The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online

moment stood and glared at his wife over Lorraine’s fluffy head.
    Jodie moved a pace or two into the kitchen. But she stopped, her eyes on them, and seemed to freeze. A tiny chime hung in the air, as the glasses shivered in her fingers. She did not speak. Her mouth worked as if she might speak, but only a squeak came out.
    Then her hands opened. The floor was limestone and the glass exploded. The crash, the other woman’s cry, the splintering light at her feet: these seemed to shock Jodie into reaction. She gave a little grunt, then a gasp, and put her right hand, now empty, onto the slate worktop; then she folded to her knees. “Watch out!” he said. She sunk into the shards as smoothly as if they were satin, as if they were snow, and the limestone gleamed around her, an ice field, each tile with its swollen pillowed edge, each with a shadow pattern faint as breath. She snorted. She seemed dazed, concussed, as if she had smashed a mirror by putting her head through it. She reached out her left hand, and her hand was cut, and a springing well of blood branched into tributaries on her palm. She glanced at it, almost casually, and made a gagging noise. She folded tidily back onto her heels. She fell sideways, her mouth open.
    He trod on the glass to get to her, crunching it like ice. He thought this was his chance to slap her, that she was faking to scare him, but when he dragged at her arm it was limp, heavy, and when he shouted Christ Almighty Jodie she didn’t flinch, and when he jerked her head round brutally to look into her face, her eyes had already glazed.
    So it seemed to him later, when the night’s events had to be reprised. He wanted to cry on the shoulder of the ambulance crew and say, only curiosity and mild lust led me on, and a sort of childish defiance, and the fact that it was there for me, on a plate, do you know what I mean? He said, I meant to ask her to be French. Probably she wouldn’t have been, but I didn’t think she’d fall over like that … I mean, how would you? How would you imagine that? And kneeling, kneeling on the glass.
    For the first day or so he was not coherent. But nobody was interested in his state of mind; not in the way they would have been, if he had been in custody for killing his wife in some more obvious way. A doctor explained it to him, when they thought he was ready. Long QT syndrome. A disorder of the heart’s electrical activity, which leads to arrhythmia, which leads, in certain circumstances, to cardiac arrest. Genetic, probably. Underdiagnosed, in the population at large. If we spot it early, we doctors can do all sorts of stuff: pacemakers, beta blockers. But there’s not much anyone can do, if the first symptom is sudden death. A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.

 
    WINTER BREAK

 
    By the time they arrived at their destination, they could no longer recognize their own name. The taxi driver stabbed the air with his placard while they stood gawping up and down the line, until Phil pointed and said, “That’s us.” Little peaks had grown over the T ’s in their surname, and the dot on the i had drifted away like an island. She rubbed her cheek, numbed by the draught from the air vent above her seat; the rest of her felt creased and gritty, and while Phil bustled toward the man, waving, she picked the cloth of her T-shirt away from the small of her back, and shuffled after him. We dress for the weather we want, as if to bully it, even though we’ve seen the forecast.
    The driver laid a hairy, proprietorial hand on their baggage trolley. He was a squat man with the regulation mustache, and he wore a twill zipped jacket with a tartan lining peeping from under it; as if to say, forget your sunshine illusions. The plane was late and it was already dark. He flung open a rear door for her and humped their bags