Author’s Note Just a brief explanation on a minor detail that may confuse some readers - in the UK, Mother’s Day is a movable feast, celebrated on the 4th Sunday in Lent.
“Let’s do what I saw on telly, Auntie Marie!” That’s the kind of statement that can be decidedly disconcerting coming from the mouth of a seven year old, especially one like my niece Chloe, who is a sweetheart, of course (though she wouldn’t be a normal seven year old if occasionally other nouns didn’t spring to mind) but has that mixture of a vivid imagination and an urge to imitate that can, on occasion, lead to consequences. Or, which can sometimes be harder, be impossible to fulfil. There are any number of things she can have seen on TV, even given that her parents are reasonably careful about her viewing. And with the best will in the world, I can’t help her transform into a car or a bird, let her run away to the circus, or buy her a unicorn. Or even a pony.
“What’s that, love?” I ask, looking into her eager, demanding little face, and surreptitiously crossing my fingers.
“A time caspule!”
“Capsule, I think you mean.” There’s a school of thought that you should never correct children if they mispronounce a word, but I know Chloe well enough to know that she likes to get things right, and though she bears it with reasonably good grace, doesn’t take kindly to being the subject of “cute” anecdotes concerning her mistakes.
“That’s it! Both of us, please!”
Well, that’s something of a relief. It could be far worse. Though I’m not sure quite how her parents might react to her burying some of her toys in the garden, especially as (and Chloe doesn’t know this yet) they may be moving soon.
“Can we start now, please?” She is well-brought up and generally remembers please and thank you, but has a belief that (giving her the benefit of the doubt) is more naïve than spoilt that if you say please then it automatically means you get what you want.
We’re at my house. Where I definitely do intend staying though of course you never know what life throws at you. I am about to hedge my bets and say that we’ll have to find something to put things in, but Chloe is one step ahead. “There’s that tin you got the biscuits in at Christmas, Auntie Marie! The one where you say that Santa looks as if he has piles!”
I can’t deny it. I said it, and it’s true. But though I hope I don’t have hoarding tendencies, biscuit tins are one of those things I tend to keep because sometimes they might come in handy. Has that time come now?
I get it out of the cupboard. It has already started to go a bit rusty, and Santa looks as if he has a rash as well as piles. Despite myself I am quite taken with the idea. Well, at least in theory I’m quite taken with the idea. But no matter what Chloe wants I’m certainly not going to put anything of any especial value in the biscuit tin in its shallow grave in my back garden. Much as I dote on her, if she thinks my amber necklace or any of my collection of little china cottages (okay, they’re kitsch, but they’re my kitsch!) are going into it, she’s got another think coming. Anyway, they’re not exactly typical of the time, are they?
Still, what is?
“A magazine or a newspaper!” Chloe proposes. Well, that’s a very sensible idea and will serve as a lining, too. Credit where it’s due, she’s taking this seriously and giving it some thought. That’s soon done, and the biscuit tin is lined with a recent copy of the East Counties Argos. Perhaps I should have chosen something national, but then again, maybe archaeologists of the future will wonder just what car boot sales were and why a row over a conifer hedge nearly brought neighbours to blows. There may not even be either cars or hedges then. But that’s a fanciful thought and I don’t know why I’m so keen to push it to one side. We decide on a few coins, not high value ones, of course, and a bus ticket. Mind you, in some areas, they’re already redundant! “What about flowers?” Chloe asks.
“No, that’s not a good idea,” I say, gently, “They’d die within a few days and in the future there’d be nothing at all for anyone to see.”
“Not that sort of flowers,” Chloe says, with the wearied patience of someone who has already decided that she wants to be a teacher and is perfecting the art of humouring the more obtuse of her pupils. “That sort of flowers.” She points to the little bunch of artificial daffodils I have in a glass vase on my desk. Chloe has always been very nice about my artificial flowers and hasn’t made tactfully worded but pretty obvious remarks about daffodils in October being a bit silly and trumpeting their fakery. “We could just cut a couple off and put them in.”
Now there is no real reason why I should object to this, is there? A couple would probably barely be missed, and anyway, I could replace the whole lot easily enough for less than £5. Whether she is wholly aware of it or not I don’t know, but there is something oddly fitting about artificial flowers going into the time capsule.
Andrew was with me when I bought those artificial daffodils, and he didn’t mock them, either. We had met up again entirely by chance after not seeing each other for nearly ten years. He had been married, but was now separated, though amicably, and I had decided that though I believed in the old adage about never say never I was quite happy to be a singleton (the other day I saw a quiz show where there was an answer saying that expression was invented for Bridget Jones’ Diary but the competitor was sure it had been used before, and I agreed with her!) and thought the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. Yes, Martin at work is lovely, and has made it plain that he wants us to be more than friends, though he’s never pushy and at pains not to make it awkward for me, but the time just isn’t right.
He genuinely hadn’t changed much, and he was gallant enough to say that I hadn’t, either. It wasn’t the first time we had met after a parting. We’d been at the same junior school for three years, when I’d spent a great deal of time saying he was an irritating little boy, and he’d spent a great deal of time saying I was an annoying little girl, but somehow we fell into the habit of defending each other if anyone else said such a thing. Neither of us was keen on games, and both of us were good at English, though he was one of the devotees of what we nicknamed Frogspawn Corner – the nature table – and I could take it or leave it, and I loved by ballet class (though I was never much good at it) and he didn’t get it at all.
We went to different secondary schools, though I don’t think we ever entirely got out of touch, it was a pretty small town and there wasn’t exactly a profusion of things for young people to do.
But we certainly didn’t know that we were going to the same university until we met up in Freshers’ Week. Both of us insisted it was just the right one for our courses – English Literature and Drama in my case, Marine Biology in his – and it certainly offered entirely acceptable courses in those, but it also, and we knew it even if we didn’t admit it, offered the sweet spot of being far enough away from home for us to feel as if we were striking out, and near enough for it to be a safety net if needs must!
We became close almost without realising it, but then it dawned on us that people were automatically looking on us as an item. If there was some party or whatever, then instead of inviting Marie or inviting Andy, they invited MarieandAndy. We were at ease in each others’ company, had a similar sense of humour, and tended, though not without exception, to enjoy the same music and the same books and the same TV shows. In our final year we went on holiday together over the Easter break, and stayed in a ramshackle cottage in Cornwall alternating between revising and doing very little apart from walking along the beach and spending more than we should at the local seafood restaurant – that was another thing we had in common, though unlike Andy, for me whelks remained a bridge too far.
Quite a few people, including the parents on both sides, were half-expecting us to return officially engaged, but – and I know this sounds like a strange way of putting it – we never got around to it. We even did the things you’re “supposed” to do when you make a decision like that, with the appropriate backdrops, like the beach at sunset and by a field full of bright daffodils. We agreed that there was an odd paradox about daffodils, people tended to associate them with Mother’s Day or Easter, but they often bloomed too late for the former and too early for the latter. But that year there was an early Easter, and there was a profusion of gold in Cornwall that would have rivalled Wordsworth’s famous golden host in the Lake District.
We knew in advance, and didn’t change our minds, that we were doing postgraduate work at different universities, and though it was a painful thought in some ways, I also decided that when it came to the famous world of contradictory proverbs, I favoured Absence makes the Heart Grow Fonder over Out of Sight, out of Mind.
Yet in the end, the latter happened. Never completely, and very gradually, but after two or three years we were leading more or less separate lives, though we still met up for family occasions sometimes, and both of us were fairly early email adopters, though we also liked good old fashioned letters. But both the emails and the letters dwindled, and when I learnt that he was engaged to Cathy, I felt a passing pang, but no lurch of jealousy or heartache. I had no wild urge to meet her, but would have had no problem being perfectly civil and friendly if I had.
And then we met by chance, at that time of year when you’re quite glad that autumn had finally segued into winter. We didn’t experience a second’s awkwardness, and even ended up reminiscing about frog spawn corner.
We also got round to the daffodils, and I said that it was a shame it would be many months before they bloomed again, but I wasn’t one of those people with hang-ups about artificial flowers. It truly wasn’t meant as a hint, and I hadn’t realised that our local Craft Et Cetera shop, as it called itself, had started a new line in artificial flowers, but he presented me with the daffodils, with the air of a conjurer. Oh, not embarrassingly so, but it turned them into something more than a bunch of artificial daffodils, and we’d always liked our simple pleasures.
Now Chloe wants me to snip off some of these daffodils and put them into the biscuit tin. To bury them in the earth in a makeshift time capsule. Everything in me rebelled against it, and I wondered how I should explain. She’d probably, at least, be quite cross with me for not introducing her to Andy!
It did rebel against it. At least, I had managed to convince myself it had.
Because here’s the thing. And I don’t know why I’ve been acting as if it isn’t. Andy and I got on incredibly well when we met up by chance. We had a good laugh and we put the words to right. If we were work colleagues, we’d get on famously, but the spark wasn’t there. And perhaps it had started to smoulder out even when we were still on that holiday in Cornwall eating shrimps and watching sunsets and waxing lyrical over daffodils. I hope we’ll stay in touch this time, but I think at heart we both know that it would be a delusion to think we were anything more than good mates. For a second that is sobering, and then it is liberating.
“Auntie Marie!” Chloe prompts. “What about the daffodils – er, please?”
“Let’s snip a couple off and put them in the capsule, then,” I said, and do so without any pain and without any regret.
The next time Martin asks me out for a drink – and I very much hope there is a next time! – I will say yes.
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