Chapter 110
They left his apartment as students leave all encounters with very old very serious people full of something they were still processing. He watched them go from the window and felt the continuation of it thirty-two young people carrying something forward that had been carried forward to them.
He turned ninety in the yard. Thomas organized it of course Thomas organized it, he had become in this respect exactly what Leroy had been for Marcus, the one who made the gatherings happen with total commitment and no acknowledgment of effort.
The yard had been renovated several times. New concrete new gate new families in new configurations but the essential quality of it the shared space, the water tap, the cooking smells in the evening was the same.
The mango tree was thirty years old It was fully a tree now, giving shade, producing fruit every season, its third branch high and solid. Marcus could no longer climb it he had not tried in years. But Thomas climbed it, and Joseph's grandchildren climbed it.
He thought about: the sky on the morning he was born, which he had been told about enough times to have made it almost a memory. The mango tree as a boy, The cold of England his mother's hands Nia's face at twenty-four telling him they were talking about the same problem from different angles the Year 9 girl who said it was good Leroy on the back wall the shoebox of letters. The notebooks.
His own journals were now thirty-seven volumes one for most years of his adult life. The early ones from England were still in the original notebooks he had bought in Wolverhampton. The later ones were in whatever came to hand.
He gave the notebooks to Thomas, in his ninety-first year, with the same instruction his mother had given him: read them carefully. In your own time. They're mostly about the work and what it meant.
Thomas received them with the seriousness the gift required. He looked at the shelf of them thirty-seven volumes spanning sixty years and held the first one for a moment without opening it, He said: I'll read them the way you read Grandma Diane's. One at a time, slowly, in the morning.Marcus said: Yes. Exactly that.
Nia at eighty-five had a quality of presence that Marcus could only describe as complete. She had lived her life all the way through and was still living it, and the living showed in the particular fullness of someone who has not managed themselves down to fit.