‘Are
you open tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, sir, from 9.’ The girl on the desk replied.
When I got home, I made myself a corned beef sandwich and sat and
ate it at the kitchen table. It was getting dark but I didn’t
feel like switching on the light.
It had only been a month since Maggie died - I don’t think
I’d realised how much I loved her until she was no longer
there. We’d married late in life – I was almost forty,
unheard of in those days, and she was thirty five. Her health was
already deteriorating when we met - diagnosed with MS at the age
of twenty five and bedridden by forty. ‘In sickness and in
health,’ we’d promised at our wedding and I hadn’t
realised how true it would be. All Maggie’s friends knew how
much she loved reading so they’d bring round histories, romances
and all the latest bestsellers. I’d pop one on her tea tray
along with a mug of Earl Grey and a chocolate biscuit and thrill
to see her eyes light up when she saw it.
‘Thanks, love,’ she’d say, ‘what a treat!’
Towards the end when she couldn’t turn or even see the pages,
I’d do it for her, reading softly until her eyes gently closed.
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I looked
down at the books I’d borrowed – Coping with Death,
When a Loved One Dies and How to Grieve. But how did one grieve?
I thought about it for a moment, vaguely remembering the funeral,
the knot of pain in my heart and my inability to cry.
‘Try to let it out, Dad,’ Lily had said, ‘you
might feel better.’
She was only trying to help but all I felt was a dull, gnawing emptiness.
I had loved Maggie so much, so why couldn’t I cry?
The next day I went back to the library and saw Liz again –
she appeared absorbed in what she was doing so I decided not to
bother her. However it wasn’t long before she’d spotted
me and made her way over to where I was standing.
‘Nice to see you again,’ she said in a mellifluous voice,
‘I’m glad you came back.’
I didn’t tell her that I had nowhere else to go and that I
just wanted someone to talk to. Perhaps my loneliness was in some
way palpable, I don’t know, but she looked me straight in
the eye and smiled, a big friendly smile.
‘I have something for you,’ she said, ‘I think
you might like it.’ She handed me a tattered old book, bound
in worn brown leather. I looked at the title – A Compendium
of Sea Stories it read.
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