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Chris padded past the doorway in his dressing gown, scratching his scalp. After more than thirty years of sharing a house, these passing glimpses of him had come to resemble wildlife sightings of a once-majestic species grown sedentary, vaguely territorial, and entirely at home in its shrinking habitat.

“Tea?” he called, not pausing for a reply.

Their conversations had acquired the rhythm of low-level negotiations: dishwasher protocol, thermostat settings, the cat’s dietary quirks. Kate had taught herself not to take the distance personally. Presumably, he had too, though she’d only begun to consider such things since meeting Jeremy.

Jeremy was five years younger than she. Attentive in the way men are before they realize how much attention is actually required of them. He messaged to ask how she was doing and how her day had gone, and he seemed genuinely interested. She appreciated his engagement, though when they were together, his voice sometimes echoed, as though bouncing off a wall.

Chris leaned through the doorframe and tweaked her bum.

“Toast?”

“Please,” she said, though what she wanted to say was: please don’t touch me. She didn’t want to be touched, but she didn’t want to be alone either. She didn’t know what she wanted, only that it wasn’t this. Though sometimes, she did want to be touched.

“You’re a mess,” she told the mirror. “A mental and physical mess.”

She had met Jeremy at a friend’s birthday dinner, one of those gatherings of people she didn’t know but with whom she was expected to share something beyond middle age and good intentions. Chris had stayed home, nursing a case of man flu.

Jeremy was seated across from her and asked her curious, well-practiced questions about her “journey,” whatever that was supposed to mean—she didn’t ask. At the time, she had felt flattered because she had stopped expecting to be noticed, least of all by someone who seemed deliberately interested.

He had an ease about him, a studied charm that gave the impression of warmth without offering much of it. Afterwards, he sent her a message through social media. First coffee, then a walk, then dinner. She didn’t mention it to Chris, not out of guilt, but because she wanted to preserve the narrative until she understood it herself.

Jeremy was clearly an experienced philanderer. Detached. Unconcerned by the complications or obligations of other people’s lives. Their early meetings followed a familiar choreography: charm, caution, politeness, with just enough suggestion to keep things interesting, but never so much as to seem eager. But then something shifted. Not dramatically. There had been no rupture, no scene. Just a vague sense of something not quite right. Like milk that smelled fine but had the wrong look, still usable, but not something you’d want to pour over cereal.
He had chosen a café with white metal chairs that wobbled unevenly on the pavement. He ordered sparkling water, no ice, and gestured at the sky with the ease of someone who assumed sunshine was an affirmation of his personal choices.

“This weather,” he said, smiling. “I keep expecting to be fined for enjoying it.”

Kate returned the smile, politely. She couldn’t tell if he was referring to the climate crisis or the British discomfort with pleasure. Increasingly, she found Jeremy’s remarks floated in the space between charm and banality. He reached across and touched her wrist.

“You seem… pensive.”

She looked at his hand. Well-groomed, moisturized, almost performative. A hand that had never done anything difficult.

“I’m tired,” she said. “Not just tired. I’m tired of pretending I’m not tired.”

He tilted his head, an approximation of concern. “Anything I can do?”

“No,” she said. “Probably not.”

He didn’t take offense. He was the kind of man who found women’s emotions fascinating in theory, like abstract art or subtitled films. Worth noting but not touching.

They finished the meal in silence. He kissed her goodbye. His lips were dry. Driving home, Kate thought she’d end the relationship with a cowardly text or voice message, but she didn’t. There were more meetings. Lunches. Dinners that slid into mornings. Chris never asked where she stayed.

“It’s good to get away sometimes,” he said. “Everyone needs space.”

She agreed and wondered whether he needed it too.

One morning, after an argument neither of them could quite locate—silence being the closest they ever came to confrontation—Kate walked out into the street and sat in the car. She watched the daylight arrange itself in dull stripes over the pavement. A pigeon limped across the road like a discarded metaphor. Then she drove for a while, returned, fed the cat, deleted Jeremy’s number and made a list of things she would no longer pretend to care about. When Chris came in from the garden, he asked if she felt better, as though she’d been unwell.

That evening, after writing down “stop pretending to like jazz” and “never go on a juice cleanse again,” Kate undressed and caught sight of something small and dark above her left breast. She pressed it with two fingers. It was a lump, new, or maybe not. Her chest wasn’t something she examined often. She didn’t tell Chris.

The next morning, she called the GP and asked for an appointment. “Earliest is next Thursday. Unless it’s urgent,” the receptionist told her.

“Not urgent,” Kate said.

The week dragged forward in slow motion, but if he noticed, Chris didn’t say anything. He made dinner. Kate emptied the dishwasher. The cat was sick on the stairs. She cleaned it up.
At night, in bed, she touched the lump and bargained with it. If you go, I’ll drink less and exercise more. I can’t stop smoking because I never started.

The next day, the young GP with an unblinking smile said it was probably a cyst. “But best to get it checked,” she added.

Driving home, Kate considered calling Emma. But how would she begin? Hi darling, how’s work? By the way, I might have cancer.

At home, Chris was fixing a shelf in the utility room. “Everything all right?”

“Fine,” she said. “Just routine stuff.”

He nodded, focused on a Rawlplug that wouldn’t bite.

That night, she cried in the bathroom, quietly, with the fan on.

The hospital appointment was scheduled for the following Tuesday. She told no one because she couldn’t say the words lump and cancer in reference to herself. Instead, she went for a walk. The morning was damp and miserable, the air like a limp handshake.

“For Christ’s sake,” she muttered. “You could at least dredge up some sunlight for what might be my last day.”

She followed the canal path and imagined the lump bobbing with each step. A secret stowaway, already taking up space. As she glanced down into the collar of her shirt, she heard her name called out in a voice stretched across decades, lilting and strange, like a dream interrupted.

“Kate?”

It was Marianne Lyle, née Baxter. They had been at school together. Marianne held the lead of a wiry terrier that twisted as if mid-seizure. Her face carried the strange brightness of people who are never sure if happiness is premature or mistaken.

“You look just the same!” she said, then laughed and added, “Well, I mean, don’t we all?”

Kate smiled. The reunion felt faintly surreal, like finding an old toy outside in the rain. Marianne’s face was rounder now, and her hair, grey at the temples, was arranged into something buoyant and insistent.

They exchanged the expected facts: children (Marianne had two), knees (shot), books (Kate feigned interest), property (Kate withheld her address). Then something rose in Kate’s throat—abrupt and indecorous, like a belch at a funeral.

“You know what I really hate?” she said. “The constant pretending. I wake up and think: another day in this fucking skin. And then I think, why am I still pretending I enjoy any of it?”

Marianne blinked. “Gosh.”

“I don’t mean every second,” Kate added. “Just most of them.”

There was a pause. Then Marianne nodded. Slowly.

“No one says it,” she whispered. “But I think it all the time. I just… thought I wasn’t allowed to.”

The dog barked, lunging at nothing. The two women stood for a moment longer, holding the silence like a fragile object until it eventually cracked.

“See you again, maybe?” Marianne asked. “Do you come here often?”

“No,” Kate said. “And perhaps never again.”

When she got home, Chris had cooked. This in itself was not remarkable. He had developed a habit of making one-pan meals involving cumin and sweet potato, which he claimed were “anti-inflammatory.”

They sat across from one another in the conservatory. Kate noticed the windows were streaked with dust. She wondered whether conservatory windows belonged to the house or the garden and who could be held responsible. The line was unclear.

Chris poured the wine.

“Did you know turmeric’s meant to be neuroprotective?” he said.

Kate looked at him. His skin had taken on a liverish tint, and his jaw was slackened slightly at the corners. His eyes, once bright, now had a rheumy sheen. His hair had thinned to the texture of baby fluff. It hit her then, not his age, but his oldness, and how that wasn’t the same thing.

But he was still horny. He made that clear, if less urgently now. His desire felt like something she had to acknowledge, like a child’s drawing on the fridge. She thought about telling him about the appointment, the scan, the lump. She didn’t.

“I did know that,” she said, and reached for her glass.

They ate in silence. Chris made a few attempts at conversation—headlines, the neighbor’s fence—but everything felt submerged, as though she were listening through water.
Later, in bed, he rolled towards her.

“Do you want to—”

“No,” she said quietly. “I really don’t.”

She waited for the sigh, the pause meant to punish, but none came. He rolled back.

The next morning, Kate woke before dawn. The house was still. She moved through it softly, as though not to disturb whatever had settled in overnight. She opened the back door, careful not to let the cat out. The sky was the color of dishwater.

The lump, it turned out, was a cyst. A harmless little sack of tissue that shouldn’t have existed but did anyway. She wondered what compelled a body to produce things so useless and inexplicable. Then again, the world itself was full of toxins, and she was probably full of microplastics.

The hospital’s email read: “Nothing of concern.” She had told no one, and now she didn’t need to. She filed it away under Things Not to Think Too Much About.

That evening, they ate early—another turmeric stew with its faintly fungal tang—and watched a documentary about the planet’s last untouched habitats. It moved slowly, reverently, with sliding drone footage and plaintive piano.

Kate felt cradled by the hush of the narration, its papery voice drifting through the room like a current of air. On the screen, a jellyfish hovered, translucent and slow, each pulse a lantern’s glow in black water.

Chris made a noise somewhere between a cough and a scoff.

“This is rubbish,” he said. “Too bloody David Attenborough. All that music and close-ups of things floating around doing nothing.”

Kate wanted to say she liked it. Not everything needed to be filled with plot, noise, and urgency. But she kept watching the jellyfish, glowing and alive.

Chris turned off the television and signaled he was going to bed.

“I’ll check on the cat,” she said.

The next morning, Kate thought about Marianne. Did she and her husband still share a bed, and did they still have sex? From there her mind drifted to Chris, to the possibility that he might be having an affair, and by some absurd symmetry, that it could be with Marianne. She considered asking him outright, but then she’d have to tell him about Jeremy.

It happened later that day. Chris had gone out to neaten the lawn edges, holding the shears like a man who knew what he was doing, which perhaps he did. Kate was inside, folding laundry into meaningless piles: gym clothes she hadn’t worn in years, socks without partners, a bra so stretched it resembled discarded skin. Outside, the clatter of shears and Chris’s tuneless humming stitched the air, until they stopped. She found him slumped by the compost bin, his face the color of printer paper, his mouth slack.

“Chris?” she said, crouching. “Chris.”

His eyes flickered, opened, but were unfocused, as though he’d fallen from a great height.

“I’m all right,” he managed, but the words fell out sideways, slurred.

She phoned for an ambulance. Her voice was steady, as if booking a haircut. They told her to keep him still. She folded an old gardening jumper under his head and avoided looking at the drool on his chin.

At the hospital, they called it a minor stroke.

“A warning,” said the doctor. Chris nodded, absorbing the verdict like a sponge in water. Kate sat beside him, watching the words float past—ischaemic, lifestyle modification—like parts of someone else’s story. Someone older.

In the silence that followed, Chris tentatively reached for her hand as though mimicking a scene from a film.

“I don’t want to be a burden,” he said, barely above a whisper.

She didn’t answer. Not out of indifference. But because all she could think in that moment was: not yet. Not like this. Not while the cat needs feeding and the garden bin is full.

The weeks that followed folded inward like a slack sandwich. Prescriptions. Follow-ups. Leaflets on sodium, stress, and low-impact exercise. Kate found herself chopping celery with undue force. Resenting the routine. Then resenting herself for resenting it. She refused to cook turmeric stew.

Chris moved more slowly now and with a slight limp. He forgot things. Once, he called her by the cat’s name. They laughed, but something in the air cracked, and neither of them could quite smooth it back. At night, he reached for her. Sometimes she let him. His desire felt like someone clawing at a ledge—fragile, clinging, nearly gone.

Once, rubbing ointment into a dry patch on his back, she caught sight of them in the mirror: her hands sinewy; his skin, mottled and fragile. He looked like an old man. She looked like an old woman tending to him. They had reached a place where nothing appeared to change, and yet everything was in flux. One day, you woke up to find that a part of you was no longer working. The end began particle by particle, until your days no longer resembled anything you had once considered life.

“I’m all right,” Chris said, though she hadn’t asked.

Later that week, while Chris napped in front of a program about antique restoration, Kate sat on the back step tending her fingernails. The garden had grown wild. Dandelions pushed up through cracks in the paving. The spider plants in the conservatory had browned at the tips. The rhododendrons were in full bloom, unruly, almost indecent in their excess, and all the more beautiful for it. She thought of the jellyfish. Not for its beauty, but because it had glowed the way they did.

A part of her longed for something decisive. A rupture. A reckoning. Something to clarify her position, but life just moved forward without asking her permission. Appointments. Meals. Half-conversations. Limp sex. A body that sometimes betrayed her and sometimes didn’t.
Still here, she thought. Not a triumph. Not a plea. Just a notation. Still here, like mildew in the grout. Like the silence between two people who once had nothing to say because everything had already been said, and now had nothing to say because there was nothing left.

She pressed her knuckle into her breast, half-hoping the lump might return. At least then there would be something to name. Something to act on. She thought of Marianne, of her shocked “Gosh,” and without warning, she began to laugh until tears ran down her face.

“Everything alright?” Chris called from inside.

“Absolutely,” she shouted back. “I was just thinking maybe we should go out and catch some jazz. I’d hate it. But you’d love it. And maybe it would do us good.”

Something shifted inside her then, perhaps a flicker of guilt at her own insensitivity when Chris needed so much, but when she went inside, the television was off and Chris was laughing too.

“I always knew you thought my experimental jazz sounded like a herd of scalded cats,” he said. “Sometimes I did too. I just didn’t want to admit it.” He reached for her hands. “We’re a couple of frauds,” he said. “Old frauds, but still here, still together, and I’m in it for the long haul if you are.”

Kate sighed. She wanted to feel encumbered, or disappointed, or even angry, but that, too, would have been a kind of performance. She wiped her eyes. “Me too.”
 

London Sojourn

Rewriting Life After Retirement

by Rebecca Knuth

 

A captivating memoir of one woman’s bold leap into reinvention — trading academia for adventure, storytelling, and self-discovery in the heart of London...

London Sojourn is a bibliophile’s dream and offers avid readers a delicious outsider's perspective on moving abroad using a literary lens.  Burned out from a career in academia, lifelong Anglophile and retiree Rebecca Knuth moves to London seeking reinvention, only to become transformed.  To fulfill her dream of writing creative nonfiction, Rebecca enrolls in a two-year writing course at City University. More important, Rebecca discovers how thoroughly the mores of the twentieth century silenced women writers. She seizes her chance to give them voice in her thesis, determined to be heard herself. A charming, heartfelt, educational, and brave story for creatives, retirees, seekers, writers, readers, and dreamers. "Intriguing, introspective, and densely packed with historical and observational factoids."−Kirkus Reviews Learn more at rebeccaknuth.com Available from Amazon, Bookshop, and your local independent bookstore.

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