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

map would have done to at least try to dry myself down. All that was in the glovebox was a single dessert spoon. I cursed myself for letting Humphrey borrow my car.

I’d spent so long wondering what I would wear to meet Jeremy, and to meet Meena as a mother. I’d fixed my hair – only to sweat my way down the M25 until I was an unrecognizable mess. I cursed myself for wanting to look nice for her.

Sitting in the boiling car, it was only getting worse. I pulled the keys from the ignition and got out. The street was quiet, the houses merrily baking in the hot sun.

I noticed a small hand at the warped flowered glass of the front door before I’d even walked down the path. It disappeared and then came back. He was real. And he was waving to me.

And then she opened the door.

‘Hello, Mrs James.’ It took me a while to take her in. She’d cut her hair and now it brushed against her collar bone. She was wearing an overall dress, and on her hip she held her child. Though she was at least forty-two by then, she seemed so much younger. And the child. He was ethereal, like his mother. He had blond hair that was curled in tight ringlets and her blue eyes. He reached out for me, unafraid, wanting me to hold him. Meena passed him to me. I was surprised by the weight of him on my hip as he struggled, trying to grab my earring in his tiny fist.

I followed her into a blue kitchen with a high ceiling. The walls were covered in sheet music. There was a cello in the corner and an open but empty violin case on the kitchen table.

Meena cleared one corner of the table of plates and papers and sat down. I sat beside her and transferred Jeremy to my lap. Now he was really struggling, trying to get at my earring. This little squirming thing was named after two lost boys, but he was very much real. Ruddy cheeked and angel haired. I opened my mouth to say something, though I wasn’t sure what it was going to be, and at the same moment she jumped up. ‘Do you want some lemonade?’

‘You made lemonade?’

‘Of course not. Geoff made it. It’s kind of his one redeeming feature. There’s lemon drizzle cake, too.’

I accepted both and, as I watched her move about the kitchen, I felt my heart break for all the time that had passed. I’d been absent when Meena became just another normal person. A person who had plates and responsibilities. Granted her son was named after a chicken, but he was hers. Her child. His finger paintings had been made into a collage on the wall. He had a high chair; he had a home. And she had a job now, something in a theatre box office. She was no longer the version of herself I had preserved in my memory. She was no longer wild.

I bounced Jeremy on my knee. The weight of him was astonishing. Not because he was particularly heavy but because he was a human. Created out of nothing.

She sat down and handed me a plate of lemon drizzle cake. It had a black hair just peeping out of the corner of the sponge. I pulled it out. It was thick. I wondered if it was Geoff’s. The glasses of lemonade stood on the kitchen counter, forgotten, but my mouth was dry. Meena pulled her own plate onto her lap and broke a corner off. She held it out to Jeremy’s mouth and he ate it.

‘I can’t—’

‘What?’

‘I can’t believe you made a human,’ I said.

She beamed. ‘I know, it’s weird isn’t it?’ She pulled him onto her lap and used the corner of her top to wipe the dribble off his lips.

‘You’re not so bad, are you?’ she asked him. ‘Are you?’ She lifted him high in the air, narrowly missing dropping her plate on the floor, and Jeremy shrieked with delight.

And I wanted to fall into the hole in the ground that was opening up for me.

In the quiet of Humphrey’s living room, I ran my hand across the photo. I could still hear that shriek of pure happiness from Jeremy. He’d be older now, wiser, more careful. I wondered if his hair was still blond, if his ears had grown to look elfin like Meena’s. There was nothing else inside the envelope, but there was something written on the back of the photograph.

In her unsteady writing were the words We’re moving! and then an address. The alphabet was English, but the letters were all marked with accents and shapes I didn’t recognize.

It had the effect of being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Meena and Jeremy Star

32 Nguy n Hũ’u Huân

Lý Thái T, Hoàn Kim,

Hà Ni, Vietnam

She was moving to Vietnam. Of course she was. She needed an adventure. She’d been unwild for far too long.

On my way to pin the photograph onto the corkboard in the kitchen, I picked up the envelope to put it in the bin and the absence made itself known. The lack of colour where there should have been. A missing monarch. The envelope was without sovereign rule. A republican. It made my already short breath catch in my throat. I don’t remember but I must have dropped the envelope and the photograph, and in my bath towel, with my hair still wet on my shoulders, I ran out of the house.

Humphrey’s house was in the middle of a field. The road that led to it was a gravel path that turned into grass the closer you got to the house. And the whole field was hidden from the main road by a line of tall dark trees.

There were tyre marks that didn’t run up to the patch where Humphrey usually parked the car. They led around to the left.

She’d