Prizes
At some point, Marnie thought, we’ll have to stop talking about death. This was not how the day was supposed to go and she didn’t mind, not really, but she had also hoped to have some kind of conversation about … not love, not that, but what had happened last night, and not just last night, the last few days, some acknowledgement and discussion, kind and honest, about what might happen next. In the Lavender Suite she had felt like a teenager but also exactly her own age, and that combination was thrilling and rare, lust and experience, together at last. What might have happened in a different room, without boots on a quieter bed? She felt sure that he’d wanted more too but now there seemed no easy segue from the scene they’d witnessed to whether they might kiss again. Something about seizing the day? Life’s short and painful, so let’s make the most of it and with that in mind …
But it was a tough transition, harder now that he’d asked her if she expected to die alone. Heigh-ho. She didn’t mind, or not too much, and perhaps this was the kind of conversation students had, late at night in a room lit by tealights. Will I die alone? Well, maybe, but don’t we all? ‘For company when I die’ was a terrible reason to want a relationship, an even worse reason to have kids – good luck with that. Besides, look at where we are right now. We’re not alone, so can’t we talk about the present instead?
The walk stretched long into the afternoon past ancient stone barns with tiny high windows, the river always in sight. The path was easy, broken only by the dry-stone walls that spanned the valley, like the frets on a guitar, and every hundred metres or so they’d squeeze through a new stile into another meadow populated by new-born lambs, a week or perhaps even a few days old, their fleeces graffitied with numbers so that they seemed like a kids’ football team. Tactless in their brightness and youth, they were delightful but also a bit much, the frisking, the baby-talk bleating, as if they were trying too hard. Was that how she’d been with Conrad?
But not with Michael. Instead they spoke about their childhoods and their parents’ marriages, which were similar in their constancy and restraint. Michael spoke the most and she thought, not for the first time, that if you wanted to get a man to talk with real emotion, you should ask him about his father.
But it was rarely a fast track to a good time. He had clearly been shaken by the scene on the hill and in this shaking something had come loose. For her own part, she had two consoling thoughts about what they’d seen, and both were such clichés that she had resolved not to say them out loud. The first, ‘At least he died doing what he loved’, had always seemed a poor consolation. She enjoyed going to the cinema in the afternoon but liked leaving too. Still, to be with people who care for you, and somewhere beautiful, for it all to be, she hoped, relatively quick, well, there were worse ways.
The second thought was connected to the first and it was this: in the brief time she’d spent with Brian and Barbara, they had seemed very happy. The phrase ‘love of her life’ occurred to her, a phrase that had always made her wince a little. It was melodramatic, the notion that this accolade might be handed out on your deathbed, a trophy to the one person who had made it all worthwhile. Marnie certainly didn’t have a love-of-her-life and neither did she expect to fulfil that role for anyone else, and that was fine too. Many people live full and happy lives without making that much of an impression, and even if someone were to say it of her, she would probably frown and ask, Really? Are you sure? Have another think.
Perhaps the idea would be less queasy and oppressive if the honour could be shared out equally so that everyone got a prize, like a children’s birthday party. But the mathematics was hopelessly off. A select few beautiful souls might pile up the trophies but many people would never be the love of anyone’s life and it was silly and pointless to worry about this. What could you do about it? What she hoped for was to be liked very much by someone for a certain period of time. That seemed achievable.
But the couple they’d sat with for a few hours had seemed very much in love and it seemed natural to envy that a little. What she didn’t envy was the look that Michael had spoken of on the hillside, the widow’s shock at the sudden absence, and perhaps solitude is more frightening when something is snatched away.