He says something in Swedish. The verbs don’t agree and neither do I.
‘Hi, pickle,’ he says, holding my hand and rubbing his thumb over the cannula where it burrows in. Back and forth, like a rhythm. It hurts, but I can’t remember the words in either language to get him to stop.
You would think after all this time there would be a lot to say, that I would be bursting with stories of my adventures and he would be bursting with his. But nobody says anything. Maybe it is a dream, after all, and my brain is struggling to generate his voice. What was it like? High? Low?
‘Lenni,’ I tell him, and then immediately wonder why, but I’ve said it now and I have to watch his face crumple in confusion. My father grabs the arm of a passing blur and asks me to repeat what I’ve said, but I don’t remember.
‘Is it about my mother? She’s eighty-three. We’re almost one hundred.’
‘The anaesthetic can cause some confusion,’ the blur says to him, and he sits down.
‘Did you go to Poland?’ I think I ask.
He nods and shows me a black and grey picture of a bean, I think.
‘I had to tell you as soon as we were sure,’ he says, ‘you’re going to be a big sister.’
‘It’s Arthur,’ I say.
‘What is?’
I shake my head and then wonder what exactly we both think we’re talking about.
‘It’s Father Arthur.’
My father turns to Agnieszka and says with panic, ‘She doesn’t recognize me.’
‘She wears purple for Humphrey,’ I say, connecting the thoughts at last. ‘Because she’s mourning. And it’s morning. That’s why she always wears purple.’
‘Lenni?’
And then Agnieszka is at the end of the bed, but she’s different. It’s not just her hair that’s different, but her face. Has she been standing there this whole time? Did she always look like that? She’s slipping, slipping, slipping …
‘Lenni?’ he asks.
I shake my head because it’s easier than speaking.
‘Lenni, the nurse called,’ my father says. And I smile.
‘You kept your promise.’
Margot and the Box
‘I DON’T WANT to let you down, Lenni.’
I only realized she was there then. I opened my eyes. I had to blink to bring her into focus. At first, there were two Margots leaning towards me from my visitor’s chair.
‘Let me down?’
‘You finished your half of the hundred.’
‘My seventeen per cent.’
‘Your half. And I haven’t finished mine,’ she said in a small voice.
She shook her head, looked like she was going to say something and then didn’t.
‘Everyone’s helping,’ she said at last. ‘Else, Walter, Pippa, the others from the Rose Room – they’ve split into teams to take on each painting. I sketch them out, direct them with colours and then supervise.’
‘Wow.’
‘The only thing is,’ she said, ‘while I work with them and boss everybody about, there’s nobody to tell the stories to.’
‘So you came here?’
‘So I came here. To tell you the next story, if you’ll let me.’
‘Always.’
West Midlands, Spring 1999
Margot James is Sixty-Eight Years Old
When he died, I got seasick. It was as though the world had tilted at a strange angle and nothing felt right. What should have been flat was actually an incline, and I found myself holding on to handrails and faltering on steps as I’d never done before. The pain of losing him hadn’t subsided like people said it would.
Humphrey’s sister had requested some of his books, to donate to the university where they’d both studied and where he’d first begun to explore the skies. She’d provided me with a list of the ones she wanted to donate, and I was packing them up into some boxes the greengrocer had given me. His shelves of books lined both sides of the living room. Most of them hadn’t been touched since I first met him but they were all, he had insisted, essential. They’d been there so long that they seemed to be part of the walls rather than objects for use, like additional beams holding up the crumbling stone structure of his little cottage. With each book I took from a shelf, it felt like I was removing a brick from the walls of the house. Without him and his books, surely it would all fall down.
I was doing my best not to pay attention to the feeling that I was giving away something I very much needed to keep. After all, when would I read them? What use were they growing mildewed in the corner of an old widow’s cottage?