‘I’m scared to,’ she says. ‘I’m scared he’ll just leave again, if I make it too much like hard work.’
I don’t know what to say to that. We go back through to the front room and I sit in my armchair and Julie squeezes onto the sofa with Kirsty and Erin. I get out the box with her present inside and turn to her.
‘Thank you for this, but I’m not sure what it says.’
Julie takes it from me. Holds out the letters one at a time. ‘M for Mabel, A for Arthur, B for Bill, D for Dot.’
Of course. How could I not see it? I take it back and look at it. ‘Thank you, that’s wonderful.’
She comes behind me and helps me put it on. And then her mobile telephone rings and she looks at the screen and says it’s Patricia.
‘Happy Christmas, Patty. Oh, okay. Yes, of course. The thing is, I’m at Mabel’s. Kirsty’s here too, and Erin. Long story. Do you want to come?’ She looks at me for approval and I nod, though I’m starting to feel a bit exhausted by it. I think back to this morning, when I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage the whole day on my own, and remember to be thankful for all this company. ‘Yes, all right, Patty, we’ll see you in a few minutes.’
We all turn to look at her, waiting for her to fill us in before Patricia arrives.
‘Huge row with her daughter,’ she says, using her hands to demonstrate exactly how big a row she’s talking about. ‘About this Geoff character. Sarah thinks Patty had something to do with them breaking up, or something.’
I think about the text message I sent, think about my mobile telephone, shut away in a drawer. No one would think to look at it, would they? Julie gets up to open the door when Patricia arrives, and Erin and Kirsty both slide to the floor, as if by mutual agreement, so she has somewhere to sit down.
‘We could bring a couple of chairs in from the back room,’ I say, but Erin says she’s fine on the floor, and Kirsty seems happy enough.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘this isn’t the day I expected at all.’
‘Tell us about your happiest Christmas,’ Julie says, her eyes a bit glazed. Has the prosecco softened her up already?
I search back through my memories, through the years Arthur and I spent alone, and the ones we spent with our parents, earlier on. There are some that stand out, like the year it snowed on Christmas Day and Arthur and I walked around the town as the snow fell and all the lights twinkled and we felt like we were in a fairy tale, or the one when he said he’d take care of the dinner and forgot to turn the oven on, so we ended up eating a plate of vegetables and then had turkey sandwiches for days afterwards. But I reach back further, to my adolescence, my childhood.
‘I was eight or nine,’ I say. ‘My dad had just come back from the war. I barely knew him but I could see how happy Mother was to have him back. She’d managed to scrape enough food together for a Christmas dinner, somehow or other, and Bill bought me a copy of Little Women. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. My family, back together. It was like magic.’
I’m back there for a few moments, and when I return to the present, I realise they’re all silent.
‘We don’t know we’re born, do we?’ Julie asks.
I shake my head. It isn’t that. Every generation has their own struggles, their own hardships. We didn’t have much back then, materially speaking, but there was a lot less to worry about, too. The world wasn’t complicated the way it is now. But I don’t have the words for all this, so I don’t say anything.
It’s only about an hour that we’re all there together like that. Soon enough, Martin’s messaging Julie to find out where she’s got to.
‘Probably hungry again,’ she says, rolling her eyes. But she gets herself ready to go all the same.
‘I should face the music, too,’ Kirsty says, getting up from the floor and stretching.
‘And me.’ Patricia hasn’t said much about the argument, but I know she’ll be devastated that something has ruined her Christmas with those girls, and I know I’m at least partially responsible for that. I thought once they were back, everything would work itself out, but perhaps that was na?ve.
It’s just Erin and me left, and we start another game of Scrabble, but neither of our hearts are in it, and before we’ve finished I tell her I need to go to bed.
She packs the game away neatly, asks if I’m sure it’s all right for her to stay.
‘I’d be offended if you didn’t, at this stage,’ I say.
We go upstairs and I get her a towel from the airing cupboard and a new toothbrush from under the sink.
‘I don’t suppose you want one of my nighties, do you?’
‘I’ll sleep in my underwear. Decide what I’m going to do tomorrow.’
She comes towards me and puts her arms around me, tight, and I’m not expecting it, so it takes my breath.
‘Thank you, Mabel,’ she says.
And then she pulls away and goes into the spare room, leaving me standing on the landing, still warm from the heat of her body.
29
A few days later, Julie’s on my sofa, scrolling on her telephone. ‘Why did she have to marry someone called Black?’ she asks. ‘There are hundreds of Dorothy Blacks. What did you say her husband was called?’
‘Thomas,’ I say.
She doesn’t even bother to check. We both know there’ll be pages and pages of results for Thomas Black.
‘And their children?’
I think back to the conversation I had with Cathy. For a minute, I think I might need to get my spiral notebook, but then I remember.
‘John and William.’
It’s only then that I realise. William. Bill. Did she name her son after her first love? And if she did, did her husband know? I feel tears prick at my eyes at the thought of Bill living on like that, in a way. If it was a tribute, it was a beautiful one.
‘What is it?’ Julie asks.
‘Nothing. I was just… remembering something.’
I make up a couple of jobs for Julie to do, and when she’s upstairs I settle in my armchair and try to picture Dot at the heart of a family. Perhaps cooking while her two boys played outside, or else helping them with their homework, or watching her husband teach one of them to kick a ball. Can I see it? I can, I think. The more I try, the more I can.
I wonder what Arthur and I were doing the day she was walking down the aisle. Whether it was a day that we went for a walk or out for lunch, or a day spent pottering in the garden. A small, silly part of me feels like I should have known. That wherever I was and whatever I was doing when she was saying ‘I do’, I should have felt it. But that’s ridiculous, and I won’t give the thought space to grow.
‘Do you think we should give up?’ I ask.
Julie looks over at me as if I’ve suggested something utterly ludicrous, like learning to water ski or jumping out of an aeroplane. ‘Give up? No, Mabel. We’re not giving up.’
‘But you said there were hundreds of Dorothy Blacks.’