by Lucy Lawrie
There was a determination on her face that made me understand that her love encompassed all roles. It was the love of a wife, and a best friend. It was a maternal love.
‘Think about it, dear. Think about all the things you did for Sophie when she was tiny. Babies don’t know what’s going on, they can’t understand what’s being said to them. But we read stories to them, we sing to them, we dress them in nice clothes. We talk to them even though they don’t understand. Just because Gerry’s at the end of his life rather than the beginning, why should that make any difference?’
I thought about pushing Sophie round the park in her pram, pointing out the flowers, the pond, the ducks, and the pigeons for the thousandth time, as her gaze drifted upwards to the trees and the sky. Jean was right; we have faith that it sinks in somehow, that they can feel love in the air all around them even if they can’t give it a name.
And now Sophie was bigger, it was the same but different. I thought about the picture books I had to read ten times over each night, the interminable games of peekaboo which were only allowed to end when she got bored. I thought about how I’d learned to make her laugh when she was pouting, by tickling the corner of her mouth; the way I had to remember to take her sippy cup everywhere, and her favourite grey bunny. In a few years there would be homework to help with, and swimming lessons to drive her to, worries to be listened to. And so it would go on throughout a lifetime together – small, everyday acts, fixing the love in place, again and again and again.
Jean sat down next to me on the sofa and picked up a photograph album from the coffee table. ‘Have a look at this. Gerry bought this yesterday, and he’s been going through the old photographs, finding the ones he wants to put in.’
I turned to the first photograph, and she leaned over me, pointing.
‘Here, see . . . now this is the church where we got married. Beautiful, isn’t it? A draughty old place in the middle of nowhere.’
‘But this isn’t . . .’ The picture showed Jean, wearing her raincoat and a headscarf over her white curls, standing smiling by the door of the church.
‘No, not our wedding day, no! Gerry and I pop back from time to time. This was last summer – we were driving home from visiting friends one evening, and we stopped by as we were passing. There was nobody about and we just took a wander around the churchyard.’
She turned the page before I could say anything.
‘And here’s Robert’s first day of school. Our son, you know. Lives in London now. See his uniform? So smart. The toes were out of those shoes in a matter of weeks, though. We didn’t go back to that shop. Oh, and here’s a picture of that snowman we built on Christmas morning . . . that Christmas back in the Eighties when it actually snowed, do you remember?’
‘Yes. I do . . .’ An image flashed into my mind – my mother taking me sledging near Corstorphine Hill.
‘Oh my, look at these sunflowers! I’d forgotten about them . . . the ones that grew so tall that very hot summer . . . when was that, now? See how small I look standing next to them? And Robert just a wee baby.’
She turned the page as if to move on, but the rest of the pages in the album were blank.
‘Ah, that’s as far as he’s got then. He wanted to do more this afternoon, but he’ll probably sleep till tea time now, bless him.’
‘It’s . . . lovely.’
‘Oh, have I forgotten the sugar? I’ll just go and get it. Have a look at the inside cover. It’s T.S. Eliot, Gerry said.’
She disappeared off to the kitchen with a shuddery breath, her hand squirrelling in her pocket for a tissue. I wondered if I should go after her, but then . . . I found the place where Gerry had written his inscription.
It was just a few lines in shaky handwriting.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
It was from Four Quartets. I’d studied it for my final-year dissertation, but the words had never hit home like this. Something was falling into place, at the back of my mind, just out of reach. I closed my eyes and seemed to see Jean sitting with Gerry, on this very sofa, in a few years’ time. She was going through the album with him, coaxing him to remember names and places that were slipping into the relentless swirl of the past. And I realised that the act of remembering these moments – fiercely reclaiming them, with love – was as valid as the lived experiences themselves. Reworking the past into the present, like kneading dough, so that each could help make sense of the other. Layer upon layer of love, over the years.
And the bravery needed to do it, to feel that love, in the shadow of a goodbye that was so close now . . .
Hearing a voice, I opened my eyes. It was Gerry. He was looking across at me. At first, I thought he was halfway between sleep and waking. He spoke as if through a dream, low and toneless, sounding somehow very far away. I realised that he was quoting from the poem.
. . . Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And that was it. The lines of my world shifted and refigured themselves in a different pattern.
Relief flowed through me, as profound as anything I’d experienced. I didn’t need to dread what I didn’t know, didn’t need to know the end of the story. I already had what I was looking for, and nothing could take it away from me.
And there we sat, Gerry and I, with tears streaming down our faces, all in silence except for the hiss of the gas fire. Overwhelmed by the appallingness, the beauty of it all.
36
Jonathan and I sat down with the worry stone every night that week. I kept pretending to forget, but my husband, once he has decided on a course of action, can be very stubborn.
I learned some new things about him. I found out that one of his greatest fears was that he would drop down dead one day, like his dad, leaving me and Sophie to fend for ourselves. I found out that Stephen had a tendency to depression, and that Jonathan worried constantly about him. I found out that he feared I would eventually become bored with his work commitments and long hours, and leave him. I found out that I had damn nearly broken his heart, with the business over Malkie.
I squirmed with embarrassment when it was my turn. He had a notepad, and made bullet points as I listed my anxieties. He made me list each thing, first rating its severity out of ten, secondly articulating what made it so worrying, and thirdly speculating as to what might help resolve it. And he didn’t say a word.
It was hard going to begin with. Even with the dizziness question tentatively resolved, there were a host of other intractable worries. They all sounded so shameful, so shocking, out loud. But after a few days, something strange happened. I began to get a little bored.
‘Do you mind if we just miss out motor neurone disease tonight?’ I said.
‘Fine,’ said Jonathan, looking at his list. ‘Shall we downgrade that one to “inactive” status? That means that we don’t need to discuss it again unless there are any further developments, for example new symptoms.’
‘Or, maybe, if I’ve seen a particularly scary documentary on TV.’
‘Exactly,’ said Jonathan with characteristic enthusiasm, drawing a big arrow across his page, and creating a new column. ‘And you could downgrade your worry that I’ll murder the whole family in my sleep.’ He shrugged. ‘Only if you want to.’
I nodded. ‘Okay – fair enough. You have been sleeping much better recently.’
He glanced up at me with just a glimmer of insecurity in his eyes. ‘You know, I think I’ll downgrade my Malkie one, too. No new developments expected there.’
I leant over the table and gave him a kiss.
*
On Sunday evening we sat down for another worry stone session. I’d just got Sophie off to bed while Jonathan spoke to his mother on
the phone. Fortified by a small glass of wine over dinner, he’d finally screwed up the courage and asked the question he’d been running away from all these years.
‘Well?’ I asked, handing him the stone. ‘What did she say?’
‘She doesn’t know,’ he said, his voice shaking. ‘She said that she had a “one-time thing” with Mr C. around about the time she got pregnant with me. So there’s a chance that he is my father. She doesn’t know whether Dad knew about it or not. But she thinks he guessed about the later affair, the one that took place the year before he died. So maybe, at that point, he noticed the similarity between us and put two and two together. I don’t know.’
I put my hand over his.
‘I’m sure he knew, Cassie. I’ve been trying to remember it, you know, that final argument. The look on his face, it wasn’t shock. It was more like anger. But I don’t think it was anger at me. It was kind of a protective look. A tigress with her cubs sort of look.’
I nodded and we sat in silence for a minute.
Then it was time. ‘I’ve got you something, Jonathan.’
‘A book?’ he said, taking it from me and tearing off the wrapping.
‘A book, yes, and a sort of idea . . . something I want to try and pass on. Something that I’d never dreamed of trying to talk about before we got the stone.’ I wouldn’t have been brave enough, I’d have feared a swift change of subject or a belittling laugh.
He nodded and passed the stone to me, signaling that he wouldn’t interrupt.
I felt my face redden as I took the risk and opened my heart.
‘You see, Jonathan, real love, the kind that lasts a lifetime . . . it comes from ordinary things, tiny acts of love, moments that pass by and you barely register them. It builds up in layers over days and weeks and years. And while you’re not noticing, it turns into something else, something way beyond those things, something that can’t be touched. I know, because I saw it – Jean and Gerry have that kind of love. And from what I’ve heard about your dad, I’m sure he had it for you. Jonathan, don’t you see? That’s why one argument on one miserable rainy school morning couldn’t possibly have mattered.’
I opened the book at the bookmark I’d left, and let Jonathan read the page, and the lines I’d marked.
. . . Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
He stared at the page, his face blank until his mouth twisted into a line and his forehead crumpled. His face fell into his hands and his shoulders heaved with silent sobs.
*
It took an hour for him to cry it all out. I held him and shushed him, the way I’d learned to do with Sophie in those dark lonely hours of the night.
Finally I felt his body go quiet.
‘Jonathan?’ I whispered.
He gave a deep, shuddering sigh and looked up at me, looked me straight in the eye.
‘You and me, Cassie. We’re going to have that kind of love.’
37
Three weeks later, Jonathan, Sophie and I were waiting to board a flight, comfortably ensconced in seats by the window in Edinburgh Airport’s departure lounge.
Jonathan had bought fruit pastilles, three packets each, to help our ears with the ascents and descents. And he had six tiny packets of raisins for Sophie.
‘So,’ he said, checking the tickets and boarding passes. ‘We should get to Granny Britt’s at about half past eight. Are you sure we’ve got enough food for Sophie? I could go to Boots if you’re not sure.’
‘No, I think it’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘I’m sure we could pick up some baby food somewhere if we’re delayed. Or yoghurt, at least.’ Sophie was going through a yoghurt craze.
‘We should think of this as a test trip,’ said Jonathan. ‘If we manage the flights okay, we could think about visiting Stephen and Moira later in the year. Or even Helen – she’s been pestering us to go and stay, hasn’t she?’
‘We could do all sorts of things,’ I agreed, feeling a little flutter rise in my stomach. ‘Let’s see if the raisins work.’
It was a warm day, for April, and the sun was streaming in through the windows. Being the Easter holidays, there were lots of families there. The kids looked as if they’d been wound up, running around in circles, pressing their noses up against the windows to look at the planes.
Sophie toddled over to the windows with Jonathan, and eyed the planes seriously for a minute. She pointed her finger at the nearest plane, looked up into her daddy’s adoring face, and said, ‘Duck’. Then, satisfied with this categorisation, she toddled back over to me and climbed up into my lap.
I settled her on to my knee, my arms securely round her, and imagined my grandmother’s house: wooden, dark and a little cold inside. I pictured the rickety wooden gate into her rambling overgrown garden, with its gnarled, stunted apple trees and climbing roses. I pictured myself climbing the wooden stairs up to the spare attic bedroom, which always made me feel like Heidi climbing up to her hayloft to sleep.
I imagined the room itself, light and sunny at the top of the house, the window looking over the garden and on, out to the sea in the distance. The bed with its white sheets and pillows, the crochet bedspread which had once been my father’s.
And now Sophie would see all this too – it would be set down deep in the layers of her memory, as it had been mine.
A boarding call came over the tannoy, making me jump.
‘It’s okay,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s for the next gate along, not us. Look, that queue at Costa has gone down. I’ll go and get you some hot chocolate.’
I nodded happily, then glanced over towards the neighbouring gate. To my surprise, I saw the small, duffel-coated figure of Milly Watkinson (or, I suppose, more prosaically, Milly McCabe) hopping on one leg towards the desk to have her ticket checked. A tall man in a dark coat was scrambling up from his seat and calling out, ‘Milly, wait, there’s a queue!’
Milly darted between the legs of the other passengers to get to the front. For once, nobody seemed to mind, and they smiled indulgently. The tall man followed her to the desk, shaking his head and apologising to the crowd as he went.
‘Ma-ma?’ said Sophie pulling a lock of my hair. I turned my head round and kissed her cheek. When I looked back a moment later the crowd had drawn round them and I couldn’t see any more. But then I heard the pounding of small feet running down the walkway towards the plane and the man shouting, ‘Milly, wait!’ Then they were gone.
It would be too much to say that Milly looked happy. I suppose she looked kind of neutral. All I could say was that she was there, she was being looked after, she was on her way somewhere; a little girl hopping through an airport lounge.
And it would be too much to say that I felt, as I sat there, a warmth, a pressure in the air, something watchful, surveying the same scene from the empty seat just to the left of me. Probably it was my brain skipping ahead of my senses for a moment, noticing that it would be easy to imagine such a thing, playing with the idea of how it would feel. Or perhaps it was my imagination working hard to tell me that a scene can always be seen from another perspective, from somewhere outside of myself.
But suddenly, in that bustling airport lounge, with everyone around us heading off to different places, for purposes and reasons known only to them, to see people that I would never meet and never know, I was overcome, for a moment, with an intoxicating sense of embarking on a journey.
Jonathan appeared at my side with my cup of hot chocolate. He carefully took Sophie on to his knee so that I could drink it. I looked at the two of them, the way she melted against the shape of him, the way his arm curved protectively round her.
‘I like airports,’ said Jonathan happily.
‘Ducks,’ added Sophie.
‘Yes, Sophie. I like those too. Isn’t it exciting?’
‘Ma-ma-ma-ma!’ she chirped, holding out her arms to me with a big wide smile, her one-year-old self bursting with a des
ire to feel more, see more, know more.
I put down my drink, picked her up, and carried her over to the window.
Epilogue
So that’s the end. I say ‘the end’, but who really knows what will happen? Jonathan might lose his job tomorrow and slide into depression like his brother. One of my suspicious symptoms might turn out to be something after all. Sophie might grow up to become a teenage goth, or move to Australia.
And what about now? I still worry, of course I do. But I’ve learned to step back a little, to trace my anxieties back to their roots.
I’ve realised that part of it comes from the fear that I’m not good enough, not grown-up enough, to function in this world; that I will someday be caught out and discovered. But now, if I catch myself worrying about such things, I close my eyes and imagine what I would say to Sophie if she told me, as a young woman, that she felt that way. And the tremendous tide of my belief in her, my faith in her and everything she is, would surely sweep those concerns away in an instant.
The other worries: about Sophie, about dying and disaster, about whether my marriage is safe, are tributaries that can be traced back to a single source – that I will somehow be wrenched from those people who make up the core of me. Sometimes these fears rush at me, threatening to sweep me away; but sometimes they’re just a background trickle, barely detectable on a sunny day. Either way, I now respect them for what they are. They mark the place of love, are inextricably linked with it.
But I can’t let them overwhelm me, can’t let them get in the way of the day-to-day business of love: the plump, splashy ritual of Sophie’s bath time; the distracting songs necessary to facilitate toothbrushing, hair washing, and long car journeys; making banana sandwiches with the crusts cut off; winter evenings in front of the television; afternoon tea at the bookshop café on a Saturday afternoon.