The Last Hymn

The letter had taken me four days to write and three envelopes to get right, which was ridiculous considering I had spent forty years painting things that could not speak back to me and had never once felt the fear I felt over two paragraphs of handwriting. I sat at my kitchen table with a glass of wine and wrote, Dear P, you will remember me or you will not, and either way I am renting St. Cecilia's Hall on the last Friday of the month, and if you come at seven I will be there, and if you do not come I will never mention it to anyone, not even to myself. Then I signed it with no name at all, just a small larkspur drawn in the corner, because it felt safer that way and also more honest, if any of it could be called honest.

I had been divorced nine years by then and I was sixty-two, and I had spent most of those nine years talking to canvases and to the kettle and to a cat who ignored me with real commitment. My daughter lived in Leeds and rang on Sundays. My hands still worked. That was more or less the whole inventory, and I am not going to dress it up. Somewhere in the spring I had caught myself standing in the middle of the living room doing nothing at all, just standing, and something in me said, plainly, in my own voice, this is not how it ends. I did not know what I wanted exactly. I knew I wanted one night where nobody knew me, where I was not Agnes who used to be married to Jamie who left, not Agnes whose paintings sold occasionally at the market, not anyone's anything. I wanted to be new for a few hours and I wanted, and this was the part that made my ears go hot even alone in my own kitchen, I wanted to be wanted.

Polly had been in the choir with me at St. Cecilia's back when we were both young women, twenty-one and twenty-two, and we had stood in the same alto row for two years and never once spoken outside of rehearsal. I remembered her profile against the stained glass better than I remembered most conversations from that decade. She had married, and I had heard through the parish grapevine, which never dies even when the parish does, that her wife had died five years ago, and that Polly had left the choir not long after and had not been seen at anything since. Two years ago I had run into her at the garden centre, of all places, and we had exchanged perhaps eleven words about compost, and I had gone home and thought about her for a week and felt foolish about it, and then stopped feeling foolish and started wondering instead.

So the letter went out, and then I did the braver and stupider thing, which was ringing the hall and paying the deposit with my own card, my real name attached to a real transaction, no way back. The woman who managed the bookings asked if it was a birthday and I said it was a private service, which was technically true, though I could not have said for what.

The last Friday came round grey and cold, and I arrived at the hall at half six with a bag of things I had packed and unpacked four times. St. Cecilia's had been deconsecrated years ago and was now rented out for whist drives and christenings-that-weren't and the occasional meditation group, but the bones of it were still there, the gold leaf on the arches peeling in long curls, the oak floor worn pale down the centre aisle where a hundred years of feet had walked. I switched on the candles one by one, and I set them along the front rail and up on the sill by the old loft stairs, and I put the portable keyboard near the rail with its one amber lamp clipped to the stand, and when I switched the overheads off the whole place went soft and gold and completely quiet, the kind of quiet you could lean your weight against.

I stood in the middle of it with my heart doing something unseemly and asked myself, one more time, what on earth I thought I was doing. And the answer, the honest answer, was that I was doing the thing I had told myself not to do, which was hope. I had written the rules out on a card that morning in my steadiest hand. No real names tonight. No personal questions. No talk of husbands or wives or children or the years between. Whatever happens here stays here, and when the light comes up we go, and there is no phone call after, no tea, no follow-up, nothing. A game, and a clean one. I had read somewhere that you can only be free inside a frame, and I had decided to find out if that was true or just something clever people said.

At ten past seven the heavy door at the back gave that long wooden groan it must have given for a century, and I turned, and there she was.

She was wearing a cream trench coat, belted, and her hair was short now and completely white, and she stood just inside the doorway with her hands still on the belt like she was reconsidering the whole enterprise, which to be fair I had reconsidered it twice on the drive over myself. She looked older, of course she did, we both did, but the profile was the same profile, and when she saw the candles her mouth did a small thing, not quite a smile, more a softening, and I felt forty years fall off me and then climb right back on, which is what nerves do.

"Hello," she said, from the doorway, not moving yet. "It's you, then. I half thought the letter was a joke someone was playing."

"If it was a joke it's an expensive one," I said. "I paid the deposit."

That got a proper almost-laugh out of her, and she came down the aisle, her shoes quiet on the worn oak, and when she reached me she put out her hand, formal as anything, and I took it and we shook like it was a job interview, two grown women in a candlelit church shaking hands across nothing, and something about the absurd formality of it made my chest hurt in a way I had not been prepared for.

"Thank you for coming," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to. "Thank you for... I know what it cost you to walk through that door. I want you to know I know that."

"Well," she said, looking around at the gold leaf and the candles and the little keyboard with its amber lamp. "You've made it lovely. It's kinder than it used to be, somehow. Softer." She let go of my hand, slowly. "Now. I got your rules. I read them four times. I'd like to say them back to you so we're both sure."

"Go on then."

"No names. No questions with real answers in them. Nothing we say tonight follows us out that door." She looked at me. "And we stop the moment either of us says so, no arguing, no persuading."

"That's all of it," I said. "Those are better than mine, actually. The last one. I should have written the last one."

"So," she said, and there was a small, wary light coming up in her face, the light of a person deciding to play. "If we're not us, who are we?"

I had thought about this far too much on the drive over, and I had decided that the only safe names were choir names, silly ones, the kind you'd give a cat. I drew myself up the way I used to when I was twenty-two and the organ had just started.

"Sister Larkspur," I said, laying my hand flat on my chest. "Of the alto row."

She looked at me for a moment, and then her whole face changed, the guard coming down a notch, and she copied me, hand flat on the cream wool of her coat.

"Sister Bellwether," she said. "Of the same row, apparently."

"Well then, Sister Bellwether," I said, and the hall was so quiet my voice seemed to have edges to it. "You're late for rehearsal."

Sister Bellwether hung her coat on the hook by the door with the gravity of a woman hanging up her actual life, and then she came down the aisle a few more steps and looked at the little folding table I had set up near the front pew, where the sherry bottle stood next to two teacups I had brought from home, both of them chipped, both of them blue willow pattern, and she looked at them for a while and then looked at me.

"Teacups," she said.

"I don't own glasses. Well, I own glasses, but they're all commemorative and one of them has Jamie's face on it, so."

That was a rule break, mentioning a husband, and we both heard it, and neither of us made a thing of it, and she just laughed, a real laugh, short and surprised out of her, and I thought, well, there it is, that's the laugh, I'd have known that laugh in the dark after forty years. She sat down in the front pew and I sat down next to her, not too close, a hymnbook's distance apart, and I poured the sherry into the two cups and handed her one and we looked at each other over the rims like children pretending at communion, and it was so ridiculous that we both started laughing again, quietly, into the cups, in a deconsecrated church at half past seven on a Friday night.

"This is absurd," she said, when she could talk. "You do know this is absurd. Two women our age playing dress-up in a church."

"Completely absurd," I agreed. "I've been absurd since Tuesday, when I bought the sherry. The man at the shop asked if it was a special occasion and I said it was a wake."

"And is it?"

"Ask me at dawn," I said, and she went quiet at that, and looked into her cup, and we drank.

The sherry was sweeter than I remembered sherry being, or maybe I was the one who had changed, and the candles did their patient electric flicker all down the aisle, and the amber lamp on the keyboard made one small warm island at the front, and I got up, mostly so my hands would have something to do, and switched the keyboard on, and it hummed the cheap little hum that portable keyboards hum, nothing like the old organ, which had been a great breathing animal of an instrument that you could feel in your teeth.

"Do you play still?" she asked from the pew.

"I play badly. I paint now. But I can pick out a line if the line cooperates." I sat down on the bench and found a soft hollow sort of sound, an organ voice, and played a chord, and the hall took the chord and gave it back a second later, as if considering it. "Forty years of painting and what do you suppose I miss? The chord. Sitting inside a chord with thirty other people and feeling it hold us up."

"Forty for me," she said, and then stopped, hearing that she'd given me arithmetic, a real fact, and I very carefully did not do the sum out loud, and she saw me not doing it, and something passed between us that was almost gratitude.

And then she said, in a voice that was different, smaller, like she was asking permission for something, "Do you remember the alto line in Hymn 43?"

I did not have to think. My hands knew before my head did. "Second verse onwards it splits," I said. "You took the low, I took the high. Miss Fenn used to say we were the only two altos who could find each other in the dark."

"Well," said Sister Bellwether, standing up out of the pew and coming toward the keyboard, "let's see if it's still true."

So I gave her the opening note, and she came in on it, and her voice was lower than it had been and rougher at the edges, and mine was thinner, and neither of those things mattered at all, because the line was still there, the line was a groove worn into both of us, and we found each other on the third bar, exactly where we had always found each