“Oh yes,” Beryl said, wiping her glasses with her hanky. “We wanted a snap of us in the shop because that’s where we first met. It took Alan about ten visits to pluck up the courage to talk to me, you know. I’ve never seen someone spending so long pretending to look at books on Yorkshire farm machinery of the eighteenth century. At first I thought he might just really love farming, or Yorkshire—or both—but then I realized he was only standing there because it was the best way to keep sneaking glances at me. Once I saw him holding a book about seed drills upside down. That was the day he finally came over and said hello.”
“And you became an item straightaway?” Peggy said.
“Oh no, not for a long time,” Beryl said. “The timing was rubbish. I’d just divorced my husband and it hadn’t been the easiest of rides. Looking back now I don’t know why I made such a fuss about waiting. It just seemed like I should pause for the dust to settle a bit. Alan said he understood that I needed time, but that didn’t stop him coming in and pretending to still care about bloody farming for the next six weeks, sneaking over to say hello whenever there was a gap between customers.”
“Six weeks?!” Peggy said.
“Every day,” Beryl said. “Even when I had five days off for tonsillitis he still came in, despite my boss telling him I was going to be off for the rest of the week. Eventually, we had our first date. Tea and iced buns in this very café.”
They were interrupted by one of the staff, who was noisily clearing away crockery from the adjacent table. She and Beryl exchanged slightly frosty smiles. “She’s the worst, that one,” Beryl said when the woman was out of earshot, without providing further explanation.
“But you and Alan were together properly after that?” Peggy probed.
“Yes, we were inseparable actually,” Beryl said. “Alan is—oh, I suppose I should say was—a carpenter. His workshop was in his house just down the road, near the little cemetery. I moved in just after Christmas. I was fifty-two. He was sixty but you’d never have known it. He could have passed for a much younger man. He had these great big strong legs like tree trunks.”
Andrew and Peggy looked at each other. In the end, Beryl realized what the unspoken question was.
“I suppose you’re wondering why we aren’t still together.”
“Please don’t feel obliged to tell us,” Andrew said.
“No, no—it’s fine.”
Beryl composed herself, polishing her glasses again.
“It was all down to my relationship with my ex-husband. We’d got married when we were twenty-one. Kids, still, really. And I think we both knew as soon as we came home on our wedding night and gave each other a chaste little peck on the cheek that we didn’t properly love each other. We stuck it out for years but eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore and I decided to end it. And I made a decision then and there”—she rapped her knuckles on the table for emphasis—“that if I were to ever find someone else to share my life with it would have to be for love and nothing else. I wasn’t going to settle for the sake of it being the done thing, or just for companionship. And at the first sign of feeling like we were going through the motions, that we’d fallen out of love, that would be it. Bish, bash, bosh. I’d be out.”
“And that’s what happened with Alan?” Peggy said.
Beryl took another sip of tea and replaced the mug carefully on its saucer.
“We were very much in love to start,” she said. She eyed Andrew mischievously. “You might want to cover your ears for this part, but we practically spent the first few years in bed. That’s the thing with someone who works with their hands. Very skilled, you see? Anyway, aside from that side of things, for a long time we were very happy. Even though his family had buggered off a long time before, and mine had never approved of the divorce, it didn’t matter. It just felt like me and him against the world, you know? But then, after a while, Alan started to change. It was subtle at first. He’d say he was too tired to work, or he’d go for days at a time without shaving or getting out of his pajamas. Occasionally I’d find him—” She broke off and cleared her throat.
Peggy leaned across the table and put her hand on Beryl’s. “It’s okay,” she said, “you don’t have to . . .” But Beryl shook her head and patted Peggy’s hand to show she was okay to continue.
“Occasionally, I’d find him sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, back against the sofa, just looking out into the garden through the French windows. Not reading. Not listening to the radio. Just sitting there.”
Andrew thought of his mother in the dark of her bedroom. Inert. Hidden away. Unable to face the world.
“He was a proud old sod,” Beryl said. “Never would have admitted to me that he was struggling with whatever it was. And I could never find the right words, or the right moment, to ask him about it all. Then his back went. Whether it was psychosomatic or what I don’t know, but he had to sleep in another room because otherwise he’d disturb me getting up—or so he said. Then one evening we were having tea, watching some rubbish on the telly, and out of nowhere he turned to me and said: ‘You remember what you told me right after we met, about what you’d do if you stopped loving the person you were with?’
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Do you still believe that?’ he said.
“‘Yes, I do,’ I said. And I did. I should have said something reassuring, of course, but I just assumed he knew I still loved him as much as I always had. I asked him whether he was okay but he just kissed me on the top of my head and went off to do the washing up. I was worried but I thought he was just having one of his difficult days. The next morning I went off to work as usual, but when I got home he wasn’t there. And there was a note. I can still remember holding that piece of paper, my hands shaking like mad. He’d written that he knew I didn’t love him anymore. That he didn’t want to put me through any pain. He’d just gone. Never left an address, never left a phone number. Nothing. I tried to find him, of course. But as you know there were no relatives to get in touch with, and he didn’t have any friends I knew of. I did actually look into getting a whatchamacallit, a private investigator, but the thought always dogged me that maybe he’d just lied, that he’d run off with some other lass. Looking at this though”—she picked up the photograph—“and hearing about this duck business . . . Well, you tell me—” At this, a sob escaped her, and she clasped both hands to her chest. “Maybe I should have tried harder after all.”
—
After they’d made sure Beryl was okay, with promises to be in touch soon, Andrew and Peggy emerged from the shop like two people leaving a cinema: blinking into the sunlight, thoughts consumed by the story they’d just been told.
They stood in the car park and checked their phones. Andrew was really just scrolling up and down his short list of existing texts—offers from pizza companies he’d never ordered from, PPI scams, work nonsense. He couldn’t shake the desperate sadness of Beryl’s story.
Peggy was gazing into the middle distance. An eyelash had fallen to her cheek, looking like the smallest of fractures on a piece of porcelain. Somewhere nearby, a car horn sounded with one sharp blast and Andrew reached out and took Peggy’s hand. She looked at him with surprise.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Andrew said.
They left the car park and made their way toward the town center, hand in hand. Andrew hadn’t planned to go this way, but it just felt right, as if they were being drawn along by an invisible force. They walked along the high street, weaving past parents with pushchairs and a group of tourists who’d slowed to a stop in the street as if their batteries had run down, then on further to Alnwick Castle, with its red and yellow Northumberland flags strained taut by the breeze. Without exchanging a word they made their way around the castle to the surrounding field, newly cut grass collecting on their shoes. Down, further, past kids throwing a dog-eared tennis ball around and pensioners resting on picnic tables watching the moody clouds closing in on the sun. Down, further still, along a path carved out by footfall, until finally they reached the river and found a solitary bench half-covered in moss at the water’s edge. They sat and listened to the gurgling water and watched the reeds struggling against its flow. Peggy was sitting upright, her hands in her lap, one leg crossed over the other. They were both very still, at odds with the rushing river, like the model figures Andrew arranged on his living room floor. But even in that stillness, there was movement. Peggy’s foot was stirring almost imperceptibly every second or so, like a metronome. It was, Andrew realized, not because of tension or nervousness, but purely because of the pulse of her heart. And suddenly he was gripped by possibility once again: that as long as there was that movement in someone, then there was the capacity to love. And now his heart was beating faster and faster, as if the power of the river were pushing blood through his veins, urging him to act. He felt Peggy stir.