Berberis' World

She loved him, but…

How did she love him?

Eventually did she

Love him?

Indeed. Eventually she did.

Eternally, totally, utterly did she love him.

Definitely. Unconditionally. Unquestionably. Categorically. Absolutely.

As they drifted, so did she. As it passed, she did also. Slowly drifting through her day… week… month… year…

Lifetime. She who had once been so vital was now lethargic. She who had sought to save the lives of the smallest of the nearly living was now housebound. As caught behind the net curtains of her living room as was the wasp.

The wasp died, eventually. As would she. She knew this fact, and was largely content with it. But still there was regret, inside her, buried so very deeply… buried under almost seventy years of denial and sacrifice and service to others and regret and bitterness… hidden always behind a uniform; the black and white of a scullery maid, the grey and white of a nanny, the blue and blue and mauve and blue and white of the many disguises she’d nursed as a nurse… caring for the elderly, the children, the babies.

More than any of these, she loved, she missed the babies most of all; their vulnerability, their total dependence, their absolute love… their sweet little faces… which would come and go and change and develop… and shift and pass before her eyes like sand through her fingers.

Her time with endless babies was past. She had drifted through marriage, foundering on the uncertainty of her love for the man she had wed… swept up into hidden, forbidden passion with another… letting her hopes and dreams slip through her fingers as so much sand. With the passing of time came the departure of those she loved, the arrival of those she would love… but not, perhaps, as she would have wished.

Time would show her this. As it would shadow the movement away and back, the ebbing and flowing, of those she could have loved differently… as it dragged behind the one whose presence was immovable and, fatally, irresistible. The ever present presence, the always baby, the one who she had once admitted she would have allowed to drift past, had she known what she might have to watch pass by…

Turning from the enveloping net she moved her feet, and they moved slowly, as through sand.

By the end, they will have been married for nearly fifty years. For almost thirty of those years, he will have shared his wife with another man, watched as they kissed and canoodled with each other, and allowed this other man to become part of their lives together.

At the end, he will have realised that this other man has become an almost indispensable part of the marriage. He will have accepted him as a brother figure, a replacement for the sisters he has not seen in twenty years. He will have accepted, quite openly, that he is unable to provide for his wife what this other man does.

Not love, you understand. Oh no. By the end, he will have understood that she needed him and much as he needed her; that fact will have been obvious to both of them for some time, but it will have taken his demise to make them admit it. He will have loved her as best he could, and she will have loved him as much as she was able. It will have been enough, for them, at the end.

There will, of course, have been the children to consider. Their inattention to their offspring will not have been something of which they were proud. Not at the end. They will have seen that the interloper has brought something other than affection to her, and companionship to him; they will have realised that he brought dissention to the house. They will have seen how his presence disrupted the normal balance of family life.

If it were to have happened now, perhaps, they might have been divorced. Legally separated. Living apart. She might have taken the children and set up home with the other man, leaving the cuckolded husband to fend for himself. Which, of course, he could never have done; in her opinion, he was useless, hopeless, unable to even boil an egg or open a tin.

By the end, she will have realised that he could do all of these things and more, and that she had never really given him the chance to show that he could. By the time he dies, she will have realised that he knows this, too. She might even have realised that he forgave her a long time ago, realising that he was not the one she should have married.

Oddly enough, they will, by the end, not have managed to get a divorce. He will have stood before a judge and, when asked, will have not been able to say that she did no washing or cooking or cleaning for him. This first, and only, attempt at ending their marriage had failed. It might have been wisdom, or lack of it, which will have prevented them making another attempt.

So, at the end, when he dies, it will still be as man and wife. Despite her three decades living as another’s wife – in common law at least – she will have said her goodbyes to him as a widow, rather than an ex-wife. Whether or not this will have made a difference only she can say, but she does not. Perhaps she never will.

The children of their union will have said their farewells in their own unique ways. The eldest son will have delivered the eulogy in stoic fashion, not shedding a tear, not even with a quavering voice. The youngest son will have been comforted by his partner, shed some tears in private. The middle child, a daughter, will have wept from the time she set eyes on the coffin as it sat in the hearse until the time the service was over, and then again in the pub where they drank a toast to celebrate his life.

Even then, it will not be over. He will have been cremated; his choice presumably, but not one his wife will have disagreed with. He will have been reduced to a mound of grey ashes, as indistinguishable in death as he was unique in life. A pile of grey dust in a small hole, prepared by those who will have reduced him to this state.

They will all have gathered in the warm and windy cemetery, as they had done five months earlier, to witness his laying to rest. They will have shared the carrying of the urn from the impersonal office to the nondescript piece of pseudo meadow into which a man with a spade will have dug a hole, 1 foot by 1 foot by 1 foot, or thereabouts. A small piece of astro turf will have been placed before the hole to allow them to pour him in without getting their feet wet, or dirty.

This will have seemed strange to her, the daughter, seeing as the one place is his life he was happiest was his allotment. Where he will have got his feet wet and dirty and not given a stuff about it. He will have relinquished this plot of land when he became too old, in his opinion, to work it to his satisfaction.

He will have realised, soon after this, that it was a mistake. Had he kept on going down to his allotment he would have had the exercise he so badly needed. Because, at the end, it will be his heart that will give out. His heart that will succumb to the exertion of surgery. Not that he will have had to exert himself; he will have been peacefully asleep when they tried to repair the damage a lifetime of dependence on cigarettes had done to his system.

His heart, unused to having to work that hard, will finally, during the second procedure, decide that enough was enough. And it will have stopped at some point the following morning. Most of his family will have been with him, to say goodbye, to wish him God speed, because he did believe, despite the apparent lack of attendance at church.

At the end, then, he will have fallen asleep, passed on, been delivered unto God, died, at peace with himself, and his life, as far as anyone will have been able to tell. His life may not have been the best life, the most fulfilling life. His death may not have been the most pleasant or the most expected. But his future, he will have imagined, at the end, would be perfect.

“It’s all a little vague,” she said, tiredly. “I remember hearing the siren and the bells but after that it’s all pretty…” she made a gesture with her hands, and shrugged. “Nothing.”

“So you heard the siren?”

She sighed, visibly irritated at the constant repetition. He had been questioning her for almost half an hour, and his habit of echoing everything she told him had begun to annoy her within thirty seconds. “As I said, I heard the sirens and the bells. Then it all went blank.”

“Blank?” he repeated. “Blank or black?”

“Black, blank, pear shaped… what difference does it make? I don’t remember what happened. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“It’s important,” he said quietly. “If it went blank, then it means you lost consciousness. If it went black, it means the lights went out.”

She looked at him, feeling a little embarrassed at her tone.  “Then I’d have to say it went a bit of both. Black and then blank and then black again. I don’t think I lost consciousness, but then I’m not a doctor…” she looked at him pointedly.

“No,” he smiled, “I guess that’s my job. Alright then, if we assume that you didn’t lose consciousness then you can be out of here as soon as we’ve checked you out. You may have inhaled some smoke, and… is your throat sore? Some of the others were complaining about sore throats. You?”

She shook her head. “The fire was on the floor above,” she said, nodding as though to confirm to herself what she had seen and heard, “and, yes I know smoke can fall, I don’t remember seeing anything in the air, or smelling anything.”

“Fair enough.” The doctor made a note on the chart he had been filling out since he started talking to her, then scribbled what she took to be a signature at the bottom. “Someone will be along in a moment to take you down to x-ray, then we can see what’s what. We’ll take some blood, too. Make sure there’s nothing wrong there.”

“Why should there be?” she said defensively. “Are you going to be testing me for drugs or alcohol? I don’t do drugs, you know. And it’s the middle of the bloody day! I don’t drink at lunchtime, it makes me sleepy.”

“We’ll make sure there’s enough oxygen in your blood,” he said with a wry smile. “If there isn’t, we can give you some.”

“Oh,” she said, quietly. She was feeling very tired now. The after-effects of the shock of the fire, and the heat in the cubicle had combined to overwhelm the caffeine which was coursing through her blood. They’d find plenty of that, she thought… enough to keep even a junior doctor going for a while. “Can I get some sleep now? I’m bloody knackered.”

“Of course,” he said, pulling the curtain around the bed. “But like I say, someone will be along in a minute, so don’t get too comfortable.”

“No chance of that on this heap,’ she murmured. “You’d have to be half dead to get a decent night’s sleep on this pile of metal. It’s like a torture device.” She rolled to her side, frowning as the plastic covered mattress squeaked and creaked as she moved. The smell of antiseptic was strong in her nostrils, but she was too weary to stay awake; her eyes were barely closed and she was asleep.

How does the rhyme go? Star light star bright…?

She wasn’t the first star I’d seen, but the second. I might have missed her had it not been for the battery of cameras and their erratic, rapid, pupil-shrinking flashbulbs. Then there were the star spotters crowded around in small groups of two or three, mainly mothers, daughters and young children, some openly, open mouthed, staring, others at a discreet distance, so they could say bitchy things about her without being overheard.

As with most stars, she shone; under all the combined wattage which bathed her, she didn’t dare not shine.  And she was small, smaller than I had imagined – pint sized would be how the red tops would describe her, in the broadsheets, she would be petite – and (dare I say this?) not as pretty as she appeared on the television or in pictures.

So I walked on past, casting her an almost derisory, perhaps even a malicious, glance, suddenly envious of her not-quite-so prettiness. And she stood smiling sweetly for the cameras, tossing her blonde head, flicking the ends of her hair provocatively around her face and shoulders.

She stood in a pose which reminds me now of one of those 1920’s flapper girls; one leg straight, the other bent at the knee, balancing precariously on the tips of its toes, a slight dip in the hip on that side, knee front and almost centre. On the same side, her arm was extended out at ninety degrees to her body, her fingers holding up a bag, the kind you get from the posher clothes shops, glossy and stiff with a plaited handle. Her other hand was on her hip. Her face was downcast, and she looked up out of her blue eyes towards to multifarious lenses, twinkling and shining.

The men holding the cameras called out to her, begging her to turn those twinkling eyes to them, pleading for her attention. They called out her name (do I mention it here? No, I don’t think I will.) as she flicked her gaze from the one circle of glass to the other, bestowed her sweet smile upon each of them in turn. And I walked on.

I wonder now whether I should have stayed and watched. I am, after all, supposed to be a writer, and to write you must observe, but I was caught in that odd state between awe and cynicism. When I see famous people in the street, part of me wants to rush up to them and feign some flattery, perhaps try to touch them to see whether they are real or merely facades. I haven’t, as yet, ever had the courage, or the cheek, to do this.

Living where I do, famous people are often to be seen walking the streets; I have seen Shakespearean actors, magazine editors, television stars, all in passing, and have talked about them out of their earshot and wondered if their ears burned, like my Mum said they always did when someone talked about you.

Perhaps if I’d stayed, I might have seen the boredom behind the twinkling eyes, the tiredness in the sweet smile, the droop of the shoulders as the posh bag became too heavy for her to hold in that ridiculous position. Maybe, as she shifted from one delicately boned foot to the other, she would have winced as the pretty shoes pinched, or sucked in her stomach so that it didn’t show under the flimsy little salmon pink dress she was wearing.

Maybe she would, as the lenses dropped away, have scratched her head, or her bum, or picked her nose. The sweet smile might have faded as she sensed the cameras’ attention waning, she may have done some inelegant and bizarre facial exercises to ease the ache in her cheeks and jaw from having to maintain the lovely upward curve of her pink and glossy lips.

And as she relaxed her legs, her hips might have shifted so that her perfect posture changed. Her abdominal muscles might have sagged, and her stomach would have showed itself under her frock. Not so much that she would look fat, or even a little bit podgy, but enough so that you knew she was a woman and not a young boy, all angles and flat planes.

Her shoulders might have dropped, perhaps allowing one of the tiny straps of the dress to slip over her St Tropez skin, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of the outer curve of her breast. And one of her entourage might have leaned over to restore the strap, and thus her dignity, to its rightful place.

Someone else might have brought her a chair so that she could sit down and slip the shoes from her aching feet. Perhaps her toes would be red and sore, squeezed as they are into the excruciatingly fashionable shoes. She might have reached down to massage them, restore the circulation to the white and cold digits.

Shoes like those were once called ‘winkle pickers.’ Goodness knows what they’re called now; I’ve seen shoes whose toes are so long that they curl up at the end. In medieval times, only court jesters would sport such ludicrous footwear, perhaps with little bells on the tips to announce their arrival.

And she might have sighed, asked or a cup of coffee, or a bottle of sparkling mineral water, or a milkshake from the nearby fast food outlet. Fawning and obsequious, a minion would have been dispatched to fetch whatever she desired, probably paying for it from their own pockets. Maybe they’d be happy to pay, so close as they are to the centre of attention that they could reach out and touch her, orbiting around the brightest star in their little universe.

I glanced at her over my shoulder and walked on.