“Oh my God!” Maeve said.
Her negligence had robbed the charity of a heap of money. She’d been expecting to empty some loose change from her purse into the collection box on the counter. Now it seemed paltry.
The woman in the shop was sympathetic. “It was your property at the time, dear, not ours. If you’d knocked it off the shelf here in the shop and broken it, that would be another matter.”
“But it wasn’t mine. It belonged to someone else. I was bringing it here. I’m sick to the stomach. I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t take it to heart. Accidents happen.”
“If I’d known it was worth all that money, I’d have wrapped it up properly.”
“Go home and forget about it, my dear. As far as I’m concerned, it never happened.”
But Maeve couldn’t dismiss it. She lay awake that night wrestling with her conscience. Morally she should do something in reparation, but she already owed money to the bank and needed every penny to pay her rent and basic living expenses.
She couldn’t ignore the whole incident as the woman had suggested. She imagined Aunt Jayne shaking her head at that and saying, “I wouldn’t be alive without the Heart Foundation. You must do something, my dear.”
She also felt she ought to tell Trevor how much his donation had been worth, and how she had smashed it to bits.
Trevor never did learn the truth.
After a week in her private hell, Maeve thought of a way out. Charities get their income mainly from shops, legacies and fundraising. She would become a fundraiser. She would collect a thousand pounds for the BHF. But how? Rattling a tin wouldn’t be much use. She’d find some personal challenge and ask people to sponsor her for this good cause.
And that was how she took up running. She’d watched several Bath Halfs and been moved by the interaction between the cheering crowd and the runners of all shapes and sizes, so happy to achieve their goals. Thanks largely to that well-meant and oft-repeated advice from her mother, she’d grown up thinking the only sport open to her was strutting her stuff in clubs and parties. She could dance the night away, so why shouldn’t she take up running? She went online, discovered she was already too late to enter, so signed up instead for the race called the Other Half, stumped up the registration fee of twenty pounds and became a BHF runner without needing to tell anyone her real reason for doing this.
Then reality kicked in. A BHF runner. She hadn’t run anywhere in years. She didn’t even walk much. A stroll to the corner shop was the extent of her daily exercise.
Late that evening she made a start. Couldn’t call it training. She tried jogging along the canal path in soft boots, leggings and a loose top with the hood up, like a teenager up to no good.
After fifty steps she stopped and thought about walking. Wasn’t there something called race-walking? She could be a BHF walker. Come on, she told herself. This can only get better. You’re not decrepit, even if your body tells you otherwise.
That night she didn’t lie awake thinking about the Toby jug. Exhausted, muscles aching, she slept at once and deeply, cancelling the backlog of restless nights, and woke up at seven as stiff as a frozen fish. But she forced herself to go out again. She had to get into the habit of moving those protesting legs.
Each outing was a struggle. She dreaded meeting someone she knew, so she would only ever venture out soon after dawn or at dusk. Her movements amounted to little more than a shuffle and her breathing was so noisy that the bird life along the canal took flight with terrified squeaks. The pain of shifting her unfit body for pathetically modest distances was far worse than she had expected. Hidden nerves and sinews announced themselves with alarming cricks and cramps. And as each fresh day dawned, she felt like a felled tree.
One morning she saw a man walking towards her along the towpath with a dog off the lead. Scary. Some dogs will attack a runner or cause a trip just by being playful. She glanced left and right for an escape route. Left was a patch of stinging nettles. Right was the canal. Compelled to keep going, she eyed the dog and the dog eyed her. She couldn’t tell what breed it was, just that it was short-haired, medium-sized, brown with black smudges and frisky. It trotted towards her and hesitated, as if weighing her up as a challenge, barked and ran past. She was thanking her lucky stars until she heard snarling and felt the touch of teeth on her heels. The dog had chosen to attack from the rear. She squealed in alarm, made a swerve and almost lost balance. The dog’s owner shouted and the dog ran to him, and he knelt and grabbed it by the collar.
All her attention had been on self-preservation, but when the man looked up and said, “Sorry,” and their eyes met, she realised she knew him.
The deputy head, Mr. Seagrove.
Mortifying. And he was plainly as mortified as she was. Too breathless to say anything in response, Maeve raised a heavy hand and hobbled past.
That wasn’t the end of it. At school later in the day Mr. Seagrove came to her in the staffroom practically wringing his hands and apologised profusely. He asked if she was in training for something and when she owned up to the Other Half, he offered to sponsor her.
Her first backer — but how embarrassing.
He insisted on signing up for twenty-six pounds, two for each mile, and from this moment there was no escape. On hearing of that handsome endorsement, Mrs. Haliburton, the head, couldn’t offer less, and soon the word passed around the staffroom and someone suggested pinning a sponsorship form to the noticeboard. The pledges mounted steadily through the week. Even Trevor’s name appeared, giving Maeve another stab of guilt. She hadn’t told him the real reason for her conversion to athletics.
The pressure was on with a vengeance. She’d been trying not to think about the prospect of running thirteen miles, but the people at work kept asking how far a half marathon was and those who already knew would say something like, “Rather you than me. That’s a hell of a long way.”
Worse still, she hadn’t yet managed as much as half a mile without stopping to walk some of the way. She was measuring her progress by counting the strides she made. The number was too pathetic to think about.
She persevered and life got busier. As well as putting time aside for what she laughingly called her training, then recovering and showering afterwards and washing sweaty garments, she needed to get organised about the fundraising. Someone told her to get social media working for her. She joined one of the biggest websites that make this possible and spent most of a weekend creating her own page and personalising it with photos, text and links, being as honest as possible without mentioning the Toby jug.
Having gone public, she couldn’t avoid telling her family. Her brother Dave thought the idea of his sister running anywhere so hilarious that he signed up for fifty pounds and threatened to put it on film, but her overprotective mother was strongly against it. Older brother Jim stumped up ten pounds but Ma refused to encourage what she called a lunatic act. By contrast, Aunt Jayne, who had started all this, phoned to say how overjoyed she was. “I’m so proud of you, my dear. Little did I think when I sent you that silly red cap that it would come to this.”
Tell me about it, Maeve was tempted to say.
“I’d be joining you if only my cardiologist would allow it,” Aunt Jayne went on. “How much have you raised so far?”