A Life Eternal by Richard Ayre

Author:Richard Ayre [Ayre, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912946099
Publisher: Burning Chair Publishing
Published: 2020-06-14T22:00:00+00:00

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I took Madeleine to Rothbury, showing her where I was born and brought up. It hadn’t really changed all that much. My sister’s and my parents’ small cottages were gone, replaced by a new estate of nice-looking houses. But the River Coquet, by which I’d sat on that day in the rain in 1918, still flowed by, and the bench was still there. We sat on it for a while as I talked about my early years when myself and other boys from the village would fish or lark about in the water during the summer. We dined in a little café where I stared at the old photographs on the walls, showing childhood friends who were now in their sixties. Later we visited the graves of Mu and her family, decorating their headstones with flowers for the first time in forty years.

We hired a car from a local garage and toured along the military road beside Hadrian’s Wall, taking picnics to eat along the way. We went up to Bamburgh and wandered along the beach below the imposing castle, perched on its eyrie of rock. Madeleine walked barefoot, smiling happily at the feel of the sand beneath her toes. I smiled back at her and pretended to enjoy it as my mind dredged up dark memories of Dunkirk and Normandy.

By the end of the week I had started to relax. The visits to the old haunts had done what I hoped they would. They had brought back a bittersweet happiness but, with Madeleine there with me, I began to unwind. We even visited Eyemouth, the small Scottish fishing village I had told Mickey was my home town. We ate fish and chips there and watched the seals glide up and down in the oily water, looking for any loose fish the trawlers may have missed. We returned to Northumberland and walked the quiet streets of Wooler, climbed the Cheviot Hills and took tea in Corbridge.

Madeleine told me she had never seen me so contented and I smiled at her and kissed her. But I noticed the odd strand of grey in her golden hair and how the lines around her eyes were getting deeper, and an inner despair tore at my heart as I thought of what my future may be like without her.

Madeleine was an anchor for me. She was what kept me from despairing at the ephemeral workings of man, that most arrogant of animals, and I sometimes believed that, without her, I would become something infinitely dark. Something perhaps very dangerous.

However, I tried to put these thoughts away. For a man such as myself to think about the future was stupid in the extreme. I had to enjoy every second, by the second. Nothing else mattered. We continued to tour around the vicinity and I delighted in the fact that she seemed to love the countryside of my youth as much as I did.

But, in the time between London and Northumberland, Grace must have said something to Wheland which sparked an interest.

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