The engine of survival

A story of a friendship

I met her when I got together with my second boyfriend. It was just after I’d finished university and moved back to London, and I spent almost every night at his place, falling quickly in love. He took me up to Derbyshire in his little car to meet Mary, who he called his surrogate mum because his own mum had died a year before and Mary was her best friend. 

She stood at the door of her tiny cottage in a tiny village in the Peak District, greeting us with what I would learn was her trademark, delighted ‘Ha!’ as we climbed stiffly out of the stale, smoke-infused air of the Fiat. She was short, with well-cut greying hair layered around her face, a long nose and eyes that almost disappeared when she smiled. She wore dangly silver earrings, shirts under jumpers, jeans and walking boots and she was confident and witty and direct and interested in people, and all of that made her attractive.

Here was a world I hadn’t experienced before. Long walks across the stone-walled hills followed by early evening ale or whisky in pubs, then back to the cottage for a stew or a curry which had been simmering in the oven, and all the while the meander of absorbing, jokey conversation with Mary and her partner Brian, a writer and university lecturer. Mary had been an English teacher and wrote, too, and she kept chickens and organised concerts in the village church and visits by poets to local schools. I hadn’t known the pleasure of alcohol glowing through my tired body in a warm country pub after a walk which filled most of a day, of pulling tufts of tobacco from a worn leather pouch to join in with the smoking grown-ups, of Mary’s particular kind of easy hospitality, and I loved it all, and it became my idea of the best time. ‘Mary said you’re very dear,’ my boyfriend said, and I turned this odd phrase over, trying to work out if it was a compliment or implied something more complicated.  

I broke up with my boyfriend, floundering in a quagmire of confusion after my parents, who had given every appearance of a perfect marriage for 25 years, suddenly separated. In the bewilderment of my grief I felt I owed Mary an explanation, and wrote to her, and she wrote back. You seemed angry with me, I said to her in my next letter, defending myself with all the insignificant things I’d dredged up as reasons for my decision. Sasha dear, she wrote back. I gave up being angry years ago. Come and stay with me. And I did, and a friendship flowered for the next nearly 30 years. 

She was a few years older than my mum and nothing like her. My mum didn’t dance in the kitchen, didn’t talk about sex, didn’t sing in the car, didn’t leave a black felt tip in her downstairs loo so people could write quotes on the walls, didn’t put on funny voices, didn’t inhale on a rollie looking suddenly severe and then let smoke seep slowly out of her nose. My mum was too busy to put aside a whole weekend for me, found cooking stressful, needed to be by herself often and intensely, to practise yoga every day, to immerse herself in impenetrable books. Mary seemed at ease with herself and others. She relished organising parties and events, including annual holidays with up to 30 people crammed into a house in a seaside town, my idea of fun and my mum’s idea of a nightmare.

I’d take the train to Chesterfield in my heartbroken single years, and she’d pick me up and drive me to the village and we’d sit in her kitchen and drink tea and talk, and then she’d potter in her slow but deliberate way, stirring something on the stove, and mention in passing that a few people would be coming round for supper that night. The guests would invariably be a stimulating mix of people of different ages and backgrounds, and often they included a potential eligible prospect for me. And there would be ideas and laughter and debate, and when the guests had left we’d wash up and discuss each one of them and I’d go upstairs to a freshly made bed where a hot water bottle lay waiting for me. 

I met my husband, and kept up my visits to Mary at least once or twice a year. I stayed with her in the seaside town sometimes and other times we went away somewhere new, and we walked and talked and didn’t get tired. She looked at me once and said, as if she was puzzled, ‘you’re very easy company’, and I felt the same. She told me she’d been a ‘man’s woman’ for years, needing the edge and excitement of sexual possibility, but as she grew older she’d come to value and crave the company of women. And after a while I realised that I’d come to love her, in the way we do our best friends.

After her partner died Mary did a masters in creative writing and wrote a memoir about her mother, a Christian missionary. She travelled to Guatemala and Cuba and wrote short stories. She did extraordinarily kind things for people. She came to London for my 40th birthday and told me afterwards she was shocked that my mum didn’t recognise her. I brushed it off, refusing to acknowledge the strangeness of it, because my first baby was a month from being born and my dad had just been sectioned and hospitalised and diagnosed with dementia and I was in shock, and I toasted him tearfully at this gorgeous summery gathering of my family and friends and in-laws. 

I took my baby to see her when he was a few months old. She didn’t coo over children, but accommodated our new needs in the no-fuss, generous way she’d always done. When my second baby was still in a sling I took him by train to the seaside town and we stayed in a big house with Mary’s daughters and grandchildren and friends. And one evening I stood in the small courtyard with Mary’s eldest daughter and we talked about Mary’s increasing forgetfulness and how she’d gestured at the pier from the sitting room window and called it ‘that thing’ because she couldn’t place the noun of it.

We stayed in touch by email. Tell me about your life, so different to mine, she said. And I told her about being woken by my eldest son in the mornings as he climbed into bed beside me, about lifting my round-cheeked youngest out of his cot, about our days of parks and playgroups and snacks and naps and sleep deprivation. Sometimes I feel bored and irritated and swamped by domesticity, I wrote, sometimes I feel perfectly happy with our little house and our garden, the children I always wanted so much, my husband and I ticking along amicably.

You amaze me with your boys and your man and your living way, she wrote back. Don’t ever lose heart. And she told me about her lover and her garden, about campaigning for local causes and playing the cello and holidays in Crete. I sank deeper into motherhood and the evolving crisis of my father’s and mother’s illnesses and care and we emailed each other less frequently. When she wrote, Mary told me she was organising and labelling everything in her house. I’m beginning to feel this creeping dementia coming on, she said. I refused to believe that too, telling her everyone gets forgetful sometimes, but she told me she was having tests, then the emails petered out, and my ex texted me to say she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And I was so angry. I wanted it to have been any other disease.

My sons and I made a last trip to the seaside town. I rented a small flat and the kids were entranced by it, running in and out of the rooms, examining the unfamiliar pictures and remote controls and bathroom fittings. Each morning we ate breakfast at a square table next to a window looking over a car park and then we’d meet Mary and her friend and daughters and go crabbing on the pier, or build sandcastles on the beach, or have lunch in the pub. It was a good time, I’d hit my stride with motherhood and despite my dad’s death and Mum’s partner struggling to cope with her care, at night I’d listen to the soft sighs and whistles of my children’s breath and think, I could never have imagined this. But Mary was quiet. Unusually anxious about the children. Uncertain about plans. In my photos she looks thin, her forehead furrowed, her shoulders hunched. 

The long shock of the pandemic began a few months later, my mum unreachable in her new nursing home. I called Mary a couple of times. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said with a charming laugh when I said my name, ‘I don’t know who you are, so you’re going to have to explain.’ I said we were good friends, and told her about some of the things we’d done together, and she said ‘how lovely,’ and sounded as interested as she ever did but in an impersonal kind of way. I heard occasional updates from my ex and then came a text to tell me that Mary had been moved to a care home. We visited her there last summer, and I intended to go again on my own. I wish I had. In January I had a call from one of her oldest friends to tell me she’d died. 

We celebrated her life in the village last week. I kept trying to believe that she really had been 83. I listened to the loving tributes to an unconventional mum who’d found the courage to leave the faith she’d been brought up in, and go it alone with her young daughters. I found out things I’d never known, that she’d climbed trees to save them, drove a sports car. One of her friends, a novelist, gave a eulogy. ‘It was a privilege to be one of Mary’s friends’, he said, and all of us wept. 

Love’s the only engine of survival, Mary had written on an A4 piece of paper with a printed photo of Leonard Cohen, and blu-tacked to the wall of her cottage. It seemed sad and slightly threatening to me when I first saw it, when I was 22. I didn’t know anything about survival then, and not much about love. I say it to myself now and I think of Mary, and I feel its truth echoing on, in her voice, in my heart.