Tess
Iris – her body, at least – was gone by the time Tess had showered and dressed, and driven back to Clearview. Donna stayed away. She’d been up all night, and she needed to sleep. There was a special room where you could visit a loved one after they had died – she’d been shown it by the manager, Claire, when she first came here – but, while she’d stood under the hot water in her shower, Tess had decided not to. She didn’t want that to be the last time she saw Iris. There was no need.
Iris hadn’t wanted any fuss. That’s what she’d always said. Tess remembered her talking about Wilfred’s committal, the memory still vivid so many years after he’d died. Iris had hated his funeral. How it had been raining and cold and how the pallbearers had almost slipped on the edge of the grave, lowering the coffin in, or at least that she had worried that they might. How desperate she’d felt, watching him go into the ground: how there had been no comfort in it for her – not in any of it. How each little thud of earth hitting the coffin, thrown by the mourners, felt like a blow to her. She’d wished there was comfort. She’d wished she’d believed, but she didn’t, she said, and that was that. And going through the ritual because it was expected made no sense to her. Do what’s simplest, she’d said. Get rid of my body the easiest way you can, she’d said. Incinerator if you could. No church. No service at the crematorium. No urn of ashes to be disposed of on a windless day. Definitely no graveyard. Wait a few months, she’d said, and then go and stand somewhere with a lovely view on a warm, sunny day and say a poem I’d like into the wind. Plant a tree. That’s what Iris wished she’d been able to do with Wilf, and that was what she wanted for herself, and for the people who loved her and were left behind.
The bed had been stripped, and then covered with just a counterpane, on top of which Iris’s few belongings had been neatly folded by someone kind and careful. There weren’t so many. Skirts, sweaters, dresses, a couple of nightdresses. A pair of sturdy shoes she’d hardly needed, and some slippers Tess had bought for her when she’d first come here, barely worn. She remembered the kind nurse saying that they could deal with the items if Tess wanted. Her grandmother’s handbag was next to the pile on the bed, and, beside that, her watch and her wedding ring. Tess picked up the ring and looked at it, thin and worn. She’d never seen Iris without it on. She could see now, for the first time, her grandmother’s name and her grandfather’s, along with the date of their marriage, engraved on the inside of the band, the words still distinct after all this time. Tess slipped it on to her own finger – the pinkie, it was too small for her ring finger – and rubbed it gently. She wondered whether Iris would want to be cremated with it on – she had never said one way or the other. She hoped not: she wanted to keep it. She felt almost unbearably sad.
And then Gigi was there, her arms open wide.
‘They told me.’
‘I wasn’t here, Gigi.’
‘Oh, my love. You were here. She knew.’
‘Do you think so? Do you honestly think so?’
‘I know that you sat there, and told her you loved her, and I believe – I choose to believe – that at some level, somewhere very deep, she will have heard you.
‘But I also believe what matters more, much more, is the life you and she had before she was ill, sweetheart. Those are the memories you should focus on. This was such a short time compared to all the time you two had together. You had her your whole life.’
Tess nodded, rubbing tears away.
Gigi brushed her cheek tenderly. ‘Come and have a cup of tea with me.’
Tess laughed. ‘The magical powers of tea.’
‘It’s true, you know … I have Assam in my veins at this point, not blood.’
‘I’m not going to see her body.’
Gigi nodded. ‘That’s fine.’
‘You’re not going to try to persuade me it’s important?’
‘Nope. Saw both my parents. I’m not sure it was. If you don’t want to, don’t.’
Tess sighed. ‘I don’t.’
‘Then that’s fine. Did you know, I mean, did you talk … about what kind of funeral?’
‘She didn’t want one if it was at all possible!’
‘Good for Iris. I’d have liked her.’
Tess nodded. ‘You would.’ More tears.
‘Did your mum know? What she wanted?’
‘I’m not sure. She’ll be okay with no church, though. She’d be more likely to want to scatter her ashes in Goa or have some shaman ritual or something …’
Gigi laughed. ‘She should never call you as a witness for her defence.’
Tess laughed too. ‘She’s all right. You know, if you’d told me even a year ago I’d be living with her, and we’d actually be getting along, I’d have laughed in your face.’
‘It’s a funny old world.’
‘You sound like Iris. She used to say that.’
‘And we’re both right.’
‘She’s still a nutter, though. Donna. Complete fruit loop. No way is she in charge of what we do with Gran … no way!’
After a few moments, Tess said, ‘What will you do … for James? Does he not want a funeral either?’
‘Richard will want the full monty. To be fair, James would too. He’s proper, you know. It’ll be all Eternal Father, Strong to Save, black clobber and cucumber sandwiches at the wake.’ She grimaced. ‘I think Iris’s way is better, to be honest.’
‘Me too.’
‘Might you want a memorial service?’
‘Thing is, she wasn’t a believer. Not in any of it. She was raised that way – christened, confirmed, all that. She knew the words to everything – not just the Lord’s Prayer and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. She’d just rejected it. Now I think I know why. So I don’t think she’d want us to do anything in a church.’ She looked down at Iris’s ring on her finger. Thought of Tom’s funeral. How wretched it must have been. She realized that was probably the last time Iris had ever been in a church, and maybe why she’d married Wilfred in a register office.
‘I know she wouldn’t. She’d come back and haunt us, I’m pretty sure. No. I know what she wanted. She wanted me to plant a tree!’ She smiled ruefully. ‘And say a poem into the wind on a summer day … I think that was it.’
‘I can’t think of anything nicer, Tess.’
She wanted to ask if Gigi knew where Oliver was, but she felt strangely shy suddenly. It wasn’t Oliver’s job to comfort her now. It wasn’t for him to be there for her to lean on. She never wanted Gigi to think she thought he was.
After Gigi left, Tess spoke to Claire in the office about direct cremation. There were some papers to sign. But surprisingly little to do right now. There’d be meetings, she knew, with lawyers. But not now. Now there was just quiet, and peace. She went back to Iris’s room. She didn’t want to see her grandmother’s body, but she wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to her things. She looked at Iris’s handbag and wondered if she might keep it. She’d never use it, but it might be nice to have it. She picked it up. It was unfashionable and old, not vintage, shaped like the Queen’s handbags. But she might like to keep it anyway. She’d been so good at being ruthless in Iris’s house, but now that her grandmother was actually gone, ‘things’ had instantaneously taken on more significance. The handbag was almost empty, as it had been the whole time Iris had been here. There’d been no need for things, not even reading glasses, latterly. Lots of the ladies in the home still had them, though, like leather comfort blankets. They connected them, somehow, to the lives they’d had. It was old-fashioned – the kind with brass feet and the clasp on the top that snapped closed – brown leather, worn a little now on the corners.
Tess remembered a bigger handbag. One endlessly capacious, like Mary Poppins’s carpet bag, and useful, perpetually stocked with sun cream, barley sugars, plasters, a handkerchief (never tissues), and a colouring book and pens. With Iris’s fabulously cool winged sunglasses. The Rimmel lipstick that smelt of powdery roses.
She ran her hands across the warm leather, snapped and unsnapped the fastening. She raised the bag to her face, to see if she could smell her grandmother within it.
She picked up the watch and looked for a pocket inside the handbag where she could safely store it until she decided what to do with both things. There was a small one, but when she slid the watch in she met resistance. There was a folded sheet of paper inside it she had never seen before. Tess pulled it out and stared at it, her heart racing. It was old and yellowed. She unfolded it and didn’t recognize the handwriting. It wasn’t from Tom. Scanning to the bottom, she saw that it was signed by her grandfather. For a moment she thought she shouldn’t read it – it must be a love letter, and love letters were private, sacred.
But it was all she had to keep Iris alive for just a while longer. And so she read it.
10 February 1956
My Iris,
I know you’ve asked me to leave you alone, and I promise you this is my one last attempt to change your mind. You won’t hear from me again after this. It’s not in my nature to give up, but I think I must. I wanted to write these words, not speak them, so that you can read them slowly and consider them carefully – if you are going to disregard them in the end, then at least I want you to have time to think first.
I am so very glad you told me about your brother when we last met. I feel like my understanding of you has been like a complicated jigsaw puzzle, with big pieces missing, and you have filled them in with your story, and I see you more clearly now than I have ever done. I see you more, and I love you more, although you have always implied that I would only love you less if I knew you better.
But what it shows me is that for the last ten years you’ve been hiding, living a half-life, where you risk nothing of your heart, but one where you stand to gain nothing either.
What happened to your brother was a tragedy. For him, for your whole family.
I have come to see that I was lucky. It was my body that the war so damaged, and my body healed. I didn’t lose my mind. There are things I saw and heard that I have never spoken of, but I have been able to put them away, lock them up in a part of myself where they can’t hurt me, or the people around me. I won’t forget – I can’t and anyway I don’t want to. But I didn’t lose my mind. Tom did. Whereas the war made me want to live, and made me determined to live well, it ultimately ruined life for him. But it certainly wasn’t love that killed him.
I know one thing for sure. Love could not have saved him either. If it could, you had enough for him to do it. When Tom wrote those words to you, he was trying to help you understand why he was going to do what he did, but he was wrong to make you promise what he did. He wasn’t issuing an edict for your life, my darling. He did not mean that you should carry his hurt close to your heart and let it stop you having love of your own. He did not want a lonely, loveless life for you. The waste of it, the sheer awful waste of it, must haunt him.
You did not die when he died, Iris, just as he did not die when Manon died. If he had given himself time, who knows. I believe he might have been happy again, have loved again. The world is full of people who have loved, and lost, and still loved, and loved well, again. Perhaps the war hurt him too badly. We’ll never know. But Tom’s story could have ended so differently.
And so could yours. So must yours. You are alive. You are full of love to give. So full you’ll explode – I see it and I feel it in you, even if you cannot see it in yourself. You can’t save your poor Tom, or his Manon. You can’t live in their past and you do not honour their memory with a life half lived. You can only save yourself. And me, because my love for you won’t be stopped, and it can’t be given to someone else.
If you let the fear of being hurt stop you, you might as well have died with him on that day.
If it is not to be me, Iris, then please, at least, promise me it will be someone. I need to believe that it will be someone. I can live with that if I must. But love, Iris. LOVE. Love with all your heart, and with all of Tom’s and all of Manon’s. Love for them too. It’s the simplest thing in the world, my darling girl. The bravest and yet the very simplest thing.
I won’t write to you again. I will hope so very much to hear from you, but, if I do not, then just know that I will always love you.
Wilf
Tears streamed down her face by the time she’d read it, and reread it. This was her piece of the puzzle. She was crying for heartbroken Iris, keeping a terrible promise to Tom, and for Wilf, the force of whose love screamed from every word.
She didn’t see Oliver come in, didn’t sense his presence until he was next to the bed, and then it was too late to pretend she wasn’t crying. She didn’t even want to.
‘You poor thing.’
And she was in his arms, heaving with sobs, his hand in her hair.
‘Mum told me. I came as soon as I got her message.’
She pulled away, sniffing hard. ‘It’s ridiculous. She’s been gone for a long, long time, really. But this … this is so final … I didn’t expect to feel this way.’
He pulled her back into his embrace. ‘You loved her.’
‘I loved her.’
He held her for long minutes while she calmed down, and she let him, calm in his embrace. When she stepped away, back in control of herself, he smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ear, and gently rubbed a final tear from her cheek with his thumb.
‘I’m disgusting. Snotty and blotchy and pathetic.’
‘You’re beautiful.’
‘I found this.’ She handed him the crumpled paper. ‘It’s from my grandfather. It was in her handbag. She must have kept it with her always. For sixty years.’
‘I shouldn’t read it.’
‘I want you to. You’ve read the others.’
‘Okay.’ Oliver sat down in the high-backed chair.
She watched him while he read. His mouth moved silently while he read the words.
Then he exhaled and laid the letter on the bed. ‘That is quite a letter.’
‘Yep.’
‘So it’s the last one?’
Tess nodded. ‘I think so. My mum was born three years after it was written, almost exactly. They’d married that Easter, just after the letter. They were barely ever apart after that. Certainly not long enough for letters. At least, not that she kept.’
‘Wow.’
‘I know.’
‘It must have done. She carried it, for all these years. All these years, Olly.’
‘And she never spoke about it?’
‘No. I had never even heard of Tom until she started talking about him that time, in here. She kept him a secret all those years. By the time my mum was old enough to ask stuff, Iris’s own parents were dead. There was no one else.’
‘Why do you suppose that was?’
Tess shook her head. ‘I had no idea until I read this. I feel like the letter makes sense of that. Like she finally accepted something about Tom, about his death. Left it behind.’
Olly nodded.
‘It explains all sorts of things. Why she would never go to church. Why she never went back to the farm, even though she hated London.’
‘Does that make sense to you?’
‘It does. She was the most loving person I ever knew. My granddad was right – she was entirely full of love.’
The baby kicked hard then. Tess gasped and put her hands on her stomach.
‘Okay?’ He was beside her at once.
‘Fine. She’s making her presence felt. All this talk of love.’
Suddenly Olly was very close. She had taken his hand before she’d even realized it and put it on her belly, where she’d felt the baby’s foot.
Olly stared down at his hand and then back up at her, his face full of wonder, and something else.
‘He was right, you know, your grandfather.’
‘About what?’
‘It is the simplest thing in the world.’
And suddenly, after all of it, even because of all it, it just was.
‘It’s you.’
His lips were almost on hers, so she could feel his breath in her own mouth.
‘You’re the one.’
They touched hers. The briefest of touches. Not even, really, a kiss. Then he rested his forehead lightly against hers.
‘You’re my one.’
It was like he was waiting for permission. His hand was still on her bump. His face was very still.
She kissed him back, gently at first, like his kiss had been, their lips just grazing, their breath merging.
But then, and very soon, she was kissing him like it was the only thing in the world she had ever wanted to do.
And, she knew, with all of her heart.
GARROWAY, IRIS. Passed away peacefully on 18th July, aged ninety-six years. Much loved wife of Wilfred (deceased), and adoring sister to Tom (1918–1945), she will be much missed and fondly remembered by her daughter, Donna, her granddaughter, Tess, and her unborn great-granddaughter. She loved us all with all of her huge heart.