A Goodbye, of Sorts

A Goodbye, of Sorts

April 1968

Edgbaston

S HE LEFT THE

photographs in her office on purpose so now that Alistair has completed his leaving lectures and leaving parties and leaving drinks and her job has quietly ended too, she has an excuse to return to campus and see Eddie one last time. Alistair doesn’t grumble when she abandons their half-packed house. Perhaps because she has started waddling now as she heaves herself and the baby within her from place to place, he even offers to drive her himself.

He’s midway through cleaning out a box of old university papers from his undergraduate years and he’s found himself unable to continue without reading each one and making comments on the marker’s assessment. ‘Unfair,’ he has said several times, and ‘This is better than I remember it.’ It is as though he is an archivist in the story of his own life. He finds himself so fascinating. ‘This should have been a first,’ he says for one, and places it in a separate pile. What he is planning to do with them, or what meanings the piles have, she doesn’t know. The movers arrive in two days’ time,

but he will likely be in exactly the same position when she returns home.

Bridie tells him she’d like the walk. And walk she does, quickly, knowing that Eddie’s lecture starts at eleven, so he will likely be arriving in the building at ten forty-five. If they are to bump into one another, she needs to be in the foyer before him. Her feet are so big now. Squished up against the bars of her sandals, spilling out like meat around the butcher’s string.

Campus is oddly quiet. She is not wearing a watch, so she asks the time of Old Joe’s face and she is not late.

But the arts faculty foyer is empty.

Eddie is not there. Nobody is. Then she remembers. It is reading week. And the students are all at home, doing anything but reading. And the lecturers are sleeping.

It is too late.

She will not get to see him one last time.

She goes to twist her locket between her fingers, before remembering it is gone. Slipped silently from the bedroom mantelpiece, where she lays it each night, into one of the boxes of bric-a-brac they were donating to the Salvation Army, driven off in Alistair’s car.

When Eddie saw her without it for the first time amidst the hubbub and noise of Alistair’s farewell drinks, he offered to accompany her to the Salvation Army shop to ask for it back. But Bridie told him she would not be searching for it.

And when he asked her why she wouldn’t search for this thing that she loved so dearly, she told him, ‘Because looking and not finding it would be worse than not looking at all.’

This feels true now.

Bridie makes her waddly way down the corridor and

unlocks the dark mahogany door. Her office is empty now, all the files and folders moved into the assistants’ room, as the four of them will be subsuming her role, as though what she did was so inconsequential it can be easily divided between four young girls straight out of secretarial college. Her kettle and mugs are gone, everything that would suggest she spent the past ten years working here is gone, except for the row of grey framed photographs on the windowsill. And, Bridie notices, with a little thrill, a small piece of paper on her desk.

When Spring, Nature’s Beauty,

And the burning summer have passed,

And the fog, and the rain,

By the late fall are brought,

Men are wearied, men are grieved,

But birdie flies into distant lands,

Into warm climes, beyond the blue sea:

Flies away until the spring

It is the goodbye he couldn’t say. The writing energetic, the words not his own. Borrowed from Alexander Pushkin.

The handwriting is squiggly in fine black ink.

It is a love letter.

And it is a confession.

Bridie retrieves the note that was slipped beneath her door two years ago from the back of the framed photograph of her and Alistair smiling on the Seine. Her in that hat.

your husband is sleeping with one of his students

It is the ‘y’ that is the real giveaway, the way its tail darts off to the left at a right angle.

Eddie.

He thought she did not know. That she ought to be warned. He was trying to save her. He was trying to free her. He was knowingly hurting her.

But she will not accept it. She refuses to believe that Eddie could be anything but good. She has to preserve him perfectly. So, she tucks the poem into her pocket, to be examined on a better day.