Alone in a room, alone in a family

They have gone, and the cups are still on the table.

The car went off the end of the road about ten minutes ago. It was a good visit. Nobody was short with anybody and somebody brought something.

There are two of these and they are not the same.

The first one everybody understands. You are by yourself, the day is long, nobody is coming, and the television is on for the noise. That one is on posters. The doctor asks about it. There are schemes for it, and some of them are good, and nothing here is going to be clever about them.

That one is not the smaller of the two. It is simply the one that gets believed.

The second one is that you were lonelier at half past four than you were at half past two.

That is the sentence. You have never said it out loud and you are not going to, because there is no way to say it that does not sound like an accusation against people who did nothing wrong.

Say any part of it and somebody will list your relatives back at you. But you've got a lovely family.

The conversation has a shape.

Your health, briefly. The weather. Their news, which is the good part and is genuinely the good part. Something about the telly. A thing one of them says every time. Then the business of coats and the long goodbye in the hall, which takes nearly as long as the sitting down did.

Forty minutes, and both sides know the shape, and neither of you put it there. It arrived over about fifteen years, one visit at a time, and it has never once been discussed.

And somewhere in it you are managed.

Slightly louder than necessary. Slightly simplified. A run of encouraging noises when you are halfway through something. Two of them working out between themselves, in your kitchen, about you, in the third person, in a kind tone, and you sat there and let it happen because stopping it would have made an afternoon of it.

You have become an item on somebody's list. You know that you have. You are glad they keep the list, and being on it is not a thing anybody can be glad about, and both of those have been true at the same time for years.

And here is the particular one, which never comes up.

There is nobody left who knows the names.

You could say a name in that room — somebody who mattered more than anybody now alive in it, for eleven years, in a town none of them have been to — and it would land on nothing. Not unkindness. They simply were not there, and the people who were there are gone.

And there is the telephone, which you have been looking at.

You do not ring because you rang last. You have found yourself keeping track of whose turn it is.

It is still your telephone, and the number still works, and nothing on this page says otherwise.

Nothing is asked of you here, and nothing in it is a reason to see less of anybody.

The visit was not nothing, and nothing here says it was. The only thing being said is that it does not do this, that it was never built to, and that it has never been said in that car.

They rang when they got home, the way they always do.