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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.
When I said yes, and I was screaming no inside, I thought I was doing the best I could for him. But now I’m not so sure.
I get my book out and step into someone else’s life for an hour, someone young and rich and full of energy. 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.
look at the cold cup of tea I made for him on the bedside table. Couldn’t bring myself to just make the one. I think of all the tea we’ve drunk, how he’d always say that I made the perfect cup, just how he liked it, though I never did anything special. He was grateful, appreciative. Not just about that but about anything I did for him. About me agreeing to be his, I think. A
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.
Because I’ve never really been sure what it was about me that he admired so much.
‘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.’ She
wake up in the morning these days and I have to do an assessment of my whole body, try to work out what hurts and how much and whether it was hurting the day before. And then it takes me ten minutes to get up and going.
‘You’re never going to live in Nashville or Hong Kong.’
a risk, a gamble. But isn’t everything? Isn’t marriage, and career, and friendship? Isn’t love? Isn’t getting on a bus, on a sharply cold late winter day, to look for a woman who might have known a girl who was once your best friend?
The price of living a long life, I think, is the sheer weight of the losses you have to suffer. You carry each loved one you lose, and they stack up, and it becomes unbearable. I tick them off in my mind. Brother, father, mother, husband, and my friend, my love.
we met, I was grieving, and I had no idea that you were too.’ She shrugs. ‘I think we’re all grieving for something. Our childhoods or a relationship or a dream.’
