FROM THE SPRING OF 2007 until the end of that long summer when Little Bee came to live with us, my son removed his Batman costume only at bath times. I ordered a twin costume that I substituted while he splashed in the suds, so that at least I could wash the boy sweat and the grass stains out of the first. It was a dirty, green-kneed job, fighting master criminals. If it wasn’t Mr. Freeze with his dastardly ice ray, then it was the Penguin—Batman’s deadly foe—or the even more sinister Puffin, whose absolute wickedness the original creators of the Batman franchise had inexplicably failed to chronicle. My son and I lived with the consequences—a houseful of acolytes, henchmen and stooges, ogling us from behind the sofa, cackling darkly in the thin gap beside the bookcase, and generally bursting out at us willy-nilly. It was one shock after another, in fact. At four years old, asleep and awake, my son lived at constant readiness. There was no question of separating him from the demonic bat mask, the Lycra suit, the glossy yellow utility belt and the jet-black cape. And there was no use addressing my son by his Christian name. He would only look behind him, cock his head, and shrug—as if to say, My bat senses can detect no boy of that name here, madam. The only name my son answered to, that summer, was Batman. Nor was there any point explaining to him that his father had died. My son didn’t believe in the physical possibility of death. Death was something that could only occur if the evil schemes of the baddies were not constantly foiled—and that, of course, was unthinkable.

That summer—the summer my husband died—we all had identities we were loath to let go of. My son had his Batman costume, I still used my husband’s surname, and Little Bee, though she was relatively safe with us, still clung to the name she had taken in a time of terror. We were exiles from reality, that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

To flee from cruelty is the most natural thing in the world, of course. And the timing that brought us together that summer was so very cruel. Little Bee telephoned us on the morning they released her from the detention center. My husband picked up her call. I only found out much later that it was her—Andrew never told me. Apparently she let him know she was coming, but I don’t suppose he felt up to seeing her face again. Five days later he killed himself by hanging. They found my husband with his feet treading empty air, touching the soil of no country. Death, of course, is a refuge. It’s where you go when a new name, or a mask and cape, can no longer hide you from yourself. It’s where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.

Little Bee knocked on my front door five days after my husband died, which was ten days after they released her from detention. After a journey of five thousand miles and two years, she arrived just too late to find Andrew alive, but just in time for his funeral. Hello Sarah, she said.

Little Bee arrived at eight A.M. and the undertaker knocked at ten. Not one second to, or one second past. I imagine the undertaker had been silently standing outside our front door for several minutes, looking at his watch, waiting for our lives to converge onto the precise fault line at which our past could be cleaved from our future with three soft strikes of the bright brass knocker.

My son opened the door, and took in the undertaker’s height, his impeccable tailoring, and his sober demeanor. I suppose the undertaker looked for all the world like Batman’s workaday alter ego. My son shouted along the hallway to me: Mummy, it’s Bruce Wayne!

That morning I walked out onto the street and I stood there, looking at Andrew’s coffin through the thick, slightly greenish glass of the hearse window. When Little Bee came out to join me, bringing Batman by the hand, the undertaker ushered us to a long, black limousine and nodded us in. I told him we’d rather walk.

We looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City. It seemed as if we’d been cut-and-pasted. My thoughts raced, nightmarish and disconnected.

It was only a few hundred yards to the church, and the three of us walked in the road ahead of the hearse while an angry queue of traffic built up behind. I felt awful about that.

I was wearing a dark gray skirt and jacket with gloves and charcoal stockings. Little Bee was wearing my smart black raincoat over the clothes they let her out of the detention center in—a mortifyingly unfunereal Hawaiian shirt and blue jeans. My son was wearing an expression of absolute joy. He, Batman, had stopped the traffic. His cape swirled in his tiny slipstream as he strode proudly ahead, his grin stretching from bat ear to bat ear beneath the darkness of his mask. Occasionally his superior vision would detect an enemy that needed smiting, and when this occurred my son would simply stop, smite, and continue. He was worried that the Puffin’s invisible hordes might attack me. I was worried that my son hadn’t done a wee before we left the house, and might therefore do it in his bat pants. I was also worried about being a widow for the rest of my life.

At first I’d thought it was quite brave of me to insist on walking to the church, but now I felt dizzy and foolish. I thought I might faint. Little Bee held on to my elbow and whispered to me to take deep breaths. I remember thinking, How strange, that it should be you who is keeping me on my feet.

In the church I sat in the front pew, with Little Bee on my left and Batman on my right. The church was stuffed with mourners, of course. No one from work—I tried to keep my life and my magazine separate—but otherwise everybody Andrew and I knew was there. It was disorientating, like having the entire contents of one’s address book dressed in black and exported into pews in nonalphabetical order. They had classified themselves according to some unwritten protocol of grief, blood relatives ghoulishly close to the coffin, old girlfriends in a reluctant cluster near the baptismal font. I couldn’t bear to look behind me and see this new natural order of things. It was all very much too sudden. A week ago I had been a successful working mother. Now I was sitting at my husband’s funeral, flanked by a superhero and a Nigerian refugee. It seemed like a dream that might be awoken from with relatively little effort. I stared at my husband’s coffin, strewn with white lilies. Batman stared at the vicar. He cast an approving eye over the vicar’s stole and surplice. He gave the vicar a solemn thumbs-up, one caped crusader to another. The vicar returned the salute, then his thumb returned to the faded gilt edging of his Bible.

The church was falling quiet; expectant. My son looked all around, then back at me. Where’s Daddy? he said.

I squeezed my son’s hot, sweaty hand, and listened to the coughs and sniffles echoing round the church. I wondered how I could possibly explain my husband’s death to his son. It was depression that killed Andrew, of course—depression and guilt. But my son didn’t believe in death, let alone in the capacity of mere emotions to cause it. Mr. Freeze’s ice rays, perhaps. The Puffin’s lethal wingspan, at a stretch. But an ordinary phone call, from a skinny African girl? It was impossible to explain.

I realized I would have to tell my son the whole story, someday. I wondered where I would begin. It was two years before, in the summer of 2005, that Andrew had begun his long, slow slide into the depression that finally claimed him. It started on the day we first met Little Bee, on a lonely beach in Nigeria. The only souvenir I have of that first meeting is an absence where the middle finger of my left hand used to be. The amputation is quite clean. In place of my finger is a stump, a phantom digit that used to be responsible for the E, D, and C keys on my laptop. I can’t rely on E, D, and C anymore. They go missing when I need them most. Pleased becomes please. Ecstasies becomes stasis.

I miss my finger most on deadline days, when the copy checkers have all gone home and I’m typing up the last-minute additions to my magazine. We published an editorial once where I said I was “wary of sensitive men.” I meant to say “weary,” of course, and after a hundred outraged letters from the earnest boyfriends who’d happened to glance at my piece on their partner’s coffee table (presumably in between giving a back rub and washing the dishes), I began to realize just how weary I was. It was a typographical accident, I told them. I didn’t add, it was the kind of typographical accident that is caused by a steel machete on a Nigerian beach. I mean, what does one call the type of meeting where one gains an African girl and loses E, D, and C? I do not think you have a word for it in your language—that’s what Little Bee would say.

I sat in my pew, massaged the stump of my finger, and found myself acknowledging for the first time that my husband had been doomed since the day we met Little Bee. The intervening two years had brought a series of worsening premonitions, culminating in the horrible morning ten days earlier when I had woken up to the sound of the telephone ringing. My whole body had crawled with dread. It had been an ordinary weekday morning. The June issue of my magazine was almost ready to go to the printers, and Andrew’s column for The Times was due in too. Just a normal morning, but the soft hairs on the backs of my arms were up.

I have never been one of those happy women who insist that disaster strikes from a clear blue sky. For me there were countless foretellings, innumerable small breaks with normalcy. Andrew’s chin unshaved, a second bottle uncorked on a weekday night, the use of the passive voice on deadline Friday. Certain attitudes which have been adopted by this society have left this commentator a little lost. That was the very last sentence my husband wrote. In his Times column, he was always so precise with the written word. From a layperson, lost would be a synonym for bewildered. From my husband, it was a measured good-bye.

It was cold in the church. I listened to the vicar saying where, o death, is thy sting? I stared at the lilies and smelled the sweet accusation of them. God, how I wish I had paid more attention to Andrew.

How to explain to my son that the warning signs were so slight? That disaster, when it is quite sure of its own strength, will announce itself by hardly moving its lips? They say that in the hour before an earthquake the clouds hang leaden in the sky, the wind slows to a hot breath, and the birds fall quiet in the trees of the town square. Yes, but these are the same portents that precede lunchtime, frankly. If we overreacted every time the wind eased up, we would forever be laying down under the dining-room table when we really should be laying the plates on top of it.

Would my son accept that this is how it was with his father? The hairs on my arms went up, Batman, but I had a household to run. I never understood that he was actually going to do it. All I would honestly be able to say is that I woke up with the phone ringing and my body predicting some event that had yet to happen, although I never imagined it would be so serious.

Charlie had still been asleep. Andrew picked up the phone in his study, quickly, before the noise of the ringing could wake our son. Andrew’s voice became agitated. I heard it quite clearly from the bedroom. Just leave me alone, he said. All that stuff happened a long time ago and it wasn’t my fault.

The trouble was, my husband didn’t really believe that.

I found him in tears. I asked him who it had been on the phone, but he wouldn’t say. And then, since we were both awake and Charlie was still asleep, we made love. I used to do that with Andrew sometimes. More for him than for me, really. By that stage of our marriage it had become a maintenance thing, like bleeding the air out of the radiators—just another part of running a household. I didn’t know—in fact I still don’t know—what awful consequences are supposed to ensue if one fails to bleed the radiators. It’s not something a cautious woman would ever allow herself to discover.

We didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight through the blinds was a dark and florid saffron. It was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off.

I pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto our bed.

I remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring running down. I pulled his face close to mine and I whispered, Oh god Andrew, are you all right? My husband didn’t reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s moaning in wordless desperation.

In on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might help in this situation.

When I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to cover us. I said, Oh god Charlie, I’m so sorry.

My son looked behind him, then back at me.

“Charlie isn’t here. I’m Batman.”

I nodded, and bit my lip.

“Good morning, Batman.”

“What is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”

“Er…”

“Is you getting baddies?”

“Are we getting baddies, Charlie. Not is we.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, Batman. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

I smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said was, Someone done a poo in my costume, Mummy.

“Did a poo, Charlie.”

“Yes. A big big poo.”

“Oh Batman. Have you really done a poo in your suit?”

Batman shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.

“It wasn’t me that done the poo. It was the Puffin.”

(The italics were his.)

“Are you telling me that the Puffin came in the night and did a poo in your bat suit?”

Batman nodded, solemnly. I noticed he had kept his bat mask on but taken off his bat suit. He stood naked except for the mask and cape. He held up the bat suit for me to inspect. A lump of something fell from it and thumped on the carpet. The smell was indescribable. I sat up in bed and saw a trail of lumps leading across the carpet from the bedroom door. Somewhere inside me the girl who had done science A-levels noted, with empirical fascination, that feces had also found their way into locations which included—but were not limited to—Batman’s hands, the door frame, the bedroom wall, my alarm-clock radio and, of course, the bat suit. My son’s shit was everywhere. There was shit on his hands. Shit on his face. Even on the black-and-yellow bat symbol of his bat suit there was shit. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself believe that these were Puffin droppings. This was bat shit.

Distantly, I remembered something I’d read on the parenting page.

“It’s all right, Batman. Mummy’s not cross.”

“Mummy clean the poo up.”

“Um. Er. Jesus.”

Gravely, Batman shook his head.

“No, not Jesus. Mummy.”

Resentfulness was starting to overcome the embarrassment and guilt. I looked across to where Andrew lay with his eyes tight closed and his hands twisted at the exquisite awfulness of his clinical depression, our unhappy sex interrupted, and this very thick stink of shit.

“Batman, why don’t you ask Daddy to clean you up?”

My son looked across at his father for a long time, then turned back to me. Patiently, as if explaining something to an imbecile, he shook his little head again.

“But why not?” (I was pleading now.) “Why not ask Daddy?”

Batman looked solemn. Daddy is fighting baddies, he said. The grammar was irreproachable. I looked across at his father with him, and I sighed. Yes, I said, I suppose you’re right.

Five days later, on the last morning I saw my husband alive, I finished dressing my caped crusader, I breakfasted him, and I ran him down to his nursery’s Early Birds Club. Back at the house, I showered. Andrew watched me as I pulled on my tights. I always dressed up for deadline days. Heels, skirt, smart green jacket. Magazine publishing has its rhythms and if the editor won’t dance to them, she can’t expect her staff to. I don’t float feature ideas in Fendi heels, and I don’t close an issue in Pumas. So I dressed against the clock while Andrew lay naked on the bed and watched me. He didn’t say a word. The last glimpse I had of him, before I closed the bedroom door, he was still watching. How to describe, to my son, his father’s last seen expression? I decided I would tell my son that his father had looked very peaceful. I decided I wouldn’t tell him that my husband opened his mouth to say something, but that I was running late and turned away.

I arrived at the office around 9:30. The magazine was based in Spitalfields, on Commercial Street, ninety minutes by public transport from Kingston-upon-Thames. The worst moment comes when you leave the overland network and descend into the heat of the Underground. There were two hundred of us packed into each tube carriage. We listened to the screech of the metal wheels on the track, with our bodies pinned and immobile. For three stops I stood pressed against a thin man in a corduroy jacket who was quietly weeping. One would normally avert one’s eyes, but my head was pinioned in such a position that I could only look. I should have liked to put an arm around the man. But my arms were jammed by the commuters on each side of me. Besides, I wasn’t sure I was up to administering tenderness like that, on a crowded train, under the silent gaze of others. I was torn between two kinds of shame. On the one hand, the disgrace of not discharging a human obligation. On the other hand, the madness of being the first in the crowd to move.

I smiled helplessly at the weeping man and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.

As soon as one emerges aboveground, of course, one can quickly forget our human obligations. London is a beautiful machine for doing that. The city was bright, fresh and inviting that morning. I was excited about closing the June issue, and I practically ran the last two minutes to the office. On the outside of our building was the magazine’s name, NIXIE, in three-foot-high pink neon letters. I stood outside for a moment, taking a few deep breaths. The air was still, and you could hear the neon crackling over the rumble of the traffic. I stood with my hand on the door and wondered what Andrew had been about to say, just before I left home.

My husband hadn’t always been lost for words. The long silences only began on the day we met Little Bee. Before that, he wouldn’t pipe down for a minute. On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth’s surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it. That is how big he was for me. When we got back to our new married house in Kingston, I asked Andrew about the color of that honeymoon sea. He said, Yeah, was it blue? I said, come on Andrew, you’re a pro, you can do better than that. And Andrew said, Okay then, the awesome ocean fastness was a splendor of ultramarine crested with crimson and gold where the burnished sun blazed on the wave tops and sent them crashing into the gloomy troughs deepening to a dark malevolent indigo.

He hung on the penultimate syllable, deepening his voice in comic pomposity even as he raised his eyebrows. INN-digo, he boomed.

Of course you know why I didn’t notice the sea? It was because I spent two weeks with my head—

Well, where my husband’s head was is between me and him.

We both giggled helplessly and rolled around on the bed and Charlie, dear Charlie, was conceived.

I pushed open the street door and stepped up into the lobby of the magazine. The black Italian marble floor was the only grace note that had survived our tenancy of the offices. The rest of the lobby was pure us. Boxes of sample frocks from wannabe fashion houses were stacked up along one wall. Some intern had triaged them with a chunky blue marker: YES KEEP FOR SHOOT, or OH I THINK NOT, or the triumphantly absolutist THIS IS NOT FASHION. A dead Japanese juniper tree stood in a cracked gold Otagiri vase. Three glittering Christmas baubles still hung from it. The walls were done up in fuchsia and fairy lights, and even in the dim sunshine from the tinted windows that gave onto Commercial Street, the paint-work looked marked and tatty. I cultivated this unkempt look. Nixie wasn’t supposed to be like the other women’s magazines. Let them keep their spotless lobbies and their smug Eames chairs. When it comes right down to editorial choices, I would rather have a bright staff and a dim lobby.

Clarissa, my features editor, came through the doors just after me. We kissed once, twice, three times—we’d been friends since school—and she hooked her arm around mine as we took the stairs together. The editorial floor was right at the top of the building. We were halfway up before I realized what was wrong with Clarissa.

“Clarissa, you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.”

She smirked.

“So would you be, if you’d met yesterday’s man.”

“Oh Clarissa. What am I going to do with you?”

“Pay rise, strong coffee, paracetamol.”

She beamed as she ticked off the points on her fingers. I reminded myself that Clarissa did not have some of the wonderful things I had in my life, such as my beautiful son Batman, and that she was therefore almost certainly less fulfilled than I was.

It was a 10:30 A.M. start for my junior staff, bless them, and none of them were in yet. Up on the editorial floor, the cleaners were still in. They were hoovering, and dusting desktops, and turning upside down all the framed photos of my staff’s awful boyfriends, to prove they’d dusted under them. This was the grin-and-bear-it part of editing Nixie. At Vogue or Marie Claire, one’s editorial staff would be at their desks by eight, dressed in Chloé and sipping green tea. On the other hand, they wouldn’t still be there at midnight scrawling CECI N’EST PAS PRÊT-À-PORTER on a sample box they were returning to a venerable Paris fashion house.

Clarissa sat on the corner of my desk and I sat behind it, and we looked out over the open plan at the gang of black faces spiriting away yesterday’s fabric swatches and Starbucks cups.

We talked about the issue we were closing. The ad-sales people had done unusually well that month—perhaps the spiraling cost of street drugs had forced them to spend more time in the office—and we realized we had more editorial material than space. I had a “Real Life” feature I really thought should go in—a profile of a woman who was trying to get out of Baghdad—and Clarissa had a piece on a new kind of orgasm you could apparently only get with the boss. We talked about which of them we would run with. I was only half concentrating. I texted Andrew, to see how he was doing.

The flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries involved. Don’t ask me which—I’d lost track by that stage. The war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they’d grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one’s eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of them—my son, or the war—with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, Gosh, haven’t you grown?

I was interested in how this new kind of orgasm was meant to work. I looked up from texting.

“How come you can only have it with your boss?”

“It’s a forbidden-fruit thing, isn’t it? You get an extra frisson from breaking the office taboo. From hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth. You know. Science.”

“Um. Have scientists actually proved this?”

“Don’t get empirical with me, Sarah. We’re talking about a whole new realm of sexual pleasure. We’re calling it the B-spot. B, as in boss. See what we did there?”

“Ingenious.”

“Thank you darling. We do try.”

I wept inwardly at the thought of women up and down the country being pleasured by middle managers in shiny-bottomed suits. On the flatscreen, News 24 had panned from the Middle East to Africa. Different landscape, same column of thick black smoke. A pair of jaundiced eyes looking out with the same impassivity Andrew had shown, just before I turned away to leave for work. The hairs on my arms went up again. I looked away, and took the three steps to the window that gave out onto Commercial Street. I put my forehead against the glass, which is something I do when I’m trying to think.

“Are you all right, Sarah?”

“I’m fine. Listen, be a doll and go and grab us a couple of coffees, would you?”

Clarissa went off to our idiosyncratic coffee machine, the one that would have been an in-house salon de thé in Vogue’s offices. Down on Commercial Street, a police patrol car pulled up and parked at the curb in front of our building. A uniformed officer got out on each side. They looked at each other over the patrol-car roof. One of them had blond, cropped hair and the other had a bald patch as round and neat as a monk’s. I watched him tilt his head to listen to the radio on his lapel. I smiled, thinking absently about a project Charlie was doing at his nursery. The Police: People Who Help Us, it was called. My son—it goes without saying—was magnificently unconvinced. At constant high alert in his bat cape and mask, Charlie believed a proud citizenry should be ready to help itself.

Clarissa came back with two plasticky lattes. In one of them the coffee machine had deposited a clear acrylic stirrer. In the other, it had elected not to do so. Clarissa hesitated over which to give me.

“First big editorial decision of the day,” she said.

“Easy. I’m the boss. Give me the one with the stirrer.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then we may never get around to locating your B-spot, Clarissa. I’m warning you.”

Clarissa blanched, and passed me the coffee with the stirrer.

I said, “I like the Baghdad piece.”

Clarissa sighed, and slumped her shoulders.

“So do I, Sarah, of course I do. It’s a great article.”

“Five years ago, that’s the one we’d have run with. No question.”

“Five years ago our circulation was so low we had to take those risks.”

“And that’s how we got big—by being different. That’s us.”

Clarissa shook her head. “Getting big’s different from staying big. You know as well as I do, we can’t be serving up morality tales while the other majors are selling sex.”

“But why do you think our readers got dumber?”

“It’s not that. I think our original readers aren’t reading magazines anymore, that’s all. They moved on to greater things, the same way you could if you’d just play the bloody game. Maybe you don’t realize just how big you are now, Sarah. Your next job could be editing a national newspaper.”

I sighed. “How thrilling. I could put topless girls on every page.”

My missing finger itched. I looked back down at the police patrol car. The two officers were putting on their uniform caps. I tapped my mobile against my front teeth.

“Let’s go for a drink after work, Clarissa. Bring your new man if you like. I’m bringing Andrew.”

“Seriously? Out in public? With your husband? Isn’t that terribly last season?”

“It’s terribly five years ago.”

Clarissa tilted her head at me.

“What are you telling me, Sarah?”

“I’m not telling you anything, Clar. I like you too much to tell. I’m just asking myself, really. I’m asking if maybe the kind of choices I made five years ago weren’t so bad after all.”

Clarissa smiled resignedly.

“Fine. But don’t expect me to keep my hands off his hunky thighs under the table, just because he’s your husband.”

“You do that, Clarissa, and I’ll make you junior horoscopes editor for the rest of your natural life.”

My desk phone rang. I looked at the time on its screen: 10:25 A.M. It’s funny how these details stay with you. I picked up the phone and it was reception, sounding bored to distraction. At Nixie we used reception as a sin bin—if a girl got too bitchy on the editorial floor, we sent her down to do a week on the shiniest desk.

“There are two policemen here.”

“Oh. They came in here? What do they want?”

“Okay, let’s think about why I might have dialed your number.”

“They want to talk to me?”

“They did good when they made you the boss, Sarah.”

“Fuck off. Why do they want to talk to me?”

A pause.

“I could ask them, I suppose.”

“If it isn’t too much trouble.”

A longer pause.

“They say they want to shoot a porny film in the office. They say they’re not real policemen and their willies are simply enormous.”

“Oh for god’s sake. Tell them I’ll be down.”

I hung up the phone and looked at Clarissa. The hairs on my arms were up again.

“The police,” I said.

“Relax,” said Clarissa. “They can’t bust you for conspiracy to run a serious feature piece.”

Behind her the flatscreen was showing Jon Stewart. He was laughing. His guest was laughing too. I felt better. You had to find something to laugh about, that summer, the number of places that were going up in smoke. You laughed, or you put on a superhero costume, or you tried for some kind of orgasm that science had somehow missed.

I took the stairs down to the lobby, speeding up as I went. The two police officers were standing rather too close together, with their caps in their hands and their big, sensible leather shoes on my black marble. The young one was blushing horribly.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

I glared at the receptionist and she grinned back at me from beneath her perfect blond side part.

“Sarah O’Rourke?”

“Summers.”

“Excuse me madam?”

“Sarah Summers is my professional name.”

The older policeman looked at me with no expression.

“This is a personal matter, Mrs. O’Rourke. Is there somewhere we can go?”

I walked them up to the boardroom on the first floor. Tones of pink and violet, long glass table, more neon.

“Can I get you a coffee? Or tea? I mean, I can’t absolutely guarantee it’ll come out as coffee or tea. Our machine is a bit—”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

The officers’ faces glowed unnaturally in the pinkish light. They looked like black-and-white-movie men, colored in by a computer. One older, the one with the bald patch. Maybe forty-five. The younger one, with the blond cropped hair, maybe twenty-two or twenty-four. Nice lips. Quite full, and rather juicy-looking. He wasn’t beautiful, but I was transfixed by the way he stood and cast his eyes down deferentially when he spoke. And of course there’s always something about a uniform. You wonder if the protocol will peel off with the jacket, I suppose.

The two of them placed their uniform caps on the purple smoked glass. They rotated the caps with their clean white fingers. Both of them stopped at exactly the same moment, as if some critical angle they had practiced in basic training had precisely been attained.

They stared at me. My mobile chimed brashly on the glass desktop—a text message arriving. I smiled. That would be Andrew.

“I’ve got some bad news for you, Mrs. O’Rourke,” said the older officer.

“What do you mean?”

It came out more aggressive than I intended. The policemen stared at their caps on the table. I needed to look at the text message that had just arrived. As I reached out my hand to pick up my phone, I saw the two of them staring at the stump of my missing finger.

“Oh. This? I lost it on holiday. On a beach, actually.”

The two policemen looked at each other. They turned back to me. The older one spoke. His voice was suddenly hoarse.

“We’re very sorry, Mrs. O’Rourke.”

“Oh, please, don’t be. It’s fine, really. I’m fine now. It’s just a finger.”

“That’s not what I meant, Mrs. O’Rourke. I’m afraid we’ve been instructed to tell you that—”

“See, honestly, you get used to doing without the finger. At first you think it’s a big deal and then you learn to use the other hand.”

I looked up and saw the two of them watching me, gray-faced and serious. Neon crackled. On the wall clock, a fresh minute snapped over the old one.

“The really funny thing is, I still feel it, you know? My finger, I mean. This missing one. Sometimes it actually itches. And I go to scratch it and there’s nothing there, of course. And in my dreams my finger grows back, and I’m so happy to have it back, even though I’ve learned to do without it. Isn’t that silly? I miss it, do you see? It itches.”

The young officer took a deep breath and looked down at his notebook.

“Your husband was found unconscious at your property shortly after nine this morning, Mrs. O’Rourke. Your neighbor heard cries and placed a 999 call to the effect that a male was apparently in distress. Police attended the address and forced entry to an upstairs room at nine-fifteen A.M., when Andrew O’Rourke was found unconscious. Our officers did everything they could and an ambulance attended and removed the casualty, but I am very sorry to tell you, Mrs. O’Rourke, that your husband was pronounced dead at the scene at—here we are—nine thirty-three A.M.”

The policeman closed his pad.

“We’re very sorry, madam.”

I picked up my phone. The new text was indeed from Andrew. SO SORRY, it said.

He was sorry.

I switched the phone, and myself, onto silent mode. The silence lasted all week. It rumbled in the taxi home. It howled when I picked up Charlie from nursery. It crackled on the phone call with my parents. It roared in my ears while the undertaker explained the relative merits of oak and pine caskets. It cleared its throat apologetically when the obituaries editor of The Times telephoned to check some last details. Now the silence had followed me into the cold, echoing church.

How to explain death to a four-year-old superhero? How to announce the precipitous arrival of grief? I hadn’t even accepted it myself. When the policemen told me that Andrew was dead, my mind refused to contain the information. I am a very ordinary woman, I think, and I am quite well equipped to deal with everyday evil. Interrupted sex, tough editorial decisions and malfunctioning coffee machines—these my mind could readily accept. But my Andrew, dead? It still seemed physically impossible. At one point he had covered more than seven tenths of the earth’s surface.

And yet here I was, staring at Andrew’s plain oak coffin (A classic choice, madam), and it seemed rather small in the wide nave of the church. A silent, sickening dream.

Mummy, where’s Daddy?

I sat in the front pew of the church with my arms around my son, and realized I had begun to tremble. The vicar was delivering the eulogy. He was talking about my husband in the past tense. He made it sound very neat. It occurred to me that he had never had to deal with Andrew in the present tense, or proofread his columns, or feel him running down inside like a piece of broken clockwork.

Charlie squirmed in my arms and asked his question again, the same one he’d asked ten times a day since Andrew died. Mummy, where’s mine daddy exactly now? I leaned down to his ear and whispered, He’s in a really nice bit of heaven this morning, Charlie. There’s a lovely long room where they all go after breakfast, with lots of interesting books and things to do.

—Oh. Is there painting-and-drawing?

—Yes, there’s painting-and-drawing.

—Is mine daddy doing drawing?

—No Charlie, Daddy is opening the window and looking at the sky.

I shivered, and wondered how long I would have to go on narrating my husband’s afterlife.

More words, then hymns. Hands took my elbows and led me outside. I observed myself standing in a graveyard beside a deep hole in the ground. Six suited undertakers were lowering a coffin on thick green silky ropes with tasseled ends. I recognized it as the coffin that had been standing on trestles at the front of the church. The coffin came to rest. The undertakers retrieved the ropes, each with a deft flick of the wrist. I remember thinking, I bet they do this all the time, as if it was some brilliant insight. Someone thrust a lump of clay into my hand. I realized I was being invited—urged, even—to throw it into the hole. I stepped up to the edge. Neat, clean greengrocer’s grass had been laid around the border of the grave. I looked down and saw the coffin glowing palely in the depths. Batman held tight to my leg and peered down into the gloom with me.

“Mummy, why did the Bruce Wayne men putted that box down in the hole?”

“Let’s not think about that now, darling.”

I’d spent so many hours explaining heaven to Charlie that week—every room and bookshelf and sandpit of it—that I’d never really dealt with the issue of Andrew’s physical body at all. I thought it would be too much to ask of my son, at four, to understand the separation between body and soul. Looking back on it now, I think I underestimated a boy who could live simultaneously in Kingston-upon-Thames and Gotham City. I think if I’d managed to sit him down and explain it to him gently, he would have been perfectly happy with the duality.

I knelt and put my arm around my son’s shoulders. I did it to be tender, but my head was swimming and I realized that perhaps it was only Charlie who was stopping me from falling down the hole. I held on tighter. Charlie put his mouth to my ear and whispered.

“Where’s mine daddy right now?”

I whispered back.

“Your daddy is in the heaven hills, Charlie. Very popular at this time of year. I think he’s very happy there.”

“Mmm. Is mine daddy coming back soon?”

“No, Charlie. People don’t come back from heaven. We talked about that.”

Charlie pursed his lips.

“Mummy,” he said again, “why did they put that box down there?”

“I suppose they want to keep it safe.”

“Oh. Is they going to come and get it later?”

“No Charlie, I don’t think so.”

Charlie blinked. Under his bat mask he screwed up his face with the effort of trying to understand.

“Where is heaven, Mummy?”

“Please, Charlie. Not now.”

“What’s in that box?”

“Let’s talk about this later, darling, all right? Mummy is feeling rather dizzy.”

Charlie stared at me.

“Is mine daddy in that box?”

“Your daddy is in heaven, Charlie.”

“IS THAT BOX HEAVEN?” said Charlie, loudly.

Everyone was watching us. I couldn’t speak. My son stared into the hole. Then he looked up at me in absolute alarm.

“Mummy! Get him OUT! Get mine daddy out of heaven!”

I held tightly on to his shoulders.

“Oh Charlie, please, you don’t understand!”

“GET HIM OUT! GET HIM OUT!”

My son squirmed in my grip and broke free. It happened very quickly. He stood at the very edge of the hole. He looked back at me and then he turned and inched forward, but the greengrocer’s grass overlapped the edge of the hole and it yielded under his feet and he fell, with his bat cape flying behind him, down into the grave. He landed with a thump on top of Andrew’s coffin. There was a single, urgent scream from one of the other mourners. I think it was the first sound, since Andrew died, that really broke the silence.

The scream ran on and on in my mind. I felt nauseous, and the horizon lurched insanely. Still kneeling, I leaned out over the edge of the pit. Down below, in the dark shadow, my son was banging on the coffin and screaming Daddy, Daddy, get OUT! He clung to the coffin lid, and planted his bat shoes against the sidewall of the grave, and heaved against the screws that held the lid closed. I hung my arms down over the edge of the hole. I implored Charlie to take my hands so I could pull him back up. I don’t think he heard me at all.

At first, my son moved with a breathless confidence. Batman was undefeated, after all, that spring. He had overcome the Penguin, the Puffin, and Mr. Freeze. It was simply not a possibility in my son’s mind that he might not overcome this new challenge. He screamed in rage and fury. He wouldn’t give up, but if I am strict and force myself now to decide upon the precise moment in this whole story when my heart irreparably broke, it was the moment when I saw the weariness and the doubt creep into my son’s small muscles as his fingers slipped, for the tenth time, from the pale oak lid.

The mourners clustered around the edge of the grave, paralyzed by the horror of this thing, this first discovery of death that was worse than death itself. I tried to go forward but the hands on my elbows were holding me back. I strained against their grip and looked at all the horror-struck faces around the grave and I was thinking, Why doesn’t someone do something?

But it is hard, very hard, to be the first.

Finally it was Little Bee who went down into the grave and held up my son for other hands to haul out. Charlie was kicking and biting and struggling furiously in his muddied mask and cape. He wanted to go back down. And it was Little Bee, once she herself had been extricated, who hugged him and held him back as he screamed, NO, NO, NO, NO, NO, while each of the principal mourners stepped onto the thin strip of greengrocer’s grass and dropped in their small handfuls of clay. My son’s screaming seemed to go on for a cruelly long time. I remember wondering if my mind would shatter with the noise, like a wineglass broken by a soprano. In fact a former colleague of Andrew’s, a war reporter who had been in Iraq and Darfur, did call me a few days later with the name of a combat-fatigue counselor he used. That’s kind of you, I told him, but I haven’t been at war.

At the graveside, when the screaming was over, I picked up Charlie and held him on my front, with his head resting on my shoulder. He was exhausted. Through the eyeholes of his bat mask, I could see his eyelids drooping. I watched the other mourners filing away in a slow line toward the car park. Brightly colored umbrellas broke out above the somber suits. It was starting to rain.

Little Bee stayed behind with me. We stood by the side of the grave and we stared at each other.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It is nothing,” said Little Bee. “I just did what anyone would do.”

“Yes,” I said. “Except that everyone else didn’t.”

Little Bee shrugged.

“It is easier when you are from outside.”

I shivered. The rain came down harder.

“This is never going to end,” I said. “Is it, Little Bee?”

“However long the moon disappears, someday it must shine again. That is what we used to say in my village.”

“April showers bring May flowers. That’s what we used to say in mine.”

We tried to smile at each other.

I never did drop my own clay into the grave. I couldn’t seem to put it down either. Two hours later, alone for a moment at the kitchen table of our house, I realized I was still gripping it. I left it there on the tablecloth, a small beige lump on top of the clean blue cotton. When I came back a few minutes later, someone had been past and tidied it.

A few days later the obituary in The Times noted that there had been poignant scenes at their former columnist’s funeral. Andrew’s editor sent me the cutting, in a heavy cream envelope, with a crisp white compliments slip.