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And there’s something I want to say, something I’ve been wanting to say now for decades, about this life we’ve built, but the words are stuck. They’re always stuck.
His shoulders rise just a fraction and I know he’s annoyed. I’m an expert in his body language, as I’m sure he is in mine. You don’t live side by side, alone, for more than six decades without learning a thing or two.
I look at him, right in the eye, and wonder when I last did that. You spend so much time talking from different rooms, or one of you on the sofa and one in the doorway. When do you ever stand inches apart like this, and really focus on each other?
When you’re choosing who to spend your life with, you don’t think about how you’ll both feel in your eighties.
When we get out of the car, I think about taking his hand. How long is it since we walked through the streets like that, declaring our union? We certainly did it in the early years, but I don’t remember when it stopped. Was there a day when he reached for my hand and I pulled away? Or dropped his hand to adjust my handbag on my shoulder, and then never picked it up again? Though we’re walking side by side, shoulder to shoulder, it seems too big a gulf to cross now. Too huge a gesture.
There will always be tough years in a marriage this long. It’s guaranteed. The best you can hope is you have someone who cares enough to weather them with you.
I’ve always thought I’d be first. I’m not sure why. He’d get on fine without me, after a while. I know he’d be heartbroken, but he’d get past it. He’s not bad in the kitchen and he’s got plenty of friends who’d rally round. But me, without him? I’m not sure I’d know how to go on. I think I’d just forget to eat lunch, or get out of bed, without him to rally me.
When I touch him, and know for sure, I’ll have to make a telephone call, and the world will come crashing in. So, I’ll hold it off another half an hour. Me and Arthur, me drinking a cup of tea with him in bed. Our last one.
Who will I be, without him?
It all feels too quick, after the slow eking out of the years we’ve lived together. To be saying goodbye, like this, when just yesterday we were shopping for fruit.
‘People are such mysteries,’ he says. ‘You really never know someone wholly.’ And here I was, thinking I did.
Why is it so hard to hear that someone was devoted to you? Lots of people have said it. The vicar, family members, even people I don’t recognise. They say how kindly he spoke of me and how his eyes lit up when he did, and I don’t know where to put myself. I knew how he felt, of course I did, but it’s hard to hear it from all directions, especially with him gone. Because I’ve never really been sure what it was about me that he admired so much.
How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?
‘I think no one is really who you think they are, even if they’ve been in your life the whole time,’ she says, eventually. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, I think we all have secrets, and things we’re ashamed of, and things we exaggerate because they show us in a better light.
‘Be entirely honest with them,’ I say. ‘Don’t just allude to it or talk about other people you know. Tell them it’s you, and this is who you are. They love you, Erin, they must. And they will accept it. It’s one thing to have an issue with a concept but it’s different taking issue with someone you love.’
‘I do believe they love me. But religion’s a powerful thing, you know?’ ‘The fundamental basis of Christianity is loving people,’ I say. ‘Helping people. Being kind.
It was thinking I didn’t mean as much to her as she did to me, and not knowing what I would do with that information.
‘I think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.’
We all have something that’s broken us, I suppose. Nobody gets away unscathed.
But perhaps she’s at her most beautiful now, with all this life behind her, all this wisdom.
