Margot and the Diary
Hello, Lenni, it’s Margot.
I’ve missed you.
Your red-haired nurse came into my ward yesterday. She said you’d asked, before they took you in for the operation, that I be given your diary. She said you write in it all the time and she suspects she might be in it. She said you wanted me to write you something.
I’m honoured you trust me with it, but you should know I’ve only accepted this book as a loan. If this is being bequeathed to me then I want no part of it, young lady.
You’ll take this surgery in your stride, I know it. Nothing scares you. I’m quite the opposite.
But here is a story for you to read when you wake up:
This week in the Rose Room, I painted the first place I lived that I really, truly loved. It was dirty and crooked. Like all the best characters.
The painting itself is fair. I know my old art teacher at school would have said that the perspective isn’t quite right, and the roof gives the impression of slanting backwards, but I’m happy with it nonetheless. The version of me that lives in my memory, the version of me that lives in that tiny flat, is a lot more like you than she is like me.
It starts, like all of my stories so far, in Scotland.
Glasgow to London, February 1959
Margot Docherty is Twenty-Eight Years Old
By the time I was twenty-eight, my father was the only one left. My mother had passed when I was twenty-six. And it had felt like I’d been orphaned when she went. The shellshock – they call it something else now – had eroded my father until he wouldn’t even allow me to sit with him. But sit I did, when the call came. He was already dead, but I sat beside him in the hospital and I memorized his face. I whispered an apology and a good luck wish for the journey, and I felt a severing. I was looking at the final thread on my tightrope, the choking embers of my only candle, the last of the lifeboats. And he was gone – snapped, extinguished, sailed away.
It was sad, but it was also freeing. I was no longer anybody’s. A childless mother and a husbandless wife, a parentless daughter with a small inheritance and no fixed address.
I could go anywhere. I realized I was free to begin again, and I didn’t lose that kernel of hope until I disembarked onto the dirty platform at Euston Station, determined that I would find my husband. The only person left.
I started with the police. It was very early in the morning; I had slept on the train but I felt dazed. My teeth had layers of fuzz when I ran my tongue along them, which, now I had felt the fuzz, I couldn’t stop doing. I’d eaten half a packet of Polo mints, but my mouth was still stale.
As I came out of the station into the light, seeing the rows of cars and red buses, the people pushing past one another on their way to work, it felt as though the suitcases in my hands were the only things tethering me to the ground.
I asked a hassled man in a hat for directions to the nearest police station, and after getting lost along several identical streets, I found it. And in I went, not letting myself stop for even a moment for fear that I might turn back.
There was a secretary at a desk and a row of stained chairs. I’d been rehearsing what I would say in my head when I was on the train. My name is Margot Docherty; I’m looking for a missing person. My husband, Johnny.
How could you misplace your husband? would be the first question, I was sure.
I was wrong. The first question wasn’t a question at all, but an instruction to take a seat and fill in a form.
I sat down. The form immediately expected more from me than I was able to give. What was my name? I knew that, but how about my address? Currently, my address was Holborn Police Station, London. But where did I live? In my recently vacated Glasgow tenement? What was my relationship to the missing person? Were we married? Really, were we still? What if he had married someone else since he left? When had I last seen him? And where? Did ‘some years ago on a beach’ count? Or was that as unhelpful as it felt? What did he look like? Was he still slim? Did he still wear his hair parted in the middle and combed to each side? And why was I searching for him in London?
Only this last question could I answer: because many years ago, he’d lain beside me with his hands on my stomach and said that before the baby came, he wanted to see the city. We never went.
My hands were sweating and the pen slipped out of my grasp. I picked it up and wiped my wet fingers on my skirt. I looked to the receptionist to see if there was anyone free to talk to me, but she shook her head.
I pondered over some more questions, which were obvious facts I should have known but didn’t. Things like his height, his health record, his job. With the sparse information I could tell them about Johnny, he may as well have been a stranger.