Chocolate Petals

Tourmaline in pink and blue decorated your fingers. You were 84 but still you had the passions of a younger woman, your eyes kept their sparkle and your words could cut, cajole or caress with the wit you had always prided yourself on. You still had 'it'.

We had been together since the early years, before the war, grounded in a shared history and a youth that not many alive today could envisage yet alone identify with. Not for us computers and TV's and mobile phones and whatnot but walks together by the river, strawberry teas and daisy chains. Talk of a trip to Belgium when we're older.

Your life and mine brought a yin and a yan to our house, unbalanced now, alone without you. You were the strong one, witty and forthright with political views and a cultured appreciation for the current affairs of the world. I was the quiet one, the one who came home from work to listen to your opinions and to tailor my policy-making accordingly.

One time, in Spring last year, you came home from a visit to Margaret down in the Cotswolds and you told me you had a lump in your breast. We went straight to the hospital and demanded you be seen. It took nine hours but you were. And it was.

Nine months of poisoned veins and two mastectomies later and you finally succumbed to the disease we call inevitability and, though I nursed you through that painful time and held you in my arms as you gazed silently into my eyes and died a wisp, a leaf, that is not how you were to me and not how I remember you.

I remember you, Marjorie, as the mate to my soul. I remember you in the heat of your passion and the crush of your lips. I remember the first time you lifted up your cotton dress on the heath back in '43 when I was home on leave and we made our first child there that day. And every time I looked at your poor, fragile, darling form in a hospital bed, or helped you up from your chair, or wiped a tear from your eye, I saw the gorgeous girl with whom I fell in love before the war when we were but children together.

I remember you now as you asked for roses for your fifteenth birthday and I brought you roses from my grandfather's - he'd been growing them round the border, the rest given over to food production and said it would be a waste were you not have them. I also brought you chocolate which I'd found in London on the black market and which you shaved thinly with a knife and called the resultant petals 'chocolate roses'. We had our first kiss that afternoon as you thanked me for your presents. I remember it. It has never left me, that moment.

And now I sit here and, to me, you're in the next room, inconceivable otherwise, isn't it? We've been together so long, you and I, that since the war I've always felt you to be near me because I know that in your heart I am always nearby you too. We had disagreements, but they never blossomed into arguments. We had quarrels over philosophies or world events but never over us, it never occurred to me that we weren't the same person, just mingled in two separate bodies. And we always made it up by bedtime.

Your eyes, your thighs, your tender kisses, your dreams and your presence of mind in any situation. We made each other come every time back before anyone knew that that would become the preoccupation of every magazine article to be written since the 70's. We kept our love physical and alive even after those good doctors cut your beautiful breasts from you and hurt the one I love in some vain attempt to control the destiny of man.

But they were good to you and the modern world was good to us and gave us more time together than we would have had were we old when we were young. I miss you and I love you and there will always be chocolate in your bedside drawer for as long as I'm around and always roses on your gravestone every Friday.

Don't wait on me, I'll catch up soon.