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

‘Of course.’

Warwickshire, 1971

Margot Macrae is Forty Years Old

His house was chaotic. The main building used to be a farmhouse – it was tall and made of crumbling stone. He’d bought it from an heir-less farmer with the intention of converting it completely into a modern home, but had given up as soon as he’d installed water, electricity, and an attic observatory with windows nested in the roof. The windows whistled when the wind blew and the radiators didn’t work.

There were several other buildings; one in which he kept a gaggle of chickens, in the other his car. In the third, he was in the process of creating a larger observatory. He had already had the good fortune that some of the roof tiles had fallen in the previous winter. He told me, as he walked me around, that he was going to set up a clear glass roof so that he could see the stars without, as he put it, ‘getting as cold as a witch’s tit’.

The chickens were many and he delighted in feeding them, picking them up and talking to them as though they understood. He had named them all after old Hollywood film stars: Marilyn, Lauren, Bette, Judy … When I asked him why, he told me that partly it was because he liked the idea that they were stars, but that mostly he was getting a bit sick of naming things after the constellations. He didn’t believe me at first when I told him that I, too, had once been a proud parent of a chicken. And I immediately wanted to call Meena. I often wondered what became of Jeremy. Whether he was still out there somewhere, pecking his way around London, living the life of a free-range chicken.

We stood in the field that spread out behind his house, and we looked up at the sky. Originally home to many cows, the field was now home to an extraordinarily overgrown garden. It was a night so cold that our breath danced away from us in ghostly patterns, but it didn’t bother me. The best way I can describe it would be to say that with him, I felt sanctuary. I felt we had all the time in the world to talk, and so much more to see. There was no hurry to speak, to impress him, to make him laugh. I felt so calm in his presence.

We sat and ate spicy tapas on his unstable kitchen table, which was propped up on one side by the Yellow Pages and on the other side with a Monopoly box. Humphrey was like nobody else I knew. He was both connected to and disconnected from the world. Connected to the intricate movements of the stars, the nowness of where each satellite, constellation and moon was in relation to the earth, but disconnected from everything else – his fridge contained a block of butter that had expired two years earlier, and the calendar that hung on his wall claimed that it was still 1964. He had tickets and flyers for events long passed, remembered sentences from Radio 2 programmes he’d loved at university, but often couldn’t recall if he had fed the chickens that day or when his sister’s birthday was.

‘I’ll just go and check the chickens aren’t hungry,’ he said, and I chose not to remind him that he had fed them twice in the two hours that I had been there. Instead, I was happy to stand alone in his kitchen among the bric-a-brac and just read. There were notes all over the place from Humphrey to Humphrey, and labels stuck on things that shouldn’t have needed labelling, like ‘The Big Spoon’. One of the saucepans was labelled ‘good’ and one ‘bad’. Why he kept both, I’ll never know.

He came back in, stamping his wellies on the mud-marinated doormat. ‘They’ve plenty of food, too much if anything!’ And he laughed as though it were another excellent joke. He took me by the hand, eyes bright, and asked, ‘Shall we go and observe them properly?’ And he led me up the stairs to the attic, where his homemade observatory let us mere mortals glimpse the heavens.

My Friend, My Friend

‘THERE ARE SILVERFISH living in the corner of my bathroom.’

Father Arthur sat down in the pew beside me.

‘At first sight,’ he said, ‘on an early morning visit to the lavatory, I thought they were slugs, but they’re not – they’re silverfish. There was just one, a dark thing that slithered into the gap between the floor tile and the skirting board.

‘You might think that I would want to get rid of them, that I might fear they are greater in number than me, that they might be living in the wall in their disgusting thousands, but I quite like them. They remind me that life is possible in even the most inhospitable conditions. They’re such funny things – little slips of silver that move like water and are so unlike any other life we know.

‘When I take a bath – and please stop me if you find this an inappropriate topic – I no longer read. Instead I watch and wait, hoping the absence of movement on the floor might bring one of them out – coax it into an adventure into the unknown lands of my bathroom floor. Often, they don’t come out. I have two theories. The first is that they don’t like the light – on my many night-time lavatory trips, they always scurry away. My second theory is that they are nocturnal. Though I confess I know nothing about the sleeping patterns of our invertebrate friends, I often wonder if they don’t like the day and prefer to explore by night.

‘In an effort not to kill them, I have asked Mrs Hill to refrain from using bleach on the bathroom floor. She told me I will get germs and that those