I tried to imagine her sitting at the dining table in my parents’ house, holding silver cutlery in the flickering lamplight and making polite conversation, and realised that she was right.
I asked if I could come with her, but she kissed me into silence.
“Let me go. I’ll see you next year.”
* * *
“Hello? Are you awake?”
Stephen sits on one the tubular grey chairs, uncomfortable as visitors always are in hospital rooms.
I smile, and nod a little. I barely have enough breath left for words.
“How are you feeling? Are they looking after you well?”
I nod again. As well as can be expected.
He fiddles with his shirt cuff. “It’s surprisingly warm for the time of year. The maple trees you planted still have all their leaves. They’re looking particularly splendid.”
He’s a good lad, this Stephen. I know he’s balding and portly, old enough to retire, but to me he’ll always be the boy who ran to show me his pictures. Once he’d finished art school and found his own style he enjoyed some success; mostly hard, blue cubist paintings that meant nothing to me. But he still took the time, one October, to paint my favourite view of our woods.
“Don’t tell anyone it’s mine,” he joked, showing me a painting in the most conservative and classical style. It hangs in pride of place on my study wall. He lives in London, most of the time, and never shared my interest in watching the seasons turn. I appreciate that he thought to tell me about my maples.
I’d like to see them again.
“Sorry?” He leans closer, bringing his ear almost to my face.
I’d like… to see them. Again.
“Maybe when you’re a little stronger.”
* * *
The August of my seventeenth birthday dragged by. My schoolfellows complained and griped about the end of summer freedom, the return to school, but for me it couldn’t come quickly enough. Each day I waited, squirrels scurrying to and fro along tree branches and starlings swooping in seething clouds overhead.
She didn’t come, and I began to grow bitter at the thought of the promises she had made, faithlessly. I raged at her, shouting at the sky and kicking over fat clumps of fungus to leave broken, white scars behind me. I cried embarrassed, stifled sobs when I thought that I would never see her again.