When Will There Be Good News?: Abide with Me Summary & Analysis

Joanna was nine years old when Martina died. She came home from school as Martina’s body was being carried out on a stretcher. In Martina’s room she found empty bottles and “something sickly in the air.” Martina had left a suicide note saying, “Too much” and something untranslated in Swedish. When Joanna found her father and showed him the note, he threw his bottle of whiskey at her.

Joanna had lived with her father for a while. Howard’s next wife, an artist from Hong Kong, had suggested that Joanna be sent to a boarding school in the Cotswolds. After her father moved to Los Angeles, she spent holidays with her “dreadful” Aunt Agnes and Uncle Oliver, whom she could never forgive “for not wrapping her in love.” She eventually saw an obituary in the newspaper telling her that her father had died in Brazil. However, Joanna thrived at boarding school, loving the order and structure of life there.

Joanna and the baby are sharing a lumpy mattress. As she nurses him early in the morning, she reflects on her belief that she carries the souls of her dead family within her. She’s an atheist, but that doesn’t mean a person “didn’t have to get through every day the best way you could. There were no rules.” The baby is the same age as Joseph when he died. She can’t imagine what her brother would have been like as an adult, but she sometimes imagines what Jessica and Gabrielle would be like now. They all “possess a reality that was stronger than anything alive, apart from the baby, of course.”

Joanna’s whole life is “an act of bereavement, longing for something she could no longer remember.” She sometimes dreams of a dog barking, and it awakens such a raw grief that she wants to kill both the baby and herself so that nothing bad can ever happen to him. She thinks about contingency plans in case she reaches a point where she can no longer run. But as long as she can, she’ll keep running. Just then she hears footsteps on the stairs—“the bad man was coming.”