PART 1 — ASHCOTE
A hundred and ninety-one miles, if you want it exact, and I do, because I spent thirty-eight years in haulage and I have never in my life rounded a distance down.
Elspeth is buried at Ashcote because that is where she is from and because she asked.
The ninth of November was two years to the day.
My car was in for a cambelt. I asked Serena a fortnight before and she said yes in the voice, and then we went round about times for about four days, and in the end it was agreed we would go up in the morning and be back before dinner.
Drew drove. Serena was in the front. I sat in the back of a black Range Rover for three and a quarter hours and was spoken to twice.
At the cemetery they stayed in the car.
That is not a complaint. People are different about graves and I have never thought less of anybody for staying in a car.
I was down at that stone about twenty minutes.
I told her about the garden, which has gone, and about the kitchen, and about how the house makes a noise at about four in the afternoon that I had never heard in forty-three years of her being in it.
I am not a man who talks. I have never been. I have said more to that headstone in two years than I said to the woman in the last ten of hers and I am aware of what that is.
Serena came down the path at about eighteen minutes and said: “Dad, we’re going in five.”
I said give me ten.
She went back up to the car.
They went at three.
I heard the engine and I did not turn round, because I assumed it was the heating, and then the gravel went and by the time I was up the path there was a black vehicle at the gate indicating left.
My phone went in my coat pocket about ninety seconds later.
You’re a burden. Walk home.
That is Drew. That is on his phone and it is in his words and it has been read out in a room since by somebody in a suit.
And thirty seconds after it, from my daughter:
Don’t wait, Dad.
I stood in the middle of a gravel path at Ashcote at four minutes past three in the afternoon on the ninth of November with white roses in one hand and a telephone in the other.
And people always ask me what I felt.
I was not frightened. I am seventy-one, I was in a cemetery in daylight, I had a phone and a bank card and there is a village eleven minutes’ walk down that road with a pub in it.
A man who ran forty-four vehicles is not undone by being somewhere without a lift.
What I felt, standing there, was tired.
Not of them. Of the explaining.
Because my first thought — and this is the thing I would most like to take out of myself — my first thought was that there would be a reason.
Drew’s mother. A thing at work. Serena’s migraines, which are real.
Forty seconds of a man standing in a cemetery building the case for the people who had just driven away from him, which is what I had been doing since about 2020 and which is the actual subject of this account.
And then I looked down at my wife’s name on a piece of granite.
And I thought about the letter I had opened the night before.
She left it with Edwin Tarr in 2019 with instructions that it come to me at the second anniversary and not before, which I thought was theatrical of her when it arrived and which I now understand completely.
Four lines. In her hand, which had gone by then and which I had to read twice.
Wilf. If Serena ever makes you feel you have to buy her, remember you already gave her everything a father owes. Don’t give her your dignity as well. It isn’t hers and I’d like it back.
I put the roses on the stone and took my phone out and rang a number I had not rung in six years.
PART 2 — ARE YOU CERTAIN
Edwin Tarr did my company’s work for twenty-seven years. He is sixty-eight and he retired from the firm in 2021 and kept four clients and I am one of them.
He answered on the third ring.
“Wilf Marcham. Is everything all right?”
“Not especially, Edwin.”
I told him where I was and what had happened, in about four sentences, in the voice I would use to report a vehicle off the road.
And then I said: “I need a car. And I need you to get out the things we talked about.”
And Edwin Tarr did not say of course.
There was a silence on that line of about four or five seconds, and then he said:
“Wilf. Are you certain?”
I thought he meant the documents. I said yes, I was certain, get it done.
And he said — and I did not understand it for another ninety minutes —
“That’s not what I’m asking.”
A car came at twenty past five. It took that long because Ashcote is Ashcote.
The two hours between that call and the car are the only part of this I enjoy telling.
I walked down to the village. Eleven minutes, as I said, and it took me about nineteen, because it was November and because there is a hill.
And on that walk a woman stopped in a Corsa and asked if I was all right.
About fifty, dog in the back, out doing something. She had seen a man of my age walking on that road with white roses and she pulled in.
I said I was fine and waiting on a car, and she said, “You sure, love?” and did not drive off until I had said it twice.
I think about her more than I think about my son-in-law. A complete stranger would not drive past me on a road and my own daughter had done ninety miles by then.
I waited in the pub in the village. I had a pint of something and a packet of crisps and a woman behind that bar called Nance let me sit by the fire and did not ask me anything, and when I said I was waiting on a car she said “right you are” and left me alone.
Three hours and twenty minutes to Linmouth.
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