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Sometimes it feels like the world is unimaginably big, and other times it feels like you could hold it in your hand.
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 loved that about reading. Being able to experience a different time or place, but mostly getting a chance to experience being a different person altogether.
How different would my life have been if I’d been a different sort of person?
‘I was married here,’ I say. He nods, as if he knows. ‘It was spring of 1961, showers on and off all day. But in between, brilliant sunshine. There was a wonderful rainbow.’ ‘A bit like marriage, then,’ he says.
I remember Arthur saying that God wasn’t in churches, that that wasn’t where you found him. God was in the flowers and the snow, the tiny robins in the garden and those tigers we’d see
‘People are such mysteries,’ he says. ‘You really never know someone wholly.’ And here I was, thinking I did.
Why do we wait until people are dead to talk about how we felt?
It strikes me that luck is a relative thing, that it’s not something you can pin down and be sure of. That it can be something you have and then lose.
‘When you’re young and you’re a woman,’ I say, ‘everyone’s interested in you. In what you look like and what you’ve got to say. And then there’s a point in your life, around fifty or so, when it all stops and you become invisible. And it’s stupid, really, because by then you have much more interesting things to contribute to the conversation, but no one wants to hear them. I’ve come to terms with it, it happened to me a long time ago, but since my husband died, some days I don’t speak to anyone, and I feel like no one can see me, and I think I wanted to test that.’
How much time have I wasted, over the years, caring about the thoughts of people I don’t know and never will?
