Meanwhile, from what I can make out, the Westminster summer recess appears to go on until shortly before Christmas. Of course, with his ministerial position, Richard is supposed to be hard at work on behalf of the nation whether Parliament is in session or not, but when I ask him whether he ought not to be at the department rather more often, he gets that hunted look which I have witnessed in colleagues’ eyes (no doubt mirroring my own) when the head mentions the reworking of next year’s lesson plans. In fact, I have noticed that he generally tries to distract me, often by the use of underhand means, such as the unbuttoning of his shirt, or mine, or both.
But if he insists on abandoning his desk occasionally in order to spend time here with me, then I intend to find things to keep him busy over the next few weeks, never fear. There is Rrezja’s leave to remain to be obtained, with which she might well need the assistance of her constituency MP. Richard isn’t the Home Secretary (yet!), and Rrezja isn’t my nanny, so a little spot of fast-tracking shouldn’t cost him his job. (I’ve already nearly done that once, so I’m being extra careful.) Nothing is happening yet about those raised gratings in bike lanes. And I have been reading a lot recently about the need to improve Africa’s access to the markets of the developed world. It’s not just a case of dismantling trade barriers and reducing tariffs, we also have to eliminate trade-distorting support to western commodities, which make it impossible for poorer countries to compete. I may find that I need to lobby my parliamentary representative about that too. Mind you, since European beet sugar is one of the subsidised commodities in question, I may have to tread softly. I think I’ll get him focused on cotton to start off with – there’s not a lot of that growing along the banks of the river Orwell.
I’m going to see Gran on Saturday, just for the day. Richard has gone away for a few days – to Minsk, of all places, on some sort of cultural exchange or link-forging visit or something, although he has been very vague about the details. Gran has invited me to go again at half term, and stay with her for a few days (they have guest rooms in the care home, if she’s still not back home by then). I think I’ll ask her if Richard can come too that time. I know he’d enjoy that. I expect I’ll bite the bullet and take him to Mum and Dad’s some time this term, too. He’s already dutifully spoken to them both on the phone. He won an immediate place in Dad’s heart by informing him, in the words of John Thornton, that he very much wanted ‘to see the place where Margaret grew to what she is’. I was touched, too, because Richard had never even mentioned that he knew the book, when I told him where my name came from. I’d very much like to meet Richard’s mother, too, but I rather gather it’s been a long time . . . I don’t want to push my luck all at once right at the beginning.
With love, and best wishes to your parents,
Margaret xxx
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
8 September 2005
Dear Richard,
I know there is no point in posting this to Minsk. Goodness knows what the Belarusian postal service is like, and you have only gone for five days – you would certainly be back again before it arrived. So I am sending it to Charterhouse Square. I can imagine you reading it when you arrive back at the flat on Sunday, before you head home to Ipswich. I dare say you will think me crazy – I’ll be seeing you just a few hours after that. And yes, there is the telephone, and e-mail (even in Minsk). I’m sure we’ll be doing that as well, but I wanted to write you a letter. A proper old-fashioned love letter. To tell you how hard it was seeing you off at the station this morning, having to break our embrace when the London train pulled in, having to relinquish your lips. And how long five days is going to seem – and five nights without being able to reach out and touch you whenever I wake up, or even stir in my sleep.
Don’t you think it would be sad if nobody ever wrote each other love letters any more? I was just sitting here, thinking about all those letters which were written from the trenches to wives and sweethearts. About loyal, hareshotten Prue Sarn, pouring into the letters she wrote to Jancis for Gideon all her tenderness for Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. And about Héloïse writing to her Abelard, and dear Captain Wentworth dropping his pen in his flurry to scribble to Anne Elliot the words of agony and hope that he dared not voice. I would love it if you would write to me next time we are apart, Richard. It is partly about having the letter to go over again (like Gran always says, you can’t re-read a phone call). But it isn’t just that, because you can save an e-mail and open it up again whenever you want, or even print it out and keep it. It’s also the idea of having the paper that you touched, that you looked at while you thought of the words – and then the writing itself, telling me how you were feeling by whether the words are flowing along smoothly, or scrawled in a great rush, or uneven and halting.
I’ve e-mailed it to you once, and I’ve whispered it against your chest, but you’ve never seen it in my handwriting before: I love you.
Margaret x
Dear Becs,
What’s new? Still alphabetically back-sliding into another dalliance with Declan?
Scenes of carnage here on Saturday morning. Snuffy has recently developed an inconvenient habit, never previously displayed, of intercepting the post. A set of model dinosaurs arrived, which I had ordered for use in some work on prehistory later in the term, and Snuffy was through the parcel tape and bubble wrap before Cora heard the joyful snarling and interrupted her. I think she smelt the seductive new plastic aroma, and mistook the contents of the package for new chew toys. By the time I came upon the scene Stegosaurus and Velociraptor had been buried under the forsythia, Pteranodon was in a condition making it well-nigh impossible that it would ever have heralded the evolution of birdkind by leaving the earth in flight, while Triceratops had suffered considerable ravages, and will now have to be passed off as its little known and lopsided cousin, Uniceratops (which probably died out long before the onset of cataclysmic climate change, due to its peculiar vulnerability to any predator approaching from the right). Even the mighty Tyrannosaurus Rex is a shadow of its former self, with its neck now bent into a submissive position somewhere around its knees, its head hanging low in slack-jawed servitude.
Richard arrived back from Minsk this evening. His suitcase was crammed with mysterious objects wrapped in newspaper, including a thickset cast-iron ballerina with a body builder’s muscles under her tights, and what looked like a ceramic sugar-beet, very similar to the one he used to have on his desk at work. It’s funny, though, he seemed a little ashamed of it all, and he says he’s going to take the lot to the Oxfam shop (but in London, not the Ipswich one). I went over to his flat and cooked him my very best River Café
ribollita
. I even peeled the outside skin off the broad beans, you know, the papery bit – an occupation which I would normally rank, as a constructive use of time, somewhere alongside picking oakum or darning laddered tights. Oh, Becs, I know it’s quite shockingly drippy of me, but it is wonderful to have him back!
Love,
Margaret xx
You should be grateful that he has apparently been converted to your own herbivorous persuasion. (T Rex, that is, not Richard.)
Hugs,
Becs xxx
42 Gledhill Street
Ipswich
14 September 2005
Dear Gran,
The enclosed parcel is just a few more books for you to borrow, plus another pot of Cora’s herbal ointment for your ankle. She says that even if the stroke has taken some of the feeling away, you still need to keep on treating the sprain. I told her that the inflammation was pretty much gone by now, but she said to tell you that her stuff also works for any general rheumatic pain, and even headaches, if you rub it on your temples. If you are prepared to put the stuff that near to your eyes, you are a braver woman than I am, Gran!
How have you been, anyway, since I saw you on Saturday? You seemed so much brighter, and it was great to see you getting to the bathroom now, on the frame. I’m determined we’ll have you back home in The Hollies before I come at half term.
Things have been busy at the hostel this week, with the two new residents I told you about. Emily and I have been helping Rosemary to sort out her disability benefit – we both went on a course about it in the spring, which helped. And Rrezja, the Kosovo Albanian girl from London, has made her formal application for leave to remain in Britain. My lawyer friend, Caroline, came up on Monday evening to help with it. Richard and I took Caro for a drink afterwards to say thank you, before she caught the last train back to London. Rrezja is already as thick as thieves with Lauren. Pat T. and Emily have had to read them the Riot Act a couple of times about boyfriends hanging about outside, but Della is brilliant at going out and getting rid of any rowdy or unwanted ones.
Oh, and about Richard and me . . . You were too polite to enquire on Saturday, and I was too embarrassed to say anything. But to quote Lizzy Bennet back to your Aunt Gardiner, you may now suppose as much as you choose. Give a loose to your fancy – unless you believe me actually married, you cannot greatly err.
Lots of love,
Margaret xx
Flat 6
14 Charterhouse Square
London EC1 9BL
20 September 2005
Dear Margaret,
You are right, of course, about love letters. Not only am I a bloke, but a middle-class white bloke from the southern half of England into the bargain, and as such there are things that if we live to be an old married couple of eighty I could never say to you face to face. (Though of course you would only be sixty-three, and still full of queenly beauty.) So I shall write them down instead, and you can read them tomorrow at Cora’s (if the first class post can be relied upon), and you’ll have to laugh off, as best you can over the breakfast table, the possessiveness of a madman who writes to you when he’s just sleeping back in London for two nights in an attempt to get some much-neglected work done.
Such as how much I miss the taste of your mouth, which eleven weeks ago had never touched mine, and which only five weeks ago I thought I might never kiss, or see, again. That the shifting colour of your eyes, so difficult to describe or discern, has always enthralled me, and does so all the more now, when gazed at from too close for focus. How, when I first slipped open the buttons of your rosebud dress, my fingertips could not believe the impossible pale softness of your skin. And that you were – you are – literally the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. How the delicate fragility of the secret places of your body is all of a piece with you, with who you are, your tender-heartedness, your precious untainted zeal. And how when we are lying together, with your body gloving mine, the little sounds you make, of pleasure and need, are not only the most erotic, but also the most deeply moving thing I have ever experienced, concussing me with an overwhelming heady sweetness I did not know existed.
And above all how much I love you, my Margaret.
Richard x
Michael, hi, and terribly sorry for the long air silence, not to mention the unforgivable failure to join you on the crowded pavement outside the Grapevine for a few long cool ones to toast the lingering autumn haze of the tail end of the parliamentary recess.
But life is sweet. Last Thursday I was called into the Inner Sanctum, shaking with trepidation as to what delphic pronouncement would be uttered by The Oracle. Against all the odds, the Rottweiler told me (in a short breather between phone calls) that I ‘feature in his plans’ – words which were dulcet music to my ears. Upon hearing them, I would willingly have offered to have his babies. Though (probably wisely) I did not.
That apart, events seem to have conspired, somehow, to keep me away from London more than is good for me, visible-presence-in-the-office-wise. What events would these be, you ask? Well, the return leg of the Ipswich-Minsk sugar factory twinning for one thing. I managed to wangle a departmental jaunt beneath which to cloak it. A visit to mark the official merger of the State Ballet of Belarus with its long-standing rival, the Belarus State Ballet. The history and repertoire of neither illustrious corps (nor indeed of any other ballet company) exactly forms a central part of my mental furniture. In fact, I’m not at all sure I could spot a
pas de chat
if it waltzed in through the cat flap. Hence, although the impediment of translation may have masked my ineptitude to some extent from our hosts, the trip provided limitless opportunities for me to look inadequate in front of my staff.
And for another thing – well, to be honest, Mike, Margaret. Putting in the shade even the splendours of the rolling beetfields of Belarus, and reducing me (even more in the fruition than in the heated imagination) to a state of love-crazed incapacity. And no, not
that
kind of incapacity, in case you were wondering; in fact in that arena I seem to have rediscovered hidden reserves of youthful stamina. Frankly, it has proved quite tough to tear myself away from her. So, all in all, when I have been here in London I have had my head buried eyebrow deep in CM&S briefings, like a guilt-ridden student behind schedule with his exam revisions – in the vain hope of sounding as though I know what I’m talking about when my staff occasionally allow me to open my mouth in public. I actually don’t care, though. Let them think what they wish – nothing can touch me. I feature in Tim’s plans – and seemingly, for the moment, in Margaret’s too. I stand impervious to their scorn.