I nod. I know he means well, but I do have to do this. It’s probably the last important thing I’ll do. I can pull it together. I can. I blink away tears and give the inside of my arm a sharp pinch. I haven’t written anything down. Wasn’t even sure I knew what I was going to say. But now I do.
‘We’ve all got our own memories, and I’m sure you’ll tell me some stories later that I haven’t heard. So here’s one for all of you, from me. Sixty-four years ago, on a cold and calm March day, we said goodbye to my brother Bill, right here in this church. I don’t think anyone here knew Bill, but he was twenty-five, and he was a wonderful brother and man, and his death was unexpected and sudden and cruel. That day, I didn’t know how I was going to get through. But Arthur, who was my brother’s best friend, stood beside me in the pew and put a steady hand on my arm, and somehow that helped me to carry on breathing. And afterwards, when we were standing by his grave and watching him being lowered into the ground, Arthur took hold of my hand and didn’t let it go until it was all over.
‘I was drowning in grief, and he saved me. For the next few months, he called into the house to ask after me and my parents, and he asked me to go to dances, though it was a long time before I could face that. He took me to the cinema and let me cry silently in the darkness, always with that steady hand on my arm. And it felt like I blinked and it was winter. I’d lost months to that grieving, only leaving the house to go to work. And one day in November I told Arthur I was feeling a bit brighter, a bit more able to cope, and he said he was pleased. The following day, he took me to a dance and he asked me to marry him, and I knew I wouldn’t find a kinder or more generous man to spend my life with.
‘And I was right. I had that steady hand guide me through all sorts of heartaches and happiness over the years. I’m very grateful for that.’
I come to a stop, and find that I don’t have any more words, so I give a little nod and step down, go back to the pew. Then the moth is back, even while we’re singing ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’， and I sing quietly, hoping I’m not out of time.
At the wake, I don’t know where to stand or what to do with my hands. I go to the bar and ask for an orange juice, though I don’t really want it, just for something to do and hold.
‘That was a beautiful tribute to him,’ one of the cousins says, coming to stand with me.
I nod. ‘Thank you. It was what he deserved.’
‘He was a good man. One of the best. And he adored you.’
I don’t know what to say so I take a sip of my slightly warm orange juice. Why is it so hard to hear that someone was devoted to you? Lots of people have said it. The vicar, family members, even people I don’t recognise. They say how kindly he spoke of me and how his eyes lit up when he did, and I don’t know where to put myself. I knew how he felt, of course I did, but it’s hard to hear it from all directions, especially with him gone. Because I’ve never really been sure what it was about me that he admired so much. I always felt like this awkward girl with the jutting chin and slightly too-small eyes. Once, after doing my hair, Mother said she wasn’t sure I was ‘the marrying kind’。 That stuck with me.
A woman comes over to join us and I see it’s Arthur’s sister, Mary. She puts a hand on my arm and it’s so like Arthur’s touch that I feel tears coming. Does she see? Is that why she removes it again?
‘When we were growing up,’ she says, with no introduction, ‘there was never enough time for all of us. Nine children, you know. And seven of them boys.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘It was a madhouse, total chaos. And yet, Arthur always sensed when there was something wrong with one of us, and was there, as a comfort. So it didn’t surprise me at all to hear that’s how he was as a husband. You were a lucky woman.’
I excuse myself, then, and go to the ladies’。 I can’t stop repeating those last words. Was I a lucky woman? And why the past tense? Because he is gone? I run through various women I’ve known over the years, try to put myself next to them and assess who was the luckier. Deidre Maycomb with her six daughters and her husband who could never seem to keep his hands off her. Ethel Smith, who always looked a bit like she’d been drinking, with the job at the Post Office and no family to speak of. Anne McKay, left by her husband when their son was just a tiny little thing. And what of Dot Brightmore? I don’t know what became of her, do I?
It strikes me that luck is a relative thing, that it’s not something you can pin down and be sure of. That it can be something you have and then lose. Or the other way around. But I know what Mary was trying to say. She loved him. She thought the best of him, of course she did. I touch up my lipstick and go back out there, ready for more. Or at least looking like I am.
At Bill’s funeral, Dot and I had got drunk on sherry, and by four in the afternoon we were painfully, deliciously sad. We sat apart from everyone else, telling our stories, picking through for one the other might not know.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘the only real argument Bill and I ever had was about you?’
I didn’t.
‘We’d fallen out at work and I was telling him about it. I wasn’t cross with you, just a bit frustrated, and he could hear it in my words. He said he wasn’t the person to come to with unkind thoughts about his sister.’
I can hear him saying that, but I’m surprised, all the same.
‘What did you say?’
‘I told him not to be so silly. That we both loved you and that’s what was so perfect about it.’
I wanted to ask, ‘Perfect about what?’ but I didn’t dare, because we’d drunk too much and I knew anything that was said that day might be regretted the next.
I get a shock when I think I see Arthur standing with his elbows resting on the bar, his back to me. There’s a lock of hair out of place and I want to reach up and smooth it down, but of course I can’t, because it isn’t him. He turns, and it’s one of the cousins, of course. But it winds me. I will never reach up to smooth down his hair. I will never straighten his tie. He will never fold the paper over and say ‘Well’ and make a plan for the day with me. How do I go on?
When I was in my early forties, I lost my job at the typing pool where I’d worked for more than twenty years. For a couple of weeks, I walked around in a bit of a daze, not knowing what to do. And then one evening we were eating corned beef hash and Arthur said, ‘Mabel, do you know what you need? A bit of purpose.’ He was right. The next day I was down at the job centre and I had started doing basic secretarial work for the doctor’s office by the end of that week. And I hear him say it now. ‘What you need, Mabel, is a bit of purpose.’ But where can I find it?
I slip away without saying goodbye to anyone, because if I start, I’ll have to go round everyone, and it will take half an hour. Olly will be waiting, and besides, I’m shattered. It’s chilly, and there’s a bitter wind. Perhaps I should have got one of the cousins to run me home. With each click clack of my shoes on the tarmac, I repeat in my head ‘purpose, purpose’。 By the time I’m home, my hands numb with cold and struggling to slot the key into the lock, I know what I need to do. I need to find Dot. And it almost doesn’t matter whether that’s what Arthur meant, whether that’s what he would have finished writing, given the chance, because there’s a tiny part of me that has wanted to do this forever. I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for me.