Thereupon the writer recollects and reminisces to the rhythm of a slow-motion film about the events that preceded and followed the crucial death through Eve’s eyes, bringing the reader on the scene, conveying every throb, every rustle, every gaze, as for a need of catharsis, mixed with an unfathomable sense of guilt, in an atmosphere of ”strange hush”, which seems suspended in the expectation of death.
“Grief shows itself in all sorts of different ways… can turn a person mad”; grief sets in again when it comes to Rosie’s mother, Mrs Hughes; after her daughter’s death, she became an alcoholic and eventually killed herself, between silk sheets, crammed with aspirins and sleeping pills, quaffing litres of vodka, clutching Rosie’s baby album. It is significative that Susan Fletcher introduces Mrs Hughes’s death almost out of the blue, when the reader is least expecting it, at the moment Eve talks about her pregnancy and her difficulty to fall asleep during the hot September nights of 1999, nearly worried about disturbing her baby. It is then that the author analyses the fear of grief, the utmost one, which neither Eve nor anyone else would ever want to experience, the one that stems from the lost of a beloved person, one’s child above all. “Real joy leaves”. “Everything lacks from then on… Mrs Hughes learnt that well enough”. “How did my grandmother bear it? How did she not dissolve, go mad?”
Nonetheless, from these apparently unanswerable questions the writer derives a universal reading key, on behalf of a young pregnant woman. Only through the thought of an impending danger for her baby or Daniel -her partner- Eve at last manages to focus on the personality and moral qualities of her life’s central figure: her grandmother. “She was a remarkable woman. I know now that her life was weighed down with unfathomable sadness, so much more than anyone realised”. Although Susan Fletcher has already written that the grandmother was long gone, it is in the final chapter that her character is most deeply treated and not by chance, since it represents the start of Eve’s new life: her rebirth, through another birth, her baby’s. Her grandmother, this “remarkable”, decisive, passionate woman suddenly dies when Eve is nineteen, leaving an unbridgeable gap.
The author, through Eve’s words, explains how the bereaved cannot get over grief by thinking their beloved did not suffer or were able to lead a satisfactory, lengthy life. Only time can smear the contours, can allow us to reminisce, in a suffering mood, but aloof from despair. It often happens that grief sets people apart: that is what happened to Eve and her grandfather with regards to the grandmother’s death; each mourns his or her own loss, cocooned in silence and lonesomeness, and lets him or herself live.
Death, though, can also be softer, people can as well slowly die away like a candle, without suffering too much standing on tiptoes, as happened to seventy-seven-year-old Eve’ grandfather, nine years after his wife, while lying up for a bad cold. We could state this event is narrated almost as a minor one; we are presented with such a description by Susan Fletcher, as though the grandfather, a tranquil man, so different from his wife, had chosen to die shyly, discreetly, just as he had lived.
The choice of this theme was undoubtedly dictated by the fact that my life too was prematurely marked by a crucial loss -my father’s, at the age of seven, like Eve. I know that mood, I perfectly realise how a child of that age is absolutely unable to process so severe a grief, from which he attempts to guard him-herself, sealing his soul, abandoning himself to the evocative power of memory.
