She wonders when her mum will realize that Uncle Wilbur is not coming back home. But would he really think of this as his home? Hadn’t her Uncle Wilbur run away too? In his case, he had run from the country to the city.
Well, it had been more complicated than that. Her mum has told her a lot more about her brother since he was moved into the care home. Uncle Wilbur left their parents’ farm in the Lake District to join the army, and after that he moved to London. He worked as a salesman, and then as a handyman, when he found he was completely unsuited to persuading young couples to buy insurance policies they neither needed nor could afford. His work on the farm, as a boy, had given him good practical skills but no love of the land or of farm work. Her mother confided that she thought Wilbur had left, and stayed away, because he could not bear the look of disappointment on his parents’ faces.
Jo holds her wine glass up and stares into the ruby liquid. Is she like her uncle? A runaway? Yes, of course she is. She thinks of James. Ever since Eric the Viking’s visit this morning, she has tried to focus on James and think of the good times. She wants to feed the tiny bit of hope she has that they will get back together; convince herself that he and Nickeeey won’t last.
It hasn’t worked. Instead of thinking of James, she has replayed the image of Eric the Viking’s hand stroking the crumpled page. It unnerves her.
A sudden thought comes to her: what would have happened if James’s dad hadn’t died? (Oh, he needed her then.) Her wayward brain adds:Or, if you’d got pregnant?And slipping into her mind is a thought she wants to fling away from her as soon as it sidles in.Aren’t you running away from Lucy’s baby?
Please, no. Not that.
She reminds herself how much she is looking forward to meeting her best friend’s first child. Then she worries she shouldn’t have had to remind herself of this.
Jo shifts in her uncle’s chair. Why does it now feel, when she thinks about James, as though a thick layer of confusion is settling like dust on her past life? Was James really a ‘manipulative wanker’? An image comes into her head of Lucy, Jemima and Uncle Wilbur – arms folded, lips pursed, nodding to each other and her. She doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Then all thought of laughter dies. If they are right, what has she been doing for the last six years? She doesn’t want to have wasted six precious years of her life. She doesn’t think she can cope with feeling that foolish.
She gets up and goes into the kitchen, looking for something for supper. There isn’t much in the fridge, and she decides she will make do with the rest of last night’s pizza. She puts it in the oven to warm through and stands at the window, looking down on the alleyway below. It is deserted. Her position, high above the pavement, accentuates her sense of being suspended in time.
It feels as if she is stuck in a limbo she would like to move on from. But to what?
Later, having finished her sparse supper, and once more tucked up in her uncle’s chair, nursing a coffee, her eyes come to rest on an unsent postcard to Uncle Wilbur. It shows an old image of the alleyway, including his shop, taken in the 1960s. Jo had fallen on it when she had spotted it in a junk shop. There is a blurry figure inside the shop who she thinks might be her uncle. She wishes that the picture wasclearer and that she could rid her mind of the idea that her uncle, like this image, is fading away.
Next to the postcard is her letter to Lucy. She is conscious that this letter is a form of atonement for something she has done that Lucy knows nothing about. Yet another thing she hasn’t told her best friend. The list is getting quite long. She thinks back to Lucy’s suppressed anger. Does Lucy already know about this other thing? Jo stares fixedly at the letter, as if it will provide her with an answer to that all-important question – does Lucy know about Finn? Is that why she is so upset? The trouble is, Jo doesn’t dare ask.
The letter remains mute, but the more she looks at it, the more it seems that the paper she has used for the letter to Lucy is all wrong. She took some of the old-fashioned stationery from the shop. It doesn’t seem large enough or colourful enough for a woman who meanders through life with such bold and easy grace.
Jo stops and mentally raises her eyes to the heavens. She is a woman running a stationery shop who doesn’t have the right stationery. She thinks of the bad pram driver asking if she sold invitations. The answer is blindingly simple: she can order more stock for the shop. She can buy the type of stationery she loves. It needn’t cost her uncle anything; she could use some of her redundancy money. She can’t believe she hasn’t thought of this before.
Jo is up from the chair in one swift movement. This is something she can do (and at least she won’t be thinking about Lucy). She leaves her coffee on the table andgoes in search of her laptop and a notebook. She smiles and shakes her head, her spirits immeasurably lifted.
She feels like a child who has only just realized that the keys to the sweetshop were in her pocket all the time.
The next day is Saturday and it is quiet in the shop, which gives Jo the chance to continue ordering her new range. She also sends messages out to her fellow stationery lovers for their thoughts of what else she should stock.
So far she has ordered: correspondence cards, invitations, notecards, some new journals and, best of all, a more modern fountain-pen brand. She thinks this will complement the classic pen designs that Uncle Wilbur favoured.
Soon messages are pouring in, and she adds the ideas she likes to a list pinned to the noticeboard. One stationery lover suggests a journal she has come across, entitled,Letters I would write to myself.Jo pauses.
What would she write to herself?
Not to waste time dreaming about marrying James? Jo lets out a long breath. She is trying so hard to move on. So far she has resisted texting him; she only occasionally succumbs to looking for him on Instagram. But she knows every time her text alert sounds, she still wants it to be James, saying that he has made a terrible mistake and that he can’t stop thinking about her.
But, somethinghaschanged. The pain isn’t as raw. Maybe it isn’t James himself, but the loss of her dream of them growing old together, which crushes her in the middle of the night? Perhaps what she is missing is not James but the thought of them as a family? That extra person, who sits in the corner of her consciousness, so that if she turns her head quickly enough she thinks she will catch sight of them.
She is facing downhill to forty, and her whole being feels this like a strong gravitational force. She fights it, tells herself that many women cannot have babies or choose not to have children; she knows she shouldn’t allow this biological act to define her. In the cold light of day, she has some chance of squashing these feelings, but when she wakes up in the middle of the night? Then she experiences the clammy panic of time running out. Wasn’t she reminded often enough by James that she was getting old?
Jo stops herself there. She has no desire to dig up and examine a whole lot of pain she would rather leave buried, so instead she concentrates on what the Runaway Vicar and Eric the Viking said – that friends are dear to us. She would definitely write and tell herself to make more of an effort with her friends (whatever James said).
There is a tap on the window and, looking up, she realizes with a start that she is hoping to see Eric the Viking. It is Malcolm. He is wearing a grey trilby which he tips to her, before striding off down the alleyway. She half waves to his retreating back then, telling herself to stop trying to double-guess what James is thinking, she turns the radio up loud and sets about cleaning the shop.
It is late into the afternoon before she has finished, but she is pleased with her efforts. The stationery stock is better organized and she has created spaces for the new items she is expecting. (A place for everything and everything in its place.) Plus the shops smells richly of polish.
Keen to tackle the oak counter that sits in the window, Jo pauses, wondering where to put all the odd bits of hardware that she has piled there. In the end she takes four deep plastic washing-up bowls, fills them with various items and carries them outside. She props them up against the outside wall of the shop and fashions a sign saying, ‘Free to a good home.’
She frowns as she thinks of Uncle Wilbur. Would he mind her doing this? Then she thinks of the man who gave her damaged stationery in brown paper bags and believes that this man would understand and forgive her.
Then she returns to the job of bringing a new sheen to the old cabinet.
