Miranda Dickinson - When I Fall In Love

‘I think you’ll find I can.’ He sipped his pint and scrutinised her for an uncomfortable moment. ‘Are you challenging me to prove it?’

The gall of him! Well, Elsie reasoned, there was only one way to haul him off his high horse. ‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

Rubbing his hands together, he began. ‘Right. Well, from your blatant misunderstanding of me and misreading of my motives, I can conclude that you have had very little experience of men – one or two serious boyfriends at most. From the small indentation on the third finger of your left hand I can see that one of those relationships resulted in marriage; from the absence of a ring now and your noticeably prickly nature towards men in general I assume that this marriage came to an end, perhaps some time ago. Am I correct?’

‘I’

Elsie swallowed hard as a groundswell of emotion threatened to sweep her off her feet. Torin had unwittingly broken through the layers of carefully constructed defences and his observations stabbed deeply. Momentarily blindsided, she struggled for control and he saw it, the same glint of triumph in his eyes as before.

‘What? Nothing to say? Surely this can’t be the great Elsie Maynard, queen of the lightning comeback? I must say, I thought you’d have retaliated by now.’

He was goading her, she knew it, but the pulse of shock was fast turning to anger within her and she needed a moment to formulate her reply.

‘Just – just give me a minute …’

Torin took a celebratory glug of beer and slapped the table. ‘Aha! Admit it – I totally summed you up! I am too good at this.’

‘Fine. You want to know?’ With every last scrap of resolve within her, Elsie rose to her feet. ‘You were correct when you said I’d only had one serious relationship. It did lead to marriage and that marriage ended, eighteen months ago.’

He spread his hands wide. ‘Hey, it’s what I do. Please don’t be offended. Sit down, would you? We were just beginning to have fun.’

‘No, thanks. I think I’ve stayed long enough.’

‘Oh come on, Elsie. There’s no need to be embarrassed about it. Plenty of women your age are divorcees.’

Elsie fixed him with a stare that could freeze sunbeams. ‘That’s true. But not many women my age are widows .’

With that, she turned her back on a visibly shocked Torin and walked with purpose out of the pub and onto the street beyond. Her promise to Cher was completely forgotten: the only impulse driving her steps was to escape.

Lucas would have loved it. He would have thrown back his lovely black hair and guffawed so loudly that even half-deaf Mrs Rafferty next door would have heard it. And Elsie would have laughed with him – it was impossible not to when faced with a laugh as infectious as his. Even towards the end of his battle, when every movement required concerted effort, his laugh was the one part of him that never succumbed to the cancer claiming his body. Jim often said he heard Lucas laugh more during the last year of his life than in all the years he’d known him. But then the last year was something Lucas was determined to enjoy. He had a point to prove – a list to fulfil. And each of the items on The List he created for their final year together was designed to amuse them both, to squeeze every last drop of joy out of the time they had left.

Lucas Webb was a lover of the absurd, his sense of humour one of the things Elsie loved the most about him. He could find the ridiculous, hilarious side of any situation, no matter how grim it first appeared. The bleak diagnosis of his cancer was no exception to this: and his coping mechanism was the spark for The List.

When Dr Hayes had delivered the devastating news to Lucas and Elsie in the too-small, too-warm consulting room in the Royal Sussex County Hospital, their first reaction had been mind-numbing shock and disbelief, quickly leading to body-shaking sobs as they both broke down. Twelve months, at most – a meagre allocation for someone who loved life as much as Lucas did. All their plans – travelling, a business of their own, children – now lay screwed up and discarded like the balls of paper strewn in the dull grey metal bin beneath Dr Hayes’ regulation NHS desk. The sense of injustice was immense, a crushing weight of hopelessness robbing the room of oxygen, deeper than Elsie had ever experienced.

But an hour later, when they were walking hand-in-hand along Brighton Pier, a remarkable transformation began in Lucas. Elsie remembered him stopping, near the entrance to the amusements, hope blazing in his dark brown eyes.

‘Elsie, I’ve had quite possibly the most brilliant idea!’

So startling was the sea change in his mood that Elsie gave an involuntary laugh. ‘What is it?’

‘OK. Hear me out. When I heard the diagnosis this morning I was like, “Only twelve months?” But I’ve thought about it and I realised – we have twelve months. Twelve months to do whatever we like and nobody can argue with us! So, here it is: we make a list of things we have to do. And I’m not talking about naff stuff like swimming with dolphins because, frankly, I think they’re overrated. In fact, that should be our criteria: nothing overly sentimental, nothing expensive and nothing predictable. We pick, say, fifty things we have to complete before I … you know …’

He was shaking when he suggested it, but his smile was all the persuasion Elsie needed to agree. And so the idea for The List was born: fifty tasks unique to them, a personal mandate for fun in their final year together. Such as sneaking into Brighton Library to stick smiley-face sticky notes within the pages of classic novels that Lucas had deemed to be so depressing that readers would be in need of some guerrilla-placed light relief (to Elsie’s knowledge, some of those notes might still be lying in wait amid the leaves of Jude The Obscure , The Mill on the Floss and War and Peace …); decorating the rubbish bins along Brighton promenade with tinsel at midnight on a balmy July night; paddling in wellies in the ornate Victoria Fountain in Victoria Gardens in the centre of town; and spending the night in a neighbour’s son’s tree house with a large bottle of Jack Daniel’s, snuggled up, drunk and sniggering like school kids under layers of blankets.

Every item on The List conformed to the three criteria. All except one.

‘Oh, and Paris,’ Lucas had added, when fifty items had been listed.

She observed him with amusement. ‘Hang on a minute, you said nothing overly sentimental, nothing expensive and nothing predictable, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So what’s Paris, then? Surely it’s all three.’

His grin was pure Lucas Webb mischief. ‘Paris is geographical .’

‘Lucas …’

‘Humour me, Els? I’m a dying man, remember? You have to honour my wishes.’

And so The List that should only ever have contained fifty items became fifty-one, the last task destined to become the only one never to be fulfilled in time …

Standing on the dark beach as the inky ocean lapped the shore below her, Elsie found herself laughing now, despite her tears. Lucas would have applauded her parting shot in the pub: the ultimate way to win an argument.

‘If all else fails, play the death card, kid. It gets them every time.’

What Lucas would have loved the most, though, was that Elsie had been in the pub in the first place tonight. For the entire twelve months they had planned until the end, Elsie’s mandate to carry on afterwards had been Lucas’ recurring theme.

‘You have a whole life ahead of you, darling. And I will be expecting you to live it. No moping around like you’ve died, too. Promise me. Promise me you’ll live life for us both?’