Jon McGregor - So Many Ways to Begin

Hey, she said. So, do you want to, her voice trailing off as though she'd forgotten how to put it, what to do, and she lowered her head to look down at herself.

He smiled, pulling at his belt and his trouser buttons, and he said do I want to what? She clambered on to the sofa, kneeling across him, clumsy with drink and banging her knee against his hip, leaving a bruise.

I'm not sure, she said, kissing his face and his neck, twisting away to reach for another mouthful of wine. Remind me, she said. And they made tired and uncoordinated love on the sofa, rain splashing in through the window, elbows banging into the wall, her soft voice whispering delightedly into his ear even as they shifted and adjusted the awkward fit of their hips across the narrow sagging sofa, stopping and starting as one or other of them said no, ow, you're squashing my arm, you're pulling my hair, move round a bit, move back a bit; but between these uncomfortable readjustments they still found room to savour the taste and the feel of each other's bodies, to press warm skin against warm skin, to pinch and to kiss and to hold.

So it wasn't difficult, when the question arose, to know when the moment had come — to circle the day on the calendar, count off the weeks, to smile at the faint smell of stale red wine on the end of the cork he'd kept, to say, it was that night, you remember, it must have been then, of course, when else would it have been? There wasn't another time it could have been.

And something happened, something which stretched the boundaries of Eleanor's enclosed world much further than they had been stretched for a long time, some massive damburst of hormones, more effective by far than the powdery charms in those pills, roaring and singing through her body and bringing her back to life. She started to pull further and further away from the stifled stronghold of their house, setting herself targets — the park, the shops, the city centre — and when she met him one day at work, waiting outside with a cigarette in her hand and a proud smile on her face as she watched him coming down the steps, he dared to hope again that the worst might be over. She cleared out the spare room, stripping the wallpaper, repainting the walls and the ceiling, hanging up mobiles and alphabet charts, buying furniture and nappies and tiny sets of clothes. When he got back from work each evening, there was always something new in the house — a baby blanket, a set of feeding bottles, a row of toys lined up along the dinner table — and the kitchen always seemed to be full of the smells of her cooking, baking cakes and biscuits, preparing dinner, making up soups for him to take to work in a flask; and when he came in through the door she was always there to show him, taking him by the arm, saying look what I bought, isn't it lovely, isn't the baby going to love it, are you hungry now by the way, and kissing him, holding him tightly, pressing her face into the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, saying oh I'm so happy I'm so happy I'm so so happy now.

The last time he went to see Julia, she didn't say anything at all. She gazed up at him from the bed, blankly, drifting in and out of a dream-drenched sleep, the covers pulled fretfully up to her chin, old before her time. Later, Dorothy told him that, four days before she died, she sat up in bed and had a suddenly lucid conversation with the doctor and her, asking who was looking after the house and whether Dorothy was still planning to take that trip to the Isle of Wight, asking how David was getting on at the museum and when he'd be down to visit her next. But nothing like that happened when he was there. She watched him coming into the room, following him with her eyes, her expression fearful and tense if it was anything. Her body gave up before she did, the muscles in her legs weakening until she could no longer stand, her bladder and bowel control faltering, her arms quivering and flailing into the air if they weren't tucked safely beneath the sheets.

I'd have been lost without her and no mistake, Dorothy told them, a few weeks after the funeral, when they were gathered at Julia's house to help Laurence sort through all the things she'd left behind. I couldn't believe it, she said, the first time she invited me here for dinner; gesturing around her as if to say, this house, I mean, just look at it. It wasn't what I was expecting, she said, laughing, not when everyone else lived in those dingy old nurse's rooms. They sat around the kitchen table, Dorothy, David and Eleanor, Susan, eating the sandwiches and cakes Laurence had laid out, and she told them all about when she'd first met Julia and how much Julia had helped her out. Laurence hovered in the background, listening, waiting to restock any empty plates, putting the kettle back on for a fresh pot.

They'd had little in common when they first met, making hospital corners on the beds of a whole wing of new wards, but that hadn't kept them from making friends almost immediately. Something just clicked with us, Dorothy said. I never knew what it was, she was like my sister more than anything else. She showed me round London, and introduced me to people, and toughened me up. I was only eighteen when I started nursing, I needed a bit of toughening up, she said, laughing, gathering up the last few cake crumbs on her plate. Laurence started to clear their plates away, asking if there was anything else anyone wanted. They shook their heads. I hated it for months, Dorothy went on, couldn't stand it, the work, and the people, and the effort involved in just getting from place to place, but I didn't dare go back. Where I came from, people didn't do that. She laughed again. I must have seemed like a real country girl when we first met, she said, but Julia soon fixed that. She turned me into a proper Londoner. I still feel like one even now, she said, shaking her head and smiling, running her thumb along the smooth worn edge of the table.

They sat quietly for a few moments more, and then David said well, should we? And they stood up, ready to get on with the job in hand, moving back through the musty hallway with its rolled-up carpets and stacked picture frames, working their way through each room and sorting everything into categories: boxes of clothes, boxes of bric-a-brac, magazines, newspapers, printed documents, handwritten documents, photographs, jewellery, items of value, items mentioned in the will. Laurence stood around awkwardly, collecting up the mugs from the table, walking back and forth between the rooms without really doing anything, picking up the occasional ornament and putting it back down, his hands hovering uselessly above papers and boxes he seemed unable to touch. Eleanor, seven months pregnant, did what she could and sat down whenever the others insisted. And although they all tried to keep each other moving, and tried not to stop and think, they each came across something which caught them out, something which snagged a loose thread of memory and tugged them to their knees. Julia's wedding dress, still wrapped in tissue paper in the attic. A photograph of Dorothy holding a one-year-old Susan, both of them clutching their thick rubber gas masks. A cigarette holder. The two telegrams. A birthday card David had made at school, with To Auntie Julia smeared across it in flaking orange poster paint. Her old nurse's watch. Half a dozen pairs of mislaid spectacles, gazing blindly up at them from beneath magazines, cushions, handbags. And towards the end of the afternoon, while everyone else was back in the kitchen drinking more cups of tea, he found what he'd been unknowingly looking for all along, tucked away at the bottom of a suitcase in the attic, waiting for him.

The suitcase was full of old papers — programmes from some of the plays Julia's mother had been in, a stack of appointment diaries, thick bundles of bank statements and tax certificates. But once he'd sorted it all into piles, ready to take downstairs, there was something left over. He listened to the voices of the others floating up from the kitchen, Susan saying something about the smell of Julia's tweed coats that she remembered from when she was a little girl, Dorothy laughing, and he thought, for only a brief moment, about putting the slip of card back where it had come from. He wondered if his mother even knew about it.