Ivy and Abe Read online

  ‘Alan became a stand-up comedian?’ I laughed when he’d run through his older brother’s career trajectory.

  ‘For a while, in the early eighties, he tried to make a living out of it. Then he trained as an accountant.’

  ‘And Tessa?’

  ‘She started off as a teacher, then became something big in some educational think tank.’

  ‘And they’re still well? Your siblings?’

  ‘Yes.’ He touched the side of my face. ‘I’m so sorry about Jon. It must have been very hard for you.’

  ‘You know what it’s like to lose a sibling.’

  He nodded. ‘It was a long time ago but it stays with you, something like that. Mum never really got over it.’

  ‘How could you ever get over losing a child? Dad found it hard when Jon died. I think that was what really killed him, not the pneumonia.’

  We had accumulated a lot of deaths of loved ones between us in the intervening years. Parents, siblings, partners. His wife Lynn had died more recently than Richard.

  He described their marriage as ‘very happy’. I wondered, initially, if I felt jealous in a Rebecca-esque way but I found I didn’t. His happy marriage seemed to pave the way for us to have a future. A bad one might have made him more hesitant.

  ‘Listen to us getting morose.’ Abe shook his head. ‘Do you still swim?’

  ‘I do. I go to the local pool several times a week and the lido in summer.’

  He laughed and put his arm around me, pulling me to him.

  We’d come full circle. We were back where we’d been when we’d first met as children, drawn to each other in a way you cannot put into words. We still fitted, at least our personalities did, after all the years. Whether our bodies would was an unknown, but we would find out sooner or later.

  ‘I’m not a brilliant cook,’ Abe said, as we walked though the park one morning after we’d met for coffee, kicking up the autumn leaves like children, ‘but I’d like to make you dinner one evening soon. At my place.’

  ‘I’m not a great foodie,’ I replied, ‘so whatever you cook, I’m sure it will be lovely. And I’d love to come.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Or today even?’

  ‘I’m picking Connor up after school so I’d need to go home first. But I could come round after Max collects him on his way home.’

  ‘If you won’t be too tired?’

  ‘No. If I get the bus I could be at your house by about eight. Is that okay?’

  ‘Perfect.’ Abe was still looking at me. ‘And I wondered …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wouldn’t like you to take public transport home late. I could get you a taxi home. Or …’

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said, feeling myself flush as I spoke. We were standing near the entrance to the park, where a group of teenagers were skateboarding on a bit of tarmac.

  ‘Good.’ Abe put his arms around me. ‘There’s no pressure or anything. But it would be so lovely if you could stay.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I appreciated the reassurance, while enjoying the prospect of being with him.

  He kissed me then, a moment of foreplay for the evening ahead of us. He kissed me until the teenagers on their boards stopped wheeling around and shouted, ‘Get a room, Granddad!’

  ‘There he is!’ I spotted Sam seconds before Abe did: he was holding up a sign with ‘Mr and Mrs McFadden’ printed on it, surrounded by felt-tipped hearts and flowers.

  ‘The kids made it.’ He shrugged and dropped it to his side, kissing his father twice and pulling him close at the same time, the way he always did. They were so easily affectionate together.

  ‘Ivy, did you have a good time?’ Sam let go of his father and planted a dry, warm kiss on my cheek.

  ‘Wonderful. Really wonderful. And it’s so kind of you to come and meet us.’

  We’d both stressed that he didn’t have to. He had enough on, with his job and two young children, but he’d insisted.

  ‘Dad spent enough time driving me and Ruby around. And it was your honeymoon. You don’t want to spoil it by sitting on the Tube for hours when you get back.’

  He’d arranged the honeymoon too, with Abe’s knowledge but without mine. It was a gift to us from all four of our children. They’d let Abe in on the details before they’d booked it, but told him to keep it a secret from me. ‘We’ll be by the sea and the weather should be warm but not too hot,’ was all Abe would say when I asked him what I should pack.

  ‘Is it northern Europe?’ I wondered if he was going to show me his fountain on the waterfront in Hamburg. ‘Or Spain?’ Had he shown a little too much interest when I’d mentioned a work trip to Almería and said I’d like to go back? ‘Or North Africa?’ I knew the flight was short but perhaps we were going somewhere in Morocco.

  He’d been several times with Lynn, Sam and Ruby. ‘Such a beautiful country. The light, the colours and the hospitality of the people make it very special.’

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about honeymooning in a place where he’d spent so much time with his wife and young family, but wherever we were going, it was too late for me to do anything about it.

  ‘Stop asking so many questions!’ Abe said, as I probed.

  ‘Have I read a novel set there?’

  ‘Will I need walking shoes?’

  ‘Should I bring mosquito repellent?’

  ‘Honestly, you’re like a child who needs to know what their Christmas present is before Christmas.’

  ‘I just want to be prepared.’

  ‘I’ve told you what to bring and I’ll make sure we have everything else we need.’

  ‘But what should I read? I like books I’m reading to resonate with the place I’m in when I’m away.’

  ‘It’s a surprise, Ivy,’ Abe said firmly. ‘Please, just indulge me and let it remain one.’

  The real surprise was that Abe hadn’t planned it. The children had got together in a way that meant far more to me than the trip itself. They’d all been so accepting, so happy for us and so unified in their desire to demonstrate it.

  We had been in an Italian restaurant not far from the register office when Lottie handed me the card. ‘This is from all of us,’ she’d said over the clatter and chatter and Sam’s iPod, which he’d hooked up to the restaurant’s system so that, after his speech, he could play us a song he said had always been one of his dad’s favourites.

  ‘And now I know why!’

  It was the Mamas and the Papas’ ‘For The Love Of Ivy’, which I often sang to myself, as you do when a song has your name in it.

  We were a noisy sprawling party, even though we’d tried to keep it to family and a few close friends. We had more of both than we’d known, and there had been thirty-five of us in a private function room that opened out on to a terracotta-walled courtyard filled with potted olive and bay trees. We could almost have been in Italy: the weather was warm, the food sun-drenched and aromatic, the waiters indulgent of the occasion and us.

  ‘Bellissima!’ the waiter said several times, as he topped up my glass with Prosecco, behaving as if I was a seventeen-year-old bride, rather than a woman of seventy-one.

  But it was also the sense of family that fitted the Italian setting: Ruby and Lottie sat with their heads together on a bench in the sun, chatting conspiratorially as if they’d known each other all their lives. Ilona, Sam’s Polish wife, was showing Connor and Tomasz how to fashion a swan from a table napkin while Sam and Max checked the cricket scores on each other’s mobile phones and pretended they were not when Hannah asked what they were doing. They were missing a Test match to witness their old parents getting married but they weren’t going to miss it entirely.

  ‘Open it,’ Lottie said, as I looked at the envelope she’d just handed me.

  The card was an Eric Slater painting, which showed a landscape that was English and picturesque but not instantly recognizable, unless you’d grown up in Sussex, which of course we had.

  ‘The coastguard’s cottages. That wa
s one of my favourite places,’ I said as I opened it. They were perched precariously on the edge of the cliffs where the meanders of the Cuckmere river emptied out into the sea, and on the other side the distinctive white cliffs of the Seven Sisters.

  ‘I know,’ Ruby said. ‘One of Dad’s too.’

  They’d all written inside the card: our children, their partners and the grandchildren had inscribed various versions of ‘Mum and Abe’, ‘Dad and Ivy’, and the heart-warming ‘Grandma and Grandpa Abe’, and ‘Granddad and Nana Ivy’. They all congratulated us and wished us many years of happiness, and at the centre, a line in Sam’s handwriting: ‘Hope you enjoy the honeymoon – from all of us, with love.’

  I’d looked up at their expectant faces, touched beyond words.

  There was a certain bitter sweetness, as Abe and I rekindled the relationship in a new and adult form, to my realization that I’d never before felt fully completed by another person. In all the adult relationships I’d had, every one good and loving in its own way, I’d always felt I was one half of it, not part of a whole.

  With Abe I felt different. Perhaps it was just our age and that we’d met at a time of life when we could spend a lot of time together: life, work, careers and families were not distracting us from each other. I told myself so because I felt sad about the other men I’d loved and lost. I thought the separateness that had defined other relationships was natural, part of being an individual, to do with my not wanting to be subsumed by someone else and their needs. Now I wanted to be Ivy and Abe.

  On the day it happened, I’d been out shopping in the morning. One of our neighbours had invited us to a party to celebrate their ruby wedding anniversary. It would be the first gathering Abe and I would attend together since we’d been married, the first invitation to go on the mantelpiece with ‘Ivy and Abe’ handwritten above the printed copperplate that detailed the time and date of the party. We’d been together again eighteen months and it was a little more than six months since we’d married and I’d moved into Abe’s house.

  We’d been to dinner parties together and family gatherings, both mine and his, but this was more of an occasion – enough to merit looking for a new dress.

  ‘Will you be back for lunch or have something in town?’ Abe asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t want to be too long but don’t count on my being back.’

  ‘I’ll probably get myself a sandwich, but let me know if you’re going to be back.’ He’d looked at his watch as he said this, as if he was calculating the hours he’d have the house to himself.

  ‘I’ll find something out, I think,’ I said. Perhaps he needed a bit of space.

  ‘Okay either way,’ he said, and kissed me.

  It was early afternoon when I got back and Abe jumped to open the door.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I asked, a little put out by his welcome. He was usually sensitive to the fact I liked a little time to myself, just to take my coat off and sort my bags out when I came in.

  ‘Would you like a coffee?’ he asked. ‘I was going to make one for myself.’

  ‘Okay. I need to put my bags down and go to the loo.’

  ‘Of course.’ He headed for the kitchen. ‘I’ll bring the coffee into the sitting room.’

  I went upstairs and put my shopping bag, with the new dress, on our bed. The view from the bedroom window was barer than it had been when I moved in. The garden was small and low maintenance but the one it backed on to was larger and had had a magnificent sycamore tree, which we could see from our bed when the curtains were open. Now it was gone, cut down by a tree surgeon on account of disease. Abe had gone out to ask him when we heard the chainsaw and saw the branches falling.

  ‘I miss the tree,’ I’d said to Abe, more than once. ‘And there don’t seem to be so many birds now – I haven’t heard our blackbirds recently.’ We often woke to the sound of blackbirds singing, and a couple alighted regularly on the patch of lawn outside the sitting room.

  ‘Our blackbirds’, Abe had taken to calling them, and when he did I wondered anew at the beauty of nature. Having someone to observe it with seemed to intensify it.

  The world seemed so much brighter with Abe at my side but the absence of the tree saddened me when I looked out of the bedroom window. Without it the garden seemed devoid of life, as if winter had come early. I tried to shrug off the slight melancholy I was feeling and went downstairs.

  Abe was reading the paper in the sitting room. ‘I’ve made you coffee,’ he said, nodding towards a cup on the table by the window.

  I paused before I sat down, irrationally miffed because Abe was on the side of the sofa I normally occupied, and in placing the coffee where he had, he was forcing me to sit somewhere else. I knew he wouldn’t have meant anything by it but I liked the fact that we’d settled into a routine, which included having places where we ‘normally’ sat. It gave a sense of longevity to our relationship, which it did not have.

  ‘Thank you.’ I sat down, glanced out of the window and immediately understood why he was on my side of the sofa, his eagerness to see me off that morning, and the way he had jumped up on my return.

  In the corner of the lawn where ‘our’ blackbirds could often be seen pecking at the ground, there was a patch of disturbed earth and, rising gracefully in its midst, a sapling. I burst into tears when I saw it.

  ‘It’s an apple tree,’ he said, getting up and coming over. ‘A semi-dwarf so it won’t overshadow the garden but it should grow high enough to see from our bedroom window and bring in a few birds too.’

  I was too moved to speak and I think Abe was perplexed by my reaction. He carried on talking. ‘We’ll probably get a few bluetits nesting in the spring, fly-catchers and warblers when the blossom is out, and in the autumn and winter, when the fruit is on the ground, thrushes, redwings and all sorts.’ He was babbling as he sat down and put his arm round me. ‘I thought you’d like it.’

  ‘I love it,’ I said, nestling into him.

  ‘So why the tears? Here, have a tissue.’

  I blew my nose and tried to put into words what I felt. ‘Because I’m so happy,’ I said, wiping my eyes. ‘I’ve spent so much of my life not quite daring to look forward to anything, afraid of what the future might bring, but now …’

  ‘That’s a lot of emotion for the prospect of a few apples,’ Abe said, putting his other hand on my knee.

  We both knew it wasn’t the tree I was talking about – not just the tree, anyway – but everything it symbolized: life and our new life together.

  ‘Have you ever wondered,’ Abe asked, taking my hand as we lay in bed that night, ‘what might have happened if we’d met at a different time of our lives?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘I mean later, not when we were children. If we’d met at the right time.’

  ‘I had this conversation with Lottie not so long ago.’

  ‘About us?’

  ‘It was about her, really. Is there a right person or just a right time?’

  ‘And what did you conclude?’

  ‘I think there’s a right person at the right time and a wrong person at the right time – and a right person at the wrong time. Who knows what would have happened if we’d met at another time? We might have been wrong for each other then, and you can’t turn the clock back.’

  ‘Unless you’re North Korean.’ Abe looked at the glow of the LED display on the radio alarm by his bed. ‘They put their clocks back as a symbolic gesture to show that they’d shrugged off the years of Japanese imperialism.’

  ‘That didn’t change the past, though,’ I said. ‘Who knows what another past might have brought?’

  ‘We’re so very lucky,’ he said, turning towards me and putting his arm around me, ‘to have met again when we did.’

  I didn’t say anything. I moved towards him and kissed him instead. It was a long kiss, and while it lasted, I struggled for the second time that day to find the right words to tell him what I wanted to tell him.


  I wanted to tell him I felt complete, in a way I never had before. I wanted him to know how happy he made me, but he winced as we kissed and I stopped, wondering if he was uncomfortable. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, snuggling close to him, enjoying the warmth of his body and his chest hair against my breasts.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m getting old, though.’

  I laughed. ‘We’re both getting old.’

  Abe let out a long, noisy breath. He sounded strained but I didn’t want to ask again.

  ‘I don’t seem to be able to find quite the right words,’ I said.

  ‘You always say the right thing.’

  Again he sounded pained but I went on, ‘I’ve always been glad that we met when we did, when we were kids. We were lucky to have had that friendship. It was like a touchstone, something I could refer to at other times in my life, times when I felt unloved and undervalued. Our friendship was like a solid foundation to my life.’

  I shifted around in bed to look at Abe. I wanted to make sure he was listening. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked again.

  He seemed uncomfortable. ‘Ivy,’ he said screwing up his face as he spoke. ‘That’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me but my chest feels really tight.’ He took another jagged breath. ‘I think I might be having a heart attack.’

  I switched the light on. His face was contorted with pain. I knew I had to call an ambulance.

  ‘I think my husband is having a heart attack,’ I said, standing naked in the light by the bed, then listened to them telling me to keep him still, to try to make him relax and rest while the ambulance came to us.

  I felt bad getting dressed as he lay there, unsure if he would care that he was found naked and in bed by the paramedics, or if the pain had blocked out any of the thoughts I was still having.

  But they’d clearly seen it all before, the young man and woman to whom I opened the door. They were professional and sympathetic.

  Everyone was. The hospital staff, when we finally got there, the doctors, the nurses, were all kind and caring. Each and every one of them did everything they could. But it wasn’t enough. He went into cardiac arrest not long after we arrived at the hospital. They tried to revive him but it was too late.