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

On my bedside table she placed a plastic cup full of coloured markers, a tray of charcoals and a clutch of pencils, and she put a white canvas on my lap, and as she sat down on the visitor’s chair, she rested a canvas of her own on her knees.

Using a black pencil, what she drew was so simple – a line of planets in a sky of stars.

West Midlands, 16th August 1987

Margot James is Fifty-Six Years Old

It had been marked in our calendar for three years: 16th August 1987. It was the equivalent of Humphrey’s Christmas. All his Christmases and a birthday thrown in too. Harmonic Convergence. The day that the sun, the moon and six planets from our solar system would perfectly align.

Of course, he didn’t buy the ‘twaddle’ that this day would spark the beginning of an age of enlightenment (an idea that was generating worldwide celebrations), but he did want to enjoy the ‘once-in-a-lifetime astral event’. I told him we’d already experienced one of those and he gave me an arched eyebrow in response.

I was much more interested in the two planets that wouldn’t be joining the line. I liked the idea that they were refusing to do what all the others were doing. They were being pulled by a different force – governed by a different law.

Like those two errant planets, I had been invited to the party but had declined. The party was being held by some of Humphrey’s friends in the London observatory. It was to include several hours of looking at the sky and recording what they saw, and then a party with food and drinks and dancing. The observatory team could enjoy an astral event like the best of them.

I couldn’t tell him why I didn’t want to go, I just knew that I didn’t. And so I offered to babysit the girls, rather than having to send them to his friend’s farm. After Bette and Marilyn had flown to the big chicken coop in the sky, we had taken on two older ladies – Doris and Audrey. They were to turn eleven that year. ‘Quite an achievement for a chicken,’ as Humphrey had put it.

So Doris and Audrey and I had stayed and watched as Humphrey packed up his best telescope and put on his ‘party cords’, and went on his way.

The bathroom was always the coldest room in Humphrey’s house, so it was only possible to have baths in the summer. Taking advantage of the warm weather, I took a bath, read several chapters of my book and shaved my legs. Then I came out, with the idea that I would watch a film on our newly acquired VHS player.

But there was something lying on the doormat. And it hadn’t been there when Humphrey left. It was addressed to Mrs James. It often took me a little time to remember that that was me. And I knew it was from her.

She always called me ‘Mrs James’. It was her way of reminding me of the permanence of my decisions, of reminding me she’d never change her name for a man. But my taking Humphrey’s name had been unconscious. Accidental, almost.

I picked up the envelope and laid it on the sofa cushion. I sat beside it. It could contain something good or something bad, but it was from her so it would probably be both.

It took me an hour or two before I could open it. In that time, I reasoned, Humphrey would almost be off the motorway and at the observatory. Probably having spilt some coffee from his car thermos on his party cords. The sun had rolled its way across the carpet and now a sliver of light lay warming my toes. Doris came into the kitchen, pecking at the gaps between the stone tiles in the hopes of finding some corn.

I should have known when I pulled at the envelope and the triangle flap came away easily, the adhesive still gummy.

Peeping at me from inside the open envelope were Meena and Jeremy. His eighth birthday wasn’t far away, but in the photograph he was a toddler still, his arms up in celebration, wearing only a striped T-shirt and a nappy. Meena had her arms around his middle and she was laughing.

The last time I saw her, she’d looked exactly as she did in the picture.

Meena and baby Jeremy were living in Acton, in a houseshare with an older couple who were both musicians in a London orchestra. Jeremy was somewhere between one and two. It was the middle of July and the sun had been relentless for weeks. As I’d passed signs for London along the motorway, my palms had started to sweat. I had this light-headed feeling that I wasn’t really in the car at all, but that it was one of the many dreams I’d had where I tried to drive to Meena only to discover I was lost, or that my car was broken or that she wasn’t where I was driving to. I felt like I was watching my car navigate the busy motorway, rather than being in control of it. I wondered if I’d die on the way to see her, and then fretted over why I felt that I would be okay with dying in a car accident as long as I was on my way to see her.

When I pulled up outside the house with the mint green door, I tried to turn off the engine without putting the gear into neutral, and then I couldn’t remember how to put the handbrake on.

I was sweating. Not just in the usual places but everywhere – in my hairline, on my thighs, on my bottom cheeks. My hands had left a wet pair of prints on the steering wheel. There were dark patches under the armpits of my striped sundress. I opened the glovebox. Tissues, wet wipes, even a