‘Right,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’m afraid I must be off. If I don’t get back into the office soon, I think I may melt. The bell ringers are coming at three to petition me about adding a Snow Patrol song to their repertoire.’
‘Crikey,’ I said.
‘My sentiments exactly,’ he said. ‘See you again, no doubt.’
Although I never did see him again. I stopped waiting for whoever had brought the candle to visit Davey. I had the feeling they were never coming back.
And then the vicar was off across the graveyard, brushing crumbs from his smart black trousers.
As he disappeared inside the church, I took a bite of the sandwich. It was egg and cress.
Moorlands House Care Home, September 2011
Margot Macrae is Eighty Years Old
I got old by accident. Those were Humphrey’s words that first time I’d taken him to the doctor’s, when his memory had started to fail him. Only on waking in my private care home to be checked by a nurse, and to totter into the day room for breakfast, did I fully appreciate what he meant. The place was faultless – the staff were neat and kind – but there was a miserable inevitability about the place. Sockets where they would need to plug in respiratory machines when I would lose the ability to breathe on my own, panic alarms for when I would be panicking and need someone else to be alarmed. Pulleys on the ceiling for attaching hoists for when I would eventually need help rising up out of bed.
There was a special lunch planned for a resident who was turning seventy. We would be having lasagne. And I found myself at the desk in my room in front of the mirror, feeling a little nervous. I was putting on a lipstick. A light reddish-brown shade from Marks & Spencer that would, I hoped, brighten up my face. I looked at my eyes, my own eyes, the only things on my face that hadn’t changed over time, and wondered what Meena was up to at that moment. When I’d sent her my new address, I’d missed off the words ‘care home’ so she wouldn’t know.
The lasagne didn’t taste how I remembered lasagne; it had a strange plastic-like quality to it. But I’d fallen into a conversation with two long-term residents, Elaine and Georgina （‘Please, call me George’）。 They were telling me about their childhoods spent in the same seaside town near Plymouth, and how they’d never known one another but had many friends in common. We were talking about the size of the world and then there he was. A few tables over, eating alone. Still thin, but concertinaed a little at the middle from age. His hair wasn’t all gone, but what was left was white and fluffy. He was looking out of the window as though he could just sail out of it and keep going. On and on.
Johnny.
Goose bumps shimmered along my arms and I could no longer hear George telling Elaine about her new slipper boot knitting pattern. Because there he was.
He dipped his spoon into his lasagne and ate from it as though he were in a dream.
I considered doubting myself. I’d seen his face in many people before – strangers on London streets, patrons in the Redditch library, even a thin man in H?i An – but this was him. I knew it. I felt it in my bones.
I remembered the court date back in the late 1970s when I’d submitted my request to end my marriage to a man I couldn’t find – the evidence to show we had looked, the last known address, the letters not answered by family, the proof that we had lived apart for over twenty years – Humphrey standing patiently by my side. I wondered if Johnny had ever heard I’d divorced him.
I hesitated as I wondered if I was being disrespectful to Humphrey’s memory. He’d told me to go and find my love, and I had. Johnny was not my love. Not now, maybe not even then. What would Humphrey think? Should I even go over to Johnny when I had a wedding ring on my left hand? One not borrowed, but truly my own. I asked these questions of myself, but I knew that if Humphrey were with me he would have already been over there, shaking Johnny by the hand and asking him what he thought of Neptune.
My heart belonged then, as it does now, to that funny, starry man who took my pieces of a life and helped me make a whole one. And to the woman who taught me how to set myself free. But my past belonged then, as it does now, to that tall, gangly boy who dropped onto one knee just after my twentieth birthday. To not ask would be unforgivable. A total denial of the mystery of it all – and Humphrey did like a mystery.
My heart hammering, I pushed myself to my feet.
I reached his chair and I let my eyes fall on him and I felt a familiarity so old it was like listening to music. I took him in. Then he looked up, and our eyes met.