Another story that shows us how grief can make us behave uncharacteristically. When her husband dies unexpectedly, Libby doesn’t expect to find a notebook listing his clandestine encounters with other men. Though their coded references are readily deciphered, her dead husband’s newly revealed dual identity is not, and she finds herself turning to graphology – a ‘science’ to which she is embarrassed to give credence – as she tries to make sense of the man she thought she knew.
Not only do we see the concealment of a gay life from a heterosexual partner’s point of view, but we also see the destructiveness of the deceit on someone we assume the concealer had intended, however misguidedly, to protect. The one thing he had withheld from her becomes his overriding legacy. In a notable use of the quietly foreshadowed small detail, it will also quite possibly make you see choice of wallpaper in a whole new light. (If you are ‘courting’, pay very careful attention in B&Q with your betrothed.)
First published in Blithe House Quarterly and available to read online here. Collected in Guess Again, Simon & Schuster, 2000
A Personal Anthology 