The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin [top fiction books of all time txt] 📗

car and walked to my father’s front door. She looked older from above – the shadows falling in strange places across her face – and I wondered if that’s how God sees us. We must look so ancient to him.

I didn’t hear the doorbell and I didn’t hear her voice.

‘Lenni?’ my dad called up the stairs. ‘Your mamma’s here to see you.’

She had dropped me off at my father’s new house after several months awake. The long purple shadows under her eyes were back. And she had that look in her eye, as she drove me to my father’s house, that she wasn’t entirely sure who I was. That if we passed each other on the street, she might not recognize me.

A week or so later, she brought everything I’d left behind at her house and dropped it all on the drive, with a letter saying she was moving back to Sweden. And then there she was. Taxi meter running. Ready to say goodbye and to officially tag my father in as a parent and to forever tag herself out.

I sat on the floor and wrapped my arms around my legs. Like I’d seen a child do in an NSPCC advert. Suddenly the size of an acorn, I sat and waited.

‘Are you coming down?’ he shouted again.

I didn’t say anything. I caught sight of my own eye in the mirrored wardrobe and I looked stupid. Not at all like an acorn.

‘Have you heard me?’ he shouted again.

‘I’ve heard,’ I called, my voice coming out much smoother than I thought it might.

I stayed on the floor for ten, maybe twenty minutes. Because I wanted her to know how angry I was.

I thought she would wait. I thought there was no way she would leave without saying goodbye. And so it came as a surprise when I peeped out of the window to see if she was crying yet, and found that the taxi had gone and my mother had gone with it.

She left a forwarding address with my father. He taped it to the fridge. I burned it on the gas ring on the hob. The smoke set off the fire alarm and I singed my finger.

I thought she would wait.

But she had a plane to catch. And a daughter in a box room who wouldn’t come out.

From her place on the driveway, the plane home must have seemed a much more appealing option than her lonely, dreamless life.

~

‘Does she know?’ Margot asked softly.

‘My father wrote her a letter. I think.’ I paused. ‘I remember he had to use her parents’ address, because the last place she told us she was living was a hotel near Skommarhamn – but that had been months before. I like to picture her there – looking out onto the water, surrounded by trees. Either she knows or she doesn’t know. If she knows and hasn’t come, I like to leave her where I imagine her – happy, free, travelling around Sweden and sleeping through the night.’

Margot seemed sad for me and maybe for my mother, too. ‘And if she doesn’t know?’

‘I see the haunted faces of the mothers of the May Ward,’ I told her. ‘I like to think that my last act as a daughter will be to spare her that.’

Lenni and Margot Go for a Walk

THE CLOCK HAD ticked 1,740 times and Margot still hadn’t spoken. I’d worked this out in the time that she’d been staring at the blank paper in front of her, with her pencil in hand. Margot was staring at the page as though it were a mirror and she had no understanding of the version of herself that it reflected back.

‘Why don’t you skip it?’ I asked.

She looked at me from a faraway place.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘move on to the next year?’

She stared down at her paper mirror. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because everything that happens next …’ She stopped.

She seemed so small that I wanted to scoop her up and lay her down in a pile of soft toys and cushions, and cover her in a warm blanket.

‘Would it help if you didn’t have to tell me the story?’ I asked.

‘No, pet,’ she said, ‘I want you to know. I think.’

We sat in the quiet for a few more ticks of the clock.

Finally, I stood up. She smiled at me absently. ‘Come on,’ I said, helping her to her feet, ‘we’re going for a walk.’

Our very slow walking tour of the hospital began by taking a right out of the Rose Room and making our way to the main atrium, where the expensive WHSmith and the café that always smells of bacon reside. We mostly ignored the people in day clothes. And we shared the odd glance with those who were also in hospital wear. A man in a particularly grim brown towelling dressing gown passed us and gave a grunt. It might have been in recognition, or we might have annoyed him. It was hard to tell.

We walked down the corridor that leads to blood tests and outpatients. There were far too many normal outside people in there, so we made a U-turn and headed in the general direction of paediatrics and maternity.

When we got to a quiet bit of the corridor, when it was just me, Margot and a cage of bed linen, she said, ‘You might think differently of me if I tell you the next bit.’

‘Might I?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘What if I promise that I won’t think differently of you, no matter what you tell me?’

‘You can’t promise that,’ she said. And I wondered if she was right.

‘You told me about being arrested and I just thought it was awesome,’ I offered.

She shook her head. ‘It’s not like that.’

We walked on a little further, both of us taking careful tiny steps.

‘But you want me to know?’ I asked.

‘Yes. And no.’ She seemed frustrated at her own answer. ‘I’ve never