The Bench

by Saskia Sarginson

  ‘No,’ I muttered, my mouth dry, not working properly. ‘You don’t understand …’

  I couldn’t explain that I was going to miss an appointment I’d waited ten years to keep. It’s today. I imagine him sitting on our bench, narrowing his eyes as a figure starts up the hill, turning his head expectantly when the leaves behind him rustle. And I can’t bear his disappointment. He’ll wait for a time, and then he’ll disappear; I’m frightened I’ll never be able to find him.

  Sam, I’m here. I’m right here, thinking of you with every fibre of my being.

  I can hardly breathe. The pain of losing him is a weight on my chest. Deep inside, I’m screaming and kicking, but I’m stuck in a sick body on a bed, the unchanging hospital routine revolving around me: three daily meals, the drug trolley, the snack trolley, the consultant’s rounds, visitors trickling in with flowers and smiles of commiseration. The woman in the next bed asks what happened to my foot, and offers me a sweet. My consultant stops by, peering over his notes. I can’t concentrate. Can’t hear their words properly – can’t give the right answers. I want to yank the needle out of my arm, swing my bandaged foot to the ground and limp down the anonymous corridors, heading for the Heath with my hospital gown flapping behind me. I ball my free hand into a fist, squeezing in frustration. But I’m so weak I hardly have the strength to curl my own fingers.

  I don’t believe in fate. I just know that if it does exist, it’s determined to keep me and Sam apart. I’ve stopped fighting. It’s over. Only now do I realise exactly how hard it’s been to exist without him, to keep smiling and working and caring for Grace and Leo, to keep moving forward through the years, gleaning sweetness from the days, when my insides were aching with loss. Even when it was very far away, this day kept me going. I’ve run it through my imagination a million times – us meeting at the bench, who gets there first, who says what – but I never thought I’d be too sick to go. I turn my head on the pillow, a single tear sliding along the side of my nose.

  I must have dozed off. I wake to see Grace peering down at me. She wears an expression of concern on her tanned face. When she appeared at my bedside yesterday, tearful, and tired from the journey, I was stunned. It was a wonderful surprise to have her with me, but I feel guilty for dragging her home.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ I blink and struggle to sit up, and her young, strong hands are at my back, silver bangles jangling; the smell of the outside is caught in her hair. I inhale the scent of cold leaves and damp earth; it acts on me like another medicine.

  ‘Mum,’ she says. ‘I’m … I’m not alone. There’s someone here to see you.’

  ‘Oh.’ I touch my straggly hair, combing my fingers through it. ‘Who?’

  She has a strange look on her face, a look of anticipation. I can see now that she’s nervous. She’s doing that thing with her mouth, moving it around, biting her lips, folding them inwards.

  ‘Grace?’ My heart has begun to kick in my chest. She’s backing away.

  I look past her, over to the entrance, hungry for the impossible.

  A figure steps into the ward.

  Sam. His name catches in my throat. The world slows, the room and everyone in it disappearing as he moves towards me, pushing his dark hair off his forehead in a familiar gesture, his long, crooked smile fixed on me.

  He’s beside me, and he takes my good hand and raises it to his mouth. He kisses it. His lips are warm and dry. He’s real.

  ‘How?’ I ask.

  He lays his cheek against my hand. ‘Grace,’ he answers. I don’t question him any more. There will be time later, I think. All the time we need.

  He sits down beside me, and we look and look at each other, as if we’re silently rerunning the years we’ve been apart, reliving them at impossible speed, spinning past the ghosts of our old lives. Staring into his face, I glimpse fragments of his time without me: there he is in a dark bar with his guitar, playing to a crowd of locals; on a lurching bus on a winding mountain road; camping out in a hut on the edge of a desert, firelight reflected in his eyes. He touches my face, tracing the lines of my bones, learning the subtle changes, the softening of my jaw, my wrinkles. I do the same to him. We smile. We have always been rushing towards this.

  I shuffle across the mattress as far as I can, and he manoeuvres himself onto the bed, careful to avoid my sore foot and the snaking line of the drip. With his arms around me, I lie against his chest, like I did all those years ago in the funeral parlour, and push my face into his neck, burying myself inside the smell and taste of him.

  The curtain swishes closed around the bed, tugged by an invisible hand. Light gleams through thin fabric. ‘Cat,’ he whispers, and in my head I thank my daughter, thank whatever invisible forces in the world led her to him, and him to me.

  Then there is no more thinking. There’s just the relief of being held, of being home, the two of us lying together in silence, marking this moment, before the rest of our lives begins.

  EPILOGUE

  Hampstead, September 2044

  Standing at the top of the hill, by the bench, Grace claps her hands. ‘It’s time! Come along!’ and her three grandchildren wheel around in the long autumn grass, the dog at their heels, and bound back up the hill towards her, laughing. Her own daughter, now in her late thirties, takes her arm and gives a supportive squeeze.

  As she waits for them to gather around, Grace glances at the view, thinking how different it would have looked to Cat and Sam back then. Today the skyline bristles with shining towers. But she supposes the Heath itself has remained almost exactly as it has been for hundreds of years. She and her husband inherited the white gothic house after Leo retired. They’d lived abroad for a long time; it felt good to come home to this place.

  She looks around at the expectant faces of her daughter and grandchildren and smiles. ‘We all know how much Sam and Cat loved this place,’ she tells her audience, ‘and the inscription meant something to them. So when the chance came to take this bench over, I thought really carefully about what it should say.’ She blinks away the blurring of tears. ‘They had thirty years. They travelled and lived and loved. They wrote music and books, and spent time with us, and grew old together. We miss them.’ Her voice breaks. She glances at her youngest grandchild, who’s beginning to fidget, and makes an effort to smile. ‘Okay, who wants to see what’s under here?’

  ‘Me!’ they all shout.

  She stoops to take hold of the scarf draped across the bench. It’s a large square of multicoloured silk that once belonged to Cat, soft and worn from use.

  ‘Ta da!’ She whisks it away, revealing the seat underneath, with its fresh inscription picked out in the wood.

  Her daughter lets out a sigh. ‘It’s beautiful, Mum. They would have loved it.’

  The children clap. The littlest one clambers up onto the slats, where she pokes her fingers into the pale lettering, tracing the words.

  Grace looks at the bench, her breath held in her lungs, because she sees them there as if they are flesh and blood, their heads together, murmuring to each other, fingers interlinked. Then they are gone, and her granddaughter is there instead, smiling up at her. She scoops the little girl into her arms, kissing her plump cheek before placing her on the ground. She wonders if the invisible ghosts of all the people who talked and walked and loved in this place are here too, whispering around them, their laughter rustling the leaves.

  The two older children are playing with Cat’s silk scarf, waving it in the air, setting the colours dancing. Grace smiles. ‘Come on, you lot,’ she calls. ‘Let’s go home.’ She gestures in the direction of the valley. ‘There’s cake for tea.’

  The two women walk slowly down the hill, arms linked, with the children and the dog racing ahead before them through the rough yellow grass.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I spend hours walking my dogs in parks, through woods, on heaths, and along river banks, and whenever I come across a bench, I stop to read the inscription. It’s a compulsion which I no
w share with my characters in this novel, Cat and Sam. Like them, I peer closely at the engraved lettering, hoping for inspiration, hungry for a story; sometimes the words I find are uplifting, sometimes tragic, sometimes they make me laugh, but however unassuming or profound, they are always resonant with the human ability to love.

  Unlike a headstone, a bench can be placed somewhere that meant something to the person it’s commemorating. That powerful combination of words and place is a kind of magic, making a simple wooden seat suddenly potent with meaning – you can almost hear lost laughter and conversation, sense someone’s solitude and stillness. But a bench is also a practical object, allowing others to make their own memories sitting in the same place, creating over time a layering of different meanings. And so a bench becomes a gift to strangers – to a whole community – a symbol that stands, not just for the person that’s gone, but for our faith in the future and in each other.

  The inscriptions in this novel are quotes from benches I’ve come across on my walks in the South of England. In the interests of privacy and brevity, I have left out names and dates. The bench inscription on p. 5 is from Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 7.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A huge thank you to my editor, Emma Beswetherick, and the following people at Piatkus who do so much for me and my books: Jo Wickham, Hannah Wann, Kate Hibbert, Andy Hine, and Helena Doree. And thanks to Jane Selley for thoughtful copyediting.

  Thank you, as always, to Eve White, and Ludo Cinelli, at the Eve White Literary Agency.

  Thanks to Sara Sarre, Alex Marengo, Mary Chamberlain, Viv Graveson, Cecilia Ekback and Laura McClelland for reading early versions and giving invaluable feedback.

  Big thanks to Andy Hank Dog for his stories about the music scene in London in the 80s and 90s, and for explaining the subtleties between different types of guitar and amp.

  And finally, my family, Alex Marengo, Hannah Hayward, Olivia Hayward, Sam Hayward, Gabriel Marengo, Ana Sarginson, and Alex Sarginson. Your unfailing love and support means everything to me.

  While researching crematoriums, a book I found particularly helpful and truly fascinating was ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ by Caitlin Doughty (Canongate Books, 2015).

  Don’t miss Saskia Sarginson’s bittersweet

  coming-of-age novel steeped in Cold War history …

  Continue reading for the prologue of the novel

  PROLOGUE

  Ruby doesn’t know how the book came into her possession. Perhaps he brought it to her on one of his visits, along with armfuls of tulips and boxes of chocolates. She shows it to her visitors – the woman with the mop in her hand, the girl who blushes when she speaks – ‘Look,’ Ruby says, pointing to the name on the cover. ‘My son. Christopher Delaney.’

  It has letters picked out in scarlet, in a raised font, which is pleasing to run her finger over, like Braille, or a secret message. It takes her breath away to know that her child is the author of this novel. She reads and rereads his name, his beloved name.

  She opens the book and his words are waiting for her. But it hurts her head to concentrate on such small writing. Squinting at close-packed sentences, the letters break apart, swarming into ants that crawl onto her fingers, marching up her sleeves, tiny mouths ready to bite. She looks away, shutting the book. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t spoil the joy she feels from holding it. She likes to keep it with her, carrying it from room to room, and when it’s time for bed, she slips it under her pillow or cradles it to her breast.

  She misses proper darkness. They won’t let her cover the opening in the door where faces watch. She keeps her eyes closed and listens to the flickering hiss of lights in the corridor and feet going by; she recognises the quick click, click of someone who’s in charge, and the slow roll and halt of someone who isn’t.

  By the time the screams begin, the muffled, echoing screams, Ruby hopes for night meds to knock her out like a blow to the head. As she falls asleep, she presses her nose into the pages, inhaling the papery scent of Christopher’s words. And it feels as though she’s taking him into her lungs too, holding him inside the hidden rooms of her body. As a child, his breath smelt of apples, mint, and cinnamon chewing gum. Hedy’s did, too.

  Hedy. Her name is a hole to fall down.

  When will he come again? She needs to see him, to touch him and make sure that he’s real. She used to pat him dry after his bath, rubbing cream into the sores on his skin. She was a loving mother. Yes, she was. She must not remember the cage.

  She must not. It makes her cry, and if she cries they will come with the wires and the straps, and that will never do, because she’s good now, isn’t she? She has privileges, like keeping a novel on the cabinet beside her bed. Like spending the afternoon in the garden when it’s warm. None of them suspect that while she sits on the wooden bench with her eyes closed, fingers linked, her face tilted to catch the breeze, she’s decoding the humming of bees in the roses, tuning in to the whispering of her name over and over: Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. Todd’s voice, telling her that he’ll be here soon to bring her home, back to Iowa. Across the ocean. Back to the two children playing in the yard, blond heads together under the burning sun.

  How It Ends is available in paperback and ebook now.