She stood there, red-ringed eyes, mouth downturned, her white hair dripping with the thick April rain. “Seeing you brings it all back. Ten years, and you still haunt me.”
Salterman nodded, clenched his hands, and drew a deep breath. “I can’t help that. We, Jinny and I, were together a long time.”
“On and off,” she said. Her eyes lit momentarily. This was how she threw her barbs: short, well-targeted, utterly truthful, but it was her truth, not all of it.
“Yet, in her final moments, when certainty dawned, who did she turn to?”
“You,” she whispered. Her face twisted. “Oh, I don’t doubt for a moment that there was something there. You were her weakness. But I was her mother. She should have come to me.”
A decade gone by had not dulled the edge; that sharp, stinging pain behind the breastbone, those moments of realisation, of hollow, empty loss. Not for either of them.
Salterman shook his head slowly and thought back to the funeral; there must have been twenty people there. Some he knew, others were part of Jinny’s new life.
“Who’s he?” one woman asked.
“The great love of her life,” came the reply from Catrin, a mutual school friend. “He left her, but she never left him.”
He wanted to turn and tell them the truth, but instead ground his teeth and moved on, slipping away when no one was looking.
It was raining that day, too, and he stood outside the crematorium, chain-smoking, the downpour soaking into his new suit, freezing his face into immobility. The great love of her life. He knew that, but sometimes even love isn’t a bridge between different needs.
He drove back to his hotel, checked out, then headed south along the M6, without looking back. That was the last he heard from the O’Connor family until the tenth anniversary invitation dropped onto his mat. Now here he was, ten years on, standing in the same April rain.
Salterman turned to leave. He was beginning to regret coming. Anniversaries, especially memorials, were uncomfortable. She rested a hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry, Chris. That was unkind of me. Especially after you travelled so far for this,” she said. “Don’t leave. Not on my account.”
Salterman stopped and covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry too, Maeve. We should have put all this behind us by now.”
He waved his free hand around the graveyard, his eyes filling with tears. “We’re the only ones left. There’s no one else to remember her. What happened to the rest?”
“Gone,” she said, her eyes darkening.
“What do you mean? Gone how?”
“They’re all dead. It’s only you and me now,” she said. Maeve smiled with one side of her mouth.
She let go of his arm and stepped back, drawing a small, ugly pistol from her coat pocket. Lifting it with practised ease, she levelled it at his chest. “Some were natural causes, though I confess, I was disappointed at those.”
