The Day between Winter and Spring

Author’s Note    I realised on a re-read that the second person authorial perspective had shifted. I thought about editing this out but then wondered if the characters and story were telling me this was the right way to tell it. Please let me know if you think this works or is just confusing – it’s fine to be honest about it!!!

Just say it, or you’ll regret it. Just say it. Take a deep breath or gasp it on a shallow one. God knows you’ve rehearsed it enough. But talking to yourself, or to a mirror, no matter how much you try to delude yourself it’s otherwise, is not the same as talking to a person. Words spoken to emptiness or to reflection, whatever they are, can be retracted, recalled, need not have any consequences.

     You know that if anyone says it, it will have to be you. He is too wary, too unsure of himself. Some people call him a milksop and a ditherer. Perhaps they are not entirely wrong about the latter. Yes, you sometimes wish that Harold were more decisive.

     But you know he has a heart that is both gentle and valiant. You think of how you first met. Well, no, that is not strictly speaking true. You knew each other, briefly, slightly, as children, when you attended the same school for a while. But though you know such words and such thoughts are very appealing, you can’t, in all frankness, say that you knew from that very moment that you were destined to be together. Harold was just a rather gawky little boy in the class above yours who was rarely in trouble apart from when you were ticked off for “wool-gathering”. Our headmistress, Miss Maloney, one of the “firm but fair” kind had very firm opinions on wool-gathering.  You once joked that it was as if our school were a sheep farm. I confessed that for quite a while I didn’t realise it was just a turn of phrase and had a very strange mental image. You laughed that soft, slightly throaty laugh of yours. 

     There were also those who said you were a boring stick in the mud. But they were the ones who hadn’t heard that laugh.

     But back to that “real” meeting. We had both been to the cinema. The stupid thing is that I can’t even remember the film – I think it was a pretty mediocre one with people saying contrived things in contrived situations. Almost without realising it we had fallen into step beside each other on the pavement outside the cinema. If I recall aright, we mentioned that we had been to the same school, for a while, but it was not of especial importance.

     Yet we recognised each other. You were tall now, above average height, but spindly and slightly shambling, like a little boy who had, as my Mum used to say “outgrown his strength”. But there was something about you – something that made all the boys I’d known before seem shallow and flashy and entirely unappealing. 

     Perhaps I am a far worse ditherer than you are. Time has started to play tricks, to race and then to drag, to stall and spring. We had a discussion the other day about time travel. That’s the kind of thing we discuss quite naturally, conversations we fall into as easily as others fall into conversations about the weather, or the news, and both of them are pretty dismal at the moment. You have this whimsical side, this apparently unbounded imagination and yet sometimes you’re so practical. 

     I will have to get it done! To spit it out, to say those words that will last only a few seconds and yet a lifetime.  

     I still can’t get used to seeing you in uniform. Ridiculous, by now. You’re not one of those men who look best in uniform. It applied to your school blazer and it applies just as much now. It hangs on you, and is too short and too loose, and even looks slightly comical.

     But the reasons for it are not comical at all. And you hate it all, hate it with a passion, yet you told me you had no choice, though there was nothing glamorous and exciting about it. There is a look in your hazel eyes when you talk about it, and I am sure there is much that you have not yet told me, but that you will tell me, when you are ready. There is a fundamental honesty to you. Though you have that lovely laugh, you don’t constantly need to be amused or to seek to amuse. You do not offer nor seek facile reassurance.

     But for you to tell me, I will have to say those words. I have not told anyone else about my intentions. Not even Mum. She is fond of you, and doesn’t look down on you the way some folk do, but I know she still harbours ideas about Peter Tonkinson. She’s normally the least susceptible woman imaginable, but he managed to charm her. No, that’s unfair. In his way he IS charming, but it’s the kind of charm that’s long-since stopped appealing to me. If I told her, she would probably give me one of those looks and say, “Well, you are of age,” . She does not add that she wonders what my Dad would have to say. I think she knows, as I do too, that the two of you would have got on. 

     I have come to one of our favourite places, by the pond in the park. We have agreed to meet up here for a walk. There are those who would say it’s not at its best this time of year, but this is a time of year I like, the time when, some days, there seems to be a season that is between winter and spring, and perhaps this day of all days. The snowdrops are still in bloom, but the first bright crocuses are poking through, though there is still a residual hint of the morning frost shimmering on the cobwebs. I will never like spiders much, but you have taught me not to fear them, not by mocking me, but by gently and quietly telling me what remarkable creatures they are. The pond is not frozen, but the surface of it is so still that it almost looks as if it is. Morning is already coming earlier, with its pastel ice-tinged sky and opalescent bands. It will not be too long before we start to hear the dawn chorus.

     You are approaching now, giving me one of your waves that seems to half-start as a salute but then turn into a gesture that looks more like an embrace. I will put my notebook aside, because, though this is a time for words, they are not ones scribbled in a notebook. They are ones that must be spoken, and ones that are simple but profound. 

I found this notebook among the effects of my grandmother, Edith Veronica Campbell, who passed away two months ago, when she was a hundred years old. I think that she wanted me to find it. And yes, I know what happened. She waited by the pond on Leap Year Day, the 29^th of February 1944, and as tradition dictated, even back then, that was a day when ladies could make a marriage proposal. She did, and my grandfather Roland accepted. I have seen the pictures of their wedding – an austerity wartime wedding, with no posh white frock and no elaborate flowers. Some have said they look a bit solemn on it, but I don’t see that in their faces. I see a mixture of joy and a certain seriousness that means far more than fixed smiles. 

     I never knew Grandfather Roland, which I deeply regret. He survived the War, but was badly injured in the Normandy Landings, and as people said then, somehow they knew he wouldn’t make old bones, though he recovered and lived long enough to see my mother and my Uncle Samuel grow to adulthood and find loves of their own.