I get on well with Susie. Well enough, anyway. But the younger generation no longer feels the need, or even the obligation, to keep in touch. At least, not ‘keep in touch’ as in ‘seeing’. An email will do for Dad—pity he hasn’t learnt to text. Yes, he’s retired now, still fossicking around with those mysterious ‘projects’ of his, doubt he’ll ever finish anything, but at least it keeps the brain active, better than golf, and yes, we were planning to drop over there last week until something came up. I do hope he doesn’t get Alzheimer’s, that’s my greatest worry really, because, well, Mum’s hardly going to have him back, is she? No: I exaggerate, I misrepresent. Susie doesn’t feel like that, I’m sure. Living alone has its moments of self-pity and paranoia. Susie and I get on fine.
A friend of ours—I still say that instinctively, though Margaret and I have been divorced for longer than we were married—had a son in a punk rock band. I asked if she’d heard any of their songs. She mentioned one called ‘Every Day is Sunday’. I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. Also that the same sardonic wit is used to escape from it. ‘Every day is Sunday’—the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. I asked our friend what the group’s other songs were. No, she replied, that’s their song, their only song. How does it go then? I asked. What do you mean? Well, what’s the next line? You don’t get it, do you? she said. That
It was one of those long white envelopes with my name and address shown in a window. I don’t know about you, but I’m never in a hurry to open them. Once, such letters meant another painful stage in my divorce—maybe that’s why I’m wary of them. Nowadays, they might contain some tax voucher for the few, pitifully low-yielding shares I bought when I retired, or an extra request from that charity I already support by standing order. So I forgot about it until later in the day, when I was gathering up all the discarded paper in the flat—even down to the last envelope—for recycling. It turned out to contain a letter from a firm of solicitors I’d never heard of, Messrs Coyle, Innes & Black. A certain Eleanor Marriott was writing ‘In the matter of the estate of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased)’. It took me a while to get there.
We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient—it’s not useful—to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
I was asked to confirm my address and provide a photocopy of my passport. I was informed that I had been left five hundred pounds and two ‘documents’. I found this very puzzling. For a start, to get a bequest from someone whose Christian name I had either never known or else forgotten. And five hundred pounds seemed a very specific sum. Bigger than nothing, not as big as something. Perhaps it would make sense if I knew when Mrs Ford had made her will. Though if it had been a long time ago, the equivalent sum now would be quite a bit larger, and make even less sense.
I confirmed my existence, authenticity and location, attaching photocopied corroboration. I asked if I might be told the date of the will. Then, one evening I sat down and tried to resurrect that humiliating weekend in Chislehurst some forty years previously. I searched for any moment, incident or remark which might have seemed worthy of acknowledgement or reward. But my memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation. I stared into the past, I waited, I tried to trick my memory into a different course. But it was no good. I was someone who had gone out with the daughter of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased) for a period of about a year, who had been patronised by her husband, loftily scrutinised by her son, and manipulated by her daughter. Painful for me at the time, but hardly requiring the subsequent maternal apology of five hundred pounds.
And anyway, that pain hasn’t lasted. As I mentioned, I have a certain instinct for self-preservation. I successfully put Veronica out of my mind, out of my history. So when time delivered me all too quickly into middle age, and I began looking back over how my life had unfolded, and considering the paths untaken, those lulling, undermining what-ifs, I never found myself imagining—not even for worse, let alone for better—how things would have been with Veronica. Annie yes, Veronica no. And I never regretted my years with Margaret, even if we did divorce. Try as I could—which wasn’t very hard—I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I’m not odd enough not to have done the things I’ve ended up doing with my life.
I didn’t read the solicitor’s letter immediately. Instead, I looked at the enclosure, a long, creamy envelope with my name on it. Handwriting I had seen only once in my life before, but nonetheless familiar. Anthony Webster Esq.—the way the ascenders and descenders finished with a little curlicue took me back to someone I had known for a mere weekend. Someone whose handwriting, in its confidence rather than shape, suggested a woman perhaps ‘odd enough’ to do things I hadn’t. But what they might have been, I couldn’t know or guess. There was an inch of Sellotape on the front of the envelope, centre top. I was expecting it to run down the back and add an extra seal, but it had been cut off along the envelope’s top edge. Presumably the letter had once been attached to something else.
Finally, I opened it and read. ‘Dear Tony, I think it right you should have the attached. Adrian always spoke warmly of you, and perhaps you will find it an interesting, if painful, memento of long ago. I am also leaving you a little money. You may find this strange, and to tell the truth I am not quite sure of my own motives. In any case, I am sorry for the way my family treated you all those years ago, and wish you well, even from beyond the grave. Yours, Sarah Ford. P.S. It may sound odd, but I think the last months of his life were happy.’
The solicitor asked for my bank details so that the legacy could be paid direct. She added that she was enclosing the first of the ‘documents’ I had been left. The second was still in the possession of Mrs Ford’s daughter. That, I realised, would explain the cut piece of Sellotape. Mrs Marriott was currently trying to obtain this second item. And Mrs Ford’s will, in answer to my question, had been drawn up five years previously.
Margaret used to say that there were two sorts of women: those with clear edges to them, and those who implied mystery. And that this was the first thing a man sensed, and the first thing that attracted him, or not. Some men are drawn to one type, some to the other. Margaret—you won’t need me to tell you—was clear-edged, but at times she could be envious of those who carried, or manufactured, an air of mystery.
‘I like you just as you are,’ I once said to her.
‘But you know me so well by now,’ she replied. We had been married about six or seven years. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer it if I were a little more… unknowable?’
‘I don’t want you to be a woman of mystery. I think I’d hate it. Either it’s just a facade, a game, a technique for ensnaring men, or else the woman of mystery is a mystery even to herself, and that’s the worst of all.’
‘Tony, you sound like a real man of the world.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ I said—aware, of course, that she was teasing me. ‘I haven’t known that many women in my life.’
‘“I may not know much about women, but I know what I like”?’
‘I didn’t say that, and I don’t mean it either. But I think it’s because I’ve known comparatively few that I know what I think about them. And what I like about them. If I’d known more, I’d be more confused.’
Margaret said, ‘Now I’m not sure whether to be flattered or not.’
All this was before our marriage went wrong, of course. But it wouldn’t have lasted any longer if Margaret had been more mysterious, I can assure you—and her—of that.
And something of her rubbed off on me over the years. For instance, if I hadn’t known her, I might have become involved in a patient exchange of letters with the solicitor. But I didn’t want to wait quietly for another envelope with a window. Instead, I rang up Mrs Eleanor Marriott and asked about the other document I’d been left.
