George didn’t look back after leaving Nancy He followed the path towards Larkwood with a growing sense of loneliness and loss. It was blinding, for he trudged on, losing sight of his surroundings, save for the small stones underfoot. Birds whistled in the trees that were banked tight against the verge.
When George looked up, he saw a woman coming towards him. At first he didn’t recognise her because she was out of place. A monastery was not her normal stamping ground, although, that said, The Sound of Music was her favourite film. He became confused in a terrible way a way that had come with the beating to his head. For there were times, now, when he doubted what he experienced, when he tramped through a world that he didn’t fully understand. Such is the importance of memory, and the things it saves; for, as George well knew, it’s only by remembering the lot that we can hope to grasp the lot. And when you cannot grasp the lot, you become very circumspect indeed. But Emily was there, right in front of him, advancing along the same imaginary line as if they were on the top corridor of the Bonnington. Father Anselm appeared behind her… he ran past him, asking of Nancy and George mumbled something, keeping his eyes on this apparition from his past that was crying.
In the same drunken spirit of doubting – and of terror that someone would shortly explain what was really happening – he said goodbye to a parade of monks as if he were the Pope. The boot of Emily’s car was open… robed figures carried a crate of apples, two bottles of plum brandy and some preserved pears. He was mumbling to himself while someone took his arm by the elbow The passenger door banged shut. He opened the window as if he needed the air to breathe. A small crowd smiled and waved and Emily was at his side unable to get the key into the ignition. Someone did it for her, and she laughed into a handkerchief. A long corridor of oak trees passed slowly as if the car were standing still. The lane opened out onto gentle hills with a scattering of houses, and the place that had given him shelter was gone.
‘Emily’ said George, very sure of himself now, ‘are we going home?’
‘Yes.’
He looked at the hedgerows, thinking of the other man he’d seen in Mitcham. ‘I tried to come back, once.
‘I know,’ said Emily She understood. ‘No one has ever taken your place. Peter was nothing more than a friend. He was to me what Nancy was to you. And God knows, George, we have needed friends, if only to bring us back together.’
Emily explained that the house would look very different, that it was new and clean. The neighbours hadn’t changed but someone round the corner had bought a dog that they let loose at night.
‘Why do you want me back?’ asked George, pulling at the sleeves of his blazer.
‘Because I found you again, in your notebooks,’ she replied, reaching for the gear stick, but not changing gear. ‘I don’t know how I could have ever let you go. Maybe I lost sight of the right and left of things, the front and back, the top and bottom… everything that brought us together. I didn’t only find you, George. I found myself.’
George slept – not the sleep of exhaustion through labour, or the fatigue of strong emotion. A great weariness had taken hold of him, as though a whole life had ended. He woke somewhere in London, unsure again of his senses until the car parked outside the home he’d left so many years ago. It was very dark.
‘Can we start again?’ asked Emily her voice heavy with hope.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
They both looked through the windscreen at the antics of a stray dog. George had strong views on dogs – especially those that barked.
‘Can we carry on from where we left off?’
‘That makes a lot of sense,’ said George. ‘Of course, I can’t remember what’s happened in between.’ He took her hand. ‘It’ll be as though nothing ever happened.’
That, of course, wasn’t true. It was a joke to bridge the distance between honesty and expectation. Emily unlocked the front door and George came home, as he’d gone, without any luggage. What did he have to show for it? Nothing you could put your finger on, he thought merrily except apples, plum brandy and some pears in ajar.