Edie offered to come with me but she doesn’t see so well now and the town is difficult for her. Fuzzy outlines of people looming up suddenly before her. She doesn’t like it. If I had wanted her to come she would have, and although she did not say so, I knew she would rather not. So I did not ask.
Edie. She had crept into my heart and settled herself in without my realising. I knew her when I was a kid and when I got back, she was what I needed. She was all that was light and air and laughter while I, I was fraying from the inside out. Slowly, softly, she loved me back to life, dancing me carefully towards the light. And with her came sleep.
She and I are opposites still. She laughs. She has laughed her way through our life together and the laughter lines around her eyes and mouth are testimony to her unfailing good grace. Moreover, she is wiser than I, she recognises her contentment and chooses what will make us happy. And at that time, she took me calmly by the hand and told me how glad she was that I was home.
I hope that I die before she does. I know that sounds selfish but now, the loss of her would be like waking again to the nudging waves around the boat. Eagerly scanning the horizons. Finding only sea.
I took the bus. Edie worries when I drive although there is no need. I only find the parking difficult.
It was one of those dark December days when the morning wakes, stretches lazily and, looking at the weather, pulls the covers more tightly round and turns back towards the night. The light never really gets away from the dragging, dull grey of the dawn, and the gloomy clouds hang despondently around the streetlights which needs must be on all day.
A fine drizzle would not let up and as the bus lurched its way up the high street, I watched the Christmas shoppers hurrying between the awnings, battling with umbrellas and too many bags, but no doubt managing to keep their spirits up with reckless overspending. I could not have been further removed from them – their struggles were not mine and I envied them the burden of theirs.
I got off at the Corn Exchange, thinking I could do with the walk, but the shoppers were insistent and ungenerous. Constantly rebuffed by a contraflow of pressing people, I arrived at the café Maggie had suggested feeling battered and disordered. Already bruised.
I need not go in, I thought, wavering in the doorway. I leant my shoulder and then my temple against the cool glass, gathering myself. I might just step back out into the rain and the seamless crowd and let myself be carried back the way I had come. Disappear. She would never know I had come. I could ignore her and any further attempts she might make to point her wrinkled finger and make me justify my loyalty. Avoid her recrimination. Suddenly I felt too tired for this; it was too bleak. At eighty-one, I was probably physically much stronger now than I had been the last time I had seen her, but then I had been young and seared by my conviction: the only thing that mattered had been to keep Joe’s faith.
‘’Scuse me, mate.’ A young man hopped up the step into the small porchway behind me. He muscled to get past but paused when he looked into my face. His own, losing its bland expression of internal preoccupation, creased immediately with concern. ‘You all right?’ He put his hand upon my shoulder, as Joe had done all those years ago, at another far remote but crucial moment of my life.
I nodded and smiled thinly. ‘Yes. Thank you. I’m all right.’ Barring my way back, he could not get past me. The porchway was too small for two to pass. I could have turned awkwardly and made him step back down but I was touched by his concern. It was kind. It reminded me of who I was and the boy I used to be.
I stood up straight and smiled at him more fully. ‘Thank you,’ I said again and then I pushed open the inner door and held it open for him to come on in behind me.
I knew she was there as soon as I got inside. I could feel her eyes upon me but I played for time. I was not quite ready yet. I took off my overcoat and made a show of shaking off the rain, brushing it down at the shoulders and then looked about for a place to put it.
It was an old-style café with six or seven tables only and it smelt of bread and coffee and warm, wet clothes. The damp of drying hair and rosy faces added to the steam from the cups and buttered toast, fugging up all the windows. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her rise from a table near the fireplace and begin to weave her way towards me. I turned away, pretending I had not noticed yet and hung up my scarf.
When I turned back, she was standing there before me.
‘Brian,’ she said, ‘it was good of you to come.’ She took my hand and, pulling me forward, kissed me on the cheek.
She was smaller than I remembered and if it were possible, more slight. The insubstantiality of her body, clad in what was obviously a best blue dress, made her somehow vulnerable. It made me want to put an arm around her shoulder and squeeze her cheerily. But then I remembered who she was and why we were here, so I did not. She looked frail, strangely at odds with the brittle, untouchable young woman I had carried in my memory all these years.
She set off back to the table and I followed. Her wavy hair, streaked through with grey and silver now, was pulled back again into a little bun, but as there was so much less of it than before, she had no difficulty in keeping it in check. No strands had been left out.
She sat down and, lashes lowered, she turned her face towards me, ‘I saw you trying to decide. Out there. Whether to come in or not.’ There was a smile behind her voice.
Her eyes, already creased, crinkled in amusement. Inscrutable. Well-worn lines fanned out and up around her mouth, and as her quiet merriment subsided, those about the rest of her features and around the edges of her face reverted to their customary grooves, as if for years, calm serenity had been her most natural expression.
I looked vaguely back towards the door and then sat down. ‘Were you worried I wouldn’t come in?’
‘No, no,’ she said, more serious now, ‘I knew you would.’
This was to me, an extraordinary thing to say. I had met this woman briefly only twice before and on those two occasions, neither one of us could have vouched reliably for our reason. And yet here she sat, professing that she was able to predict my actions. I could not really feel affronted, just surprised by her assumption and, eyebrows raised, I must have shown it. Maggie shrugged, smiling softly, ‘I think you are a person who will always try to do what you have said you would,’ she said, her quiet sincerity disarming me entirely. I stared at her, unblinking, but she would not let me in.
‘What would you like?’ It was the waitress by my arm but the question, dragging us back up from the deep, confused me momentarily.
‘Mmm?’ I forced my eyes away from Maggie and glanced up at her, bewildered.
‘To eat,’ she said, stifling a yawn. ‘To drink. What can I get you?’
We ordered coffee and Maggie asked for cake. We sat awhile, waiting, to all other eyes an elderly couple enjoying one another’s company and mid-morning brunch. Waiting. I did not want to wait. I did not want to eat or drink. I wanted just to know.
Maggie was not oblivious. She talked about the weather, about the winter, Christmas shoppers but all the time, she looked about her, not at me. She staved me off. The cake arrived and she admired its size and texture, offering half to me and then tucking in without compunction. Had I been her friend, I would no doubt have been amused by her quick and darting conversation, enjoyed her lively interest in all things other than that which lay between us. But as it was, I felt increasingly discomfited. She had not asked me here to talk about the cake.
‘Maggie,’ I said abruptly. She stopped. She laid her fork down carefully upon her plate next to the half-eaten cake, and she wiped her mouth, scrunching the napkin up in unhurried hands, which then came down to rest, neatly folded one on top of the other, in her lap. She sat back. Finally.
‘Maggie. What do you want?’ I asked, trying but failing to keep the waver from my voice.
For the first time since we had sat down, she frowned, and the light-hearted animation that had seemed so natural to her person summarily d
eserted her. It was replaced by a quiescent gravity I had not seen before. She was silent and, acutely aware that I was watching her, waiting, she looked down, casting her eyes about the table, seeking an object, any object on which she might focus the attention she seemed so unwilling or unable to confer on me.
She found it eventually in her hands which, loose-veined and liver-spotted, formed a gnarled and crooked cradle for the discarded napkin that lay beneath them. I continued to wait and for a while, we both became engrossed in the quiet composure of her hands. Suddenly, she moved them and, bringing them up to rest lightly side by side at the table’s edge, she slowly smoothed the cloth.
‘Billy died,’ she said, deciding. ‘Billy Rawlins.’ She glanced up briefly across at me, as though vaguely hoping this alone might be enough to explain the reason for our being here. ‘Did you know?’
‘No.’ The word, attempted with what I thought might be my ordinary voice, failed to sound. I licked my lips and tried again. ‘No, I didn’t know. I hadn’t heard.’ I saw him for one second, his skinny, sunburnt body crouching low on the wooden seat of the boat, his face, blistered and wasted, framed by the glare of glistening blue and his eyes, his narrow, half-closed eyes, slit against the sun. ‘When?’
‘Two months or so.’
I let my breath out slowly and closed my eyes, as if by doing so, I might shut out his sudden and unwelcome presence. I didn’t want to remember. But Maggie had begun.
‘When I saw his name – Billy’s – in the paper, that he’d died, I felt… well, what it felt like was… relief. Mnnh. It sounds so terrible, doesn’t it, to say that out loud? But it was relief – relief, I realised, because it wasn’t you.’
She smiled almost apologetically, faintly embarrassed at having to allude at all to the possibility of my demise. I could not help but smile too then, at her scruple, but she did not notice. Hers had vanished and she was too intent now on getting out what she had come to say.
‘I thought if I could see you… I thought that if I could just talk to you again, one last time… while I still had the chance, I hoped I think…’ She stopped abruptly, her eagerness frustrated by an unfamiliar incoherence she had not expected. She clearly had not considered the possibility that it would be her own inability to communicate that might prove an obstacle to our exchange.
As I watched her shift uncomfortably on her seat, I had to fight the sudden urge to put my hand out to cover hers but, fearing that she should recoil, I did not do it. Instead, I looked away.
‘I don’t know… maybe it shouldn’t matter really, after all this time.’ Offering this uncertainly, she hesitated as if to leave me time to take my cue but, finding the contradiction she invited to be unforthcoming, she shook her head quickly and leant forward to whisper urgently, ‘But it does still, doesn’t it? Surely it does?’
I looked up. ‘Matter?’
She nodded slowly. ‘Matter. To me, yes, I think it does. I wanted to get things straight. To understand. It just did not seem right. That I – that we – should get so old, that one day, soon perhaps, one of us should die and the other should look back and find then that it’s just too late.’
She paused, but as I gave her nothing, she drew up her shoulders and said suddenly, ‘You bury things, don’t you?’ Waving away the startled look that must have registered on my face, she went on quickly, ‘I don’t mean you, I mean we all do, don’t we? Don’t we have to? You have to get up and go on and so you keep it down inside you. You let the layers of your life quietly cover it. You don’t have to look at it. But it shapes you. It makes you from the inside out into who you really are. And now, I think, I want to know. I want finally to know if the person I’ve become, if the life I’ve tried to live…’
She stopped again, flailing for the words that might most accurately encompass it.
Having started to speak as the thought had taken her, she now found herself at the peak of her explanation without the capacity to finish it, for the violence of emotion that had built up behind it seemed to have deprived her once again of her natural coherence. Furrowing her brow, she closed her eyes briefly as though that might help her rid her mind of all the superfluous detail that hampered clarity and bring only to the fore what she wanted most particularly to convey. ‘Well… if my life has not after all been based upon untruth,’ she finished quietly.
Then, leaning in towards me once again, she tilted her head slightly and continued careful y, ‘You see, I have always wondered. All my life I have wondered but did not think I was quite brave enough to know… to know if what I told myself, if what I let myself believe, was true. What if I was wrong? How then could I have put much faith in anything? How could I have believed in any one any more? No, no, it was safer not to know. It gave me leave to carry on, living… loving. Finding a way. So much of how I tried to live, you see, the person that I’ve tried to be, was based on what I wanted, needed even, to believe… Joe had really tried to do.’
Her voice, cracking for the first time, dropped away at the mention of his name and the harsh lines of concentration that had buckled the contours of her brow were replaced by a singular softness that stole across her face as she turned towards the familiar, well-worn path of the past. His name hovered in the air between us, the unfathomable connection that had long kept us apart.
‘But now… well, I’ve nothing left to lose. I have been happy. My life’s been happy. And I didn’t, I realised, want to miss the chance after all. Of knowing. It was Billy’s name there in the paper – but it made me think of what if would have felt like had it been yours. You are the only one who knew, you see. Who knows. The only person I could ever ask.’
Though I was listening intently, I could not take my eyes from the efforts of her fingers which, thin and crooked, unable to unbend entirely, were attempting what could be no more than a loose-fitting grasp on the table’s rim. It took me some time to realise then that she was waiting and longer still to understand that what she waited for was me.
But I could not reply. I was still not ready to let him go. The elapse of time had not lessened my reluctance to utter the sentiments that he had begged me not to. It seemed no less of a betrayal now than it had seemed then and I clung to it, clung still to the self-imposed commitment to make restitution for his loyalty to me. But she took my silence for encouragement and, lifting her face, forced querulous lips to form the question she had brought me here to answer.
‘I wanted to ask if… if, in the end, what I decided to believe was so much closer to the truth.’
‘Maggie, I can’t!’ I burst out, the heightened volume of my voice cutting across the general conversation in the room so that momentarily, all about us, there was silence. People, having glanced our way, looked at their companions meaningfully before turning their thoughts back towards the slipstream of their lives.
‘I can’t tell you anything any different,’ I hissed, when there was noise enough again to speak. As I had begun to feel the safe ground beneath me give and start to shift and slide away, I scrambled desperately for the foothold carved deliberately deep so many years before. ‘I can’t tell you even now that I should have told you something different. I can’t. You must see that. He… he is the only reason I got back. The only reason that I am sitting here. I would not have made it back, if he had not…’ I stopped to swallow, to try to ease the familiar, nagging ache that was beginning to rise again at the back of my throat. ‘I never felt, I don’t feel even now that I had a choice. And I know… I know how much I must have hurt you. I have regretted it. All my life I have regretted it. But I was thinking only of what I had to do for him. I can’t undo it, even now, I can’t…’
‘No, wait. You don’t have to. I don’t want you to…’ Her hands came up and she put them out towards me, beseeching me to stop. Overwhelmed suddenly by the cavernous depth of the impasse that now lay between us, we both fell silent, each at a loss as to how we might retain the precarious equilibrium that at any time, at a single word, while we were in o
ne another’s company, might so easily be lost.
‘I was always sorry for it,’ I said.
‘That did not make it any easier to bear.’ This came from her quickly and, for the first time, I heard an edge of bitterness in her voice. It was a reflex of a reply that had come out of her mouth before she had even taken time to think, as if old wounds, unexpectedly chafed, had roused in her the dormant resentment that up until now, she had been certain she no longer felt. It had flared up momentarily in the face of an apology that she doubtless recognised as genuine but that offered her nothing more. She saw me flinch and immediately contrite, she scrabbled to retract it, saying quickly, ‘I know. I’m sorry. I know you were.’ And then smiling suddenly, she added softly, ‘It was all there in your face.’
Realising almost as soon as she had spoken that these words would offer me no purposeful enlightenment, she continued eagerly, ‘What I mean is there are some things, aren’t there, in your life that never do quite leave you? The way something’s said, how someone looked. A couple of words. It can be all that you remember sometimes, can’t it?’
She tilted her face slightly up towards me, soliciting but not pausing for accord. ‘And what I took away with me about you, all that I could ever bring to mind when I thought of you, was that look of sorrow on your face. At the docks. In that café. There was such a lot of pain there in your face. Pain and sympathy. But there was also something else. Fear. Even shame. I saw that it cost you so to say it. What you said to me. I knew it did. You could not even bring yourself to do it at the docks. You might never have told me anything, had I not sought you out. Such appalling sorrow in your face. I have never quite been able to forget it. Whenever I remembered you. And every single time I thought of Joe.’
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