Birthday Read Free Page A

‘Yeh, but she made up for it a million times.’

TWO
    After the early days of being in love Brian hadn’t seen Jenny for fifteen years, until a letter came from Nottingham to say his father was dying. He’d seen little of the old man in the previous decade, during which the binding of love and detestation had turned into tolerated indifference. Still, his imminent death meant something, as he stood on the platform thinking it strange that he always had to search for the station exit, never an automatic walk up the steps and across the booking hall onto the street, as if the roots of his instinct were cut on the day he left.
    From the crowd around the train his name was spoken clearly enough to startle, and for a few moments he wondered what this half familiar face had to do with him. The express would leave in a few minutes. ‘Hello! Don’t you know me?’ As if the likelihood of his not doing so would devastate her, though the distress in her features wasn’t due to his changed appearance. ‘It’s me, Jenny.’
    The more he looked the less altered was she from the girl he had known. He supposed he had mumbled the right words: ‘What are you doing here? Why are you getting on the train? Are you here to meet someone? Or are you going to the seaside?’ He must have said something like all those things, his smile covering the love and curiosity he should have felt, her signals indicating a catastrophe he lacked the nobility of soul to comprehend, and in any case the past they shared was far too far away to be of any help. Eyes filmed by heartache, she held back tears, as if trying to say something with a silence to which he could not respond since he had no silence of his own to give, his heart a ball of string that would need a lifetime to disentangle because he had become another person, and so had she.
    Without luggage, she looked too unhappy to be travelling for pleasure. He noted the usual kind of blouse, and one coat button done up unevenly as if she had put it on in a state of shock. ‘I’m going to the hospital in Sheffield.’
    Train doors clacked like rifle shots, shouts and whistles normal to him but a grief to her who only wanted to be on her way. He tried to remember whether she had relations in Sheffield. ‘What are you going there for?’
    â€˜My husband’s had an accident in the foundry where he works.’ She gave a mad woman’s smile. ‘I’ve got to run, though, or I’ll miss my train.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. Is he badly hurt?’
    â€˜I don’t know. They telephoned the corner shop. But I’m sure he must be.’
    â€˜Perhaps it’s not as bad as you think.’ He held her warm and vibrant hand while wanting only to get away, yet they were drawn close for a kiss, as if it might reduce the bad news. She wasn’t altogether there, but who would be? He hoped she would remember the meeting as he pulled open a door the guard had just closed, to make sure she wasn’t left behind, being already with her husband as the train went into the tunnel of its own smoke.
    He had cut so many people out of his life in order to make a different world for himself, couldn’t connect any more to a woman whose husband had been smashed up in a foundry. The death of his father seemed a formality by comparison. He found the exit easily, as if instinct had come back at the sight of her, marvelling at the chance meeting while walking up the steps.
    George, paralysed from the waist down, had to be cared for night and day, lifted and carried, taken and fetched, wiped and fed and humoured and honoured, and no doubt loved, Jenny’s subtly harassed expression the most she would allow herself to show. She did everything, and would have done more had it been demanded or possible. She could have fled – others had been known to – left him in a hospital or convalescent home on the coast, but abandoning your