The Last List of Mabel Beaumont(87)



Time drags. I wait for Erin to wake, and when she does, I offer her porridge and toast. She laughs as I make pot after pot of tea. Then she announces that she’s going to the library and I want to ask her to stay and help take my mind off the waiting, but I know I can’t. I’ve turned Dot’s visit into this seismic event, which I’ve been building up to my whole life, but it might, in fact, be as small and simple as two old friends catching up after many years apart.

As I wash up the breakfast dishes, standing where I stood when I saw that flash of green earlier this morning, I remember something. Just a small snippet of conversation from that last day Arthur and I had together.

‘Do you know where Olly’s bone is?’ he asked.

‘That green thing he carries around? I haven’t seen it.’

‘I’ll have a look for it tomorrow. He seems a bit lost without it.’

That was the extent of it. But am I imagining it, or did he reach across for my spiral notebook after he said that, as if he was going to make a note of it?

Find D





And did I see him start to write something, and then ask if he wanted a cup of tea? He looked up, put the pen down, said he would get it. I finish the note for him, in my head.

Find Dog’s bone





Did I push that memory aside, bury it somehow, because I wanted the note to mean something else? Because I needed it to? It doesn’t matter now. He is gone, and I will never know. And if a scribbled, unfinished note about a dog toy was what it took for me to do the thing I’ve always wanted and needed to do, that’s fine with me. Life doesn’t always take the expected, straight path. I know that now.

I go to make yet another cup of tea, and Arthur’s in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter. I look at him, really take him in, and I know, somehow, that this is the last time. That when Dot comes inside this house, he’ll really be gone.

‘Goodbye, Arthur,’ I say. ‘Sleep well.’

And I blink, and he’s gone.

At half past eleven, I force myself to stop flitting about and sit in my armchair. Erin brought home fresh daffodils after her shift yesterday, and they’re just beginning to open. I find myself going back over how Dot and I met. We were eleven, both new to grammar school, pushed together when the teacher, Mr Dennis, asked us to get into pairs and she looked over at me and raised her eyebrows in a question. We were learning about the lead up to the Second World War, and it didn’t quite feel like history, back then.

‘How do you think Hitler persuaded people to vote for him?’ I read aloud from the sheet we’d been given.

Dot ignored me. Looked around, checking where the teacher was. What was she going to do?

‘Do you dare me to go out and run to the end of the corridor and back without him noticing?’ She jerked her head in the direction of our teacher.

I was bewildered. Why would she want to do that? ‘No,’ I said.

She shrugged, pulled the sheet of paper towards her. ‘Let’s do this, then.’

And I knew, in that second, that this girl was nothing like me. Saw, for the first time, how very different people could be. And how intoxicating. That was the only thing I learned that day.

There’s a knock at the door, loud and confident, and I get up and take a deep breath before going out into the hall. She is standing on my doorstep, here in Broughton, where I found and then lost her. And to an outsider, it would just look like one old woman visiting another. Nothing special or earth-shattering. But from here, from inside my heart, it’s a tiny miracle to be standing across from her.

‘You’re here,’ I say, and then wish I could take it back and say something less silly.

‘I’m here,’ she says. ‘Can I come in?’

There is so much to tell her. So much to ask. But where do you start? With tea, I decide. I’ve bought some fancy biscuits and I put them on a plate while the kettle boils. I’ve left her in the front room, and I picture her in there, looking around and making silent judgements about the life I’ve lived. My hands are shaking when I reach into the fridge for the milk. I tell myself to stop, to calm down. I don’t know what’s going to come of any of this, and I mustn’t build it up too much. It might be nothing.

But it isn’t. It isn’t nothing. To have found her, and to have her here, in the home I shared for many years with a man we once knew.

‘Can I help?’ she asks, appearing in the kitchen doorway. ‘It’s a lovely home you’ve got, Mabel.’

I hand her a mug and follow her through to the front room. I watch her looking at things, peering in close at a photograph of me and Arthur on our wedding day, picking up a shell I keep on the bookcase that I found, once, on a beach in Cornwall. She is really here. Her blonde hair is grey, now, and the curls have gone. It’s cut short, not unlike Erin’s. I think Erin calls hers a pixie cut. She’s heavier, too, her body more rounded and feminine.

‘I missed your wedding,’ she says.

‘And I missed yours.’

She snorts. ‘If you’d come to mine, you might have told me I was doing the wrong thing. That it wouldn’t last more than a few years.’

I don’t say anything, and I know we’re both thinking about my marriage, about whether or not it was the right thing. Whether or not it was what you might call a success.

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