We learn, in the normal run of things, that we have to part from our parents and their generation, whether early or late in our own lives. But somehow we nourish the belief that our friends are going to be with us until a kind of joint ending occurs.
It's a deluded, dream-like state, this, and all too often we are forced, joltingly, to wake up and cope with what we consider to be an unnatural death. It has been written that our losses are like worm-casts, growing beside us and accumulating for as long as we ourselves live. But I think losses are more often like looming mountains.
Writer Beverley Farmer died on 16 April. She and I had been friends, albeit usually long-distance ones, for more than 30 years. It seems to me now that we had so much in common that friendship was almost inevitable: it was just a matter of timing that first meeting.
Much of an age, we had been brought up in a similar way, I deduced; we attended the same university college, although not at the same time, and her most influential teacher became my university mentor. We married Greek men, and Beverley's son is the same age as my eldest son; eventually we both, to our great joy, acquired granddaughters. As well, we were both published by that trail-blazing firm McPhee Gribble. And we were letter-writers.
Significantly, each of us had experience of village in life in Greece, although Beverley lived here long before I arrived, and her village is in the north of the country, while mine is almost as far south as it is possible to go on the Balkan Peninsula. For that reason we never met in Greece, although there were phone calls, and there were always letters; we met instead in Melbourne, Geelong, Point Lonsdale, London, Oxford, and Canterbury.
The memories come rushing back. A day in Oxford, among the dreaming spires, where Beverley, a gifted photographer, took a great many pictures. A visit to Canterbury Cathedral where, used to free and easy Orthodox services, during which people stroll in and out of church, we were startled to be met, once a heavy door was opened, by a figure clad in deep black, cadaverous of mien, and sepulchral of voice.
'Evensong is in progress,' he intoned, and there was no invitation to enter the hallowed space. 'Straight out of Trollope,' remarked Beverley, making me laugh.