Mrs. Quinn's Rise to Fame

by Olivia Ford

For a moment the future wasn’t somewhere that she feared, a place promising only old age and loss, but instead a place of hope and possibility. It became somewhere she wanted to tread.

To want something, she realized, was to make yourself vulnerable to losing it.

she said, catching her breath, sobered by a sad thought. “Do you ever think about if one of us…” “One of us, what?” “If one of us was, well, left on their own.” Bernard looked out of the window, pushing his hands into his dressing gown pockets. “I suppose I have done before, yes.” “And?” “It’s very sad, but there is little point in dwelling on the things we can do nothing about,” he said, his lips forming a heavy smile. “Besides, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.” “How do you mean?” “Well, I know that you can’t have one without the other,” he said, “and we’ll only be grieving for something which has been our greatest joy.”

She had once read somewhere that the tragedy of monogamy was that you never fell in love again, but how wrong it was. Over the years, she had fallen in love with Bernard over and over and over.

“I’m no expert and I certainly haven’t done everything right over the years, but the strongest couples I know have grown together, supporting their partner’s changes rather than harnessing or fearing them. It’s a bit like growing roses—you don’t get to choose exactly which way the stems unfurl, but if you help them climb you get the pleasure of watching them flourish.”

“You say—” He paused, taking a moment to consider his words. “I don’t know the situation…but when you say he doesn’t deserve it, don’t you think that what he deserves is…the truth?”

“And you never know,” he added, a glimmer of hope in his voice, “his reaction might not be quite as you’ve imagined it to be.

She would never be able to comprehend the strange borrowed time that you experience before bad news hits; the minutes, hours, sometimes days where you reside in a bubble of ignorance, a place where small things still matter, before it is pierced by the needle of perspective.

Perhaps it was the steep pitched roof or the narrow windows, but something about it felt cold, almost eerie. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she had always believed it to be true that buildings absorb much of what they witness.

“Jenny,” he said, holding her hand as tight as his limited strength would allow. “We could all live in fear of the worst-case scenario, but it wouldn’t be a lot of fun…” She fell silent, searching for a way around his words. “Try to be led by hope, rather than fear,” he said, his face softening into a smile.

For seventeen years, time had served only as a reminder of when she needed to be somewhere, or a gauge by which to prepare a meal or bake a cake. Overnight it had transformed into the most precious commodity and she would do anything, anything at all, to make it stop.

Old age can make us feel like we need to live a smaller life, but Jenny has shown that our dreams have a place at every stage of our journey…that they can be achieved because of our age, and not in spite of it.”

“I realize now that I’ve done a terrible thing, that in losing my right to choose, I robbed you of yours, and I will never forgive myself for that, Bernard…You would have made a wonderful father.” They stayed like this for quite some time, until he wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. She had never seen anything quite so sad as his tear-stained cheeks. “If my life had turned out differently, Jenny, then it wouldn’t have been with you,” he said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, his swollen fingers shaking, “and I couldn’t have borne that.” He blew his nose in short bursts, before pushing his handkerchief up his sleeve. “I have loved my life,” he said, “and the truth is, I don’t dwell too much on the things I haven’t had, because I know that I have had so much.

“I’m only hurt that I know the different cups you take your tea in at different times of the day, and how you like the curtains ajar so that you can look at the sky first thing in the morning, and how when you’re worried you rub the cold side of the duvet against your top lip…but I didn’t know this.” His words lapped against her like icy water, so that she could barely catch her breath. “I’m sorry that this most terrible thing happened to you, that you’ve carried this pain all of your life, and that you couldn’t share it with me.”

“We will always be a part of each other, Jenny,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “I love you, and even death will never change that.”

She sought comfort in his strength, in knowing that whatever happened now, she had Bernard to share it with. And then she thought of Bernard as a young man, and how he had always put her wants before his own. Each time he had raised the conversation of having a family, she had made an excuse, pushed it away, until one day it was too late. “Bernard…” she said into the darkness, “…if you could do life again, knowing what you know now, would you still have chosen to do it with me?” Her words were absorbed by the silence so that she decided he must be asleep. She rubbed the cotton of the duvet against her top lip, feeling the joy and the sorrow and the love of the last fifty-nine years. “Yes,” he said, stretching out his foot to find the warmth of her leg, “every single time.”

“Over the years you will both inevitably change but you will always have one thing in common, and that is that you’re both only human, so try to be kind.”

“To say that I’ve made a few mistakes in my marriage is an understatement, but what I have learned is that sometimes it is our mistakes, our greatest failings, that are the real tests—opportunities to get to know each other better, to put the word love into practice, to watch everything break into a thousand pieces and to glue it back together again.” She looked at Bernard, great oceans in his eyes. “The secret to sixty years? I’m not entirely sure…but one thing I do know, is that to truly know someone and to love them, is the greatest love of all.”