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

germs will make me ill, and that at some point she will have to do it, but I begged her not to, at least for now. I think of them as my tenants, my tiny immigrants, and I am their protector, their observer and their friend.’

‘How many are there?’ I asked.

‘At least two, but I hope for more.’

‘You could take down the skirting board and have a look.’

‘But what would I do then?’

‘Count them.’

‘And then what? I don’t think I’d feel good about destroying their home.’

‘So you will just have to drink a lot before bed.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘So you need the toilet in the night.’

He laughed. Quietly at first, but then it got louder. ‘Oh, Lenni,’ he said, ‘that’s simply wonderful.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I never would have thought of it.’

And then the smile faded from his face and he was sad again, just as he had been when I’d come into the chapel and New Nurse had gone off in the direction of the main entrance, telling me she was getting chocolate and a magazine, and if I wanted anything I should tell her now or forever hold my peace.

He stared up at the brown stained glass cross. ‘I’ve been looking at this window for so many years and now I’m worried I’ve been taking it for granted.’

‘Taking it for granted?’

‘I’ve only got a week left as hospital chaplain.’

‘What? A week? When did that happen?’

‘Lenni?’ He was concerned, worried that I didn’t know the date. But nobody who spends their days in nightwear has much need to concern themselves with the date.

‘I thought you had four months left.’

‘I did.’

‘It’s been four months?’

‘It will be, at the end of next week.’

I watched him breathing, pulling the air in through his nose slowly, his eyes still on the stained glass cross.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked in the gentlest voice I have.

‘What if nobody comes?’ he said, finally looking at me.

‘To what?’

‘My final chapel service. I fear it might be rather poorly attended.’

‘What about the old man? The sleeping one.’

‘He was discharged.’ He took a sharp breath in. ‘I’m sorry, Lenni,’ he said, ‘it’s my job to help you, not the other way round.’

‘You help me, I help you. That’s just how it is,’ I told him.

‘Thank you.’

‘Hey, you’ll always be my friend, my friend.’

New Nurse chose that moment to push open the heavy chapel door and then stumble as the door gave way and let her in. Although I suppose she didn’t really choose the moment – how could she know what was happening on the other side of those doors? But I wish she’d waited. I wanted to stay.

Margot’s Getting Married

MARGOT AND I sat side by side as rain battered the Rose Room windows. It wasn’t so much like the rain was falling from the sky as it was being thrown. I managed to get acrylic paint all along my pyjama sleeve as I painted a characteristically terrible picture of myself, aged three, crying at the nursery school gates. But it was very cosy, sitting in the warm room while the rain fell outside. Margot drew with such delicacy that you could almost hear their crunchy leaves, see their skeletal structure – a small posy of dried flowers, browned and curled at the edges and tied together with a ribbon.

West Midlands, September 1979

Margot Macrae is Forty-Eight Years Old

The sunlight had crept all the way across the half-laid carpet of Humphrey’s sitting room and still I hadn’t written a word. There was a patch where the carpet wasn’t fixed to the floor so it was very easy to catch your toe under it and trip. We often did. I’d tried Sellotape, but it didn’t stick to the flagstone beneath. The stones were icy in the winter mornings, such that we would each try to convince the other to be the one to go downstairs and put the kettle on. That room was everything – kitchen, living room, dining room – and then the stone staircase led up to the bedroom/observatory. I was sitting at the writing desk Humphrey had built for me, and I stretched out a leg and tucked my toe under the gap between the carpet and the floor.

‘Are you finished?’ Humphrey asked with a smile, the bucket of chicken feed in his hand shaking and spilling a few crumbs onto the floor. The girls would be in soon enough, pecking away at the flagstone for their unplanned second helping. Along with the writing desk, Humphrey had also built a chicken flap into the kitchen door. The less said about that the better. (‘Why should cats have all the fun?’ he’d said.)

I shook my head.

‘Mine’s on the side,’ he said, and I took it up – the list of invitees to our ‘little do’, as he called it. His brother, his sister, various aunts and uncles, a number of colleagues from the university, some from the observatory in London, one or two of the locals at the pub; his arachnid writing building a web of friends and family. A safety net spinning out around him.

My page was blank.

And so I wrote a name, just one. And putting it down in black ink was like carving open my chest and giving Humphrey a glimpse of my heart.

I didn’t have the right address, I was sure of it, so I wrote to the last one I’d held.

And I placed my one white envelope into the bag of invitations and I held my breath.

Of course, no reply came. The aunts and the uncles and the colleagues sent back their slips of paper with the box ticked according to their attendance and their preference for the meal. I checked the bottom of the bag to make sure my one invitation wasn’t still with us, and I imagined it out there in London, vulnerable on top of the scratchy doormat of strangers, frowned at, murmured at, and then eventually thrown into the rubbish bin