Mr Doubler Begins Again: The best uplifting, funny and feel-good book for 2019. Seni Glaister
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had no regrets. We’d said everything enough times. And even if he had suddenly dropped dead when I’d just told him I was sick to death of not being able to sleep at night because of the awful noise he made, then I’d still have no regrets because we’d have recently talked about our love for one another. We’d probably have talked about how we first met, or the arrival of our daughter. About how madly I wanted him and how madly he wanted me and how badly behaved we were when we first fell in love. We loved that, you know, recounting the really good bits. I’d never really tire of talking about that. Because, I suppose, all the bad bits towards the end could never really unstitch all the good bits from the beginning.
‘I like to imagine our marriage was a little like a hand-knitted blanket. It was a glorious thing to behold, full of intricate pattern and a multitude of colours and so very beautiful to examine in detail. Towards the top, there were a few dropped stitches and a few holes, and maybe the colours weren’t quite so bright, and maybe the needlecraft was a bit patchy, but it never unravelled. It still worked as a blanket. It was a lovely thing to look at, and it kept us warm, held us together. And it’s so much better to look at the beginning bits and stroke the colours and talk about the love and the joy that went into creating it rather than to focus on the last few rows.’
‘My blanket unravelled,’ Doubler had said, tears pricking at his eyelids.
‘I know. Our stories are not the same, Mr Doubler. Sometimes when you drop a stitch, you can’t really patch it up – it just undoes. It’s awful. It feels like a waste of time, doesn’t it, to end up with a pile of loose wool where before you had something useful.’ Mrs Millwood had looked thoughtful.
‘But afterwards, when the pain stops, you can tidy things up a bit. You can’t ever make that blanket again, not out of that wool, but what you can do is wind the wool up into a really neat ball – and that in itself takes time and patience and a degree of love and generosity – and then you can store the ball of wool away somewhere safe. And maybe just look at it from time to time.’
‘I am so far from that time, Mrs Millwood. It is still just a knotted mess at my feet. It trips me up; it catches me out. I couldn’t even find an end if I tried.’
‘So don’t. Do what you’re doing. Walk around it, step over it. Ignore it. Sweep it into a dark corner if watching it is causing you too much pain. But one day, you’ll have the strength and the resolve to look for an end and then slowly, slowly you can tidy it away neatly. You’ll feel some peace then.’
Doubler had carefully stored the image away in his memory and then asked, ‘And the anger you felt when your husband was dying – did it go when he died?’
‘In my case, yes. Because we’d said all our hurts and we’d said all our “sorry”s and I was just so glad he didn’t have to suffer again and I was so, so relieved to sleep through the night. For the first week or so I just slept and slept. My daughter thought my doctor had medicated me, but, no, I was just catching up on the sleep that you can’t have when you’re caring night and day.’
‘Ours are very different stories, Mrs Millwood.’
‘They are chalk and cheese, aren’t they? I bet when you’re tripping over that mess of tangled wool, you can’t imagine it ever made a blanket in the first place. But it probably did – the pain is just hard to see past. It can blind you, that kind of sadness.’
‘I had no warning, no inkling. And yet she knew! She could have spared me the shock, couldn’t she? She can’t have loved me much if she didn’t even think I needed a bit of gentle letting-down.’
‘Love, Mr Doubler. It’s a funny thing. True love doesn’t go away, but the pressures of life can do things to people. Who knows why some people react so differently? Sometimes it’s just an ageing thing. Like wine. Some wines are best drunk right away, as soon as the wine is made. And then no amount of keeping it and nurturing it will make it any better. Others aren’t that great first of all, but they get better and better. But the really good wines, Mr Doubler, they’re good when you first drink them and there’s still room for improvement.’ She had looked at him, puzzled then. ‘Why “chalk and cheese”, do you think, Mr Doubler?’
‘Well . . .’
Doubler blinked his eyes open and looked around the room, expecting to see Mrs Millwood bustling into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Had he told her where the expression ‘chalk and cheese’ had come from? Almost certainly – it was the kind of information he enjoyed being able to furnish. And she would have logged it carefully to relate to her friends at the knitting circle or, perhaps, the animal shelter.
There were people who knew Mrs Millwood at the animal shelter, people who perhaps missed her as much as he did. And surely there were animals, too, animals that might even be suffering as a result of her sudden departure. He had something in common with all of them, if only his sadness.
Doubler thought about the copy of the Yellow Pages he had tidied away in the cupboard and wondered from where Mrs Millwood drew her strength. She had been blessed with so much courage while he had so little. She certainly had enough for the two of them, but if he were to borrow some of hers, what on earth could he give her in return?
He looked at his strong and weathered hands. Mirth Farm soil was so ingrained in them that the fine lines formed dark contours and he wondered if he studied them for long enough, he’d find, drawn there, the topography of Mirth Farm itself. His hands were generously calloused, and Doubler was grateful for these hardened areas that gave him protection from the tools he handled daily. He ran the rough tip of his right thumb over the armour of his left hand, thinking how clever those skin cells were to form here where they were most needed, as if they had learnt lessons from every knock, every blister, every small wound. His heart, though, had taken some hard knocks of its own but had failed, he now realized, to similarly protect itself from future injury. If anything, it was more vulnerable to hurt now than ever before.
Perhaps, he wondered further, his heart had not hardened because that was not the place he suffered most when Marie went. It had been his head, not his heart, that had borne the brunt of the pain. His brain had ached with the inspection of her action and the replaying of the last months, weeks, days, looking for a clue, looking for a moment at which he might have changed their future. It was his brain that hurt from the constant examination and recrimination, and it was his brain that eventually stopped coping and had almost shut down altogether while he’d descended into the post-Marie chasm to escape the constant thinking. But the impact Mrs Millwood’s absence had on him was a very different thing. It hurt deeply in his ill-prepared heart.
He thought of her in her hospital bed and wondered whether she was strong enough in all the right places to recover. She seemed to be so much more resilient than he would ever be. Here he was, physically as strong as an ox, being propped up by Mrs Millwood, an invalid no less. Somehow, he would need to find some courage. He headed out to the potatoes to think.
Having had no answer when she rang the doorbell, Midge rounded the farmhouse and crossed the yard, heading for the kitchen door, a bag full of groceries under each arm. Today, it was calm at the top of the hill, where normally the wind gusted, making it difficult sometimes to appreciate the silence that her mum so often talked about. She took a moment to inhale a lungful of hillside air and looked around her as she walked, observing her surroundings properly for the first time since she’d started to visit Doubler.
She popped the bags down in the yard, leaning them against a deteriorating stone wall. The yard was quartered by the back of the farmhouse itself, a locked garage and the first of some huge barns, which felt ominous in their stillness. The yard, nothing more than a turning circle really, was surfaced in gravel, and the bare fields she had driven through crept right up to each of the buildings so that, other than a briar-filled narrow flowerbed that circled the farmhouse itself, the grounds were devoid of anything that might be considered a garden. At the front of the house, to the right of the approach, there were a number of fruit trees – apple, she thought, and some others that might