We don’t at first know the details, except that she nearly died and that somehow Gerry has not overcome this trauma. We learn that early in their marriage, when they were still living in Northern Ireland, Stella was involved in an accident. In the hotel room, when they send away the chambermaid who’s come to put a chocolate on their pillows, he quips, ‘We’ve just turned down the turn-down service.’ Every event is an opportunity for joking. The comfort and pattern of their relationship particularly shine in their dialogue, which is so good it’s film-ready.
Gerry is uxorious, admiring of his wife and very protective: he always stands behind her on escalators because she has poor spatial awareness. They have a habit of kissing in lifts between floors. They have sex surprisingly often for a couple their age, and at night they sleep as ‘soft, stacked chairs’. MacLaverty draws out his characters with great patience. We would recognise Stella and Gerry if we found ourselves sitting opposite them in an airport lounge and we might think – wrongly – that they were dull. There is nothing especially unusual about them, or, to put it another way, there is everything unusual about them, as there is about any couple that has lasted so many years together, with their share of sadness and joy. ‘Like a sweet for take-off, modom?’ We imagine her rolling her eyes. For Gerry, high jinks means pretending to forget to buy the Werther’s Originals, so that he can present them to Stella with a flourish on the plane. Like any couple spending a lot of time together, they rely on a catalogue of shared jokes and memories. They have a grown-up son and a grandchild who live in Canada. Stella is religious and increasingly drawn to a spiritual life. Like MacLaverty himself, they are Irish but live in Glasgow. Gerry and Stella are in their seventies, retired and on a city break to Amsterdam. A marriage that has lasted forty years has many stories to offer, not just about forbearance, accommodations and forgiveness, but also about secrets, sadness and Faustian bargains. Writers may see young love as offering greater potential for excitement and plot, but, as Bernard MacLaverty’s fifth novel shows, love in later life can be both more complex and ultimately more affecting.
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