Dear Thief

30

March happened, I forgot to mention it. Forgive me.

But really, if honest, I could have seen Nicolas’ offer coming. Something firm, almost intolerant, came over him when I asked about a month ago if he knew where you might be living. The question was more hypothetical than anything, I had no doubt that he wouldn’t know. He was looking down at a newspaper or, no, dinner. I think we were eating at a cheap Italian place called Ciro’s. He raised his eyes only and said, ‘In the desert.’ Then he went back to eating.

It was the first time he had acknowledged that he knew about the postcard from you to Teddy, a postcard that had dropped through my letterbox ten years before. He speared his food as if he had suddenly had enough of everything and wanted to draw a line once and for all. Enough suffering, enough separation, enough silence. Last week, when he asked me to marry him, he said, ‘I want us to just get back on with our lives’, which made me laugh before I had time to stop myself, because his tone implied that the fifteen-year break in our marriage had been just a bad fortnight that we should forget. And yet I agree, and I want to get on with life too. The question isn’t about whether or not to get on, but what constitutes getting on.

It is curious for a person to think that for a long time they might not really have been living — curious, I mean, for them to not know if they have been living. When do all the activities of living add up to a life? I can tell that Nicolas thinks my flat is an admission of defeat, my job an evasion of responsibility — that I have given up on myself. My letter to you was probably the last straw; she is stuck in the past, he thinks, and not even a wholesome bit of the past. She cannot move on. The more I think about it, the more it feels that he wants to rescue me from my sad unreconciled state and make me add up to something.

At the same time he also seems to tread very carefully around my life as though he sees it as something self-contained and sustaining; he is wary of my independence. I know this because he comments on my hair being short, where short-haired women are for him slightly dangerous creatures who might not need much from a man. When I had my hair like this in the past he always said he preferred it longer, but when he comments now it is to say, with a hint of trepidation, that he thinks it suits me. There is something in this movement from him and what he likes or prefers, to me and what is good for me, that gives me the feeling that he views me now as something separate and worthy of his respect. He said we had each grown and become much more fully ourselves, that this is the basis for a strong marriage. And so I asked him, What will happen if we get together again? Do we remain fully ourselves and, if not, will it be grounds for divorce? He said I was trying as usual to solve the future before it had become a problem. But it seems to me, Butterfly, that men have never really heard of forethought.

One of the few clear things I know about Nicolas’ life these last fifteen years is that he spent some of it in Japan living with a woman he met in the theatre. A year after he met her he moved to Kyoto to be with her, on a visa sponsored by her mother’s theatre production company. And he told me that although he had only just now asked me to marry him, he’d made the decision a couple of weeks ago, while we were walking in the Isabella Plantation. He said the idea had come to him suddenly as more of a suggestion than a proposal, and one he hadn’t planned on having. What I think is that his idea was prompted, consciously or not, by the row of azaleas and Japanese maples we were walking between at the time; he saw those early azalea petals and he thought of his lost romance, just as we are all reminded of romances and losses every day of our lives, and he sought instinctively to fight back against it with the offer of something new. What’s more, I think he either recognised it then or has recognised it since, and he knew I knew he was doing it. He has always been that way, a man whose future is an impulsive reaction to or against a past he has just remembered and cannot accept, with the hope that comes in the absence, as I said, of any forethought whatsoever.

He has told me virtually nothing else about that relationship, though I know it lasted three years and that he spent a lot of time alone in her family’s holiday home at Cape Ashizuri while she toured Japan with her productions. I have no concept of what Cape Ashizuri is like, though I gather he found it beautiful. To my mind Japan is made up of impossible intricacies and subtleties and isn’t capable of any kind of epic cape, but I kept this facile observation to myself. He said that while living there he would come back to England once in a while to work on a show for a few weeks, or he might do the lighting for some of her productions, as was the plan, but his lack of good Japanese made the process too slow and confused, and he gradually stopped asking and being asked.

He said she became tired of being his translator. I get the impression that it was a relationship that promised a lot and offered a little, in the way exotic things do; I think he misses all that it never was, the possibilities. And I have tried so hard myself to live in a way that doesn’t deal in possibilities so much as realities, but I understand how easy it is to come under the power of an obstinate dream, and in a funny way perhaps it is this that makes me want to say yes to his suggestion, not because I think I can fulfil any of his dreams but simply because of that flicker of empathy, which for a moment lays itself down like a bridge between us.

I do at least know that her name was Chihiro Mori, because it was written in the back of his passport as an emergency contact, and for whatever reason his passport had once been lying open at that page on his kitchen sideboard. He might have left it like that on purpose to save me asking the question. Such a peculiar relationship we have now, made up of things that aren’t said and dodging anything that might come from the other’s heart. We have been carrying on like this since Boxing Day, because that, of course (maybe you knew it from the beginning), is the real reason I started writing this then. He came round late on Christmas Day after Teddy had gone, to pay nothing but a friendly call with a bottle of brandy and some monkfish to cook, on the off-chance that we might escape the dry tasteless curse of turkey, and it was when he left on Boxing Day night that you appeared like that in my mind, so intrusively, perhaps jealously. Looking at the bed where some curious love of old had been invoked from nowhere, like spirits summoned by witch doctors. Looking at my face left irritated by his stubble, and the glasses of sparkling water by the bed, because as we know, where Nicolas goes, so goes sparkling water. Seeing, and shaking your head sadly, saying, My friend, do not — only the weak slip back.

It has been four months now of new quiet routines, trying out recipes on one another, making love with a certain defensive intensity, bickering where we used to argue, but bickering harmlessly, and remaining, both of us, completely unwilling to talk about the past. We simply deflect all matters of importance. Even when he asked me to marry him I just told him, with a small break in stride, that I didn’t know what to say. He said I should not answer yet, even if I could. When he came back from America in mid-June he would expect an answer, but before then he was actively uninterested.

When we were in the Isabella Plantation a fortnight ago I said something like, ‘Look at this tupelo tree, we should come back in autumn when it’s bright red.’ And again, that mention of us being together in autumn might have been casual or weighted, even I don’t know. It was simply evasive. Perhaps he has got tired of the evasion and decided it would be better if we just owned one another again, rather than dancing strangely in and out of one another’s vision. I also believe, based on his muted response when he found me writing this letter, that he had known of its existence for a while.

I used to feel there was comfort in remaining Nicolas’ wife even in our complete estrangement, and he must have felt the same about being my husband, because neither of us ever pursued a divorce. And the truth is that there is comfort in being somebody’s anything, and in a person even saying that of you: my wife, my husband, that little word of possession.

But possession, Butterfly. A word that didn’t impress you. Husband, wife, also words that failed to impress. You once threw a fork at Nicolas when he suggested that a husband owns his wife and a wife her husband. He ducked out of the way and then held your gaze as he laughed.

31

There is a sound I associate with the country rather than the city — the humming of electricity lines. In the city you can’t isolate this sound from all the others, but in the country, where the wind throttles along the lines across open fields, you can hear and feel the vibrating song, and it seems to me that the grass in the fields stands on its tiptoes.

I have in mind this sound and an autumn dawn, which is when the hum is amplified by wet air and by billions of droplets of dew on blades of grass and spiderwebs and on the cables themselves. There is Teddy running ahead and Nicolas’ strong back and the bits of leaves in his hair. This must have been the September or October of 32984, before the January you left, and we had all got up for a dawn walk. You were nocturnal by then, and night after night you upset the calm of the house with your silent restless skulking. The morning I am thinking of, Teddy woke up and there was no more sleep to be had for anyone, so we went out into some golden God-flung humming vibrating mist that had appeared as if to show humans they knew nothing about the Earth.

Along the lane you tried to part the mist with your hand. There was Teddy running ahead with Nicolas, bits of leaves in Nicolas’ hair, though why I can’t say. Had he lain down somewhere, had one of us stuck them there? Teddy perhaps, when piggybacking. You were talking about the deities of the morning, eulogising the breaking of the day; why did people get up after the day was already broken when they could stay up at night, watch the transformation of darkness into light rather than always light into darkness? There is Aušrinė, Lithuanian goddess of the morning star. Aurora in Roman, the rosy Titaness Eos in Greek. In Vedic philosophy the goddess of the morning, Ushas, is a kind of portal for awakening, we pass through her into enlightenment. Why do people not want to be enlightened, why do they only want to be endarkened?

I remember this word in particular, and your sullen wild nerviness, which had an energy of its own; you clung to your cigarette like a climber to a rope, you kicked at a stone and let it roll into the verge. I remember the mist, the smoke and the steam from your breath all at once. I think this was when you took my arm, pressed the wet wool of your shawl against me and said, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ Or no, perhaps I said something first about how early morning is thinner, less real, how I felt I could pass through the mist, steam and smoke, through the wet wool, into a reality beyond. Maybe it was me who started it, but in any case you asked, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ And I said, ‘Is there a gauze?’ and you said with a small smile, ‘You can’t tell me this is the sum of it.’

Whatever I might have been about to answer, I didn’t when I saw your face. I can hardly say what it was. Something in the very idea of dissolution seemed to calm you, in the same way you were calmed when you used to talk about your first memories — real or borrowed — of life in Lithuania, a life that was gauzy at best, shifting and lost. As if you found something of yourself in the loss of the world around you. You, you have wrestled with this religion and that, this love affair and that, from god to god and man to man, with prayers and needles, to try to see your way to something true; you have been like a heron thrashing a fish against the riverbank — you would say so yourself. But your face lit with the notion that it might all be unreal and might not matter after all.

So I did not answer, though I could have. Instead I let you speed up our pace to catch Nicolas and Teddy. As we climbed the lane the mist was thinning and the sun spun through the trees in spokes — wet, golden light, and while the hilltops were basking, the mist was still thick down in the valley. Grey, bottomless trees rose from it. Church spires floated in the distance.

‘In Hindu mythology,’ you said to none and all, ‘the sun isn’t the mother of dawn, but the lover. He chases her across the sky and the day starts with a burst of romance. The flowers bloom, the lotus blossoms. . .’

‘The wheat is lovestruck,’ Nicolas said.

‘The bees are drunk.’

‘The streams are laughing.’

‘The monks are hungry.’

‘The clouds are giddy.’

‘The temples are buckling.’

‘The crickets are strutting.’

‘Time is tripping.’

This was evidently a conversation the two of you had had before in some form. You spoke like lovers; you had returning topics and private games. As we walked further, off the lane and up through the fields where the grass was pulled upwards by the vibrating hum of electricity, the light made strange glowing arcs around us. As if it were rucked by the vibration. I had never before and have never since seen this effect of the light. If I looked at it, it seemed to disappear, but if I looked at the ground or at Teddy or you or Nicolas, I could see it, a hoop, glowing. I still have no idea what caused this, but in my memory I see Nicolas a few steps ahead, ringed by this light. He walked tall with the carelessness and ease of a younger man.

33

Today at work Gene spoke for the first time about his Lithuanian roots, though it was me who brought it up. Such a private man, and yet not cold, not at all. He does a lovely thing when he is thinking of an answer to a question — he levitates his eighty-five-year-old hand upwards to demonstrate, I suppose, the rising of the thought from heart to head. Up it goes, shaky and slow. And when it has risen he speaks, but only then.

‘The trees,’ he said, when I asked him what he remembered about the country. ‘The oak, hornbeam and what else? Lindens. Lindens.’

‘Where were you from?’

‘Ariogala.’

‘Where is that?’

‘Oh, central-ish. A small town central-ish, in the middle. But I haven’t lived there since I was a very small child, you know, so don’t trust what I tell you.’

I smiled; I was helping him on with his clothes at the time, pulling socks over his papery ankles. He has asked for a female assistant to do these things and we’ve no grounds to refuse; his notes from the hospital back up this request, which suggests to me male abuse or bullying of a kind as a child, maybe. In his torso, his chest, his arms, he is a big man and still quite powerful for his years, yet so small and crumpled in his underwear — he the child, I the adult. ‘I trust what you tell me implicitly,’ I said, but he wafted away my faith in him. There are times, I suppose, when your lack of authority in a situation is so complete that you must come to doubt your expertise in everything, even the whereabouts of the town you were born in.

‘As fate would have it, I’ve been looking into Lithuania recently,’ I told him. ‘I’m trying to find out about an old friend.’

I expected him to be interested but he wasn’t particularly. He just nodded.

‘Have you heard of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences?’

He shook his head.

‘My friend’s brother, Petras, had something to do with them, that’s all.’ One white leg into the trousers, the other leg, an awkward hoisting of them up around his waist while he leant on my shoulder. I added, ‘He was investigating something specific, about the effect of radiation on algae in lakes that are used to cool nuclear-power plants. You were not allowed to openly investigate these things then, in case you discovered something the state didn’t like. But I’m sorry, you’ll know all this.’

Naively, I thought that Gene would respond somehow, or find in Petras’ gallant fight a shared cause, but he just pulled himself up from leaning and buttoned his trousers. ‘I wonder if it’s still the way you remember it,’ I said, with one last attempt at engaging him. ‘The lindens and all.’

I have noticed how elderly people acquire an unpredictable, unreliable look, almost impish in some, as though they are slipping between gears. Gene looked at me in that giddy way and then he said, just as you did that day, ‘The Soviets cut most of those down.’ And he said it so readily that I wondered if this was the stock belief, the people’s mantra, perhaps a way of summarising a set of complex losses. But nations can define themselves by their landscapes, this is certainly true; a tree can signify liberty, a tree felled by a foreign hand can crash to the ground as loudly as any army can invade. Sure enough, as he made his silent way into his shirt, he looked out of the window at the trees there as though they had just asked him a question.

‘Gene isn’t a Lithuanian name,’ I said.

‘Nobody could pronounce Juozas. My mother loved Gene Kelly, she thought I looked like Gene Kelly. Well, it was just her opinion. And later in life she started calling me Gene sometimes — perhaps she was confused or just joking with me. So when I came here and needed a name, that was the one I adopted.’

‘When did you come to England?’

‘When I was five-and-a-third.’

‘To be precise.’ I stood to get his wallet, which he always likes to have on him once dressed. ‘But you remember home?’

‘This is home.’

He was working his arms into a cardigan by this point. He asked suddenly, ‘What’s your friend’s story?’

‘Her story? You see, I think she isn’t the kind of person to have a story, maybe that’s her problem.’

‘We were Hasidic Jews,’ he said, as if on a separate plane of thought. ‘Many Lithuanians were. Do you know what Hasidic means? It means loving kindness—and that is what our religion is about. We told stories and sang and prayed. In Ariogala we had a place called the Valley of Songs because there were so many music festivals there; you see, Lithuania is a place of prayer, song, myth and folklore, and stories. Stories.’

‘You remember all that from before you were five?’

‘Of course not — not all our memories are things we remember.’

Again he smiled, or maybe he’d always been smiling, and I made some comment or another about this being true; I think how many memories I have borrowed from my parents, even from you, and built them up as if they were my own. I eased his foot into a dark-red shoe, his favourite pair, that he insists on wearing to the exclusion of all others. He looked down at me so sober and placid.

I asked him, ‘So where would somebody without a story go in Lithuania?’

His kindness remained, but he watched me blankly.

‘I’m looking for my friend.’

Still he watched me blankly. Was this to say, Your question is foolish. Or was it only that his thoughts were already elsewhere?

34

Though unsentimental by nature, a memory comes to you. You are outside your hut when a breeze catches you and takes you back to a time when you were not much more than a baby, in the dunes at Nida with your mother, father and Petras. Petras is around eight or nine, a towering brother tall as the hills, fearfully loved. Your mother and father are burying him in the sand and it makes you screech with laughter. They laugh at you laughing; this is what Petras most often recounted about you when you were older — your baby laugh, which was a cackle of pure joy requiring a mouth open to its fullest and a complete suspension of breath. Even when he emulated it we laughed too, so infectious was it. You were game, as a child. Feral, Petras commented, and your parents countered, Delightful. The foulest temper and the sweetest, most coaxing love of life and adventure, and nothing in between except sleep, which was deep, determined and uninterruptible.

Petras is up to his jaw in sand, and the sand keeps falling away from his face because he is laughing at you laughing. Your parents scoop it back but it flows away. Then you feel a breeze — maybe it picks up, or maybe you’ve turned your head into it — and you become quiet at the feel of it over your skin. Grains of sand rush across the surface of the dunes like lunatics, like drunks. Of course you do not think of it in terms of drunks and lunatics at the time, but you think it as you remember. You close your eyes and open your mouth to feel the air touch places it can never usually reach, and the laughter around you stops. The air is on your gums and your handful of new, sore teeth and the insides of your cheek, filling up your mouth as if you have eaten one of those cottony clouds up there.

This breeze, which is warm and balmy, but edged with a northerliness that never allows you to forget where in the world you are, has returned fifty years later. It touches your right side as you bend over the vegetables in your plot behind the hut. Holidays, you think. Holidays! At Nida, in the long spit of dunes where the sand flows like water but is dry as bones. How can bones flow? How can water be dry? You stand up, flick your ash on the soil; good for the pea shoots, they like it. And so they ought; you’ve filtered smoke through your very own lungs to make that ash.

You have taken to watching a video of geese flying, and you go indoors, suddenly provoked by the memory, and switch the video on. You found the video player and the tiny, portable TV in a skip in the village, so you took them. Inside the video player was this short film of geese flying, just a film without commentary, and at first you had it in your mind that the film had no sound. You never checked to see if it was the sound on the TV that was defunct, because you would rather that the film were silent.

Except, after days of watching this film, you realised it wasn’t silent at all, it was rich with the honking and squawking of the geese. You muttered incredulous profanities at yourself for this oversight — it is abysmal, wholly unnerving how deaf, blind, dumb, hubristic and arrogant you can be for assuming that a lack of human noise means no noise. You won’t survive in this world with thinking like that, amazing really that you have survived this long. But I’m telling you, you should forgive yourself. Life is like this; the senses are instruments that go out of tune. You have been surrounded by non-human sound for so long in this forest of yours that only something different and out of the ordinary counts as sound now. The owl-call, the throaty crow, the snorting bison, these are no longer sounds in themselves, but part of the fabric of the air.

Anyway you watch these geese in formation. You have no idea why you find them so interesting but you could sit and peer into the screen all day if it weren’t for the fact that, quite unconsciously, you chain-smoke while you do it. Even someone with only a very scant regard for her own life would baulk at the saucerful of dog-ends these sessions yield. Besides, not enough money to smoke this much. So you watch the geese for an hour or so at night, usually, to get you off to sleep.

On this occasion, though, the memory of yourself and your family in the sand dunes has taken over, and the V of geese sheeting across a chalky sky is not providing much distraction. Neither do the Upanishads have anything to say that can take you out of yourself, because the memory resists and pulls you back. The Upanishads say abstract things about time and about childhood, but what you feel is not abstract and the memory crashes through their verses as a ton weight through mist. So you turn the book aside.

It is peculiar to think of yourself as a child. As an adult you are a one-woman nation state. You do not consider yourself a person with a history and allegiances and moral frailties, but as a set of religious, political, social, physical principles, a stockpile of abstractions that have to be met periodically by base needs like food and sex, and here in the clash of the rarefied and the base you find yourself. It is a gritty little thing, this self, and not worthy of much, but it defends its borders all the same. You never expect perfectibility, you expect to be troubled because, after all, everything complex is troubled.

But as a child, with the breeze on your eyelids and the back of your tongue? Could this simple pound of happy flesh really be you, and is there any road you can take between this self and that and, if you could, what would it achieve?

Your thoughts turn away from yourself and towards those curious dunes, and to Petras. Ironic that he went on to dig himself into the Lithuanian landscape for the rest of his life, throwing his cause against the diggers and drillers and axes and chainsaws, dear old Petras, hero Petras, dear Petras, the drillers, the axes. Your thoughts run together anxiously when you think of him. Who would have thought a love of botany could set you against the state? You look out of your one rectangular window at the woods, what used to be oak and is now quick-growing spruce, larch and pine.

You remember all the battles he fought against the power station at Ignalina, against the deforestation of the countryside, against the obliteration of indigenous flowers, trees, birds, and finally against the oil-drilling at Nida. The Russians might try to stamp out our language, take over our schools and businesses, but — you hear him say, white-lipped — they are not going to ruin our dunes.

And they did not, you say to the geese on the wing. They did not! You pour out the last few drops of steeped nettle tea from the pot and slice a piece of cheese from the rocklike remains of a block. You sit back from your thoughts. Funny how that memory came on the breeze and, now the breeze has gone, how the memory is gone too. What was it about the way the loose sand was speeding across the surface of the dunes, around the legs of your parents and over the mound that was Petras’ buried body? It made you calm and ecstatic; when you think of it now it fills you with electrical energy, and you wonder if your hair is standing on end.

35

This is tantamount to assault, you are now saying. The cheese on my table is not rocklike; I do not even eat cheese. First the imagining of my life, what I eat, how I sleep and what I sleep on, and now of my memories themselves. The air aroud my baby teeth, this preposterous fantasy about geese! Do you not think that you and your letter have gone a step too far?

Sometimes when I look at the drawings at the end of the life-class I see that the bad ones are those in which a student has stopped looking and started making things up; in those drawings I acquire a rigorous little face that isn’t mine and a pair of breasts that belong to somebody and anybody else, and there is a kind of cruelty in the pencil marks, a violence at the way I have been hijacked and misused.

I do not feel bad about inflicting this violence and cruelty on you. If you had not run away I would be able to see you, and would not have to make you up. When I think about it, there are so many sentences I could begin like that: If you had not run away, I would be able to. . .

It is true, you do not eat cheese. I forgot. You came downstairs one morning when you were living with us in Morda and said you had dreamt that a cow was standing before you. You had heard its bell clinking along the lane, then it drew up to the door like the milkman. You shall not drink of me, it said. Its breath crept warmly around its nostrils. So in the morning you made yourself the first of a thousand black teas and dry toast.

But you’ll still eat of it? Nicolas said later, over roast beef. You took a piece of meat in your hand and shrugged: Unless I receive further instruction, yes.

36

When I look back on our years of friendship it seems to me that you are a person who, with fair consistency, has had more interest in others’ happiness than your own, though you had volatile ways of showing it.

But what am I saying? Can I really mean this? Sometimes you peer at me through the dark as I write and the familiarity of your face forces my hand into words that are kinder than they are truthful. To rephrase: you did not go out of your way to make another person happy, but you did not go out of your way to make them unhappy, either. You never went out of your way. It isn’t even that you are a selfish person — in fact isn’t the opposite true, that you are fundamentally selfless? By which I mean somebody who lies low like a card in a pack, until the cards are dealt. Sometimes her appearance in the hand will be good news, sometimes bad, but she herself is neither. She is just offered up, and played or not.

I am thinking now of the time you were staying with us, two or three months after we got back from the pearl-fishing trip I told you about. Ruth came to visit for a day and night — to visit Nicolas, that is, because I hardly knew her then. She was one of his friends originally, from childhood, and I find it easy to forget this fact now that we have our own decades of friendship between us. You must have been staying with us for three weeks or more and in my memory these were happy times. It was a rogue, hot May day and we were all in the garden, sitting around the old wrought-iron table and chairs that we inherited in the move.

I am sure at first you didn’t want to be there for Ruth’s visit, but obeyed when we insisted you stay — and I mean obeyed, because you sat with all the subservience of a tethered dog. But I could see that you liked Ruth instantly, and I knew why. She is capable and one of life’s doers — dark, large, deep-voiced, lovely; she is lovely still. She can wear big brash jewellery with finesse and she will never ask how you feel, or ask you to account for yourself. Not a human being but a human doing, Nicolas used to call her. In the weeks prior to that, since your arrival, you had deflected all my questions. Where have you been? What are your plans? Have you been happy? You had said only, ‘None of it matters, all you need to do is tell me when you want me to leave.’ (To which I replied, ‘I never want you to leave.’ I repeated it so many times, was so relieved to have your company in the loneliness of motherhood, that you did my bidding and stayed; have I only myself to blame?) But my point is that Ruth was exactly the kind of person who would remove any burden of explanation or justification and simply accept your existence in the garden as a fact amongst any number of other facts that were neither here nor there to her.

When you discovered that she could sing you came to life; there was no mistaking the moment you became interested in something — the image I have is of accelerated footage of a fern opening, where something inward becomes outward and unstooped and ready. I remember that she sang the Solemn Vespers so strikingly that the neighbour came to watch, and we were never to forget it because that neighbour, Christina, didn’t again manage to have a conversation with us without mentioning it. Ruth’s voice wasn’t trained, but it was churchy, rich and capable of almost anything. Each time she got to the end of a song you would pick whatever flower or weed was growing in the bed next to you and toss it towards her with a ‘Brava!’, an ‘Encore!’ You went to her and put your fingertips on her throat to feel her vocal cords vibrate while she sang, and when she finished you did something that I imagine must have been extraordinary to her at the time, you kissed her on the lips. She mentioned it once recently and I pretended I couldn’t remember the occasion at all.

I think we all went to the table then and poured drinks. Having witnessed that kiss, Nicolas sat back, impressed and threatened. There: that one-sided smile I liked so much, which was the containment of a pleasure that compressed not quite invisibly in his mid-chest, and rose far enough to twitch his Adam’s apple as a horse-flank twitches under a fly. Meanwhile he leant back a touch more and linked his hands in his lap so that his masculinity could defend itself. He did this combination of half smile and retreat whenever he saw something in womankind he liked and couldn’t control, and because he did it only with respect to women and nothing else it made me see in him, by turn, something I liked and could not control. He then said, more assertively than usual, ‘You sing, Butterfly.’

‘I can’t sing, I’m flat as a pancake.’

‘That can be remedied.’

‘It can?’

‘Of course.’

‘People can be divided into two categories,’ you said. ‘Those who think everything is fixable and those who think everything is breakable. You are the former and I’m the latter.’

Nicolas smiled; I had the impression that he was satisfied to have been noticed and judged by you, regardless of the judgement.

‘Let’s try,’ he said.

‘Try to fix me?’

‘Come on,’ he shrugged. ‘It can’t hurt.’

To my surprise you stood. ‘Very well, I’m yours.’

The two of you had coexisted politely those previous weeks with little to say to one another, and with a paranoid awareness of the other’s space. I do clearly remember that phase of courteous sidestepping because I remember being touched by it — how, with me, you were vivid and quick and caustic, and yet how with Nicolas you and he both became awkward. You in particular seemed to have all the confidence pulled from you: you bent your head more, which made you long-necked and grebelike and apparently meek; you were always glancing up from the floor. You were not coquettish, I wouldn’t want to suggest that any of this was planned on your part. I think you were genuinely pinned by a social ineptness I’ve seen in you before, with the others at school, say. Yet you stood, and said — not just to Nicolas, but to Ruth—‘I’m yours’ and you waited without mockery for them to make of you what you knew couldn’t be made.

They straightened you. Ruth put her fingertips on your shoulders. ‘Draw them back,’ she said, and then, ‘More.’ She tucked her fingertips lightly under your chin and asked you to look to the horizon. She asked you to breathe with her. ‘You can’t sing well if you can’t breathe well,’ she told you.

‘I can’t sing well regardless,’ you said, but you were not frustrated or impatient. Nicolas lifted your arms and let them drop, uncurled your fingers from their fists. He put one of the plucked flowers between your teeth, so you could not protest. I remember that Teddy found this funny and let out his thrilled cackle, and I see you standing there winking at him, thin and upright in the cut-off shorts we had made from my old jeans because the weather had turned hot. Long, pale legs patterned at the back with chair swirls, toes clutching at the grass. You had even forsaken your shawl and were wearing a long-sleeved cheesecloth shirt. Ruth sang a note and asked you to match it; yours was flat. At the next attempt it was a semi-tone higher, but still flat. There would be a return to breathing and a general re-elevating of your posture — chin up, shoulders back, chest open — as though this would rally the note from a higher place.

I knew, as did you, that it wouldn’t. We had sung together enough in the past to know that the cause was hopeless, and hopeless because you didn’t care to be in tune; just as you had said, you were not a person who believed things could or even should be fixed. They were as they were. But how could Nicolas or Ruth know this about you? To them, you were a painting that needed restoring, which implies that they thought you had come from a perfect state of harmony and could go back to it. Foolish assumption, this one we make about beauty, to assume that it must have come from perfection. Sometimes, to use your word, it’s the result of pure randomised chancery, some happy irreversible spillage.

Between Nicolas and Ruth it was agreed that posture was your problem. Probably you would be a lovely singer if only you were not one of life’s slouchers. I remember you looking at me with a collusive smile when they started straightening your back and asking you to envisage a plumb line through your core, and your vertebrae stacked like a ladder. You called: Do not let us grow crooked! You were then forced through some lessons in comportment, and you complied, walking up and down our long, narrow garden with an ashtray on your head whilst smoking. You would raise your arm and flick the ash around the vicinity of your crown. I don’t put this compliance down to your good nature particularly because, though I think your nature is many things, it is not good. I know you will be the first to agree. I put it down to this neutrality I talked about before. People want things from you because you interest and confound them — so, unbothered by any sense of self-preservation, or any sense of self at all, you offer what you have without analysis, expectation or defence. You deal yourself up, they play you.

That said, I think you were amused by that afternoon. I have often admired how careless you are with yourself. You walked up and down the garden with an ashtray on your head, then an empty glass, then a full glass; you ended up with ash and gin in your hair, you let Teddy blow the ash out. When you sat you resumed your wiry slouch with your foot up on the table, your ochre-tipped fingers tapping your knee and your beauty unknown and uninteresting to you.

‘You see, I’m not good at anything,’ you said, more with victory than self-pity.

‘Oh, come now,’ Nicolas replied.

Ruth leant across and put her fingers on your throat, reciprocating what you had done to her earlier. ‘You’d have a very good voice with training. But if you don’t stop smoking, God knows what will happen to it.’

‘Whatever it is,’ you said, ‘it won’t be half as bad as what’ll happen to my will to live if I do.’

Nicolas gestured in the direction of the house. ‘Not true that you’re good at nothing.’ And then to Ruth, ‘She takes good photographs, there’s one in there, if you want to see it.’

How hypocritical we can be; he spared you his previously stated view on the subject, his view that your still life was sordid, and then trite and obvious. And you spared him your knowledge that he was sparing you. ‘Oh, come now,’ you said simply.

‘I think you don’t believe in yourself enough.’

‘Oh, I believe in myself, I believe in almost nothing else, that’s my problem.’ And then, to Ruth, ‘But you are good at things, I can tell. Let me see, you’re a sculptor, or a lawyer.’

‘A paediatrician.’

‘Exactly,’ you said, and a genuine pleasure lit your face before you became suddenly inward — not sullen, but removed. I knew you had disliked Nicolas’ attempt at consolation and congratulation. You wanted to be obliterated, you wanted us to agree that you amounted to nothing, that you, your self, was eclipsed by your own fumbling, vulgar ineptitude. You would have been delighted to know that Nicolas had used the word sordid — you are delighted to know that, and as you read it off the page I bet a small thrill goes through you at this opportunity to take yourself and your sordidness out of the range of good people and cease to exist. And this is what I mean when I talk about your desire for others to be happy, just as you were glad to find that Ruth had a good voice and a vocation and was, as far as you had decided, happy. Ruth’s self was big enough to make yours redundant.

Soon after that you went to your room and stayed there until the next day. What I am guessing you don’t know is that later, when I went up to you, I found you lying on your bed still in the shorts and shirt, but with your shawl over your legs. Your left sleeve was rolled up above the elbow and that arm lay soft side up on the bed in surrender. I could see clearly the puncture from a needle. Your head was thrown back and your face unnervingly placid. At first I thought you were dead, but when I felt for a pulse it was firm and regular, if anything too insistent. There was no syringe, tourniquet or folded pocket of powder, but it would have been consistent with your sense of manners to put those back in the drawer or in your suitcase or under the bed, or wherever you kept them.

You were not asleep, but you had little idea of where you were. You knew somebody was in the room but I’m sure you didn’t know who, or which room. ‘Oh, to be a sick child and be in Ruth’s hands,’ you murmured with a smile. ‘Doesn’t she make you feel comforted somehow?’

‘Sshhh,’ I whispered deep into the well of your ear.

‘Do you think the name Butterfly becomes me?’ you asked from some blind depth. ‘Do you find me especially becoming? No, you see, Teddy was mistaken. Me, I prefer Fly. Like John Clare in his poem to a butterfly. To see thee, Fly, warm me once more to sing. Ha! He takes her down a peg and owns her. You, Fly. Otherwise she’ll get above herself and flitter off to another poem, I think you know what I mean. Please, if you will, call me Fly. It is better. My feet are dirty, my feet are covered in shit.’

I pressed my hand on your head. ‘Sleep, Fly.’

Do you know, I always thought that perhaps Teddy wasn’t so wrong when he named you Butterfly, but that was a vague thought that I had out of motherly generosity. And yet just now I realised (I have just been standing at the window, thinking about it) how mistaken Teddy wasn’t, as if he saw something true that had always been there. That name actually was becoming, was unironic. Butterfly: settling on nothing, at the windowpane basking or trying to get out, batting at the light as if baffled by this lovely form that is (so it thinks) some fragile decoration of its ugliness. Do you know what I thought when you were lying there that evening? Instead of being angry that you had brought drugs into our house, I felt an unexpected sense of gratitude towards the needle that had given something back to you. Ah, I thought, so this is what is making you look so well! So bright-eyed and flushed with life. And I am certain you felt that exact gratitude when you guided the needle to the vein. For once you were not dealing yourself out, but were being dealt to. Nicolas said one time, when we were talking about your addiction, that you were a coward for escaping yourself, but I think that the opposite is at least worth arguing — that you were reclaiming yourself.

You looked so strong, well and calm, and I didn’t want the drug to ease off and drop you back to a slouch. Do not let us grow crooked, say the Vedas. We that kneel and pray again and again. I moved the shawl to cover your shoulders. We are all looking for miracles and small mercies, I mean this. Who are we to decide on another’s behalf what is miraculous, what is merciful?

37

That shawl of yours struck terror into the hearts of young men. You, aged twenty-one, would sit amongst the handful of young people from the village, around a limp fire in the woods or amidst a pile of beer bottles in a field or at the bottom of someone’s garden, and you would hardly speak. Just smoke, and play along at cards if the rest of us played. At that time you were in a phase of wearing Petras’ clothes, simply because, you said, you had grown into them and he had grown out of them. His brown and blue cords, his drainpipe jeans, his boots. You had not really grown into them, they were all too big for you. And always you wore your shawl, like a blanket laid neatly over an unmade bed. Through this complex crocheted honeycomb, this thick, soft network of deflection and obfuscation, sometimes, sometimes, sightings of your bare arms or inklings of female shape. But instantly lost again to the greater shapelessness that was your too-big shawl, this flocking of wool around your birchlike frame. As if, almost, you were giving shelter to the shawl and not the reverse.

You can tell I have thought about this — how you looked, how you were to those boys (although I couldn’t even name any of them now; they don’t warrant remembering). I have thought about it probably too much. The honeycomb, the flocking, et cetera. I have wrestled with ways of explaining you. They tried to draw you out, those boys, but you were undrawable. They thought that your thick cloak of hair was an encouraging, wholesome sign, as if it were flagging up welcoming semaphore. Yes, you were formidable and silent and strange, and yet your flushed skin — your soft hair — serene in the firelight — like warm wax — you were a Mary, a mother, no, a girl, a maiden, a kindly creature, a possibility. I know what they saw. I think of it like this: a herd of wild horses stampeding across a plain throws up a plume of dust, and through this plume the horses’ ferocious and muscular beauty is gentle, almost romantic, the stuff of pleasing paintings in living rooms. You plumed like so; your beauty was so fierce it kicked up its own haze, something dulcet, like a myth. Those boys squinted at you with a giddy sort of look while they tried to work out how to approach you, and tried to balance risk against reward.

You accepted their cigarettes without thanks; you handed out your own without regret; you won or lost at cards with equal indifference. Gradually they became suspicious of you. I say gradually — it was a short time thinking about it, a summer and an autumn, and that was the end of our tentative spell as extroverts. It was ’72, the year that Petras left home for Lithuania, which of course was the real, if unofficial, reason you wore his clothes — because you missed him; or, more rightly, appropriated him — because, seven years his junior, you had finally come of age by growing, almost, into his jeans, by becoming worthy of him, I suppose you could say. Not his equal, but at least worthy.

So the boys began to mock you; you were a dyke, a whore, you were filthy. Of course, we always insult what we do not understand, especially if it has rejected us. When the moon sails out, you quoted, from Lorca, and I misremember and misquote, the waters spill over the earth and our hearts are little islands in the infinite. Poetry was your only response to anything they did or said and you used it as wastefully as somebody emptying a cartridge into grey sky. The poems would leave local indents of silence, like hammer marks on metal. The others might laugh, they might miss a beat and then carry on talking as if you were not there, and you might carry on quoting poetry as if they were a paying audience, or otherwise, likewise, not there.

Then one evening in August or September, in the Morda woods, the matter of what was underneath your shawl was raised and became pressing. ‘What do you think is under there?’ you said with your own languid brand of scorn. You were kneeling by a crude small fire pit that had been dug earlier in the summer, to which we often returned, or anyway if you were not kneeling then — if you were sitting on the ground — you came to your knees fast when you felt the questions strengthen. They beset you with their curiosity. They asked and then demanded and then asked again, and all you said was, ‘What do you think is under there?’

They jumped on you all at once — three or four of them — to wrest your shawl from you. It was not easy, you bent yourself double, your chest pinned to your knees. Finding no way in, they pulled back at your shoulders and tried to hoist your body up, but you had wrapped your arms under your legs and made yourself unopenable. They pulled your head back by your hair, and when they realised that they could get no further without real violence, the kind of violence that would be shameful towards a woman, they instead tried to tug the shawl upwards over your head — not straightforward, because the shawl too was pinned by your body, which had locked itself down.

I stood up, but as I came towards you to help, you turned your face to me and shook your head: left and then right, a short, firm no. I will always remember that. It was an affirmation of all that seemed to define our friendship — the way we asked each other to be left to our own fates; people intervene when they think the other person has no fate, or only a weak one that can be changed — just as those boys supposed with you. You have never purposefully interfered with my fate, nor I with yours. And I knew that by sitting back down as I did I was not neglecting you, but affirming your autonomy, your control, and that at some point in this battle for your shawl you would win; I wasn’t sure what you would do to win, but I knew you would.

Such a strange sight to see them only half laughing as they tried to rid you of this thing they were so afraid of. Two of them were holding you down, one or two trying to pull it up over your head. Of course they would get it if they persisted long enough; you were outnumbered. But your soundless, motionless resistance appalled or disappointed them, I think, and there was a moment, just a moment, when they all seemed to pause, to step away and look at the back of the shawl pulled over your head and spread on the ground in front of you like a pool of spilt cream, and entertain the faintest thought that you were not worth it.

Another moment and they would either have torn it from you in aimless frustration or backed off, sat, drank, concluded: Stupid dyke. Either way, you would have lost. But just as that moment was approaching, you raised yourself up a fraction and straightened your arms in front of you as a child does when being undressed. You offered yourself. There was some laughter and hesitation; one of them stepped forward and rolled the shawl calmly off, then stood, unsure of what to do with it. You sat up and neatened your hair. You were wearing — and I remember it, partly, because it was mine — a white vest top with lace edging that could not have been more feminine or disarming to them, which followed closely the fragile cage of your ribs and the flatness of your stomach and, most crucially for them, I suppose, the great surprise, the ampleness of your breasts, plump and shapely against all the odds. You came to your feet, held out your hand and clicked your fingers for the shawl, which was given. The silver cobra coiled around your upper arm might as well have flicked its tongue at the giver; Petras’ trousers hung at your waist with sudden elegance. It is a beauteous evening, you said, as you eased the shawl back into shape with light tugs here and there, and picked bits of leaf and twig from the wool. It is a beauteous evening, calm and free; the holy time is quiet as a Nun, breathless with adoration.

And you smiled at them, and they — what did they do? I don’t know, I don’t remember. Did they speak to you again, did they watch you walk off? Because you did walk off, into the woods away from home, declaiming Wordsworth; you must have been shouting by the time you had gone from view, because we could still hear you, you will be glad to learn. But they, what did they do? Who can guess. They slide into the shadows as men do when you have had your final say.

38

Iskim back over the last few pages of this letter every so often and I usually wish I could change what I wrote.

When I wrote, for example, about your indignation at my so-called memory of you and your family in the dunes, and the sand blowing across a buried Petras, I implied, I suppose, that I had made the memory up. But something about that memory is true, isn’t it? I can definitely remember you telling me about this once in the red room at Morda, or in the lanes at Morda, or on the trunk of the fallen horse chestnut in the school fields, or in the cottage at Morda, or in the garden, or in the car, or in London, or in Spain. I’m sure you scuttled your fingers to imitate the bone-dry, flowing sand, and you said, How can bones flow, how can water be dry? And didn’t you even put your head back and open your mouth for a long minute while I sat or drove or cooked or tried, with a cheap parasol, to win back a square foot of shade from the Spanish sun?

You see, I over-emphasised there my forgery and invention, and under-emphasised the very thing that drove me to write the memory in the first place, which was a sense of sudden closeness or complicity. The truth is that trying to get to the emotional heart of things is so difficult, because emotions morph into one another with such confusing subtlety that what was elation is now fear is now rejection is now rage is now wonder, all depending on the agenda we come at them with. So how can we get to the heart of them when the only heart they really have is our own? And this heart is supremely inconsistent and liable to irrational turns.

For example, the pearl-fishing trip in the Oykel Valley. Sometimes the centre of this memory is the pearl itself, which represents happiness, a joint achievement, and a time in our lives when we were a family at one with itself. Sometimes the pearl slips to the background of this picture and what emerges as forefront is the moment I mentioned — not more than five seconds long — when I caught Nicolas staring at Teddy and me from the water. For a number of years this was all I could think of when I remembered that trip, because I couldn’t decide why he was staring or what his expression meant. It was a look of love, I knew that, but was that pain behind it, or fear, or intense happiness, or. . . ?

I began to be troubled by a lack of facts, namely whether this trip happened before or after you first appeared at our door in Morda. I know the pearl-fishing trip was in the April of 1982, and I know you arrived that April, either soon before or soon after, but nothing I did to force chronology onto these events made any difference. I would go over the scene in my mind, but the problem is that the mind is a bad loser and can never accept it doesn’t know best, so what it doesn’t know it invents. Hence it invents, at one moment, the spectacle of our camping equipment spread over the grass in our garden to dry out before we put it away: therefore, you arrived after the trip happened. Yes, you were sitting, not on my coat as I’d previously mentioned, but on the edge of the groundsheet. You wrapped the guy-rope round and round your thumb as you spoke, and never once asked about our camping trip or where we had been.

At the next moment, it invents the opposite scenario. It does so as soon as I question the veracity of the last, because I’m certain the garden wasn’t full of camping things, or at least if it was it means we had only just that day got back, since Nicolas was always prompt about packing away. So the mind rebounds. It says, Ah, no! We hadn’t just got back after all — we were about to go. The tent was in a heap in Teddy’s bedroom, where Nicolas had removed it from its bag to check it was all there. You were sitting on the floor in Teddy’s room reading stories with him, wrapping the guy-rope around your thumb while the two of you mouthed sounds with lips pouted.

The chronology mattered so much, or so it felt then anyway, because the interpretation of Nicolas’ expression that day as he waded in the river completely depended on it. Did he look at Teddy and me with such love because he had just, while fishing, had an image of you in his mind and was guilty and threatened by what he felt? Or was it because he hadn’t yet met you and was still happy in his marriage, at an optimum point of devotion before it ebbed away?

And then sometimes this image too fades to the background and the storm is all I can think of. More recently this is how I tend to remember it, with less and less personal emotion and more as an abstract awe stirred by those incredible tantrums of nature. And now I think: Did I share too much with her? Am I cutting her too much slack? Am I making her think I care more than I do? Because, as I said, I think about the pearl-fishing trip now with detachment, little more, and somehow I wish that when I wrote about it I hadn’t got so carried away with how it was, and had written more about how it is. Just a storm, is how it now is. I should have written a few rudimentary details about when and where, leaving out the digressions about Nicolas’ upbringing and his expression and the salmon fisherman and the hot-water bottles; just the storm and a tree on fire, and our plastic cups tossed into the air, and an eagle plummeting sideways to snatch the bacon rind from the water as our plates reeled downstream. And three bleary little glad faces hardly noticeable behind glass and a veil of rain.

39

The longer I go without word from Teddy the more I imagine him with you in or around your hut, out taking photos of the trees or swimming in the static lake against the hum of a generator. You sit outside at a fold-up metal table that squeaks at the joints, on a day that is two degrees short of warm, and gaze into the light. This was how you were with him, benign but largely indifferent. Even when he was clanging a wooden toy against the fridge or screaming at a minuscule injustice, you never minded his presence. But you made no effort to engage in his world, either. I thought of it like the relationship between a human and a dog; human throw stick, dog chase stick, human shall never chase stick. Different types of beings equally united and divided by stick. Teddy appreciated your lack of likeness to him, and rarely missed a chance in the evening to curl himself against you in your armchair. You neither cuddled him nor shrank from him; maybe you would rest an arm across his shoulders.

So you are at the fold-up table, trying to build a Japanese torii out of snapped twigs, and are contemplating how vertical everything is — the trunks of the spruce, the secondary and tertiary branches that shoot straight up in search of light, the light itself falling like a plumb line in faint beams that make you look up for a UFO. Ah, how you would love an alien in this moment. The pitter-patter of intelligent life across the forest floor; you would sit your alien down and ask it to be honest about what it thought of Earth. Honestly (and here comes your frank, unsparing look) — do you think this Earth is wondrous or absurd? You contemplate briefly the possibility that it doesn’t speak English or might be as dull-witted as a stone, but don’t like to bother your fantasy with these trifles.

Over there Teddy stalks through the trees photographing lichen and leaf veins and insect dances. Or he threads through the water, always a good swimmer. The problem with Teddy is that he bears a false love, and his loyalty is misplaced. He loves you because he thinks you were exiled unjustly, and he prides himself on being the one member of our family who fights this injustice. Edward the fair, Edward the peaceful, watching over you with unquestioning belief in your goodness. He would strip the pines bare one by one if you asked him, just because you asked him.

Evening comes. There is incense and frying kippers and God beating about in the reddening sky. The sky looks sore. You are wondering why God must be so forceful with everything. You are wondering about Teddy too, how a four-year-old boy grew into this dark, intense man walking the forest with a camera and how from such chubbiness came high cheekbones, carved nose and sharp eyes. If only he would go away and care about something else; it makes you feel guilty that he loves you still, and you hate to feel guilty, the most wasteful of emotions. His very presence is making you waste yourself. You take up a bit of tobacco from the table top and chew it — don’t you — with your shoulder turned against him.

40

(But why do you write to her like this? Yannis says. He is taking me around Borough Market, his favourite place in London. A place of modern worship, lofty and vaulted, more populated on a Saturday morning than the church is on Sunday, its roof more light-letting than the great Gothic windows of Southwark Cathedral.

It’s unhealthy, he says, that you should be writing to her like this, as if she were a friend.

I wonder if he remembers the comment he made a few weeks ago, about how I live in a draught? The other has left and — what was it he said? ‘They have left, but not shut the door. It must be like living in a room with a draught always coming in.’ This is how he put it, or how I said he put it. So when he takes a sample disc of cacciatore salami from the knife at the Italian delicatessen and asks me why I write to you like this, I say, Do you know, Yannis, that in life there are people who give shelter and people who take it; do you know that the people who take shelter come in from the cold and eat and drink from the cupboards of the people who give it, and sometimes they even make promises about staying and formulate in their minds a future in which they put their dreams to bed, their dreams of long, empty roads leading away from everything that ever tied them down? These people say, to themselves and sometimes aloud, I would like to give up my wandering, finally I would like to be one of the sheltered.

But one day the givers come down from a night of uneasy sleep and see that the door (which, come to think of it, had always been left ajar) is wide open, and the person who takes shelter is gone. Visible through the opening is a cloud that looks like a fast-dissolving highway. The days go on. The weeks go on and the months. Sometimes — this is more common than you might think — the ones who give shelter think about that highway themselves, this highway of freedom. But they have a temperate and cautious way of living, which means that no sooner do they visualise the highway than they see it dissolve. So they stay in the draught of a room whose door has been left open; they live in and endure the draught of somebody else’s escape for freedom.

And then, Yannis, I say (as he handles appraisingly some miraculous edible rocks of cheese), you can see perhaps why one day one of them tries to close the door by proceeding as if the past made no impact and the old course of life can be resumed. And why the other one, entirely unconvinced that the past is really in the past, gets up, stands at the threshold of the door and looks for a shadow. A sound or something moving. And calls after the taker of shelter who has left their life so draughty and stripped; stands there calling out.

What? he says — you are calling for her to come back? No, I tell him, I don’t want her to come back, I just can’t be sure that something of her is not still there. So then I hope your letter is full of abusive swearing, he says; and when I tell him it is perfectly civilised he concludes sadly, Pot plants, you see. I told you. You modern women, pot plants.)

41

I suppose you might think that Yannis is not real. See how often he makes a convenient appearance when I have something I want to confide, something it would be awkward to say directly. What stops me having invented him for that purpose? How do you tell the difference between a person made of flesh and one made of words? I know this thought will have crossed your mind once, if not many times, because that is the way you think, by which I mean you think as if everything is a symbol for something else — like God being a sexual fantasy, or a triangle the symbol of creation. For you, nothing is what it actually is, even the desert you live in is an allegory, even the beetroot you eat is a transcendent notion; the more of it you take in, the thinner you get. No wonder you fell into this unlikely devotion to Hinduism and its purposefully symbolic gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva — but I know I was talking about Yannis and I know I have started to go off-track.

Far from Yannis being made up, almost nothing in my life currently is more real than he is. And there are lots of conversations we have that are banal and trivial and signify nothing, which is why they don’t make it onto the page — in fact Yannis is exactly one of those people who can gossip inanely all day about the racing odds, the unpunctuality of buses, the treachery of women, et cetera. Of course I wish his wife would come back to him, but I also wish it won’t be for a long time, or I wish it would always happen tomorrow — you see, to be complicit with somebody is such a thing. He is the only person I have really talked to about you and he billows with opinions about it with typical Cretan hot-headedness, but when the conversation ends it ends, and he pours wine and makes some injurious remark about the government or the health-and-safety people who are always on his back, then asks me if I — if anyone — has actually read D. H. Lawrence. He has been trying with The Rainbow for over two months and his bookmark — not a receipt any more, but a KitKat wrapper — has found its way just past the middle.

‘Could you give me an idea what it is fucking talking about?’ he asks gently.

Is the flesh which was crucified become as poison to the crowds in the street, or is it as a strong gladness and hope to them, as the first flower blossoming out of the earth’s humus?

He frowns accusingly at the page. ‘Humus?’ He swipes his finger into an imaginary dip and feeds it into his mouth. ‘Humus?’ ‘Yes,’ I laugh, ‘the first flower blossoming out of the thick wet chickpea-and-sesame soil.’ He throws up his hands. ‘Oh, I don’t care, Lawrence was a lunatic,’ he says, and he covers the book discreetly with a copy of the Racing Post.

I say this as if it’s what he does in general, but it’s what he did once, this week, when I told him about your job as a photographer of fake weddings. As an immigrant who has done everything he can to abide by the law and respect his host culture and learn his host language, he felt affronted by a livelihood predicated on dodging the law. By your little business that operated from a newspaper booth under the arches off Villiers Street in Embankment, by all the people living in squats and trying to get passports by whatever means. He believes these are the kind of people who give immigrants a bad name.

But I think if he could ever have seen the photographs you took he might have changed his mind, or opened it a little. Those photographs were not the stuff of hasty loveless services in registry offices. They looked pricey, an extravagance the bride’s father had paid for to commemorate what would be a lasting union. No immigration officer could fail to see the sudden, bright and unlikely cross-border love that had sprung up between this louche, wiry Londoner and this lovely young woman from Port Elizabeth or the Karoo, with the luscious orange orchid bursting from her right temple.

Nobody was to know how the one-size-fits-all dress was gathered in at the back with bulldog clips, or that she had no shoes unless she provided them herself, or that the venue was the tiny back garden of a friend who had an arched iron love seat under a quince tree, and behind that a wall running with passion flower, and not much else besides. Out of frame was the washing line and a child’s tricycle. In the frame, though, you made not just a wedding but a marriage; this was how I put it to Yannis, and it seems I stumbled on exactly the right phrase. Your lens married these people. The photographs were devotional and passionate, just like your Still Life, but also the opposite — because while the still life flaunted the gaping hole at the centre of things, your wedding photos disguised it, or even, I sometimes thought, dispelled it. I always imagined that some of those couples must have fallen genuinely in love when they saw how you had photographed them.

‘Then I need a photograph like that of me and my wife,’ Yannis said sadly. And then he added, with renewed objection, ‘But still I think it isn’t right.’ When I suggested that it was different back in the eighties, he began on one of his righteous rants about deference to the law and level playing fields and the sanctity of marriage, all of which come from a place of goodness in his big, honest heart, but none of which I really listened to. I had started thinking about those times, because they coincided perfectly with the three years you lived with us in Morda. I thought about all the trips you took back and forth to London, the diary you used for bookkeeping, the way, for a year or so, this little business gave you purpose, friends of sorts, a notoriety — or so you once said — when you walked through Embankment Gardens.

Sometimes you took payment in kind: jewellery, clothes, shoes, drugs. You would come back to Morda with your hair pinned in place with a Mexican silver barrette, or in an elegant, outdated silk shift and trousers, or with a sachet of pinkish amphetamine that you would tap tentatively into a soda water after dinner with a kind of generous sense of experiment; you were just trying out a gift, after all. It would be ungrateful not to. I might find a bottle of Chanel No. 5 on my bed, or a book — yes, you passed on to Nicolas and me an unwanted illustrated book of South African diamond mines. You accepted the strangest forms of payment, if you don’t mind me saying, and they became ever stranger as time wore on. The return leg of a two-way ticket to Johannesburg, should you ever want a holiday you couldn’t come back from. Shoes that you would never wear, a handmade patchwork bedspread someone’s grandmother had toiled over; and of course the little sachets, the pinkish yellowish greyish or bright white powders, the tiny pricey offerings of amphetamine or cocaine or heroin; they amassed over time and you hid them in a locked box at the back of your wardrobe so that Teddy could never find them.

This is what I was thinking when Yannis spoke — about your London life I never really saw, but which ate at you in mouthfuls. I saw you, in my mind as I was thinking, as a firework opening up and fading out. At first it was hair clips and dresses and stockings and clasps, so that you came home dazzling ironically, smiling, laughing, smearing orange grease on your eyelids. Nicolas hinted that he thought you had several men waiting for you there, several lovers, although he did not use that word. You handed over money each month for your keep. And then, over the three years, you would come back ever more jaded and falsely brisk, your wages seldom in the form of cash, more often in the form of folded sachets squirrelled away into the lockable box, your mood held up increasingly by a synthetic hum of restless energy that had a disappointing lifespan which, when it wore out, left you for days in your room.

Ah, but none of this is the heart of the matter, is it? Surely the heart of the matter is a guest-house in Earls Court where Nicolas stayed when he was working in London. The Ellis Guest-house, run by Mrs Ellis, stand-in mother to Nicolas, poacher of perfect eggs, server of hot buttery toast (a toast-rack denier, a loose-tea evangelist), who judged not, who ran her house with discretion and honoured her guests with privacy and tried to pay attention to the small things — plenty of toilet roll in the bathroom, clean, sharp cutlery, extra blankets for winter.

All sorts of people went through Mrs Ellis’ house and her door was always open, so long as you could pay the minimal prices. The regularly homeless, the recently divorced, the runaways, illegal immigrants, failing writers, out-of-work actors, those fresh from jail. Nicolas liked her liberalness and her quiet revolt. She would have been exactly the kind of person to turn a blind eye to the woman who sometimes went up to his room and left his pillows smelling of cypress and smoke, and exactly the kind of person to supply scissors when he asked, without a pause or a question, and to not comment the next morning when, alone at breakfast, he looked stricken, a lock of dark hair wrapped around his hand. That woman’s dark hair, unmistakably; there it was, the same smell, piercing through swirls of warm milk and breakfast butteriness.

I almost asked Yannis, there and then, to come with me to Earls Court and see if the guest-house was still there. It was late, and the errand pointless, so I didn’t ask after all. At home, after I’d left Yannis bemoaning the loss of morals, bemoaning you and Lawrence, slipping The Rainbow under the Racing Post, I did the things one does for bed — clothes off, teeth cleaned, face washed — and then I took that lock of hair out of the desk drawer, where it lives between newspaper in a shallow cardboard box that once housed a portable radio, and I placed it on the desk and stepped away from it. Years since I’ve looked at it. The fascination is still with the same particular thing — not the foot-and-a-half of hair itself, not the buffed-leather cavalry-boot black with its mahogany surprises, not the unkempt ends, not the cypress, the smoke, the coffee, the trapped life in the dead strands — but the top of the hair where the scissors made a clean swipe. A straight line, a decision; this is how I see it, a decision. Whose decision? Whose hands held the scissors and sliced that clinical line in the lamplight or dark? Yours or his?