Tiny Acts of Love

by Lucy Lawrie

  Leaving today for job in London. Packing up the flat. Drop by if you have a chance. I’ll be here till four. Malkie.

  Leaving. The word slammed into my chest, making it hard to breathe. I’d done so well, pushing him to the back of my thoughts the last few weeks. Seeing him would undo all that effort in an instant. But if I wanted to say goodbye, it would have to be now. Did I want to? My hand seemed to think I did, since it moved up and flicked the indicator from left to right.

  In minutes I was there, outside Malkie’s flat. I double-parked behind a white van which had its flashers on and its back doors wide open. There were piles of boxes inside, and an old sofa which I recognised as Malkie’s.

  How many times over the years had I imagined doing this again – ringing the buzzer, walking up the tenement stairs, softly knocking at the black door on the top floor. But it was the small details that got me now. I’d forgotten the tangle of dusty spider plants at the door of the neighbouring flat. I’d forgotten the view from the stairwell window onto the back of the next tenement, the patches of green blooming around the downpipes, the row of narrow bathroom windows with their dingy net curtains.

  ‘Hey,’ he said as he opened the door. Scruffy, in fraying jeans and a grey university t-shirt, he stood aside to let me in. My insides lurched with unequivocal desire. But as I walked into the hall and breathed in the musty, damp stone smell – the same smell from all those years ago – the desire dissolved into a sadness so heavy I could hardly move.

  ‘Well, come in, then!’ He gave me a playful shove and closed the door behind us. ‘Cup of tea? Actually, sorry, the kettle’s gone. Can of Irn Bru? Sandwich from Greggs?’

  ‘No, it’s okay. Thanks.’

  He led me through the hallway towards the bedroom-sitting room. It was empty, the bay window and the ugly stone fireplace standing out as the only features. Even the grey velvet curtains had gone. The rucked up navy carpet – an offcut that Malkie had fitted himself – showed a darker, deeper-piled square against the wall where the bed had stood.

  This room. It had been the stage for so many scenes played out between us. A drawn-out drama of intense highs and lows, cut off from the ordinary life going on outside. I remembered how everyday things – chatting about our days, watching television, settling down to sleep, getting dressed in the morning – had all been oddly charged with unreality. There had been a sense that we were acting it out, that we couldn’t quite get inside the relationship we were supposed to be having.

  And the room had stayed tucked away in my mind for years afterwards, the same scenes playing in endless loops in an attempt to understand it all – what went wrong, what could have been. It was strange to think that it had been here all along, looking the same, smelling the same, in a solid world outside of my imagination. Where had it been most real, I wondered, in the world or in my head?

  I sat down cross-legged on the fluffy square of carpet, on what would have been my side of the bed. He sat down next to me.

  ‘So . . . you’re going to London? That was quick.’

  ‘Yeah. Ach well, they offered me my old job back. McKeith’s weren’t keen on me working my notice. In fact, Radcliffe pretty much turfed me out on the spot. It’s fine though. No point in hanging about. There’s nothing for me in Edinburgh now.’

  ‘So you’re selling the flat?’

  ‘Yup. Had an offer the day it went on the market.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?’

  ‘I didn’t want to make a fuss. Didn’t want you to try and stop me. You’d made your feelings clear.’

  I nodded. I’d come across more resolute than I’d felt, obviously. A good thing, all things considered.

  ‘So this is it,’ he said, with a lift of his eyebrow. ‘The end of Cassie and Malkie.’

  There was a wry, self-deprecating note to his voice. He was trying to take the edge off the goodbye. But I knew I needed to speak straight and true.

  ‘It is the end, isn’t it. And I’ve loved you for such a long time.’

  He looked awkwardly at his trainers, biting his lip and fiddling with the Velcro straps. It reminded me of how he’d looked after our first night together, when we’d sat on the grass in the summer heat of Princes Street Gardens, overwhelmed with feelings neither of us knew what to do with.

  The thought seemed to take all the energy out of me. I uncurled my body and lay down on my side, on the carpet. He lay down too, facing me, close enough to breathe each other in.

  ‘You’ll always be part of me. In here.’ I held my hand to my throat, which felt tight with tears. ‘But in the real world . . . well, there’s nothing left for us.’

  There was no reply, other than the look in his eyes. I committed his face to memory for the last time. The freckle above his lip; the two tiny white spots under the lower lashes of his right eye; his eyebrows, too dark against waxy skin; the blue eyes, too close together. Flawed, perfect, part of me. But not part of my life, not any more.

  He squeezed his eyes tight for a second, then rolled on to his front, his face buried in his hands.

  ‘Goodbye, Malkie.’ I gathered myself into a sitting position, rested my hand on his shoulder briefly, then stood up and walked away. The hurt was physical – I felt as though I was leaving a part of myself lying next to him on that patchy carpet.

  As I walked out, I breathed in the musty stone smell again, and knew, now, why it had made me so sad. It was the smell of the quiet despair of those wintry Saturdays, those cold, bright Sunday mornings, shot through with longing, and the knowledge, held deep down inside me, that I would never really be his. It was despair that belonged to then, not now . . . and it was time to leave it behind in this empty flat, with all the other ghosts.

  *

  I was paying for my groceries when I felt a hand on my arm.

  ‘Hello, Cassie dear.’

  It was Jean Forrester, and Gerry behind her pushing the trolley. I was shocked to see that Jean looked older, paler, the lines etched more deeply on her face, her usually stiff white curls somewhat wilted. And Gerry looked just plain miserable.

  We went to the café. We talked about Brand New You for a while. Jean confirmed that everything was fine, that she was taking Gerry into work with her again. She described the new arrangements at some length, but it almost seemed like she didn’t care about any of it any more. And Gerry, instead of adding his usual nods of concurrence, just stared down at his teacup throughout Jean’s monologue, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.

  ‘Is something wrong, Jean?’ I asked finally. ‘You don’t seem yourself today.’

  Jean sighed. She shot a glance at Gerry and then fixed her gaze on me. ‘Gerry has Alzheimer’s. We’d been hoping it was something else, a temporary thing. A thyroid problem, Marjory Parkinson from next door had said. But no – now the doctors say they’re pretty sure.’

  So this was to be the end of Jean and Gerry’s story. The blankest, the emptiest of fates. I had witnessed my grandmother’s slow, relentless descent into the abyss of dementia – Granny Woods, I used to call her, to distinguish her from Granny Britt. Until I saw it happening, I used to think it was almost just a natural part of growing old, a gentle, creeping fuzziness. I didn’t appreciate how it could gnaw its way through your brain like a cancer, slowly stripping you of not only your memory, your faculties, your dignity, but ultimately your personality, perhaps your very soul itself.

  To see Granny Woods, who had been a kind, dignified person, become paranoid, aggressive, even violent, had been hard for me as a young teenager, but for my mother, it had caused unthinkable pain. She told me once that the guilt was the worst thing; wishing her own mother dead, praying for that final release.

  ‘Oh no,’ I breathed, my voice catching. ‘Not that.’

  Gerry, sitting opposite me across the Formica table, stirring his tea with a white plastic stirrer, didn’t say anything. But I could see the look in his eyes. He knew what his fate would be. What coul
d be worse than knowing that everything that made you you would be mercilessly unraveled and emptied out of you?

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Well, we’re going to take this one step at a time.’ Her voice was strong and level. ‘He’s going to take part in a drug trial which may hopefully slow the disease down. And it varies a lot from one individual to another . . . sometimes people can stay relatively stable for years.’

  ‘I’ve made her promise to pack me off to a home as soon as she’s had enough of me,’ said Gerry. ‘Or arsenic in the soup, perhaps,’ he added thoughtfully.

  We finished our tea and cake. As Jean and Gerry gathered their things up to go, I felt a rush of sadness at the idea that I might never see them again, now that the case was fully resolved.

  ‘You know, Jean,’ I said. ‘That cake was really dreadful, wasn’t it. Mass-produced, I would think. I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a cake as good as that raspberry sponge. What did you say the name of that baker was?’

  ‘Well, dear,’ Jean said, ‘I think his order book’s full, for the raspberry sponge. I don’t think you would be able to get it. Oh dear, I don’t know what to suggest. Why don’t you come round next week, for a bit of tea and cake? The whole sponge is really too large for just the two of us.’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said.

  *

  When I got back home, I gathered up my courage and emailed Helen, filling her in on the events of the past few months, saying I was sorry for not confiding in her. I asked if we could establish a regular time to talk – because life was too short, and altogether too tricky, to try and manage without your friends.

  And then I spent the rest of the afternoon making Malkie’s Secret Recipe Bolognese (the secret being four tins of tomatoes for every pound of mince). It was dark outside – the rain that had been threatening all day had finally begun to fall – but the kitchen was bright and warm. Sophie played with crayons at the table while Dita rolled pastry and peeled the apples for a blackberry and apple pie. Jonathan browsed the internet looking for villas in Italy, for a much-dreamed-about summer holiday. This was good; it was life, it was growing, it was making plans. I pictured Malkie, powering down the motorway to London, and his flat, empty and dark now, rain battering against blank windows.

  I stood by the cooker, leaning on the work surface and flicking through recipe books, stirring the Bolognese every few minutes. I stirred all my sadness into it – for Milly and her mother, for Jean and Gerry, for the damage I’d inflicted on my marriage these past few months, for the time I would never spend with Malkie in this lifetime.

  But it was happiness and satisfaction – not loss and longing – that I felt when we sat down to eat later. Jonathan opened a bottle of red wine we’d been saving, poured a glass for Dita and me. Happily oblivious to the origins of the recipe, he appeared to enjoy the food, making appreciative noises as he twirled spaghetti round his fork. And Sophie, who hadn’t been eating well recently, pressed it into her mouth with her hands, her little, pink-socked feet swinging vigorously under the seat of her high chair. Intent on watching her, I almost forgot to eat. Because it was a tiny miracle – my history, the richness of my experience, being converted into the very cells of my daughter’s body. And finding itself all the way up my kitchen walls, too, spaghetti, and toddlers, being what they are.

  As I cleaned up afterwards, while Jonathan bathed Sophie upstairs, and their singing drifted through the house, I felt fine. Maybe I will always think of Malkie when the light falls in a certain way on September afternoons. But I will smile, and go on with my life.

  32

  That night, I decided to take Jonathan away for the weekend. If our marriage was going to turn a corner, if we were going to start talking, then now was the time.

  Practically speaking, it was our last opportunity to do it for a while – Dita was leaving on Monday, to attend to some matters in Holland. She’d assured me that she’d be delighted to take care of Sophie for a couple of days, and I booked a bed and breakfast at Glen Eddle, a remote corner in the south-eastern Grampians – a quiet place where we could do some walking and clear our heads.

  Jonathan finished work early on the Friday afternoon, and we hurriedly packed the car and left, waving to Dita, who was standing at the front door with a bemused Sophie in her arms. My stomach was turning over at the thought of leaving my baby overnight, some dark (but by now very familiar) part of my mind wondering if she would still be alive by the time I got back.

  ‘It feels strange leaving her, doesn’t it?’ I said as we made our way towards the Forth Road Bridge.

  ‘Yes – it’s ages since we’ve been anywhere. Did you check whether they do a full Scottish breakfast?’

  I shrugged. I wasn’t going to be waylaid by discussion of breakfasts.

  ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Elliot McCabe, and his daughter-in-law.’

  He grunted.

  ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking about them a lot. It makes every ordinary moment with Sophie seem more precious.’ I didn’t add that my anxieties had quietly climbed to full pitch since hearing the details of Ann’s illness. I didn’t add that I felt disgusted with myself at this, when other people had real problems to contend with. And I didn’t add that the dizzy spells were coming on so frequently that I was scared to drive. I needed a cue from him first.

  ‘Did you remember to put my walking socks in?’ he asked. ‘They were on the dryer in the kitchen.’

  We drove on, eventually leaving the motorway and taking a complicated route through a network of narrow country roads. The landscape changed, the flat agricultural land ending abruptly as we entered the Angus Glens and the foothills of the Grampians. The last part of the journey, into Glen Eddle itself, was along a single-track road, which wound along the side of a scree-covered slope. Mountains rose sharply on either side of us, dark against a fading violet sky.

  The farmhouse where we were taking bed and breakfast was, quite literally, at the end of the road – or at least the point where the road turned into a forest track. Jonathan brought the bags in from the car, and the farmer’s wife, Mrs Petrie, showed us to our room. She led us up a narrow, steep stairway, with a treacherously worn orange carpet.

  Our room was basic and didn’t seem to have been updated since the 1950s. The bed was a squashy double, covered in a white candlewick bedspread. The furniture comprised a bedside table and a tall dresser, both in dark wood, and a single high-backed chair.

  Mrs Petrie wished us a pleasant night, and left. The old-fashioned room seemed forgiving, gentle, like returning to a grandparents’ house once visited as a child. Something unwound a fraction inside me, and a deep shuddery sigh escaped me as I fell back onto the lumpy bed.

  We slept for nine soothing, uninterrupted hours that night. In the morning, Mrs Petrie made us an enormous cooked breakfast that satisfied even Jonathan, and we put on our walking things and set off to climb the highest of the mountains surrounding the glen.

  The route took us through the forest to begin with. Liquid, early morning light played through the branches, falling in pools on the forest floor; and it was quiet in there, even the noise of the river was hushed. The track climbed steadily until we reached the deer fence, crossing a wooden stile that brought us out onto bare, open hills. We picked our way along the hillside, crunching over streams that trickled over the path at intervals, gravel sparkling under the surface.

  We reached the summit at lunchtime. We huddled together in the shelter of a rocky outcrop and ate the cheese sandwiches Mrs Petrie had made for us. I studied the view across the glen, and far down the valley to the south, where the river meandered as the plain widened.

  On the way down we took a different route, and scrambled down a stony gully into a wide corrie, a hollow scoured out of the mountainside by glaciers in unimaginable years gone by. We could see a waterfall, a thin white ribbon twisting down the rock, and I wanted to see it up close so we set off across the heather. It was further than
it looked, and to see the larger cascades we had to clamber up the steep rocks for some way, before pulling ourselves up on to a shelf of boulder that would pass for a viewing platform.

  I stood, lost in the water as it tumbled over the rocks, pounding into a black swirling pool at the bottom. Every so often the breeze lifted the spray onto our faces. The beauty of it, the way it filled all my senses, made my throat ache. When Jonathan turned to go, I could hardly bear to follow him.

  We got back to the farm at four-ish, as the light was starting to fade. The wind was icy now, and the sheep were huddling together in clumps near the river. When I peeled my boots and walking socks off, flexing battered, exhausted feet, my body seemed to glow. We climbed the orange stairs to our bedroom and slept for an hour.

  Later that night, I suggested we go for a walk; it was a clear night and there was a viewpoint up behind the farmhouse. The farmer’s wife lent us her torch, and we set off.

  We let our eyes adjust to the dark, agreeing we would only use the torch if we got lost. Sound and touch became everything: the roar of the river, the crack of twigs under our feet, Jonathan’s strong, warm hand taking mine. It was the first time he’d touched me since Glenallan House. After ten minutes’ steep climb we came out of the trees at the viewpoint.

  There was a narrow bench and we sat down. The coal black mountains were just traceable against the sky. They seemed to have a presence in the darkness, waiting, perhaps, to see how this was going to play out.

  I searched for the right words, words that would spark a connection. But the longer I sat twisting my fingers in my lap, the more uncertain I became. The outcome of all this seemed inevitable. This space between us was just too wide. Even if I could find the words and throw them out there into the darkness, I sensed that their meaning would dissipate before they made it across to him. Misinterpreted, misunderstood, they would simply disappear into the void. So we would sit here for five or ten minutes, and walk back to the house. Then tomorrow morning we would pack up our things and drive back to Edinburgh, slot back into normal life, and go on as before.