Related By Water

By Marguerite Wetton

As the first painful waves of grief take root in green-fingered Frances' life without her famed husband Jack, seasons continue. Birth, growth, death and never-ending flux sometimes drag her, sometimes flow her through seasons of surprise as she navigates widowhood, romance and new grandmothering.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kalula
• Release date: Nov 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645994018

Book preview

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Copyright © 2023 by Marguerite Wetton

The moral right to be identified as the creators of the work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the authors.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Book Cover by Marguerite Wetton

Edited and designed by Red Feather Publishing

www.redfeather.com.au

ISBN: 978-0-6459940-1-8

Contents

Acknowledgements

SPRING 2022

1.COMINGS AND GOINGS

2.GARDEN COMMUNITY

3.MORE COMINGS

4.RELATED BY WATER AND GROWING

SUMMER 2022

5.TIMELESS

6.GEMMA

7.GROWING RELATEDNESS

8.GROWING BABIES

9.RISKY WATERS

10.CITIES GROWING BABIES

11.RELATED BY MARRIAGE

12.OLD GROWTH FOR NEW

13.GROWING BY NATURE

14.RUMBLES IN RELATIONSHIPS

15.AUTUMN

16.FOREIGN WATERS

WINTER 2022

17.RELATED AT SNOW

18.LIGHT AND WATER

19.LATE SUMMER INTERLUDE DURING WINTER

SPRING 2023

20.CALMER WATERS

Biography

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Adeep acknowledgement to Tony, my collaborative husband, Karen, my extraordinarily tolerant editor, Sophia, my granddaughter who dared me to finish this, and my sister Nat, who proofread the story.

Acknowledgement is extended to all the brave people whose losses, stories and methods to acquire resilience, inspire this work, and who shared them with me so generously over the past four decades.

Related By Water

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SPRING 2022

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one

COMINGS AND GOINGS

The day is mild, like so many days this early spring. It seems the brutal time is fading into something quite sublime: a season of warmth and succour. A mood of lenience that could exacerbate into something languid. Birds mingle with clouds lightly, disregarding survival matters, within the phlegmatic stillness of the newly sprung day.

I follow the first butterfly I’ve seen so far. A Brimstone, blending with the plants, like a leaf. When it rises, an airborne piece of thistle off the mother plant, I catch a glimpse of Meg’s place, still hunkering in shadow.

The hill does that. It shades the back of her place and spring will come later there. Even this tender-hearted season in this new world.

It will be foreign, to step out into the world after everything. I may not need to, much. I may dig here for all of spring to see what I draw forth from the labour. No expectation in me, after being surprised by so much.

I stand for a moment, stretching out: arms, back, one foot at a time. At this age, nothing lubricates as it did, of course, although I’m not complaining. Being lean has some advantages to joints, I think.

If I think of Mabel lifting around a heavier weight.

I gaze at a duck skimming the water. First, appearing to ski into his soft landing and then as if thinking better of it, rising again to ski in among the reeds, to some better place, some shadier spot, some foraging ground, that his smell, his eyes, his experience, or his deep intuition lead him to.

Mary Oliver’s water, ‘flavoured with…ducks.’¹

I poke my toe into the cool, grey water. The earth is soft, muddy, deep and rich. The reeds are swaying softly across on the other side. A black-headed gull rises up from nowhere.

In my background, the sounds of my adult children in conversation. I am lulled by their voices, soothed by the familiarity of their arguments, which used to jar and require my intervention. Now they live in the realm of flexible thoughts and spider webs of dissolving opinions.

Gemma: I’m waiting for more exposures of the élite! Posturing and self-righteousness! Censorship should be abolished! Undress the corporate gangsters and media controllers!

Her voice rises and mingles with a bee buzzing closer at hand.

Fred’s calm, sane voice: "You suggesting no codes and rules? No social norms? Promoting a free for all of bad behaviour? Think of AI without censorship. I vote for more of it!"

His hand against his thigh, in a thick sounding swat.

Fred: Being human, that’d be a more violent option!

Gemma: Pretence is equally violent! It’s less noisy, but if the royal family is an example of how manners, ‘maketh man’² then their men should be as infallible as the flawless diamonds raped from their colonies are! President Xi with his beatific smile and his global colonisation is another example of pretence. And sponsored, by countries such as ours!

Fred, laughing patronisingly from a distance: Ho hum.

I am smiling, weeding and industrious.

Gemma, without surrendering: "No one’s honest about power being the main objective and money being the main channel to it. Faking righteousness. Expose the lies! Have respect!"

Fred: Respect? You’d fail at that. You love swearing, for one.

Gemma: "I want to know what this shitty war’s about, or in fact, the shitty virus!"

Fred, even more distant: Hmm. Humans want autonomy and seek supremacy. It’s how we’re wired.

Gemma, very angry, throwing her arms up the way she used to, in a tantrum:

"Your gender! Although, we’re all hopeless, fake, dangerous power mongers. Or overt and abusive ones, grabbing it from others." Then, almost desperately: "There are no answers!"

A sigh and chuckle from Fred, as if humouring a small child.

My world, unlike theirs, had certainty. Doctors knew cures. No one questioned the spherical nature of the planet.

The sky is battleship grey now. It will rain later, no doubt.

We need to desire peace, before all else, if we want to thrive, like ducks.

Then Jack died.

Mabel’s arriving soon, I say to them.

Gemma: What? Why?

Me: She’s my sister. She’s coming for a few days.

Gemma: I hope she’s not bringing her husband with her.

Fred: Oh-oh. Shrapnel about to happen. Conflict in the making.

Me: No, she’s coming alone. He’s at a medical conference in Utah.

Gemma: That’ll be interesting, for a gynaecologist. Talking about inside a woman in a city of genitalia deniers, in spite of the number of children they pro generate. More hypocrites.

Fred chuckles. He skims a flat stone. One, two, three leaps.

Gemma: Good he’s not coming. She’s enough hard work alone, don’t you reckon? If you include their relationship, it’s unmanageable. I’d have to leave.

She leans back on a rock gazing outward in a vague, Gemma kind of way, as if she’s seeing something we are not.

I know better now, not to ask what she’s thinking. That was for childhood. This adult could bite back or worse. Tell me something I’d rather not know.

I watch the duck rise again out of the reeds and fly back towards us, settling in the spot it had first chosen, then rejected. The clouds gather in density, blocking the mild sun.

Fred: Food. I’m going in.

There’s something to rely on: Fred’s gastronomic requirements.

Perhaps circumstances alter, but we never do. Like Gemma with the trails she leaves that I decide, today, to leave behind her wet foot prints.

Soon we are sitting around the magnolia pink, round table in the house, my house. I’m glad I kept it when Jack went. It was hard enough losing him. Serendipitous, since grief and throwing out of everything he ever touched, that I ended up keeping this place. I love the comfort of it, against the hill, with its view towards mountains and far away, the ocean.

It used to be Jack’s: full of his trout fishing gear, full of his laughter, his books, dog eared and musty.

Forks into Fred’s fluffy omelettes while I pass toast to Gemma. It seems natural that we serve her.

She tells us about the magazine, the doctors who are contributing, the pharmaceuticals that are advertising for revenue and on-line readership.

I hate this digital world. I try not to listen. EFTs, BOTS, they’re all a foreign language peppering my mother tongue. I cannot contribute to conversations initiated by ‘driving traffic’ and ‘flywheels’. I even prefer expletives. At least they name something I can touch. Or smell.

This new world is no longer my habitat. I also do not have the lingua franca, the currency for it. I contract into my egg, while their ululating brainstorming ebbs and flows. It was like this even with Jack, me being a semi-presence like a flower on the wallpaper, rather than a living one in a jar on the table.

How will any people using the separating language of the digital world manage with high contact situations like death and babies in the birth canal?

This world has gone ‘digimodernist’³ and I can’t see a door in for myself. In addition, there’s the war. The horrible, ghastly, threatening war and the crazy war mongers.

How will I respond to that? If I am to be a thriving, alive person in this new world? It all seems contrary to human living and health. I, who have pulled myself out of the death trench, how will I adapt to a virtual reality?

Jack had to die. He’d never have lived among these digital people in Siri speak. I may have a widget of a chance.

Not for the first time, I think it was an error that I did not die with Jack.

I see the pond outside, sparkling now in a glow of sun, through a window in the dark clouds. The birds must be shadow-dancing, invisible to my eye. A soft breeze rustles the surface, and it sends ripples in light and dark.

Good to be alive though, on this spring day with company.

A long way off the wallpaper and into this life of jostling devices and websites. The gambling of invisible energy everywhere. It all happened so fast!

The conversation has changed gear:

Gemma: Well, I thought I’d freeze some. I mean, if Mister Right is not showing up, then what choice does it give me… right? I mean, I don’t want regrets, you know.

Fred: Not sure what I think. I’m glad I’m not a girl. How old were you this birthday again?

Gemma: You? Forget numbers? An accountant? I’m two years your senior. I assume you know your own age…

Laughter.

I don’t want to know about freezers and eggs, I think.

She’ll do what she wants, this daughter, anyway. She won’t be thinking of the child until it’s there, competing for attention, needing attention. Being a child, if children are still children.

Sylvia Plath is here in my head:

‘A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle,

About in a bald hospital saucer.’⁴

We all know how she ended.

Anyone for tea? I ask safely.

Nods, distant smiles, through the looking glass.

Outside the darkness enfolds the pond again. Invisible birds make visible spirals up to seek shelter. Soon the rain thumps on the window and I see the drops spreading and running in vertical lines.

Jack loved the rain. He said it altered the ions. He said negative ions neutralised his tension like sex. It released primal intensity.

Do I miss him? Or just the lump of him sitting in the chair, (he loved, and I threw out, when he went), glasses on the tip of his nose, ready to fall off, reading me something from somewhere, eyebrows bunched.

He spoke my language. He read my books. I never read his. Hemingway, whom I dislike as a man, is too ungoverned for me. I see his brilliance but cannot remove him from the stories.

Jack could. He loved the way Hemingway sees the human subtext, the societal weaknesses.

Jack could adapt. Agile in conversation. Everyone loved him in a gathering. He could flit around topics and smile and grace the women with his eyes, the men with incredulity.

He didn’t fake it. He loved to watch them and to highlight their positives to see how they responded.

He would write about it later, of course, and read it to me a thousand times, each time in its newly edited form.

He would whisper it into my ear at night. Even at three a. m. when I was deeply asleep, I’d hear him, and ignore him and try to hold on to the sacred slumber that could elude me.

Perhaps who I miss is the Jack inside of me, the construct I made of him, to gratify me, to keep me present, to anchor me in the world.

For some, that would be love enough.

Gemma: Mum, you’re somewhere and I’m talking to you.

Me: It’s true. I wander a bit. I haven’t got dementia though, in case you think I do. I’m not even seventy yet. So don’t look worried or plan any moves on me. I was thinking of Jack.

Gemma: Ah, yes, Jack.

That’ll shut them both up, I think. They’re always waiting for me to cry about Jack, but I don’t. I can’t. I’m not sure whether I feel shock or grief.

I described it to the grief counsellor as a strange sense of losing a part of my body I have lived with for so long and cannot find. A limb stump, aching.

I did not find the grief counsellor very useful.

I doubt anyone she loved had died.

I don’t need a counsellor anyway, telling me how to respond. It’ll take as long as it takes, I know. Like everything that has ever happened to me, that loss will sink down into some depth where a frank acceptance happens and then one day I’ll wake up and it will all be history.

So when is Mabel coming? Gemma is asking. Her eyes have softened. I shall allow it to sink in.

Mabel will be here tomorrow, I say.

Gemma stiffens. I should have warned her. I didn’t believe Mabel would come. I thought it would wash over.

I habitually feel mild fear of Gemma’s wrath. She was always tempestuous and I like calm. I attempt not to rouse her, to avoid seeing her aquamarine eyes flash, her lean mouth set into a line, her face fire up.

Of course Mabel comes.

She arrives and as she stops at the door, she punctures her tyre on a piece of flint on the drive.

Mabel, as one would expect, has no spare tyre, so the day is spent in a drama of driving to town, buying a wheel that can be delivered only next week and extending her two-night stay to seven.

Mabel is sitting knitting at the fire, a long, red object as broad as a shawl but much longer, with yellow tassels at one end.

It folds about her feet, which are shod in small black city boots. Her ankles expose pale stockings, beneath her floral skirt, which bunches at the knee. The knitting rests on her ample breasts, growing magically, with very few needle clicks, as she leans back languidly and knits, looking at the fire.

Let’s put on music, she says. I have some here. Rustling in her womb-like knitting bag.

Good idea! Gemma calls authoritatively. Everyone likes Chopin, I’m sure? I know, before Mabel chooses something Gemma hates.

Gemma waves her democratic arm over our heads in benediction and we nod.

Soon a piano sonata fills the air and dances along with the fire.

Mabel crosses and uncrosses her legs and shouts over the music:

So, Fran, how is life without Jack? You finding your way? It’s been months now, hasn’t it or a year? Things going ok?

Her lips move beyond the glass. I see them and hear the words through mist. I do not answer. I often don’t. No one minds. They carry on, Gemma making coffee, Fred reading, looking up briefly, Mabel knitting, gazing at me with blue inquiring eyes.

Ok Fran? She asks softly now, kindly.

Yes, I’m ok, I say automatically.

Instead of the truth: I have no idea who nor how I am like this, alone with strangers who are my family. Next of kin.

Mum is doing great! Pipes Gemma in sudden solidarity. She’s amazing. This person my daughter is speaking of, someone distant, like Maya Angelou. Some heroine.

Yes, Mum’s amazing, adds Fred looking doubtful.

Good, good, says Mabel. Good. He was a good bloke, Jack, but I’m glad you’re ok, Fran. Getting older’s no fun.

Thank you, I say in response to whichever comment would please them.

Tea? I resume my position at the comforting kettle, observing the ribbon of steam rise and dissipate. Like my grief, if this is grief, I think. Slowly and warmly and upwards and gone.

Mother, she is saying in one of her accurate assessments of our flaws: your problem is that you have no sheath between yourself and the outside world. You’re at once a cynic and expect the worst and on the other hand entirely the idealist, naively throwing yourselves at wolves.

I have no time to say thank you before:

"Mabel, on the other hand is a wolf. You’d think you’d have had enough practice in childhood with that kind of person!"

Mabel cannot hear us inside. She is outside the kitchen window now, picking the daffodils I planted before Jack died. They’re flowering prolifically as if it is their last chance.

I do need to ballast myself against my sister and the world in general. Including my daughter.

My empathy is so deep, my connection to the who-it-is I see and feel in the other person, that I explain all their impediments away to myself and leave myself bare.

‘She dreamed a Humanitarian convoy…’. A poem I heard read by a Ukrainian poet, about the war.⁵

It is the same door that opens, whether you let love out or hurt in.

I am the kind for whom this door has a floppy hinge, requiring renovations. Something more objective, sturdier, to hold the boundary closed: Good fences make good neighbours.⁶

Gemma: I’m going tomorrow, Mum, not because of Mabel, but I have a gig in the city, and you know I can’t refuse it. You’ll be ok, won’t you? Now you have Fred and Mabel you will be busy.

Coward, I think. Or queen.

Of course I’ll be alright. I’m alright alone, thank you very much. In some ways more alright alone than not.

Gemma is gone in a cloud of black hair and coloured scarves. In her hybrid. Memory of a broad smile and a spicy scent is all that remains of her now.

It is astonishing that we humans are so generous when we are experiencing the things we wish to experience and so miserly and cruel when we aren’t.

Mabel: Come, Fran, let’s go for a walk, you love walking still, don’t you?

I look at Mabel’s urban shoes, uncertainly. I’m unaccustomed to receiving so much attention. It never happened when Jack was here.

None of us had time to wonder how we were then. He took up so much space. He took up so much of our lives with his colour, his complexity, his irrepressible charm. His depth.

Me: Ok, Mabel, we’ll walk to the pond. Is my reply.

The rain is gone, the earth is soft. Mabel hobbles in her city boots. I stride.

The ducks and geese and gulls are all awash in the water, dibbing and dobbing, feeding, preening and doing their best for Life.

Look Mabel, I say for diversion. The male mallard is smiling at you.

Mabel: Fran, you say the oddest things.

She smiles, however, back at the duck, as if he’s flirting with her. She cocks her head and smiles again. He cocks his. A mirror image.

I’m leaving Oscar, Mabel says, quite matter of fact.

Me, not knowing what else to say: Oh. Since this signifies the other reason for her visit.

Leaving, she continues. It’s not really news, is it? I’m done with his obsession at work and his profession doesn’t really allow for much. No soft touches in a personal relationship.

I control my imagination.

As long as you’re happy, pet, I say, using Mother’s term of affection. As long as it brings you joy.

It’s just the financial part now to nub out and being Oscar, this will not be easy. You’re lucky in a way…

I think she means that Jack is cleanly dead. Proven. Announced. A death certificate awarded. Life insurance. Paid. Urn buried. Ashes buried.

Me: I am not lucky to lose a part of myself, Mabel, no I am not. This is not what I would have chosen. This new life of living Jackless.

Perhaps Mabel is shocked. Perhaps she is relieved. She never says.

Her tyre arrives and Fred puts it on.

Mabel is gone the next day. Gemma is quite right. Mabel comes when Gemma is here, to rile her, to push her into something that becomes interesting, within her boredom.

I wave her small hatchback away and see its silver bubble cantering smoothly along the smear of the road up and over the hill behind the pond. An undramatic ending.

I am alone now, because Fred leaves me alone, and that is a relief.

He is off wondering into the moors. He’ll be back with a story no doubt.

Not a flamboyant, crazy story like Jack would have, no.

Fred is sensible and urbane.

Fred is natural and sane.

Fred is an angel.

Fred sits among us in this family, solid and serene, working enough, earning enough and smiling periodically. He shares little, criticises not at all and laughs at clever jokes.

Fred is clever. His partner, Jean, is clever. Jean curates artwork and is an art auctioneer. Jean is a mix of fragility, toughness and kindness. As far as I know they appear to love one another.

They collect art works of oceans that grace their walls, signed by famous artists. Originals.

They also have a portrait of their dog, the retriever Folie, in the kitchen.

Fred and Jean do not want children. They want to send money to the Africans and to the war victims. They want to travel now that The Bug has resigned from the public arena.

Fred and Jean spend time working on Climate Change things and fundraising.

They have a house in the city with a view of the city lake, stretching towards the mountains, reaching down its tributaries to the oceans.

A dog walker arrives at their home daily to take Folie for a walk to the lake.

Folie, despite her name, is as sensible as Jean and Fred. She is also kind and never jumps nor barks nor sniffs into the groin.

Folie sits and wags her tail and smiles like a human, lifting her upper lip, expecting a pat, and usually getting it. She waits patiently for the dog walker and obeys the commands flawlessly while her owners are away.

Jean and Fred travel. They eat in restaurants with strange names. They know interesting people in the city. They work, they experience, they move about.

Fred’s shoes are always clean.

Except here. With me. On the moors and in the pond. Fred slides into his childhood, like a bun off a baking tray into a basket warmed for its arrival.

He’ll come back with mud up to the knees and he’ll have some splashes on his jacket that he will not notice. His eyes will be misty with calm and sparky with interest.

Fred will be deeply content.

I sit at the fire and gaze at the flames and do what I do these days: I think about Jack.

I don’t think about him dying, nor do I miss him.

I just think about his presence. I think about him with Fred as a boy, with Gemma on the horse, with the dogs racing behind them as they run out to hunt stags on the moor.

No one cares that there are no stags here. No one cares. We live in the world of dreams. Being dreamers, we are all content.

Fred throws the door open as his phone on the escritoire begins to ring. It stops when he picks it up.

Phone’s been ringing a bit Fred, I say.

Fred leaves no trails.

Somehow, he disposed of his Wellington’s at the door before entering, his jacket on the hook, dripping into the tray beneath.

Aha, he says. It’s been Jean. Something must be up. I’ll give her a ring.

He turns his back to me and rings his wife. I see his face, reflected in the window in front of him.

He is wearing ear buds.

I gaze in the fire. Yellow, white and blue flames dart.

Hi Sweetie, he says. I was on the moor and missed some calls. Here now. Love you.

He moves into the kitchen. The phone rings again and he picks it up. I look up. He’s silent. I see his face drain of colour his eyes squeeze shut.

Oh Jean, that’s (pause) just wonderful. Of course we’ll manage. May I tell my mother? Just her, yes. No, Gemma’s not here. Ok. Do you want me home? No? Ok. Yes. He says it’s all ok? How are you feeling? That’s more to the point. Oh. Ok. I think I’ll come home anyway. No, Mum won’t mind. Yes, she’s alright. I’ll be up tomorrow, ok? Yes, about noon. I’ll take the nine o’clock train from the village. Yes. No. Yes. Ok. Click.

Alright. Mum is always alright, right?

My mother died, but I was alright. My children left home. Alright again. I lost a home, I rode over a dog, I fell off a rock and broke my leg, but I was alright. Now, Jack is gone. Alright again.

Mothers are alright. Mine was. I am.

Fred walks around the counter gazing out, a cup in hand. For a moment he holds his head to the side, and I see Jack’s profile: upturned mouth, ready to smile, shine in the eyes, head cocked left.

Fred: Mum, I have unexpected news.

I hold my mind still, avoiding shadows forming with unknown names.

Jean is unexpectedly nine weeks pregnant.

Nine weeks? I say incredulous. How can anyone be nine weeks pregnant without knowing that they are?

Did she know? I ask.

No, he says. She just took a test today.

She didn’t know for nine weeks?

Don’t women today know? If they miss a period, it is probably a baby? Or do they trust contraception utterly, or maybe they’re too busy to notice?

Nine weeks?

Me: That’s a big piece of information for you, Fred. How do you feel?

I am kind. I pass him banana bread on a plate. I rest a hand on his shoulder.

He is gazing into the fire too, now. We stand frozen. Mute.

Jack. A new baby. They dance in the flames. One gone, one coming in.

Fred: Yes. A big change. Jean sounds happy.

Ah that is an important component in a peripatetic world. They will settle down. Grow a garden perhaps. Jean is happy. I am happy. If Fred is happy.

And you? I press rather uncharacteristically.

I will become happy, says Fred, with decision. For now, I am digesting this big change.

We gaze again into the fire. It answers us with a crackle and a spark. We look at one another and smile.

We two will become happy, I say.

Once the fire is embers, Fred adds, You will be a grandmother, Mum. Imagine.

I can feel Jack in the air, saying: Life becomes rich with grandchildren, Fran, you’ll see. We’ll be mature by then and walk on the moors and tell them interesting biographical details to enrich their incubating lives and we will look at one another and smile knowingly, as they gaze up in wonder.

He said this once on a yacht. He was looking into my eyes in that deep way he had of excluding everything and everyone, except the eyes he held and the soul within them.

You’re the only woman I could ever have been married to, Fran, he said that day, in sharp lines and monochromatic tones.

He didn’t say: The only one I’d love, or, the most wonderful of all.

No: the only one I’d be married to.

The darner of socks, singer of Hebridean love sons in my average voice, the cook of the Sunday roast and fisher of the children out of water, the writer of his references, telephonist and monitor of agent and editor. Cate. Erica. The married one, while the genius worked. The one with a little business on the side, who paid the bills much of the time.

Me: I didn’t mind being your wife. I won’t mind being a grandmother either.

Jack: You were a wonderful wife. You still are, Francesca. You still are, my dear, and I appreciate your wife-ness like no other man would. I know this, because I can appreciate with my whole heart.

Me: You lie Jack, I say, that day. "You’ve never done anything with your whole heart. There’re always a few chambers reserved for yourself, or for some spirit that has not yet incarnated. No, Jack, not with your whole heart, but certainly perhaps with more than others can. In your own multi-dimensional way."

Jack: This is the wife I need Fran. One who can respond like that. Like a real human being.

Me: You mean, like a man, Jack? After all I like sailing, I like chopping wood. I respond to a madman like you Jack, and I have not abandoned you. Not once.

Jack and I fell silent then on that yacht in the middle of nowhere, on a flat ocean you could see your face in. Way down into the depths, the fishes.

He may have had others. It was reported. I never asked. He never said. Neither of us were impacted. We did not care. I was his wife. He was my Jack. That was all that mattered, until he died.

Fred will never abandon Jean. I can see his face soften to the idea of the baby, as he gazes into the flames and says it before I can:

I wonder what Father would have said.

We spend some time musing on Jack’s response. At last, Fred has it:

Jack would have said: Tell your mother when it’s due, Fred, and until then, we’ll practice, and we’ll be prepared on the day to become Mr and Mrs Grandparent.

That is exactly what Jack would have said.

Fred and I laugh. The fire dies. We go to bed. My son is a father soon and Jack will never see this child. I will be a solitary grandmother on our side. I will not know what to do. In seven months’ time. A sharp learning curve. For everyone.

I have two new roles now to think about: Grandmother. Widow. The first, a secret. The second out there, public, observed. One has an opening day or night. The other a result of the last encore.

When Fred leaves with the neighbour to the village, I can still sense his quiet repose, the slow pace that his energy moves at, in spite of the shock he just received.

I cannot imagine Fred and Jean with a baby. A baby, though, they will surely have now, and that will change everything. A deadline.

I feel calm and relieved to be alone.

Spring is earnest and this year, the warm breeze becomes hot. The ducklings hatch early. The daffodils may not last.

I spend my days digging in compost, growing my worm farm into two, making cow horn preparations for the beds. I plant. At full moon.

I am content, within my garden, to add a slow value to things. A rhythmical quiet to the world, which will almost certainly provide some outcome of goodness. Even one beetroot counts.

The oak trees have their delicate green halo, the fruit trees are a shock of buds and blossom. The light, so strong at midday, curls the petals and they drop into a carpet.

Then, at last, the rain comes, thick and fast and cool, thumping the dark soil, the yellowing grass.

Rivulets run in dry patches and the ducks venture out of the pond to hunt worms, whose pink heads are displayed surprisingly as the rain washes soil off their stealth.

I suppose I should think of a career path. Something to earn from. Something to give out from.

Something that matters.

Nothing in me is roused by the idea, in the motley room of op-shop-new furnishings. All white chalk painted furniture (by me) and: Tiffany lamps, a Chinese carpet, with pink roses and green leaves, a hat stand and dresser (circa the nineteenth century), mismatched chairs, one wicker at the dormer window. Many beds, (in covers of floral curtains). My enormous bed. The crockery I began to collect from street piles being thrown out during the virus, when people were locked up and had time to declutter; homemade pottery amidst Delft and Wedgwood Beatrix Potter.

Scatter pillows of cotton velvet, patchwork, and a fibrous, grainy yarn, lie about everywhere. Yellow and cornflower blue.

I only kept the escritoire in case I ever draw, or write, or think about writing. Which I do not. I am too occupied with thinking and not thinking. Its small drawers could hold secrets, but they are as empty as I am.

I try to imagine a child running in through the door, or down the passage, but cannot.

It seems that I have come of age now, as an adult. Since Jack has gone. I’ve suddenly grown old and skipped all the intermediary phases.

The phone is the only interruption to my peace.

Mabel has phoned.

It is a fact now, that she is leaving Oscar. He finally made a spectacle of himself with a patient, and she had enough. She is excited and planning a small war for the assets.

I listen, objectively, feedback and forget.

Mabel occupies a completely different universe.

Gemma breaks up her relationship with her boyfriend and moves in with a group of women for company, leaving her apartment barren.

The virus hit relationships hard.

Not Jack’s and mine. Until he died, it made us closer.

We made a pact not to be afraid. Not of the virus, not of the world, nor of where it would take us. Not of each other.

Our children were far in the city. We couldn’t access them, and they could not visit. We had finally entered the relationship capsule, alone, together, simultaneously. Jack and I did not read the news. He opened devices to take notes for books only.

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two

GARDEN COMMUNITY

Iread old books, rereads of Anita Desai, Nadine Gordimer. I am lulled by other times, places and others’ experiences and garden with commitment, while Jack cooks, or we both cook.

We cook what I have grown.

You have brown fingers, Fran, Jack says. All soils are rich in your hands and sprout delicacies unknown and unimaginable.

Soil is embedded under my nails. He rolls my hands in his, sensuously.

He scrubs new baby potatoes, we roast them on sticks in the fire, after a short par boil. We lather them in butter and basil. The sauce drips through our fingers and onto the floor. Jack wipes it with a rough, wool sock. He licks it off between my fingers.

We were stuck there, Jack with me. Me with Jack. We did everything together out here. Co-conspirers in a jettisoned world.

We could be outside, in all weather. Jack could write and read to me, and cook. I could read and garden and respond to him (no small feat) and answer the phone, and read. We could listen to music and birdsong, and he could sing us to sleep. He had a marvellous baritone-bass, sought after by choirs.

Jack, I say. "We need to go out. Go somewhere. Do something. I’m not sure it’s good for us to only do this."

"This? says Jack. This is heaven, Fran. Why would we change anything? At last. We’re being paid to do what we most love. Nothing much. With each other."

We should share our potatoes with the neighbours surely? I ask.

Jack incredulously: Why?

We make potato salad, baked potatoes, fried potatoes, potato fritters and leek and potato soup.

We walk on the moors, we wash our wellies, we build a fire, we grind the coffee, we drink it, we feed it to the compost and pack it under the gardenias and rhododendrons.

We watch the ducks. A swan briefly visits the pond. I wonder where his/her mate is, don’t they mate for life?

I try to get Jack to cut the blackthorn hedge back. He refuses.

No Fran, I refuse, says Jack inverting a salute. No. We shall not abuse nature for our own pleasure.

We leave the hedge. It grows long prongs of branches that annoy my sense of order.

I climb on a ladder with cutters and cut. I cut and cut. My hands grow painful, my eyes grow weak, my shoulders ache. I do not complain.

I complete the hedge. It is boxed and tidy.

Jack waits in the doorway with ratatouille.

Here’s dinner, Fran. Let’s eat at the pond. I’ve put a bench there.

He has.

Jack has dragged my mother’s antique church bench