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

wouldn’t stay on his head, and in the background the flowers from my mother.

When I fell quiet, Meena took me by the hand and led me up the steps. She unlocked the front door without letting go of my hand and led me up the two sets of stairs to our flat, where she sat me on my bed.

I watched as she slipped my shoes off my feet and paired them neatly by the bed. She did the same with her own. Then she took a glass from the cupboard and walked out of the flat. From the bed, I could hear the tap in the shared bathroom hissing. She always waited for the water to get really cold. When she returned to me, the water inside the glass was swirling with the white particles that looked like a snowstorm. I drank from it as though it were the first water to touch my lips.

As I drank, she locked the door, closed the curtains, and then I heard the squeaking of her divan bed’s wheels as she pushed her bed up against mine.

The still-bright sun worked its way through our blue curtains in waves, and the room became the ocean.

She took the glass from my hand and placed it on the dresser. Then she sat beside me, so close that I was sure I could hear her heartbeat, though in hindsight it must have been mine. And in between her eyes, a freckle that I’d never noticed caught my attention and held it as her lips gently touched mine.

And she laid me down on my bed and kissed me.

When I woke, I was surprised to see that the sun was shining.

I thought the world might have tipped on its axis.

Meena’s bed was back on the other side of the room and Meena was gone.

Chickens and Stars

‘DID YOU LOVE Meena?’ I asked Margot.

We were sitting in the corridor outside the Rose Room, both of us having forgotten that this week’s class was cancelled on account of Pippa being on a half-term trip with her nephew. She was taking him to see the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.

The corridor was quiet; only the occasional porter went by. Nobody seemed too interested in the girl in pink pyjamas and the old lady in purple, sitting side by side on the shiny floor.

‘Of course,’ Margot said.

Then she looked up to the ceiling and thought.

‘She was always moving, always up to something. Fidgeting, talking, smoking. She was never still. And when I first met her, it was her constant evolution that thrilled me, because I wanted it for myself. I wanted to be able to change out of Margot and become someone better. Someone happier. Or at the very least, someone new. But for all the good things about her, she was headstrong and unpredictable and flighty. And the more I found things I didn’t like about her, the more I hated myself because those things didn’t matter to me in the least and I loved her anyway. But I decided that they should have mattered and I couldn’t love her. So I searched for more reasons, hoping I’d finally pile them high enough that they would matter, and then I could leave London and by doing so escape the unanswered question of the gap between our beds.’

Margot and The Professor

London, August 1966

Margot Macrae is Thirty-Five Years Old

I hadn’t ironed a thing since 1957, so when I returned home from work one afternoon, I was surprised to find a man sitting on the end of Meena’s bed whose suit was so well pressed it appeared that he could simply be snapped in half.

‘Oh,’ we both said.

He was older than me. Late forties, perhaps. He was holding a wedding ring in the palm of his hand.

‘Are you a policeman?’ I asked.

His brow furrowed. ‘No,’ he said.

‘TV licence?’

‘We don’t have a television, Margot.’ Meena’s voice was behind me. She came into the room wearing a very short pair of pyjama shorts and an almost see-through teddy top.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked. Meena smiled at me blankly, as though she couldn’t hear me. ‘I haven’t seen you since … I thought—’ I wanted to end my sentences but I was aware of the man’s eyes upon me.

‘Are you back?’ I asked.

‘Back?’ she scoffed. ‘I never left.’

While she’d been gone, I’d taken apart Jeremy’s run and thrown away his stash of seeds. I’d made her bed and I bought us a new mirror in a green frame and I’d hung it on the wall. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. She sat beside the man and gave me a smile I couldn’t read. The dressed-ness of the suited man and me only served to make Meena seem more naked.

‘I need to teach you about self-incrimination,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You find a strange man in your flat and the first thing you do is assume you’re being arrested?’

‘I didn’t think I was being arrested,’ I snapped, ‘I thought he might have been here to tell me you were dead.’

‘God, Margot, I go on holiday for one week—’

‘Three weeks.’

‘And you think I’m a missing person?’

‘So, who is he, then?’ I asked.

‘This man is your saviour.’

I looked at him. He tucked the wedding ring into the inside pocket of his jacket.

‘Did you join a cult?’

Meena laughed so hard that she snorted. ‘Do you know, my mother is always asking me that. This man, my dear Margot,’ she said, ‘is …’ She started on an H sound, but then the man’s eyes flared and an expression that was briefly frightening passed across his face. ‘The Professor,’ Meena finished. ‘The very man to whom you owe your freedom from your twenty minutes of incarceration.’

‘Oh,’ I said, and for the first time The Professor smiled. He didn’t look at all how I’d pictured him – as a young, bearded fellow with