After Forever Ends

by Melodie Ramone

  “Quite.”

  “I’m a very mature eighteen, that’s it, yeah?”

  “Yes, that’s it.” I drummed my fingers against the table.

  He looked at me thoughtfully, “Don’t you think it’s time for you to go and see your friend Sandra?”

  I took a deep breath, “We’ve tried so many times. Something always seems to happen. Every single time. I’ve more or less given up.”

  “You talk to her five days a week on the phone, Love. I’m officially retired now. We’ve never taken a trip to Ireland in all the years we’ve been together. Why don’t we take a hop over and see her?”

  “We should.”

  “Aye, we should. Why don’t you call her and see when it would be best for her. There’s nothing stopping us now.”

  A sudden excitement was coursing through me, “I’ll do it now!” I began to stand up, but Oliver caught me by the hand.

  “Can you believe it’s been fifty years?” He asked slowly, as if he were contemplating a deep secret of the universe, “I bet you a quid she looks like hell.”

  We both burst out laughing.

  I had not been to Ireland since I was a child of about nine. I had forgotten how incredibly beautiful the countryside was. Sandra lived in a small village about two hours outside of Dublin in a ridiculously huge old manor that housed a small museum.

  “She married well,” Oliver noted as he parked the car.

  I didn’t say anything, but I had known that her husband was from old money and was a descendant of Duke Whoever-He-Was of Wherever-He-Was-From. She had mentioned that she lived in a manor house, not that it was in reality a small castle.

  “Her parents weren’t exactly poor, either.” I muttered.

  A tall, heavy set old woman in a rose coloured silk suit came out the great front doors and jogged down the steps. “Silvia!” She shouted, “Silvia! Silvia! Oh, Sil!”

  “Great galloping green grasshoppers!” Oliver gasped, “It’s Sandra!”

  I instinctively hurried toward her with my arms open. We met half way and clung to each other in the way that I had only seen two women cling to each other in films. Both of us had tears rolling down our faces.

  “Oh, Sandy!” I said into her snow white hair, “It’s been so long!”

  “Oh!” She sobbed, “It hasn’t been a day!” She pulled back and looked at me. Her face was wrinkled like an old piece of parchment, “Look at you! Silvia Cotton! All these years and you’re still beautiful! Hardly a wrinkle! And you’re wearing the hair clip I gave you at school!”

  “Of course I am! Did you think I’d lost it?”

  “I didn’t think you’d still have it!”

  “A gift from my best friend? It’s a treasure!”

  “Oh, Sil!” She threw her arms around me again. “My best friend!”

  Oliver stood patiently to the side. When Sandra finally looked at him, he flashed that charming smile, “Sandy Ashby! The Grand Trumpeter of Bennington Palace!”

  That was a nickname he had given her first year when she passed gas during a timed exam.

  “It was so loud it echoed!” She had told me one night after lights out, “And it was just me and Ollie in the back of the class. So everyone turned and looked at us. I was dying from embarrassment, but Oliver just got that nutter grin and he said, ‘What? They give us a decent amount of fibre in our meals!’ Oh my God, Sil! He took the bloody fall for me!”

  We had laughed so hard about it that the Professor McClellan came into our room and told us if she heard another peep again we’d both be in detention.

  “Oliver,” Sandra was positively beaming at him, “Do you want the first thing I say to you to be shut up? Oh, do come here!”

  He lifted her off the ground with a hug. “Ah, Sandy, it’s good to see you after all these years! You look well.”

  “You look old,” She teased, “And so do I! Enough of your politeness! Come on, you two! Come inside! Have you eaten?”

  Sandra brought us up into her mansion and introduced us to a few members of her staff. “They’re at your disposal,” She told us, “You can pick up any phone and dial 9.” Oliver and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Neither of us had ever been in a home so fine.

  Sandra seemed to think nothing of the surroundings. Her husband had left her the manor years earlier in exchange for her not divorcing him. “He owed me more than this,” She told me with the look that only another woman could understand, “But I took it anyway. He’s dead now, did I tell you?”

  “No, you didn’t mention it.”

  She nodded. There was not even a hint of emotion in her voice, “Yes, well, you know he was considerably older than me. He died in Hawaii, of all the places he could have been wasting his last moments, with his newest mistress. As if a twenty-nine year old divorcee with three children was in Hawaii with a seventy-nine year old man because she loved him!”

  She glanced at Oliver, who was noticeably bored. “Ollie,” She prodded him gently, “Do you still like to golf?”

  “I don’t golf, Sandy. I whack golf balls. I find it much more therapeutic than driving myself mad trying to knock a walnut into a tiny hole. Alexander is the golfer.”

  She laughed, “Well, my husband was a golfer and there is a nine hole course in the back. Or, if you’d rather, you can just go whack some balls. We have plenty of grounds, I’m sure you won’t bother anyone.”

  “Wicked!”

  “I’ll have Jacob get you the clubs. You’re a bit taller than John was, but they should be all right.”

  Between whacking golf balls and borrowing a fishing pole to fish in her stocked pond, Oliver more or less disappeared for the next week and stayed gone. It left Sandra and me alone to laugh and talk for hours. It was just like we were girls again.

  She and I took a long walk on the grounds the day Oliver and I left. The conversation turned to old classmates.

  “You know, Meredith Ainsworth died at Christmas. She had a nasty fall from a horse about a year before and broke her spine. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she never got back up on her feet very well. It was all downhill from there. She was my husband’s cousin’s wife. Did you know that?”

  “You never told me that! I think of her from time to time. I supposed she’d married some Greek oil tycoon or a prince or something.”

  Sandra laughed and shook her head, “No, not a prince, just an heir to a great fortune! James is a good man and he gave her a good life. They had five daughters, can you imagine that? Beautiful girls. Bitches all of them, but they adored her. She was a wonderful mother, too. It was effortless for her. She loved them all so much. They had a yacht and sailed all over the world together with their children.”

  “Wow. I’m glad for her.”

  Sandy nodded, “Meredith never changed. She never got a clue in her head and she never gained an ounce of fat on her body. Her husband absolutely adored her. He gave her everything she wanted. She had a stable full of beautiful horses, Arabians and Andalusia’s. The last time I was at her estate she asked me if I still talked to you. She wanted to know about you and Oliver, about how you two had got on after Bennington. Then she wanted to know all about Alexander. She wanted to know how he was and what had happened to him, if he was happy. When I told her he’d married Lucy she was relieved. ‘He can’t take care of himself,” she said, ‘He absolutely could never make it alone. I’m so glad he married someone who’d do it all for him so Silvia didn’t have to take care of them both’. She really did love him once. As much as she claimed to hate him after Easter that year, the way she talked about him to me that day was as if he was the one that got away.”

  “For her, I’m sure he was. I don’t know what it was about them, but they were kind of special together. Still, he treated her so awful in the end.”

  “Actually, she told me that after graduation he phoned her and they talked it out. She thought that there might even be a second chance, but it never came about. She thought that he was in love with you.” Sandy
paused, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, she continued, “I told her that was silly, but she didn’t think so. She said you, Alex and Oliver were a bizarre triangle and she knew she could never make it into a square, so she gave up hoping. She said she couldn’t compete.”

  “The three of us have always been close, but I’m sure none of us ever intended on excluding her.”

  Sandy smiled, “Well, she was very spoiled. Being as she was not the centre of attention, she probably felt excluded. But speaking of Alex and his exes, I saw Sarah Farnsworth not long ago in Belfast and she’s looking quite sprite. She looks ten years younger than any of us,” Sandra drew a deep breath and sighed, “When I think of us from Bennington, I still think of us all as being so young. Those are the pictures I have in my head. Us, just kids, making our way through school. We really looked out for each other, didn’t we?”

  “Always. We were a family.”

  “It’s hard to believe that any of us have died,” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Poor little Meredith.”

  “She was sweet in her own way.”

  “She was! Oh, how I hated her once! And why? In the end, we were in the same family. Cousins. We were friends,” She sighed, “And then there’s Lance. Did I ever tell you that I had a crush on him?”

  “Of course you did.”

  “He didn’t find me attractive. I was too tall,” She smiled. What she said was true. Lance liked Sandra, but she was not at all his choice in women being as he only stood to her chest. “But I thought he was one of the most handsome boys at Bennington.”

  “He was a bit of a cutie in his day.”

  “I’m just so glad I knew him. Merlyn, too. Merlyn was a nice boy. He used to help me with my luggage the first and last days of school. It was like a tradition, him helping me haul them out of the car and through the gates. I was always forgetting my code, you know, to get in, so he’d wait for me and punch his in. I don’t know why he did it,” Sandy wasn’t looking at me as she spoke. Her eyes were fixed on something far away.

  “He did it because he liked you. Merlyn wouldn’t have stood there waiting for just anybody.”

  “Yes, I would have counted him as a friend. I would have dated him if he’d asked me. My father would have had a fit with him being black, but I’d have done it anyway. I never cared about anyone’s colour. Merlyn was a great chap. He came from such a good family Daddy would have had to have gotten over it sooner or later,” She had a look on her face like she had a completely separate thought, then came back and finished, “But Ollie and Alex…they were well above my station.”

  “You knew the twins the whole time you were there!”

  “I did. I met them first year, but they weren’t my friends. Not until you came along. Ollie was nice to me, but Ollie was nice to everyone unless they irked him. It wasn’t like he made any effort to notice me. We just had classes together. And Alexander? Well, I don’t know what went on with me and Alexander. There was that short period in time when I thought we might get to know each other. I was terrified!” She laughed, “He was so handsome and so bloody mean! I think I might have brushed him off more than I meant to because after a while he wasn’t anything more than polite to me. He never gave me the time of day again.”

  “What are you talking about? Alex was very fond of you! I know he was because he told me! And so was Oliver!”

  She patted me on the back, “They may have been fond enough of me, but I was not on their social magnitude! I wasn’t in their crowd! They only chose me because they chose you and I came attached.”

  “Social magnitude?” I snorted, “I was invisible, too!”

  Sandra burst out laughing, “Oh, Silvia! I always loved that about you! You were always in your own little world! You didn’t know how much you stood out. When you got to Bennington everyone was talking about you. You had all that lovely red hair and those huge boobs!” She laughed, covering her mouth with the back of her hand, “And Oliver was besotted with you from moment one. Oh, he’d sit and watch you like there wasn’t another woman alive. It didn’t matter what you were doing, he couldn’t take his eyes off of you! That really brassed the girls off, but the boys were all jealous of Oliver. There wasn’t one who didn’t fancy you.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “No, it is! That morning you arrived everyone was chattering. ‘The new girl, you should see her! She looks like a right snob’, the girls said, ‘She was on the quad flirting with the Dickinson twins! It was terrible!’ The boys were all going on about how gorgeous you were. I decided to hate you immediately and then I saw the name on the list of my new dorm mate. Silvia Cotton. I knew it was you! They did everything by the alphabet…why wasn’t there a B that year?” She laughed out loud and squeezed my shoulder, “When you walked into that room and said hello to me I wanted to scream. I was sure you’d be awful, but you were so sweet. And helpful! Remember I found that hole in the seat of my uniform and you fixed it straight away! How long exactly did it take us to be best friends?”

  “I don’t know. Six minutes?”

  She laughed again, “Bennington was a lonely place for me until you came. No one noticed me. You took the time to see me. You were my first best friend, Sil. I lived for those late nights when we would sit up and talk way past lights out. They meant the whole world to me. I was so sad when you got to move into the game keeper’s quarters. I was happy for you, but I missed having my best friend all to myself. I wanted to throttle Oliver for stealing you away like that!”

  “I’ve always missed you since. Isn’t it odd, though? All these years and it’s like we’ve only been apart for five minutes, really.”

  “That’s how you know a soul mate. Time and distance make no difference. You just pick up where you left off.”

  We sat for a long time. Finally, I asked what I was thinking, “We missed so much of each other’s lives. We talk on the phone often, but now that I’m here, look at me and tell me true, Sandra. Was yours a happy life?”

  She looked up into the sky, “I think so. My marriage was a train wreck. My husband drank and philandered. My children were spoiled rotten. They had no respect for me. There were times I was unhappy. It got better once they all left. I got on with my life then, I had discreet affairs. I travelled. I have some regrets, but all in all, I’d say yes. How about you?”

  “I could die right now and know I had a wonderful life. I had wonderful friends, a wonderful marriage and wonderful children. I did all I wanted to do and saw what I wanted to see. Yes, I’ve have had a great life.”

  “Regrets?”

  “None.”

  “I didn’t think you would.” We were quiet for what seemed an age. Sandy finally spoke. “You lied to me once.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes. The night you came back to Bennington after you married Oliver. You told me a huge lie.”

  “What was that?”

  “That sex was like magic,” She said and we both laughed until it hurt, “It was never like magic for me!”

  “I’m sorry!” I said sincerely.

  “Ah, it’s all the same, isn’t it?” Sandra still looked like herself when she smiled. I could see that little girl from Bennington peeking through the folds in her skin, still see that little spark of wonder in her blue green eyes, “I got over the disappointment.”

  “I was never disappointed. Sex was always magic for me.”

  “Well, why wouldn’t it be for you? You and Ollie are the stuff young girls dream of. You don’t hear of a story like yours too often.”

  People were always telling us that. “We are very lucky.”

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t even have to work at it. Your marriage, I mean. Don’t tell me it was always wonderful. I couldn’t bear to hear it!” She pressed her hands to her ears. “I know he’s not perfect!”

  “No,” I answered slowly, “He’s not perfect. Sometimes we did have to work at it. Sometimes we still do. We don’t always agree. Sometimes we even fight, but we make
each other laugh, too. That’s our secret. We just laugh at each other. And at ourselves. Well, we really just laugh at everything and everyone.”

  “You always did.”

  “Yes, because the world’s as bloody funny as it is serious!” I explained, “And we’ve always chosen to laugh instead of cry. It’s always been wonderful, though, being with him, even during the hard times. Even when I want to club him in the head with something, I love him just the same as I always have. More, really, if you want the truth.”

  “How can you?”

  “Because he’s Oliver. Silvia loves Oliver and Oliver loves Silvia. It’s just the way it’s supposed to be. It’s been the only thing constant in my life. I don’t complicate what’s simple.”

  “You never wanted another man?”

  “It never crossed my mind that I needed one.”

  We sat in silence again for a long while. Finally, Sandra spoke, “Fifty years, Sil! Look at us! We’re a couple of old ladies!”

  “Speak for yourself!” I laughed, glancing at my plait. The vibrant red of my hair had been washed away with different shades of silver. It didn’t bother me. I always thought those stripes were pretty. “I don’t feel old. I just try not to look in the mirror. It says too much.”

  “That it does.”

  “When will we see each other again, Sandy?”

  She looked thoughtful, “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, really.”

  “No, no matter. You’re in my heart.”

  “And you’re in mine, Sil.”

  I hugged my best girlfriend. “We’re going to have to go today. Oliver has to go into the office tomorrow. He said he’d help the new doctor with some of the charts. The poor lad seems overwhelmed.”

  “Well, we both knew you wouldn’t stay forever, although I wish you would. Both of you,” She sounded almost hopeful, “I have plenty of room.”

  “Oliver would never leave Alexander.”

  “And you’d never leave Oliver.”

  “Not ever.”

  Sandy took my hand and squeezed it, “Then I’ll miss you both.”