Romance audiobook scripts

Third of November. Dearest Eleanor, They have moved us again, which I am not permitted to tell you, so I will say instead that the mud here is a different colour and leave you to draw your own conclusions about the geography of France. I have your last letter in my breast pocket. It has been rained on twice, which means I now know it by heart, which was probably your intention. You always did write as though you expected to be memorised. You asked me what I think about. I will tell you honestly, because you have never once thanked me for being gallant. I think about the kitchen. Not the garden, not the church, not any of the places we were photographed being sensible in. The kitchen, at half past five, when you have been up since four and the bread is wrong again, and you look at me over your shoulder with flour on your wrist and say, well, say something then. I think about saying something then. There is a boy here, nineteen, from Leeds, who has appointed himself my keeper. He believes that because I am older I must know how any of this ends. I have not corrected him. It seems a small enough kindness to be the man who knows how it ends. He asked me yesterday whether I had a girl at home. I said I had a wife. He said that was different, and I said yes, it is better, and he laughed at me for a full minute. I let him. It has been a long week and the boy needed a laugh more than I needed to be right. Eleanor, I am going to write something now that I would not say to your face, so you will have to forgive the coward's method. If this goes the way it may go, I want you to know that I was not frightened for most of it. I was frightened the day I left. Standing on the platform, watching you decide not to cry in front of the neighbours, I was more afraid than I have been at any moment since, and everything after has been ordinary by comparison. You gave me the worst day of the war before the war even started. Which means, in a manner of speaking, that you have been protecting me ever since. Write to me about the bread. Write to me about the leak in the scullery and whether your mother is still not speaking to us. Write to me about nothing at all, at length, in your appalling handwriting. I remain, in mud and in earnest, Your Thomas.

The casseroles stop on day eleven. Nobody warns you about that. They warn you about the first night, and the paperwork, and the terrible morning when you reach for your phone to tell him something. Nobody mentions that grief has a catering schedule, and that when it ends you will stand in front of a fridge full of other people's kindness and understand, quite calmly, that everyone has gone back to their lives. I threw out four of them. I want that on the record, because I have been very good about everything else. Owen comes on day twelve, which is either thoughtless or deliberate, and with Owen it is never thoughtless. He does not bring food. He brings a ladder. "Your gutter," he says, by way of greeting. "It has been wrong since spring. He was going to do it in April." And that is how I find out that my husband talked to his brother about the gutter. That there was a conversation, somewhere, in some car park or kitchen, in which the two of them agreed that April was the month. That life was being planned out loud in rooms I was not in, the way it always is, the way I never thought about once. I stand in the doorway while Owen sets the ladder against the house. It is October. The light goes early now. "You do not have to do that," I say. "I know." "I can pay someone." "I know." He climbs. I watch. Somewhere down the street a dog is losing an argument with a bin. Here is the part I have not said to anyone, and I am going to say it now, in my own kitchen, to nobody, while my husband's brother clears leaves out of a gutter eleven days after the funeral. I am not only sad. I am furious. I am furious that he left the gutter. I am furious that he left the lightbulb in the hall and the thing with the car insurance and the way the boiler needs the switch flicked twice. I am furious that being loved by him meant being handed a list of small unfinished chores, and that I will now do every one of them alone, badly, for the rest of my life, and that this is what the books mean when they say love. Owen comes down the ladder with his hands full of wet leaves, and he looks at my face, and he does not ask. He says, "There is a gate hinge too." I say, "I know." He says, "I could come Thursday." And I hear myself say yes, before I have decided anything at all.

The house sold in nine days, which the agent called a triumph and I called a verdict. I came back to clear the last of it on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are cheap and I have become the kind of person who books flights on cheap days. Twenty-two years in that kitchen. Two children raised. One marriage that did not so much end as run out of road somewhere around the second recession. There is a particular sound a house makes when nothing is left in it. Not silence. Bigger than silence. The rooms give your footsteps back to you at a slightly wrong angle. I found things, obviously. That is what these days are for. A tooth in an envelope, unlabelled, which could belong to either child and which I have kept, and will keep, and will never be able to explain. A recipe card in my mother's handwriting for a cake she never once made well. Three of my husband's ties in the back of a cupboard, still knotted, because he took them off like a man escaping. And under the stairs, in a box marked simply KITCHEN, the mugs. We had two. Green for him, cream with the chipped lip for me, bought in our first month here, for two pounds each, in a shop that is now a phone repair place. For twenty-two years those mugs came out every morning without either of us saying a word about it. I sat down on the floor with them in my lap and I did not cry, and then I did. Here is the thing nobody warns you about. The marriage ending was a decision. Two adults, one long conversation, a lot of paperwork. I have made peace with the decision. The mugs are not a decision. The mugs are just a fact that used to be true. At four, Daniel knocked. He does that, still, in a house neither of us owns any more. He stood in the doorway in his terrible gardening coat, holding a flask, looking at the empty rooms with his mouth doing the thing it does when he is not going to say the sentence he came to say. "I brought tea," he said. "There is no kettle." "There is no anything." "I know. I checked on Sunday." Which is how I found out he had been coming here, on his own, to sit in an empty house. We drank tea out of a flask, on the floor, in the room where we had every important conversation of our adult lives, and he did not ask me to come back and I did not offer, because we are both too old to confuse a feeling with a plan. But when I stood up to go, he said, "Same time next Tuesday?" And I said yes before I understood what I had agreed to.

My father kept the light for thirty-one years and spoke of it exactly twice. The first time was to tell me how the wick must be trimmed, which he did on my ninth birthday, in the tone other fathers use for prayers. The second was the night of the wreck, when he came down the stairs with his hands burned and said, "It was not the light." He was right. It was not the light. The light never failed him. The sea simply did what the sea does, which is arrive. I have lived on this rock my whole life. I know the difference between the sound of weather that will pass and weather that will not. I know that gulls go quiet before the worst of it. I know that a man walking up from the harbour in the wrong boots has come with bad news, because good news waits for better weather. That is how I knew about Tom before he opened his mouth. He came up the path in his brother's boots, in March, with his cap in his hand, which is a thing men only do at funerals and proposals, and it was not a funeral. I put the kettle on. There are three kinds of silence in a lighthouse kitchen and I chose the third, the one that makes a man speak. He said, "They are giving me the boat." I said, "I heard." He said, "It is a good boat." I said, "It is a very good boat, Tom." And then neither of us said anything for the length of time it takes water to come to the boil in a room where nobody is willing to go first. Here is what I did not say, though I have said it in my head every day since, in this kitchen, in this weather, to this window. I did not say: I have watched you come up that path four hundred times and I have counted every one of them. I did not say: my father will die on this rock, and I will keep the light after him, because there is nobody else, and because he taught me the wick on my ninth birthday, and because that is a promise even if nobody ever called it one. I did not say: ask me anyway. What I said was, "You will want to be away before the tide." He looked at me for a long moment, and put his cap back on, and said, "Aye." And he went down the path, in his brother's boots, and I stood at the window with two cups on the table and watched him the whole way down, because I have never once been able to stop. The light went on at eight, the way it does. He came back in October. But that is a different chapter, and I have a wick to trim.