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

‘I can’t do that, Lenni,’ he said, ‘I can’t leave you here on your own.’

‘I’m not alone, I have all these nice nurses and doctors and all these tubes. Look at them all! I’m out of my mind with all the tubes!’ I pointed to the tubes burrowing into me, across the bed, attached to the various machines.

‘Lenni,’ he said softly.

And then I couldn’t be soft any more. ‘I don’t want you here.’

He didn’t speak.

‘I want you to go to Poland. Take a holiday and see Agnieszka, meet her family. Then come back and start your life together and let her make you laugh.’

‘No, Lenni.’

‘You can’t say no to a dying child.’

‘You’re not supposed to make jokes about this,’ he said, but he smiled a little.

‘I want you gone.’

A few tears fell from his eyes and he had to take off his glasses to wipe them away.

‘It will be a promise. Promise that you’ll go away and you won’t come back.’

‘But I—’

‘And if I get to the end, the nurses will tell you. They will call you and they will tell you to come. And then you can come and say goodbye. But that won’t be our real goodbye. This will. While I’m still Lenni. When I’m flush for tubes and looking forward to when they bring dinner because I like the strawberry yoghurts they have here.’

He shook his head and more tears fell, so he just took off his glasses and rested them in his lap. Then he took my tubed hand in his wet one.

‘If—’

‘If I change my mind, I will get them to call you and you will come,’ I said. ‘I know. But you have to promise.’

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because I’m setting you free.’

He sat with me for hours and when they brought my dinner, he asked the nurse to swap my lemon yoghurt for a strawberry one.

I woke up the next morning and found Benni the beanbag pig sitting in the visitor’s chair where my father had been, and there was a picture resting in Benni’s lap – a folded photograph of my father and me on my first birthday. I am in his arms and holding one hand up to my own eye and smushing it with the palm of my hand, and he is laughing. I have cake icing all over my cheeks and on my dungarees. The photo was worn at the centre in a cross from having made a home in his wallet for fifteen years.

And on the back, in green highlighter pen borrowed from the nurses’ station, he’d written: I will love you forever, pickle.

~

Margot gave me a smile that looked like she understood. And that maybe, although I might be wrong, she was proud of me.

‘Can we go to London now?’ I asked.

‘Well we could,’ she said, ‘but today we’re going somewhere new.’

Margot and the Road

Warwickshire, February

1971 Margot Macrae is Forty Years Old

The A4189 between Redditch and Henley-in-Arden is winding, long and lonely. It’s worse in the dark. The winters in London were never as cold as those I experienced in the countryside. In London there are all those tall buildings and bright lights to protect you, whereas out in the country you are exposed and vulnerable. If the pin in the map on the wall of Meena’s bedsit was still there, it pierced a spot just a few miles from where I was now driving, where I had found myself a job in a local library and settled into a small, quiet life.

I caught my own eye in the rear-view mirror and surprised myself with the fact that I now looked like a grown-up. I didn’t feel twelve years older than the Margot who had stepped off the train at Euston, alone and grieving, but I was.

And there I was, on the road, completely alone and in darkness. There were no cars ahead to follow and no cars behind to reassure. I went up a steep hill where leafless trees clawed up to the sky like grasping hands. I followed my headlights around another corner, and noticed briefly that the grass either side of the road was being blown about by the wind. A leaf flew past my window and I wondered for a moment if it were a bird, thrown out of control by the heavy winds. Spots of rain announced themselves on my windscreen and I turned on my wipers. Wipe, wipe. I kept my eyes on the road; I wasn’t far from Henley now. There was nothing to be afraid of. Wipe, wipe. I drove on, curling around another corner and past the old church. In the night, the place looked haunted.

The darkness rose up around my little car, and anything not illuminated by my headlights waited in the black unknown.

Around another corner – the empty hedgerows shivered against the wind and I leant closer to the steering wheel. I reached a straight section – the last part of the journey before Henley would be in sight. I was just starting to relax when my headlights lit up the dark figure of a man standing in the middle of the road. A man I was about to hit with my car. He didn’t move and for the briefest of seconds, neither did I. The shock of seeing him arrested my brain, but then my foot took over, pushing the brake with all my strength. My car swerved to the left. I jabbed at the horn, trying to gain control of the wheel. He turned then, and took a large step onto the grassy embankment by the side of the road. My engine stalled, or cut out, and I stopped, my front left wheel joining him at the edge of the road.

It must not have taken more than a few seconds for all that to happen, but it felt like it happened very, very slowly. I sat motionless for a moment. On this empty, seemingly