’ll make sure you find the grave okay.’
‘I don’t mind, whatever you’re happy with.’
Not for the first time, I felt a wave of irritation that Victor never seemed to give a straight answer, unlike Ginny who was sometimes breathtaking in her directness. When we worked on the magazine, I’d gone with her to a meeting she was putting together for a ‘Best of British’ feature to go with coverage of summer festivals with various people who wanted to push the Britishness of their products. At least two people in the room didn’t quite manage to get their ‘Oh, I didn’t realise you were black’ expressions under control. She’d laugh and say, ‘You were expecting a white Virginia and here I am, a black Ginny! Still British though!’ And then she’d watch them fluster and bluster while they inevitably said something like, ‘I hadn’t thought about what colour you’d be, it’s not really relevant, is it?’
She’d let it go with good humour, but afterwards she’d moaned to me. ‘Yeah, they hadn’t thought about colour because they’d assumed I was white.’
Initially I thought she was overthinking it, but over the years working with her I saw it all: the automatic assumption that the best person to interview a black celebrity would be Ginny, the way she was wheeled out when the management were showcasing their diverse workforce. God knows how she put up with it all with such grace.
I realised that I really wanted to go to her grave. Wanted to stand near where she was buried and tell her that she had left such an enormous hole in my life. She wouldn’t have let Faye get to me. I swallowed and stared out of the window, with tears sliding down my face.
Friday turned out to be a bad day to travel. Every time we thought that we’d finally cleared the traffic on the motorway, the speed restrictions flashed up again. And with every traffic jam, our mood seemed to sink further into melancholy.
When we arrived at the cemetery, stiff and aching after hours in the car, we took a few wrong turnings before we found Ginny’s grave.
I stood back to let Victor put down his roses. I whispered to Patrick, ‘Shall we leave him for a few minutes?’
Patrick went up to him and put his hand on Victor’s shoulder with such tenderness, I felt an