Thomas waved me away. He wasn’t interested in judging me. Which was as true then as it had been when he was barely even a man.
‘How …’ Thomas faltered. ‘How do I begin?’ he asked, and then he laughed at himself. ‘Margot, my God. How was it?’
And I imagined, though I might have been wrong, that he was asking how was life? How did the last fifty-eight years treat you? Was life what you thought it would be? Did you live happily, freely, well? But the question was too big, astronomical, and I wasn’t sure I had understood it in the first place.
‘I’m well,’ I said instead. ‘How are you?’
He gestured to the surroundings. ‘Old!’ And then he laughed and I remembered why I had liked Thomas. He was so much lighter than Johnny, so much happier.
‘When did Johnny die?’
He nodded, his smile sliding away.
‘About two years ago,’ he said. ‘Though I’m sorry to be the one to tell you. He fell down the stairs, broke his leg. It turned into pneumonia. It was quick.’
‘Were you there?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘but he wasn’t alone.’
I nodded.
‘And yourself?’ I asked. ‘What became of little Thomas Docherty?’
‘After Johnny left, I took over his place at Dutton’s. Eventually, it was me and a pal running the place.’
‘So no aeroplanes?’
‘Aeroplanes?’
‘You loved them. I remember you had that red toy one with the rotating propeller.’
He smiled. ‘I can’t believe you remember that. It’s funny how quickly it goes.’
‘And did you marry?’
‘I did. My wife passed three years or so ago. We had a girl, April. Who’s just now pregnant with her third.’
We sat in silence for a moment. Seeing him was so surreal, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was in a dream. Or that I’d ripped through the barriers of time and peeped through into a world I wasn’t meant to know about. I was hearing answers to questions I’d carried for so long that I thought I’d never have them answered.
‘I looked for Johnny,’ I said, ‘I followed him to London a few years after he left.’
‘You did?’
‘I didn’t find him though. It would’ve been a mistake anyway. In fact, I never even knew if he went to London. It was just a guess.’
‘You were right,’ he said.
‘I’ve always wanted to know what happened to him.’
‘He did go to London, for about a month or two, but he couldn’t make it work and so he ended up moving to Bristol, working in the shipyards.’
‘Was he happy?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he have a nice life?’
Thomas leant forward and put his old hand on my old hand. ‘Yes,’ he said.
I took a breath. That was all I needed to know.
‘He stayed in Bristol for most of his life. Moved back here about ten years ago. They say the call home is strong, don’t they? In the end?’
‘And here we are,’ I said.
‘Here we are.’ He smiled.
Glasgow Princess Royal Hospital, February 2014
Margot Macrae is Eighty-Three Years Old
I woke up in my little room at Moorlands care home with a crackling pain in my chest. I thought I had indigestion, but what happened next was evidence to the contrary.
The panic button that had so intuitively foretold the day I’d need it was right. I would need it. And I’d be panicking and hoping that someone else would know or care, or come into my room and panic with me.
And then a face I couldn’t place but I knew I knew appeared. It’s a blur after that. I remember them taking off my top in A&E to stick on the pads for the ECG, and I remember wishing heartily that I’d been wearing a bra.
The next thing I knew, it was the morning. And I was in recovery from an exploratory surgery which left some open-ended questions. The doctor, whose dress beneath her stethoscope was covered in white flowers, said it would probably be weeks before I’d be strong enough for the next surgery stage. The very posh woman in the bed beside mine tutted loudly at that.
‘Weeks!’ she said.
I noticed her red dressing gown was monogrammed with the initials W. S., and I wondered what life a person must lead in order for them to need to identify their dressing gown from others with such regularity that monogramming would seem a wise choice.
The doctor pulled the curtain around my bed and came closer. Her perfume was a sweet vanilla. ‘You’re not to worry,’ she said. ‘Just rest. You’ll be strong again soon.’
I lived out my days happily in the little curtained-off area. A week or so into my stay, the monogrammed lady lent me a book and gave me two pears from her personal fruit bowl on her bedside table. She told me that she was a gynaecological surgeon for thirty years and, in her own words, ‘loathed what she’d become’. Her ex-husband was managing her estate until she was released, but she’d been bouncing between infections and various treatments for weeks. Had she been her own doctor, she would have disliked herself for taking up a bed space for so long.
‘Try a pear,’ she said, ‘they’re Conference.’
A few days later, a letter arrived for me.
Perhaps not an incredible thing in and of itself.
But it was incredible to me.
How can it be that paper is still flown around the world, in the era of email and text?
And then it went into my postbox at Moorlands Care Home. And then it was cleared out and given to Emily, one of the assistants at the care home whose task it was to bring me a suitcase with some more of my pyjamas and essentials.
‘This came for you,’ she said, as she slid my suitcase under my bed.
The envelope had a stamp with a man I didn’t recognize. And the return address was Ho Chi Minh City.
I could barely hear sweet Emily for a moment because all I wanted was to open the letter. But she wanted to tell me about Johnny’s brother Thomas, about how his daughter April
