The Last Love Note(91)

Back then I hadn’t known that the wound would never close over. Hadn’t known it would slice open, over and over again – at the sound of a song, or the sight of the perfect gift for him in a bookstore, or at a certain scent on the breeze.

Two years after his death, the triggers of grief were as acute as they were two days in. More acute, perhaps, because at two days there was the benefit of disbelief: this couldn’t be true. It’s not happening.

At two years, it is real. Embedded.

And then I found myself in New York City. A city in which my heart remembered how to beat, not just because it had to, but because it wanted to. This city scooped me from rock bottom and dragged me to the surface where I could burst through and breathe again. It showed me that maybe my world didn’t end because my husband’s did. Maybe there’s a life beyond ‘widow’. Maybe I wouldn’t die of grief, after all . . .



The more Charlie and I see of the world, the closer I feel to Cam, but the nature of those feelings is changing. It’s as though our adventure is dialling down the pain of grief and dialling up the memories and love. The seasons change again as the temperature cools and I show Charlie all our old haunts. Paris and Venice and Prague.

‘Mummy and Daddy lived here for three months,’ I tell him outside the black door of a terrace apartment in Bloomsbury in London. ‘Daddy had a research grant to write a book on medieval prose.’

‘Hose?’

‘Prose. It’s when we write the way we speak, rather than doing fancy things with words, like making poems. Anyway, you don’t need to understand what Daddy wrote about yet. One day you’ll read his books and you’ll see inside his thoughts. Aren’t we lucky to have that? Now, I know you’re only five, but I want to show you Daddy’s favourite pub in the whole world. It’s just around the corner.’

The Lamb is a gorgeous Victorian pub, brimming with nostalgia and history. Flowers in hanging baskets, antique ‘snob’ screens so the patrons don’t have to look at the bar staff. Storybook stuff.

‘There’s a famous writer called Charles Dickens who used to drink at this pub,’ I tell Charlie. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes used to meet here too, but there’s only so much literature history Charlie will tolerate.

I close my eyes, put my arms in the air, spin around slowly and take a huge breath.

‘What are you doing, Mummy?’

‘She’s soaking up the literary spirit of the whole of Bloomsbury,’ I hear Cam say. ‘Just like last time.’

Goosebumps erupt on my skin. I slow the spinning but keep my eyes shut, a smile emerging straight from my heart and spreading through my body like sunshine. I should have known he’d turn up at the Lamb. If I stay very still and very open, our energies feel so close it’s as if we can almost touch. This feels like neither space nor time. It’s a vessel where love is infinite. Limitless. A transient crossover between where we are and wherever Cam might be.



‘We were so happy, Daddy and me. And when you came along – wow. Both of us were writers and neither of us could find enough words to describe how much you meant to us. You were our world, Charlie. You always will be.’

He looks at me quizzically. ‘Did Daddy have a favourite ice-cream shop in London?’

Clever. Just like Daddy.

As we join hands and run towards the tube station, our laughter bounces off cobblestone pavers in a side alley, another memory in the making for the pages that will fill chapter upon chapter of a new story.

It’s not a fork in the road, I realise. It’s just the road. There’s no Story A and Story B. There’s one, imperfect, meandering direction.

Cam would want us travelling light, sucking the marrow out of every stop, living this trip and whatever comes after it as though our lives depended on it, which they really do. We’re not here to half-live our remaining days, always partly in flashback.

We’re in a buggy in Hyde Park, having a horse-and-carriage tour, when my phone beeps with a message. It’s an alert from the Aurora Advisory Service I’m subscribed to in Senja, Norway.

There’s been a massive solar flare, one of the biggest this century and, within forty-eight hours, scientists predict the most vivid aurora in living memory.

I book us flights, then and there, on my phone from the carriage. ‘Charlie,’ I say, barely able to control my elation, ‘we’re off to see the lights!’

This is it. Top of my bucket list. The perfect alignment of everything that really counts. I can’t help feeling on some inexplicable level that Cam is responsible – as if he controls the sun’s behaviour and our proximity to the best place in the world from which to see the one thing that’s tantalised me most since I was sixteen years old.

Of course he’s not doing that, but try telling that to the romantic in me.

I touch the pendant hanging around my neck. I wear it all the time. Perhaps it’s the pendant bringing us luck, infused with Hugh’s ability to make things better and easier for me, ever since the day I met him.

Charlie throws his arms around my neck. ‘I love you, Mummy,’ he says. ‘You’re a magician!’

I laugh. ‘What do you mean?’

He turns to me with his big eyes, lit up with the optimism of youth and says, ‘You always make amazing things happen. All the things we’ve seen already and now you’re turning up the lights!’