Shirley and Mal

Sat in the shadows of the afternoon, Shirley slumped into her chair, sipped at her tea and gazed out of the window. As someone of a retired age, what she was doing wasn’t out of the ordinary for a weekday afternoon, but somehow, on that day she felt different.

Shirley felt a real nostalgia, something that she hadn’t experienced in a very long time; it was as if some shrub of emotion had managed to germinate deep in the hollows of her mind and there wasn’t a thing she could do about it, so she decided to embrace her thoughts with somewhat narrow arms.

Exhaling like a boiling teapot, Shirley glanced across the darkness of the lounge, then up at a shelving unit caked in dust and filled with knick knacks of days gone by. After scanning each specimen with a keen eye, she finally landed on something that made her spine quiver; it was the elephant in the room. Although Shirley had managed to keep it stealth under her radar for some years, it was at that precise moment when it came back to say hello.

She rocked forwards on her chair and in one swift motion, pushed herself onto her feet and clasped the small of her back in a fleeting moment of agony. She slid her feet over the worn carpet, reached for an object at the top of the shelving unit, and glared down at it with apprehension: in her hands stood the elephant in the room; the same elephant she had tried to ignore at all costs, but simply couldn’t bring herself to get rid of.

Shirley slumped back into her chair, hand on chin. She slurped at the Yorkshire Tea from her favourite cup and wedged the fingertips of her free hand underneath the lid of the dusty old plimsoll box that sat in her lap. She knew she was about to open up the belly of the elephant and there was no turning back.

Its contents were exposed. With a newfound gusto, Shirley dipped a shaking hand into the box and pulled out an ever so slightly crumpled piece of lined exercise book paper. She clasped the paper with both hands, raised it to eye level and examined each and every word methodically, just like she had done in her days as an office secretary.

My Sweet Shirl,

Seeing you again last week is something I never thought would be possible after being sent away to ‘fight the good fight’.

We went to the depths of hell and back. We saw and, indeed, did things alien to our very nature. The kind of things that will plague my sleep, indefinitely. Although these things were terrible, gut wrenching and horrific, they simply do not compare to the way in which you were pulled from my grasp last week. Frankly, I’d go through that four year hell ride again if it meant I didn’t have to lose you, not this way, anyway.

I understand you thought I’d perished out there in the land of purgatory; the land of lost souls and silenced dreams. I mean, it is a miracle that I’m still alive and on my own two feet (although my mind has been somewhat scarred). But, I want you to know, if there was a way of telling you that I was alive—I would have made every effort to do so, but such a privilege was merely a pipe dream out there. I thought about you during every single strike of my pocket watch; during every contraction of my lungs. Those thoughts of you—and Cliveden—were the only things that allowed me to thrive in an environment meant for the dead.

I suppose, in some naive way, I thought you might know that I was still alive and planning on coming back to you, but it now dawns on me that there is no room for true romance in real life, only practicality.

Of all people, it does sadden me that you ended up with him. I’m sure he is a stand up chap and has the means to give you the life of luxury you were obviously destined for, but I know in my heart it’s not real. Your mother and father couldn’t wait to set you up, just as soon as they thought I was heading for a box.

Listen, my sweet: I don’t blame you for a second. I blame myself. I blame greed. I blame the human race. We’ll always have Cliveden, and I’m thankful for that.

To make things simple, I’m moving far up the country to start a new life and will allow you to enjoy yours. People will move in and out of my view like confused chess pieces, some may even stun me. But, one thing will remain as constant as the tide, time, and death itself—I will always love you.

So goodbye my love, maybe we’ll meet again in realms unknown.

Yours faithfully,

Mal

Shirley dropped the paper onto her lap and looked out at the horizon. She studied the autumnal day though glassy eyes and gazed at the distant roof of Cliveden House. It was there where they had met all those years ago and there where they forged a bond thought to be unbreakable under the gothic twilight of the house.

On that sweaty July day, Shirley was picking berries out in the Cliveden courtyard under the cosh of the sun; an errand she used to run for her mother every summer before the village pie making contest. Her mother had won seven years in a row and in some respects, Shirley knew that she valued those pies more than she did her own daughter, but she was always eager to please her family in any way possible.

After a while Shirley stopped to mop her brow, and that’s when she saw him. He stood handsome and proud in the foreground of the sun’s glare. He wore a white t-shirt that hugged to the contours of his wiry torso and he had the hair of a Hollywood movie star.

Thinking of that moment, Shirley looked away from the window and focused on her feet—the only place where she could take shade from her memories. She wasn’t really sure whether to laugh or cry as she recalled the moment where he first tried to establish contact with her.

“M-Mal. My name, the name’s Mal,” his mouth, as wobbly as jelly.

She remembered the way she giggled at him. When he walked up to her he looked so cocky and self-assured, but the closer he got, the more his awkward adolescent nature shined though—and she was glad. She’d met so many slick, arrogant young men at her father’s country club and she found them tiresome. Mal was different; Mal was pure. Mal, she knew, was free from the shackles of money or social stance.

Things picked up quickly and they began courting. Every other afternoon they would meet under the same oak tree in Cliveden’s courtyard, and it was there where they would kiss and gaze at the nuances of the house. Mal was an apprentice builder at the time and he knew a lot about construction; she didn’t care much for it, but loved the passion in Mal’s voice as he spoke, and listened to every mispronounced verb and adjective with intent.

During that whirlwind summer, they used Cliveden as their very own playground of amour. Shirley and Mal walked hand in hand through the meadows and rolled around under the blanket of prize winning flowers; they swam freely in the Thames and although other people often picnicked in the area, to them, no other souls seemed to exist.

Summer closed its gates on the first chapter of Shirley and Mal’s story. The air wasn’t so soft and forgiving. Sun was traded for the cover of cloud and it was no longer feasible for them to spend their days larking around Cliveden. They both knew they were from different sides of the track and that their love would be strained to its very limits, but they didn’t care.

It was when Mal first had supper at Shirley's parents house that the magnitude of the situation reared its ugly head. He didn’t know his Shiraz from his Rioja, or which fork to use at the dinner table, and when they found out where he was from, it was for want of a better phrase: game, set, match (without the strawberries and cream).

He wasn’t welcome at their home; she was forbidden from seeing him and to no one’s surprise, a suitable match was arranged for her with haste—Bart Singleton—the weasel-faced boy from the large cottage down the lane.

Bart was armed with nothing but bravado, an award-winning vocabulary (half of which he didn’t understand) and a trust fund so colossal, it made Godzilla look like a farmyard animal. No matter how much Shirley protested, her parents wouldn’t budge, but love prevailed over practicality. Shirley and Mal would sneak out and meet under the stars’ tender light to share a few fleeting moments every week. When they weren’t together, they’d leave each other letters under the old oak tree, and although they could only be as one for a few measly hours at a time, it was just enough to keep them going. But unfortunately, things would not improve.

World War II was officially declared, the British needed young and healthy fodder to be cast into hell’s abattoir and with that, Mal’s fate was sealed. He was drafted faster than his head could spin and it was only a matter of days before he would be shipped away to lands unknown—unforgiving places of plague and peril. Shirley and Mal said their goodbyes under the gothic twilight of the house for the very last time and made promises of freedom and fidelity. Mal got down on one knee and sealed the bond with a promise saturated in tears, then, like lightning, he was gone. But he was going to return—the pair had found love in a time of hate, and nobody knew it but them.

Shirley sighed and contemplated another cup of Yorkshire Tea, something to soothe the throat and wile away the time, but she knew that even a brew couldn’t suppress her memories with the belly of the elephant open in the room. She rubbed wet palms on her thighs, dipped back into the box and pulled out a sheet of paper that had retained its tone of brilliant white:

To My Future Darling,

I’m going away to fight the good fight, but I will come back. Not only will I come back in one piece, but I’ll come back as a man.

I’m not entirely sure what to expect. There may be danger, there may be bullets, and there may well be death lurking in the air, but the forcefield of our love will keep me alive, you can count on that my sweetest, Shirl. You just make sure you don’t get forced into things that will crush your spirit while I’m gone and I promise that once I’ve served my country, I’ll never let you go. My grip will be vice-like, but my touch, tender. We’ll start a family and live in a humble home filled with love and hope. You have my word.

By now I’ll be knee deep in that foreign soil of which we spoke, but don’t lose any sleep over it. I have you and that’s more than a man could ever hope to live for—if you ever feel weak, just think of Cliveden. Just think of Cliveden and you’ll triumph over even the toughest of trepidation.

I will write as I’ve always done, and think of you eternally.

Until next time, my love,

Mal

Some years went by and Shirley’s resistance to Bart began to subside. She had no more tears left to cry. Bart, not one to back down, continued to pursue her and as the reality of Mal’s possible demise crept into her bones, the lavish gifts that were thrown before her began to shine brighter than stars that once illuminated Cliveden House.

Bart and Shirley wed in style and became the couple to be. She learned to love Bart, in a clinical way more than anything (as one would love an especially nice pair of shoes or a bracelet) and as time went on, realised that she should never have resisted her fate. It was meant to be. Seven-course champagne meals aboard luxury steam trains, casual trips to the countryside and exclusive chin wags in the city replaced sandwiches under the oak tree, paddling in dirty river water. and sharing flat pints of ale. Mal had just become another distant memory. That was, until the day he returned.

Shirley was getting into the back of the Rolls Royce when she saw a ragged figure standing hunched under the cover of the street’s vegetation; there was no mistaking who it was. The car rolled past him and their eyes locked for a moment that felt like a million lifetimes, but alas, she was wearing a new life, and it fit her well. For weeks she managed to subdue the thought of his haggard gaze, but it kept on jabbing her in the side like a blunt dagger, and after the twelfth sleepless night, Shirley ran to Cliveden. Sure enough, and rather predictably, the goodbye letter was wedged beneath the tree’s roots in a plastic bag. She sat in the rain and read his words over and over again until they barely made sense. As Shirley sat in her arm chair and scanned each squiggle all those years later, she realised that she had never really moved on from that moment.

Shirley took the room’s stale air in deep, then exhaled for as long as her lungs would allow her. It was a cleansing ritual that didn’t work; all the huffing and puffing in the world couldn’t release the demons from within and even though she had lived with them for her for several decades, they clawed at her daily. The only problem was, on that day, she couldn’t keep them at bay.

Her head sank and her eyes were focused on the belly of the elephant once again. She flicked through a few scraps of paper until she came across a time-worn Polaroid that showed two fresh faced youngsters with an overwhelming optimism in their eyes, and the branch of the oak tree just flirting in the foreground. Shirley knew this picture well as it represented the one fleeting period in her life where everything was just so. It was just before the move. It was the time where love had prevailed over practicality.

Shirley grew tired of weasel faced Bart and his flamboyant ways. She yearned for something real, something immaterial: Mal’s sweet embrace. After reading his forlorn note of surrender under the cover of oak, Shirley returned to their special spot every day in hope that she would experience Mal’s awkward approach once again. That day never came, exactly.

After a while, feeling desperate, and concerned that she might just die of a broken heart, Shirley searched every public record and rifled through every available phone book in search of Mal—she even plucked up the courage to ask his mother, but sadly, she had passed. He had vanished without a trace, but she would turn up the carpets of the earth to find him. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and still, she was running around in circles.

Feeling fragile, Shirley turned to the forlorn note for some back-handed solace and after studying Mal’s scruffy scribblings, it suddenly dawned on her—she hadn’t checked the envelope for a correspondence address. With shaking hands, Shirley dipped into her knicker drawer, pulled out the envelope and there it was on the inside of the flap: Mal’s new address, plain as the material on which it was written. Sometimes we complicate things so much that we cannot even see the carrot dangling in front of our face, she thought as she read the postcode.

She immediately penned Mal a letter and posted it first class without checking it for errors. The largely illegible note was her heart poured onto a page, palpitating, bleeding and broken. It spoke of her selfishness; her lack of suffering in a time where the world was torn apart; her ignorance to the horrors of war when people were losing their kin and donning their ration books; her guilt of self-betrayal, and her sincere apologies for casting Mal aside like a dirty old dish cloth.

She needed to be with him and after some time they spoke via the telephone. Mal’s voice was an unattainable drug.

***

Their love was declared and they arranged to meet in the only place that made any sense. Beneath the old oak tree they kissed passionately and poured years of locked emotion onto each other's bodies. They were as one again. They larked and laughed and lived like yesterday, and out in the grounds of Cliveden, asked a passer by to document their happy union with a Polaroid. The picture would have been perfect, if it wasn’t for the oak tree branch messing it up.

Naturally, Shirley was blocked from the family fortune and told never to return; she had made a mockery of them and everything for which they stood. The purse strings were cut, but, what Shirley and Mal had was far richer than any sequin gown or pearl necklace, and with that knowledge in their hearts, the pair moved to the solace of the Kentish countryside to start a new life together.

Mal worked as a farmhand and Shirley commuted to town to work as an office secretary. Every night they would return to their rented cottage and talk of their days over a hot meal. Life was bliss. It was everything they had hoped for.

It was a plain old Sunday afternoon. Mal was showering after fixing up the garden and Shirley was plating up the roast dinner. “Mal, dinner,” she hollered up the stairs.

Mal had worked up a man’s appetite and didn't want time getting in between him and his food. Somewhere between the seventh and eighth step, Mal lost his footing and was sent tumbling towards the ground floor.

Crash. Silence.

It was a mess. The hospital specialists did all they could for Mal, but it was no use, his mind had been pulped and it was beyond the capabilities of the Good Lord or medical science.

Shirley wrestled with her conscience night and day. Could she really leave him again?

Maybe the humane thing would be to smother him and put him out of his misery like they do with mangled animals. Perhaps she would if she could only figure out whose misery she would be ending?

There she sat all those years later. After the accident, Shirley moved herself and Mal back near home to live in a small ground floor flat in reach of their beloved Cliveden House in hope that the familiarity might somehow cure him, but they weren't the same wide-eyed young lovers who left for Kent a few years before. Regrettably, circumstance had ground their spirits to a fine dust, a dust that aged the eyes and dried the skin.

Shirley put down the elephant; she could take no more. Broken, she glanced up towards the right hand corner of the bay window and there he sat in his wheelchair, gazing vacantly at their antique vase with childlike wonder. Shirley looked on with pain and admiration at the man who gave her more than she could have ever dreamed of, then took it away in a moment of haste and hunger; the man who crawled the trenches when she was eating rich game; the man with a pride and honour that excelled aristocracy; the man who devoted his whole being to her. The man who…

Her head swelling with misplaced thoughts, Shirley leant forwards on her chair and let out a wail the likes of which she never thought possible, and just like that, it all came out and drenched the carpet. Shirley flooded the belly of the elephant and soaked the room with her tears, each droplet a repressed emotion that had been waiting to flee her system for what seemed like two lifetimes; she was cleansing her soul and all the while Mal sat still. Silent. Serene.

She clutched the ring on her left hand, a talisman of loss and regret. Soon after Mal suffered his fall, Shirley was clearing out the belongings which had by then, become null and void, when she came across a small velvet bag lurking in the bedside table. Inside it was a ring. It was plain yet solid and oh so beautiful, indicative of Mal's good nature, and on the inside there were words inscribed:

Boy meets girl. Life complete.

This would have said it all, but life has its own plan for people. Even though they were unable to tie the knot, Shirley still wore the ring with a certain pride, and told people they were married, until things wore thin and she began to forget. Over time Shirley grew tired. To her, romance was something only fools fought for, and as a way of coping, she viewed Mal as some giant baby assigned to her care by the government. He was just a time consuming object: a glorified vegetable that she had to wipe, bathe and feed.

Shirley sat there in her chair sobbing. She looked Mal right in his eyes and for the first time in decades, saw the strapping young hero she had once fallen in love with and the warm embrace of Cliveden smothered her until she cracked a smile. She remembered a time when happiness ran through her bones and gave her strength. A time when everything seemed possible, and she had Mal to thank for that.

As a dutiful partner, Shirley had remained true to Mal since his accident, but also tried to ignore the human part of his presence, and that's when it occurred to her—although filled with mementos and memories, that little box of knick knacks wasn't the thing she was trying to hide from day to day, it was Mal. He was the elephant in the room.

Shirley fixed her eyes back onto his and yet again, the truth spilled out in buckets. It was painful, but it felt right. For the first time in a long time, Shirley leant over to Mal, kissed his soft, yielding lips, and gripped his hand tight.

She wasn’t sure whether he squeezed her hand back through the memory of love and appreciation, or because he wanted feeding, but as Shirley let out a whimper, she cast the former possibility from her mind and got up to make some more tea, just like she had done every other day for the past forty years.