The Night Following Read Online Free PDF Page B

she’d seen a hundred Januarys, not twenty-seven. She was too young to come out with half the things she said, but that was what Daphne was like nowadays, bitter. She was becoming a bitter old spinster, a type all too recognizable since the terrible Great War, which had taken so many of the young men of their generation. Now there were simply too few to be the sweethearts and husbands of all the women who remained, many of whom were now resigned to spinsterhood, all their hopes of youthful romance and wife and motherhood dashed. Evelyn knew she was one of the lucky ones.
    She turned to gaze in the direction Daphne had taken but she couldn’t see her. After only a few yards the walls and pavements of Station Road melted into a thick blur. She rubbed her eyes and set off toward Roper Street, protesting inwardly at Daphne’s words that were still echoing in her head.
    It wasn’t true that getting married meant ending up somebody’s unpaid skivvy. She wouldn’t. It wasn’t true that men were all the same. Stan was different. Stan didn’t want a skivvy. He was principled. He believed in equality and the rights of the working man. And this January was different from other Januarys, not freezing and colorless at all if you only looked a little deeper, beneath the cold, ashy surface of the world.
     
27 Cardigan Avenue
The whateverth May

Dear Ruth

I’m not sure these letters are right. Carole says there isn’t a right or wrong, the idea is I just write what I want, whatever I’m thinking. I can express anything I feel. Including anger, she added.

Write what
I
want? What does that mean? I said to her, You don’t appreciate the situation,
Ruth’s
the one for the words, not me. I’m no good with words. Not the letter writing kind, anyway. Oh, give me rainfall bar charts for Derbyshire since the second world war or an ornithological distribution map of the British Isles and I’ll bore for Britain on those, I said. I’m on safe ground there. But as I told Carole, you were the English teacher, I was only Geography. I looked out some Overdale photos and showed her. Even found some Overdale poems your kids did.

Carole won’t let it go though, she says of course I don’t have to if I don’t find it helpful, but she’d like me to persevere with the letters. Just write whatever I’m thinking, express anything I’m feeling. It’s well known, she said, to be a useful tool in grief management.

Huh, I can’t even think straight so how can I feel straight? Let alone write it down? I told her, Ruth’s the one with the words, or aren’t you listening, I said.

Maybe you
are
angry, she says. You don’t need qualifications or special language to say you’re angry. Or to write to your wife. Just use ordinary words.

Use ordinary words to say what? I don’t see how telling you about window cleaner, pressure cooker etc can be a useful tool for anything. I never was the writer. Nor the talker. You were. What would the listener have to say after all this time?

Carole says whatever I write it’s for you, not her, but I asked her to read this just the same. She thinks it’s a start. I asked her to leave. Told her I was tired.

Well, no more for now.

Arthur.

Ps later——
STILL
no sign of pressure cooker yet.
     
    I would rather omit this. I observe it now only reluctantly and without hope of forgiveness, because nothing should be omitted. Though I have braced myself time and again to go back over it, as I might make myself watch a film with shocking scenes that I thought I ought to try to understand, I don’t remember, to begin with, that I did actively decide to close the garage doors behind the wrecked car. Until that day I had always left the garage doors open for Jeremy’s return in the evening, but this day was unlike any other, and certainly I was now quite unlike myself. So I can’t know if my reason for closing them was to conceal my shame, or the evidence of the collision, or because some part of my mind had