‘What if nobody comes?’ he said, finally looking at me.
‘To what?’
‘My final chapel service. I fear it might be rather poorly attended.’
‘What about the old man? The sleeping one.’
‘He was discharged.’ He took a sharp breath in. ‘I’m sorry, Lenni,’ he said, ‘it’s my job to help you, not the other way round.’
‘You help me, I help you. That’s just how it is,’ I told him.
‘Thank you.’
‘Hey, you’ll always be my friend, my friend.’
New Nurse chose that moment to push open the heavy chapel door and then stumble as the door gave way and let her in. Although I suppose she didn’t really choose the moment – how could she know what was happening on the other side of those doors? But I wish she’d waited. I wanted to stay.
Margot’s Getting Married
MARGOT AND I sat side by side as rain battered the Rose Room windows. It wasn’t so much like the rain was falling from the sky as it was being thrown. I managed to get acrylic paint all along my pyjama sleeve as I painted a characteristically terrible picture of myself, aged three, crying at the nursery school gates. But it was very cosy, sitting in the warm room while the rain fell outside. Margot drew with such delicacy that you could almost hear their crunchy leaves, see their skeletal structure – a small posy of dried flowers, browned and curled at the edges and tied together with a ribbon.
West Midlands, September 1979
Margot Macrae is Forty-Eight Years Old
The sunlight had crept all the way across the half-laid carpet of Humphrey’s sitting room and still I hadn’t written a word. There was a patch where the carpet wasn’t fixed to the floor so it was very easy to catch your toe under it and trip. We often did. I’d tried Sellotape, but it didn’t stick to the flagstone beneath. The stones were icy in the winter mornings, such that we would each try to convince the other to be the one to go downstairs and put the kettle on. That room was everything – kitchen, living room, dining room – and then the stone staircase led up to the bedroom/observatory. I was sitting at the writing desk Humphrey had built for me, and I stretched out a leg and tucked my toe under the gap between the carpet and the floor.
‘Are you finished?’ Humphrey asked with a smile, the bucket of chicken feed in his hand shaking and spilling a few crumbs onto the floor. The girls would be in soon enough, pecking away at the flagstone for their unplanned second helping. Along with the writing desk, Humphrey had also built a chicken flap into the kitchen door. The less said about that the better. （‘Why should cats have all the fun?’ he’d said.）
I shook my head.
‘Mine’s on the side,’ he said, and I took it up – the list of invitees to our ‘little do’， as he called it. His brother, his sister, various aunts and uncles, a number of colleagues from the university, some from the observatory in London, one or two of the locals at the pub; his arachnid writing building a web of friends and family. A safety net spinning out around him.
My page was blank.
And so I wrote a name, just one. And putting it down in black ink was like carving open my chest and giving Humphrey a glimpse of my heart.
I didn’t have the right address, I was sure of it, so I wrote to the last one I’d held.
And I placed my one white envelope into the bag of invitations and I held my breath.
Of course, no reply came. The aunts and the uncles and the colleagues sent back their slips of paper with the box ticked according to their attendance and their preference for the meal. I checked the bottom of the bag to make sure my one invitation wasn’t still with us, and I imagined it out there in London, vulnerable on top of the scratchy doormat of strangers, frowned at, murmured at, and then eventually thrown into the rubbish bin on top of an egg shell and some still-steaming teabags.
I sensed that Humphrey felt sorry for me, that he wanted to cheer me up, so we went for a drive to Coventry and, splitting up inside Rackhams, he went to buy his first morning suit, and I went to buy my second wedding dress.
The women’s department was empty and without any windows. It felt like I’d wandered into the gently lit night with only racks and rails of quiet clothing for company. A saleswoman spotted me browsing and came over. Feeling instantly like I was under suspicion of stealing, I tried to act very normally.
‘Can I help?’ She smiled.
‘I’m going to a wedding,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it like that.