For Agnes

Somehow, I didn’t think the ivy would grow back after Agnes died. But here it is. And here am I, looking at it.

It had started to dry up that October. The wall went from bearing a heaving cascade of green to a bitter wasteland of dried up veins snaking over the house in search of something else to destroy. Agnes seemed surprised to see it on our last ‘perambulation’, as she called them. ‘Damned thing’, she said. ‘Must get Jones on it’. But then our conversation moved on and I never met Jones. Then Agnes died. Only then was the ivy torn out. I’m glad I wasn’t there for that. I imagine it like hair being ripped from a scalp. I think Agnes would have felt that too.

I loved our rambles. Me, Agnes and Teddy, her grey Scottie with a bright purple collar and permanent scowl. We would start at her house and cross over the eternally muddy footpath past the pub and beyond where the Downs opened up, limitless, before us. Agnes in her burgundy wellies and me in the grotty trainers my mother had been trying to throw out for years. Agnes always found that funny, that my right shoe had a hole where my little toe stuck out.

‘And how is the littlest piggy today’, she’d say, and let out a wonderful wheezing laugh, one of the many laughs she had stored in her.

She was always interested in my few stories, though I can’t imagine why. Only because she was so interesting. I found out something new about her life every time I met her. The time she was mugged in New York when she visited her sister and fended off the attacker with her umbrella. Even back then, as she reminded me, she was in her early sixties.

‘And this is the very umbrella!’ she brandished it before me. The handle was carved and painted to look like a mallard’s head with sleek greens and browns smoothed from years of use.

‘I was almost tempted to ask him for his wallet.’ A different laugh, staccato, high. It started to drizzle. Agnes swept up her umbrella and it unfurled with a click, a great black bird stretching out its wings.

 ‘Come on Amelie, don’t be silly, plenty of room for two.’

We walked side by side, her head bobbing up and down at my shoulder. She held the umbrella as high as she cold but the top strands of my hair still caught in the tangle of its spidery metal roof. It tugged with every step she took but I didn’t mind. I never minded with her. She always wore a little beret, the same colour as her boots, perched on her head, ever so slightly tilted to one side with great care so as not to spoil her grey curls. Under the umbrella, I was immersed in her scent as well her stories. Dried thyme, old books and a hint of Chanel. Her house had its own smell. Like an antique shop, brimming with old things but alive with herbs and lavender. I told her once that I’d like to gather up the smell of her house and cram it into a candle or perfume. That really made her laugh.

‘What, Eau de Agnes? Old hag with undertones of moth? Oh you are fun-fu-fun oh you are funny.’

Her stammer only came out very occasionally, breaking up her sentences into little pieces that her mouth struggled to put back together again. She told me about it one grey afternoon as we sat drinking fresh mint tea in the living room with Teddy curled up by the log fire. She would always pause with her eyes closed when she was recalling a specific detail and I imagined the memory dancing in the front of her mind like an old film reel. I’m not sure she realised how her old face would light up with the past, reliving the moment with the same twitch of the eyebrow or cheeky smile that had animated her face all those years ago. That afternoon, she spoke of her childhood in what was then Rhodesia, with no access to a speech therapist to ease her stammer.  

‘There’s terribly good research these days on it these days, though. I heard on the news that one thing you can do to help an affliction like that is give it a name. I thought B-b-b-Bernard was rather good. You have to say it like that every time.’

The wheezing laugh again.

I was never afraid to laugh with her the way I am with my mother’s or grandmother’s friends. With them, I give my cocktail party laugh: stiff, polite, brief. But when Agnes made that comment, I heard a peal of laughter. I was very surprised to find it was coming from me. I don’t think Agnes was. She carried on.

‘When I speak French though, it’s quite different. It’s fluid, you see, rather like playing a violin. English on the other hand…’- she waved her hand dismissively - ‘like banging a spoon on a saucepan. No rhythm! Terribly difficult to fall back into when I stutter. In French, though, it’s like there’s an invisible conductor. I just sail right along, smooth as anything!’

She paused to demonstrate, raising her teaspoon like a baton as a line of French dripped from her tongue like honey.

‘Do you know what I just said Amelie?’

I didn’t.

‘Oi madame, your arse is showing.’

A new laugh, silent but full bodied, eyes crinkled, shoulders heaving. ‘I heard that quite a bit back in the day. I told you about when I ran away from home to be a Bluebell girl in Paris didn’t I?’

She hadn’t. That was one of the many wonderful things about her. I’d known her for a year at this point and yet she hadn’t thought this information was significant enough to have been brought up before now. I immediately texted my mother saying I’d be home later than expected and settled back in my chair.

In the summer, we sat outside on the patio with a jug of her lethal Pimm’s à la Agnes, to which she added peach schnapps and strawberry liqueur. Agnes also set out a blue ceramic plate with blackberry tartlets she claimed to have made herself but, by her second glass of Pimm’s, admitted they were from the village shop. We sat in the cool of the umbrella shade in silence as a breeze rustled the thick curtain of ivy on the wall. It was the end of the holidays and university loomed again. Agnes knew this. She didn’t push the questioning. So we just sat and breathed in the last of summer together. I think about that day a lot now. There’s an instant peace that comes over me when I do. Sun-warmed grass glowing in the dying light and a gentle hum of bees in the ivy. And then Agnes’ voice.

‘I shall miss you.’

That did it. Preparations for university and the idea of leaving home again had left me numb but at this, my eyes and nose prickled with warning. Agnes moved towards me and silently gathered me in her brittle arms. I hadn’t cried in front of her before. A moment passed in stillness before she spoke.

‘You know, I always liked the French for ‘I miss you’. ‘Tu me manques’. It means, quite literally, ‘you are missing from me’. Very pretty but not quite true, I don’t think. I mean, if I died tomorrow, I’d miss you and Teddy and the house and the ivy and all that. But isn’t that wonderful? To have things to miss? That’s where the French got it wrong. To miss something means there is still part of it with you. At least, I think so. That’s been the business my life really, collecting things and people and places that I’ll miss and that’ll miss me. And it’s all still gathered up inside me. All of it. Because here I am, a few grains of sand left in my hourglass and I feel so… so wonder-so won- so wonderfully full. So when I am in my last days, that’s what I hope to remember. And, in the meantime… well, in the meantime there’s washing up to be done.’

I returned to university the following week. I kept her safely in the back of my mind and on my wall where I pinned a picture of her and Teddy standing in front of the house before a walk. She stands there in her navy blue coat, shielding her eyes and looking not at the camera but at me, behind it. Her mouth is open, in the middle of saying something. I wish I could remember what it was.

I saw her twice again after that summer. Once on a return home in October where we sat in the warmth of her kitchen eating slightly burnt biscuits. The ivy was just beginning to brown then. As we stepped outside with Teddy on his lead, she looked at the ivy disapprovingly as if it were a misbehaving child.

‘Damned thing. Must get Jones on it.’

But we left it behind and set off to the Downs, crunching along the newly fallen leaves which set the earth on fire with their reds, yellows and oranges.

 The next time I saw her was in December at the village Christmas fair. She was at the white elephant stall, helping out by passing judgement over every item (‘I don’t know who in their right mind would want it but- oh then it’ll be £5, thank you’). I caught her eye and after the fair was dismantled, we set off with Teddy hobbling along beside us. Only then did I realise how thin she had become. I didn’t want to let myself notice but I did. I was unusually quiet because of it, scared that if I opened my mouth I’d start crying again. I bit my lip and listened to her, followed her to Paris and London and Barcelona and watched her fall in love and break hearts and sing and dance and live. Then, as we looped round back to her house, I saw it. The ivy. Grey and lifeless.

‘Damned thing,’ said Agnes. ‘Must get Jones on it.’

Two weeks after I got back to university, I got a letter written in the whispering scrawl of a shaking hand.

Amelie, darling.

I thought you should know that Teddy died yesterday afternoon. Of course, I’m dreadfully sad but he was wonderfully old and I think he certainly served whatever purpose he was put here for, don’t you? I think I might get another dog, don’t you think that would be fun? Maybe a spaniel. You can help me name it. I do hope university is treating you better than last year and if it isn’t, then know that it’s not forever. At least this year you don’t have to live with those horrid girls!

I hope you’re not holding yourself back. You told me once that you don’t like talking about yourself but darling, you mustn’t wait until you’re my age to find yourself interesting! Half of the stories I’ve told you seemed boring while I was living them but gosh, how precious they are now! So I’ll tell you the only useful thing anyone told me at school: never be a spectator in your own life. You might not think you’re enough, that you’re not special or exciting but Amelie, my darling, you’re HERE! And my goodness, you’ve made my life special and exciting. So GOOD LUCK with everything and I’ll see you when you’re next back.

Special love,

Your old friend.

I got the news over text. From my mother. A short addendum to another message. This is just to say. Oh by the way.

She was 86.

I don’t know how it happened. Who, if anyone, was with her. There seemed to be so many people in her life. I wasn’t told about a funeral and didn’t know who to ask about it either. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have gone. I imagine it would have been the sort of thing she’d have hated. That was one of the things we never got to discuss. I can picture her wanting a celebration, no mourning allowed, bright colours only. It was January. I didn’t want to come home. At least, not for a while.

When I did return in late February, I took the long way home to avoid her house. I looked away from the train station bench where we first met. Where she dropped a book of saucy limericks which I bent down to pick up for her. I knew three of her many laughs before I even knew her name.

 I next came back in March for my 20th birthday. I had heard the house was for sale. I couldn’t help it, I had to see. I crossed the village square, turned down the familiar corner and then there it was. The ivy. Green, lush and everywhere. It can’t have grown back that fast. But it had. And I was glad.