Fifteen years earlier
You wrote one more letter; it arrived a week or so after my mother had died.
I’d stayed on for a few days after the funeral, but the house without her in it was cold and dismal and I couldn’t wait to get away.
I returned to Bristol and spent the remainder of that year hidden away in the little terraced house I shared with Liv and Sam in St Paul’s.
When I remember that time, I always think, poor Sam, Sam who had two fully working parents, who was only twenty and was mad about football and astronomy and mixing up weird fizzing concoctions in the chemistry lab.
His only mistake was to love a girl who was crippled by loss.
I was alone in the house when your letter arrived, and from the moment I saw the envelope with my name and address in your sloping, looped handwriting my heart began to pulse.
I’d lived without you for almost a year by then, I was getting used to you not being in my life, yet I ripped open that envelope with hands that shook.
Inside, a drawing of a flower, a peony, a close-up of its bloom, the petals packed tight like the leaves of a cabbage.
Peonies were my mother’s favourite; her coffin had been covered head to foot in a hundred pale pink ones.
No better symbol to pierce my heart.
But that wasn’t the thing that made me cry; it was that you’d remembered me telling you she loved them.
Catherine,
I am so sorry that you’ve lost your mother.
I remember how much you loved her.
Whenever you talked about her you smiled, did you know that?
I spoke to her once on the phone when we were going to Paris and I needed your passport.
Her voice was light and warm and full of laughter, just like yours.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘A day trip to Paris. Now that sounds interesting.’
People like her don’t just disappear, I hope you can believe that.
It’s like that song, the one you used to love: there’s still plenty of living to be done after you’ve died. Lucian