April 17th, 2024
London, England
The teacup trembled in my hands as Margaret snapped her words like a belt cracking against furniture. She’d always held a britches-first, pickled-sausage-wedging attitude, but this—this was something new. “You’re not his wife!” she hissed, her rhinestone spectacles glinting in the kitchen light. “Not a proper one! Just bouncing in his cottage like a spare teat on a sheep’s udder, tin-potting about!”
I set the cup down on its saucer with more care than I felt. “Margaret, what are you talking about?” My voice came out syrup-thick, like I’d tongued something tart and forgotten to spit. “Thomas and I have been—”
“Four years?” Her laugh had the sharpness of burnt toast. A flick of her hand, and her permed hair do went from jaunty to reactionary. “No marriage certificate? Then you’re not his wife! That’s it, all of it! Wait till Lucy arrives. She’ll remind this young fool who belongs on the bosom.”
I gathered the dishes, letting my knuckles whiten on the plates. Four years—washing Thomas’s blood pressure pills down his throat, tolerating Margaret’s high tea tirades on «proper tea service,» four years pretending the ache in my ribs was just old age.
“Lucy… your daughter?” I asked softly.
Margaret’s knobbed finger jabbed the air. “Not daughter—wife! They married in nineteen-forty-something before the war, but they never got legally separated when the silly lot ran off to Australia in ‘eighty-two! Lucy’s coming back, now she’s respected in that nursing college of hers, and then—” She waved a hand at the kettle, “—we’ll see who runs this house.”
The front door thudded open. Thomas’s stick tapped against the linoleum. I flung the drying cloth into the sink and met him in the hall.
“Good walk?” I asked, tugging his pea coat off. His arthritic shoulders hunched like a bad omen.
“Decent enough,” he muttered, avoiding my gaze. “Mum say something to you?”
Margaret clapped her hands like a hen crowing. I felt the floorboards creak under my weight as the world tilted sideways.
“Thomas, what’s this about Lucy?” My voice was tinny, echoing from somewhere far away.
He fidgeted with his scarf, the one I’d knitted him from that off-putting grey wool. “She phoned. Said she wants to… try again. After thirty years?”
“After thirty years?” I parroted. “And me—what am I? A temporary tenant? The tea-cozy on your arm?”
“Emily—”
“Thirty years of tea-cozies and I didn’t even get a pension!” My throat burned like citric acid. “I left my shop! My friends! The flat I’d saved for years to buy! All for what—a lopsided marriage certificate and a mother-in-law to match?”
Margaret clutched her heart. “Ach, you did it to yourself, dear. You chose the charwoman’s life—now don’t sit there moaning about the mess.”
Thomas winced. “Mum, please—”
“Please what? Say it,” I hissed. “Say you’ve never truly loved me. That I’m just the live-in nurse your Lucy abandoned.”
He looked at me then. It was like watching a man stare at a photograph of someone he’d last seen at a funeral. “I thought I loved you,” he said at last. “But when Lucy called… I saw you for what you were—just someone to make the tea, someone to call when the blood pressure spikes.”
I laughed then, though it sounded more like the creak of a disintegrating door. “How poetic. A decade with you, and I’m not even a proper wife. Just the janitor of your heart.”
I went to the bedroom we’d shared since our first flat. A moth flitted past the window, and I remembered the nights we’d watched the stars through the singlepane glass, dreaming of a double income and a seaside cottage.
My suitcase had been deflated in the wardrobe for years, once packed for holidays we never took. I pulled it down, stuffing my jumpers and diaries without care.
Thomas found me in the hallway, holding the key to the flat. “Where are you going? You can’t—”
“I can,” I said. “And will.” The key dropped into my hand like a gold guinea, though much colder. “I’ve got a life waiting. Unlike you.”
Later, I found myself on Auntie Mabel’s doorstep. Her council flat smelled of black tea and mince pies, and her dog, a spaniel called Pip, licked the salt off my face like a balm for my pride.
That night, I told her the whole story over scones and clotted cream. The tears came then, hot and unstoppable, but Mabel just patted my hand. “Love’s a fool’s game, dear. But you’ll make a right brave start again. I’m sure of it.”
The next morning, I started at the hospice downtown. The manager, a brisk woman named Joan, showed me the residents—jerky-chinned old men with cancer, knitting needles in one hand and a jam tarts in the other. “It’s hard work,” she said, “but the pay’s there, and the tea’s decent.”
I think I’ll take the bus with Pip and Mabel, altogether. Let the leaves on the parks green up in spring. Let London pass me by on its smoggy, bustling way.
Thomas hasn’t called. I hope his Lucy brings him enough tea to last a lifetime.