After Forever Ends (73 page)

And what did Gwennie do? She dropped her headset on the floor and she ran into his arms. I wasn‘t there, of course, but two weeks later, the doorman, whose name was Diego, told me the story before their wedding. “Neither of them would let go of the other," He smiled, “Like they were afraid if they did they’d lose each other forever. It was quite a while before they left the lobby.”

Gwenllian Hughes became Gwenllian Dickinson in the same registrar’s office where Oliver and I had been married forty-four year before. There was a new constable, of course, and the room had been cleaned and dusted, but otherwise it looked the same as it had that day all those years ago. Alexander grinned and nodded, “This is a good place, "He whispered and both Oliver and I agreed. Bess couldn’t make the occasion, but Oliver and I stood with Carolena, Adam, Gryffin, Lakshmi Alex, Lucy, Nigel, Nattie, Mickey and Annie and Steffen, and we watched our Warren and the girl from down the street take their vows. When Gwen kissed him she whispered, “I’ll love you forever, Ren,” and he whispered the words, “Forever, Gwennie” back to her.

It was all his father and I needed to know that they’d come full circle. We were thrilled.

After swearing that there would never be another secret between them, Warren and Gwen settled into Ana and Eddie’s old house. They sat together hand in hand and laughed at everything and everyone around them all the time. Gwen took time off from recording to help Warren set up his school of music in Newtown, which attracted many students just because she was involved. She released two more albums in collaboration with him and went on a world tour. He stayed home to mind his students. Five years later, her next album was released to a cooler response, but I think that was fine with her, especially since she had just discovered she was pregnant. In May of the following year she bore twin daughters. What do two consummate musicians name two baby girls? Aria and Lyric, of course. Three years after that, they had a son they called Cade, which was, of course, short for Cadence.

Five years after the last grandchild came into the world, Oliver and I were sitting at the kitchen table. Spread out before us were a pile of papers. Bank statements, retirement fund quotes, life insurance policies, an inventory of all we owned, the deed to the land in the wood, and the receipt from the cheque from the bank for the amount that Oliver had just sold his medical practice.

“This is depressing,” He said with a grin, “But it must be done.”

“It must.”

We sat together and figured out exactly what our life’s work was worth and devised a way to split it among all seven children and our grandchildren. It was not as easy a thing to do as I might have thought.

“They can sell the cars,” Oliver sat back in his seat, “And really anything else they might want to get rid of. I imagine there’ll be some.”

“And what about the house and the land?”

“I’ve thought about that. This land’s been in my family for almost three hundred years. Caro lives too far, it’ll rot out by the time she gets back here to it. Nigel loves the wood, but he’s busy with his own life. His children aren’t interested. It would sit. Annie and Bess…they’ve no attachment. Bless them, they’d just sell it off. Natalie’s a wonderful choice, but she’s got her own home and family, she doesn’t want to be bothered coming out here. So that leaves us two choices. Our sons, Gryffin and Warren.”

“Warren lives the closest,” I said quietly, but it was my sensibility talking, not my heart. “He’d care for the place.”

“Aye, he does.” Oliver nodded in agreement, “And he would take care of it. Maybe he’d even use it sometimes. But his piano wouldn’t fit in here and I don’t think he’d ever want to tear himself away from his music.”

“I agree.”

“It’s Gryffin who loves the wood most of all,” Oliver was looking at the papers on the table, “He always has.”

“He does.” I agreed, relieved that he said what I’d been thinking, “Gryffin understands the winds and whispers. He has a special tie to the faerie folk.”

“He’s connected to this place in a way the others are not,” Oliver’s face relaxed as he looked into my eyes, “He’d live here if it were empty. I’m sure of that. He’d live here with Lakshmi and he’d write his stories under the tree like he used to when he was little.”

“I know he would.”

“And he wouldn’t change it up.” Oliver was deep in thought. “I reckon he’d probably not change a thing. He respects the magic of the place.”

“He’s made up of all the magic that’s here. If any of the children got a full cup of muffin magic, it was our Gryffin.”

“Now that’s the truth.”

“Ollie, there is no choice. The cabin and the land need to go to him. You know that as well as me.”

He nodded again, “I thought the same.”

We were quiet for a moment.

“If I go before you, I want Carolena to have my ring,” I ran my fingers over it, “To give to Kitty one day.”

“All right, Love,” He wrote it down. “Anything else? “

“I think we’re finished.”

“I hated doing this when I was thirty. It was much simpler then. It reminds me of my mortality and I hate that. I’m only sixty… something…”

I laughed, “And getting senile, I see! You’re sixty seven, Sweetie!”

“Am I that old?”

“That’s not old!”

He laughed. “Sixty seven! Here I was thinking that old bloke in the bathroom mirror was me and to find out I’m still young.”

“Quite.”

“I’m a very mature eighteen, that’s it, yeah?”

“Yes, that’s it.” I drummed my fingers against the table.

He looked at me thoughtfully, “Don’t you think it’s time for you to go and see your friend Sandra?”

I took a deep breath, “We’ve tried so many times. Something always seems to happen. Every single time. I’ve more or less given up.”

“You talk to her five days a week on the phone, Love. I’m officially retired now. We’ve never taken a trip to Ireland in all the years we’ve been together. Why don’t we take a hop over and see her?”

“We should.”

“Aye, we should. Why don’t you call her and see when it would be best for her. There’s nothing stopping us now.”

A sudden excitement was coursing through me, “I’ll do it now!” I began to stand up, but Oliver caught me by the hand.

“Can you believe it’s been fifty years?” He asked slowly, as if he were contemplating a deep secret of the universe, “I bet you a quid she looks like hell.”

We both burst out laughing.

I had not been to Ireland since I was a child of about nine. I had forgotten how incredibly beautiful the countryside was. Sandra lived in a small village about two hours outside of Dublin in a ridiculously huge old manor that housed a small museum.

“She married well,” Oliver noted as he parked the car.

I didn’t say anything, but I had known that her husband was from old money and was a descendant of Duke Whoever-He-Was of Wherever-He-Was-From. She had mentioned that she lived in a manor house, not that it was in reality a small castle.

“Her parents weren’t exactly poor, either.” I muttered.

A tall, heavy set old woman in a rose coloured silk suit came out the great front doors and jogged down the steps. “Silvia!” She shouted, “Silvia! Silvia! Oh, Sil!””

“Great galloping green grasshoppers!” Oliver gasped, “It’s Sandra!”

I instinctively hurried toward her with my arms open. We met half way and clung to each other in the way that I had only seen two women cling to each other in films. Both of us had tears rolling down our faces.

“Oh, Sandy!” I said into her snow white hair, “It’s been so long!”

“Oh!” She sobbed, “It hasn’t been a day!” She pulled back and looked at me. Her face was wrinkled like an old piece of parchment, “Look at you! Silvia Cotton! All these years and you’re still beautiful! Hardly a wrinkle! And you’re wearing the hair clip I gave you at school!”

“Of course I am! Did you think I’d lost it?”

“I didn’t think you’d still have it!”

“A gift from my best friend? It’s a treasure!”

“Oh, Sil!” She threw her arms around me again. “My best friend!”

Oliver stood patiently to the side. When Sandra finally looked at him, he flashed that charming smile, “Sandy Ashby! The Grand Trumpeter of Bennington Palace!”

That was a nickname he had given her first year when she passed gas during a timed exam.

“It was so loud it echoed!” She had told me one night after lights out, “And it was just me and Ollie in the back of the class. So everyone turned and looked at us. I was dying from embarrassment, but Oliver just got that nutter grin and he said, ‘What? They give us a decent amount of fibre in our meals!’ Oh my God, Sil! He took the bloody fall for me!”

We had laughed so hard about it that the Professor McClellan came into our room and told us if she heard another peep again we’d both be in detention.

“Oliver,” Sandra was positively beaming at him, “Do you want the first thing I say to you to be shut up? Oh, do come here!”

He lifted her off the ground with a hug. “Ah, Sandy, it’s good to see you after all these years! You look well.”

“You look old,” She teased, “And so do I! Enough of your politeness! Come on, you two! Come inside! Have you eaten?”

Sandra brought us up into her mansion and introduced us to a few members of her staff. “They’re at your disposal,” She told us, “You can pick up any phone and dial 9.” Oliver and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. Neither of us had ever been in a home so fine.

Sandra seemed to think nothing of the surroundings. Her husband had left her the manor years earlier in exchange for her not divorcing him. “He owed me more than this,” She told me with the look that only another woman could understand, “But I took it anyway. He’s dead now, did I tell you?”

“No, you didn’t mention it.”

She nodded. There was not even a hint of emotion in her voice, “Yes, well, you know he was considerably older than me. He died in Hawaii, of all the places he could have been wasting his last moments, with his newest mistress. As if a twenty-nine year old divorcee with three children was in Hawaii with a seventy-nine year old man because she loved him!”

She glanced at Oliver, who was noticeably bored. “Ollie,” She prodded him gently, “Do you still like to golf?”

“I don’t golf, Sandy. I whack golf balls. I find it much more therapeutic than driving myself mad trying to knock a walnut into a tiny hole. Alexander is the golfer.”

She laughed, “Well, my husband was a golfer and there is a nine hole course in the back. Or, if you’d rather, you can just go whack some balls. We have plenty of grounds, I’m sure you won’t bother anyone.”

“Wicked!”

“I’ll have Jacob get you the clubs. You’re a bit taller than John was, but they should be all right.”

Between whacking golf balls and borrowing a fishing pole to fish in her stocked pond, Oliver more or less disappeared for the next week and stayed gone. It left Sandra and me alone to laugh and talk for hours. It was just like we were girls again.

She and I took a long walk on the grounds the day Oliver and I left. The conversation turned to old classmates.

“You know, Meredith Ainsworth died at Christmas. She had a nasty fall from a horse about a year before and broke her spine. She wasn’t paralyzed, but she never got back up on her feet very well. It was all downhill from there. She was my husband’s cousin’s wife. Did you know that?”

“You never told me that! I think of her from time to time. I supposed she’d married some Greek oil tycoon or a prince or something.”

Sandra laughed and shook her head, “No, not a prince, just an heir to a great fortune! James is a good man and he gave her a good life. They had five daughters, can you imagine that? Beautiful girls. Bitches all of them, but they adored her. She was a wonderful mother, too. It was effortless for her. She loved them all so much. They had a yacht and sailed all over the world together with their children.”

“Wow. I’m glad for her.”

Sandy nodded, “Meredith never changed. She never got a clue in her head and she never gained an ounce of fat on her body. Her husband absolutely adored her. He gave her everything she wanted. She had a stable full of beautiful horses, Arabians and Andalusia’s. The last time I was at her estate she asked me if I still talked to you. She wanted to know about you and Oliver, about how you two had got on after Bennington. Then she wanted to know all about Alexander. She wanted to know how he was and what had happened to him, if he was happy. When I told her he’d married Lucy she was relieved. ‘He can’t take care of himself,” she said, ‘He absolutely could never make it alone. I’m so glad he married someone who’d do it all for him so Silvia didn’t have to take care of them both’. She really did love him once. As much as she claimed to hate him after Easter that year, the way she talked about him to me that day was as if he was the one that got away.”

“For her, I’m sure he was. I don’t know what it was about them, but they were kind of special together. Still, he treated her so awful in the end.”

“Actually, she told me that after graduation he phoned her and they talked it out. She thought that there might even be a second chance, but it never came about. She thought that he was in love with you.” Sandy paused, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, she continued, “I told her that was silly, but she didn’t think so. She said you, Alex and Oliver were a bizarre triangle and she knew she could never make it into a square, so she gave up hoping. She said she couldn’t compete.”

“The three of us have always been close, but I’m sure none of us ever intended on excluding her.”

Sandy smiled, “Well, she was very spoiled. Being as she was not the centre of attention, she probably felt excluded. But speaking of Alex and his exes, I saw Sarah Farnsworth not long ago in Belfast and she’s looking quite sprite. She looks ten years younger than any of us,” Sandra drew a deep breath and sighed, “When I think of us from Bennington, I still think of us all as being so young. Those are the pictures I have in my head. Us, just kids, making our way through school. We really looked out for each other, didn’t we?”

“Always. We were a family.”

“It’s hard to believe that any of us have died,” She wiped tears from her eyes. “Poor little Meredith.”