Thirty years!
Well, this was definitely something that needed celebrating. She grabbed her mobile and created a WhatsApp group. She called it ‘Thirty Year Reunion!’ and chose a picture of the lake that dominated the York university campus from Google for the image. Then she typed her message.
Hi both. I’ve just realised that it’s thirty years since we first met in York. Sounds like an excuse for a get-together to me! What do you think? Up for it?
Would they be up for it, she wondered? Her finger hovered over the send button. Angie certainly would, Maggie felt sure, although they might have to stay in York for their night out. Romany was fifteen now and certainly old enough to be left for an evening whilst her mother went out of town, but Angie had always been hugely protective of her in a way that she had never been about anything else in her life. If the reunion happened, it might be best to suggest that they stick to York rather than head over to Leon’s neck of the woods.
Maggie was slightly less sure of how Leon would react. He’d had a rocky time recently and might not feel like celebrating. She had first wondered if something was awry in his world when there had been no Christmas card from his family the Christmas before. Becky was generally very organised, her cards arriving promptly in the second week of December. Maggie’s own cards always went out in the first week and so she doubted she could have been accidentally overlooked. Of course, she might have been cut from the list on purpose, although Becky had put up with her for all these years so it would have been odd if she had suddenly changed her mind. Curious, Maggie had rung Angie to see if she had received a card.
‘Hang on!’ Angie had said. ‘Just putting you on speaker while I check.’
It clearly wasn’t a big job to look through her Christmas greetings, as she was back on the line moments later. Either she had received very few or, more likely, she hadn’t bothered to open the ones she got. Maggie visualised her own card – carefully chosen and with an individual and thoughtful message handwritten inside – sitting amongst a pile of circulars and bills, unopened and unloved.
‘Nope,’ she said. ‘Nothing here either.’
‘That’s unusual,’ said Maggie. ‘Becky is generally so fastidious about these things.’
‘Anal, you mean,’ replied Angie. ‘No offence,’ she added quickly.
Maggie didn’t take offence any more. Angie had always struggled to grasp that a life ordered beyond what she saw as reasonable was the very kind of life that Maggie prided herself on having. What Angie saw as anal, Maggie considered to be just good planning.
So, Maggie had then texted Leon, not mentioning the lack of a Christmas card per se, but asking after him and the family in a more general way.
A few moments later her phone had rung. It had been him.
‘Hi, Lee,’ she’d said. ‘And a merry Christmas to you. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s going. And how about you?’
‘I’m fine. No news.’ She could feel her cheeks burning but she wasn’t ready to tell him about what had happened. She wasn’t ready to tell anybody.
‘Life just ticks on really,’ she’d continued. ‘Well, races by at breakneck speed actually. How are we nearly fifty, for a start? I think I’m in denial. Doing anything nice for Christmas?’
There was a pause at the other end of the line and Maggie felt the atmosphere shift.
‘Actually, I’ll be on my own this year,’ he said. His voice had sounded thick all of a sudden, as if his throat had closed and was only allowing part of the sound out. ‘Becky and I, well, we split up in the summer.’
Maggie had been momentarily lost for words. What kind of a friend was she to have let this happen and not to have been there for Leon? She racked her brains, trying to think of the last time they had been in touch. Easter, maybe? Surely not that long ago, but then life had a habit of racing by. It could well have been six whole months since they last spoke. And in that time his marriage had collapsed.
It was sad, but it wasn’t really a surprise. Becky had never been quite right for Leon, in Maggie’s opinion at least, and she had seen tensions in their relationship over the years, but she had always assumed that they arose because Becky had never really taken to Leon’s university friends rather than it being indicative of wider problems in the marriage. But, putting her own views aside, she felt awful at having let Leon go through the marriage break-up on his own, even if she had had no clue that it was happening.