‘It’s about this old fisherman who’s really unlucky because he hasn’t caught a fish in ages but then one day he catches a fish but it’s too big to put on his boat and—’
‘That sounds as dull as owt,’ said Doreen.
‘Aye, it does a bit, to be fair,’ Maggie agreed. ‘I’ve been readingHow Green Was My Valley. I like it. The characters are like people but better because you don’t have to talk to them.’
Wilbur looked up at her and stood up. There was something about her that made him want to be taller. ‘Yes. Not many folk are worth talking to.’
Doreen nodded. ‘My dad says that. He’s miserable too.’ Then, randomly: ‘He’s a foreman at Hawke Street.’
‘It’s the steel works,’ explained Maggie.
‘I know.’
‘Does your dad work there?’ Doreen asked. ‘Maybe my dad’s your dad’s boss?’
‘No. Well, he used to. He died in the war. He was in the air force. I never knew him.’
And Maggie’s face flinched just a little, as if some of his pain had splintered and shot through the air just by saying it. She wasthen and always as incapable of hiding emotion on her face as a river was able to hide the ripples from a fallen stone. And the Wilbur of 1958 clearly felt rotten for sending the conversation downward.
‘Sorry,’ Doreen said. She wasn’t too bad underneath it all. ‘That’s horrid.’
‘Don’t be. It’s all right. You can’t miss someone you never knew.’ Possibly the biggest lie he ever told. He wanted to change the subject. ‘I’d like to be a writer.’
He didn’t know, even at the time, if that was what he wanted to be. But in that moment he did. In that moment he wanted to be whoever had writtenHow Green Was My Valley.
‘Nah. Really?’ said Doreen. ‘Do you, honest like? Aren’t writers lettuces?’
‘Lettuces?’ Maggie asked.
‘Aye, big and boring wet things that people say do you good.’
He showed her the front cover of his book, and remembered something Miss Graham had told him. ‘Ernest Hemingway is not a lettuce. He blew up Nazi submarines in his own boat with his own explosives.’
‘Marilyn doesn’t think writers are dull,’ added Maggie. ‘She’s married to one.’
Doreen tilted her head. ‘Is she ’eck as like!’
‘She is!’
‘Marilyn Monroe?’
‘Aye. Unless you know of any other Marilyns.’
‘But she could have Rock Hudson. She could have Marlon Brando …’ Her eyes widened at her own expanding revelations. ‘She could haveElvis Presley. What is she doing with awriter?’
The mystery hung in the air for a while.
‘I don’t know,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s odd. Maybe she just likes him.’ She smiled at Wilbur and he smiled back and his ghost stood there understanding, like they didn’t, the enormity of this moment. ‘Ithink I’d like to be a writer, actually,’ she continued. ‘Better than being a secretary or a housewife.’
Doreen looked disgusted. ‘Is it? I can’twaitto be a housewife. I’m going to be like a Catholic and have twenty babies.’
As the Ghost watched, he thought of Doreen the last time he saw her, in about 1980. She had just left her slob of a husband and their fish and chip shop to finally find love and self-acceptance with a woman called Rosie who she had met on holiday in Lyme Regis, while perusing postcards. Looking at her now, Wilbur could see the sadness in her, a desperate and overcompensating effort to be something society was ready to accept.
Meanwhile, young Wilbur watched Maggie laugh and was momentarily mesmerised.
‘Nineteen boys and one girl,’ Doreen said. ‘Called Jacqueline. Little Jackie. I can see her pigtails. Anyway, I thought you wanted to be an artist.’
Maggie was a bit embarrassed then. ‘Not really …’
