Forty-one diaries

Text 1: Bought Her Daffodils, by Margery Toft

An original novel extract.

Arthur had kept a diary every day of their marriage, and Constance had never once read it. That had been the arrangement, though neither of them had ever said so. He wrote at the bureau after supper, for exactly a quarter of an hour, with his back to her, and she knitted, and the clock on the mantelpiece measured it out between them.

Now there were forty-one volumes in a row on the shelf, and the funeral was a week behind her, and the house had become so quiet that she could hear the electric meter turning in the hall.

She took down 1953 because it was the year their son was born. She told herself that was the reason.

His handwriting was small and tidy, like the man. Weather fair. Paid coal bill. C. tired. Weather wet. Mended fence. C. very tired, but would not say so. She turned the pages more quickly. It was all like this, a careful, modest record of nothing much, and she felt a kind of tenderness and a kind of disappointment, both at once, as if she had opened a present and found it was socks.

Then, in March, a line that stopped her.

Saw C. at the station today with the letter. She did not see me. I have decided to say nothing.

Constance sat down on the arm of his chair. The room tilted slightly and then righted itself.

She had been so careful. She had walked to the station on a weekday morning when he was at work, and stood on the platform with the letter in her glove, the letter from Daniel, who had asked her to come away with him to Canada. She had stood there while the train came in, and the doors opened, and the guard looked at her, and the doors closed, and the train pulled out. Then she had torn the letter into very small pieces and dropped them into the bin by the ticket office, and walked home, and peeled potatoes.

For forty years she had believed she carried that morning alone.

She turned the page. Weather fair. C. seems happier. Bought her daffodils.

Constance closed the book. In the hall the meter went round and round, patient as a clock. She sat very still in the darkening room, holding the diary against her chest with both arms, the way you might hold a person.

Explore how Margery Toft uses language and structure to present Constance’s discovery and her response to it.

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