Dear Thief

1

In answer to a question you asked a long time ago, I have, yes, seen through what you called the gauze of this life. But to tell you about it I will have to share with you a brief story.

One night in the hot summer of ’76 I was staying with my grandmother, who was dying, and I was reading a book of Buddhist stories. My grandmother was asleep in the rocking chair, inhaling with feathered breaths. Her exhales were smooth and liquid, which seems to me now the surest sign of a life’s exit — when the act of giving away air is easier than that of accepting it. In fact I knew she might be facing her last night but I didn’t do much to cling to those moments. I was sitting on the sofa in my underwear with my legs drawn to the side, watching her for minutes at a time while the breaths fluttered in through the dignified gap between her lips. She was sweating around her brows, and at the base of her throat. I remember vividly her sapphire pendant in the dip there where the skin was moist.

My grandmother had gone beyond the point of caring about death. She’d phoned me the previous night to say she was on her way to the ever-after and could do with somebody to feed the dog; I never did know what she thought would happen to the dog after she was gone, though maybe she had no concept of after, or no stomach for it. When I had spoken to her I called my parents at their hotel in Kerala in India and told my father that his mother was dying; I packed a small number of things, including the book of Buddhist stories on my parents’ bookshelves, and made the journey to London the next morning.

It had meant walking at first light from Morda to Oswestry, to catch a bus to Shrewsbury, to catch a train to London. I went along the lane that you and I had walked so many times, from my house to Morda village, one-and-a-half wingspans wide and hedges of six feet, crossing brooks and dipping away from sight only to appear again in triumph five hundred yards later, shaking the valley off its back. Gently monstrous; roaring in the glory of spring or summer. This is how I think of that landscape when I stop to remember — although I know, before you raise a sceptical brow, the over-optimism of memory.

My mother had told me to take money from the cloisonné box on the kitchen dresser for the train fare. I was twenty-four but I had almost nothing of my own. This is what happens when there are cloisonné boxes in the kitchen and folded leather wallets in the pocket of a father who so brims with a love he can’t fathom that he must give and give in order not to suffocate with the excess — a daughter who isn’t so much spoilt as made resourceless and who lives life in a state of constant guilty gratitude. Though happy all the same; I wouldn’t want you to think otherwise.

It would take at least two days for my parents to get back from India; that was why I left Morda early, because it was me, and me alone, who would see my grandmother leave this world. That was the first time I ever did something for which somebody else could be truly grateful and is why I remember that walk along the lanes and the journey to London and the sweat on my grandmother’s throat. I remember it because it was the first time I felt neither indebted nor childlike, as if the whole kindly legacy that was my parents had been removed from the equation and left me freshly sprung on the sofa in the heat of the evening and the presence of death — defiant of death, but somehow courting it too. Now and again my grandmother would wake up, look at me, smile vaguely, then sleep.

The Buddhist stories I was reading that night were about discipline and faith and letting go of the things that are liable to pass. There is the man who grieves so much for the son he thinks has died that he refuses to accept, years later, the man who returns and calls him Father. Do not cling so hard to your own version of the truth, says Buddha, else you will fail to see the real truth when it comes knocking. There is the story of teacups: the student asks the master why Japanese teacups are so delicate and easy to break. The master tells the student that it isn’t that the teacups are too delicate, but that the person who drinks from them is too heavy-handed. It’s not for teacups or grass or mountains to change, says Buddha. It is for us to adapt to what is. Do not clutch, do not judge, let pass. Everything is impermanence.

It wasn’t at this point that I saw through your gauze of life, though; actually, far from it. In my grandmother’s hot, silent room, nothing had ever seemed more permanent. When I was a child I had played on the floor of this room, shifting tiny figurines of soldiers, horses and goats around invisible territories. I was ringed by the chocolate-brown velvet sofas and biscuit-brown velvet chairs and the standing lamps and occasional tables and the smell of burnt honey that had knotted even into the carpet, the caramel carpet; this is how childhood comes to me, in terms of sweet food lavishly spread, uneaten, slowly going to waste.

Nothing had changed since those days except that everything had degraded and two decades of light had beaten the colours back a shade. But here, the little change only proved the lack of any dramatic one, and it was the same with the dog — the dog that had been here when I was a child was dead, but here was its offspring lying in its shadow by the rockers of the chair, just as always. Don’t you think — don’t your senses lead you to admit — that nothing has ever been less gauzelike than this great wall of reality we’re faced with, day in and out?

In any case, at one point I got up and poured some iced water for my grandmother, and turned out all the lights in the room except for the lamp next to the rocking chair. The pool of sweat at the base of her throat had dried up and her skin had flattened a tone — and I mean it this way, like a piece of music gone off-key. Her eyes were open and she’d taken my hand. ‘You’ll grow into yourself,’ she said, and it was the first sentence she had put together for hours. ‘Grow into myself?’ I replied. ‘Yes — in spite of everything, we’ve always looked poor, our family, it’s the big bones and height and these dirty tans we get, but your mother became quite beautiful in the end, and so will you.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, though I wasn’t sure I agreed, either about my mother or about myself. ‘Have you fed the dog?’ ‘Yes, Nana, don’t worry.’ ‘He gets manipulative if he’s not fed.’ ‘Really, what does he do?’ ‘He plays mind games, he gets witty.’ ‘How so?’

She closed her eyes and shook her head faintly. ‘Well, it’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’ve fed him.’ ‘Where is he?’ she asked. ‘Down here by your feet.’ ‘He’s alright?’ ‘He’s out like a light.’ ‘He’s alight?’ ‘No — he’s asleep.’ ‘Asleep?’ ‘Yes, fast asleep.’

Then her brow crumpled and the feeling was that she’d lost her footing suddenly and tripped another yard down towards death. It is hard to explain these things now, they sound invented, yet this is exactly how it felt — the tripping downwards towards death. I got the book and read her a very short story called ‘The Burden’, and as I read I could see the scene the two of us made: two women, one, I suppose, in the prime of life and one about to leave life altogether, their dark hair and louring (so Nicolas once said) features making them unmistakably related, one dressed in beige and the other hardly dressed at all; my grandmother was right, my mother’s side of the family had always had a degenerate and hungry look. My father’s genes were more refined, but recessive. I think by that age, twenty-four, I still hadn’t stopped hoping to turn out like him.

You know it is said, and has been proven, that people are more likely to die when they are left alone, a fact I didn’t know then but must have sensed in some way, because during my reading of ‘The Burden’, which was not more than a couple of paragraphs long, my grandmother closed her eyes again and prepared herself for what it was she now saw coming. I did wait; I waited by her feet for an hour and did nothing but hear her breaths and pre-empt the last one. Sometimes there was a gap of fifteen or twenty seconds after the exhale when I was so sure it was the end that I’d grip her hand tighter in farewell — and then a sudden gasp and the air would go back in again. Each time this happened I became more tense and almost irritated until it felt as though I were willing her to die faster. So eventually I kissed her forehead, put on a dress and took myself outside.

She lived by the river a way downstream from Woolwich Arsenal and upstream from the old firing range at Rainham Marshes. A pacifist sandwiched by war, she used to say. She had a grand, decrepit terraced house in one of the wharfs before they were demolished and turned into what they call luxury dwellings. When we were children she would climb down the bouldered flood wall with us and take us onto the beach, and we’d walk or run in swirls following the oil that had marbled the mud and sand — and we weren’t to tell our parents, who had forbidden us to go anywhere near that quick and filthy shore.

Because the summer was hot and the river low I was able to walk right along the water’s edge that night of my grandmother’s death. If you want to guarantee staying alive, my grandmother used to insist, you must stay high on the foreshore so that you don’t get sucked into the mud. I went a long way east towards the marshes, walking an imaginary plank in the dusk.

Across the river there was the open scrub-land and what looked like a huge shadow cast by nothing — the Gallions Hotel, where, in times past, people would stay before getting on steamships to India, to China. Just here the Thames is half river, half sea. A thousand pale horses frothing at the bit. It is close to a mile wide, they say, and usually churning and milky, with a driving wind; they also say that there is a primordial forest under the water where it bends at Gallions Reach and that the current swells over rotted upturned roots.

But on this night it was differently milky, it was low and languid as if basking. Maybe this was when the gauze started to show itself and things began to lose their ordinariness, with the moon fattening in the night heat and everything quietly expanding. On its south bank there is a stretch, or at least there was then, where a patch of woods and thicket comes all the way down to the shore so that, with the warmth, the sand, the silver light and the curious stillness, you feel like you could be somewhere tropical. A shifting, a partial collapse; I don’t know. I might have just as easily been with my parents in India, or they might have stepped out of the trees barefoot onto the beach, my mother with her tan and Amazonian height, my father quiet and rangy behind her.

Just after the trees the river kinks right and the beach is narrow or sometimes gone, and every time I had walked that far before I hadn’t been able to get any further. You can climb up from there and then drop back down to the shoreline after the kink, where the beach is wide, maybe at its widest, which is what I’d always done. That night was the first time I’d walked right round the corner of the river, and it was there that I found — or anyhow found myself walking on — something that wasn’t sand or stone, but bones.

When you trod on them they gave a civil clink like a knife tapping a fork or a porcelain cup shaking in a saucer. They were hip bones, femurs, shin bones, tiny pivoting joints, a ball without a socket and a socket without a ball, the smooth plates of kneecaps, long scooped jawbones that belonged to something probably bovine, or maybe equine. It wasn’t a scattering, either, but a pile that had lodged itself in the moonlit sedge by the flood wall.

I put some of them out on the sand. They had a low, resigned calm. Nicolas has since wondered if they were from an old glue factory that had been upriver, on the Isle of Dogs, and had washed up at the kink where the current is forced to shift direction. Just a guess, though. Possibly they had sat on that shelf of the riverbed for years and had only been exposed by the low tide. Or maybe they hadn’t been washed up but had been dumped there, though who would bother? And what for? One way or another they must have been in the Thames for a long time, given how smoothed off they were by water and how hollowed and porous, as much shell as bone.

They were greyish-white and washed clean. These most functional of things, but so abstract when you look at them out of context. They could be sculptures. So I mused for a while on how beautiful they were, with a kind of self-conscious appreciation that annoys me, because really I am only thinking of how sensitive I am to be able to see their beauty. I scooped them up into my dress. I was overcome by them. Everybody is aware that the Thames is a great swallower of bodies and much loved by the suicidal, and that corpses and parts of corpses do wash up on its shores — but this wasn’t the case here. May it be known that when I took them I knew without doubt that they were not human, and that if they had been human my feeling wouldn’t have been what it was.

I filled the sling made by the lap of my dress and walked home to my grandmother’s like that, with my skirt gathered up in my fist. My grandmother was dead when I got back, as I knew she would be. I poured my hoard onto the bed in the spare room she always kept ready for family visits, and then I sat at her feet and put my head in her lap. My parents later railed at me for leaving her there in the rocking chair all night and said I should have reported her death straight away, but I saw no rush, I see none now, and I would not do it differently if I had the time again. Her death was so powerful and calm a presence in the room — the same calm I mentioned in relation to the bones on the shore — that it felt as though her life and all its interminable errands and demands and dramas had waited for this ecstatic moment of its own end, so that it could revel a little in that end, so that it could know that all of those seemingly interminable things did eventually terminate. And it could be comforted by that and rest in its own familiar space in the rocking chair by the lamp with its dog, for a while longer at least.

And so, this gauze. When you talked about it before, did you mean that sometimes, very occasionally, everything that had appeared very solid about the world loses substance? I mean, one is sitting there perhaps, on the bed on a hot night with crossed legs, and there is an inversion. One feels — or I should say, I feel — as if I could put my hand through the window glass or the wall as easily as through fog, and yet I can barely lift my arm and move it through air. This is because it seems that there is no point. I seem to be only air myself, and there is no point in shunting air through air. Nothing to achieve in that. Is this the kind of thing you mean?

For example, I look at the bones I collected in what might have been a dream — except it cannot have been a dream because the bones are there in front of me — and I do not recognise them as bones at all, but as arbitrary groupings of matter that have no past or future or meaning of any kind. My own bare knee fits this category too, and I stare for half an hour at the orange street light that glows off the curve of the kneecap.

I feel no grief at the death of my grandmother because life as I’d always known it shows itself now as only the negative space made by a much vaster reality. When I think of my grandmother in the room directly below, fundamental and as still as a root, she is perfect in my mind’s eye and the more my mind looks, the more she too becomes a grouping of matter, unassigned and timeless. To say she is dead is senseless, just as senseless as it is to say I myself am alive.

If this could be one example of seeing through the gauze of life, then the answer to your question is resoundingly yes, I have seen through it. I think I sat in a trancelike state for hours that night and it was only when the sun came up that I moved. Then I flannelled my grandmother’s face with cold water gently, as if not to wake her, and called the hospital. It was about six-thirty or seven in the morning that she was finally taken to the mortuary.

As for ‘The Burden’, the story that became the last spoken words my grandmother heard, even now it springs so energetically to mind, and it goes as so: Two monks are walking down from the foothills of the Himalayas to the nearest village. When they reach the village it is raining and by the time they head back up towards the foothills with their bag of walnuts, rice, dhedo, vegetables, spices and the like, the streets are flooding and turning to mud. A beautiful woman is standing on the other side of the road trying to cross. The older monk passes his bag of shopping to the other, takes off his shoes and walks straight through the puddles to the woman, then he lifts her and carries her across. Later that evening after prayer the young monk seems worried and almost shifty and he keeps looking at his companion as if there is something he needs to say. Finally the older monk asks what troubles him and he responds, ‘We aren’t supposed to touch the opposite sex and yet earlier today you carried that woman right across the road.’ The older monk thinks about this for a moment and it looks like he might have no way of defending himself. But then he glances over each shoulder, opens his arms to show how empty they are and he replies, ‘Brother, I left her at the roadside where I put her down — it’s you who is still carrying her.’

2

On the whole I do not think of you any more. So it was strange when you came into my mind like that, standing over my bed with your spine stacked tall like a wonder of the world and with the thighs of someone who hasn’t eaten for a year, hovering as if you wanted something.

Thanks to this I am at my escritoire at just gone four in the morning with my hand welded to a pen with a split nib, suddenly curious about you after years of an incuriosity you might call callous. It’s been a mild and dreary Christmas but now, on Boxing Day night, it has started snowing, and I’ve had to go and find a blanket from the airing cupboard. As soon as the first flake of snow fell I thought of you, as it landed on the pane in that ludicrous wet collapse that removes all the mystery. I tried to put you from my mind but you wouldn’t go, so I got up. That was at about midnight, when the music from the jazz club a few doors down was coming to an end, and it was almost as if the first flake fell on the last note.

I sat on the edge of the bed trying to breathe in squares, the way a yogi or swami will tell you — breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, out for five, hold for five, in for five. It made me thirsty. Does she think it was worth it? I wondered. This is what came to me when I pictured you there. Not: Is she happy, is she free, is she alive? — no. Does she think it was worth it? I would look to your face for an answer, if only I could see, in reality, in the flesh, that face. I got up for water, then for tea, then I sat in the armchair by the window and watched the snow. It has settled so thickly. Have you ever noticed the absolute chaos and panic of snow if you look up and watch it explode out of the sky? And yet it lands with order and without a hush, and sudden wellbeing is bestowed. How so? You can see people’s happiness condensing in billows of laughter; the few people who’ve walked along the street in the last hour from the bars along Goodge Street have all been laughing.

What I mean to say is: I haven’t resorted lightly to writing to you. It’s just that you appeared so expectantly at my bed earlier that I wondered if what you wanted was an answer to something, and the only vaguely urgent question I could think of you asking in all our long years of knowing each other was about the gauze of life. My hand has cramped in the process of giving it, and I think it is an uncertain start, an overly cautious and laughably sincere start, everything considered. And now actually I realise that far from wanting an answer, you have probably forgotten you ever even asked. It was seventeen years ago, eighteen even; hard enough to remember what happened two thoughts ago, let alone back in a life since lost.

But despite having been up most of the night I’m not tired at all and an energy is coming from somewhere behind me that might be the snow, falling without pattern. I wonder now why I didn’t just answer the question when you first asked it. I don’t understand myself, or for that matter the passing of time. Seventeen years! Can you credit this? No, nor can I. It’s late; I’ll make one more tea and go to bed.

3

I didn’t go back to bed. I went out in the snow because it won’t stay fresh for long in London. I went along to see Yannis, a Cretan who runs the Greek store on Hunter Street and opens up every day at five a.m. to make his own pitta bread and custard pastries, and we took coffee out onto the road and spelled out sweltering in the snow with our tracks — or, I should say, swelt ering because I did my half upper case, Yannis saved energy by doing his lower, and our halves didn’t quite meet. Yannis loves the snow, I remember this from last year. He relishes its crunch, like biting into an apple, he says. He tells me that Crete is never purified by snow and so it grows ever hotter and more corrupt; I say that the snow does not purify but temporarily shrouds, and ends up becoming dirt if it covers dirt — but Yannis is not ready to hear this and tells me I am like his wife, unromantic; like all modern women, passionate as a pot plant.

Before you say it, I know. I swore I would never live in London, but that was because of the Cold War. Nobody would take the time to wipe Morda off the map, and if you are raising a child it is of genuine concern that the place they live is not suddenly wiped off the map. Times are different now that we are not waiting for the Russians to extinguish us, even you have to admit it — and people are different too. I think our hearts do have a chance to warm up a little when not so full of fear, and ever since moving here I have found London to have a kind of sincerity, safety and solidness, like a stout old uncle, like Yannis almost.

There is also of course the jazz club, Jimmie Noone’s (Jimmie’s, as most people call it, and which I can never help reading, with a certain sadness, as ‘Jimmie No one’s’), which goes on until one or two in the morning on a Friday and Saturday night. In the summer the saxophone wafts in through the open window, and below that the clarinet, and below that the river of piano. I drop to sleep with birds singing in my throat. There seems to be no specialism; one night it is swing, the next avant-garde, or big band, bebop, ragtime, or Charlie Parker, Nina Simone and Thelonious Monk tribute evenings, ‘Ruby, My Dear’ played with the tenor saxophone alongside the piano, which makes it far more beautiful to my ears. Countless nights I have gone about life, cooking or reading to the sound of this jazz, and occasionally there will be a singer whose voice will make me stop and listen, or stop and sing, or stand with hands on hips racking my brains for the name of the tune, or look out of the window as if I might be able to see the sound. Sometimes people passing by will dance together in the street, tipping from foot to foot if swing, or swirling limbs if Latin, something like ‘Blue Bossa’. As I can confirm from my living-room vigils, people often stop to dance to ‘Blue Bossa’. I can imagine you doing just the same. And at those times, amongst others, I will think to myself: London, God bless you! For the summers that are warmer and stickier than in the countryside, and for all this free music. And being here then will seem like a homecoming.

You will know the escritoire I sit at to write this — the one that used to be in the hallway in my parents’ house, with its tambour top that no longer rolls smoothly, and the six miniature drawers full of pointless things my father found and could never bear to part with. I inherited the desk from him, and I have not got rid of those things. I am sorry to tell you that my parents both died by the mid-nineties, my father first, then my mother three years later. Really, they were better than me in so many ways — richer, happier, more travelled, more generous and loving, more panoramic of mind. Since being in my hands the escritoire is a mess. Of course, it was never a mess in their hands, except inside the drawers where it couldn’t offend the eye. So I have invented a foolish little measure for keeping some order, to do right by my father all these years beyond the grave (in the way we do keep trying, all our lives, to do right by our parents, whether we know it or not): there is a piece of Roman jet, a conch and the oval of amber you gave me that sits on the beech like a spoonful of honey; these three are always on the desk somewhere, gauging the mess as groynes gauge the height of the tide, and if I can see them I know — with a sense of daughterly relief — that the mess is not winning.

I’ve lived in this flat for two years, which is not long in terms of belonging to a place but long enough to be exempt from the charge of passing through. This might account for the look that I know is often on my face, that I catch sometimes in the mirror, a look of wary attachment, suspicious belonging. But then maybe the look is not that at all but just the general cross-purpose muddle of the ageing face in which all kinds of incompatible things have collided. Surprise, torment, pleasure, peace, disillusionment. All of these separately and at once. And on the subject of surprises — and I would like you to contain your mirth and judgement if you can — I have taken full-time work in a care home; maybe this explains the wary look, suspicious of death perhaps, or what awful ambush waits for our bodies around the corner.

You are opening your mouth to object about this care-home job (like some born-again Christian foisting your light upon the world, you will say), but what of it, my friend? For once you have no right or means to reply, and so I continue. Until I moved here I was living in my parents’ old house, which I inherited from them with the escritoire and everything else. So large and alive with their successes and love — but you know the house was too big for one person, too big for two people even, and when Teddy and I were there we thought we could hear it expanding around us. When Teddy left home for university four years ago I stayed on for a couple of years until it became unbearable; then I sold it and came to this flat.

Even before Teddy left we had resorted to living mostly in the kitchen. The red room had fallen out of use since a family of starlings got bold and moved into the chimney stack, and in hindsight I think that was the beginning of their dominion. Those rare occasions when we did use the room the starlings’ occupancy meant we couldn’t light the fire, and so the room was for summer days only, doors open wide to the moths, dust, flies, mice and spiders; Teddy set up his tripod and photographed the room’s gradual surrender to nature, a process that completed itself beautifully during the second winter of the starlings’ stay, when the birds came down through the open damper and got into the house. He caught shots of them in flight above the dresser, in front of the television, in front of the mirror above the fireplace, and it was that one, that single fortunate shot of a starling and its reflection in flight in an Art Deco mirror, that got him his place on a photography course at university and prompted me — now that my only child had, as they say, flown the nest and I was alone — to leave the village.

I bought this place without looking any further: not so far from Russell Square, much beyond what I could afford, but I had looked on the outskirts and it seemed to me that it wouldn’t do; so I had to use some of the nest egg I’d set aside for Teddy from the sale of my parents’ house in Morda, and even then I couldn’t say that what I bought is anything more than basic. It is one of those many London Regency buildings that lost its decency a good hundred and fifty years ago and was carved into flats, mine having two small bedrooms, a windowless kitchen, a big, light living room, but then this, this magnificent thing — a stained-glass window at the back, in the bathroom, with the image of a hummingbird braking hard at a fuchsia, all electric blues, greens and reds, an uplifting sight when the evening sun comes through and one that makes me think always of Teddy’s photograph.

4

Playing cards, hand after hand. Bending willow, shaking boughs for apples, reading erotic scenes from our parents’ novels. Drawing one another’s faces. Drawing on one another’s backs. Knees up in winter by the fire, looking at your father’s sketches of plants and your mother’s photographs of you as a baby clenching your fists. Bolting down the lanes at Morda, hollering, Come on then! It was all about your need to throw yourself at every corner in defiance of what was around it, and so we bolted and ran, and even when we walked it was fast, and even when we sat slouched over a task you were leaning into it, showing your back to whatever doubt said that you were not capable.

You were going to walk east to west across America, from Rhode Island to a place called Eureka in a straight line. One day you would lay out a map of North America and say, Done that. I would crop my hair like a field of winter wheat, and you were going to rewrite the Talmud in rhyming couplets or otherwise in limericks and publish it as a new religion. We would pave one of Morda’s fields with slabs of granite inscribed over and over with our names. I was going to marry below me and live on love. You would not shave, or wear dresses. You were going to accept death long before you died. I was going to sing: Mozart, Handel, Fauré, Joan Baez, Edith Piaf. I was going to sing and sing, and you were going to compose your new religion and not brush your hair or be precious about your body, which was given you as a strange gift that had come without a label and for whom you had nobody to thank.

Bolting down the lanes late for school, bolting down those same lanes year upon year late or drunk on your parents’ firewater, which we stole and replaced with lightly brewed tea, knowing it might be years before they noticed. Breaking out like horses and shouting Starka! after the name on the bottle because we liked the way it sundered the Shropshire calm. You brushed off male interest whenever it came, scarce though young men were in our village of farmers and ex-miners. You looked at men sidelong and would respond to their interest by saying placidly, ‘Thank you, no’ and lighting a cigarette.

Your brother would hand over 50mg of phenylpropanolamine, or 40mg of amphetamine, and he would tell us with a liquid tongue that your father’s assiduous cataloguing of English flora was a final treachery. He had stolen — confiscated — your father’s handmade collections. I remember him (the dull clang as he sat on the piano keyboard, and the back of his shorn head in the mirror behind him, which didn’t seem to belong to the same person as the face, which was wide and kind and always appeared to know something we didn’t — this is how I always think of him, in two mismatched halves) — I remember him leafing through the pad of faint sketches of dandelions, campion, honeysuckle, aquilegia, love-in-a-mist, flicking the pages with the back of his hand as he talked about his friends in Lithuania who were staying to fight for the cause. Because it was one thing to escape communism as your parents had done, but another to deny where you had come from, to start drawing dandelions neatly labelled in the bottom left Taraxacum officinale. It was true, I suppose, that when he showed us the botanical catalogues your father had made of Lithuania’s native hepatica, meadow rue, yarrow, gladioli, the drawings were more eager, the ink more mutinously pressed into the page; because they were not limp inventories like the English catalogues, but urgently amassed proof of what the Soviets were about to wipe out. To which you, who had left Lithuania as a baby and had never known the place, said uncertainly, ‘And yet, who cares?’

Sitting in what would soon become the red room with the fire lit and our 40 or 50 or sometimes 60mg, while my parents were away for their long stints in India escaping the winter. We played hand after hand of Poker, 21, Gin Rummy, All Fives. These were not games but little parlays with fate; I remember the feeling that each card turned was a renewal of luck, that I could continually play myself out of dead-ends and misfortune, like flinging open a series of gates until one led to the great reward, the ultimate boon. We were surrounded, in the red room, by a sense of divine bounty, something mighty to aim at; so it was with this room. An intoxicating place. It was lined with shelves of religious texts — Christian, Jewish, Roman Catholic, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu: my mother and father could not limit themselves to a single doctrine, they saw the mysticism of faith divide and emblazon itself like a firework, from the books of the Apocrypha to the Hindu moksha, in one explosive rejoicing. And you, marooned in the wet Welsh Borders, rising from our card games erratic and euphoric and irrepressible, plucked books from the shelves, sifted through creeds and, like some creature trying to shake itself dry of the swamp, settled on the Upanishads.

Brava! These raw songs of Hindu philosophy suddenly in your hands. Sitting once more, as we had as children, on the floor by the fire with your elbows on your raised knees, your top half slung forward, crescent-backed in the pose your mother always said would cripple you. Reading: If everything is in man’s body, every being, every desire, what remains when old age comes, when decay begins, when the body falls? You would turn the two hooped earrings through your left ear in a full rotation as you read, until the lobes flushed crimson.

Cooking haphazard creations; you liked meat. We once tried to kill a rabbit in the garden but we couldn’t catch it, and when one of your stones did find its target the poor creature turned a gaze on us that dissolved our appetites — such offended surprise, as if it had expected more of us, and then a moment of cold scrutiny that appraised our souls, and then terror and flight. Let us never do that again, I said, and expected you to dismiss me as sentimental. But you nodded, a certain softness and ruth settling in your pout, and tossed your remaining stones into the hedge.

Cooking pieces of mutton and steak that we found in my mother’s freezer, a deep chest of frozen flesh; you would fry the meat and splash fat against the wall while scowling, as if a cold wind were at your face, and then serve it up on plates with nothing but a spoonful of mustard or Crosse & Blackwell pickle or homemade damson chutney. During those winters we ate pounds of fruit that we’d stored from the autumn, from days of footing up ladders in my parents’ garden and shaking boughs and shielding our heads against the apple and plum rain.

Evenings spent during the winter that crossed over from 1971–2, painting the large room red on a whim. We painted it in one night with an energy that felt inspired, or at least that was how we pitched it to my parents when they returned home from India a week or two later. ‘We felt inspired,’ you said. ‘Please forgive us, didn’t we do a good job?’ My mother stood there blooming an Indian health, a slim, calm, tanned radiance of incense and hard-won spirituality, then inspected the edges around the skirting boards and door frames and found in them something that satisfied her sense of perfection. You had finished them with a two-millimetre watercolour brush and had taken swabs of turpentine to every blemished inch of skirting board. My father just regarded me and said, ‘You’ve grown tall, my love.’ He looked like a man who’d found a prize, then found it again, again, and whose happiness at life was such that the colour of a wall was of the same benign lack of importance as the birth or death of a star elsewhere in the cosmos.

Then one night the following winter, when they were away again, you took the Safavid vase from the mantelpiece, laid it sideways on its great copper belly on the table and began arranging fruit in the enormity of its mouth. This task took you two hours. First a watermelon, a polished planet filling the opening, and in front of it plums, an apple, a quince, some damsons, some red-currants that spilt out onto the table. You left it there for two weeks until the melon had collapsed inwards and sent a river of juice over the vase rim, and in this swam the flaccid damsons and the remains of the redcurrants. The apple and quince were withered and furrowed as anxious old brows. The plums were a low mossy outcrop. You pointed at the new darkness behind it all, the darkness that was the inside of the vase and which had been revealed by decay, and when you pointed at it, it was true that it emanated with a kind of force, a ravenousness.

The photograph you took of it was bawdy and bold. You called it Still Life with Irascible Hole, after Roger Fenton’s infamous Still Life with Ivory Tankard and Fruit. Vanitas, you explained, was the art of symbolic still life to represent the passing of transitory things and the emptiness they leave. In Fenton’s photograph the fruit was rude with ripeness and the dark opening of the tankard relatively small, like a carp’s mouth agape. In yours, the dark opening of the Safavid vase was more a beast mid-roar. In his, the emptiness threatened in the way a beautiful red dawn threatens the day, but in yours the threat was fulfilled and the day was done. His was subtle, but halfway measures have never been for you. It was a photograph that threw death at your face. But all the same it was lovely to look at in all its sepia richness, the glowing of the copper, the glossy juices and shining, sagging pulp that were full of your fearfulness. ‘It’s yours,’ you said. ‘For you, my dearest friend, to remind us that our days on Earth are numbered, and the numbers are not that big.’ You winked, you flashed a smile. ‘Thank you, Nina,’ I said.

Us in the tunnel, up the tree, by the fire, in the lane, on the sofa, at the stove, behind the camera, on film, the various nouns and prepositions of our lives over several years. You appearing one day in a cream crochet shawl that your parents had bought you for your twenty-first birthday and which seemed at once to confirm and reinvent you. You sauntered in tall and vulnerable and with an air of magnificent poverty about you, tossed your hair, flung the shawl like a matador his cape, and grinned.

You on the floor by the fire, roasting yourself until the silver cobra that wound up your right forearm began to burn your skin, which prompted you to turn and roast the other side. Your camera by your feet, your dark hair to your waist, your earlobes flushed and your back bent forward. Those strong, rough-skinned hands holding the Upanishads: What remains when old age comes, when decay begins, when the body falls?

5

But you looked so old and sad when we saw you last. I am plagued by this — by your crochet shawl, in particular, once creamy as a new lamb; when you came back for the last time it was filthy and torn, but torn in just one place, and this single tear — with the white of your shoulder coming through like some fallen rampart — betrayed a loss of dignity far greater than if you had stood naked in public. You were hunched, and there was something cruel about your face, though, when I think about it now, it might have been a cruelty reflected onto it from the world, and not one coming from within. But then what is the difference, when all’s said and done? A face is cruel or it isn’t, it lets itself become that way or it doesn’t.

Are you better? I am not naive; it seems clear to me that there is something very wrong in a language that uses the same word to mean ‘improved’ and ‘cured’. By better I mean only improved. You telephoned us from the station and I went to collect you. You were standing at the end of the platform with your head down and your weight off one foot, in the way I’ve seen wounded wolves stand in films like Once Upon a Time in the West—not that I have seen this film, but this is how I imagine it to be. It had been almost two years since we had seen you before that. When I got you home and we asked where you had been, you said, ‘I’ve been in an elevator, going up and down.’ So we sat you out in the garden at the mossy table and gave you tea, and asked you again. ‘I’ve been in an elevator, looking for love.’

‘For two years?’ we asked.

‘Love is hard to find.’

The garden was blowing with leaves and Nicolas put his elbows on the table with an attempt at anchorage and a seriousness that was almost morbid. He said, ‘So did you find it?’

‘I didn’t find the one. But I found a lot of people I wasn’t looking for, and I made do.’ He asked, ‘Who were you looking for?’ and you told him, ‘Laurence Olivier.’

He stood sharply and walked indoors. Your moods were the stuff of legend, and that day your mood could only be described as dangerous — languorous, facetious, self-absorbed; you were amused by yourself and this was the worst of all possible states, because it was the kind of amusement I imagine Caiaphas felt when he made a deal with the Devil. The amusement is a mask for the wretchedness we feel for striking up an unhappy alliance — in your case this alliance was with yourself, whom you had long thought badly of and were always escaping. But on that day it was as though you had recognised that you owned only yourself, were shipwrecked with yourself, and your mood reflected your disgust at this most desperate, careless misfortune.

Later that evening you went on the train to London and Nicolas went with you. ‘I’m getting out’ was the last thing you said to me when the two of you left for the station. He came back alone two days later, and that was that where the three of us were concerned.

Get out of what? This mess, this life? I have always wondered — and I will only ask you once — did you manage it, did you get out?

6

Teddy was here yesterday; his arrival made me put down my pen for the first time in days. He came to visit for the night on his way to see friends for New Year’s Eve, but he brought no bags as such, just an extraordinary array of energy drinks and some crash weight-gain powder that he had as pudding with a glass of wine, as part of a prolonged attempt at gaining breadth. He has grown up willowy like my father, without Nicolas’ sturdiness — but this strikes me as strange when I write it, because Nicolas was a slender man when younger and hardly (what would you say?) burly himself. It’s just that, at twenty-two, Teddy is taller than Nicolas ever was and doesn’t have that thickset neck and jaw, and the prominent Adam’s apple, the sheer masculinity, and it bothers him. Wrongly, but all the same.

The thing is that I see very little of Teddy lately, and when he visited this time it was to tell me that I will see even less of him still. In four days, January 3rd, he is taking his camera and travelling around eastern Europe for a few months to photograph the forests, to travel to Lithuania in particular. Perhaps to find a wife, he said. English women stifle him. We were out on a night walk by the river at the time; the skies were clear after days of snowy cloud, and he wanted to show me the arrangement of Jupiter and Venus on a rare cross-path, one above the other in the western sky, rather like lights on some stupendous radio tower.

We saw the planets sure enough. I thought they looked rather alien-invasion and wondered why I hadn’t noticed them before. ‘Things are rarely seen without being looked for,’ Teddy said with that palladian, harmlessly arch tone that sounded strange coming from somebody whose nappies I had once changed. Yet I respect him and he shows himself routinely worthy of it in the things he knows or thinks or feels, for example when he insisted that we try to see the planets, and the sky in general, in reflection in the water, because a sky without a reflection is just the sky in profile. I discovered on that walk that my son loves reflections, he loves and requires symmetry. But though we stood at several points along the bank in the grainy mulch of mud and thawing snow, and though the city found some crude reflection, the river was too wide, full and flowing with meltwater to reflect any of the subtleties of the sky. We stood pointlessly in the way people do when they have come to see something and end up seeing nothing.

‘But Lithuania,’ I said to him. ‘It’s too far away.’ He took my hand hesitantly. ‘In the scheme of things, it’s just around the corner,’ he replied, and I could only say, ‘Not in my scheme of things.’ ‘Well, I’ll send you photographs, one a week.’ But I knew that, even with the best will in the world, he would not, so I suggested, ‘Send me one — just one — make it a good one.’

Five years after you finally disappeared I found a postcard from you in Teddy’s bedroom. It was 1991, so he must have been eleven at the time. It bore a picture of a chihuahua on the front wearing a Tommy Cooper hat, and on the back a Lithuanian stamp. I haven’t seen the postcard itself for years, but I do still remember the picture on the stamp, which was a castle, and I remember this because Teddy was very much into castles and fortresses at that time and had drawn a tiny knight in its turret and another on a horse approaching at speed from the far left, above the words Dear Teddy.

In the card’s short message you claimed to be living in the desert, and it bothered him immensely that you had not said which desert; he had looked at his atlas to see if there were deserts in Lithuania and found there were none to speak of. When I asked him about the postcard, this was his only concern, that he might discover which desert you meant. He thought perhaps you were referring to the dunes along the spit, down to Nida — could people live in dunes? He had a look of respect and despair when he asked that, which implied that of all the women he knew, past, present and future, you were the one who could most plausibly live alone in sand dunes.

I did not have the heart to tell him that as likely as not there was no desert and that he had been flung a metaphor. It reminded me that, for all that you love to call a spade a spade, the spade is always a symbol for something else. You try to dig with it and it bends in half. This is not the kind of woman you can expect to get something straight from, I wanted to tell him. It made me feel defensive of him, because he was a child and still in the habit of taking you at face value, of worrying about and trusting you.

I am sure that his trip to Lithuania is a delayed response to the call of that postcard, but I decided not to bring it up. I have always wanted him to live life fully and not to be afraid, and not to put barriers in his way — above all else, not to be the barrier itself. Instead, as we left the river and walked up through the streets, I decided to change topic by asking him what was wrong with English girls.

‘They don’t know anything about the world,’ he said. So I asked, ‘And other girls do?’ He ruffled his hair with his fingertips as Nicolas has always done. ‘I don’t know yet.’ I suggested that maybe it is because we live on an island, and islanders are always more closed off from the world, and he turned to me with his grey eyes narrowed and said, ‘Mind you, I do have a thing for Jean Shrimpton.’

I laughed. ‘Jean Shrimpton! She’s older than me now.’ ‘What, did she used to be younger than you?’ he asked. He made a square with the thumb and forefinger of both hands. ‘You know the picture I love best? The one of her with the white scarf around her head.’ He loosed his hands upwards in adulation. ‘Ah, she looks so perfect in that one.’ I said, ‘Where she looks like a young girl, you mean?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Vulnerable, unblemished—’ ‘Underage.’ ‘Exactly.’

Then he gave that smile of disruptive mischief that I’ve known him to have since he was weeks old, and he stopped in the middle of the pavement, suddenly serious, and looked directly up at the clear sky.

‘You know when I see stars I always think about…’ He left a pause, so I invaded it. ‘When you see stars you should think about stars, Teddy.’ I said it with frustration, admonishment, though I had meant to be more delicate than that. And I regretted saying it, because he looked at the ground without reply and appeared to shrink into the old shape of himself as a child.

He was going to say, in case you missed the nuance, that stars make him think about the holes of light that beamed through your shawl the day you arrived at our back door. He has made the observation more than once before. It is funny how deeply affected we can be by the smallest things that happen in childhood — I have no doubt he still sees you exactly as he did that day, raising your arms against the spring glare and growing wings. His vocabulary was limited more or less to nouns in animal picture books then, and I will always remember his glee at having a word for what he saw: butterfly! This great, dark-winged vision leaking light as if bullet-holed. Two decades later he still packs the truth of you into this vision etched on his one-year-old retina and thinks of you as eternally magical and light-shot, so that even the stars are first and foremost reminders of you.

Should I, his mother, disabuse him of this view? Should I say to him, Teddy, Butterfly is not quite the creature the name implies. Or should I let him see the good in you and have him run with this glorious vision he has: you with your head thrown back in laughter, you with a copy of the Upanishads quoting May we never hate one another while your eye gleams wickedly, you wrapped in the shawl and stoking the fire in the woods as the sun comes up, you in the dunes, negotiating and renegotiating your terms with every shifting grain of sand so that they allow you to make permanent home amongst them.

Am I being unfair? Perhaps you are a tender creature after all and perhaps Teddy’s notion is the truest. There are butterflies that survive winters. To be resilient is not always to be hard. If your nickname were purely ironic it would never have survived so long, surely, and you would have shrugged it off as you shrugged off everything that no longer suited you. I cannot say for sure that Teddy is wrong in his assessment, this is the thing, and so I let yet another subject go.

My own father once said that your children are beautiful to you in a way that nothing else is; as a girl I remember him telling me about my beauty as if he were outlining a profound fact, or setting out a singular truth. It was not a description, because that would suggest it was from his point of view; no, it was an explanation of my very particular beauty as known by him, the world expert on his subject. He knew something about me that I would never be able to know myself; he knew it because he was my parent and preceded me, and could see into all the voids from which I’d sprung. And as soon as I became a parent I could acquire that piercing vision and could know and see the same as my father had known and seen. It is such a steady love you feel for your child — bottomless and generous — and all afternoon I have missed Teddy, and every time he goes I miss him, as if each time he falls once and for all from the face of the Earth.

7

Somehow I feel fraudulent to have written most of the last few pages in January, after Teddy left the country, and to have made it sound like I was still referring to ‘yesterday’. In fact I went back to work on New Year’s Eve and haven’t had time for this letter since.

More than this, I am aware that I haven’t been completely truthful and I wonder why. How can it be that we can begin something wholeheartedly and slip, so quickly, into guarded omissions and liberties with the truth? Under the circumstances the goodness of human nature is very quick to buckle, don’t you think? But then, of course you agree, and you hardly need me to point it out.

So a dilemma arises: let’s say you lie in a letter, or maybe not even lie as such but just write something that is not completely honest, or omit something that might have been important to add. Do you edit that letter with an infill of truth so that the reader never knew there was a lie, which might mean removing or rewriting a page or two, or even starting again with a new, robustly direct approach? Or do you admit the lie, as I have done, and remove nothing, and be transparent for good or bad? And isn’t the admittance of a lie more honest, anyway, than a truth arrived at through editing?

I have wondered about this kind of thing for the last hour, sitting here turning the piece of Roman jet in my hand and trying distractedly to think of ways of describing it. This is what writing does to you, it seems, it turns objects that used to be just things in your life into things that must be described, and at the same time makes them feel increasingly indescribable. This Roman jet, for example, which is a thimble-sized amulet bust of a man with angled cheekbones and gaze of steel, who might be an athlete according to Nicolas, and who might also be made of carbonised wood and not jet at all. I treasure him, but the longer I look at him the less able I am to say anything that would make anybody else feel the same, or even anything that justifies why I feel that way myself.

Yet this instinct, Butterfly, that I should simply record things for good or bad, as I said. I suppose I have gradually come to believe that what’s written cannot simply be amended to suit some later preference and so I have decided this is the way I will go on, writing without amendments, transparently, yes, see-throughably, as though any of what I wrote mattered in the slightest. All you can do is trust me, even though I might be writing one thing and thinking another. While I write my spare hand might be doing anything, for all you know; it might be driving a pin into your voodoo stomach. But of course it isn’t, dear Butterfly! All I mean is: aren’t written words strange in this way, so inscrutable, all hurrying together on the paper to cover up reality like a curtain drawn across a stage.

8

Come on then, I hear you say. What was this frightful lie?

As I told you, it is not really a lie so much as an omission, and the omission is Nicolas. I went to great lengths to describe to you what happened on the night of my grandmother’s death, including the bones, the falling away of the gauze, the pedantic detail of orange street light on my kneecap, the two monks and their groceries, and so on, and it feels now that all of this might have been just deflection, as if describing effects without mentioning a cause, and I don’t know why I would have done this.

You see, as well as finding a pile of animal bones on the Thames shore that night, I also found Nicolas; he was crouching on the shale, by the water, and he seemed to be scrutinising something there. Of course, I didn’t know he was Nicolas then, he was just a stranger without detail — a drunk, I thought, an eccentric, homeless possibly. He was there when I made my way back to my grandmother’s house with the bones wrapped up in my dress, but we didn’t speak. You do not want to come across a man when you are alone there at night. Probably I should not have been on my own there at all. But when I got back to my grandmother’s door I realised I had dropped one of the bones, and I noticed because it had been one of the more unusual. A cow shin, I’ve since assumed, and the longest and finest of the heap I had picked up. It had been washed down so much by the river currents that it was perfect, without any torque, almost like a purpose-made musical bone or a razor clam — at least that is how I remember it. I tipped the other bones onto the doorstep and, without going indoors, I went back to the river.

He was still there when I got back, but this time he was sitting on the slope of the flood barrier with his legs outstretched and ankles crossed, gazing out — and he turned around. I saw him do that and I thought he was about to speak, then he turned back to the river. Not the murdering type, I told myself. Too healthy in the face: large jaw, dimpled chin, plump lips, dark eyes; not killing anyone, too kind. Young, handsome, proud-looking; he had looked at me uncertainly as if worried that he was worrying me, and that was when he turned away. I wish men would not do this. But it didn’t matter anyway, because I suddenly had no fear of him. Somewhere between his intention to speak and his decision not to, I realised my grandmother had died — it was as if my certainty grew out of his lack of it and, because of this exchange between us, I felt completely unafraid. I picked my way down the slope, just a few feet from him, and started scouring the beach. It was only after I had been looking for the bone for a minute or two that he called to me.

‘What did you lose?’ And so I said, without thinking, ‘My grandmother’ and I lifted my chin defiantly and took him in for the first time.

He had the hair of a king; I could imagine women running wax through it. Thick, curly and dark, and dark serious brows. ‘Careless,’ he said.

Then he stood and made his way down the slope in two sideways strides. He took something out of his pocket, took a torch from the other pocket and shone the light onto his opened palm. ‘The tail of a peacock,’ he said. I glanced it over and he explained, ‘A broken half of a figurine from Victorian times, or maybe before. I found it a few weeks ago on the shore near Blackfriars Bridge.’ So I said, partly because I was annoyed with his flippancy about my grandmother, and partly because I had no idea what else to say, ‘I don’t know what to say.’

He lifted one of those heavy brows and turned the peacock in his palm a couple of times before putting it back in his pocket. ‘Do you mean your grandmother has died?’

When I nodded he showed an expression that surprised me — sorrow; no, not sorrow. I don’t know how to explain it, except that you will know it anyway, that expression he has always had in which his whole life turns up for a moment in his eyes. He might be thinking anything, though in fact there probably is no thought he could single out. The most ineffable of looks — I put that down to the moonlight at the time, though I realise now of course it is nothing to do with the light. It is a look that fuses poles. It could be fear, then and again it could just as easily be peace; I always think, when I see it, of the way very hot water can feel cold for a moment — there is some point of intensity where one thing can be experienced as its opposite, and that is the intensity I am talking about in his expression.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘if you lose something on this shore and you keep looking for it, one day it’ll turn up. It’s widely believed that the river reunites all things.’

I wasn’t sure if this fatalism was supposed to be his attempt at solace, as if death unites all things, as if one day I would find my grandmother again; anyway, I was not consoled. I was needled. His openness wrong-footed me, his candid, unproblematic face, which I knew (consciously, even at the time) I would fall for because it was not like mine, and which made me bad-tempered because it had taken away my power to decide what I wanted and didn’t.

‘I suppose you think it’ll offer up the other half of your figurine?’ I asked finally, when I realised he had said all he was going to say on the subject of my grandmother. And he replied instantly, ‘I do.’ ‘So will you be coming to look for it for the rest of your life?’ Again, instantly he said, ‘Surely that depends on how soon I find it.’

We crouched at the bottom of the slope, in the marsh grasses. ‘I’ve come back to find one of the bones I dropped,’ I said, and before I could go on he intervened with, ‘I guessed.’ ‘A long one,’ I said, ‘I thought it was worth the return trip. Maybe I dropped it when I climbed up here.’

He said I didn’t seem to have; I had to agree. I looked at him in profile, at the proud curve of his nose, at his lips that rose permanently at the corner in a smile, at his overall slapdash elegance as he sank deep and loose into that crouch. And me deep and loose in mine too, because I am a natural croucher, but not elegant, more functional, as if I have been designed to hinge at extreme angles for a purpose still, at the age of fifty-two, not discovered.

‘The Thames is full of loot,’ he said. ‘Maces, axes, swords, half peacock figurines, coins, Roman shoes, pipes, pots, cannonballs, cufflinks. Bones, of course — as you know. Animal and human — some of them might have been Neolithic ritual offerings.’ ‘Do you think mine are Neolithic ritual offerings?’ I asked, and he looked east along the river. ‘Very much doubt it.’ ‘But you haven’t even seen them.’ Then, I remember, he reeled in his gaze rapidly until it was fixed on my mouth. ‘So why did you ask me?’

He watched me at an angle as if taking in something extremely curious, and then we got back to our feet; my blood had rushed and I’d felt for a moment that the moon was hurtling. ‘I’m sorry about your grandmother,’ he said, and took my hand to help me up the slope.

‘Please don’t be, she was happy. She always fed her dogs fresh mince and red-wine gravy, and put two eggcups of brandy in their water to give them good dreams — her heart was good and big. Heaven will find room for her, please don’t be sorry.’

‘I meant I was sorry for you.’

I told him he mustn’t be.

‘When did she die?’

‘When you first looked at me from over there.’

He opened and closed his mouth without managing to produce a word, and when he saw I was smiling he did so too. Mine was a smile dredged up from somewhere thick with the overpowering smell of incense. My mother had always burnt eucalyptus, holy basil, cardamom, ginger grass, lemon grass, palmarosa, brought back from her trips to Kerala, and that was the smell of home. Now it smoked up heavily in my nostrils as if I were catching my own scent.

When I told him I had to go back, he said, ‘Come on then.’

If it struck me as strange that he was coming with me, that I didn’t refuse, that he’d known about the bones despite never having looked up the first time I went past, that he’d assumed my grandmother’s death without the slightest doubt, or even that I had assumed that death without doubt, well then this strangeness was nothing to be marvelled at. We were not living in normal times just for the moment. We walked.

We stopped when we had reached the pile of bones on the doorstep. When I bent to them my head filled with tears as if I were a bucket being emptied, and I sobbed, because I had no idea how I would move her or what to do with a dead person.

‘Wait until the morning,’ he said, and ran a thumb under my eye to staunch the tears. I blinked and the tears ran horizontally along his thumb and down into the well between knuckles, into the small hammock of webbed skin.

‘I don’t think you have a hope in hell of finding your figurine,’ I said, and he thanked me, and said he appreciated the encouragement.

In my mind I have always since conflated his smile as he said that and walked away with the smile on my grandmother’s face when I found her dead, both expressions of infinite contentment. In the morning, after I had called for an ambulance and my grandmother had been taken away, I was left sitting in her rocking chair, tearless and calm after that peculiar epiphanal night of seeing through the gauze, my foot stroking her dog’s back. I hadn’t wanted to go in the ambulance and I had agreed that I would walk to the hospital straight away to see to the papers. It was then that Nicolas came back; it couldn’t have been much after seven a.m. but the sun was long up and when I heard the knock on the door I had no doubt it was him. I was still wearing my dress from the night before, which was streaked with the bones’ dirt and the to-and-fro across the flood wall, and which in any case he took off — may I say it? tore off — once the door was closed.

I refuse to feel awkward telling you this.

9

Shortly after we met I gave him one of my grandmother’s rosaries, which was made of beads of ox-blood red. He gave me a conch that looked like a harp. He had found it on that same bit of river beach a few years before, in the marsh grass. How did a bright queen conch from the tropics arrive downstream of Woolwich? It struck me, these strange relocations the things on our planet go through; but of course, Nicolas says, the Earth is a closed system, where else can things go? We live on a sphere with a roof and a floor. Things simply move from here to there either underground or across the ground or through the air, disappearing, emerging, decomposing, re-forming, transforming. All this, yes, but never ceasing, because ceasing to exist is not an option on offer to the things on this planet.

Beggar’s spoils, you called all the useless things he collected. Broken relics of man’s washed-up endeavours on the shores of the Thames, and the flint, coral and graptolite he dug up in the woods upriver from Morda. Nicolas’ sorry old beggar’s spoils, you said, which was frankly uncharitable. You told me, in his presence, never to trust a man who forages in the substrate. He answered only that I should never trust a woman who tells another woman what she should never trust in a man. It was not his way to rise to your or anyone’s bait, and I respected this about him. He knew he had some lonely and pedantic habits that hardly needed a psychologist’s eye to be seen for what they were — digging in the soil, scratching at limestone for fossils, mudlarking on the shores of the Thames for washed-up trinkets. Each boy needs his father; those who have lost hope of ever having one never stop looking for something else instead.

But even in full awareness of how open he was to mockery, from you especially, he was not ashamed of what he did. No, he only talked more about its subtleties, which felt to me curiously brave. He called these surfacings of fossils and flint unmanned miracles. He said that nature was pushing its bounty up through the soil, silt and mud and that people like him who collected it were less archaeologists and more flower-pickers. Sooner or later each thing under the ground would bloom above it, and whoever had his fingers ready to pluck would be the one rewarded. And he felt that if he waited long enough each treasure would have its season and what was missing would surface, including therefore the other half of his figurine; he didn’t ever seem to doubt its appearance, or worry that his fingers would not be the ones hovering when it did.

‘Flower-pickers!’ you would tease. ‘Our own little florist of the river shore.’ With this reproach you would tussle his hair or press your thumb along his eyebrow as though neatening a child. To which he would respond without words, more with an amused smile — the sexily boyish, playful smile that you and I once agreed was his trademark. You will remember that once he went upstairs, brought down his box of beggar’s spoils and laid them on the kitchen table in front of you. Flint, coral, porcelain, coloured glass, metal deer brooch, dagger, trilobite, gemstone, dog tag, watch battery, leather sandal, plastic button, gun, pin, bone. And he asked you to take your pick. Of course you picked the gun, a Mauser C-96, a German piece from the First World War that he had found on the north bank of the Thames. You thought it was wonderful. You lifted it to your head with a rueful grin and pretended to shoot yourself.

This was something I loved about Nicolas, that he would not be bullied, that he made the bully rueful, but never took pleasure in doing it. He was — is — a sincere man at heart. That is the thing.

10

Yannis sells the best fried squid, marinated anchovies, salted sardines and unleavened bread in the whole of London — he says the whole of England. He also says this isn’t saying much. He has a griddle in the tiny kitchen area behind the counter, where he fries the squid to order and sells it in a greaseproof paper bag. Occasionally I go to his shop in the evening when he is about to close and buy a bag at a discount, and eat it on the way home. Yesterday evening he asked me to stay for a few minutes because he had something he wanted to discuss, so we sat at one of the two high, round tables in the window, with a glass of beer each and a plate of bread and anchovies, and he asked me what a man had to do to get his wife back.

‘I think begging is the only way,’ I said, but he had tried that. He came to England four years ago because his wife had got a job as an oncologist in a hospital here, but now she was the one who couldn’t settle and wanted to go home, while he had built a business from scratch and wanted to stay. She says it is his fault they can’t go back to Crete, his stubbornness. He says she is unreasonable to drag him all the way here only to drag him back. He has been working through a stack of English modernist novels in a bid to anglicise himself — he has laboured through page after bewildering page and learnt phrases like ‘a pint of porter’ and ‘the industrial epoch’; words like ‘brat’ and ‘rascal’ and ‘ghastly’ and ‘nothingness’. She cannot tell him this effort has been for nothing?

After months of arguing to what has become a script, she has gone. Except not to Crete, but to her sister’s friend’s house in Muswell Hill. ‘Muswell Hill!’ he said to me. ‘This is bloody ghastly.’ Unknowingly he pressed his thumb into an anchovy’s face as he said that, because he was gripping the rim of his plate. So I removed the thumb and squeezed his hand. ‘It is not the anchovy’s fault,’ I told him, and he looked at his plate, at the wretched flattened fish, and muttered a string of apologies.

The upshot is that he asked me to write to his wife and point out his virtues. Like a letter of recommendation. I told him I could not; it wouldn’t work. Let’s put aside the fact that she is his wife, and if she hasn’t seen his virtues yet she may never do so. The finer point is that women are loath to accept the recommendations of other women. He seemed intrigued to be told something about what women do and don’t do, and looked at me brightly, like a dog that has seen its lead. But the truth is I have no other insights to share with him, and I told him that — not only can I shed no light on womankind, but I also know nothing about relationships except for some faint grasp of the multiple ways they can go wrong.

‘But people like you,’ he said, ‘who have been married and divorced, you know things the rest of us don’t.’ I suggested that a special knowledge of failure is not such a valuable thing, and besides, I was never actually divorced, only separated. After a moment of surprise he seemed genuinely disappointed. ‘You mean you’re still technically married? After ten years of being apart?’ ‘Actually it’s fifteen years,’ I said, and I tried to explain that while it only requires a single yes to get married, to get divorced you have to say no so many times in so many different ways, and so expensively, that it does not always seem worth the trouble. Marriage is a construct easily put together, and painstakingly dismantled. The law makes it this way. To prise it apart, legally speaking, you have to take to it with a sledgehammer as if it were your worst enemy you were obliterating, and not the remains of your tenderest dreams. Not the little patch of fertile ground your only child sprang from. Nicolas and I could never bring ourselves to do that, that’s all. Is it so strange?

You will see my cunning here, as if my agenda is to relate to you in passing a conversation I had with Yannis, when really of course I am using it as an opportunity to tell you something. I just thought you might be wondering what had happened between Nicolas and me after you left. Sometimes I wonder if you assume we carried on as if nothing had happened, and there is a part of me that likes you to think that, and a part of you — a caring part of you — that probably likes to think that too. And it is true that I do still see him from time to time now that we both live in London. Anyway, I suspect I overstated the point when I said what I did about tender dreams, because Yannis poured the last of his beer into my glass with great, warm compassion — and I suppose I should mention that for him to appear compassionate is a triumph of character over looks, because he is in fact made like a warlord, with a long straight nose that is almost vertical and a forehead that slopes back alarmingly — and said that he thought it must be chilly, to be in a marriage that is over but not ended. Because the other has left, he ventured. They have left, but not shut the door. It must be like living in a room with a draught always coming in. His big, savage, Cretan face winced at the thought.

11

They know me here; an hour or two after closing time Yannis drags the two tables together and a few of them congregate. Sometimes, once a month or so, me amongst them. When they sit together it is like the edges of the city have been drawn in, those with gold teeth and polished teeth and false teeth and missing teeth, those chased to England by Idi Amin, those who are the children of the Windrush, those who own a piece of the Berlin Wall. They come in comfortable shapeless hand-knits or beautiful suits from charity shops, except the one Nigerian who comes in beautiful suits from House of Fraser. There are always spirits and often coffee and sometimes bread. Each has fingers quick with cards; the usual is five-card-draw Poker played with a royal deck. Coppers and silvers and nothing above a pound, before midnight anyway, because no one has money to waste. It is just company and cigarettes and spirits and laughter, and an exaggerated communal love of the Queen — Poker is a royal game and she is their patron, Britannia, the matriarch it is better to love than be scorned by, the aggressor in a pair of brogues; they make affectionate attempts at mimicking her voice, which sends the ash from the tips of their cigarettes flying in gusts of laughter.

After midnight the real money comes out, small but serious sums, and then I lose interest; I still abide by the friendly pact you and I made, to play only for honour and never for money. So I sit aside with pen and paper, here by the glass display of the counter, leaning on Yannis’ copy of The Rainbow that has a receipt as a bookmark, which is still towards the beginning of chapter one.

Yannis believes my Poker skills are better than they are, perhaps because he is not used to women being able to play cards at all; I have told him about the games you and I played and explained to him that it was never in the name of skill or even fun — no, only ever in the name of jeopardy, throwing ourselves at chance and seeing who was luckier, and who the universe favoured first. Our little deals with God, I told Yannis, and he said, God does not play cards (which may or may not have been a pun, with Yannis it is hard to tell). In any case, under this misapprehension that I have any talent for the game he always positions himself with his back to me when I sit out and go to the counter, so I can see his cards and stop him if he is about to do a catastrophic thing, but I never stop him. Lately, like now, I just sit here at the counter and write to you.

Do you remember that morning when you were sitting on the windowsill at the far end of the living room, going through some old letters and photographs of your ancestors? Leaning against the wall. I think it was winter. I don’t know why but I often think of this when here with Yannis and the others. You found out that your great-grandparents had been part of a large influx of Lithuanians to Coatbridge in Scotland, at the turn of the century, all poor as birds and shipped in to work in the coalmines. Unlike the peasants who went to the New World in search of milk and honey, the letters and photographs of your ancestors did not give the impression that these Lithuanians expected anything beyond a reprieve from starvation; maybe not even that. There was only one picture of your great-grandmother, and I remember it well — do you? She is standing in a long, heavy coat in a grey street with a collection of saucepans hanging by string over one shoulder, a bundle of clothes or food in the crook of that arm, and in the other arm a baby — your grandmother — swaddled grimly. It appeared cold, she appeared cheated, but not surprised.

You looked at that photograph for a long time over a cigarette; you drank in the smoke slowly and steeply while you stared at this woman who was not really anyone. Her hard face and her scowl. The child in her arms would go on to marry one of the fortunate Lithuanians who thrived in Scotland, a Jewish man who became a doctor, so she is the one everybody starts with when they trace the family’s history, being, as she is, the good news. But my interest was in the poor broken human being who gave birth to and held her, the one who didn’t prevail, who nobody ever talked about and who probably died young in Coatbridge with bad lungs and no notion of any life that would ever yield anything but hardship and grind. You looked at the picture with a kind of fascinated contempt. You pitched your ragged beauty on our windowsill like a makeshift tent; really you never did look like somebody who was going to be there long, and I remember thinking that as I came into the room and saw you in silhouette, with your unbrushed hair tucked behind your ears. (Maybe this is the link, the thing that makes me think of you when I’m here, because Yannis and the others have this temporary look too, like they are staying and not living, even if they stay for the rest of their lives.) Behind you in the garden Nicolas and Teddy were running about in some weak Morda sun.

Your grandmother — to return to a happier theme — met your grandfather on a train to Glasgow; she going on a frugal shopping errand, he going to his last year of medical school, both immigrants, but he without any of the expectations of defeat that came with that title. They saw one another and fell in love with themselves, seeing in the other the heroic survivor they each thought they were. (Am I right in what I remember? I go over these facts sometimes in case they tell me something new about you, in the way people like to find out new things about the dead. But this memory of you on the windowsill is twenty years old and decidedly worn down.) Five, six, seven years later — your grandfather by now a specialist in lung diseases — they moved to escape the Scottish cold and ended up in the small mining community in Shropshire that is Morda, where he ran his own practice; your father was born, became interested in botany and, after the Second World War, in his early twenties, became the first in his immigrant family to go back to Lithuania, to fight for its independence from the Soviets.

This is what you told me — and that in going back he came to be involved with the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences, where he joined a project to archive seeds of indigenous plant species that were fast disappearing under Russian industrialisation. This is how he found himself face-to-face with the intimidating beauty that was your mother, who was working as a typist at the Academy. Your brother was born soon and out of wedlock, but it was another seven years before you arrived, into a now coherent and happy family in a respectable area of Vilnius; born and then, before you could know it, left as the communist grip was tightening on people like your father, and came back to Morda.

I think of the day you showed me the things of your ancestors and in that memory you are the lazy little Jewess slung in the warmth of the window, the only one of your family for generations who has had nothing material to overcome and no danger to face. You don’t even have a working religion, the Jewess is just a title that gives you licence to flirt inconsequentially with other faiths in the way a married woman can flirt inconsequentially with other men. Atrocity is going on over there, where your people are from. You just draw on your cigarette without appetite, toss the photograph onto the table and rest your head back against the wall. So I take the cigarette from your hand and sit at the opposite end of the sill, and think how strange it is, the random loins we spring from, the beauty that unfolds even from a sullen shuffling woman with clanking pans. That she left her country in 1901 and eighty-two years later it is still not free — yet that you are free, and I am free. We are free and here on the windowsill. You put your bare foot on top of mine; there are times when the very presence of another person can be a miracle. Your foot is warm, which is surprising. I suddenly remember this as I write.

12

And you would ask Nicolas and me, ‘Where did you two meet?’

‘On a filthy Thames beach,’ we would say.

And then a few days later, or a few weeks later, ‘Where did you two meet, anyway?’

‘On a filthy Thames beach.’

You would sigh, ‘Ah yes.’ Which made me think that either you forgot the answer time and again because it wasn’t romantic enough, or that you asked repeatedly because the answer was so romantic you wanted to hear it again. As children are prone to doing with stories they like.

I used to think your longing for other people’s romantic anecdotes was just one of your many ironic gestures, or a strange nervous tic you hadn’t been able to shake off from girlhood — but maybe it was actually one of your more conventional traits. We take all sorts of gleeful interest in things we would never have or do in our own lives, why else would my Wednesday afternoons be spent hauling in a pile of execrable crime novels from the mobile library to feed the appetites of those mild old ladies who read them in a little scented plume of rosehip and lilac? They lap up the stabbings, the disappearances, the trail of blood on the passenger seat. Their lumpy knuckles cannot put the books down; their faces become gentle and settled while they read about gore, as if they are back in their days of breastfeeding. Never so merciful or so reposed, and I can feel a moment of such warmth, such love towards them like that.

And so with you in your own way, if you heard that someone was in love, or had done something sweet. You were absolutely sincere, almost adulatory at the notion of one person loving and finding shelter in the life of another. You would declare, ‘How beautiful’ and then tilt your head off to one side in calculation of exactly how beautiful, and you might not move, and if you were in the middle of doing something like tearing a piece of bread from the loaf, you might stop with the bread poised halfway to your mouth. That same hand, so given to batting away any faint hint of romance for yourself, would float in quivering appreciation of somebody else’s.

‘And then what?’ you once said. ‘After you and Nicolas met. Your first date.’

I told you we went to the Serpentine, to see an exhibition; perhaps that was when he gave me the conch, though I really couldn’t say. It was about a week after my grandmother’s death and the day after her funeral. Perhaps you don’t remember this conversation, but I firmly do. We were sitting at the kitchen table in the cottage in Morda one night drinking Polish vodka, while Nicolas was away for work and Teddy in bed — I’d drunk four or five shots while you’d barely touched your first. I told you about how I stayed the night in my grandmother’s house with my parents after the funeral, and the next morning, while they were going through some of her things and deciding what to do with it all, Nicolas and I went to the Serpentine. We didn’t touch one another, we only toiled chastely around the rooms, hands in pockets, and were polite, and feigned expertise.

You reared up, do you remember? You raged! An exhibition, my friend? My dear friend, who never much liked art or galleries or places that had to be crept around, who took some peculiar Platonic offence at the idea of a painting of a tree, when you could just go and see a tree. A first date at the Serpentine! This insincere use of art for courting couples who’d rather be fucking is a waste of everybody’s time. You said, An obscene squanderment, and you said it standing with your arm flung theatrically. Men and women are born to share their bodies in a way that aeroplanes are made to fly; they should do it shamelessly, routinely. They may do it liberally if they wish, and in different configurations. Men can do it to other men, women to other women. Wives to other women’s husbands, husbands to other men’s wives. Let’s not be prudish. But they should not do it while pretending to do something else. An aeroplane is never coy about flying. Imagine it! Down with the coquettish aeroplane! Somebody put a great deal of work into that exhibition, and all you could think about was your loins. You should have booked an hour in a cheap hotel and been done with it.

Your anger was very unreasonable, Butterfly. You were such a tyrant; just because my romance failed to come up to scratch, you felt your world had been betrayed. This is the problem with people who live vicariously, they ask a lot of their friends. In the face of your outbursts I would always clam up and make a decision to withhold things from you as a punishment for your unreasonableness; maybe you noticed, although, then again, maybe not.

But now I imagine you on your own in this so-called desert, trying to build a life out of little, and it hardly seems to me that it can hurt to step forward again into our conversation, even if so many years later, and end this petty punishment. It never made me feel good anyway. You once intimated that if only I had spoken up more for my relationship with Nicolas you might have behaved differently, and at the time that idea made me sullen with injustice. But maybe there was some truth to it; I have often had to consider that since.

13

Later on in that conversation with Yannis the other day, after I had refused to write to his wife, we got talking about our marriages. We talked about their early days and the romance. I suppose this is what prompted me to write what I just wrote — which incidentally, on a reread, I think is true in gist, but the outburst about coquettish aeroplanes might be a bit improvised and slightly unfair on you. However, there is the self-made law of honesty to abide by, so it must stay.

Yannis and his wife had their first and last real date at the age of seventeen at Lake Kournas in Crete. They skirted past acres of ocean in a beeline for one clear disc of lake, the only one on the whole island — all that land, and they headed for one tiny hole in it. This is what it is to fall in love, he said, there is a world of firm ground but we go for the gap. We aim for vertigo. In that lake were the inverted White Mountains, whiter and cleaner in the water than they were out, as if the mountains themselves were a crude afterthought.

He and his wife dived in for the mountains, thinking they would find them together. Love makes you very optimistic, he said. An intense day of basking on volcanic rock and slipping into water as pedaloes wove by, a few hours spent burning up with love and enduring the downsides of heat, of midges swarming to one’s warm parts, and by the next day she was pregnant. They married so quickly they never had time for another date, and then their son Akis was born. Akis, who sprung from that day like the infamous Lady of the Lake, who purged Kournas of its sins. Yannis is romantic, like you; when he says that love makes us optimistic, he says so as if we are right to be optimistic. In a way he reminds me of you, and I think you would like him.

This was his turn; when it came to mine I told him about the night Nicolas and I spent locked in the Royalty Theatre in the West End, a night that stands out, one I spent a lot of time thinking about yesterday after I wrote what I wrote. It was October I think, or November, 1976. Nicolas and I went to this theatre, where he was doing the lighting for their programme of perpetual failures. He worked there for nothing to get experience, which meant he stood on a platform show after show training a light on a cast of disconsolate actors who played to a near-empty auditorium. One night I met him there after a show and he brought me in to wait while he packed up. I went to his platform and he introduced me (as if to friends) to the new electric spotlights and tried to explain to me about lumens and foot-candles, gobos, the projection of a crescent moon onto the black backdrop of the stage. And while we were there the theatre was locked. The caretaker came in and turned off the main auditorium lights, and we saw him from our perch and said nothing.

Nicolas switched on a spotlight. There was just one column of white light spiralling diagonally through darkness to the left-hand side of the stage, which seemed a number of miles away. The Royalty was a big thousand-seater theatre, and the darkness took away its walls and made it a ten-thousand-seater, fifty-thousand. With torches we climbed down into the auditorium and Nicolas sat at the back of the stalls. He said, ‘Go to the stage and stand in the spotlight.’ I picked my path there slowly. I put my feet in the centre of the circle of light and laid the torch down. I asked what I should say. ‘Tell me about the men you’ve known,’ he replied.

There had been some men in passing, I told him, though I couldn’t see him in the glare. Some men — or, rather, many men. There wasn’t much else to do out on the Welsh Borders. You finish your A levels, you are so busy discovering yourself that you forget to go to college or get a vocation, you start working in a pub and, when your best and only friend leaves town, you become a loner and invest yourself in things that rely little on the company of others, like pleaching willow and learning how to slum it comfortably under the stars, and singing. You start singing in the pub on the evenings you’re not working and people come to see you because you have a good voice and an unintentionally provocative appearance — it isn’t your clothes that provoke but what is underneath them, despite your efforts to cover it. The singing is short-lived, you realise you love the company of others, but only when they are indifferent to you. You like trees and fungus and the challenge of making water boil in a tin pot, and rinsing the coffee cup in the river — rain even better — so that you can pour wine into it and sleep deeply and wake up thirsty and starving.

None of the men had been of much note, I told him, and to my surprise he found this sad. It was the only time he interrupted my speech, and his voice came from the dark and was thin with distance. ‘Many men and none of note? Do you not think maybe you chose the wrong men?’ But the thing is of course that choice had little to do with it. Shropshire is not London. Not that you take whatever you can get, just that you have to take some of what you can get, and what you could get then was severely restricted. Anyway, the need for meaningful solitude is sometimes best met by being in meaningless company, wasn’t that the paradox? He probably baulked at the word meaningless, maybe because he imagined the possibility of himself being just such a man who delivered nothing to a woman. But they were not nothing, I tried to explain, they were just something without meaning and without note. All sorts of perfectly good things fall into this category.

When it came to his turn, and we swapped places so that I was near-invisible in the stalls and he was the one in the spotlight, he explained that he, himself, had been more reserved and thoughtful. He had been in love, but not often, and not the love his mother had told him to hold out for, but still, nothing meaningless. Well, almost nothing. Maybe one or two. His girlfriends tended to be small and slender with one particular part of their bodies of which they were mortally ashamed, though this had never been the eyes, which in four of six cases had been brown, bright and lovely.

They tended to have fringes, he said, and birthmarks. Fringes were like well-kept gardens and denoted a homely girl with an open, tidy face. You see, you are brought up in the Kent marshes, just you and your mother in a wooden house whose land has no boundaries, you just guess at where the garden might end and where the acres of treasure-studded flatness begin. It is just a changeable guess. Then a miracle: when you are fourteen you move with your mother’s new husband — who has emitted from nowhere and married her so fast even you missed the wedding — to a wholesome suburb of New Hampshire where the sun is very often out and the large gardens demarcated and where the seasons arrive with clear intention in discreet unmistakable blocks. Glorious times of having and giving. Pumpkins as big as a full moon.

America! Where you find a home for your enormous smile, where the gap between your two front teeth is no longer a defect but an open door through which girls hurl themselves, where the dimple in your large chin turns you from an awkward kid into an all-American youth, easy and jokey, where you learn that expression of almost permanent sardonic amusement, and take to wearing aftershave and growing stubble and holding your head proud, where people call you dashing; you take to amateur dramatics and discover that you have the kind of face that can do anything. It can suit a baseball player or an intellectual, depending on how much stubble and whether a T-shirt or a linen shirt, and whether the prescription glasses — once the bane of your life — are on or off. If off, and if bouncing a ball from knee to knee, you are the high-school heartthrob. And if on, suddenly you can be a New York Jew, clever and sharp and easy, playing life and winning; playing life and always winning.

Three years on, when the marriage collapses, you and your mother move to Deptford and live in a house next to a piece of derelict and apocalyptic ground bafflingly named Twinkle Park, and you seek girls with fringes to allay your homesickness. How do you really feel about fringes? How do you really feel about the scraps of New England accent that still hang around your speech when you are losing confidence and feel threatened? If America is what protects you, and if America is thousands of miles away in a life you barely even had, what protects you?

So now you are thinking about your future and your career, about lights, how to get a paid job doing lighting for stage or screen, and though you are twenty-five you haven’t slept with anyone, fringe or no, for eighteen months — or hadn’t, that is, until a month before and what could now be called the Night of the Bones, though you are not sure about the momentousness of this title. The affair might come to nothing and then it will be lumbered with a label that portends something big. Better just to say, since that night on the filthy Thames beach. Or more rightly, since the morning after that night on the filthy Thames beach.

Later on Nicolas turned off the spotlight and we found our way backstage with torches. In the wings we made a nest of blankets and drapes that we found in the dressing rooms, and an Oh! Calcutta! banner, which we used as a sheet. We stripped off without any mention of each other’s spotlit sexual summaries, because he knew enough of my bored promiscuity to be determined to make it a thing of the past, and I knew enough of his outgrown fetish for the neat and the safe to be determined to make him kiss my fringeless forehead and wish himself well clear of his boyhood and his New England pumpkins. ‘I will marry you if you like,’ Nicolas said—‘but I have no money.’ I asked him what it cost to get married but he had no idea. I said, ‘I could sell some things, I have a bracelet, a bike I’ve never ridden, I have a piano.’

‘Oh! Calcutta!’ he grinned, and eased himself on top of me. We lay still. He asked me which particular part of my body I was ashamed of and I told him the part between the crown of my head and the soles of my feet. Maybe because he felt I meant it, he seemed pleased. Whole-body shame is part of a bleak and complex way of being that has nothing to do with gardens laid neatly to lawn. ‘You’re a baroque,’ he said, ‘an irregular pearl, one that isn’t spherical or symmetrical.’ ‘The cheapest, then,’ I answered. ‘Unique, though, and beautiful.’ I sighed: ‘How embarrassing — in this torchlight you’ve mistaken me for somebody else. In the morning light you’ll look at me and quickly dress and scurry away.’

‘Like all women,’ he said, ‘you refuse to accept a compliment — why can’t you?’ ‘Why can’t I? — because at school they called me a giraffe.’ He laughed. ‘It must be those two horny growths on your forehead.’ And then he asked, in a voice close to sleep, if I would go pearl-fishing with him one day.

History, of course, knows the answer to this question, it knows the long night-drives up to Scotland and poses the question in hindsight: how many holidays is a woman supposed to endure camping by the Oykel River in a freezing Scottish springtime while her husband looks for pearls? For that matter, how many trips to antique shops hunting out rubies or San Carlos peridot or Baltic amber, combing for jet, bartering at mineral fairs? Will there be a reward for this in the afterlife or has it all been in the name of selflessness? And yet at the time of course the answer rushed to my lips without pause.

He turned our torches out and told me to listen. Could I hear that high-pitched sound, that wailing? I answered no, too deafened by the darkness. It was the thickest, dustiest, most crowded darkness I have ever known. He told me that a year or two before there had been a show, the Royalty Follies, that used dolphins, and the dolphins had lived in a tank in the theatre for weeks. And now they haunted the theatre and could be heard. We lay in calico, velvet and dust, awake and asleep all night, but I didn’t once hear them. I only heard the braking and whistling of underground trains until they stopped for the night and when they started in the morning, and had an awareness of a beautiful intention I now had for my life, the intention to be happy. ‘There!’ Nicolas would whisper once in a while, perhaps into my neck or into my mouth. ‘A dolphin, did you hear it?’ But I never did hear it. I just kept thinking, maybe saying, with a kind of anxious joy: ‘I have a piano, a Bechstein I got for my eighteenth birthday, we could sell that.’

When morning came we had no notion of it. I held the torch up while Nicolas looked in his pockets for a watch. I stared upwards into that band of torchlight and saw dust caught and falling, in exactly the way meteors fall. Each particle of dust left a tail, and seemed to appear from nowhere as a burst of light and then dissolve. I don’t know why it should be that such small things can sometimes take up so much of our attention and imagination, but this dust is one of the sharpest memories I have so far in my life.

I suppose the world is constantly producing things of wonderment, every moment, at every scale, and one time in every million or so our minds will be such that we will be open to seeing it. To see the silver effervescing of that dust was as beautiful a sight as any mountain or waterfall; but then, when I saw it, I was in love and as happy as a human being can be. Of course this helped. The world is heavily changed by the way we perceive it; in all my reticence and doubt, this is one thing even I haven’t been able to dispute.