Golden Hour (32 page)

She eats the scrambled eggs on toast first, because it turns out she's extremely hungry. Then she calls him.

“Hi there,” she says. “It's me.”

“Hi,” he says. He sounds subdued.

“We have to talk, don't we?”

“I guess so.”

“Come down tomorrow evening?”

Tomorrow is Friday, his usual time for getting out of London.

“I can't,” he says. “The guys are giving me a goodbye party.”

“Okay. Saturday morning?”

“Sure. I can do that.”

“Call me when you're on the train and I'll meet you.”

Now that this has been decided Maggie feels a wave of relief and exhaustion wash over her. Whatever happens will happen. They'll talk on Saturday.

Maybe I'm a leaf in the wind after all.

Dean knows how much Sheena loves
Coronation Street
so he waits patiently until the mournful end music plays. He has one hand in his pocket, feeling the ring. He's been silent with excitement ever since Sheena came home.

Sheena half-watches the ads as she shifts her body to a more comfortable position on the sofa.

“You okay, babe?” she says.

“How about we go out?” says Dean.

“Out? It's nine o'clock at night.”

“It's sunset. There's a sunset sky out there.”

“You want to look at the sunset?”

“Yes,” says Dean. “With you.”

She stares at him and realizes he's up to something. He never was any good as a liar. Then she looks back at the TV. Coming up next is
Homes from Hell
. Houses built too close to the sea that fall off cliffs.

“So why build there in the first place, you muppets?” says Sheena to the television. “All right,” she says to Dean. “I'll get my coat.”

“It's not cold out.”

“I'm not taking any chances.”

They go out together, into the dusk of the estate. The shop
is closed, but it's still brightly lit inside. They cross Eridge Green.

“So where are we going on this walk?” says Sheena.

“You'll see,” says Dean.

He's right about the sky. It rises up over the water meadows, over the railway line, over the river, a soft smudge of reds and golds. The sun itself is long sunk behind the hills of the town, but its light still colors the sky, rimming the few island clouds.

“You're a mystery man, you are,” says Sheena.

He can tell she likes it. This is Dean in charge.

They pass the playground and the allotments and head up the track. The neatly tended hedge bounding Landport Road turns to bramble and thorn. Here between the fence and the fields the track is narrow, rutted. Two boys race by on bikes, heading home.

“You like it here, don't you?” says Dean, meaning the estate, the countryside, all of it.

“I do like it,” says Sheena.

“It's brilliant, your house,” says Dean.

“Your house too, babe.”

“My house too.” He's lived there three years now. Three magic years. “Means a lot to me, that does.”

“Course it does.”

But he wants her to know how much it means to him. Hard to find the words for this sort of thing. You don't want to sound soft.

“Couldn't do it without you, Sheen. It's like, you saved me.”

Yes, that's how it is. Sheena, my savior.

“Oh, darling.” She squeezes his hand. “We save each other, right?”

The track rises into the darkness of trees.

“I can hardly see where I'm going,” Sheena says.

“You keep hold of me, sweetheart. I'll look after you.”

At the farmhouse they fork right and the track descends again. Ahead they see the shine of water that's the Cut. Between the tall trees the colors of the sky are deepening. On the left of the track the hillside rises steeply, thickly wooded, its ramps of dark earth carved between the trees where generations of kids on bikes have scrambled.

Where the track reaches the meadows, right by the bright water of the Cut, there's a five-barred gate for tractors and a small kissing gate for people on foot. This is Dean's chosen destination. He leads Sheena to the gate.

“This is it,” he says.

He leans on the five-barred gate and looks at the darkening roll of meadowland, broken by lines of trees. The high railway line. The distant tower of Hamsey Church on its river knoll. The sunset sky.

“Should be more red in the sky,” he says. “But nothing's perfect.”

“I think it's perfect,” says Sheena.

“And looky what we have here.”

He goes to the kissing gate.

“This is a kissing gate. That means you have to kiss me.”

Sheena laughs at him for that. “You don't have to bring me all this way to kiss you,” she says.

“But I want a special kiss,” says Dean.

He goes through the kissing gate to the far side. Sheena, smiling, comes up to the gate on her side. Dean feels in his pocket and takes out the ring.

“This is for you, Sheena,” he says. And he goes down on one knee. Right there by the kissing gate, on his knee, on the dry grass. “If you'll have me.”

“Oh, babe!”

Sheena takes the ring. She can't speak. She's silent with surprise.

“I know I'm nothing much,” says Dean, “but I love you and I want to marry you.”

Sheena gazes at the ring in the fading light.

“Deanie,” she says. “This is so beautiful.”

“I'm on my fucking knees, Sheena.”

She looks up from the ring with a smile.

“Then get up and give me a kiss.”

He rises, and they kiss over the gate.

“Course I'll marry you, babe.”

“You will?”

He sounds amazed. Relieved.

“Don't mean much to me either way, but if that's what you want, that's what we'll do.”

He comes back round the gate and takes her in his arms.

“So you'll never leave me ever?”

“Never ever.”

“And you like the ring?”

“It's perfect. I've never seen anything so beautiful. Where'd you get it?”

“Brighton. I've been saving and saving. Mind you, Sheena, it's not new. It's second-hand.”

“It's antique, is what it is. That's why it's so beautiful.”

“If it doesn't fit we'll have it altered.”

Sheena tries the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. It's tight, but it goes on. She holds her hand up to see it there, shaking her head in wonder.

“It's so beautiful, Deanie. It's like it was made for me.”

Dean is happier than he ever thought he could be in all his life. Because he's done something good. Because his girl's going to marry him.

“So what was all that about the sunset?” she says.

“I wanted to propose somewhere you'd remember. I wanted you to say for all the rest of your life, There was a sunset sky.”

“Oh, babe.”

They walk back slowly, hand in hand.

“You really don't mind the ring not being new?” he says.

“Course not,” she says. “It's got all that love in it. All the women who've worn it before me. They were loved too.”

“Not as much as I love you,” says Dean.

And they stop in the dark tunnel of trees and kiss again.

Laura leaves home just after eight in the morning, to do her supermarket shopping. You have to get there early these days to be sure of a parking space. Her dinner party is up in the air, she has no idea any more how many she's cooking for, it could be six, it could be ten, but what can you do? She can't ask Maggie to make up her mind when she's in mid-crisis. Carrie won't answer her questions. She'd call the whole thing off except Roddy and Diana are coming anyway, and what reason could she give Liz and Alan? You can't say you need to know exact numbers to proceed. That would be ridiculous. What sort of person can't cope with a few last-minute adjustments to her plans?

A person like me. So much for being a leaf in the wind.

Waitrose is oddly comforting. She glides with her smoothly rolling trolley down the bright aisles and thinks, “This is grace abounding.” The words come into her mind unbidden. From where? Some hymn? Searching the shelves for Maldon salt and redcurrant jelly, she remembers that John Bunyan's spiritual autobiography is called
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
. First printed in 1668, twelve years before
Pilgrim's Progress
, she handled the sale of a fine 1672 edition to Wheaton College, Illinois, for just over $50,000. Bunyan's self-confessed sins were
profanity, dancing
and
bell-ringing
. It was one of her jokes at the
time. What would Bunyan make of Waitrose? The grace of God transmuted into the promise of everlasting plenty on ever-refilled shelves.

It's all very well letting yourself be blown like a leaf in the wind, but what if the wind's blowing you nowhere? We're all put on earth for a purpose. Who said that? Some long-ago Sunday-school teacher. Funny how you go on believing something like that long after you stop believing in God. There's no reason why it should be true. It's much more likely we all show up by accident, and lead random lives. But you go on believing, there has to be a purpose.

She finds the redcurrant jelly. There's a purpose, of a very small kind. You seek for a jar of redcurrant jelly, and you find it. Maybe it's just vanity that drives us to look for something grander.

Then there's the children. You make them your purpose for so many years, then you have to stand by and do nothing when their lives are going wrong. If Carrie's not happy, that has to be my fault, doesn't it? It means I've made too many demands on her, or too few. She doesn't have a high enough opinion of herself, which is why Toby can walk all over her. He's like a cat, that boy, you can stroke him but he'll never love you.

All the time operating with half her attention on her shopping list, Laura is filling her trolley. At the deli counter she meets Belinda Redknapp. She's deeply tanned, and wearing skinny jeans.

“Belinda, you've got even slimmer! How do you do it?”

“We've been in Syria,” says Belinda. “Everyone who goes to Syria gets the runs. Diarrhea, the diet. And we've been in Jordan, so Tom could see Petra. I said anywhere so long as it's hot. How about you? Have you been away?”

“We're going in September. Steering clear of the school holidays, after all these years.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes, I think so. Carrie may come, but I doubt it.”

“Everyone keeps telling me they can't get rid of their kids, there aren't any jobs, just wait till they graduate and they'll be home again. But we don't see Alex for months on end. And Chloe's actually got a job! Can you believe it? She claims she's told me what it is but I've still got no idea, so I expect she's a lap-dancer or something. They say there's good money to be made in lap-dancing, but I can't think why. They're not allowed to touch, you know? I really don't understand men.”

All this in her usual ringing tones. Belinda doesn't do embarrassment.

“Let's have lunch one day soon,” she says. “I want to tell you about my new discovery. It's the answer to everything.” She lowers her voice to whisper in Laura's ear. “Lubrication.”

They go their separate ways down the shining aisles. Laura marvels at the life force that is Belinda. Trust her to find a way to be young again where it counts.

She moves on to the dairy shelves and picks up two tubs of double cream. Roddy is coming this evening, he doesn't want feeding, but it would be friendly to offer him something. She remembers that he likes Florentines, and heads up the biscuit aisle. Funny old Roddy, going in search of silence. He must drive Diana up the wall. “I'm a stranger and a pilgrim on the earth,” he says, just like Bunyan. Perhaps he's a chief of sinners, drawn to profanity and dancing and bell-ringing. And yet even as she smiles at Roddy she admires him. He's setting out on his own adventure.

Maybe that's what happens after the children leave home and the long empty years loom before you. You stop servicing other people and begin your own adventure. But where do you go?

She wheels her trolley along the checkout counters, looking
for the one with the shortest queue. She sees one with only two trolleys in it and is about to join it when she gets a clear view of the waiting trolley. It's the big kind, and it's full to the top. Better to join a longer line of less full trolleys.

Hell. I've forgotten my Bag for Life again.

She's always doing this, rushing out of the house in too much of a spin and leaving behind her now extensive collection of Bags for Life. She refuses to buy yet more. I'll just have to have carrier bags and be a polluter of the environment. And it is useful to have a stash of old plastic bags to wrap up the remains of meat or fish left uneaten after a meal. They can't go on the compost, and if you don't wrap them in plastic they stink. But the plastic bags end up somewhere in the Atlantic, choking marine creatures to death. Every little thing you do causes some damage further down the line.

The shopper in front of her transfers her purchases from trolley to belt. Laura waits for her to reach for one of the little plastic barriers that separates one shopper's goods from another, but she neglects to do this. Laura has to do it for herself. Surely this is wrong? She wants to tell her she's forgotten to put down the—, but she doesn't know what it's called. It'll have some specialist name that only experts use, like
cam
or
berm
.

“Hello, Laura. Out early.” It's Joan Huxtable, a stalwart of the village, in her mid-seventies now but as well groomed and upright as ever. “Aren't we having a glorious summer! But they do say it's about to break.”