Chapter 4
I wouldn’t have been late meeting Marjorie at the care home on Saturday if I hadn’t been so stupid on Friday night. So very, very stupid.
I should have politely declined Mattias’ dinner invitation. But he was persuasive, and after the wedding, I was happy to see a normal man.
As uninviting as the rainy February night was, it was comforting to walk through our neighbourhood to the flat. We’d scoured every up-and-coming area north of the river together to find one we could afford. It had the world’s tiniest double bedroom, but a big open-plan living area, and it had been home for many years. Catching sight of it as I rounded the corner gave my stomach a little tickle. A lot of lovely memories were wrapped up there. It did feel weird ringing the bell, though. Proof positive that I was an outsider now.
‘You look lovely,’ Mattias said as we hugged hello at the front door. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I have a surprise. I’m celebrating.’
‘You are? Ooh, tell me.’ I followed him through to the kitchen, staring at his broad back. Everything was so familiar. I fought a wave of nostalgia.
‘We had a great meeting today,’ he said as we entered the spotless kitchen. As the cook in the family, he ran a tight ship in there. ‘We’re getting the contract!’
Mattias’ urban planning company won contracts about once every thousand years. It was big news. ‘Fantastic! But why aren’t you all out together getting drunk?’
‘The guys had to go home after work. Mark’s wife needed him to mind the children and Alex already had plans with his girlfriend. So I thought I’d offer some dinner in exchange for a willing partner in crime.’
‘Oh.’ He had nobody to go home to. I ignored the stabbing guilt. ‘Well, I’m glad you called. I’m always happy to celebrate.’
‘Good, because it’s a champagne night. Get the bottle, will you? It’s in the freezer,’ he said, getting glasses from the cabinet with the wonky door that had needed fixing since we moved in. ‘Tell me about your day. Any news on Zurich yet?’
I shook my head.
‘Maybe you won’t go.’ He sounded hopeful. Again the guilt welled up. How long would I feel responsible for hurting him?
‘I do hope I’ll go. I need the work. And it’ll be good to get away for awhile.’
‘You’ve already got away from me. How much more distance do you want?’ He smiled. ‘I’m only joking. It’ll be good to go to Zurich. I hope you get to go. Cheers.’
‘Thanks. To your success.’
‘To success for both of us,’ he said.
By the end of the champagne bottle I was infused with good feelings and bubbles. We chatted amiably over enough paella to feed Madrid. He did probe about my love life a couple of times, but wasn’t offended when I deflected his questions. Just as I wasn’t offended when he deflected mine. The Rioja flowed after the champagne and we found our rhythm again. It could have been any night over the past ten years.
I was surprised to hear the glassy crash of bottles going into the recycling bin from the pub next door. It was well after last orders, and much later than I’d planned to stay. I was also much drunker than I planned to be.
‘I should go,’ I heard myself slur.
‘You should stay. B., you’re in no condition for the Tube. I’ll make up the sofa. Really, why don’t you just go home in the morning? It’s Saturday anyway. No work.’
‘I don’t want to kick you to the sofa.’
He laughed. ‘Who says I’ll be the one on the sofa? Good lord, you do take liberties. Break up with a man and you think you get all the luxury.’
I laughed back. ‘Of course. The sofa’s the least I can do.’ There was a second bedroom, but it was five feet wide and stacked with storage boxes that we’d never got around to throwing away.
‘I’ll get you a T-shirt. You’re in luck. There’s a new toothbrush in the cabinet.’ He ambled off, a little unsteadily, to get my sleepwear.
It was too late for the Tube anyway. And it was a big L-shaped sofa that we smugly chose at IKEA while couples all around us argued. Plenty of room to stretch out. Much nicer to stay here.
I woke with a snort, my face wedged between the sofa cushions. Sunlight streamed through the big windows, diffused by nearly transparent curtains (another smug IKEA purchase. We were insufferable that day).
‘Coffee will be ready in a few minutes,’ Mattias called from the kitchen table, where the weekend papers had already been disembowelled.
‘Thanks.’
‘Take a shower if you want. I’ll make us some breakfast.’
‘No, no, that’s okay, I’ll get going soon.’
‘You may as well eat something. I’m cooking it anyway. You’ll feel better. Here.’ He handed me a glass of cold water and two ibuprofen.
‘My hero.’
‘Breakfast in fifteen minutes. Take a shower. There are towels in the closet. Well, you know that.’ He padded back to the kitchen in the ratty old hand-knitted slippers his mum got him for Christmas when he was about twelve.
My head and heart both told me I shouldn’t be there. I hated when they ganged up on me like that. I ate as quickly as good manners allowed, chastely thanked Mattias for his hospitality, and hurried to the Tube for the long journey to the care home.
Last night was definitely a mistake.
Even the bright sun couldn’t make the care home’s 1950s exterior look cheerful. The first time I saw it I dreaded going in, imagining what a place housing people with nowhere else to go must be like. I was pleasantly surprised. It looked more like an upscale hotel than a residence of last resort. The only clues as to its purpose were the safety railings throughout the hallways and the wide doors that easily accommodated wheelchairs. But while the environs were as pleasant as you could hope for, I was still getting used to its inhabitants.
Sure, over the years I’d made the usual comments about how wonderful it was to have the benefit of old people’s experience and time-tempered viewpoints. But I didn’t mean it. It had never been true in my experience. The only old person in my life, my gran, was nine parts venom shaken, not stirred, with one part martyr. A cantankerous martini in a dirty glass. I knew guilt was on the cards whenever I visited, but there was no way to prepare for the attack. She was a blaming ninja. Once I thought I’d got off, only to have her say as I climbed into the back seat for the ride home: ‘Now, B., be nice to your mother. You weren’t an easy birth, you know, and she’s still suffering.’ Honestly, home-baked cookies and hand-knitted jumpers didn’t take the sting off that for a nine-year-old.
Despite my presence at the home, I was no Manolo-wearing Mother Theresa. I got tricked into volunteering by a dull woman at my colleague’s birthday dinner. She went on and on about her charity work, finally pausing in her self-deification long enough to ask me what kind works I did. Not ‘if’, but ‘what’. This sort of woman got right up my nose. It was one thing to be rich, but being so worthy made her insufferable. Given that I was pretty rubbish on the philanthropy front, and hated being shown up, and would probably never see the woman again, I lied. Noticing an old lady at the next table, I ruefully shook my head to indicate frustration at my inability to help mankind, and said that I’d been looking in vain for a care home to volunteer in. The angels chorused as she exclaimed that she volunteered at one in Wandsworth, where they were always looking for people to help. Lucky me.
As it seemed churlish to decline to volunteer on the grounds that Wandsworth was a bit out of my way, I found myself south of the river every Saturday afternoon. At least I never had to see my benefactress. The saintly lady only descended on weekdays.
‘Hiya, B. How goes the war?’ That was Jim, speaking to me through his surgical mask. Jim wasn’t a doctor. He was a germophobe. His passionate views on cleanliness meant that he also wore surgical gloves and a paper suit. ‘Have you had your flu jab yet?’ He asked, as he did every time we met. I was sure he plotted each new case on a world map in his dining room. He was that kind of man.
‘Nope. I’ll do it soon, though.’
‘B., it’s important.’ He looked suspiciously over his shoulder, as if a wrinkled harbinger of death might be poised to lick him. ‘Flu is a killer. And we’re carers. We need to be protected against disease.’
I had no doubt that his sleeves hid track marks from multiple flu jabs. Even fully inoculated, I knew he’d only speak to me through his mask next time. It was remarkable that he was in the care home at all. Actually, it was a wonder he left the house.
I hurried towards Marjorie’s room. She was my favourite inmate. We weren’t supposed to have favourites but everybody did, right? It was only natural, like when parents said, ‘I love my children equally’ they really meant ‘I prefer that one over there’.
She was as sharp as a pin, just physically frail. She was no old lemon, though. She really seemed to enjoy being at the home. ‘All my friends are dead,’ she’d cheerily announced upon our introduction. That wasn’t surprising for someone who knitted scarves for soldiers in World War II. ‘I can’t imagine a sadder thing than being left alone in that big old house,’ she’d continued in her erstwhile two-pack-a-day voice. ‘Give me chair aerobics any day!’ And I knew we would be friends. Not because I liked aerobics, or exercise of any kind, but because she was a natural optimist.
‘Hello, dear, how are you?’ She was propped against a mountain of silk-covered pillows, her deeply wrinkled face brightened by two intense spots of coral blusher. Despite being a white lady from Bristol, she was wearing a beautifully ornate cheongsam.
‘Looking good, Marjorie! Did you get your hair done?’ Each blue-rinsed ringlet was perfectly curled.
‘Yes, I had my permanent yesterday.’ She blushed beneath the coral, patting her head self-consciously. Despite her rather extraordinary dress sense, Marjorie wasn’t the eccentric geriatric you’d imagine. She’d been married to a Chinese professor. Not a professor of Chinese, but a professor of Chinese origin, decades before cultural integration became a household phrase. She fell in love as much with Chinese style as she did with her prof, and they lived in Hong Kong until he died. Her slim arms may have been a little crêpey but the silk still suited her tall, slender frame. Most forty-year-olds couldn’t have pulled off her look. ‘Come sit by me, B. I have something for you.’ She grinned like the conspirator she often was.
‘What’s this?’ The leather was worn and curled at the edges; a deep watermark blistered the top corner. The yellowing pages were densely packed with large loopy writing.
‘It’s one of my journals. I told you, I’ve kept them all my life. I’ve been thinking a lot about our talks, and they’ve brought up so many memories. So I dug out these old ones, from the early days. Oh, B., it’s been wonderful to read them again, to remember those times. Even the bad bits, the terrible times. The emotions are worn in now, you see, not painful any more. That’s one benefit of getting old! As I was reading them I thought some of it might be useful to you.’
‘Marjorie, I’m overwhelmed that you’d share these with me. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome, dear. I know you’re trying to find your way. Oh, I don’t know, maybe they’re of no use at all. I guess we’ll see!’
I really was touched. Marjorie and I had recently been exploring some of the bigger questions in life. When I first started volunteering I brought a book to read to her, as instructed. But the recited word only jogged her memories, so we never got far.
‘Remember I told you I’ve had the same questions?’ Marjorie asked. She knew all about my break-up, and my reasons for it. ‘I’d forgotten that I wrote it all down, my thought process, such as it was! It’s all in my journals.’
‘So you know the answer.’
‘Ah! No, my dear, I don’t know the answer. I only know what happened to me. You have to find your own answer.’
‘I figured you’d say that. 1938?’ I said, examining the first page. ‘You were just a kid when you wrote this.’
‘Hmm? Let’s see. Well, I was seventeen. That was pretty grown up in those days. I had friends already engaged then,’ she said. ‘I was engaged just a year after I wrote in that journal.’
‘The Chinese professor?’
‘No, my first husband, Jimmy.’
‘You had more than one husband?’
‘Three, actually.’
‘Marjorie, you dark horse!’
‘Now, don’t start making assumptions, young lady.’
‘I didn’t mean–’
‘Dear, I’m only joking. I stopped caring what other people thought about my life before you were born.’
I laughed. ‘Most old– I mean, most women your age do care about appearances, don’t they?’
‘Do you know a lot of old women? Dear, you do like to make sweeping assumptions,’ she said without malice. ‘Well, assume away, but I’ll tell you the whole story if you’d like to hear it.’
I said yes, please.
‘Jimmy was my next-door neighbour,’ she said. ‘In fact, we were born on the very same day, in the very same house. The midwife started out running between the back doors, but eventually she made Jimmy’s mum come to our house. Jimmy’s was a big family and we had the extra bed, you see. So Jimmy and I were literally brought into the world together. Some might say we were destined to be tied up in each other’s lives because of it. I don’t know about that. I used to believe in destiny, but a long life, with all that happens, has a way of making you question things like fate. Fate or not, we were in each other’s lives all right. Jimmy was the son his father longed for, though he loved all his daughters in his own way. There were nine girls, but I wasn’t close with any of them. They had a reputation for being mean. Maybe it was just because there were so many of them. Sharing probably came easier to me and my sister, with just the two of us. And there was more to go around in our family anyway. Mr Wright wasn’t much of a provider, and poor Mrs Wright had to be the breadwinner more often than not, or they’d have starved. I suppose the girls shouldn’t be blamed for fighting for what they could get.’
‘Was Jimmy like that too?’
‘Oh no!’ She chuckled. ‘He was the prince of the family. He got the best of everything. Well, what little of the best there was. But his sisters bullied him terribly, as you might expect. That’s why we spent so much time together, away from his house. Who knows, if he didn’t have all those sisters, we might never have been friends.’
‘That sounds like something that someone who believes in fate would say.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does. These days young people love to string together a long series of events that point them in a certain direction and say, “It must be fate.” Like that film with that American. You know, the blonde one.’ She looked expectantly at me.
‘Er, which blonde one?’
‘Sylvia Plath.’
‘Ah, you mean Gwyneth Paltrow. That was Sliding Doors.’
‘The film with that lovely young man.’
‘I know who you mean. What’s his name? Thingamajig. The Scottish one, from that movie with Hugh Grant.’ Clearly I too would one day frustrate young people with my vague and inaccurate descriptions of random people they’d probably not heard of. ‘You’re right, that was all about the twists of fate that send lives down different paths.’
‘Which is poppycock.’
‘It’s not!’
‘Utter poppycock. There’s no such thing as “if only”, because the fact is, what happens, happens. You can say, “If only I’d taken the next train, I wouldn’t have sat next to that woman who spilled coffee over me”, but the fact is, you didn’t. You took that train.’
‘So you don’t believe that everything happens for a reason?’
‘B., I’ve buried two husbands and a child. I’m not the person to ask about that.’
‘I’m sorry, Marjorie, I had no idea.’
‘Why would you? We’ve never talked about it. No, B., things don’t happen for a reason. We live our lives and we justify the things that happen in them. It’s only our interpretation that gives those events meaning, gives them power.’
That was a lot to think about, because I did, very much, believe in fate. Take leaving Mattias. It was fair to say that before watching that stupid film together I hadn’t actively questioned our relationship. I mean, I had niggles over the years. Didn’t everyone? When you realised he would never want to watch The X Factor with you, or that he hated to dance, or would never like your best friend. But we had the big interests, the important ones, in common. For years that seemed like enough. So why did I think to ask the question then, when it had never occurred to me before? If I hadn’t repeated a single line in a silly film, I might still have been living in that sunny flat with a man who was my best friend, making plans for the winter holidays. I disagreed with Marjorie on that one. ‘How did Jimmy propose to you? Was it romantic?’
‘Oh yes. Although getting married was inevitable, in a way. Our families expected it. We expected it. It was always on the cards. Still, it was romantic. He took me up to London for our eighteenth birthdays, and asked me on Tower Bridge as we looked over the lights of the city. It was romantic, but sad too. We knew, of course, that we’d soon be at war. He asked me in May and we went to war in September. Everything we did in those days was tinged with a sense of urgency. Love was no different.’
‘Were you in love with him, then?’
‘In love? I loved him, certainly. He was my first love. We were best friends. And we’d grown up together, both in body and mind.’
I knew how she felt. Mattias and I met in our twenties before we had any real idea what we were doing with our lives. We matured together. There was certainly a strong bond because of that. Even now, broken up. Yes, playing happy platonic couple last night was definitely a mistake.
‘We knew war was coming, so we didn’t waste any time getting married,’ Marjorie continued. ‘We were married in August. Jimmy signed up with the first wave in September and was gone within a month. I didn’t know I was expecting until after he left. He never saw his son.’
‘He died fighting?’
‘Noo. Actually, he was stung by a hornet.’
‘A hornet killed him?’
‘He was terribly allergic. Little James was born just a week after his father died. He was such a darling, and of course he utterly depended on me. I didn’t have much time left over for grieving. None of us had time for that in those days. We had a war to live through. James was the spitting image of his father as a baby, which was comforting for Mrs Wright, though in a way it was heartbreaking. She used to cry her eyes out when she held him. That’s why it was doubly terrible when James died.’
‘What happened, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘It was during the Blitz. James was staying next door. I’d come down with whooping cough and we didn’t want him to catch it. The bomb went straight through the Wright’s roof. All four of them, James and three of Jimmy’s sisters, were killed in the same room. It happened so soon after the sirens began that I didn’t even have time to go over and get him.’ She shook the memory from her head. ‘I’m sorry, dear, I haven’t thought about that night in many years. It’s nearly teatime, isn’t it? What do you think? Shall we go to the dining room? There’s a rumour that Chef has made trifle.’ Her face was childlike in its excitement. ‘Will you get my wheelchair for me please? My arthritis is acting up in this weather.’
‘Of course. Marjorie, I’m so sorry that you had to go through that.’
‘Thank you. But it’s just part of life. These things happen sometimes.’
I couldn’t even imagine such losses, one because an insect found her allergic husband in France and the other because she caught whooping cough. And she didn’t believe in ‘if only’? I wasn’t raised to contradict my elders, but I thought she was telling porky pies.