Chapter 5
‘You’re telling me Dot’s still married?’ Julie is still, which is unusual for her, a basket of washing in her arms.
‘Yes,’ I say.
She raises her eyebrows so high they disappear beneath her fringe, but she doesn’t say anything.
I tell her the whole story, and partway through she puts the washing basket down and sits on the sofa near my armchair, where Dot usually sits.
Dot’s registering with the doctor, and I know I don’t have long.
I don’t want to still be telling this story when she returns.
It’s her life we’re talking about, after all.
‘Well,’ Julie says. ‘And you’re happy with all this?’
‘I’m not happy…’
Julie waves her hand. ‘Bad choice of words. Not happy, obviously, because he’s standing in the way of you two getting married. But you accept it?’
I think about this for a moment. If you love someone, if you want to be with them, don’t you have to accept the things they tell you? The things they’ve been and done and said before they were with you?
‘It is what it is,’ I say.
‘What a mixed-up world we live in,’ she says. ‘Where you have to lie to the government just so people who are in love can spend their lives together.’
And I agree about that. I understand that borders and visas are complicated things, but love isn’t. Love is pure and straightforward, when it’s right. Geoff and Rupert shouldn’t have needed Dot to be involved.
I hear the scrape of Dot’s key in the lock and we both go quiet.
‘You’re back!’ I say. Every single time she walks through that door feels like a small miracle.
‘I’m back, Mabel. Hello, Julie. You two are quiet? Everything okay?’
I scrabble around for something to say, and land on the truth. ‘I was just telling Julie about Geoff.’
‘Ah.’ Dot nods. ‘I thought you might. Come on then, Julie, give me your worst.’
Julie tilts her head. ‘I think it’s very honourable, what you did.’
I can see that Dot wasn’t expecting that. She knows that these friends of mine are fiercely protective. But they are good people, too, and they recognise good deeds.
‘It’s just a shame that it leaves you and Mabel in the position it does,’ Julie goes on.
‘It is,’ Dot agrees. ‘But marriage isn’t the be all and end all, is it? It isn’t as if Mabel and I can’t be together.’
Julie mulls that over. ‘You’re right. Being together is the most important thing. Marriage just seals it, doesn’t it? It’s just nice to say to your loved ones, and the whole world: here we are, and we promise to love each other forever.’
I can see that Julie’s thinking about her own marriage, about her ex-husband who’s having a baby with another woman. She looks a bit misty-eyed, a bit lost.
Dot hands a leaflet to me and it’s an advert for a boating company in Overbury. ‘Do you fancy it?’
I look from the leaflet to Dot and back again. ‘A boat trip? Today?’
‘Yes, I thought we could get a bus over after lunch, give it a try.’
‘Why not?’
Dot’s always full of ideas for things to do, and I find that I don’t mind it, that I find it exciting, in fact.
I limited my life with Arthur for years, always saying no to things he suggested.
I was like an animal who’d curled up, ready to die.
But finding Dot opened up all kinds of doors for me, showed me a bit of what I was missing out on. And now I don’t want to miss a thing.
‘Do you want to come with us?’ I ask Julie.
She’s washing up, humming a little tune. ‘Me? On a boat? No chance.’
It turns out she gets seasick at the mere sight of a boat, but she offers to drive us into Overbury to save us getting the bus.
* * *
At the dock, we buy tickets and queue up to board and there are lots of mums and children, because it’s the Easter holidays.
I watch a little girl and boy chasing each other around their weary mum.
The girl has pigtails and a stripy top and the boy has a smear of chocolate on his face.
It looks like fun, I think, and then reflect on that, because I’ve never thought that way before.
‘Is it fun, having kids?’ I ask.
‘It’s tremendous fun,’ Dot says. ‘And sometimes it’s mundane. Just making dinner over and over again and picking things up off the floor. But I tried to make the most of the fun parts.’
When we step onto the boat, there’s a moment where I feel like I’m falling, one foot on the boat and one on dry land, and I can just picture the boat moving further and further from shore and me doing the splits, or more likely falling into the river.
But Dot holds my hand tightly and when we’re both on, we find some red plastic seats and settle in.
‘So, boats,’ I say. ‘An interest of yours, or…’
‘More of a dream, I suppose. I’ve always liked the water, the sea. There’s so much we don’t know about it. It’s scary, but it’s so wonderful, too. Don’t you always feel better when you’re around water?’
I think about that. ‘I like a bath.’
She laughs and I think, as I so often do, about what a full life with her would have been like. A lot of laughter, I think. A lot of joy.
‘Was there a lot of laughing, with Arthur?’ she asks, and I marvel at how our thoughts are synchronised.
‘Not enough.’ It feels like a betrayal to say this, but it’s true. Arthur was steady and dependable, he was kind, but he was a touch too serious.
‘I can’t believe we weren’t at each other’s weddings,’ she says.
For a long time, back when we were young, now over sixty years ago, it looked like my best friend Dot would marry my brother Bill, and the idea of either of us missing the other’s big day was unthinkable. But then Bill died and it changed everything.
‘What were yours like?’ I ask.
‘With Tommy, fairly small, just close family and a few friends. And even smaller with Geoff. We would have done it with no one there but of course we had to make sure it looked like it was real. Rupert didn’t come. Said he couldn’t face it. I’ll always remember that. What about yours?’
It’s a long time since I’ve thought about mine and Arthur’s wedding.
‘I felt like I owed it to my mum to do everything the way she wanted. After Bill, you know? She thought she’d get to have two weddings, and she only ended up with one.
So it was bigger than I’d have liked. It just seemed to grow and grow in the planning. Dot…’
I trail off, and she looks at me, and I’m sure she knows what I’m going to ask.
‘Did you get the invitation?’
‘I did, Mabel. I remember turning the envelope over, seeing your handwriting. I didn’t open it for a day or two.
And when I did, I saw your parents’ names, and his.
I’d thought you might not go through with it, but the invitation made it clear that this was what was happening. I’m so sorry, Mabel. I couldn’t come.’
It’s a heavy moment, so I try to lighten it. ‘It’s a bit late for an RSVP.’
And then we’re laughing again, and there are tears in our eyes, and I’m not sure whether they’re happy or sad ones.
‘Do you know,’ she says, when we’ve gathered ourselves, ‘my grandson Sean once told me he was doing a crash course in driving, which meant learning in a condensed period of time, but it sounded like something more worrying to me. Anyway, that’s what we’re doing with each other, in a way, isn’t it?
We’ve missed out on more than sixty years, between losing touch when I left Broughton and finding each other again this year.
So we’re taking a crash course in each other, trying to fill the gaps, plug the holes. ’
I like that analogy, and I think about it for the rest of the trip.
We sit mostly in silence after that conversation, watching the water go by out of the window, and Dot’s right, there is something grounding about it.
Something calming. Although some of the children are starting to get ants in their pants, and there’s a lot of running around and shouting. When we dock, Dot turns to me.
‘Shall we?’ she asks, holding out her hand for mine.
Her eyes are watery, and I don’t know whether it’s from the breeze.
‘If you’d only told me,’ I say, ‘if you’d told me why you were leaving or why you didn’t come to the wedding, it could all have been so different.’
‘It could,’ she says with a shrug, as if it’s nothing to her, this alternative life we’re discussing. ‘But then would we have this, right now? We might have fallen apart, one of us might have left the other one, and we might not be on a boat trip in the spring at the age of eighty-six.’
We’ve been over this, and it’s something I wrestle with in the night when I can’t get to sleep. She’s right, of course. We made our choices, lived our lives. And this feels like a bonus chapter, an addendum with all the best parts included.
‘Let’s go home,’ I say, and we stand on our slightly wobbly legs and head back to solid ground.