‘Okay.’ She holds his hand. ‘And will I jump into the grave and call your name and be devastated and inconsolable?’
‘You’d spoil your dress.’
‘I wouldn’t care.’
‘All right, then. I’ll be in my box and I’ll listen. As far as I’m able.’
‘I will beat my tiny fists on the wood.’
‘Thank you.’
They squeeze each other’s fingers.
Ahead in the queue is a mother with a toddler daughter: all curls and frills and graded shades of pink. The girl has collected a leaf at some point, perhaps in her garden — the child’s family may have a garden — or else during the walk to get here. Up until five minutes ago, the thing was a perfect little autumn in her hand, crisp-edged and tawny. The girl has loved it into splinters since then. She is currently staring at her palm and how it is dirty with veins and shreds, although she doesn’t cry. Perhaps she has a philosophical turn of mind. Either that or she doesn’t yet understand her loss.
He clears his throat, ‘I’ve chosen the music.’
‘For what?’
‘For the wake. And the service.’
These occasions are only guesses and are so far away and distant and tiny that they can seem fun. And people of all ages joke about their funerals, pick tunes.
‘You’ll have Andrew Lloyd Webber and like it. Sea shanties round the coffin and then I’ll play the spoons.’
‘I’ll come back and haunt you if you do. I’ll come back and bite you.’
‘Why else d’you think I’d do it?’
A student of the wandering sort shuffles past, his business concluded, and heads for the rest of the world. He seems exactly as bewildered as he did when he drifted up to make his enquiry.
Young men are easily confused, she’s often thought this. They lack resources.
The building society is busy. There are nine strangers — including the toddler — straggled out between her and the end of her mortgage and then the probable garden with pre-existing, or easily purchased, trees.
Or maybe they’ll change their minds and want decking with some pots — less work. Sit out of an evening and sip Martinis, daiquiris, home-made lemonade, and nobody doing their back in with mowing the lawn because there isn’t one.
It doesn’t do to over-prepare. She realises that it’s good to let some mysteries remain.
Flower beds, or pots, or runner beans — it doesn’t matter.
The woman ahead of her looks stressed and is holding a sheaf of ill-kempt papers. Whatever her problem is, it will take a while.
Monday lunchtime.
Predictably busy.
They should have known better.
There’s the second fig to eat, yet — a distraction — except that it’s his, intended for him. Not that she’s asked if he likes figs. She made the assumption that he should because their tastes have been consistently in agreement right from their start.
It’s something to give him, a fresh fig.
She doesn’t want his money. She isn’t truly accepting a gift, she is agreeing that he has to save her and embracing that. Anything else would hurt him.
And she can’t hurt him.
Without his intervention — although this isn’t what it’s about, or what they’re about — her mortgage interest would tick and tick, asking £6.80 from her every day. Plus, her inadequate mortgage endowment is shrinking and shrinking, which loses her — by some unhappy coincidence — pretty much another £6.80 every day. In this area, and several others, it can seem that she is being punished for something unnamed: perhaps sins she is waiting to commit.
He has lately been very firm that she ought to get rid of her flat and she agrees. The place has become unreliable. There is something wrong, for example, with the roof. People move unaccountably in and out. Most mornings, when she checks the table in the hall, there is mail for entirely theoretical residents. Yesterday there was a letter addressed to ‘Mr Basement’. She isn’t aware of anyone using that name. Odd objects are left on the steps during the night: pieces of metal, old mops, plastic things that seem culinary, or else medical. There is a sense of illicit activities taking place. Meanwhile, and perhaps in response, the council has sent notices to say that odd objects will no longer be uplifted, or that they will not be uplifted so often as hitherto, or that they will be uplifted from other locations, as yet unclear.
‘The council are turning off the street lights.’ He does this occasionally: follows her thinking while it runs inside. ‘This winter.’
‘Really?’ It’s generally a thing to love: the way he is mixed in her thinking.
‘Said so in the paper. To save money.’
‘Can they do that?’
‘Apparently.’ He lifts her hand, which means he intends to kiss it and — here — does so, as if she were delicate fruit, the touch light as a breath and elongating. ‘We needn’t go out any more in the nights.’ This hot between her knuckles, before he raises up his head and stares. ‘We could stop in and have lanterns and a fire.’ A blue and inquisitive stare. ‘Do you think we’d enjoy that?’
‘I’ve never seen you in firelight.’ As if she has a list of ways in which she would like to see him: in dappled sunshine, or a CT scan, perhaps in evening dress, or else a movie of the 1930s with a railway platform underneath him and leather luggage and a hat. In school, at his first job, with his first love — so much she has missed.
‘We’ll make sure we have a fireplace. Garden and a fireplace. And then we’ll get ourselves in firelight.’
‘On a rug.’
‘On a big rug.’
She can’t deny this curiosity, this ache to have felt his earliest kiss, his potentially scared or possibly reckless activity when no one had ever been with him, or left him. Imagination is inadequate.
Asking him — show me your past, let me have it — could be misunderstood. She doesn’t want him to be the man she’s seen in photographs: Polaroid Christmases, dated clothes; that isn’t who she loves, or who makes her undoubtedly satisfied. At night and on their daytime occasions — celebratory occasions, in his study with the paperwork jolted and spilling occasions — then he is always new, as smooth and new as teenage nonsense and summer running, as the best kinds of games. His pacing has maybe changed from what it was — he rolls up in waves and then back, has pauses — but his truth is only young and in the present tense. It is important that she keeps him absolutely sure of this.
If he doubts, she convinces him. That’s how it is and will be.
And each time he’s reassured, he draws in slightly closer.
‘How are you surviving?’
‘Okay. How about you?’
They are solicitous in balanced but not identical situations. She asks how he is during illnesses, if political news has upset him, if they have quarrelled. He asks after lovemaking, if she’s tired, if they have quarrelled. They quarrel mainly at great speed, so they can move on to enquiries and holding and being held and can have nothing wrong any more. They lean on the rise and fall of their ribs when the shouting’s done, old trouble in the press of breath. As a rule, they don’t like being scared without each other, not even if each other is what scared them.
This morning hasn’t been frightening, not quite. They spent it with each other in a lawyer’s office, going through unspilled paperwork so that their lives will be coordinated and tidy from hereon in.
She called it the document instead of the will. This made matters slightly confusing and so she changed to my document and your document and eventually everyone — all three of them — was documenting.
Afterwards, business over, he kissed her in the street — a grey building at his back with a grubby doorway, and so she closed her eyes while they hugged and therefore spared herself the ugliness. He kisses very well. On that occasion, he was particularly fine.