(A few more pieces of mine hung up on the web this weekend, in strange places, but fun, too. Still Saturday in Port Brokeferry - and here's another piece.)
JUST AS THE MINISTER HAD ASKED
Corinne was with Lillian. Just as the minister had asked. They were in old Tom’s house and that was strange. They both thought so, for they talked with their voices lowered, like people in church. Lillian was talking about Tom and telling Corinne what she would miss about the old man. Corinne wasn’t really listening. Not really. But it was enough that she was there, just as it had been enough she’d sat reading to old Tom when he wasn’t really listening to her.
‘I used to keep an eye out for him. Looking from my window I could see if he was up and about. And if he caught me looking he’d wave and throw me a wide grin. I made him soup some days. Was making it for myself anyway and easy enough to make a little extra for Tom. He liked a good vegetable broth with ham cut into pink pieces. And Callum dropped in every other day with leftover bread. That’s what Callum said, leftovers, but I think he kept a loaf back specially for Tom.’
They started in the bedroom. Lillian threw back the curtains and opened the window to freshen the place. The bed was unmade and Corinne could see the shape of Tom left behind in the sheets. Like a part of him was still there. The mark of his head left on the pillow. Lillian stripped the bed, carried the sheets and pillowcases off to the kitchen and fed them into the washing machine. Towels, too, from the floor of the bathroom. And she cleared the dirty dishes into the sink and ran a bowl of hot soapy water.
‘He had a daughter, you know.’
Corinne didn’t know.
‘Angela. There’s pictures of her in a book someplace. Stick-pin thin and hair as dark as crow stares. Always laughing, in the pictures at least. Left the village as soon as she could. Itchy feet and wanting to see the world, just like the young do. Got as far away as it is possible to get from Port Brokeferry. Went to South America and became a nurse.’
Corinne had picked up a clean tea towel and was drying the dishes before they’d had time to drain. She felt she had to be busy, too, like Lillian. Cups and small plates with flowers on the rim and flaked gold bands. She had to open several cupboards before she found the places they belonged.
‘Angela married a man from Colchester. All that way to Peru and Argentina and she marries a man from Colchester. Name of Matthew. And that’s the last old Tom knew. There were letters once and then postcards and then nothing. For years nothing. All Tom’s last years. He just read the same letters over and over. Sad, don’t you think?’
Lillian cleared the fridge of food. Some things she put in a plastic carrier bag for Corinne to take back to her mother and the rest she threw into the bin that stood at the kitchen door. Cupboards she did the same, cleared the shelves, and bread that was hard she got rid of, and three day old scones or older.
‘I’ve written to her. To Angela. To the last address he had for her. Not the first time I have done that and no reply to any of the other letters I sent. But I thought she should know that her father had passed. She ought to know that. So I sent a letter, saying how he hadn’t suffered and how he thought of her right to the end. It’s what a daughter would want to know about her father, I think.’
Old newspapers Lillian threw out and junk mail that had piled up on the table in the kitchen. And she reached under the sink for bleach and bathroom cleaner and cloths.
‘You’re a quiet thing, Corinne. Here I am prattling on about a man you never knew and you listening like I was a schoolteacher and here was a lesson worth listening to.’
Corinne smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
‘Or maybe you’re not really listening and your mind is elsewhere. On a boy maybe, and he is all you can think about. The way his eyes look at you and the gift of his smile and the brighter the day is when he is in it.’
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