‘It’s bound to be different,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘because it isn’t going to happen. I mean it.’ What I was saying was serious and he needed to realize it. ‘If you want more kids, you need to be honest with me, and not go along with it thinking I might change my mind. Because I won’t.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I wanted to be a dad, I wanted a child. We’ve got a child. That’s fine.’
I stared at him, into those blue-green eyes, and he met my gaze. He meant what he said.
Florence was so different from Lizzie. Polar opposites. As long as she was fed and clean and warm enough, she was happy. She cried if she needed something but not those raging, painful howls her mother had made, the sort that clawed inside your skull and scraped at your nerves.
‘When Lizzie met you,’ I say to Jack, ‘when you started going out. She was so… giddy.’
I remember her bursting to tell us: ‘The one who played Cassius, the one with the dark hair.’
Lizzie had been sign-language interpreting at the Royal Exchange. One of her first big jobs and she was petrified. We were worried at first; Jack was living with someone, but Lizzie insisted that he was an honourable man. He would tell his partner. Of course I fretted: if he could be fickle once… But Lizzie knew he was the great love of her life. She never doubted they’d be together.
And she was right. Jack left his girlfriend in London and moved to Manchester.
‘And your proposal!’ We laugh with delight and another wave of shame runs through me. Lizzie is dead. I ought never to laugh again.
The men catch my mood.
‘It’s all right,’ Tony says, his eyes on me.
‘She was embarrassed,’ Jack says after a pause.
‘But she loved it,’ I say. ‘The romance of it.’ Several months after their first meeting, Jack was playing in What the Butler Saw at the Birmingham Rep, and Lizzie was doing the signed performances.
At the end of the show, after the curtain call, Jack remained on stage, and the technician, who’d been primed, played a drum roll, alerting the audience, who were already on their feet ready to leave. Lizzie was sitting at the side of the stage, near the wings.
Jack had practised his message and began to sign to her. At first she did nothing, just went bright red. ‘I was too surprised,’ she told me. Jack repeated the signs: Lizzie, I love you. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?
Blushing furiously, she stood up and translated to the audience.
