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

at the end of the bed, but she’s different. It’s not just her hair that’s different, but her face. Has she been standing there this whole time? Did she always look like that? She’s slipping, slipping, slipping …

‘Lenni?’ he asks.

I shake my head because it’s easier than speaking.

‘Lenni, the nurse called,’ my father says. And I smile.

‘You kept your promise.’

Margot and the Box

‘I DON’T WANT to let you down, Lenni.’

I only realized she was there then. I opened my eyes. I had to blink to bring her into focus. At first, there were two Margots leaning towards me from my visitor’s chair.

‘Let me down?’

‘You finished your half of the hundred.’

‘My seventeen per cent.’

‘Your half. And I haven’t finished mine,’ she said in a small voice.

She shook her head, looked like she was going to say something and then didn’t.

‘Everyone’s helping,’ she said at last. ‘Else, Walter, Pippa, the others from the Rose Room – they’ve split into teams to take on each painting. I sketch them out, direct them with colours and then supervise.’

‘Wow.’

‘The only thing is,’ she said, ‘while I work with them and boss everybody about, there’s nobody to tell the stories to.’

‘So you came here?’

‘So I came here. To tell you the next story, if you’ll let me.’

‘Always.’

West Midlands, Spring 1999

Margot James is Sixty-Eight Years Old

When he died, I got seasick. It was as though the world had tilted at a strange angle and nothing felt right. What should have been flat was actually an incline, and I found myself holding on to handrails and faltering on steps as I’d never done before. The pain of losing him hadn’t subsided like people said it would.

Humphrey’s sister had requested some of his books, to donate to the university where they’d both studied and where he’d first begun to explore the skies. She’d provided me with a list of the ones she wanted to donate, and I was packing them up into some boxes the greengrocer had given me. His shelves of books lined both sides of the living room. Most of them hadn’t been touched since I first met him but they were all, he had insisted, essential. They’d been there so long that they seemed to be part of the walls rather than objects for use, like additional beams holding up the crumbling stone structure of his little cottage. With each book I took from a shelf, it felt like I was removing a brick from the walls of the house. Without him and his books, surely it would all fall down.

I was doing my best not to pay attention to the feeling that I was giving away something I very much needed to keep. After all, when would I read them? What use were they growing mildewed in the corner of an old widow’s cottage?

The Fifth Annual Astronomy Conference, Calgary, 1972, a big white book that would slot perfectly into the box that had once held Brazilian bananas, was the last on the list. It slipped its secret onto the floor with such silence that I didn’t notice.

It wasn’t until I carried the boxes to the car that I saw her. Smiling, about to say something, a cherubic baby Jeremy in her arms, looking up at me from the cold stone floor.

I picked her up and held her in my hand. And I felt that she was so far away that this was the closest I could ever come to holding her again. I hadn’t heard from Meena since the previous Christmas. Jeremy would have been nineteen years old by then. I wondered if he had begun to resemble his father – the creaseless professor whom I had disliked all those years ago. When they left, I’d held a hope in my heart that she might not be able to stick it and might come back, but they had moved south and found home in a city named for a certain President Ho Chi Minh. A man who had once, a long time ago, given me some excellent advice.

I surveyed the quiet living room.

I took Humphrey’s love for granted sometimes, which is something you can only do when you’re really secure in someone’s affection. But I know he was happy and I know I was too.

You’ll find him … or her, Humphrey had said on the occasion of our very last meeting.

So I sat down and wrote her a letter, and then I posted it before I had the chance to change my mind.

a forest has grown between us

in the first silences, little leaves and shoots grew, still so small that we could crush them if we chose, but we stayed silent, never walking the space between us, never crunching underfoot the buds and the grass that were growing there

with every month that passed, our untravelled distance became thorny with the beginnings of a tree that blocked my way, and i didn’t have the courage to travel that space between us. i felt tired thinking of scratching knees on tall thickets

when the seasons changed and changed and changed and the hedges and brambles thickened, to walk to you would be to take a chainsaw and fight my way through what time had done to the space between us

until one day, the space between us, so solid with life in the middle, so thick with wide trunks and leaves, so green and dense and dark, had closed into a wall and i could no longer see you on the other side

to travel that distance between us now would be to risk my life

and what if i cleared a path, fought my way through that forest only to find on the other side

that you’re not there?

m x

Old Friend

‘MARGOT?’

‘Yes?’

‘Would it be weird if I said I love you?’

‘Not at all.’

‘It’s just, I think you need to know, I love you.’

‘I love