so over the thought of him laughing. If she’d been a youngster it would have been a simple mistake, but when you’re sixty-seven years old, she thought, it’s a mistake of old age. And now, sitting in that robe and clinging on to a love that had passed her by, she couldn’t have felt more foolish. What on earth was wrong with her? Who was she trying to kid?
The sight of the champagne felt like an insult, so she tipped what was left down the sink and put the dirty plates in the dishwasher. The basket of wishes was just as unfortunate, so that went back into the cupboard alongside the old bottle of champagne, his diary, and a few other gifts that he had left throughout the years.
“What are you looking at?” she asked Cookie when she saw him watching her. “A silly old fool,” she offered quietly to herself. A single fat tear dripped onto the robe, the silk blushing as dark as her mood. “What a senseless old woman you’ve become, Elizabeth.”
Pictures of Kate stared back at her accusingly from around the room. One in particular stood out. In the photograph, Kate was just twenty years old, wearing a harness with her feet strapped together and her arms spread wide, standing on the edge of a cliff surrounded by jungle greenery. Moments after that photograph had been taken, she had thrown herself over the edge, her life secured by nothing more than the bungee cord and a large dash of hope. “Born courageous” was what Elizabeth always said of her. Even as a child she never feared having a go at things. Nothing like Elizabeth, not in appearance or character, instead following her father in both. Kate would never have sat around waiting for gifts from a man who’d left her. When she thought things were over, that was it, done. That’s why Kate wouldn’t speak to her anymore, not since last November. Best part of a year without so much as a hello. Elizabeth missed her so much, and her two boys. They would have grown so much in the time she hadn’t seen them. Elizabeth wished she could take back the things they had said, but that wasn’t how life worked. It didn’t seem to matter how many messages she left or phone calls she made, how many times she begged for forgiveness. You couldn’t turn back the clock.
Standing at the window, she brushed the curtains aside, looked down to the coast and up the hill to where the old Mayon Lookout was positioned. A walk up there would have been her first stop in her plan for the day, and afterward she would have driven out to Penzance to go to the theater. That was Tom’s wish in 1982: I wish that I could take you to see a musical in the West End. Cats was good. I think you would have loved it. Today she was due to see an acoustic guitar player, a woman singing. The closest she could get to fulfilling that wish. But she already knew she wasn’t going to go. It wasn’t 1982 anymore, and this wasn’t the West End. Whosever life she had been trying to live all these years, it wasn’t really hers. It was a life that belonged to another girl, one who stopped existing in many ways on the day that Tom left.
Heading upstairs, Elizabeth returned to her bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she opened the bedside drawer and removed a box of tissues. Underneath, she found a black-and-white photograph of Tom, standing without a shirt, his hands on his hips. The hardest thing wasn’t knowing that he didn’t look like that anymore, but knowing instead that she had no idea of what he did look like now. Knowing that he had changed, and she didn’t know in what way. Fingers so old she barely recognized them as her own brushed across the image, before she placed it back into the drawer and covered it with the tissues. Sometimes it was best not to look.
“Pull yourself together, Elizabeth,” she told herself. Using a trick of old, she gave her cheeks a pinch for some color, then finger-combed her graying blond hair into place. Grabbing a pair of walking trousers and a thick fleece from the wardrobe, she dressed, then picked up the robe from the bed. After a moment’s hesitation she bundled it into a heap and tossed it to the bottom