When we were 19, my best friend and I promised that if we were both single at 60, we’d find each other — I turned 60 last Tuesday, and my old landline rang.
She died in the November of 2021. Pancreatic, like him, which Sam says is a coincidence and which the consultants say is a coincidence and which I still find difficult to hold.
And about a fortnight before she died she asked her son to come and sit down, and she gave him a name, and a phone number for a landline in Rowe’s Mill, and an instruction.
“When I’m gone, and when he’s going — not before — you ring her.”
Sam Haverty carried my phone number in his wallet for four years on his mother’s instructions.
He rang it on my sixtieth birthday because that was the date in the box, and because his father had told him the story of a promise under some bleachers, and because he had been told to wait until his father was going.
And his father was going.
The son.
He was thirty-nine and he had known about me since he was eleven.
Not the whole of it. He knew there was a woman his father had grown up with, because there was a photograph of four teenagers on a wall at his grandmother’s, and because when he asked, aged eleven, who the girl was, his father said “that’s Lornie” and then did not say anything else for the rest of the walk home.
And he knew from the way his mother went very slightly still at the name.
He told me all of that in a hospital corridor while his father slept, standing up, holding two cups of tea, and at the end of it he said something I have thought about a great deal since.
“I want to say this once and then I’ll leave it. I’ve had forty years of him and you’ve had four days. So I’m not going to pretend it’s fair. But I’ve never once had all of him either, and I’m forty next month, and I worked out what that was about when I was about nineteen.”
And then he said: “I’m not blaming you. I’m blaming the bit where nobody told anybody anything.”
The letter.
Adele left a letter.
Not with Gil. With her solicitor, in a sealed envelope, with instructions that it was to be given to me — to a woman she had never met, whose name she knew from a shoebox — after both of them were dead.
Sam broke that instruction. He gave it to me in the car park at St Ansel’s on the Thursday, while his father was still alive upstairs, and he told me he had thought about it for three days and decided his mother had meant after, and that after was a technicality, and that he wanted me to have read it while I could still say something to the man in that bed.
It is one side of A4.
I am not going to put all of it here. Three lines, which I have had permission from Sam to use.
***I found the box in 1994 and I read them and I put them back. I want you to know I read them, because I don’t want you thinking I was a woman who didn’t notice.***
***He was a good husband and he was never entirely in the room. I decided I’d rather have most of him than none of him. That was a decision and I made it again every year and I’d like it written down somewhere that I made it.***
***I’m not sorry I kept him. I am sorry nobody asked you anything.***
***I’m not sorry I kept him.*** She wrote that to me and she was right to.
What we had.
Four days.
Tuesday evening to Saturday morning.
We did not say anything enormous. That is what surprises people.
We talked about the bakery, and a teacher called Mr Ivor who neither of us had thought about since 1983, and whether the chip shop by the bridge was still there, which it is not.
On the Wednesday he made me read the cards out loud to him, in order, because he could not hold them and because, he said, he had never once heard them.
Forty-one birthday cards. Most of them say almost nothing. Happy birthday, Lornie. Hope it’s a good one. G. Year after year after year.
The 1997 one has a whole paragraph in it about a job he had been offered in another town, which he did not take.
The 2008 one says: Sam’s off to college. You’d like him. He’s got your sense of humour, which is a strange thing for me to write down.
And the 2021 one, the year Adele died, says one line.
***Not this year, Lornie. Not fair on her.***
Even with the box in a wardrobe and his wife three weeks in the ground, that man would not put a soft sentence in an envelope he was never going to post, because he thought it would be disloyal.
He died on the Saturday at about twenty past six in the morning. Sam was on one side and I was on the other and neither of us was asleep.
And the Friday, which is the day I will keep.
He was clearer on the Friday than he had been since I arrived. The nurse said that happens and told me not to read anything into it, kindly, in the corridor, which I appreciated and ignored.
We did the bakery. We did Mr Ivor. We did a list of every teacher who had ever thrown a board rubber.
And at about four in the afternoon he said: “Ask me something you’ve wanted to ask for forty years. One. You get one.”
And I had about nine hundred and I picked the stupidest.
I asked him what happened to the bike. A red one, second-hand, that he rode everywhere from 1982 to 1984 and that was the single most important object in his life.
And he laughed until he had to stop and get his breath, and then he said: “I sold it in the September of 1985. For a pram.”
And there it was. The whole of it, in one sentence, and neither of us had to do anything else with it.
And then he said: “Ask a proper one.”
And I said no. And I put my head down on the bed next to his hand, and he put his hand on my hair, and we did not talk for about twenty minutes.
That is the four days. It was not a reunion. It was two people of sixty being nineteen for a bit, in a room with a machine in it.
What I have had to take.
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