Ivy and Abe

by Elizabeth Enfield

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the doctor said.

  ‘You can have a few moments with him.’ The nurse held my hand briefly, before leaving me to sit with Abe, as the warmth and colour drained from his body.

  I lay on the bed next to him. I couldn’t think of him as a corpse. Not yet.

  I held him, even though his heart no longer pumped and he no longer breathed, and I kissed him, even as his lips began to stiffen and turn blue.

  And then I couldn’t bear it any more. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alone in the world, not after Richard died, or Mum, not even after Jon and Dad died. I’d opened myself up entirely to Abe. I’d let him in as I’d never let anyone in before, and now that he was gone there was a hole inside me that was too big to be filled by anything or anyone.

  There was a gentle knock on the door and the nurse opened it tentatively. Did she smile when she saw me lying beside Abe on the bed? ‘Do you need more time?’ she asked, unshocked.

  ‘No,’ I said, although it was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, getting off the bed and walking towards the door.

  ‘Hello.’ The nurse is waiting for me outside. ‘I’ll get you a cup of tea and we’ll call someone for you.’

  She guides me to a chair. ‘You’re in shock,’ she says, handing me a mug.

  But I’m not.

  I look at her, trying to gauge her age. I guess she’s about twenty-seven. I wonder if her profession makes her more aware of the fleeting nature of life than I was at that age. Death then would have shocked me but it doesn’t now. It is inevitable: the thing I always knew was coming had come earlier than I’d hoped for but, nevertheless, as I had expected.

  Life is a series of moments. All of them fleeting. Yes, it goes on, but not in a smooth and seamless way. It jumps from moment to moment and eventually it ends. I wonder, not for the first time, how my life might have panned out if I’d met Abe at another point in it. I wonder how things might have turned out between us. But the only thing I know for sure is that eventually we’d have reached the end.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ the nurse says, as I sip my tea.

  I nod.

  ‘How long had you been married?’

  I find that I’m not sure how to answer. ‘Only a few months.’ I register her surprise. ‘But I first met him when I was a child.’

  She smiles as if this makes sense. ‘You seemed very close,’ she said.

  ‘We were.’

  London, 2015

  In string theory, the multiverse is a theory in which our universe is not the only one: many universes exist parallel to each other. These distinct universes within the multiverse theory are called parallel universes. A variety of different theories lend themselves to a multiverse viewpoint.

  In some theories, there are copies of you sitting right here right now reading this in other universes, and other copies of you are doing other things in other universes.

  Andrew Zimmerman Jones, String Theory for Dummies

  ‘You’re turning into one of the diehards,’ Tony said, as I stood on the edge of the pool, adjusting my goggles.

  It was late September and the water temperature was dropping daily but I wanted to keep swimming outside for as long possible. Someone had chalked ‘13C/56F’ on the board at the end of the covered walkway that bridged the indoor and outdoor pools and, underneath, one of the lifeguards had scrawled, ‘Still warmer than the sea off Aberdeen in summer!’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said, to my newish acquaintance.

  Tony was probably in his mid-thirties. I could never be sure what age people were any more. He swam outside most days in the large rectangular pool, which was flanked by a row of coloured changing huts and overhung by trees in the park outside. I’d met him when I’d pointed out a greenfinch to him a few weeks ago, diving down to drink from the pool, and he’d said it looked like a canary.

  ‘Canaries are more strikingly yellow. And you’d be unlikely to see one here.’

  Tony was Australian. I supposed that accounted for his lack of knowledge about British birds.

  ‘I saw a parakeet in Richmond Park,’ he’d told me.

  ‘I’ve seen a few about. I heard they escaped from an aviary during the hurricane in 1987.’

  ‘I heard that Jimi Hendrix released a pair in Carnaby Street in the sixties,’ he’d replied, grinning and pulling on a swimming cap. ‘I’m Tony, by the way.’

  ‘Ivy,’ I replied.

  ‘Good to meet you, Ivy. Enjoy your swim.’

  We’d had a few exchanges since then, usually to do with the water temperature, the length of our swims or the quietness of the pool. Gone were the foreign students, who sunned themselves in tiny bikinis and tight swimming trunks but hardly ever got further than dipping their toes in, making a big deal of how cold it was.

  Occasionally, Tony would ask if I’d seen any more exotic birds and I’d feed him the name of something that was really quite common to see how he reacted.

  ‘A redwing? Really? Guess you don’t see them very often?’ I couldn’t tell if he knew I was teasing him and that redwings were as ordinary as song thrushes – he probably saw them every day without knowing.

  ‘What’s the water like?’ I said to him now. He was already in the pool, but paused between laps when he saw me.

  ‘It’s probably colder out there today,’ he replied, and resumed his swim.

  I liked the cooler temperatures. It meant the pool was fairly empty, where it had been crowded at the height of summer, and swimming more exhilarating. It made me feel fully alive in a way I had not since Richard had died and then Jon, almost exactly a year later.

  A part of me felt guilty for having escaped the disease that had claimed too many family members, and the random way in which others’ lives seemed to be cut short. But I knew that both Richard and Jon would want me to carry on living my life as fully as possible. I felt I owed it to them and to my mother: to appreciate the life I still had, especially now that I was over the worst of the grief. Time did heal, slowly.

  Of course, there were still bad days but they were less frequent. On the whole, life was good. Swimming outside and feeling the rush of autumn’s chill when I got out of the pool made me appreciate my life and living it.

  ‘Are you training for something?’ Tony asked, as I wrapped my towel around myself and we walked together towards the changing rooms.

  I wasn’t, but Tony was too much of a stranger for me to explain that coming here was part of a routine that was important to me. For so long my life had been held together by the framework of family. Now that the children had grown up and Richard was no longer alive, I needed something else to provide that structure so I clung to and created daily rituals: a cup of tea in bed when my alarm went off in the morning, breakfast with the radio on in the background, a short walk before a couple of hours’ work, then lunch and my swim. It wasn’t always the same: there was time, too, for friends and family, film and theatre. Sometimes work dominated my days but, even without it, they no longer felt long and empty, and my routines made sure they did not.

  But I wouldn’t tell Tony so. Instead I voiced a thought that had occurred to me a few weeks earlier. ‘I was thinking of doing this trip where you swim between Greek islands.’ I’d read an article, years back, and it had sounded wonderful. A boat transported your luggage and kept pace with a group of swimmers, offering somewhere to rest and recover if the swim was too arduous. It was not something Richard would have wanted to do. He hadn’t been much of a swimmer, and while he was alive, I wouldn’t have considered going off and doing it without him.

  Now, if I wanted, it was a possibility, and while I wondered if I was too old, I could still swim reasonable distances.

  ‘Wow, that sounds amazing,’ Tony said, heading off towards the men’s showers. ‘Good for you, Ivy. You’ve got some balls.’

  It was ridiculous to think of it as ‘my’ spot but I had begun to. The proximity of the café made the bench unnecessary. People sat at
the tables and chairs outside, if the weather was good enough. I was the only person who carried their tea the extra few yards so I could drink it by the path that ran alongside the river. It was quieter there: the sound of the breeze in the cluster of ash and alder trees dulled the chatter from the café, and squirrels moved noiselessly through the branches of a horse chestnut. There was a narrow dirt path that ran between the bench and the river, worn away by joggers and cyclists, although most now preferred the tarmac track the council had laid down on the other side of the trees.

  Today someone had occupied my bench and I hovered, wondering whether to sit there as usual or walk on and find somewhere to be alone with my thoughts. Sensing my presence, the man looked up and moved his drink, which he’d placed beside him, a little closer, making space for me. I gave him a half-smile, as I sat down, then removed the lid from my tea and emptied into it the sachet of milk. But I was too aware of his being there to lose myself entirely.

  The first time I’d come here, I was exploring new surroundings. I’d moved just under a year ago to be closer to the children, who were now both working in London. I hadn’t wanted to be in the family home any more. There were too many ghosts, too many memories. The rooms were no longer rooms but archives of the time we’d spent there. The narrow shelves in the alcove in Lottie’s bedroom, which had been home to her collection of Sylvanian families, the rail across the passage that ran alongside the house, from which we’d hung a trapeze for Max’s seventh birthday, the mismatched spindle on the staircase, which had replaced the one Max had broken climbing up the outside, and the narrow desk that ran alongside the back wall of the kitchen, so the children could do their homework there as teenagers: these were the markers of our life there.

  But that life was over. There was too much space for one person. I spent most of my time in the kitchen, preferring to sit on the small sofa by the window than in the sitting room and to work at the kitchen table, rather than in the office extension Richard had created when my business began to take off.

  I rattled around in it, which intensified my loneliness.

  I felt cocooned in the flat I had now, which was smaller but, once I’d had it decorated and moved my things in, surprisingly familiar.

  ‘It feels like being in a parallel universe where everything has shrunk,’ Max said, when he’d finished helping me move furniture and put up pictures. ‘You’ve still got the same painting over the fireplace and the same chair by the window.’

  It was true, though I hadn’t been aware just how much mirroring of the old house I’d been doing when I’d chosen paint and put things away.

  ‘Even the stuff on the shelf in the kitchen is exactly where it was before,’ Lottie said, laughing.

  That was also true. My mother’s copy of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which I liked having but never used, was closest to the wall and next to it a row of other cookery books, bordered by a pile of three Polish pottery cereal bowls that Max had given me one Christmas.

  ‘Have you been to Poland?’ He was travelling a lot at the time.

  ‘John Lewis.’ He’d shrugged.

  The rest of the shelf was lined with ceramics picked up abroad. There was a teal and azure flower-patterned plate from a holiday in Greece, another that depicted the running of the bulls in Pamplona, and a jug decorated with olive branches that we’d bought in Italy. Next to that was a yellow pottery lion, which Lottie had made in primary school, and the wonky penholder that Max had produced at the same stage.

  ‘What, no ashtrays?’ Richard used to say, year after year, when the offerings from DT classes were carried home in schoolbags. ‘That’s what we used to make when we were at school.’

  I’d arranged the photographs above the mantelpiece in the living room much as before too, with the picture of my mother before she became ill next to the one of Richard and me on our wedding day, Richard looking smarter than I’d ever seen him in a new suit – the overall effect was a little spoiled by the folded sheaf of A4 that bulged from his breast pocket. ‘My speech,’ I remember him saying, patting it, whenever anyone commented.

  I couldn’t imagine meeting anyone else. Not now. I’d got too used to Richard. The idea of someone new becoming as familiar as he had been scared me. Although he’d been dead for more than two years, I still felt his presence, or perhaps it was his absence. I still half expected him to appear: to climb into bed beside me, to call out when I put my key in the front door or to sit down, now, on the bench between me and the stranger. I could practically summon him up: see him rubbing his hands together as if it were cold, even though it wasn’t really, and commenting on the breeze, taking a tissue out of his pocket and blowing his nose, out of habit, not because it was necessary.

  All the little things that used to annoy me were now the things I missed.

  And Richard was missing a life that was a little easier without the children at home or the pressure of full-time work. It didn’t seem fair, after all the uncertainty surrounding my own health. Only a couple of years after I’d had the all-clear, Richard’s had begun to fail.

  I’d thought it was work that was bothering him. I knew something was causing his distraction. When I asked if anything was wrong he said no, but in a way that suggested otherwise.

  There were the times when I’d called him at the office and been told he was out at a meeting he’d not mentioned. Later he was evasive if I asked about it. On occasion he’d close his laptop hurriedly, if I came into the room. And the physical side of our relationship, which had always been good, had waned suddenly, to a point at which it was almost non-existent. That had always kept us close, even when life made things difficult. We’d never stopped loving each other, never stopped making time for that side of our relationship. I’d begun to appreciate its importance in a way I’d not thought about when I was younger. It was not the only aspect of our marriage: we were friends and we had the children, we took an interest in each other’s work and had a shared interest in the world, but all of that was condensed into the moment when we fell asleep, two people holding each other after making love.

  Was it another woman? Was that why Richard now turned away from me in bed, claiming tiredness and leaving me to lie awake, trying to dismiss the suspicions that were starting to bother me?

  I waited for a sign, some evidence that I was not simply being paranoid. So, ‘Ivy, we need to talk’, did not come out of the blue.

  I’d been waiting for it, dreading it, but expecting it.

  ‘Now?’

  He’d just come in from work.

  I was washing up. My hands were deep under the suds, scouring a frying pan. He hadn’t even taken his coat off or put down his briefcase. It occurred to me he was going to leave there and then. Or maybe he thought I’d throw him out.

  The children had already left home and I was getting used to the empty quiet again after twenty-two years of rumbustiousness. It seemed that the two of us, quieter and slower in our late fifties, would never be able to fill it again. Marriages often faltered when the nest was empty. I knew that, although I had not expected ours to. Richard had always seemed too solid. I couldn’t begin to imagine a life without him.

  ‘Yes, now.’ He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and slumped into it. ‘Come and sit down.’

  ‘I’ll just finish this pan.’ I wanted to delay what I thought was going to be a confession.

  ‘Leave it. Just come and sit down.’

  I dried my hands on a tea-towel. ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Not really. But you have one if you like.’

  His tone was too kind. He was going to do this gently.

  I went to the fridge and took out a bottle of white wine, grabbing a couple of glasses from the shelf beside it. We might both need one.

  ‘What is it?’ I tried to sound neutral.

  ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you,’ he began, ‘but I’ve been too scared. I didn’t know how to.’

  ‘Go on.’ I clutche
d the stem of my wine glass so tightly I wondered if it might snap.

  ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he said.

  ‘Cancer?’

  It’s odd feeling relief when you’ve just been told something terrible. But there was a moment, before the implications of what he’d said dawned on me, when that was all I felt: relief that he hadn’t said what I’d thought he was going to say.

  ‘Bowel cancer,’ he continued. ‘I know I should have said something before but I was scared and I hoped it might be nothing. I’ve had a bit of pain in my stomach for a while now.’

  ‘Bowel cancer?’ I knew it was serious but I never imagined Richard would be dead eighteen months later. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘I’ve been having the pains for a while,’ he said. ‘I thought it was just indigestion at first or that maybe I’d strained a muscle at the gym. But I went for an endoscopy a couple of weeks ago and I had the result today.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I would have come with you.’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you if it was nothing.’

  ‘But it’s not. It’s cancer.’

  ‘There’s a tumour that needs to be removed and part of the bowel with it. I’ll be having chemo too.’

  ‘But you’ll be okay, won’t you?’ I hated myself for seeking reassurance, which he couldn’t possibly give me, for wanting him to, when I was the person who should have been there for him.

  ‘I hope so, Ivy,’ he said. ‘But I’m scared.’

  I was scared too, but I didn’t say so, not then, not out loud.

  I said it when we made love later that evening with an urgency and sentiment that were new, even after twenty-five years of marriage, even after all the question marks that had hung over my own health; a clinging to life when it was in danger of being taken away.

  That was the last time I felt really close to Richard. He began slipping away, retreating, even before he discovered the cancer had spread. It was as if he knew it would happen and he needed to dull the pain of death before it came.