The Group Did Not Survive It, But Not in the Way People Expect

The group did not survive it, but not in the way people expect.

There was no argument. Nobody was thrown out of the chat. Nobody made a speech. At no point did anybody say I think this has run its course, which Hilary says she would almost have preferred, because it would have been a thing that happened on a date.

What happened was that the chat became administrative.

---

Birthdays. A link. A reply to the link. A photograph of somebody’s dog.

The four of them had, for eleven years, used that chat as a kind of continuous low-level conversation — forty messages on a Tuesday about nothing — and after the message it became a noticeboard.

Then it became a noticeboard that two of them used.

Then, at some point the following spring, it went quiet, and the quiet was not remarked upon, and after about six weeks of quiet it had turned into the kind of quiet that would require a formal act to break.

---

Pav tried to organise something in the June.

Anyone free the 14th?

Nuala said yes. Hilary said yes, and then spent a day worrying that saying yes had been presumptuous.

Dawn did not reply.

It did not happen. Pav did not suggest a different date, and after that nobody tried again.

---

That is the whole ending. It took about nine months and nothing happened in any of them.

“People want a scene,” Hilary says. “There wasn’t one. Thirty-one years and it ended with an unanswered message about a Saturday.”

---

Nuala and Dawn still speak. Weekly, sometimes more.

Nuala managed the only genuinely difficult thing in the entire business, which was to stay close to both of them without ever once carrying information between them. She was asked to, by both, in different ways, in the first few months. She refused both times, gently, and both times said the same thing, which was: “I’m not doing that. You can be cross with me about it.”

Neither of them was cross with her. Both of them have said since that she was the only one who came out of it having behaved well throughout.

---

Pav and Hilary still speak.

They see each other more than they used to, which neither of them has ever commented on and both of them have noticed. There is a specific quality to that friendship now that Hilary finds difficult: they are close, and they are close partly because they are the two who were bored, and that is not a foundation either of them enjoys looking at.

The two halves do not meet. There have been two occasions — a fiftieth and a christening — where it might have happened, and on both occasions somebody was very slightly unwell.

---

Hilary spent about a year trying to work out whether she had been forgiven and eventually understood that this was the wrong question.

“It’s not that she hasn’t forgiven me,” she says. “I think she probably has, in the sense that she doesn’t think about me much and doesn’t wish me harm. Forgiveness isn’t the currency. The thing that’s gone isn’t something you get back by being forgiven.”

---

In the September, fourteen months after the message, Hilary wrote and asked whether Dawn would meet her for a coffee.

She said she would understand entirely if not. She said she was not going to ask for anything. She said she had one thing she wanted to say and that afterwards she would leave it alone, permanently, and mean it.

---

Dawn replied in four days.

Yes. Not the restaurant.

Hilary laughed out loud at that, on her own, in a hallway, and then sat down on the stairs and did not laugh at all.

They met in a café near the station on a Tuesday afternoon.