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

‘What was Vietnam like?’

‘Amazing. It was hot and busy and so alive. I could hardly believe all this life had been going on while I’d been living alone in Humphrey’s old farmhouse. And of course, there was Meena.’

‘Did you find her?’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘We burned the forest down.’

I followed Margot to the airport sometime in 1999. After a long flight with two stop-overs, we landed at Tân So’n Nht Airport. It wasn’t the heat but the humidity that hit us as we made the uncertain journey from the plane to the quiet airport terminal. It was night and ours was the last flight arriving before morning. I didn’t have any baggage, so I walked freely, following Margot as she juggled papers and phrasebooks and her passport. She was nervous. She’d booked the flight and packed before she’d had time to prepare herself. Which was a blessing and a curse. Time would have calmed her, but it also might have stopped her.

She needn’t have worried, though. The almost-stranger half a world away that she’d placed her trust in was waiting for her. He looked like Meena; he had the same face shape and he had her eyes. He was tall, though, and hadn’t quite yet grown into himself. He was holding up a hand-drawn sign with Margot’s name on it, and Margot, upon the relief of seeing him, ran to him and wrapped him up in a big hug.

I followed them both, listening to them talk, hearing Margot explain that she’d met him when he was no more than a cherub and him telling Margot that he recognized her at once because wherever they had lived, his mother had hung up a picture in a gold frame: a blurred photograph of Meena and Margot at a party. Margot was wearing a green dress and they were dancing, spinning with their arms crossed and held together. It went with them wherever they went, he said.

When they reached his moped in the car park and he said, ‘Jump on!’ Margot had laughed and then really laughed. He handed her a helmet and then, because she’s awesome, she climbed onto his moped behind him, her suitcase sandwiched between them. He pulled them into the busy traffic, a thrumming vein of the city made up of scooters and taxis, of people for whom this was just another evening and not something completely extraordinary.

And when they arrived in the narrow leaning alleyway where Meena and Jeremy shared an upper floor flat, I stood beside Jeremy and watched as Meena ran to Margot, crashed into her so hard that they both almost fell over, wrapped her arms around her and cried, careless and free, ‘Tao yêu mày!’

Birthday

I THOUGHT IT was my birthday when I saw the candle. I had to sit up before I could work out which was the right way round to look at things. I must have been sleeping because I didn’t remember anyone turning off the lights.

They were creeping. Creeping with a candle. Margot, Pippa, Walter and Else (hand in hand), Father Arthur, New Nurse, Paul the Porter. They were all smiling and for a moment I wondered whether I was dead. The candle flickered and lit up their faces, and it was resting on top of the cake that Margot was carrying very slowly and carefully to my bed.

She gingerly placed it on my table and pulled it closer so I could see. In swirling black sugar icing, it said: Happy 100th Birthday Lenni and Margot.

‘We’re a hundred?’ I asked. ‘We did it?’

Pippa held up a painting I hadn’t seen before. It was the best I’d seen. It was of Margot and me, side by side in our pyjamas, and I was laughing, the sky above us filled with stars.

In the bottom corner, it said: Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital, Margot Macrae is Eighty-Three Years Old.

‘We’re your last year?’ I asked, not believing Margot had actually captured me in paint. I looked so real.

Margot smiled and patted my hand. ‘Of course,’ she said.

New Nurse scraped up chairs for everyone and they sat around me. Like pilgrims.

The glowing thing on the cake wasn’t actually a candle – it was a plastic Christmas candle with fake wax dribbling down its side and a bright LED bulb which was flickering. It was doing a good job of looking like a candle. ‘No open flames,’ New Nurse said by way of explanation. Then she lifted the cake and held it in front of us.

‘Make a wish,’ New Nurse said. Margot and I blew over the cake, and by witchcraft or magic the plastic LED candle went out.

Pippa handed around paper plates and cut thick slices of cake. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had cake. It was delicious. A perfect choice. And now I could honestly say I’d tasted my hundredth birthday cake.

‘I never thought I’d see my hundredth birthday,’ I said.

‘Many happy returns,’ Else said with a soft smile.

‘Very well deserved,’ Father Arthur added.

‘It’s quite an achievement,’ Pippa said, ‘and now seems like a good time to tell you that I’ve been talking to a gallery owner in the city and she wants to display your paintings as an exhibition. That is, if you’d be interested.’

‘What do you think?’ Margot asked, looking at me.

I nodded.

‘One hundred years old. How does it feel?’ Arthur asked.

‘Weird,’ I said. ‘It feels like just yesterday I was seventeen.’

‘I’m told I don’t look a day over eighty-three.’ Margot winked at me.

So we ate cake and talked and laughed, and together Margot and I celebrated our one hundred years on the earth. It’s been a long life and it’s been a short life.

The light they brought with them stayed long after they’d gone.

Margot

WE WERE ONE hundred years and a day old, and a little face appeared at the window of my ward. At