Love, Dad
Dad had posted it to me last year so I could stay at his flat in London when he was away. I’d lost it, of course. ‘My daughter the absent-minded professor,’ he’d said, rolling his eyes. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get another one cut.’ But he’d never got round to it, and I’d not thought of it since. I don’t know what it is doing here. I read the words again and think of his hand writing them. And I think of Dad holding my own tiny hand as I put the other one flat against the sarsens at Stonehenge, back when I was very small and there were no fences to stop you walking among the stones. I looked up at the thing that was like a door but had no walls behind it.
‘Is it a house, Daddy?’ I asked him.
‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘It’s very, very old.’
I held the cardboard and felt its scissor-cut edge. And for the first time I understood the shape of my grief. I could feel exactly how big it was. It was the strangest feeling, like holding something the size of a mountain in my arms. You have to be patient, he had said. If you want to see something very much, you just have to be patient and wait. There was no patience in my waiting, but time had passed all the same, and worked its careful magic. And now, holding the card in my hands and feeling its edges, all the grief had turned into something different. It was simply love. I tucked the card back into the bookshelf. ‘Love you too, Dad,’ I whispered.
29
Enter spring
MANDY OPENS HER door, takes one look at my face, and mirrors it with a horrified expression of her own. ‘What’s happened, Helen?’
‘Mabel!’ I say weakly.
‘Did you lose her?’
‘No!’ shaking my head. ‘She’s in the car.’ And then three requests: ‘Mandy, can you help? I cut my thumb. Can I use your phone? I need a cigarette.’
Bless her for ever. I collapse into a kitchen chair. My knees hurt. Brambles? I have no idea. My thumb is still bleeding. Mandy hands me iodine wash, fixes the tear with steri-strips and bandages, makes me a coffee, pushes a packet of tobacco and cigarette papers across the table. Then she waits while I call the College where I should, right now, be teaching, and stammer out apologies. Then I tell my sorry story.
I’d seen signs over the last week or so. The season was turning. A bluebottle in the garden; torpid purple crocuses on the lawn. Dots of cherry blossom falling outside the walls of St John’s. And one evening last week, a host of blackbirds carrolling into the deepening sky from perches all over the city’s gable ends and Gothic spires. Spring was coming. And usually I’d rejoice at the curious bluish tint to the air and the lengthening days. But spring will mean no more Mabel. She’ll be moulting in an aviary. I shan’t see her for months. My heart hurts thinking of it. So I wasn’t thinking of it; I’d ignored the flowers and the flies. And that was part of the problem. For something was stirring in Mabel’s accipitrine heart, and perhaps it was spring.
I had an hour to fly her today. I’d some freelance teaching in town that afternoon, and I knew I was cutting it fine. So I decided to head back to the old field where the rabbits are. We’ll catch a rabbit, I thought, then I’ll drop her back at the house, pick up the teaching material, and run down the road to teach it. What could possibly go wrong?