Today's Reading
Just that. I can't emphasise enough how much of a nothing I had thought it to be. That was all I did. Gave a person a place to be on Christmas Day decades ago.
And then, decades later, out of the blue, I get this letter. And it told me that Christina had died and that she had given me her house in Spain for 'an act of kindness long ago'. It also made clear I could sell the house, or rent it out, if moving there was too 'impractical'.
It was a surprise, to say the least. And one that left me feeling like I had lost more than I had gained. A friend I never really had from a time that felt like a distant dream. I had no plan to move there. As you get older, patterns become harder to break. And you don't want them to break. My pattern had been broken various times in the past. When I retired. When my husband keeled over in his greenhouse. Even losing our dog, Bernard, had thrown me off balance. And, of course, when Daniel got hit by a Royal Mail lorry while riding his bike.
And nowadays, while I was craving the old married pattern I'd once found too much, a new pattern had formed. Feed the birds each morning. Food delivery on Monday. A morning voluntary stint at the British Heart Foundation charity shop on Friday. Cemetery on Sunday. And eternal guilt and grief and emptiness. There were only the most minor fluctuations. I had settled into the pattern called Increasingly Elderly and I had not really thought about it.
But that was all about to change.
An Ongoing Situation
'Sorry if this is too direct,' I told the solicitor. 'But how did she die?'
'I thought you knew,' she said. Mrs Una Kemp. A voice like it had only just come out of the fridge and needed time to soften.
'No,' I said. 'It stated that she had died, in the letter, but it didn't say how. So I would like to know how she died, if possible.'
'She died at sea...'
This wasn't, I realised, a direct answer.
'I'm sorry. How did she die?'
A crackle of breath on the line. 'Oh. That is an ongoing situation.'
Ongoing situation.
'Sorry. In what sense?'
'In the sense that the Spanish authorities are still looking into the precise circumstances in which she died. They are very thorough. The only thing that we know for certain, the only thing that we have been told, is that she died at sea.'
It only occurred to me a good five minutes after the conversation had ended that this ambiguity seemed rather peculiar. Why were the facts so mysterious? According to the solicitor, her will had been recently changed to include me as a beneficiary. This, combined with the general bizarreness of it being left to me, filled my mind with questions.
And I had always been the type who couldn't see a question without pursuing an answer. Wherever it took me.
.14159
'No two legs are ever the same...' said the surgeon. 'Even on the same person. Even if they look identical. The veins are always a different pattern. It's like fingerprints.' And there was something about what she said that made me think of mathematics. All those examples of unpredictability sitting inside sameness. The way if you times a diameter by pi you will steadfastly always find the circumference of a circle, yet the numbers that make up pi's decimal placings follow no pattern at all.
3.14159 et cetera, for ever, with total and utter and mind-boggling randomness.
There is always an element of unpredictability in even the most predictable things. And if you lived like it wasn't there, then life would pull the rug from under you, so you might as well embrace the .14159.
I stared at the blank wall and the upside-down clock. I knew almost nothing about Ibiza. Except that it was exactly the sort of place I didn't think I would ever visit. Or want to visit.
Blondie came on the radio. Not 'Sunday Girl' but 'Heart Of Glass'. Unpredictability within a pattern. Like life.
'You're not going to be flying anywhere soon?' the surgeon asked, a few minutes later. 'Because it's a bit dangerous, with your legs.'
'Are you suggesting I go without them?'
She didn't appreciate my joke.
'No,' I said, watching the nurse slowly hitch a compression stocking up my leg. 'No. I am not flying anywhere soon.'
It had been a long time since I had knowingly told a lie.
And I felt as naughty as a retired and widowed maths teacher possibly can. Because in that second, still tilted upside down on that surgery bed, I knew I had a plan.
This excerpt is from the hardcover edition.
Monday we begin the book Kiss Me at Christmas by Jenny Bayliss.
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