STARING INTO THE VOID
Simon and Lily wed when they were both just nineteen. Their love blazed so fiercely, it seemed they couldn’t breathe without each other. Their parents, wary of such intensity, hurried to make things proper, lest anything unseemly befall their youthful pair.
Their wedding was lavish, nearly theatrical. There was a china doll perched on the Rolls-Royce bonnet, a sea of roses, a cacophony of toasts, fireworks splitting the sky, a never-ending buffet at the local hall, and glasses raised with a chorus of Kiss, kiss! that swelled like waves.
Lilys parents took no part in the expensesthey simply had nothing spare, scraping by for bread and a bottle of gin. All the cost fell to Simons mother and father. His mothers name was Alexandra Alford, but mindful of English tongue-twisting, she insisted on being called Sandy.
Sandy had often warned Simon not to pursue a girl with troubled, hard-drinking parents, but the wind cannot be bottled. Simon swore to his mother that Lily bore none of their vices, and that the strength of their immortal love would drown any shadows in a tide of light.
Still, Sandy cautioned:
Mind yourself, love, for a crabapple will never give you an orange. You wouldnt want your romance to end faster than a sparrows sneeze.
Simon and Lily hovered on the cusp of joy so dazzling it seemed unbreakable; all future hardship withered before them, and all the world lay at their feet.
But life spun a different yarn.
For a wedding gift, Sandy and her husband handed them the keys to a tidy flat. There you are, darlingslive and be blissful!
For a while, the universe glimmered kindly. Lily bore two daughters, Daisy and Lucy, and Simon adored them with the proud air of a man set in his castle. He strutted through the house, kingly in his happiness. But not five years passed before fissures crept through their world. Lily began to vanish into the night, coming home late with the ripe tang of cider clinging to her.
Simon pleaded, hungry for explanation, but Lily kept silent, then finally snapped that shed never loved himjust a girlish crush, nothing more. Now shed met the real love of her lifea married man with three daughtersand was leaving for him, consequences be damned.
Simons mind clouded over, numbed by betrayal. He felt like a haunted house nobody wanted.
Lily vanished to some far-flung, moss-cloaked hamlet with her new beau, proclaiming, If the hearts light, paradise comes with nettles, but with misery, even the meadows seem cramped. The children, meanwhile, were left behind as afterthoughts.
Sandy, shrewd as a fox and sharp as a tack, scooped up the girls into her care. She and her husband doted on their granddaughters, filling the house with sweets and soft old songs.
Simon wandered, mourning, aimless. A friend whispered about a charismatic spiritual group, and Simon, grasping for meaning, joined. There they matched him with a dour widow named Gladys, mother to two sons. It wasnt long before Simon married her, the ceremony strange and severe as a midsummer storm.
Gladys soon saw to it that Simon had no time for his own girls. She heaped him with problemsDrop Oliver at school, feed little Victor his porridgeand if Simon so much as mentioned Daisy or Lucy, Gladys bristled:
Theyve a mother of their own, havent they? Let her sort them out. Youve enough to do with my boys.
Simon complied, resigned and hollow. His heart ached for Lily, though he knew that bridge had turned to mist.
Seven years passed, and Lily returned to Sandys house without warning, clutching the hand of a four-year-old girl.
Sandy surveyed the faded, worn woman at her door. Well, Lily, lifes driven a hard bargain, hasnt it? That your daughter, then? Sandys words jabbed like pins.
Yes, thats Maisie, Lily shuffled from foot to foot. Would you put us up? Just for a little while?
Sandy scoffed. Wasnt expecting vagabonds. Whats happeneddid he kick you out?
I left him, Lily muttered. He drinks like a fish and hits me for good measure.
You chose him, Lilyno one twisted your arm. Why not go home to your parents? Sandys words sharpened, like nails in a coffin.
I just missed my girls. Please, let me see them? Lilys voice trembled, knowing Sandys bark seldom bit.
Hmph. Sudden motherly instincts! Youre a cuckoo, Lily, thats what you are, Sandy sneered.
A knock interrupted their quarrel. Daisy and Lucy, now gangly-eyed teens, slouched inside, looking at Lily as if she were a ghost. Wounds lingered in their silence; love, if any had remained, was lost long ago. Sandy lamented often that her granddaughters were orphans with breathing parents.
Still, Sandy roofed them allshe couldnt turn them out into the street.
But within a month, Lily disappeared again, this time without so much as a note. Word filtered back that shed returned to her tormented lover in the village, leaving Maisie behind with the only real family she’d ever known. Now Sandy and her husband had three granddaughters under their roof, and the girls repaid their kindness with loyalty and love. The house was a faded tapestry of gentleness, discipline, and mutual respect.
And the seasons spins onward
Years blurred by. Granny Sandy went first, then Grandad followed, both slipping quietly into the pages of memory. Daisy married, though never had children herself. Lucy’s hair silvered early, and she wore her solitude as if it were an old cardigangrudging, familiar. Maisie, seventeen and restless, gave birth to a child of uncertain parentage, and drifted away, chasing her mothers shadow into the countryside.
Youth vanished without farewell, old age arrived without courtesy.
Lily lived alone, her companion gonehis daughters, anger simmering, had fetched him away to Southampton, accusing Lily of neglect. Keep your nose out of our business, they hissed.
The village called Lily a shameless drunk. Glass walls everywhere; gossip flitted like moths at dusk. Only a whisper, and tales would bloom. Her reputation was a sad lullaby, sung in the corners of every crooked lane.
Simon, across the city now, fled his marriage to Gladys, just managing to claw himself free from the sects iron embrace. Alone as a moon on a cloudless night, he survived on lukewarm tea and stale bread in his mothers old flat, sharing space with three cats and the clinging silence.
That was all the love that remained.
Yet there had been a time when happiness had knocked on the doors of Simon and Lily. How strange, how distant, how dreamlike it all seemednow as forgotten as breath on a winter windowpane.
