by Alice Jolly
I am sorry, he says. I am very, very sorry.
Please, Ahmed, don’t. It’s kind of you but really – Jay made his choices.
But still he holds her hand, and says again that he’s sorry. She’s never noticed before that he’s beautiful – his face dark and feline, the features painted in with the finest lines of the brush. Slowly she unfolds, lays her head against his shoulder, feels tears spilling onto her cheeks. But she isn’t only crying for Jay, she’s crying for the gulf which divides her from Ahmed and always will. For despite his dignity, despite her head, briefly, awkwardly on his shoulder, she can never understand. Even though Jay is dead that makes no difference. Still Jay will have to be put aside, cannot be compared to the loss of half a family, a whole life. A country where story has broken down into strings of meaningless events, a cacophony of senseless babble. Once she would have hated Ahmed for this and still the embers of hate burn – but she also knows that it’s right that she should always stand aside for him. Even grief has its leagues and now she sees that may be part of its value.
Jay made his choices, they all did. And what’s happened is due to the squalid little mistakes and petty grievances of their lives. And there is no bridge to be built. No lessons to be learnt, although they may create some. She – and all of them here – have been given the bright and brilliant gift of the day, the fact of being alive. And this is the way in which they have squandered it. Affluence and security have led them to nothing but folly and trivia. Lara sees all this but surely she must have atoned enough by now? She was only ever an averagely bad mother.
Martha appears holding Lara’s mobile. Patricia, she says. Lara takes the phone. Patricia’s voice is calm, distant, stretched thin as silk. She confirms what Lara’s already been told about the bomb and the market. So he’d been dead all of yesterday and nobody knew. At the hospital Hans identified him because of the T-shirt, Patricia said. There was no doubt. If only there could be some corner of doubt. But he was wearing this T-shirt, black with the Empire State Building and – New York, New York. He was given it by an American soldier. And Hans spoke to the doctor, who said that it would not have made any difference when they took him to the hospital because there was no hope.
Lara clenches her teeth. She wonders about the T-shirt. Was that the only way they could identify him? And there had never been any hope. What did that mean? For a moment, her mind fills with shattered bone, fragments of flesh, dismembered limbs, organs crushed like over-ripe fruit, pools of blood – but she pulls herself away. She will not ask, not now.
Patricia says, Someone here said it is like he committed suicide slowly. But this is not right because he was very happy when he died. I saw him that morning and he was happy like a lamb in spring. He has gone running into death with his eyes and his arms wide open. I told him many times that he would die and he knew that and he said he felt no anger for anyone, only love and that if the time came he would go quite willingly.
Lara clenches her teeth, whimpers inwardly. She says thank you to Patricia, assures her that she’ll call soon to let her know. But let her know what? What is there now to know? Lara hands the phone to Wilf, bites back a wave of pain. Around her old patterns are re-establishing themselves. Martha and Mollie are competing over who should make the tea. Mr Lambert can’t be expected to hold out much longer. And Mollie is starting to talk about the Coventry Blitz and a white house with the back window blown out but a woman and a child still asleep in the bed. Mollie doesn’t understand what has happened, of course. But right now they all need to fail to understand. The era of being irritated by Mollie’s tepid washing-up water is at an end.
And as Mollie speaks, Rufus is firing himself up, as he must do, so that Mollie can be more than the outline of a person. For a moment, Lara thinks back to that evening when Rufus and Mollie found out that she was pregnant with Jay. This morning at least is not like that. The difference matters. Lara asks herself yet again – what happened to my mother? Why is she only the outline of a person? So vivid and present and yet not here? Was it all to do with that earlier war, Coventry? Lara will never know. She sees her parents now as very young people – blameless, and ignorant. Unprotected. Just starting out in the world. As though the years have peeled away from them and left them all quite fresh again. With skin almost too sensitive to touch. This is what Jay has done to them.
You can have them operated on, Mr Lambert says to Martha. But a friend of mine went down that road and he’s never been able to sit down again.
Terrible, Martha says. Tea? Coffee?
Coventry? Could you just shut up about Coventry? Rufus says.
But Lara can feel none of the old anger now. In this new and brutal landscape the old patterns are comforting. All of them now have crossed into a world where kindness, forgiveness, is all that can save them. They at least owe Jay that. Lara remembers his letter – all I know with certainty is that every day you make the choice.
I’ve warmed up that bacon sandwich for you, Martha says.
Oliver comes to sit beside her, lays his hand over hers. Yes, kindness. Perhaps that’s all God ever was. Jemmy’s courage, Rufus’s glorious fit of temper, Sebastian alive still in his watery world, Martha with the warmed-up bacon sandwich which Lara will never eat now. And the woman in Baghdad singing a lullaby to her children, the old man who befriended Jay, close to death but joyful. Here it is possible to find a small and failing God in whom they can all trust.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book took an extremely long time to write and so I am grateful, first and foremost, to all those kind friends who tactfully decided not to question my sanity as year rolled on from year and no book emerged. I am also truly grateful to all those people who pledged for this book through the Unbound website. Without your generosity, support and enthusiasm, I would not still be writing. There are also many who are not able to offer financial support but, nevertheless, cheer heartily from the sidelines. I am equally grateful to them. In particular, I should like to thank John Boyle, Loretta Stanley, Jeannette Cook and Martin Westlake of the Brussels Writers Group. Susannah Rickards patiently read many drafts of this book and Clare Andrews was also a committed early reader. Kathleen Jones always offers a word of wisdom when I need it and Clare Dunkel regularly comes out with brutal but necessary comments on the challenges of being a writer. Caroline Sanderson, Paola Schweitzer and Amanda Holmes Duffy are endlessly supportive. The title of this book comes from a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye called ‘Kindness’. I would like to thank her for that poem and for all the thoughts that those wonderful lines inspired. I am also grateful to everyone at the Quaker Meeting Houses in Brussels and Nailsworth and to my colleagues on the Oxford Master of Studies in Creative Writing. My agent Victoria Hobbs at A. M. Heath is always there when I need advice or help. Mark Ecob was responsible for creating a cover which I absolutely love. My family doubtless find it impossible to live with a writer in the house but manage not to say so. Thank you to them for their patience. Finally, of course, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all those at Unbound who have made this book possible – John Mitchinson, Dan Kieran, Anna Simpson, Imogen Denny, Xander Cansell, Amy Winchester, Georgia Odd and Caitlin Davies.
SUPPORTERS
Unbound is a new kind of publishing house. Our books are funded directly by readers. This was a very popular idea during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Now we have revived it for the internet age. It allows authors to write the books they really want to write and readers to support the books they would most like to see published.
The names listed below are of readers who have pledged their support and made this book happen. If you’d like to join them, visit www.unbound.com.
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This edition first published in 2019
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© Alice Jolly, 2019
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