‘She that Scottish bird?’ volunteered one.
‘Yes!’ Agnes cried. ‘Yes, that’s her. Do you know her?’
‘Not so’s people would talk about it,’ quipped the man.
‘Well, do you know where she is?’
The man looked at her. He was bearded and wore a tattered tweed hat.
‘She ain’t here,’ he said finally. ‘And you ain’t going to find her, neither. She’s gone.’
‘Where? Where has she gone?’
‘Dunno. She’s just gone, is all. Haven’t seen her round for a couple of weeks.’
‘She the Scottish one?’ said the leader belatedly. ‘I got you now. I know ’er.’
‘Do you know where she is?’ said Agnes.
‘Skin and bone, that the one? Yeah, I got you. Used to be up by the river, up there? Yeah, she’s gone.’
The sack in Agnes’s hand was heavy and she put it down. She was too late. Annie had died, in the coldness of a London night with no one in all the city to comfort her.
‘But where’s she gone?’ she said again.
Her mind could scarcely encompass the question. Where, after all, was there to go? Did one just disappear, and then die again as gradually people forgot the particulars of one’s life? She felt terror grip at her throat. She wondered if Annie would haunt her, her withered little ghost scuttling about the room while Agnes slept alone.
The group were regarding her now with some sympathy.
‘Sorry, love,’ said one of them.
“Er son come to find her,’ said the leader suddenly. ‘Took ‘er off home with him, so I heard.’
‘What?’ Agnes stared at him. ‘Her son?’
The faithless Jacky had returned, then! She felt her heart swell with relief.
‘’S right. Took ‘er back to Scotch-land. Know ‘er well, did you?’
‘No,’ Agnes cheerfully replied. ‘No, I didn’t really know her very well.’
She turned to go, leaving the bag with them. Perhaps they could find some use for its contents. The group of men watched her.
‘By the way,’ she said, turning back to them, ‘what exactly are you all doing?’
‘What does it look like?’ said the leader. ‘It’s a bleeding Bible class, innit?’
On the bus to Highbury she sat at the top and looked out of the window. At this level, the pavement classes were all but obliterated. One sailed, ship-like, through a strange element of streetlamps and first-floor windows, a post-diluvian world. She thought of the strange congregation she had just stumbled upon. Really, they hadn’t seemed mad at all. In fact, they were quite ordinary. For a moment the empty bus appeared to shift around her to accommodate them. It struck her that faith was a free element, like air. One could have it for nothing. One could have it when one had nothing else. It was one of the comforts of ordinariness. The bus shuddered to a halt and one or two people clomped up the stairs. A man in a long coat sat down in the adjacent seat. Out of the corner of her eye Agnes could see that he was young and rather handsome. He did not look at her. She returned despondently to her perusal of the window.
It was perhaps, after all, very simple, she thought as the bus turned into the Holloway Road. It was just a question of not looking too closely at things. Close up, the mad weave was bizarre and imageless, but from a distance a pattern could perhaps be discerned and somewhere within it all that she knew: her family, her friends and then herself, all of them busily plaiting and sewing, creating the small corner of life they would one day look back on, together or apart, as their own. She supposed one only found out how one compared by looking at the picture. It was the final result and she would wait for it, as those around her were now waiting.
The bus became entangled in a long rope of traffic. There was a unanimous sigh as the passengers settled back, resigned, into their seats. There was no hurry, after all. For ordinary people, such as herself, there was nothing to hasten towards, no defining moment. She too leaned back in her seat, succumbing to the journey’s hiatus.
The bus lurched forward a few feet and then stopped. She thought of John, of his irreversible loss. Tears began to start up behind her eyes. She felt his name forming in her throat, swelling in her brain; the cipher of her desire, the word that lay between herself and the unthinkable! He was no longer perfect. In fact, he was irreparable. The worst of it was that she no longer needed him. He hadn’t even left her that. For a moment her mind roared with grief for him; and then he was gone.
Agnes looked up, blinking. The light in the bus was exceptionally bright. Someone seemed to be speaking to her.
‘Excuse me?’ she said.
‘I said, it gets boring, doesn’t it?’
It was the man in the seat next to hers. He was smiling benignly at her. She wondered what she had been doing to make him so concerned.
‘Only if you want to get there,’ she replied.
He appeared to be considering her answer.
‘That’s true,’ he said, nodding.
‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘if you were going to the Odd Fellows’ reunion party, you wouldn’t be in such a hurry, would you?’
He looked at her bemusedly. She felt herself blushing. Suddenly he laughed.
‘I suppose not,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know if it would be worth it.’
‘That depends on how odd a fellow you are,’ she replied. ‘You never know, it might open up a whole new world.’
He laughed again, this time more heartily.
‘My name’s Steven,’ he said, extending his hand.
She looked at the hand and then at him. Perhaps things weren’t so ordinary after all.
‘Agnes,’ she replied, shaking it. ‘Agnes Day.’