‘So what’s she got that you haven’t? This Estelle?’
Julie looks wistful for a minute. ‘She’s a decade younger and a couple of stone lighter, for a start.’
This obsession with youth, it’s always riled me. A woman Julie’s age, she’s seen things, done things. She knows what she wants and has something to say.
‘I think he’s a fool,’ I say, and she thanks me and covers my hand with hers, which feels a bit too intimate, so I pull away. She’s growing on me, though, I have to say. That first day, I didn’t think we’d last the week.
‘I’ve thought of something I need help with,’ I say.
‘Oh yes?’ She seems pleased.
‘The bed,’ I say. ‘It’s a king, you see. And Arthur and I used to strip it and make it back up together, every Thursday. It’s a bit much, on my own.’
‘Consider it done,’ she says, and disappears upstairs.
When she comes back, she goes over to the wall by the door, and I see she’s looking at our photos. It was Arthur who would get them framed and get a hammer and nails out. Me and him on our wedding day, on that trip to Anglesey, about to board the ferry at Dover. It seemed a bit narcissistic to me, to put up all those photos of ourselves, but Arthur used to say who else would we put up photos of, and he had a point.
‘He was a handsome man, your Arthur,’ she says.
I’m not sure whether she expects me to answer. I always knew he was good-looking. Women looked at him, and then at me, as if trying to decide whether they were happy with the pairing. As if it had anything to do with them. Quite often, he’d get a smile and I’d get a scowl, because they didn’t know why he’d picked me, I suppose. He didn’t notice. He wasn’t vain. And to him, it was all so simple. I was his friend’s little sister, and he made his mind up the very first time he met me, he told me once.
He was nineteen and I was sixteen, and Bill brought him round for his tea. It was pork chops, he said, and there was mashed potato and cabbage and gravy. I don’t have any memory of this particular day. It felt to me like he was always there, practically an extension of Bill, but I didn’t say that when he brought it up. I pretended it was significant for me, too. He said, ‘You scraped that plate clean, and then had a pear for afters, and I remember thinking to myself, I like a girl who has a good appetite.’
It wasn’t very romantic, liking me because I ate a lot, but like I say, it was simple for him. He met me, and he knew. I was the one.
‘Do you believe in the one?’ I ask Julie.
‘All that soulmates stuff?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know, Mabel. I thought Martin was my one and only but what does that mean for me now? That it’s all over, finished? And where does that Estelle fit in? And besides, if there was one man on this whole Earth who was made for me, wouldn’t it be a bit of a coincidence if he happened to live in the same town as me? If I met him at the butcher’s?’
‘Is that how you met?’ I think of sausages and sides of beef, blood on cleavers and stained aprons.
‘In the queue,’ she says, blowing her fringe out of her eyes. ‘He was picking up a lamb shoulder for his mum for Easter Sunday.’
‘And what were you doing?’
‘I was buying ham for my dad’s sandwiches.’
‘And that was that?’ I ask.
‘I mean, not quite. We chatted a bit, but he didn’t ask for my number or anything. It would have been a bit forward, wouldn’t it? But then I saw him again, at the butcher’s, a few weeks later, and that time he asked if he could take me for a drink. Years after, once we were married, he told me that he’d asked the butcher about me and been told I often came in on a Tuesday after work. He’d hung around outside for three Tuesdays by the time I showed up.’
She sounds quite proud of that, and I nearly say it’s hardly dozens of roses and surprise trips to Paris, but I don’t.
‘And did you always know?’ I ask, instead.
‘Well, I’m not sure. People talk about knowing, but I’m not sure you ever really do.’
She’s wrong, but I don’t say so.
‘It was more like he took me on a few dates, and I introduced him to my family, and they seemed to like him well enough. And after a year or so, he suggested moving in together, and we did, and a few months after that, once we knew we could live with each other, he asked me to marry him.’
‘Down on one knee?’
‘No, but he bought a ring.’ She breaks off, looks at her finger, and then presumably remembers that she doesn’t wear it now. ‘He did well.’
Are women’s expectations typically this low? A few dates and a ring? She hasn’t said anything about passion or undying love. She hasn’t said anything about feeling dizzy and sick and like she couldn’t possibly live without him.
‘Did you ever feel sick?’ I ask.
‘Sick? What do you mean?’
‘With the emotion of it all. The, you know, the love?’
‘No, I never felt sick. Did you, Mabel?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Sick and terrified, like I was standing on the edge of a fifty-storey building, preparing to jump.’
I can feel it now, if I close my eyes. She looks at me, sort of amused. Like she didn’t think I had it in me.
‘He must have been quite a man. Cup of tea, Mabel? Or do you fancy a walk at all?’
I look out of the window. It’s grey, but dry. Olly, who was fast asleep, pops his head up at the word ‘walk’。
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I say.
While I’m in the toilet, she gets Olly ready with his lead, puts her coat on, and gets my coat and gloves out of the hallway cupboard. Arthur used to do that. Little, thoughtful things that added up to a whole lot. I come out and she’s standing in the hallway looking a bit lost, a faraway look in her eyes, and I think about how she’s helped me and how I wish I could take some of her sadness away.
It’s cold and a bit blustery, and I almost wish I’d stayed indoors, asked Julie to put the gas fire on. She links her arm through mine and it feels a bit familiar, but when I look down at our arms she pulls me in a bit closer.
‘I can’t have you falling on me,’ she says. ‘There’d be so much paperwork to fill out.’
And that strikes me as funny, and I’m laughing and that sets her off, and for a minute or two we have to stop, just on the corner of my street, both laughing like we’ll never stop, like Dot and I used to on an almost daily basis back when I didn’t know how lucky I was to have a friend like that. A man walks past with a hoity toity little dog that growls at Olly, and Olly silences it with one sharp bark. The man gives us a funny look, like it’s unthinkable for two women to be out walking and laughing in the middle of a Thursday afternoon, and I don’t care. How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?
‘Do you need anything from the shop?’ she asks, once we’ve gathered ourselves. ‘We could head that way if you do?’
I was planning to do a piece of fish for my tea, it was down on the list for this evening, but when I actually stop to think about what I want, it isn’t that. Arthur used to say he couldn’t be doing with choosing on a Sunday what he wanted to eat the following Wednesday, but I liked planning the meals for the week and doing one shop. It was all right for him to say that; he wasn’t the one organising it all and making sure nothing went to waste. But now, it’s just me, and I see that I don’t have to eat that piece of fish that’s in the fridge, that I could have it tomorrow, if I wanted. That I could buy one of those ready meals, a pasta dish or even a curry.