‘Because if you’ll have me, I’d still like to come, Mabel. It will just be a bit more sporadic, because I’ll have to fit it in around my other jobs.’
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’d like that. I’d like that very much.’
I let myself in, go through to the front room, and for the first time in a long time, Arthur’s there. Standing by the fireplace. I know, by now, that he won’t speak, that he’s not really here, but it’s a bit comforting, all the same.
‘Dot’s dead,’ I say, and saying it aloud like that, the grief crashes over me again.
All that wasted time.
‘You, and Dot, and my whole family. My turn next, I suppose.’
I realise that I wouldn’t mind one bit if I died in my sleep tonight, and it’s a shock, because I haven’t felt like that for a while now. Not since I started this search, since I met these women.
Is that a flicker of something on his face? Sadness, empathy, jealousy? In the early days, he felt threatened by the closeness I had with Dot. The years we’d spent together that pre-dated him. I thought he might try to edge her out, and I was ready to fight back against that. Wasn’t ready for her to disappear into thin air, though, was I? I stare at him, trying to make out his expression, but it’s blank. I’m just projecting my expectations onto him. This vision, this isn’t Arthur. This isn’t the husband who stood by me through six decades of good and bad days, it’s just something my brain has conjured up, because it still isn’t ready to admit he’s no longer here. That he’ll never again take hold of my hand and ask what I’m thinking and do his very best to come up with a solution to my problems.
‘I will never say goodbye,’ I say. ‘I will never get to ask her what made her go, and why she didn’t keep in touch, and whether she missed me the way I missed her.’
I go to get a cup of tea, and when I return, he’s no longer there. That’s when I start to weep again. It’s self-indulgent and I don’t care. The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable. I tick them off in my mind. Brother, father, mother, husband, and my friend, my love.
35
‘I loved her,’ I say. Quiet, tentative. Still, after all this time, unsure. Not unsure about the words, and what they mean, but about saying them out loud.
‘I know you did,’ Julie says. ‘I know, Mabel.’
But she doesn’t.
She’s been so gentle with me since that awful day in Overbury, making me tea and sorting out my washing and food and medication. Is she worried that I’ll forget to take it? Or worried that I’ll stash it, and take too much? It’s something I’ve entertained, the idea of suicide, though never too seriously. If I didn’t have her, and the others, it might be different.
Now, she stands behind my armchair and gives my shoulders a rub. ‘It was such a shock for you, wasn’t it? You’d lost Arthur, and then you hoped – we all hoped – that you’d have this great reunion with your friend, and now we have to adjust to the fact that that isn’t going to happen. It’s really hard.’
I want to ask her what washing powder she uses, because her scent has become so familiar and comforting, and I’d like to start using it so it feels like she’s here, but I don’t know whether that sounds odd.
‘Do the others know?’ I ask.
I can’t face telling each of them, the way I had to telephone everyone after Arthur’s death.
‘Yes, they know,’ Julie says. ‘They’re sorry too.’
I’m grateful that she’s taken care of that for me, without me having to ask her.
When she leaves, calling out that she’s put a shepherd’s pie in the fridge for my tea, I wait a little while and then I get my coat and shoes on. It’s harder to make myself go out, now I don’t have Olly, but there’s something I need to do. Something I should have done a long time ago. Maybe sixty-two years ago.
Some years, in March or April, there’s a day when you walk outside after months of wind and rain, and it’s spring. It’s like that today, though we’re barely into March. I raise my face to the sky and let the sun touch me, and it feels like the forgiveness of someone you love. I take it slow and steady, get to the end of my road, turn left up the lane that leads to the town centre. And then I’m in sight of it, the church and the graveyard, and I feel all shaken up inside because I’ve visited for decades but never said the one thing I should have. And today is the day I’m going to change that. The tree that hangs over my family’s gravestones is starting to bud with blossom. Another spring, another fresh start. There are daffodils all around, too, moving gently with the breeze.
First daffodil of the year, Arthur would say ‘spring has sprung’ and once they were in the supermarket, he’d buy me a bunch every week and put them in the window by my armchair. I’ll miss that, this year. Perhaps I’ll buy a bunch for myself. Is that frivolous? But no, they only cost about a pound and that’s a small price for the way they make me feel. There’s something about the smell of them and that bright, bright yellow that always makes me so hopeful. They’re all around the church grounds, the daffodils. The Brownies plant them every year. I’ve seen them, with their long plaits and muddy fingers. I wonder what my family would make of it, these children making their resting place that bit brighter.
‘Hello,’ I say. ‘It’s me, it’s Mabel. I’m here. I’ve come to tell you something.’
I laugh nervously, but there’s a rattle to it. It’s a laugh that’s knocking on the door of a cough. Cancer? You question everything, at this age. Could this be how it started, for Dot?
‘I found out about Dot, about her being gone. Is she there with you, Bill?’
At twenty-two, I spent every spare moment with Dot and Bill and Arthur. If I close my eyes, I can smell Dot’s perfume. Like a summer meadow. That day when we went walking, just after Bill died, when all we could do was cry, and we needed to be out of the house, because Mother kept talking about how Bill would have proposed to Dot, and although we all knew that was true, it was just too desperate to think about an engagement that was never going to happen because the man in question was dead at twenty-five.
We went out of town, into the hills where we stood less chance of running into anyone. I needed to be out there with all that space and air, and her. There was nothing to say, so we were quiet, just walking, putting more and more distance between ourselves and our homes. After a couple of hours, we sat down under an enormous oak tree for a breather, and Dot lit a cigarette and when I tried to light mine, I saw that my hands were shaking. Clumsy with grief, I suppose. Dot reached across and lit it and the heat of the flame was like a call back to Earth and I wondered where I was, where I’d been, before that call. I waited for Dot to move away, and she didn’t.
There’s a sparrow on the fence a few feet away. I tilt my head, look at it. Its eyes glassy and small. Then it’s gone, and I’ve fallen, or have I just dropped? I’m on my knees, anyway, my tights laddered, no doubt. And I’m crying, too, great sobs ebbing and flowing, like waves.