Future Promise

Hope never falters in this light-hearted short story by Kathleen Conlon.

LINDA returned from a week’s residential art course on the Isle of Skye and couldn’t wait to display her portfolio. “What do you think?” she said, spreading her offerings upon Sally’s dining table.

Her friend inspected the pictures.

“Did it rain a lot?”

“No,” Linda replied. “Why?”

The paintings, landscapes mostly, appeared to have been rained on, but Sally suspected that perhaps this owed something to Linda’s failure to grasp the finer points of watercolour.

“They’re very striking,” she said, thinking that if Linda’s talent matched her enthusiasm her pictures would be exhibited in the National Gallery.

The two women had met at a computer class and chummed up in the refectory over two cups of something that went by the name of coffee.

“You look glum,” Linda had said. “I must say I can’t get the hang of it, either.

“I’m sure there are gremlins in those beastly machines.”

It wasn’t Sally’s inability to understand how to defrag her hard disk that was making her feel glum, however.

It was receiving her decree absolute, which had dropped through the letter-box that morning.

The marriage had been going downhill steadily for a long time, but suddenly, unsatisfactory though it might have been, it seemed infinitely preferable to the alternative.

Linda tried to cheer her up.

“We have one life,” she said, and then checked herself. She’d just completed a course on Zen Buddhism.

“As far as we know. So it’s up to us to make the most of it.”

Her own marriage had ended amicably.

They had simply outgrown each other, she said, and felt that they would get on better if they were apart.

He still obliged, she said, if she needed the sink unblocked, despite being happily ensconced with a new lady.

That was what Sally needed. A new someone.

Sally felt the only way to get over a man who had broken your heart was to meet another contender.

To this end, Linda encouraged her to join the gym, the walking club, the art group – though Sally demonstrated even less aptitude for art than Linda.

Linda began to gather up her paintings and surveyed them, head on one side.

“A bit too much wet on wet, do you think?”

“Well . . .”

“Anyway, what I came to tell you was that I met your double on that course – truly. I was absolutely taken aback.

“She’s your height, your colouring, same hairstyle – the absolute image!

“I honestly thought, that first morning when I saw her, that you’d followed me!”

“Who was she? What was her name?”

“Sarah something. I didn’t get the chance to talk to her because she had to leave on the third day. One of her children was ill.

“But I tell you, she could take your place on an identity parade and no-one would notice.

“You don’t have a sister, or a cousin?”

Sally’s parents were dead and she was an only child who’d produced an only child, Matthew, now studying computer systems at university.

“But my name,” she

Sally was determined not to give up on love, but was she simply clutching at a fantasy?

allowed, “is Sarah. There was another girl in my class at school called Sarah. She sort of got priority, so I’ve been Sally since I was five.”

“Weird!” Linda decided. “Though they do say that everyone has a double.”

****

The idea intrigued Sally, though: someone walking around, looking just like her and bearing the same name.

She wondered if that woman was indeed a distant relation.

Her mother had had one brother, but he had died childless, and her father had been brought up in an orphanage and knew nothing of his background.

Eventually, she forgot all about Linda’s encounter, instead trying to find herself another, more compatible, partner.

It was a process which consisted of agreeing to go out with a series of men who turned out to be total mismatches.

“Maybe you’re too picky,” Linda said when she’d reported yet another date had had to be got through with gritted teeth.

“He droned. And he still lived with his mother. Can you imagine?” Then Sally shrugged.

“Maybe I’m just not cut out for coupledom.”

“How old are you?”

“You know very well I’m thirty-nine.”

“You want to spend the next forty years hugging your pillow, with the cat?”

Sally wanted someone to care for, someone to care for her.

She wanted her heart to leap at the sight of him, yet to feel at ease in his company.

Perhaps she was no more realistic in her expectations than she’d been at eighteen, when she’d got married.

Matthew telephoned her. Irregularly, but that was the way of teenage sons.

Like most children of divorce, his loyalties were divided, but he was mature enough to want her not to be lonely.

“They say you have to kiss a lot of frogs,” he pointed out, “before you find your prince.”

****

Antonia Warner’s letter arrived out of the blue. She wrote from Birmingham, telling Sally that she was researching her family tree.

As the result of much delving, she had discovered that her mother, orphaned at birth, had had a brother slightly older than herself.

The children, unaware of each other’s existence, had been put into care and the little girl was adopted.

Much perusing of records had successfully identified the brother, who had married and produced a child.

It seemed reasonably likely that child was Sally.

She recalled the mysterious Sarah on the Isle of Skye.

So she wrote back, confirming the relevant details of her father’s life.

Further letters were exchanged. A photograph was enclosed.

Though they were, apparently, first cousins, there wasn’t much of a resemblance. But Antonia sounded nice.

When she said that her job occasionally brought her to Sally’s neck of the woods and perhaps they might meet, Sally was only too happy to agree.

****

They hit it off immediately. They shared a similar outlook and found the same things amusing.

“I feel I’ve known you for years,” Antonia said, after a lunch during which they laughed a great deal.

She was married to Ian, a GP, and they had three teenage children.

That Christmas they invited Sally and Matthew to join them.

There were parties and visits to the panto, there were walks and games and intense discussions about everything under the sun.

Ian, a big, jovial man, was a born host. Matthew became close to Sam, the cousin nearest to him in age. Sally met one of Ian’s partners.

Jack Richards was a widower around her own age who didn’t say much, but what he did say was well worth hearing.

She also became aware that he had the kind of blue-eyed steadfast gaze that she found quite beguiling.

“You’ve met someone, haven’t you?” Linda said when Sally returned home.

The phone rang the very next day.

“Sally?” the voice said. “It’s Jack. Jack Richards.”

They exchanged pleasantries for a while.

“I’d really like to see you again,” he said.

Sally knew that this was something that needed to be taken slowly.

****

A year later he asked her to marry him. They were sitting on the shores of Lake Windermere.

They’d had a delightful weekend, walking on the fells during the day and enjoying the tranquillity of the long and spectacular sunsets over the lake. “What do you say?” He turned to her, not quite daring to meet her eyes, because she would see in his eyes the imploring look that he couldn’t quite disguise.

He didn’t need to implore. They had come together gradually, and gradually she had become aware that Jack did make her heart leap, and yet she did feel totally relaxed with him, and safe and secure.

She said yes.

****

Sally moved down to the Midlands, but she and Linda kept in close touch.

Linda visited often, stayed over when the twins were born and threw herself into the role of godmother.

She’d taken up new interests, among them hang-gliding and horseriding, but she still enjoyed painting.

When the twins, Stella and Josh, were five and spending a week of the holidays with Jack’s parents, she persuaded Sally to accompany her to the Isle of Skye.

There they made various inept attempts to paint the purple heather and the mist-shrouded hills.

They’d both forgotten about the summer seven years ago when Linda had encountered Sally’s double.

Sally relished the freedom from the demands of two boisterous children.

On the third morning, she received a phone call. Josh had developed chickenpox and it was likely Stella would follow suit.

Linda came into Sally’s room as she was packing. She looked amazed.

“It was you! It must have been – that Sarah woman. Having to leave because one of her children was ill. I reckon it was a kind of déjà vu, but in reverse.”

She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed.

“Are you sure you didn’t dream the whole thing?” Sally said.

Linda shook her head in wonder.

“I must have had a sort of clairvoyant experience!”

Sally stopped what she

“I must have had a sort of clairvoyant experience!”

was doing.

“It’s more likely,” she said, “that there was another Sarah whose child was ill.”

“Do you believe that?” Linda looked awestruck at the possibility of possessing this psychic power – which had never manifested itself before and never did so again.

Sally didn’t know whether the whole thing was pure coincidence, or whether Linda had been granted a glimpse into the future.

She just wished that, if the latter was the case, they’d recognised it for what it was.

Then she might have been spared from kissing an awful lot of frogs.

The End.