The Ladies’ Club
There was something about these women that captivated Gillian . . .
I Twas when Gillian had started working from home that she first noticed the women. Well, actually, that wasn’t quite true.
When she’d first started working from home, pretty much everywhere else was closed.
It was such a strange time to look back on now.
And then things had begun to open up again, with precautions at first, and then without.
Life had gradually returned to normal – except in one respect.
Somehow it had become accepted that everyone would continue to work from home.
So long as Gillian had her laptop and her work mobile, she was fine.
That’s how she, being a full-time worker, came to be idling in a café at 10.30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.
She set up her laptop, her mobile at her elbow, and returned to her spreadsheets.
Customers came and went. None of it particularly distracted her.
In fact, she found the low-level buzz the closest thing to the old office environment that she’d encountered in years.
She hadn’t realised just how much she missed that.
More than the coffeemachine gossip and inane elevator chit-chat, it was simply the background hum of human activity.
After a couple of hours, warmed and hydrated with tea and more tea, she returned home.
The silence of her house hit her more bleakly than ever.
She tried putting on the radio, but found the shouty DJ intrusiv and their choice of music distracting.
Silence blanketed the flat again.
Next morning, settling at her desk, she thought longingly of going back to the café.
So that became her new routine.
She’d get to the café around nine o’clock.
There was one table, smaller than the others, set awkwardly behind the stand where customers collected their napkins and sachets of sugar.
Gillian had noticed that no-one liked it.
Cramped for two people, it was usually unoccupied no matter how busy the café got.
That became her table. That first Wednesday she was vaguely aware of a high-spirited group of women over by the window, but she didn’t pay them much attention until she realised it was them again the next Wednesday.
Same table, same seven women.
Same high spirits interspersed with intervals of quieter conversation.
“Regulars?” Gillian asked Joan, the owner, when she went to the counter for her second pot of tea.
She tipped her head towards their table.
“Ah, you mean my Wednesday Widows’ Club?” Joan asked.
Gillian flinched with indignation on their part, and Joan laughed.
“That’s what they call themselves. They come in every Wednesday . . .” “And they’re all widows?” After Joan nodded, Gillian turned to take another look.
Widows. It conjured up sad older ladies in mourning for their beloveds.
Older ladies they might be, but these women were having a whale of a time!
One of them had just finished recounting some tale that had the others in stitches.
As Gillian watched, two of them stood up to gather their plates and mugs together, but then another took charge, producing a tray from beside her seat and fussily piling everything on it.
She was the one who brought it to the counter for Joan.
“Thanks, Joan. Great coffee and cake as usual. See you next week!”
A flurry of kisses and hugs amidst the tugging on of jackets and gathering of handbags – and then they were gone.
Suddenly the café was as quiet as her flat.
“Widows . . .” Gillian murmured. Just like her.
There was no chance of returning to her spreadsheets now.
Her thoughts were far away, with Simon.
Oh, her lovely Simon. “He was a good lad. You could always rely on him,” folk said after the funeral.
He’d been a plumber, with a solid reputation for doing gold standard work.
A good lad. Really, could you want anything more in a husband?
Someone who was kind and thoughtful, who never let you down?
Simon had been everything Gillian had ever wanted.
And then, in the blink of an eye, the skidding of a wheel, the inexperience of a young driver – gone.
None of her friends had been through this. A widow at thirty-seven.
At a loss, they offered the usual well-meaning platitudes.
“Time’s a great healer.” She wanted to ask “How long?”
How long would it take for this savage wound to become any less painful?
And if it did, would it mean she was forgetting him?
“Life leads you down the path you’re supposed to travel.”
“Really?” was her silent, dismissive response to that one.
Her mum, her rock, was doing her best.
“We know you miss him, love, but he wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.”
Well, of course he wouldn’t, but it wasn’t like she could switch it off.
All these months on, Gillian doubted if she’d ever emerge from the darkness.
Which is why she was so fascinated by the women.
Widows, just like her, and yet nothing like her.
How had they managed to find their way back to the light?
Wednesdays became the focal point of Gillian’s week.
They were always the same group of seven, squeezing around the same table.
She could imagine how she would have told Simon about them.
“They’re all sorts of ages – sixties, seventies, maybe eighties.
“Typical older women, with short grey hair, or white.
“One’s is longer and she wears it in a bun.
“Oh, and one’s is dark brown – can’t possibly be natural.”
She could imagine Simon’s “Oh, miaow!”
It made her smile. “Nice-lady sweaters, long scarves round their necks, gold wedding bands . . .”
Unconsciously her fingers caressed hers.
“One’s quite bossy – always takes charge. There’s always one, isn’t there?”
Just as there was always a quieter one.
The others would gently try to draw her in, Gillian had noticed.
“They seem kind ladies.” She’d given them all names now – Bossy, Mouse, Bun, Dark Brown . . .
Then there was Sticky – she had a slight limp and used a walking stick – then Stripey – her jumpers always were – and Giggles.
She was the one with the stories that made the others howl with laughter.
I wonder how they know each other, Gillian wondered one morning, her eyes on her laptop screen but all her attention on the women.
Friends first, who had all been widowed over time?
It seemed unfeasibly unlucky that none of them had a surviving spouse.
She was musing on that as she went to collect her second pot of tea.
That was when she realised that she and “her widows” were the only customers.
She glanced at her watch. Mid-morning. The café was usually bustling at this hour.
“Where is everyone?” she asked Joan, gesturing around. “I’ve never seen it so quiet.”
“It’s the weather,” Joan replied, nodding towards the windows. Rain streamed down the glass. “Keeps folk at home.”
She laughed at Gillian’s astonished face.
“Hadn’t you noticed? It started shortly after you came in.”
Gillian shook her head. “I must have been absorbed.”
“You’ll have earned this, then,” Joan said, placing the little teapot on the counter.
Gillian didn’t correct her assumption that she’d been hard at work.
No need to confess that she’d been preoccupied with her widows.
The weather certainly hadn’t dampened their mood.
Their spirits seemed as buoyant as ever.
She had just reached her table when she heard a loud bang from their table.
It sounded like the walking stick clattering to the ground.
She spun round, ready to pick it up, instinctively helpful.
The ladies were cheering, thrusting slender glasses at Bossy as froth spumed out of the champagne bottle in her hand.
Gillian couldn’t help laughing at herself.
Walking stick? Hardly! That had been the champagne cork popping!
“Joan, come and have a sip!” That was Bossy, flapping her hand to call Joan over.
“And we can’t leave you out, can we?” she added, suddenly looking at Gillian and flapping her hand again.
Gillian felt obliged to protest.
“Oh, I couldn’t . . .” But it was a half-hearted effort, and Bossy had already poured a couple of inches into a glass.
She held it out to her. “Go on. All work and no play and all that.”
“Come on in!” Bun and Dark Brown on the bench seat insisted on squashing up to make room for her between them.
Joan was urged to drag over another chair.
“Cheers, everyone!” A criss-crossing forest of arms clinked glasses together.
“What are you celebrating?” Gillian asked twice over the chatter, doubting anyone could hear her.
Bossy answered.
“It’s Corinne’s one-year anniversary.” She pointed at Mouse, who blushed.
“One-year anniversary of . . .?” Gillian wondered aloud, looking across at Mouse – Corinne.
“It’s a year since I lost my husband,” she said in a wistful voice.
“Oh!” Gillian was nonplussed, which Bossy plainly recognised.
“Not that we’re celebrating that, exactly,” she put in hastily. “We mark their passing and celebrate the life that they shared.
“We’ve all been there, you see.” She bobbed her head around the group, and they nodded in agreement. “We’ve all lost our partners.
“And somehow we’ve found this group. It’s a well-known fact that tea and gossip are the best of friends and cure any ill.”
“Too right.” The sentiment echoed around the table.
“Though the occasional glass of bubbly doesn’t hurt, does it, Helen!” This was Giggles, tipping her glass at Bossy – Helen.
“It was Bette there,” Bossy indicated Bun, “who introduced me.
“And I brought Olga, who brought Fran.” That was Stick and Stripey.
“There have been others over the years,” Bossy continued, “but they come and go.
“It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but these women, their support – well, it’s been a lifeline for me.
“It’s taught me to live again when I was in danger of drowning.
“Four and a half years now...”
“Two years,” Stick and Stripey said together.
“Ten! I can’t believe it . . .” That was Bun.
A ripple of similar murmurs ran around the table.
“Seven months . . .” It was barely a whisper.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Bossy said, and Gillian felt a warm hand clasp hers. “I bet it seems like yesterday, and yet forever.
“And nothing anyone says helps, does it?”
Gillian couldn’t speak. The other woman was a blur through a haze of tears.
“We know. Believe me, we know.”
Beside her, Bun put an arm round her shoulders.
Dark Brown shuffled an inch or two closer.
It was like an embrace. Or a lifeline.
“Just you take all the time you need,” Bossy said with another squeeze of her hand. “We’ll be here when you’re ready.”
WHEN Nicola Gray entered the home of Carol Stevens nine years ago, they had no idea that this was to be a lasting friendship.
“We were on a road trip down the Pacific coast to San Francisco with our Canadian friends, Rom and Aileen,” Nicola explains. “We stopped to visit their friends, Carol and Harlow.
“Carol and I hit it off immediately. We bonded over our love of quilting and fabric.
“Over the eight years of being friends, we only met in person six times, but we e-mailed and messaged one another frequently.”
Carol had been a quilter for decades, while Nicola came to the craft around 15 years ago.
Nicola went on to join the Newent Quilters group.
They are a small but productive group who always have charity projects on the go.
“Carol and I would send pictures of our quilting projects,” Nicola continues. “If I got stuck, she would always point me in the right direction.”
Two years ago, Carol was diagnosed with an aggressive form of acute myeloid leukaemia.
“A short time before she passed, I had an e-mail from her saying she was leaving me some fabric and wanted me to ‘keep busy’.
“I was, of course, very touched.”
Following Carol’s death, Aileen and Rom came to stay, bringing a huge suitcase.
“It was full of beautiful fabrics, but I couldn’t deal with it then and there. It was too much,” Nicola says.
“Later I found a quiet day and went through it.
“There were a couple of blocks in there – pieces sewn together to create the repeat pattern ‘churn dash’.
“All the fabric was there to do more blocks and make an entire quilt.”
Nicola called on her fellow Newent Quilters to create a quilt and raffle it for charity.
A friend helped her in the planning stages, then a group of eight put the quilt together at an all-day workshop.
Once the quilt top had been pieced, Ali Shayle of Orchard Quilts completed the quilting process.
“When I saw the Leukaemia UK quilt completed, I found it quite overwhelming,” Nicola recalls.
“Quilting is all about connections – shapes, patterns, colour – and they’re made with communication and love.”
The quilt took pride of place at the Newent Quilters exhibition last year, where the group raised around £1,300 split between two charities in memory of Carol – Leukaemia UK and Maggie’s.
In one final twist of fate, the winning raffle ticket belonged to Carol’s son and daughter-in-law.
Unknown to Nicola, Aileen and Rom had bought tickets on their behalf.
“I think it is such a fitting outcome – the quilt is being returned to the family and the circle is now complete.
“I miss Carol’s sunshine personality, enthusiasm and encouragement, but she sits on my shoulder whenever I sew.
“She instructed me to keep busy, and yes, I was kept busy, Carol!”
To find out more about the work of Leukaemia UK, or to make a donation, visit leukaemiauk.org.uk, or call 020 8189 9878.