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

Glasgow, December 2003

Margot Macrae is Seventy-Two Years Old

We went to Davey’s gravestone shortly after the funeral, Johnny and I. I took flowers wrapped with a blue ribbon, and as I placed them at his grave, I looked at my husband and he looked at me and I had this consuming feeling that we were both deep underwater, so far from the surface that we could no longer see the sun. Unable to hear each other’s words, as we shouted our mouths filled with water.

Fifty years later, I stood at that same spot carrying a bunch of flowers tied with a yellow ribbon.

Time had turned this little spot in a Glasgow graveyard around the sun fifty times, and yet it looked much the same. Fifty winters had frozen the stone that bore my son’s name. Fifty summer suns had shone down where he lay sleeping. And though my feet had travelled far, I had come nowhere near the spot where I now stood.

The graveyard was quiet. The grass was frozen from the bitter night before. I wondered if it was cold down there, deep in the earth. My posy seemed a pitiful apology. I could still picture Davey as clear as day, his forehead scrunched up, his wide eyes exploring every new thing. The hands that were so tiny it made me marvel at his very existence.

I knelt on the cold grass and the dew began to seep into my trousers.

‘Hello,’ I whispered. Just beyond, on the path, two women in dark blue made their way across the graveyard, one carrying a bag for life with a group of white tulips poking out of the top.

‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long,’ I told him. ‘I hope you can forgive me.’ I’d left Vietnam because I had to see my Davey one last time. I couldn’t die without saying goodbye. So when I returned from Vietnam, I sold Humphrey’s farmhouse and moved home, to Glasgow.

I placed the flowers in front of him. The cellophane around them crinkled.

‘I was so afraid of you. Of how much I missed you and how much I loved you and how much I failed you.’

I took in a deep breath. Some of the thoughts were so loud.

‘If your father were here, he’d remind me that neither of us could be held responsible for a heart defect. But he’s not here. In fact, I don’t know where he is.

‘But maybe you do.’

Beside the flowers I’d placed on the cold grass was a small white candle in a glass holder. I picked it up. On the side of the glass holder were the words Rest in Peace. It was relatively clean and relatively new. It had been lit, but had only burned for a short time. There was just a shallow dip in the wax.

Neither of Davey’s sleeping neighbours had such a candle, so it wasn’t a gift from the church. I couldn’t think of many reasons that a stranger might leave a candle at the graveside of a baby who’d passed away more than half a century before. I felt a shiver and I stood, the cold from the wet patches on my knees having seeped into my bones.

I wondered at the power of what I held in my hand. There were so few people who might remember Davey.

Of course, I’d thought about Johnny over the years, but when Meena threw his missing person’s report in the bin, she threw away the part of me that felt I had an obligation to find him, whether or not he wanted to be found.

December seemed to suit the graveyard. The sky looked like it was made of the same grey as the headstones.

I replaced the candle and I kissed the stone that bore the name of my Davey. For bearing it so clearly through all those winters, through all those turns of the earth.

Glasgow, July 2006

Margot Macrae is Seventy-Five Years Old

‘Good afternoon. May I?’

‘Please do.’ I made some room on the bench and the vicar sat down. As he sat, he let out a sigh. I caught the scent of fabric conditioner on his clothes. I wondered if he was hot in them. Those black trousers and shirt on a sunny hot day like that must have been warm.

‘Have I seen you here before?’ he asked.

‘I’m here quite often lately,’ I told him.

‘Visiting someone?’ he asked.

‘Sort of.’

‘It’s a beautiful day for it.’

I wondered what ‘it’ was. Grieving? Waiting for whoever left the candle to return? And was this day truly wonderful for it? I agreed with him anyway. From his bag, he took out his lunch – a sandwich wrapped in plastic and cut into quarters. He held one of the little squares out to me and I found myself taking it.

The vicar took a big bite of his sandwich.

‘It gets a lovely light in the afternoons, this part of the churchyard,’ he said.

‘It does.’

We sat in silence for a while. I watched him chewing on his sandwich and I wondered how someone so nice ended up being the vicar of such a lonely church.

‘Right,’ he said, standing up, ‘I’m afraid I must be off. If I don’t get back into the office soon, I think I may melt. The bell ringers are coming at three to petition me about adding a Snow Patrol song to their repertoire.’

‘Crikey,’ I said.

‘My sentiments exactly,’ he said. ‘See you again, no doubt.’

Although I never did see him again. I stopped waiting for whoever had brought the candle to visit Davey. I had the feeling they were never coming back.

And then the vicar was off across the graveyard, brushing crumbs from his smart black trousers.

As he disappeared inside the church, I took a bite of the sandwich. It was egg and cress.

Moorlands House Care Home, September 2011

Margot Macrae is Eighty Years Old

I got old by accident. Those were Humphrey’s words that first time I’d taken him to the doctor’s, when his memory had started to fail him. Only on waking in