Page 53 of The Show Woman

52

Long love

And so they come. The showmen come, and the show women come, and the fortune-tellers and the sweetie wives and the acrobats and the horse-riders and the carousel-operators and the menagerie-owners and the jugglers and the hawkers and the boxers and the cinematographers and the whole, bristling multitude.

Down Gallowgate streams the procession, thick with mourning, showmen in black bearing the coffin aloft, heads down, until the traffic stops and a deep, reverent hush falls across the city, the only sound to be heard the creak of worn leather shoes on the cobbles.

And on a sunlit morning in March, as wild primroses creep from the earth and the blackbirds strike up a tender chorus, Lena buries her mother.

Maggie will lie next to her husband in this quiet corner of the showground, two lovers reunited in death, brought together by the daughter they adored. A final, chosen resting place.

The crowd grows still as Lena scatters earth on the coffin, lays a bloom of lavender on its lid, turns to let the gravedigger do his duty.

There are three empty chambers in Lena’s heart now. One for her father, one for her mother, and one for Violet. She will keep them that way. For it is in those hollow spaces that her love for them blossoms, untouched by time, unbruised by its turbulence, lengthening with the days. She will find them again, her three lost loves, back out on the road. For her father can always be found in the long, curving bend of a country track, in the redolence of a summer’s morning after rainfall. Her mother in the swaying of a lavender crop in a soundless field, in the scent of a ripe apple at a fair stall on a hot day.

And Violet, her daring, beautiful sort of sister, will be there in the air above her. For in leaving the earth Violet has become one with the sky, its every rippling breeze, its squally nights and its stillness, soaring eternally upwards.

Lena stands for a moment in the swell of the crowd, an immovable point of light amid the whirl and the clatter, a single sprig of lavender clutched to her heart. Time for the road now. Time to go home.