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

my private care home to be checked by a nurse, and to totter into the day room for breakfast, did I fully appreciate what he meant. The place was faultless – the staff were neat and kind – but there was a miserable inevitability about the place. Sockets where they would need to plug in respiratory machines when I would lose the ability to breathe on my own, panic alarms for when I would be panicking and need someone else to be alarmed. Pulleys on the ceiling for attaching hoists for when I would eventually need help rising up out of bed.

There was a special lunch planned for a resident who was turning seventy. We would be having lasagne. And I found myself at the desk in my room in front of the mirror, feeling a little nervous. I was putting on a lipstick. A light reddish-brown shade from Marks & Spencer that would, I hoped, brighten up my face. I looked at my eyes, my own eyes, the only things on my face that hadn’t changed over time, and wondered what Meena was up to at that moment. When I’d sent her my new address, I’d missed off the words ‘care home’ so she wouldn’t know.

The lasagne didn’t taste how I remembered lasagne; it had a strange plastic-like quality to it. But I’d fallen into a conversation with two long-term residents, Elaine and Georgina (‘Please, call me George’). They were telling me about their childhoods spent in the same seaside town near Plymouth, and how they’d never known one another but had many friends in common. We were talking about the size of the world and then there he was. A few tables over, eating alone. Still thin, but concertinaed a little at the middle from age. His hair wasn’t all gone, but what was left was white and fluffy. He was looking out of the window as though he could just sail out of it and keep going. On and on.

Johnny.

Goose bumps shimmered along my arms and I could no longer hear George telling Elaine about her new slipper boot knitting pattern. Because there he was.

He dipped his spoon into his lasagne and ate from it as though he were in a dream.

I considered doubting myself. I’d seen his face in many people before – strangers on London streets, patrons in the Redditch library, even a thin man in Hôi An – but this was him. I knew it. I felt it in my bones.

I remembered the court date back in the late 1970s when I’d submitted my request to end my marriage to a man I couldn’t find – the evidence to show we had looked, the last known address, the letters not answered by family, the proof that we had lived apart for over twenty years – Humphrey standing patiently by my side. I wondered if Johnny had ever heard I’d divorced him.

I hesitated as I wondered if I was being disrespectful to Humphrey’s memory. He’d told me to go and find my love, and I had. Johnny was not my love. Not now, maybe not even then. What would Humphrey think? Should I even go over to Johnny when I had a wedding ring on my left hand? One not borrowed, but truly my own. I asked these questions of myself, but I knew that if Humphrey were with me he would have already been over there, shaking Johnny by the hand and asking him what he thought of Neptune.

My heart belonged then, as it does now, to that funny, starry man who took my pieces of a life and helped me make a whole one. And to the woman who taught me how to set myself free. But my past belonged then, as it does now, to that tall, gangly boy who dropped onto one knee just after my twentieth birthday. To not ask would be unforgivable. A total denial of the mystery of it all – and Humphrey did like a mystery.

My heart hammering, I pushed myself to my feet.

I reached his chair and I let my eyes fall on him and I felt a familiarity so old it was like listening to music. I took him in. Then he looked up, and our eyes met.

I smiled, wondering how my eighty-year-old self compared with my twenty-five-year-old self. How many lives had I lived since I last saw him? How many moments? How many days? Had I known I’d have ended up there, with him, would I have done it all the same?

‘Johnny?’ I asked.

He squinted at me; his mouth fell slightly open.

‘Margot,’ he said, and it wasn’t a question but an answer. ‘How on earth …?’

And then it slowly slid into place, and I must admit it was a feeling not unlike falling.

Johnny’s brother couldn’t take his eyes off me.

I shook my head, tears forming, the air squeezing out of my lungs.

After a moment of white-hot nothing, I came back. Thomas was still staring at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as though it were his fault that he so closely resembled his older brother – it had been the same when he was a fifteen-year-old with bruised bony legs standing on the doorstep of my mother’s house, pretending to be Johnny.

‘Well’ – he smiled – ‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing you again!’

I had always imagined he would marry young and move to America, train in the air force, learn to fly. But his accent told me otherwise, still thick with Glaswegian charm. The last time I’d seen him might have been Davey’s funeral. Or a family dinner not long after. I tried to remember what he had looked like, but there were several memories stitched together and none of them seemed right.

‘It was you, then?’

‘What was?’

‘The candle. Did you visit Davey’s grave?’

He nodded. ‘Was a while ago, that. It was something Johnny asked, before he went, that I’d keep an eye out, you know?’

‘Well, thank you,’ I said. ‘I didn’t get there as