Then, with another look that tells me in no uncertain terms that I have ruined his cigarette break, he turns and hunches, with a slight limp on the left side, back through the revolving doors into the hospital. The doors stop with him halfway in, halfway out. They do that whenever the sensor thinks someone is too close to the pane of glass in front.
I follow the cigarette and pick it up. It’s still lit, but the light is fading. I’ve never held a cigarette before and I’m surprised at two things – one, it’s very light, and two, it’s very smooth. I roll it forwards and backwards between my finger and thumb, and hope I don’t see anyone I know.
When I am just beginning to entertain the question of what would happen if I smoked it, I take the option off the table and throw it into the bin. That’s my good deed for the day sorted.
I know I should go back inside before New Nurse notices I’m gone, but I linger for a moment or two, watching the cars perform their merry dance. A reverse into a space, a pause, giving way, a do-si-do around the mini roundabout.
When the smoke starts gently snaking its way up from inside the little green bin, I think that it might be time to go. By the time the flames appear, spilling out above the symbol on the bin with the three arrows all going in the same direction （I’m not sure what they stand for. Health, wealth, happiness? Father, Son, Holy Ghost? There are so many great threesomes to celebrate）， it’s definitely time to go.
Margot and the Astronomer
‘PIPPA, HAVE YOU got any glitter?’
‘Glitter, Lenni?’ Margot asked sceptically.
‘Yes, glitter – of course glitter!’ I told her.
‘But won’t it end up looking like a Christmas card?’ Margot asked.
‘Of course not. So … glitter?’
‘I don’t think so, Lenni,’ Pippa said, pulling out each of the drawers in her desk in turn, ‘but I can certainly add it to The List.’
I nodded, authorizing the addition of glitter to The List. ‘Gold, please.’
Margot looked down at the piece in front of her that she was adding the finishing touches to – a dark blue sky studded with tiny stars, and a little cottage sitting patiently underneath.
‘I bet you fell in love with him. You did, didn’t you?’
‘That would ruin the story.’
‘Telling me would ruin the story or falling in love would ruin the story?’
Margot only laughed.
‘Can I hear it?’
‘Of course.’
Warwickshire, 1971
Margot Macrae is Forty Years Old
His house was chaotic. The main building used to be a farmhouse – it was tall and made of crumbling stone. He’d bought it from an heir-less farmer with the intention of converting it completely into a modern home, but had given up as soon as he’d installed water, electricity, and an attic observatory with windows nested in the roof. The windows whistled when the wind blew and the radiators didn’t work.
There were several other buildings; one in which he kept a gaggle of chickens, in the other his car. In the third, he was in the process of creating a larger observatory. He had already had the good fortune that some of the roof tiles had fallen in the previous winter. He told me, as he walked me around, that he was going to set up a clear glass roof so that he could see the stars without, as he put it, ‘getting as cold as a witch’s tit’。
The chickens were many and he delighted in feeding them, picking them up and talking to them as though they understood. He had named them all after old Hollywood film stars: Marilyn, Lauren, Bette, Judy … When I asked him why, he told me that partly it was because he liked the idea that they were stars, but that mostly he was getting a bit sick of naming things after the constellations. He didn’t believe me at first when I told him that I, too, had once been a proud parent of a chicken. And I immediately wanted to call Meena. I often wondered what became of Jeremy. Whether he was still out there somewhere, pecking his way around London, living the life of a free-range chicken.
We stood in the field that spread out behind his house, and we looked up at the sky. Originally home to many cows, the field was now home to an extraordinarily overgrown garden. It was a night so cold that our breath danced away from us in ghostly patterns, but it didn’t bother me. The best way I can describe it would be to say that with him, I felt sanctuary. I felt we had all the time in the world to talk, and so much more to see. There was no hurry to speak, to impress him, to make him laugh. I felt so calm in his presence.
We sat and ate spicy tapas on his unstable kitchen table, which was propped up on one side by the Yellow Pages and on the other side with a Monopoly box. Humphrey was like nobody else I knew. He was both connected to and disconnected from the world. Connected to the intricate movements of the stars, the nowness of where each satellite, constellation and moon was in relation to the earth, but disconnected from everything else – his fridge contained a block of butter that had expired two years earlier, and the calendar that hung on his wall claimed that it was still 1964. He had tickets and flyers for events long passed, remembered sentences from Radio 2 programmes he’d loved at university, but often couldn’t recall if he had fed the chickens that day or when his sister’s birthday was.