And my sister Imelda came across that front room and took hold of the chain and lifted it out over my collar, and unclipped it, and put it in her own cardigan pocket.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. He’s been gone six years, Lorene. Take it off. You’re making everybody uncomfortable.”
Somebody said, “She’s right, love.”
My aunt nodded.
Nobody said one word for me.
And I said, “All right, Mel,” and I stood in my own father’s front room with nothing round my neck for the rest of that afternoon.
She gave it back to me that night at the kitchen sink without saying anything about it.
Eleven months before that afternoon, my sister had stood in the doorway of that same house and told a man in a bad jacket that I was married and had moved away.
PART 3 — 1973
Cal was taken in the November of 1969.
He was held, and then he was moved, and then he was held somewhere else, and he came home in the spring of 1973 with the others.
I am not going to write about those years. He has told me all of it over about eleven months and it is his and it is not going on a page for strangers.
What matters here is that he came back.
He was in a hospital until the August. And in the September of 1973 he got on two buses and came to Harrow Ford, to my parents’ house on Kell Row, in a jacket that did not fit him because he was two stone under what he had been.
He knocked on that door at about four in the afternoon.
I was at work at the mill office. My mother was at her sister’s.
My sister Imelda answered it.
She was twenty-six. She had been married to Ward Pellow for two years by then and they were living at the house while their own was being done.
And she told him I was married.
She said I had married in 1972 and moved to another state and had a baby, and that I had asked for it not to be passed on.
Then she went into the front room and took a photograph off the sideboard and showed it to him through the doorway.
It is from her own wedding in 1971. I am a bridesmaid in it and I am standing next to Ward because that is where bridesmaids stand.
She held it so that the frame covered her.
And Cal Tabor looked at a photograph of me in a dress standing next to a man in a suit, and said thank you, and went back to the bus.
PART 4 — THE BOX
Imelda died in the January. She was seventy-seven.
In the March her daughter Nuala was clearing the airing cupboard and found a shoebox with a rubber band round it.
Eleven letters from me to Cal, sent in 1970 and 1971, returned and never opened.
And nine letters from Cal, postmarked between the September of 1973 and the June of 1974, addressed to me at Kell Row.
Nine. He wrote for nine months after that doorstep. Even believing what he had been told, he wrote nine times.
None of them were opened either.
Nuala read one and then rang her husband and then rang the veterans’ organisation on the letterhead, and it took them four weeks to find him, and he is in a bungalow ninety miles away and has been since 2011.
Ninety miles.
Ward Pellow died in 2009 and I have had to accept that I will never know how much he knew. Nuala thinks nothing. I think something. Neither of us has any way of finding out and we have agreed to stop.
PART 5 — THE MAN AT THE DOOR
Here is my part in it.
In the September of 1973, Effie Marsden from four doors up stopped me at the gate and said there had been a man at our house that week asking for me.
I asked Imelda.
She said it was somebody selling encyclopaedias.
And I said, “Oh,” and I went in and put the kettle on, and I never asked her again in fifty-two years.
I did not push it because I could not afford to. If I let myself believe for one afternoon that a man had stood at that door asking for me, I would have had to go and find out, and finding out would have finished me.
So I took the encyclopaedias and I kept them for fifty-two years.
Cal and I have been in each other’s houses since the April. He is at mine mostly. He does not drive at night any more.
We are not married again and we are not going to be. We are married. Neither of us ever did anything about it and there is a certificate in a drawer from 1970 with two strangers’ signatures on it.
Nuala comes on Sundays. That has been the hardest thing to arrange in my own head and she was the one who made it possible, and I have told her so.
The green ring is out of the box. It is on the windowsill next to his, which is not green, because he kept his in a tin and I wore mine in a mill office for seven years.
He’s been gone six years, Lorene. Take it off.
My sister said that in our father’s front room in front of twenty-five people, with her hand still on the clasp of my chain.
She had had nine of his letters in a shoebox for four months when she said it.
And she gave the ring back to me that same night at the sink, without a word, which is the thing I keep turning over.
She could not leave it round my neck in front of the family for an afternoon.
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And she could not throw it away either.
THE END
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