Chapter Text
Valerie’s first letter is the shortest you’ve ever received and entirely unexpected.
The air was off when you woke that morning but December was new and the bite fierce so you explained it away as such. Bundled in your cardigans, each member of the house had them descended on the dining room for a hearty breakfast before embarking on the snow-sodden day.
What no one had expected were the seven sharp white envelopes standing perfectly straight in the centre of Mrs B’s spread.
Each envelope reads a direction to a specific person: Trixie, Sister Julienne, Sister Monica Joan, Nurse Crane, Sister Frances, Sister Hilda ; and yours in the centre: Lucille.
“It appears as though evening muses have descended upon us,” Sister Monica Joan drawls, reaching over to pluck her letter from the pile as her other hand finds a scone.
The unsettlement misses her.
Everyone else remains perfectly still, silent.
You wonder if they can hear the rattling of your heart, deep and rising in your chest as it wills an escape from this dread, as it wills for the evening before.
Because you know the lines of that writing like you know the lines on your hands.
And you know what’s in those envelopes before Sister Monica Joan has even peeled back the glue.
She’s left.
Last night, Valerie had made you a hot chocolate -- spiked with your favourite rum -- and you sat at this very same table. You spoke of your day, of the new lives you brought into the world. Simple things. The pleasure of putting your feet up, the pleasure of good company. Valerie had listened as she always did, her whole attention committed to you and only you. Valerie had smiled. And she leaned into you. And she was there .
Around you, the others move, falling into their assumed seats. Letters in hands, your colleagues begin to discover the truth as you remain rooted in forced ignorance.
Silently, you find your chair -- ignore the empty space between yourself and Trixie.
“She’s really gone,” Sister Frances is the first to speak, eyes shining, cheeks flushed red.
Her tears fall unabashedly and a jolt of anger suddenly courses through you. She has no right to be so upset, Valerie wasn’t her best friend . It’s entirely unjustified, this anger at poor young Sister Frances, immature and unnecessary.
Valerie was everyone’s friend.
Is.
Valerie is everyone’s friend.
“Nurse Dyer has attached her letter of resignation,” Sister Julienne says, calm. She flattens the folded note with her hands, running them along the table. She appears to take a moment, allows a whisper of confusion and hurt to make itself known. And then she’s back to her usual self. “She has had a difficult few months, a difficult year more fittingly. We must allow her the rest and recovery she needs. She will be dearly missed and we shall keep her in our prayers whatever her future plans may be.”
The others pour over their letters. Sister Monica Joan clutches it to her chest, recounts some long poem to the sky with a mouthful of a sultana scone. Hilda and Julienne continue breakfast subdued but perfectly normal elsewhere. Frances cries silently as the letter shakes in her grasp; you worry, momentarily, if the tear tracks will scar her face like those wild animals you used to read about.
It’s why you haven’t read yours yet. Fear that the same will happen to you.
“No forwarding address,” Trixie says, tone empty. She folds her letter upon completion. Small and neat. She keeps the square in her hand, tucked into the palm, and helps herself to tea. No one comments on her lack of food.
Phyllis, it appears, shares your sentiment of privacy and pockets her letter for later in the day. You can hear the thought she has; there’s work to be done, we’ll deal with that in private .
Your letter stays leaning against the fruit bowl until the table empties.
The toast, the three nibbles of it you take, are dry and tasteless - even with the generous helpings of Violet’s jam you’d added naturally.
(Valerie’s favourite fruit is blackberries, followed only by raspberries, because they remind her of berry picking with her grandfather in the space between Spring and Summer in her youth. She always fawns over the dregs of jam that remain - scoops them heartily on her toast each morning.)
You and Trixie stay as the others depart, lingering in some sort in-between. Her hand, warm, comes to your shoulder and you feel the sharp corners of that folded square.
“Do you know, Lucille, I think it’s time Phyllis had a bedroom to herself, don’t you think?”
Her voice is sweet but sharp, like the blackberry jam on the toast before you. Entirely unpalatable.
But you know she needs your proximity when you want solitude. So you do what you’ve always done, what Valerie always does, you roll with the punches and put others first.
You smile brightly back at Trixie, daring it to reach your eyes, and you nod, “I think that'll be the most suitable arrangement.”
Trixie cannot be alone in her room for reasons you’ve come to understand. Besides the matriarchal Sisters whose presence is only now a small comfort, Trixie has been endlessly abandoned, her bedroom close to a haunted house with the ghosts in it. Phantom names from times gone by with Cynthia, Chummy, Jenny, Patsy, poor old Barbara . You do this for her, fill a gap like a grave in a bed that will never be truly yours.
Valerie never met Patsy. You wonder if she’d have felt the same if she did.
No. She wouldn’t. Because——
Trixie squeezes, the paper corners dig through the microfibres of your cardigan.
What it feels like is a knife, what it feels like is it being twisted, right into your heart.
Trixie leaves.
An exchange happens between you and the letter. You stare it down. Inanimate, the letter is, in its actuality but most painful in its existence.
She’s left .
For the first time in your life, you crave the scent of cigarette smoke.
-
I’ll miss you the most.
All my love always,
Valerie
x
-
You’re furious. Beyond reproach. Rage boils and bubbles beneath you like a cauldron spitting dark magic out into a world, twisting it, warping it. What was once peaceful, bright and full of hope is marred by the fury inside of you.
It eeks out, ebbs and flows from the gap in the door, down the stairs and out into Poplar. It feeds into Fred’s allotment, weeds crippling as it does so, tainting the harvest, but why care?
You have been mad. You have been livid. You have been devastated.
But never all at once in such an incendiary way.
Black flames appear before you, licking away at the surfaces of your room, of her room. You sit in her bed and you yearn for the flames to the paper in your hand.
You sit in her bed and yearn for the flames to take you back.
To Jamaica? To Taunton? To the night before? You have no idea.
In ten little worlds, Valerie Dyer has ignited such mania in you that you want nothing but the world before her or the world before her departure.
How dare she ?
The others, that you’d seen that morning, they’d received long, willowy letters of double sided or more. You’d wager that, to them, she’d detailed her reasons, her mindset, anything. Cherished memories spilled across black ink like veins of a throbbing heart of the most important friendships of her life. Anecdotes, promises, reasons.
That’s all you want. Reason.
And to you she’d left a greeting card response.
Fake in its sincerity, that’s how it feels.
An afterthought.
I was your best friend .
The paper holds more white than black and perhaps that could be seen as good. It’s bright that way, the paper, not bogged down with dark smudged scribbles - Valerie never did have the neatest handwriting of the team.
Perhaps it was supposed to be cognizant of your friendship. Effortless, simple, words unsaid lingering in the chasms between you even when you stood so close to one another.
No.
That would be too much in the instance it was true. Too hard to accept what is now reality. What is now loneliness.
The rage, unbidden and wild, is an easier beast to ride alongside.
An afterthought is better. An afterthought isn’t heartbreak and what could have been.
The x , chosen with purpose and placed under her name, it smudges as a tear escapes you.
You cannot allow devastation to win. Rage must be victorious. You must hate her .
But you can’t.
Because the bed still smells of stale cigarettes and the perfume Trixie bought her for Christmas last year - her first of any expensive kind. She’d been spoilt that day, overjoyed and excited.
Her pictures, little doodles you and her had done during crafting hour with the Sisters are still framed above the headboard.
A photostrip—from when you, her and Trixie took liberty of the booth at the back of Woolworths on a shopping trip last month—that had been tacked to the glass of one of those frames is missing now.
She took it with her.
As well as your copy of Anna Karenina that she’d kept on her side table. The one that she had promised you she would finish one day.
(“ If it’s boring you, you don’t have to Valerie, please don’t feel obliged.” “It’s important to you, of course I’m going to finish it. I’ll take this to my grave if I have to. Even if I only read a paragraph a day, I’ll finish it for you. ”)
You never did get to tell her how she reminded you of poor Nikolai Levin.
Shaking, harder than Frances had that morning, you fold the letter once more, along the same sharp crease Valerie had early that morning.
You return it to its envelope, slotting it in, and holding it in your hands for a moment longer. The pad of your thumb circles the looping of the letters of your name, the pen choreographed with care that you feel in its presentation.
It’s only then, when you move to set it on the bedside, do you recall scrawl on the inside of the envelope flap.
Hadn’t Trixie said that—
A forwarding address.
Her last great gift to you, her final act of selflessness.
When all she seemed to crave was privacy, Valerie had given you the means to send her a letter.
“ All my love always”
What was it Tolstoy had written?
“If they hadn’t both been pretending, but had had what is called a heart-to-heart talk, that is, simply told each other just what they were thinking and feeling, then they would have just looked into each other’s eyes and———“
You would have said——