Love Lane

Are you Mr Sheppard, son of the head of such-and-such, long-dead, of Stourbridge?
I turn from sorting piles of ancient books, her own late father’s, look into the eyes of this woman
– Spirit free
And kind
Who would not see
A mind
Who saw beloved artefacts in terms of price and sale.

A woman slim, tall, her black hair shaped and shorn
A sense of colour blends and fabric in her style.

I knew her first name from the call
But had not recognised the educated northern speech
The absence of the Midland vowel.

You’re Helen Turner  aren’t you?

She told me how, from Redhill (then Girls’ Grammar School)
She climbed up so much further, a director, at the top of her career now.
Her husband with her now, an artist,

Who stood there affable, amused, as reminiscing Stourbridge days
We cut a deal
Whose value could not replicate the dead man’s life in books.

Meanwhile I sought a memory, and there was one, and only one.

Late May, late spring. It was the beginning of half-term, the evening long and light and sunny
Seeming quite like life, the view, at fourteen, top entrance:
a park like Mary Stevens

Life, the spread of lake, and playing fields, the Norton suburbs, then beyond
The hills of Wenlock, Abberley and Clee.

Those iron gates, their pillars white, we did not enter as we’d done.

Her brother had a van, and could bring the stock to Dudley. From there, they’d return to where their lives had grown, where all connection lay. That cultivated man, the artist, I would not see again.

Nor her. It was a second parting.

That evening, long ago in May she told me no, we would not be together, nor take those wandering walks through Oldswinford, nor aptly-named Love Lane.

Strange, the shock of that announcement is all I can recall now, her young determined face, her slenderness, her grace, her black, black hair.