Chapter 90
He read the ninth notebook the week after the funeral. He sat at the kitchen table in the morning, the way he had sat to read the others, with coffee and quiet.
She had been writing the ninth notebook for the last three years of her life. The handwriting was different from the early notebooks slower, more deliberate, the precision still there but expressed differently, with more space around each word.
She had written about growing old. About what it felt like in the body. About the specific quality of time at the end of a long life how the days felt both longer and shorter simultaneously, how the past and present occupied the same dimension.
She had written about Marcus constantly, as she always had but now from a longer view. She wrote about watching him at fifty, at sixty, at sixty-three. She wrote about the way he moved through the world and what she recognized in it from when he was five years old in the mango tree. She wrote about what she was proudest of not the books or the school or the programme, but the quality of his attention. The way he looked at people.
She had written: 'He learned that from me, I think. Or perhaps I gave it to him when I held him the first time and looked at him completely. Perhaps it is simply what we give each other when we see each other fully. You give a person a gift and they carry it and eventually they give it to others and it becomes larger than any single giving. That is the only kind of legacy that matters.'
He read the last entry. She had written it two days before she died, on a Friday morning.
She had written: 'I am satisfied. Everything I worked for is real. My son is a good man who does good work and loves properly and teaches the true things. My grandchildren are growing into themselves with confidence. My great-grandchildren are here. The yard still stands. The new mango tree is small but it is there. I am satisfied. I have arrived at the ending. It is a good ending. I am not afraid.'
He closed the notebook.
He sat at the kitchen table in the morning light for a long time.
Then he put the ninth notebook with the others on the shelf, and he made a second coffee, and he went to his desk, and he opened his own journal, and he began to write.