Inside Bridie Bennett’s Heart

Inside Bridie Bennett’s Heart

‘S IT DOWN,

E DDIE,’

Marjie says when I arrive at the charity shop, breathless, abandoning my suitcase at the door. I sit down on the tartan bar stool, heart hammering away.

‘Now, I might be wrong,’ Marjie says, going to the door and flipping the shop sign to ‘closed’. ‘But I just had a feeling about this one,’ she says.

Marjie unzips her handbag and pulls out an emerald velvet jewellery box. She opens the lid and picks up the necklace by the chain, holding it up so that the heart dangles between us. And there it is. Even from this distance, I know.

There it is. After all this time.

‘You found it,’ I say.

‘Really?’

‘That’s it!’ I leap up, knocking the bar stool to the floor with the back of my knees. ‘You found it!’ I hold out my hands. This is it.

Marjie places Bridie’s shining golden heart in the centre of my palm. And we are together again, we two things that belonged to Bridie Bennett.

I turn the locket over in my hands and stroke my finger across the letters ‘B.B.’ inscribed on the back. ‘How?’ I ask. ‘How on earth did you find it?’

Marjie looks just a touch embarrassed as she says quickly, ‘There’s a website, vintagelockets.com, and I sent them an email, oh, years ago now, just asking them to keep a lookout, and their buyer spotted it on eBay. So I messaged the seller and we agreed on a price and it arrived this morning. It came all the way from an antique shop in Plymouth.’

‘Plymouth?’

‘I have no idea,’ she says. ‘ Vintage lockets

was just one of, erm, many websites I’d contacted. A few said that secondhand stuff can really travel, especially jewellery.’ Her cheeks are a little rosy, now.

‘You did all that for me?’ I ask.

‘I really wanted you to find it.’

‘Thank you, dear friend,’ I tell her, and she waves me away.

Marjie leaves me alone with Bridie Bennett’s heart.

The last time I saw Bridie Bennett, she was eight months pregnant, she didn’t know what she was having because people didn’t back then, but she was quite sure it was a boy. Dressed in a black floral dress that hung about her, standing in the corner of the arts faculty common room, watching as her husband gave a speech about his time at Birmingham. I found it hard to look Alistair in the eye in those days, so I was watching her. Truth be told, no matter who was speaking, I would have been looking at Bridie. She was softer now, from the pregnancy, her cheeks rounded, and her whole self just seemed more peaceful. She went to twist the locket from

about her neck, but her hand fell flat against her chest and a look of loss crossed her face. I had to fix it. But as we talked in quiet voices so as not to disrupt Alistair’s commemoration of himself, she said to me, her grey-green eyes on mine, ‘Looking for it and not finding it would be worse than not looking at all.’

And I have thought about that for nearly sixty years. And it seemed to me then and it seems to me now that quite the opposite was true.

And now, here it is, held tightly in my shaking palm, and though I am a little too afraid to look within, looking would be better than not looking.

The gold is tarnished but still bright, and the filigree pattern swirls around the front.

Sometimes I wonder if I imagined her, embellished her. Conjured her out of my loneliness. But no. She was real. And here is her heart.

I struggle to open the clasp, slipping the lock under my thumb nail. It takes a moment until, finally, Bridie Bennett’s heart swings open and lets me take a look at what’s inside.

And there he is, smiling up at me, his handsome face, his green eyes. It makes perfect sense that this gentleman was inside Bridie Bennett’s heart all along.

This dashing chap. How could it be anyone else?

‘Hello,’ I say to him. Feeling the sting of disappointment that it might have been me inside. Oh, the arrogance to assume I had a claim to make.

‘You can come out,’ I call to Marjie, and I hear a rustling of the bead curtain.

She comes over. ‘What was inside?’ she asks, and I show her.

‘Oh, he’s so handsome,’ she says. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Ferris,’ I say fondly, stroking the photograph.

‘Sweet,’ she says.

‘He didn’t have a tail,’ I tell her. ‘She used to say he lost it at the fairground. He was a lovely boy, would wind around your legs to say hello.’

I pull gently on the heart-shaped photograph that has been enclaved in Bridie’s golden heart for all this time, so that I can pass it to Marjie. Out it flicks and I pass it over to her, almost missing entirely the letters E

and W

that have been scratched into walls of her heart.

Oh, my Birdie.