Sweet Peas and Marigold Suns

11th July 2011 Monday

This morning I sit at my desk in my study and my husband sits at his in the room next to mine. We still call it the office but he’s not working. He’s filling out a long medical form to support his application for unemployment benefit. It used to be called disability allowance. Most of the questions are things like do you need help to go to the bathroom, can you use the stairs or do you get frightened in open spaces?

I ask if he wants help with the form and he says no. He says it’s not frightening - the thing about not knowing who people are - their names, their faces - but it upsets him. He has to put it down on the form - what it’s like for him - that's something I can't do for him.

I feel cold in the house even though the air is warm outside so we eat our lunch at the table - pecan rice salad from yesterday, perked up with lots of chopped basil. The kitchen is perfumed with vases of purple buddleia, and mauve, magenta, pink and white sweet peas from the allotment.

Sweet peas were one of my mother’s favourite flowers. This afternoon I sit with my father in his room and I tell him it was the third anniversary of her death yesterday.

‘Was it?’ he says, ‘I’ve forgotten. I don’t want to remember that time. You were there when she died weren’t you’.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and you were there before as well’.

We talk about getting some sweet peas to put on her grave.

‘What about the flower thieves?’ he says.

‘I don’t think they’ll want a bunch of plastic sweet peas,’ I say.

‘I’ve seen some in the flower shop down the road and they look quite real and not too artificial. I think she’d like them. Let’s get a couple of bunches when I come on Thursday.’

When I get home there is another vase of flowers on the counter so I know my husband is back from the allotment. They are bright orange calendular - marigolds glowing like small frayed suns holding the heart of summer in every petal.