Small kindnesses, p.10
Small Kindnesses, page 10
After an hour of talking, they move back into silence. The book says they’re two-thirds of the way round. Every so often one of them will see something they deem worth sharing – a blue-tit in the hedgerow, his crown the colour of the sky, or a particularly shapely holly leaf. There’s so much to see, even at this time of year. Leonard sees an oak on the distant horizon, and the shape of it reminds him of the last National Trust estate he used to work at. His mind ambles around this time of his working life – in his head he bumps into his freckled boss again, and the young lady who made the cakes on whom he cultivated an innocent crush for over a year. He fondly remembers the sociable robin (‘Mr. Red’) who used to perch on the end of his wheelbarrow as Leonard wheeled it about. All gardeners have to know a friendly robin at some point in their career; it’s in the rules. He feels safe somehow, walking with Lily, and he settles himself more and more firmly in the past. He wanders into the kitchen and eats a thick wedge of the tea-lady’s best coffee cake – with coffee butter-cream and real coffee beans as decoration, best accompanied by a cup of earl grey. He puts the crumb-strewn plate down and takes the hand of the tea-lady and walks with her across the grass towards the edge of the river.
He reaches a spot where there are flat concrete steps down to the water and he sees that there’s someone already sitting there, facing the water. She’s wearing a navy blue top with a long cotton skirt and has pearls around her neck. Her hair is dark, cropped close. The tea lady disappears in a sudden puff of smoke and Leonard’s hand is left holding empty air. It was eight years after they were married, just before Rose became pregnant with Raine. She’d come to meet him for lunch as she sometimes did. They’d sit and listen to the river, eating the sandwiches she’d made for them both – cheese and pickle, or chicken from the roast they had at the weekend as a special treat. He’d been a little worried about her for a while. She’d not been herself, and had started snapping at him for no reason. He’d been surprised by her venom. One evening he came home to find her sitting on the sofa and gazing at the wall as if she was in a trance. He’d tried asking her what was wrong but she’d just walk out of the room. He sits next to Rose on the steps by the river and the whole conversation floods back as if he’s there.
‘I’ve something to tell you, Leonard.’
He can still remember her tone of voice, the gravity, the effect it had on him.
‘I’ve something to tell you.’
This time her voice cracks mid-way through, as if in half. The silence asks him to prepare himself, underlines the words that are coming next.
‘You must leave me.’
He’s horrified. He wasn’t expecting that. He can’t find any words. He searches her face as she stares into the water. It’s as if all the life has left it. He waits for her to explain. She starts whispering something, he can hardly hear her. He asks her to speak louder, puts his ear closer to her face. She looks like someone else. She’s saying it over and over, like a mantra.
‘You must leave me.
You must leave me.
You must leave me.’
The emphasis on must – a statement of bare fact, an order. He asks her why, he asks her to explain. He says her name. She is locked in. He notices she is rocking slightly, he notices her hand is grasping the other so tightly that the knuckles are white. There are angry red spots where the blood has pooled under the skin. He touches her on the arm. He’s lost her, he’s utterly lost her. He begins to worry about getting her home – imagines having to hoist her over his shoulder like a sack, imagines for a horrible second her standing up and jumping into the water, going under in front of his eyes. He can’t leave her on her own. He needs help. He doesn’t want anyone to see her like this.
He gets her to the car somehow, coaxing her, half dragging her, and sits her in the passenger seat and straps her in. She is like a sack of compost. He wants to tell someone he is leaving but he doesn’t feel able to leave her – maybe she’ll get out and run, maybe she’ll have some kind of fit… His heart wants to escape, his mouth is dry. When he looks at his watch he’s amazed to see that he’s only had ten minutes of his lunch break so far. He can phone work from home, tell them he’s taken ill. He drives Rose home, and all the way she mutters ‘you must leave me, you must leave me’, the words starting to lose their shape, blurring into each other. It isn’t a human sound. He speaks to her as they drive, ‘It’s OK, Rose darling, we’re getting you home now’, as if speaking to a child, to a hurt animal. When he pulls the car up outside their house she seems to come to, she looks around wildly. He’s afraid again that she’ll try to bolt – he keeps her in the car for a few minutes, carries on talking to her. They hobble in together, and when they get into the hall and he shuts the front door, she collapses onto the floor and vomits all over the carpet.
He gets her up to their bedroom and pulls the blankets up under her chin and she falls asleep instantly. He cleans up downstairs like an automaton, and wonders what else he should be doing. He doesn’t once consider calling the doctor. No one else needs to know about this; it’s their business. When he’s finished cleaning up, he sits by her as she sleeps. He hopes she might wake up as ‘herself’ again, but when she does, when the sky is losing its light, she looks at him from somewhere far away. That night is the worst. She is delirious – moaning, crying, shaking off the covers, pushing him away. She says things he doesn’t understand, about what a terrible person she is, about needing to keep Leonard away from her. He can hardly bear to look into her eyes. He thinks the light will never come back.
In the morning she is able to eat a little toast and shuffle to the toilet. Mid-morning between fits of sleeping she holds out her hand and said ‘Leonard!’ He nursed her back to health, slowly. One morning she asked for jam on her toast instead of the marmalade he’d been giving her; one afternoon she asked if he’d called her work to let them know she wasn’t well. He took time off work himself and was forced to get the doctor in to write her a proper sick-note. The doctor wrote ‘nerves’ in neat capital letters on a bit of paper and subscribed sleeping tablets and some other pills that Leonard flushed down the toilet. Eventually he trusted her to be alone during the day. When he got home he’d go straight upstairs to see her, bringing her a few sweet-smelling 'Blue Heaven' freesias from work, stories from the day, strawberries. She got back on her feet, eventually. They never talked about it. It never happened again.
The sun pokes out from behind a cloud. It’s still drizzling – there should be a rainbow. As he’s searching the horizon, he catches sight of the pub in the distance - they seem to be approaching it from a different and surprising direction. He shudders to put an end to thinking about that terrible time. Lily catches his eye, and he smiles and says he was miles away, and stumbles on a dip in the road. She holds out her arm and he grasps it, steadies himself.
Back at the pub they decide to have a quick half before setting off home – a small reward for their physical efforts. Lily insists on paying for them both, leaving Leonard feeling uncomfortable but unsure of how to articulate his uneasiness. Why shouldn’t she pay? They chose a table in a bay at the front of the pub so they can bathe in the weak sunshine further weakened by the thick dusty windows. The first sip of bitter is nectar. They both make ‘aah!’ noises at the same time as setting their glasses back on the table and sinking back into the soft red velvet seats. It feels so comfortable between them that Leonard decides it’s only natural to talk to her about what is on his mind.
‘Her hair had been short, really short, since I met her. She’d always told me her hair never grew, something medical – she told me stories about when she was a little girl.’
Lily doesn’t have to ask who he’s talking about. She just nods at him and waits for him to continue.
‘I found a ticket too, in an old handbag of hers. It was to Didcot. We’d never been there; she’d never been. I’m not sure what it all means.’
‘Couldn’t she have gone there shopping once, with a friend from work? Or gone with your… with your daughter and not told you?’
Leonard shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t like that, our marriage. We knew everything about each other. I could tell you what she’d eaten for lunch at work every day. She could tell you what colour underpants I was wearing.’ He blushes a little at having mentioned his underpants by mistake. ‘I knew her inside and out, Lily. Or at least I thought I did.’
They sit sipping their bitter for a while, mulling things over. He imagines Lily is going through the same thoughts he’s had these past weeks – trying to think of a logical solution, a scenario that would explain why she’d felt the need to invent such elaborate lies about such a ridiculous thing. It’s maddening. It reminds him of when Rose had asked him to thread a needle for her once - she’d left her reading glasses upstairs. He’d sat there for aeons, missing the tiny eye time after time with Rose dissolving into laughter behind him. He refused to let her take the needle and thread back, even once she’d gone to fetch her glasses and stood hovering over him with a hand outstretched. He was going to get that needle threaded if it took him all night. When it had finally gone through, he’d told her to never ask him to do it again, not yet ready to see the funny side.
Lily takes another sip of her drink, making a smacking noise with her lips like a man. She looks over at him.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. My mate Charlie reckons I should leave it well alone, get on with my life. There’s nothing good can come of digging around now she’s gone. But I just can’t.’
The last word comes out of his mouth with a circle of desperation around it. He’s given himself away. He lifts his own glass, grateful of something to do with his hands. He wishes he could have another, he’s already thinking about the bottom of the glass. He wants to drain it in one go and order a quadruple rum and coke, sit here out of the drizzle and get happily sloshed. Instead he takes a baby sip. He reflects on what he’s said to her so far. He might as well carry on.
‘It’s like a novel I don’t know the end to. I’ve read the first few pages, got hooked, and now someone’s hidden the book. I don’t know if I even want to read it or not. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a sad ending.’
‘Whatever you find out, Leonard, would it change the way you felt about her? About the years you spent… When you talk about her, I can… I can see her. I feel as if I know her. The Rose you knew… She’s real already. I don’t really know what I’m trying to…’ She trails off, tries to find her way back. ‘What I’m saying is, you can’t get rid of the Rose you knew. Your wife. She’ll always… She’ll always be your wife. But then what do I know, really… it’s not my…’
Leonard feels comforted by this, recognises the truth of what she’s saying.
‘I do want to try and find out,’ he says. ‘I don’t even know if it’ll be possible now; it’s so long ago, I don’t know if there’ll be anyone left alive who’ll know why… who’ll be able to make some sense of it. But if I don’t try, I’ll always be left wondering. It’s better to get to the truth, don’t you think?’
‘I’ve always believed in heading towards...’ She pauses, as if searching for what she does believe. ‘Worry often gives small things a big shadow. But there are different types of truth, Leonard. We never see it properly - it depends where we’re looking from.’ She pauses. ‘If you want me to… I there’s anything I can…’
He nods a ‘thanks’ to her. He feels ready to leave. He drains his glass and sighs, his eyes widening slightly in a ‘shall we go?’ gesture. As Lily hooks her handbag over her shoulder, she says as an afterthought, ‘It’s a shame about her mum. Seems nobody can get much sense out of her these days, now that… Such a waste…’
Leonard isn’t sure he’s heard her right.
‘These days?’
‘Yes – it’s a terrible disease… my aunt was – Leonard? You did know she was ill, didn’t you?’
‘Rose said she was dead.’
‘Oh.’ She pauses, as if waiting for him to absorb the new information, and puts her handbag down again. ‘I’m sorry, Leonard, I assumed you… I tracked her down first when I was looking for Rose. She lives in a home, she’s got Alzheimers. She’s been there for... Rose said she was dead? Maybe she couldn’t cope with her any more… it’s a difficult…’ she breaks off as Leonard shakes his head violently.
‘Rose said she died when Rose was young. Before I met her, years ago. What’s going on, Lily?’
He looks into her eyes, searching for answers. All he can see is concern. She puts a hand on his arm. He drops his eyes from hers, ashamed of his need. His need for answers, his need for Rose. If she were here, he could ask her. He’s suddenly angry at her. It’s not fair of her to leave him with all this. He gouges chunks out of his beer mat with his car keys. He’s aware of Lily’s hand resting gently on him, stopping him from floating away.
‘I’d like to meet her mother, to go and visit. Would that be allowed, do you think?’ he asks.
‘Well, I don’t think there are any rules about... I suppose she’s not very likely to say no. I’ve still got the number somewhere… We could give it a… They said she wasn’t too good when I spoke to them, Leonard. It might be a waste of time.’
‘That’s OK. It’s something to try, isn’t it? Somewhere to start. If I don’t do something I’ll go mad.’
‘Leonard, I’m happy to call them if you want me to. I’ll do whatever I can to...’
‘Thanks. Let me know what they say.’
He feels energised by this new approach. He’s going to try to find out what’s going on. He’s not just going to lie down and turn it round and round in his head any more. As they’re gathering themselves together to leave again, Lily remembers something.
‘Oh – Leonard – I do, by the way.’
‘You do?’
‘Like Sunday roasts. I thought it might be a hint? Although I’m not very good at them I can never get it quite…’
He remembers his out-of-the-blue statement earlier, when they were walking. ‘Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean it like that!’
‘Well, anyway, I’ll do you one next week if you like?’
‘Oh, no, really, I don’t want to...’ He struggles with the words, not knowing quite what he wants to say.
‘It’d be a pleasure. I’ll make you help me with the peeling… the chopping, the washing up.’
‘OK, I’ll let you know.’
‘I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t mean it, truly. I’m not…’
‘As long as you don’t call me Truly anymore, we have a deal.’
It takes her a few seconds to get it, and when she does she groans loudly and fake-punches him on his arm. He pantomimes sudden pain, clutching the spot where she’s touched him, clasping it with his other hand and moving backwards in slow motion with his mouth wide, his eyes scrunched up. He slumps back down onto the seat, mouth ajar, tongue hanging out. When he comes back to life, he’s ready to drive home, ready to greet Pickles and find refuge in a crossword book. He might even experiment with the scone recipe Lily brought along for him.
They part in the car park, Lily leaning forward for a hug and Leonard kissing her on the cheek instead. The awkward moment is prolonged when Lily anticipates a second kiss and leans towards him to be left hanging mid-air. She laughs and tells him she’s never got the hang of that silly ‘mwah mwah’ kissing. She suggests they start again and holds out an arm to him. How long is it since he’s properly hugged anyone except his daughter? They approach each other diagonally, facing away from each other. It’s a short hug, chaste, but tight – he feels her arm muscles pushing against him and squeezes back. He gets into his car and turns his music up loud.
A
bag of cherries
As Leonard collects fallen leaves for Peggy’s modest compost pile on a drizzly weekend afternoon, he catches a flash of orange amongst the browns and green. It’s the shiny, pumpkin-coloured berries of Iris foetidissima, clustered in fat seedpods. There’s always colour. There’s always something to look at, to touch, to smell, even at the end of November. He marvels that a whole week and a half has passed since he was sat in the pub with Lily. He’ll see her again in an hour’s time - they’ve arranged to visit Rose’s mum. He hates the way time seems to have speeded up the older he’s got. When he was small, a year felt like an eternity – so long to wait for another birthday cake and presents, so long between fish and chips on a Wednesday and sponge pudding on a Friday night.
That morning he’d woken up with a small sinking in his stomach. He was surprised to match it up to the knowledge that Gloria was coming over. She’d ignored Leonard’s suggestion that she should come round for a drink with her husband Pete instead, and had left him a message informing him she’d be there at her usual time. What would Lily think if she knew about their strange arrangement? She’d think he was taking advantage of Glor. So why did it feel like it was the other way round, as if he was somehow doing Glor a favour? He decided before he got out of bed that he’d tell her straight as soon as he saw her – that he didn’t need her to come over any more. He’d spent the morning thinking about how he could put it to her without offending her, how he could explain it properly. Rose would have known what to say. It made a change to think about Gloria for a while – more straightforward. There are pitfalls now when he thinks about Rose, when he suddenly loses his footing.
