Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

There had, of course, been other men since: young clerks from the Barclay’s Bank where she worked, an older man from the post office when she was in Portsmouth, but no one who she could seriously consider as a husband. Until Stuart. There had been something different about Stuart, a solidness and calmness that gave Theresa comfort, a balance that the other men seemed to have lacked. Perhaps it was because he was already married when she first met him.

Stuart worked in her office at the bank, and from the start she had known he was married. She had even met his wife, Nancy. Stuart introduced them at the manager’s annual party. That was three years ago now, but even then she had noticed how frail Nancy was. How Stuart supported her at her elbow as if he was afraid the wind would blow her away or knock her down. ‘Cancer,’ he had explained the following day when she’d asked. ‘The doctor says there’s not much he can do.’ He spoke with his head down, in a low voice as he sorted some papers on his desk. Theresa felt awful for asking but then Stuart had looked up at her and, sensing her awkwardness, he’d smiled at her, as if to tell her it was all right. ‘But she’s fine,’ he’d said. ‘Really. Fine.’

Theresa knew when Nancy had died. It was a Monday morning and when Stuart didn’t arrive at his desk, everyone in the bank thought they knew why. It must have happened over the weekend. They’d been expecting it for some time, no one had seen Nancy for months and when they asked after her Stuart’s replies had been getting briefer and briefer: ‘Oh, she’s well, well enough,’ or ‘Not bad. Very tired, though, very tired.’ When he returned to work, two days later, he had the look of a man who was empty of something inside, like a blown bird’s egg, complete but somehow lighter. His grief was not dramatic, black, but delicate, fragile and it was then, watching him move about the office in his usual way, a quiet vacuum at his centre, that Theresa knew for certain that she loved him.

They became good friends. They would go out for lunch together and Stuart would sometimes talk about his late wife to Theresa. She never felt jealous. In fact she had felt privileged to be so close to this fine, rarefied grief, this grief that was a gentle afterburn of love. She admired his ability to remember her, his ability to love and, strange though it was, that is why she had fallen in love with him herself: for his loving of another woman.

Stuart’s hobby was music, composing for and playing the piano. Theresa had inherited both her mother’s voice and an old carved piano she had kept under a blanket in the back room of the farm in Icklesham. That autumn Stuart started to visit her digs on the weekends, sitting at the piano and playing his songs when they had finished their tea, his long, pianist’s hands running the length of its keyboard.

Encouraged by him, Theresa would sing the accompaniment. Then one day he had asked her if she would like to take a walk instead, and they had come here, to this hill and this bench, where, for the first time, he had kissed her. Just lightly and just once, but he had kissed her. And ever since this bench, Albert’s bench, had become their regular place on the heath. It was the destination of their walks, their meeting place, where they brought their picnics last summer. It was also where, a week ago, almost exactly a year after that first kiss, Stuart had asked her to marry him. And that is why she hadn’t needed to tell him where to meet her this evening. She had simply written, ‘on the heath at 5 a.m.’ He would know where to come, if he was coming at all. There was nowhere else she could have meant; for them, this was the heath. This bench and this view, consecrated as it was by their shared memories.

When Stuart proposed Theresa had wanted to say yes straight away, with all her heart. She could no longer imagine a future without him in her life. But she could not say yes, she knew that. Not without him knowing the truth about her. Not without her telling him what she had sworn on her mother’s Bible in that tea room in Lewes never to tell anyone. So she had written to him that night, after he had walked her to her door and said goodbye, trying to keep the disappointment at bay in his voice. She had written to him and told him everything: about Tom not being her father, and about Arthur Cripps, who was. She even told him how Arthur had written to her once a few months after her mother had visited her at Lewes, a strange, polite, guarded letter: ‘You must be, I think, that little girl of four I saw all those years ago…’

She finished the letter by telling Stuart that if he still wanted to marry her, then he should meet her ‘Next Sunday, on the heath at 5 a.m.’ She had said she would understand if he did not come, that she would understand if he never wanted to see her again. Then she signed the bottom of the paper, ‘your Theresa’, and blew on the ink to dry it. She did not read the letter over, but folded it, sealed the envelope, addressed it and walked out to post it straight away, before she had time to change her mind.

That was a week ago. Since then, she had heard nothing from Stuart, but that was what she had requested, a week of silence to consider what she had told him. But now, waiting for him on Albert’s bench, she was beginning to wish she had never written that letter. What had she done? What would she do if he did not arrive, if he never came? How long would she wait for him?

♦

Suddenly the kestrel drops from the sky, a brown streak, its talons drawn, landing in the grass with its wings outstretched. Theresa watches its dive, then its hunched position in the long grass and its grey hooded head, peering over its shoulder before turning away and stabbing with short, sharp jerks between its legs. A little boy points at it and tugs the sleeve of his father. Theresa thinks of the animal, the shrew or the mouse that is there, unseen and unheard but still there under the talons of the bird, struggling for its life.

She looks at her watch, two minutes past five, then back up at the heath with its wandering couples and individuals passing each other, each person involved in their own lives, their own futures; their thoughts unseen, unheard by her, but like the kestrel’s prey, still there. She wonders what this evening means for them? What are they all remembering or considering as they stroll along, talking, or as they stand alone, pausing under a willow to look through its leaves at the sky? Were any of them, she wondered, feeling as she was: their life on a knife edge, everything they valued hanging by a thread that would either be rescued or cut loose in the next ten minutes? It was impossible to know. All she could be certain of is that like her, they would feel the low sun, flaring at the edges of their eyelids, the touch of the breeze on their faces. That some of them may have seen the kestrel dive, and that others would not. A million sensations were passing through them all as they shared this time and space on the heath. Passing through and passing on, a stream of thoughts and feelings, some which will snag and remain as memories, but most which will live and die in the passing of a breath.

And then, among the milling people on the path below, she sees him. Striding along, a bunch of red flowers bright against his brown suit, emerging from the anonymous crowd. And suddenly, he is there, in her world, breaking into her isolation. He is looking up at her and has been all the time she was watching the kestrel. She has been so alert, waiting, expecting him and now he has surprised her. Although he is far away below the hill he stops in the path, lifts the flowers and waves them at her. She can not make out the details of his face but she knows he is smiling. She feels a flood of relief rush through her and her eyes prick with tears. The scene she has been watching, which has been so clear, so sharp on her senses, swims back into an everyday focus. Because she is no longer waiting. He knows who she is, her story, and he has come to be with her, now and forever. He waves the flowers again, and as she lifts her hand to wave in reply, she feels her world fall back to her, as suddenly and violently as the kestrel, dropping to earth out of the sky.