Chapter 26 #3
‘It’s just that there are too many ears at the house…’
He nodded, and she steered the car on past the green, past her cottage and up towards the church, the one Henry knew of old.
The churchyard was deserted, still and silent in the early afternoon sun, as Peg walked along the path she had trodden so many times before.
‘My daughter tells me I should talk to you,’ she said. ‘About Julian.’ She didn’t need to point out where they were standing, whose gravestone was in front of them; Henry would be only too aware.
‘Do you want to?’
‘Part of me does. The sensible part. The logical part which knows things have to move on. But my heart doesn’t make it so easy. It’s scared, you see, of what might be said. What might be invited into my life and what it might not be able to cope with.’
Henry was silent for a moment, ostensibly looking at the place where Peg’s husband was buried, but she knew he was thinking about her words. Thinking, but saying nothing.
She let the seconds tick by, her heart beginning to thump in her chest. She had started, but she had no idea how to carry on.
‘I notice you haven’t put yourself in that sentence,’ said Henry after a moment more. His eyes were gentle. ‘And I do understand why not, how hard this is.’
She gave him a quizzical look.
‘The sensible part… my heart… it’s scared…
what might be said. Not I’m scared, what I might say…
’ He held up his hand. ‘You’re trying to protect yourself, and I get that, I really do.
I can see how hard this is for you, Peg, and the last thing I want is to make it any harder.
There’s no need to share any of what you’re feeling if you don’t want to. ’
Peg shook her head, harder than she intended, and took a deep breath. She needed to say this now, before it was too late, before she lost Henry as well.
‘Do you know why I like gardening so much?’ She tipped her head at him, carrying on before he could reply.
‘It’s because it’s easy with plants. You can pull them into the light, feed them, water them, show them some love and they’ll respond.
But people don’t, not always. Sometimes, despite your best endeavours, despite all the love you can show them, and all the care you can give them, they choose not to listen. And Julian was one of those people.
‘He shouldn’t have died when he did. We’re all going to die, I know that, but Julian’s death was…
senseless. Unnecessary. Stupid and selfish…
He was diabetic, but he absolutely refused to listen to anyone – not me, not the doctors – especially not the doctors.
He said he wasn’t going to let an illness rule his life, but ironically, trying to ignore it meant that it very much ruled his life.
They call it diabetes burnout – when the relentlessness of living with it becomes too much, but I’m not sure that was the case with Julian.
He barely even acknowledged he had the disease.
And so over the years, his health deteriorated, rapidly towards the end, and then he had a stroke.
I think you know the rest. We talk about grieving when someone dies, but I grieved for Julian when he was still alive.
I had all that love and nowhere for it to go.
I still do…’ She trailed off, letting the tears come.
It was time to stop holding them back. ‘And so I don’t know where that leaves me when it comes to someone else. When it comes to you…’
Wordlessly, Henry took a hanky from his pocket and handed it to her. Then he simply stood beside her, and she was grateful for his reassuring presence. Grateful that he didn’t try to put words in her mouth.
‘Have you ever gone walking at night?’ he asked a minute or so later.
‘And seen little snapshots of people’s lives through the lighted windows of their houses?
Dusk is the best time, when no one has their curtains closed yet.
I used to walk our dog and wonder about all the lives in those houses – what the people were doing, how they had spent their day – who they were with, and what they were talking about.
And in all the times I watched them, I never once thought they were unhappy.
I always pictured them warm and cosy, without a care in the world, and it hurt because I wasn’t one of them and I never thought I would be again. ’
Peg nodded. ‘For me, it was people holding hands in the street, or the way a couple would smile at one another, looks so filled with tenderness, so full of love for their shared life, that the pain was almost unbearable. I felt as if I were the only single person alive on the planet. And it wasn’t that I wanted that kind of feeling with anyone else, just that it was a reminder that I’d had it, once, and lost it.
That I would never feel that way again, never share in something so powerful it defied anything which stood in its way.
The stupid thing was I don’t even think that’s what I had with Julian.
We had a good marriage, don’t get me wrong, but that’s what hurt more than anything when he died – that he could give up on us, give up on our shared life so easily, and it made me see that he never even realised how powerful love could be. ’
‘Perhaps he was afraid of it,’ offered Henry. ‘Thought himself unworthy.’
Peg swiped a hand across her cheek. ‘Perhaps,’ she agreed. ‘At times, I think I’ve hated him for that, but now all it does is make me sad, because he never understood it was there for the taking.’
Henry scuffed his feet in the gravel at the path’s edge.
‘Thing is though, Peg, that wasn’t all I saw when I looked at those houses.
My place isn’t like yours – I live in a street, among a row of houses, which backs on to another row and looks out on another, and another, and another.
And sometimes at night, I’d stare out across the rooftops, all those little boxes filled with light, like stars in the sky, all separate and never touching.
But every now and again, I’d see something different.
I’d see a tiny golden filament stretching from one to the other.
I’d see lives connected, interconnected, and that gave me hope because I knew that we weren’t all destined to be alone forever.
‘Sometimes lives don’t stay separate. Sometimes they touch, and once they do, they become bound together, at first by just a tiny thread, but then, if they touch again, the thread becomes stronger.
Lots of those lives won’t ever meet, but there are some who are drawn together because they can sense that thread just waiting to be picked up. I think that’s what we are, Peg.’
Peg stared down at the ground. The same ground where, four years ago, she had stood to say her goodbyes. To a man who had been a part of her past, yet one never destined for her future.
‘That’s the difference between us,’ she said. ‘Once upon a time, if I’d seen those boxes, all the little lights in the sky, the lives they held would have just run on endlessly into the night. Parallel. And never touching.’ She turned to Henry, lifting her face to his.
‘And now?’ he asked, vulnerable, his heart open and undefended.
Peg smiled and slipped her hand into his. ‘Now, I see hope,’ she said.