The Last List of Mabel Beaumont(78)

She looks at me like she’s worried I’ve gone mad. Like perhaps I’ve forgotten that all those people I listed are dead.

‘I know it’s not the same as doing it when they were still alive, but it’s better than nothing. It’s still something.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Of course it is.’

There’s a clattering noise and then Erin and Hannah appear again. Hannah’s hair is a little more unruly than it was when she went upstairs, and they keep reaching for one another’s hands, both of them grinning. And I feel a sudden stab of jealousy, because I recognise that dazed, fuzzy look. It’s the look I saw in the mirror after Dot and I kissed. It’s lust and wonder and confusion and elation and pleasure so sharp it could be pain. And they have a whole lifetime of it ahead, while I only felt it once.

‘We’re going out,’ Erin says. ‘Just for an hour or so. Do you need anything?’

She is considerate, and I will point to that if Julie has any more of her worries about this setup.

‘No. Have fun,’ I say.

I wonder whether Erin has told Hannah about me. Whether she lay upstairs, her head on Hannah’s chest, hot and frenzied from kissing, and said ‘You’ll never guess what.’ I don’t mind if she did, if she has. I don’t mind, now, who knows. All my life, it’s been above me, looming, threatening, and all I ever had to do to diminish its power was to say it aloud.

‘So Dot was the love of your life?’ Julie asks, when they’ve gone.

I consider this. She was, of course she was. But Arthur was too. It was such a different love, one like fire and the other like cool stone, steady and dependable. I don’t know what would have happened if Dot and I had tried to make a life together. It would have involved so much deception, so much secrecy. I don’t know whether we would have been able to withstand that. And, despite what happened that day on that walk, I don’t know how she felt, either. Whether that kiss was a moment of madness rather than a moment of truth. Can the love of your life be someone you didn’t really get to love at all?

‘I thought she might be. I was hoping I might get to find out.’

‘That’s why you waited until after Arthur was gone to look for her,’ she says. ‘Out of respect?’

‘I didn’t think to do it earlier, truthfully. Didn’t consider it as an option. It was him who suggested it, in the end, with that note he left. I think once I married Arthur, I convinced myself that that was that. I’d made my choice.’

Julie nods. ‘And his death freed you of that, in a way.’

It’s not a question, so I don’t answer, but if it was, I would say this. His death opened me up, loosened me, made me look at things a little differently, made me see more clearly. Arthur was sixty-two years of love and protection, and his death was a letting go.

She goes off to do some washing and make my lunch, leaves me to my thoughts. I close my eyes, not to doze off, but to remember better. Dot and me, up in my bedroom.

‘You said you had something to tell me,’ she said.

‘I do.’ And I wanted to tell her but I didn’t, at the same time.

‘Well, spit it out, then.’ She was standing behind me, plaiting my hair. She tapped me gently on the shoulder with the brush.

‘Arthur’s asked me to marry him,’ I said.

I couldn’t see her face, and she couldn’t see mine. We reacted to the telling of this privately.

‘I think we both knew that was coming,’ she said, after a pause that felt momentous. ‘What did you say?’

It was my turn to pause. I put a hand up behind me and placed it on hers, on the brush handle, and she stopped what she was doing and came round to sit on the bed, facing me.

‘I said yes,’ I said.

Did I see a flash of pain, of jealousy? There, and then gone. She raised her eyebrows and her expression was questioning.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, in a small, quiet voice.

And then I started to justify it, the decision, though she hadn’t asked me to. ‘He’s been so good to me since Bill died, so patient. I like how reliable he is, how solid. I feel like he’ll look after me. And we get on, don’t we? He makes me laugh and he’s kind. And he’s always keen to have adventures. I feel like he’ll push me to do things I wouldn’t do otherwise.’

Dot was silent. She looked up at me and smiled, but her eyes were sad. ‘It sounds like you’re trying to talk me, or maybe yourself, into believing it’s the right thing to do.’

‘That isn’t fair.’

‘Isn’t it?’

I looked down at the sheets, because I knew that if I looked up at her at that moment, if our eyes met, something momentous might happen. And I wanted it to, but I was terrified, too, and the terror won out.

‘Being with him, and you, and Bill, those were the happiest times of my life. I feel like I can keep hold of that, if I marry him. If I don’t, and he goes off and marries someone else, and I wait around to meet someone who never knew my brother, I feel like I’ll be letting go of those memories.’

I dared to look up, and she was shaking her head.

‘That’s not how memories work. You’ll always have that, those memories of us all together. But that’s over, now, isn’t it? It was over the moment we lost Bill. And it feels like maybe you’re trying to cling onto him by marrying his best friend.’