I smiled, wondering how my eighty-year-old self compared with my twenty-five-year-old self. How many lives had I lived since I last saw him? How many moments? How many days? Had I known I’d have ended up there, with him, would I have done it all the same?
‘Johnny?’ I asked.
He squinted at me; his mouth fell slightly open.
‘Margot,’ he said, and it wasn’t a question but an answer. ‘How on earth …？’
And then it slowly slid into place, and I must admit it was a feeling not unlike falling.
Johnny’s brother couldn’t take his eyes off me.
I shook my head, tears forming, the air squeezing out of my lungs.
After a moment of white-hot nothing, I came back. Thomas was still staring at me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as though it were his fault that he so closely resembled his older brother – it had been the same when he was a fifteen-year-old with bruised bony legs standing on the doorstep of my mother’s house, pretending to be Johnny.
‘Well’ – he smiled – ‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again!’
I had always imagined he would marry young and move to America, train in the air force, learn to fly. But his accent told me otherwise, still thick with Glaswegian charm. The last time I’d seen him might have been Davey’s funeral. Or a family dinner not long after. I tried to remember what he had looked like, but there were several memories stitched together and none of them seemed right.
‘It was you, then?’
‘What was?’
‘The candle. Did you visit Davey’s grave?’
He nodded. ‘Was a while ago, that. It was something Johnny asked, before he went, that I’d keep an eye out, you know?’
‘Well, thank you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get there as often as I should have.’
Thomas waved me away. He wasn’t interested in judging me. Which was as true then as it had been when he was barely even a man.
‘How …’ Thomas faltered. ‘How do I begin?’ he asked, and then he laughed at himself. ‘Margot, my God. How was it?’
And I imagined, though I might have been wrong, that he was asking how was life? How did the last fifty-eight years treat you? Was life what you thought it would be? Did you live happily, freely, well? But the question was too big, astronomical, and I wasn’t sure I had understood it in the first place.
‘I’m well,’ I said instead. ‘How are you?’
He gestured to the surroundings. ‘Old!’ And then he laughed and I remembered why I had liked Thomas. He was so much lighter than Johnny, so much happier.
‘When did Johnny die?’
He nodded, his smile sliding away.
‘About two years ago,’ he said. ‘Though I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. He fell down the stairs, broke his leg. It turned into pneumonia. It was quick.’
‘Were you there?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but he wasn’t alone.’
I nodded.
‘And yourself?’ I asked. ‘What became of little Thomas Docherty?’
‘After Johnny left, I took over his place at Dutton’s. Eventually, it was me and a pal running the place.’
‘So no aeroplanes?’
‘Aeroplanes?’
‘You loved them. I remember you had that red toy one with the rotating propeller.’
He smiled. ‘I can’t believe you remember that. It’s funny how quickly it goes.’
‘And did you marry?’
‘I did. My wife passed three years or so ago. We had a girl, April. Who’s just now pregnant with her third.’
We sat in silence for a moment. Seeing him was so surreal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in a dream. Or that I’d ripped through the barriers of time and peeped through into a world I wasn’t meant to know about. I was hearing answers to questions I’d carried for so long that I thought I’d never have them answered.
‘I looked for Johnny,’ I said, ‘I followed him to London a few years after he left.’
‘You did?’
‘I didn’t find him though. It would’ve been a mistake anyway. In fact, I never even knew if he went to London. It was just a guess.’
‘You were right,’ he said.
‘I’ve always wanted to know what happened to him.’
‘He did go to London, for about a month or two, but he couldn’t make it work and so he ended up moving to Bristol, working in the shipyards.’
‘Was he happy?’