… and he never came back. When I saw the telegram, it felt as if a bomb had exploded in my heart. Sometimes I think I died with him at the Battle of the Sambre as he went over the trench. And for a long while, I wanted to die with him. But there were years of life without Albert, numb, flat years where all I wanted was the life I’d thought I was going to have with him. Other men came along but I couldn’t love them because my heart was too fractured; there wasn’t enough of it left to love. Then my father, like that, gone. Nothing is as sudden as death.
‘At the funeral it seemed that you knew what to do in the face of death, knew almost how to organize and command it, how to cope with it and still breathe and walk and talk. I had only known how to die when death came near. But you were businesslike about mortality and it was an answer.’
She covered herself in the tablecloth.
‘At the funeral I felt your warmth for me and it melted something deep inside me that had frozen, and when my mam said I couldn’t have tea with you, I knew that was my life now and that it belonged to me, and that I want to live it before I die, not spend it grieving.
‘And there was something else.’ She smoothed her hair away from her eyes. ‘When I saw my father laid out in his coffin, he looked perfect and dead. His skin was cool and even, his face set peacefully, not strained. And he was lying so still in an immaculate white shroud. He was perfect: perfectly still, perfectly composed, and perfectly serene. I realized then, that the only thing in the world that is perfect is death. Life is like this, here, now – not perfect, not still, not calm, not over. Like us. So I opened up, I reached out, I sent the postcard, and you came and you’re married. And I …’
She didn’t finish the sentence but Wilfred sensed she wanted to say something else.
‘And I want to be here with you,’ she added. Wilfred put his hand to Flora’s face, stroked her cheek and took a piece of grass from her hair.
There was a peace between them born of release, a silence without secrets. The moon was reflecting its pure light on to the cove. Wilfred looked over Flora’s shoulder and out of the window, and saw that the sky had darkened somewhat and the stars were emerging, bright and far away, peppering the night with their beads of light. The wind moved in the trees and bats swished across the sky. The tablecloth they were wrapped in was muddy, stained with earth, damp from tears and warmed by their sunburned skin. Wilfred put a hand to Flora’s narrow shoulder.
‘What will you do?’ Flora asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
Wilfred and Flora walked silently from the cove through fields of green wheat, Wilfred carrying his bike, to the low hedge at the back of White Hook. At the bottom of the garden Wilfred picked Flora up in his arms and lifted her over the hawthorn. They parted silently. Wilfred went to kiss her on the lips but Flora turned her face away.
There was a light on in the house, Flora saw – her mam was still up and waiting for her. It was past midnight and her mam must have feared the worst. For the last few weeks Flora had told her she was going for a bicycle ride when she had been cycling to the cove most days to take photographs but then she hadn’t returned. Night had come. It was dark and silent by the time Flora pushed open the door and walked through the porch into the kitchen.
Her mam was at the round kitchen table, a lamp burning intensely beside her, sitting mutely, waiting modestly. The fire was low and a breeze was disturbing the green curtains hanging at the kitchen window. Flora stayed still for a few seconds and then she walked across the floor, sat down on the slate tiles, put her head on her mam’s knees and cried.
Her mam sat upright, as she had been taught to do in her childhood, and put her now weathered hand on her daughter’s head while Flora wept. Mrs Edwards was mature enough to say nothing. She didn’t ask where her daughter’s clothes were, or why