Dear Thief

50

You see? Time has passed, another week, gone with the snap of a twig. This is exactly what I mean, about time. Where and how it goes is unfathomable to me. I make my way back and forth across the city half watching out for you, until everybody looks like you. I know the futility of this, but the eyes look, don’t they, without the involvement of reason. Meanwhile June has come as you can see, the start of the gracious season, the season for forgetting that one’s windows need cleaning because the light is too high and full to glare off the glass. You would think that living is a kind of scholarship in time, and that the longer we live the more expert we become at coping with it, in the way that, if you play tennis enough, you get used to coping with faster and faster serves. Instead I find that the longer I live the more bemused I become, and the more impenetrable the subject shows itself to be. I sit on a heap of days. My feet no longer touch the ground. The day after Teddy’s fifth birthday he asked if it was his birthday still and we had to tell him no. He began sobbing inconsolably and he didn’t stop, nothing we could say would make him stop.

Is this a trick played on us? I remember stroking Teddy’s hair then and feeling that, as a mother, there ought to be something I could do, somewhere I could lodge a complaint.

51

Adog is barking. Something small like a terrier or a — I don’t know. I don’t know a thing about dogs. Making a chopping sound through the forest, which is driving you spare. After two days of this you bash about the hut singing, you clank pans with sticks, you shout out: This is perfect, this is perfect! This is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect! You turn up the squawking of the geese — honk, bark, honk, bark, an animal orchestra; if only you had not caught the mouse that thrived in the one food cupboard on bags of oats and barley, then there would have been vocals to the percussion and that would have been perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. Outside the hut you stand and bark with it. It, you, it, you. It hesitates at first because it doesn’t recognise your language — dog, but not dog. You are some big dog, a mastiff maybe; you howl. It barks. You growl, it barks. You bark, it barks. Please! you shout, and it barks.

You pull up a log outside the hut and sit; if you close your eyes and do that thing whereby you gather the outside world inwards, you can put the dog in your head. If the dog is in your head it is not a dog any more but a passing perception. What is it they say? A cloud, moving across the clean sky of your mind. A dog-shaped cloud, bounding through your mind; a dog, barking in your mind, a dog up against your skull, a dog-bark gnawing through your skull.

Why is there no peace! The dog must be shot, or pelted with stones. You march down to the lake where the mosquitoes swarm and you go in up to your ankles. If you were a different sort of a person you would swim, it being the right day for it — warm and still. The water sits motionless against the shore like a spread blanket. If cold water did not make you feel instantly hostile, you would take off your tired old cotton dress and get in and get your head under, into the dogless silence. If you were one of those women who love to bake and to swim, you would. You know the ones I mean — women with curves and a boisterous brood and recipe books from their grandmothers, women with wild-flower arrangements and menstrual cycles that work with the moon, women whose milk flows, whose cheeks are ruddy in the cold, whose long thick hair lightens in the sun, who can improvise something interesting with rhubarb or even turnip, who reread the classics, who rub almond oil into their nice thick middles, whose skirts give to a full easy stride, whose calves are strong and ankles fine, women with small dignified noses amid wide compassionate faces, women who are trusted by birds and lambs.

You stand ankle-deep in the water and let a mosquito settle on the vein on the back of your hand, before squashing it quick as a flash. It gave so easily; it is hard to take any pleasure out of this retaliation. You flick its corpse off your hand, angry at its weakness. Angry with everything today because of that dog, angry with this forest and this country. The spruce-pine-spruce-pine, the violent swinging of the seasons, the brackish lifeless sea, the food that sits like clay in your stomach; everybody is melancholic and drunk. They all drink too much. The national disease. You shouldn’t say it but there it is, the truth. Your ancestors, coming to Scotland, must have been relieved to find a similar picture there, and no wonder they failed to prosper on the whole. It was only your grandmother who slipped through the eye of that needle.

Evening falls, but not darkness. The dog is still hacking away at the calm. You lie for a while on the charpoy but more of the ropes have broken and your weight is unsupported on the left side; using an old winter scarf you lace it up again like a shoe and contemplate your exile. Why has she put me here? you ask. Why has she locked me here in a forest inside a letter? On one piece of evidence that is extremely scant: a postcard to Teddy with a Lithuanian stamp and a comment, rashly made, about deserts. From which she fashions a life. Does she not consider that I sent that postcard on a visit to see Petras’ grave, perhaps? A four-day visit, nothing more? No, instead she fashions a sad and absurd life.

I have considered that, of course. You made it clear that day on the windowsill, when you showed me the photograph of your great-grandmother scowling drably from the roadside, that you did not want a heritage. There is a type of person who does not want back, but wants out. Out! Out of the confines of yourself. You are not the type to have a sentimental relationship with your past, or to feel, like Gene, drawn back towards the valley of songs. The Jew in you is indifferent. She is sorry that the past has been one long fight, she is sorry for the suffering; sorry, but not that interested.

Heaven is for those that are masters of themselves. They can move anywhere in this world at their pleasure. Anywhere in the world, you say aloud. So why here? You take out from under the mattress the short letter Petras wrote you before he died, a letter that, in reality, might not even be in your possession. But I am giving it to you, herewith. It arrived at our house a few months after you left in January 1985, and I opened it, because you had left no forwarding address and because I owed you no discretion. Whether it ever ended up in your hands depends, I suppose, on Nicolas, whether he passed it on to you when he saw you next, or else sent it to you later, and this is for only you and him to know. But here, I have stashed it under your mattress and given you the will to look at it again.

As you see, it describes great happiness at the prospect of a free country now that Gorbachev has come. He is so young, Petras enthuses. So progressive! Attached to the letter is a newspaper clipping with a picture of Gorbachev; the clipping is seventeen years old now, and looks it. You inspect his square, strong face, fascinated by the violent wound of a birthmark and the downturned mouth that appears so kind. So unassailable, yet avuncular, so trustworthy; he is the sort of man you have to assimilate all at once, because the separate parts of him don’t add up.

Meanwhile Petras and his scientist friends are planning to test the eutrophication of Lake Drūkšiai to see if the nuclear-power station has warmed the water, and this all sounds hopeful and noble indeed, and with Gorbachev and his reforms on the scene they might even be able to publish their results. You let the letter drop to the floor. Five months later Petras will over-indulge his love of a drink and will spread himself face-down on the roof of a car that is hurtling along a dark lane and will die laughing, as will his friend who is driving. Weeks away from forty and he dies the death of a teenager.

Why have you put me here? you say. Punishment? To teach me a lesson? You were always the coward in a family of heroes; it was the others who fought the fight, and that they only sometimes won is testament to their courage. This is what you think I am trying to tell you now by trapping you here, still alive, in a country the rest of your people have left, either by accident or design. That you are a coward. I have consigned you to pining for those who were bolder than you. I have you craning your neck backwards. I know you feel you have tolerated me enough, my insinuations and implications. I am a coward, you say. So what? I never claimed to be anything else. You lie flat. All this with Petras; why must you be forced to rub up against terrible loss that cannot be undone when all you want is to be free, and when I know that this is all you want, and take it from you out of cruelty.

I have contemplated, between this paragraph and the last, a peace offering. How about if you put on your shawl, take some oatcakes and a bit of leftover chicken in some newspaper from the pile by the stove, and walk out along the track towards the only building in the vicinity, where the barking dog must be tied up. I have given you this building, and this sudden compassion for the dog, out of sheer love and friendship. It seems wrong for you to be so alone. But I think, when I approach you with this idea about the chicken and oatcakes, you shake your head. I see you sit up on the charpoy and look intently ahead as if I were sitting opposite; you are wearing that look, the one you reserve for arguments you don’t intend to lose. You straighten your back a little for dignity. Do you think you have punished me? you say. You will have to try harder than that; let the thing bark.

So, deep into the night, it does.

52

As I say, I am not a gentle person. I have not succeeded in becoming one, despite my efforts.

At work I was called in and asked how I had allowed that fight to happen, and at first I said the usual things, like there being nothing I could do, and that I had stopped it as soon as I was able, but we all knew that if it had been another member of staff on duty the fight would not have happened.

Why? Because I suppose I liked it happening. Of course I could have stopped it, but I enjoyed the flare of energy ripping through that room, and I wanted heartrates up. I wanted them to be angry again, instead of lost. We find ourselves in anger, we shout and there we are. I appreciated the bit of pink on Claudia’s wrist where Frank had grabbed her. I thought: She flushes still! Her body is alive enough to object to violence against it. She feels pain. Good. They want to smoke their lungs down to burnt prunes: encourage them. If their lungs can wither, that means they are living things, since only living things wither. We let elderly people smoke forty a day because we think it no longer matters, they are as good as dead anyway so we let them do what they like. But I say do more than let them, it matters more than ever that they smoke, because only living things can smoke, wither, go pink in the wrist, reel out a slap, spit the word bastard, hurl a teaspoon, a shoe, a cup, be angry about what happens in Australia, feel pain, protest.

There is that little bit of savagery in me that my grandmother did try, to her credit, to smooth away. She would say that it was always better to be peaceful and non-reactive and I don’t think she would agree that we find ourselves in anger. On the contrary, we lose ourselves. But she didn’t manage to take the last few thorns out of my side. Eventually I admitted at work that I had probably not done enough to keep control, and they talked to me at length about insurance, health-and-safety, legal responsibility, moral responsibility, in loco parentis. In loco parentis. At the age of their children we are asked to act as their parents.

And so I spent my breaktime watching over Gene’s sleeping body, trying to glue together a porcelain statuette of a boxer puppy that had lived on the mantelpiece and been broken by something like a slipper, trying without success to imagine myself as Gene’s parent. I can tell you I felt indignant on Gene’s behalf that I should be asked to make him half a man like this, while I somehow, in this little shuffle of roles, became twice a woman. But I tried it, to feel that protective care I mean, to want to dandle his aged, frightened spirit while it creeps towards the next world; to let him be done for. To let him have nothing left to be angry about.

Since telling me about M that day he hardly speaks, to me or anybody. He keeps some interest in the things of life (like the remote control, which he obsessively dismantles and rebuilds), but he seems to have lost much investment in what happens to himself. I get the feeling he has come here to do one thing only, and that is to die with as little trouble to others as possible. Some days he barely gets out of bed and barely even wakes up, and he sleeps on top of the covers completely naked and with the window wide open. This made it all the more surprising when he said to me the other day, with sudden force, ‘I should have chased her.’ It was just after the fight, when everybody else went out into the garden and he was still at the table reassembling the remote control. He raised his head as I walked towards him and inspected the mess in the room. ‘I should have chased her,’ he stated as a fact. ‘Who?’ I asked. Because he said nothing I asked, eventually, ‘M?’ He nodded. ‘Do you regret it?’ I asked. ‘Yes!’ he said, pressing the side of his fist into the table.

I put my hand on his shoulder and said something consoling like, Don’t regret it, or You did all you could, or simply, Well. I don’t know which words slipped out and I don’t suppose they made any difference to him anyway, but when I was tidying the room after that I found I was comparing myself to him again, in the sense of being passive I mean, passive to the point of losing somebody, and I enjoyed this fantasy. I bought deeply into it for a few minutes, thinking about those few months after Spain, before you suddenly disappeared, and seeing myself as docile, tolerant, self-possessed and, at last, gentle, in the way Gene is, and Yannis too. When I pictured you and I playing 21 just after we got back from Spain I was, in my imagination anyway, tending expertly and quietly to my cards in the way Gene had tended to the remote control, while the rest of the place went to pieces.

Went to pieces? I hear you say. Who or what went to pieces? — we were a house of calm. Weren’t we happier in a way? I hear you ask it almost sweetly. After all, you might have slept with Nicolas, but you were never going to expect him to leave his family or give himself in any way to you; devotion was not a quality you asked of people, commitment neither; you did not give these things and did not ask for them. If you could give and receive moments of happiness and self-escape, that was enough, that was, in fact, everything. Didn’t Nicolas become a different man after that, one who went from investing endless hope in a world that rarely delivered to one who had had a hope met? After a month or so of bitter exclusion he found himself gradually allowed back into the fold and he did not come back in regret and self-loathing, but with a certain muted victory over life and over the forces of loss. He had done what he liked and got away with it; his incredulity was plain to see, his new faith in the ability to be happy, to have what one wants. To have all the things one wants, at once, without conflict or reproach or guilt, to be allowed such a thing.

Didn’t we live in a kind of new communal harmony? Didn’t our household take on a new unity and balance? Everybody was someone and had a role to play. By that point you had been with us for two years as an outsider and then all at once you were part of our number. You developed a perverse obsession with cooking, mainly single-pan maverick meals of meat and foraged greens. You were going through a phase of eating liver and kidneys that the butcher gave you for next to nothing, so you dealt up fortified pans of iron and blood, and the zincy phosphorus of greens, thick glossy chard cooked down to a mulch, limp chickweed and sweet nettles that were, pre-massacre, probably emerald and springy; a plateful of soft metals that Teddy would not have eaten if anybody but you had put it in front of him.

I remember one meal in particular, one I’m sure you will not remember at all (or which did not even sink in far enough to become a memory), when you put one of these plates of chickweed and liver in front of us, and Nicolas, staring at it expressionless for a few moments, said, ‘I am not going to eat this.’ There was no anger in that or even impatience or frustration, he just put it to you as a fact, and you smiled from somewhere remote and said thickly, ‘You don’t like the look of it?’ ‘Starvation would be preferable.’ You patted his knuckle lightly with your knife: ‘Starve then.’

Once, you see, before Spain, he would have been too polite to refuse your food because you were a house guest and his wife’s friend; even after two years of you living with us he managed to maintain that courtesy. Now you and he had a relationship of your own, whatever that was, and that meant he could be critical of you in the way people can when they know a cord is not so fragile as to snap under a little pressure. You, who would once have hated to offend him, your friend’s husband, treated him with the confidence of somebody who has earnt the right to offend a thousand times.

And as for me, I sat without a word, docile and unruffled; I did not get up to make Nicolas something else, as I probably would have before, instead he got up and made us all something else, a quick thing like a fry-up, I expect. After dinner he went to put Teddy to bed and you washed up while I dried; it took you over half an hour. You were slow and heavy-lidded and moved your arms like a swimmer, and broke a plate by smashing it against the tap in a misjudged movement. Afterwards when you had sunk down into the sofa in a drowsy ebb and flow of consciousness and I went for a bath and Nicolas spread his paperwork on the bed and Teddy slept, I remember feeling almost content, a feeling I relate to being a child when my family was all together, one of knowing everything is in its place.

Everybody has a sudden power. Nicolas can say, I am not going to eat this. You can say, Starve then. I can refuse to get up and help. Nobody bears any responsibility to please, everybody is tongue-and-groove with everybody else. Nicolas takes on a new intensity in bed, which is to say, You are my wife. It is not gratitude that makes him passionate but a zealous kind of — what can I say? — revelry, revelry in the unbreakable bond, so that somehow the two of us have become closer, our marriage more magnificent, I think, in his eyes. You and I too, closer — in a de facto way more than a practical one, but all the same closer; because we are always closer when one has taken too much from the other. Always closer when ousting and threatening, because a meaningful relationship thrives on reasserting yourself against the other; that is what it is to relate rather than to be alone — which makes me realise now, as I write, how I never for a moment felt alone in that period between Spain and you leaving.

Neither could you have; you were busy turning your attention to the most intimate, faithful relationship of your life, one you practised in the privacy of your room. You affixed a lock to the inside of the door so that Teddy couldn’t amble in, and when you came out sometime in the early evening your face and neck were flushed and you would move languidly about the house in uninterruptible peace, and at times go about a period of prolonged, ecstatic cleaning, and then curl up in the armchair and sleep. Once a fortnight, you told me. One needed a strict limit with a drug like heroin, and one had to know where the tipping point was. For you it was once a fortnight, this and no more. If you could keep it this way you could manage the addiction and it was better, when you had it, it was all the better for the wait.

I suppose there is no more loyal and private a relationship than that between a user and her drug, it leaves no room for anybody else. Either you were locked with it in your own world or you were weathering out the time until you could have it again. At first this seemed workable, and certainly on that October morning in the mist, when you spoke about the gauze of life and you and Nicolas danced through your conversation about the deities of the morning, jubilant and quick-witted, certainly then you seemed lifted. But by Christmas of that year you would spend your fortnight in such anguish; you might not know how agitated you became then, irritable and barbed even towards Teddy, and restless, messy, withdrawn, more and more unkempt, a nightmare, a slow-occuring natural disaster. We went to the coast of Mid Wales one afternoon in early December and while we walked the coastal path you sat on a short promontory watching a wave smashing at a rock; I tell you this because I doubt very much you remember. We had to go back for you at the end of the walk and pull you to your feet. Your fists were clenched. This was what day thirteen began to look like, and then day twelve looked like it, and eleven.

And so I have told you, and I will tell you again, that I am not good, or lenient, or gentle. What kind of a friend will watch this happen and nod, and allow the idea that heroin only once every two weeks constitutes some sort of healthy, moderate regime? I was no kind of a friend to you, a thing we both know. It was not Gene’s docile passivity that made me accept our triangle. You had looked, shaken your head at me, shaken your head! No, you had said, do not intervene, and I had stood there in the humid Spanish night as if drugged, convinced that what was happening was somehow an inevitability of your fate, to which we were all silent witnesses and secondary players. But then you were always so convincing, and your fate was always the most pressing.

No, let me make it clear. I was not docile, or passive. I dressed myself up as the forgiving sort, but there is forgiving, and there is also tolerating, which is forgiveness in rags. And then there is something else, which is nothing short of a heartless fascination with somebody’s downfall. On our journey back from Spain, looking at you as you slept, I began to realise that if it was your fate you wanted, you could have it — your sad, sordid, wretched fate of self-annihilation. In my defence, Butterfly, you made it so easy, I never once had to lift a finger. I would never have chosen that path for you, I hope you know it. I have loved you, but you have not at any point made this the obvious or logical choice, and when I went into your room that January morning in 1985 I was not even sorry to find your bed stripped and your things gone.

Maybe if this letter is a form of defence it is only to object that I may be unkind but I am not weak, as I know you think I am. I am unkind because I didn’t want to forgive you or Nicolas, but I am not weak, because forgiveness of you was never my choice. You cannot forgive somebody who doesn’t ask to be forgiven. There is no point leaving somebody who agrees that you should leave. We can argue with a piece of bad reasoning in another, but we cannot argue with somebody who acts under the influence of love, as Nicolas did. I might almost have felt sorry for him after you left, if he had invited even a moment’s pity. In my ignorance and my hardness I hadn’t realised what effect you’d had on him, what you had given him, which I see now as the gift of risk and loss. Finally he stopped believing that you would come back, or that he would find the cow shin or the other half of his peacock figurine; he lost his foolishness and he broadened and aged like a tree.

Even weeks after you left he would comment that he could smell you on things, that sharp smell of saplings, of bitter green wood on the cushion on the armchair where you had taken to resting your head.

53

Yannis’ place is as clean as a child’s conscience. Together we spent today scrubbing it from top to bottom so he can try to sell it as a going concern rather than fold the business and give up the lease. This is after almost two weeks of deliberation and long phone calls to his wife in Crete, who is unbending. Have you ever tried to wield a cloth with a broken heart? I can tell you it cleans at half the rate. It was as if Yannis were trying to put back the grease the cloth was taking off, which was after all his grease, his footprints on the lino by the fryers, his fingerprints on the till.

‘A year,’ he said, ‘I will give it a year. And if my wife and Crete are giving me a headache I will come back.’

I told him this was a fair plan, but I know he will not come back because certain moves are irrevocable. I don’t know why this should be, only that we know in our hearts when they are, and the more we tell others how easy a thing is to undo, the more we know we never will undo it. I will miss him. Not only him, but the others here we sometimes play cards with — Christos, a Greek man Yannis knows from the cash-and-carry; Tam, a gentle Jamaican English teacher in his fifties who discovered Yannis’ shop through a love of baklava and who recently lost his wife; then there is the Nigerian, Muyi, whose suits are from House of Fraser, if you remember, and his friend Winnie. And others, but it is too late in the letter to tell you about them now.

Not that I know any of them well, except Yannis, but sometimes it is the little rituals you miss most when they end. The scrape of coppers across the metal tabletop, Winnie using her thighs and the table as percussion to the traditional Ugandan songs she sometimes breaks into, olive-oil fingerprints blooming on the top left back of the nine of spades and just left of centre on the two of diamonds, and everybody noticing and noting and pretending they hadn’t noticed or noted; Muyi’s gifts of salted caramel truffles from some improbably priced place on Madison Avenue (he has brothers in New York and crosses the Atlantic probably more often than I cross the Thames), his enthusiasm for New York speakeasies, his intolerance of conservative white men, his vehement refutation when Yannis calls himself a conservative white man, despite that Yannis wants more than anything to be one. Muyi tells him he cannot be because he is an immigrant and self-made. Yannis visibly heats with frustration at this basic right being removed from him.

These speakeasies that Muyi goes to — he was telling us about them last night when we got together for a kind of pre-emptive send-off for Yannis, who might not leave for weeks, but these people have a great sense of ceremony. Apparently you have to access speakeasies with passwords and winks and membership fees that buy you a particular table and a waitress who knows how you like your gin. Muyi goes to ones in London, though there are hardly any, but the best are in New York. You push against a door that looks boarded up, he says, and you go past a doorman who pretends to be Mafia or a 1920s Chicago detective, you go up some stairs or down some stairs and through a second door, which might have been pulled off a shed or a phone booth or might be an old headboard for a bed or might be a bullet-proof bunker door writ with invective from the Old Testament about how God hates a drinker. Then you step into a low-lit secret temple, a gin den or vodka joint and a menu with fifty-plus cocktails and discreet barmen and beautiful black waitresses and live bands, as if it is still Prohibition.

I could see you in such a place. While Muyi was speaking, and pouring American gin with his lovely hands, I pictured you with him or somebody like him in a place like that. As everybody argued about the point of speakeasies in an age of legal alcohol (and Tam was calling them theme parks and telling Muyi he demeaned himself and black people by going to places that were invented, in part, to keep black people down) I was giving some of my attention, as I have come to do, to the street outside Yannis’ shop. I used to look for you only in the way people look out for dead loved ones, not because they expect to see them or even hope to, but just as a reflex, or maybe through curiosity. I wonder what it would be like if so-and-so walked around the corner now? Lately, do I look with something more like expectation? I don’t know if it could be called that, but I have at least run out of reasons why you couldn’t walk past. Something both sinks and rises in me, Butterfly, when I think like this.

At night most of what I can see in the glass is a group of people huddled round a high circular table with fans of cards. And last night the conversation continued about the revival of obsolete things, times, people and places, gangsters stabbing black men in back alleys without anybody so much as lifting a brow, beautiful black waitresses growing old with oppression. I was listening and not listening. I was looking out of the window at myself looking out of the window; I couldn’t peer around my own reflection, which was — pensive. (It has taken me a few minutes to land on that word, having gone through sad, defeated, nondescript, shadowy, wary, weary, confused, suspicious, anxious, wiry, concerned, murderous, lonely, defensive, dark, old, refined, narrow, superstitious — none of which were right, some of which were ridiculous and make me sound more like a piece of furniture than a human.) I looked pensive, or more specifically like someone who has been drawn down too many pathways of thought and is no longer able to double-back. Contrast this with Muyi, who must be in his forties and glows like a stone that gathers no moss. Or even Yannis, who is solid and guileless and fends off complexity like a cow. It is a crime to think too much. Yet I think too much. The thinking buries my sense of joy, which I know is there; and I am jealous of those like Muyi and Winnie who have not buried themselves like this.

But you did not bury yourself, either; you would get so far into your troubles and then break out irritably, impatiently, would throw your head back in raucous laughter and shrug the world off. Last night when Muyi was talking about New York speakeasies, I could see you with him and I could no longer justify, even to myself, my solitary confinement of you in a forest. I am sorry for this, sorry for the geese, whose concept I knowingly abused.

One stiff frosty evening not long before you left I brought coffee to your room and sat on the floor while you told me how the flight of the goose is the symbol for escaping continual rebirth, getting out of this agitated world. The goose flies, we break free at last without needing to come back and do this life again. Do you remember saying this? You pulled back the plunger and I saw a swirl of blood rise up in the needle, and then you closed your eyes and said that you could taste it in your mouth, and then that you were washed with warmth, and then you stood by the condensated window with your fingertips touching the pane until droplets ran down.

‘Anything is possible,’ you said, spreading your hand against the glass. ‘Ask me to do anything and I will be satisfied doing it.’ You regarded me with wide eyes and such deep stretching peace. Your hand slid down the pane and lay on the sill. You told me there was not one grain of fear or discomfort in you and nothing you could not or would not do, and do again, and love. You were made of light, were part of everything. Every beautiful detail of your childhood was right here to be lived again, you were burying Petras in the sand, you could feel the air on your back teeth. A most lovely sensation, the air there. Whatever you needed to do or be you could do or be. Nothing impeded. You had hit the ceiling and ripped through it, ripped through the gauze, there was light everywhere and you were it. Total acceptance of the way things were, gone any trace of desire to harm or bear a grudge, you were saying the word harm but it was a sound, the concept meant nothing to you any more. Instead of it you had the most visionary focus and patience, your beliefs came in colours and smells that overwhelmed the world with sense, logic and beauty, because there was nothing wrong, nothing to put right, no barriers, no emptiness. You were the goose in flight from the anxiousness and suffering of the world. I am the goose, you said with a shallow, euphoric smile as you rested your head against the wet pane. I am the goose!

I know you did not even notice when I left the room and went downstairs. There is nothing worse than witnessing somebody else’s salvation, Butterfly, when all you want is your own — when you were promised your own, when you grew up to believe there would be a great reward. And now, well, how easy it is to start living out one’s own reveries about the other, or worse still to project the future one thinks the other deserves, rather than the one she probably gets.

I have kept you lonely and baffled by the Upanishads. Your vegetables grow and their abundance reminds you of all the people you cannot share them with. I have given you a lake and not let you swim in it. Your video collection is very poor, even by your own standards; the geese fly but they are trapped in the screen and will never be free. Your beauty is for nobody to see. Your forest is nondescript when it comes down to it, just trees, all of them straight and none of them perfectly straight. I have given you food that makes you thinner. I have been untying the ropes on your charpoy one by one so that your sleep gets ever more uncomfortable, until you cannot sleep at all. I have given you one pen, and soon I will take it away. Then you will not even be able to keep a record of your life, and so you will be undone, my friend, you will be undone.

54

They have it that jealousy is the most corrosive of emotions and I have felt it corrode me and whittle me down to something dishonourable, this is the truth. I have looked at — not even taken from its box, just looked at — the lock of your hair and have been filled with heat that is as close to panic as to any other emotion I can name, the kind of panic one feels when one’s place is threatened. A survival response perhaps, one that comes from seeing that one’s position in the world is not central or has been usurped.

I generally dislike this tendency in us to try to boil down everything we think, do and feel to a base instinct for survival, as if we are not responsible for our reactions, or as if we have no choice. But in this case perhaps it is true; we realise that somebody we love has loved someone else more, and we feel swiped aside like a skittle. Nothing essential holds me in place, all that I am is swiped aside and scuttled out of sight. For good or bad this is how I feel when I look at that lock of hair. I can’t touch it; I can only take out one of the ten-pack of cigarettes that I buy after the life-class, light up, stand back and inspect it from a cautious distance. Why did she? I think. Why did they? How did they? Was it worth it?

This is not something I very readily admit, and I will never tell Nicolas, but I went to stay at Mrs Ellis’ guest-house once. It wasn’t run by Mrs Ellis any more, but a man called John or Simon or Peter Ellis, who I assume was her son. I knew that Nicolas used always to rent the back room on the first floor because he mentioned once its view of the garden, which Mrs Ellis stocked with bird food. The roof of the portico, which was just below his window, was harangued (his word; this is the only time I ever remember him using it) with birds that landed on his sill. He kept his window shut. How could he complain? If he resented Mrs Ellis’ kindness towards birds he would have to resent it towards himself too.

I booked in advance and asked for this room. It was big and light. There was an iron-framed double bed against the left wall, badly made with sheets and blankets that pined for a hospital corner — an old pink, patchily bare woollen blanket, and pastel-striped pillows, a thick towel on the end of the bed that smelt of packaging. Nets at the window with worn lace, a tasselled lamp on a cheap, modern bedside table of plasticky pine, what would once have been a handsome wardrobe with broken fretwork above the doors, a light-blue carpet, a floral border on the woodchipped walls, a discoloured landscape print above the bed, a travel kettle with a limescaled spout, instant coffee, no teabags, no milk, three ashtrays (on the kettle tray, on the bedside table and on the windowsill), a dressing gown hanging on the back of the door as if somebody had left it there in error, a clean but not fresh smell.

I arrived in time for bed. I did nothing there but go to bed, not even wash. I used the toilet in the bathroom across the corridor, that was all. Because I always sleep naked I made myself, but I didn’t want to. For an hour I lay in bed with only the light from the lamp and with my arms by my side on top of the covers; I suppose this was about nine years ago, I was forty-three or forty-four, although I don’t know why this is relevant to mention. Just that I saw myself then as I was writing and my hair was long and my skin holding on to a last sheen of youth. The cheap pine bedside table looked like a new thing, otherwise I expect the room was exactly as it had been when you were there. I doubt if the son had done anything to the guest-house since his mother, presumably, passed away, he was just running it down — it had that feel in any case.

One of those nights passed when you don’t know if you really ever slept. The hours slip away somehow. There was an uncanny quiet stillness for a long time of the sort you would never expect in London, but then Nicolas did always remark on how quiet it was there. I will tell you what I imagined: he is agitated and belligerent, a mood you have not seen in him before, and he stands by the window with his hands in his pockets. You have had a long train journey together and although it was spent largely in silence, there is anyhow nothing left to say and you wish he would snap out of this mood. He brought you here, bundled you on a train so unceremoniously, you did not ask him to come with you, you did not ask him to bring you to this place. He is cross because you left, cross because you have come back; you simply can’t win. You take your clothes off, sit on the end of the bed and shrug: This? If not this, then what?

He stands there as if in terror. There are aspects of this imagined night that I felt I was not making up, and this is one of them. I lay in the lamplight and I could see him at the window, unblinking and paralysed by the inevitability of the scene he has set up and which now overwhelms him. I know this feeling, I have had it thigh-deep in the sea as a nine-foot wave rears and thunders in. You lean down into your bag and take out a tin, which contains pre-rolled cigarettes, light one, light another off yours and hold it out to him. You tell him what it is; you have injected your last, now you just have these two left to smoke and that will be that. No more. After tonight you are getting out of this disagreeable habit.

Nicolas has never done such a thing. He extends his arm to say you will have to bring it to him. An attempt at asserting some power over you. You do. At the window you rest your weight on one leg and look out as you smoke, perfectly unbothered by your visibility in a lit room on a dark night. He goes to where you sit on the bed and makes his first inhalation deep and reckless, and expects something. When there is nothing left to smoke and he still feels normal — if stricken with anguish, longing and anger can be considered normal — he lies back on the bed and counts the flower, leaf, flower, leaf that alternate around the ceiling rose.

If my decision to stay at Mrs Ellis’ seems perverse to you, I should say that one of the main reasons was to establish whether Nicolas did or did not use heroin that night. If he did it would have been the first and last time, I have no doubt about that — and all the more transformative for it. This was always a question that bothered me and one I could never decide on, or ask him. When he came back home two days later, to pack his bags, something in him had changed, this is all I can say. As if a chemical change, not only in his demeanour but in his brain, as if a crucially nervous, searching part of his brain had been unplugged and had left him relieved of the kind of peripheral anxiety and unease we pray God to remove, if religious — or simply live with, if not.

Of course, the room had no answers in itself. All the same, an answer came. I don’t know if it was right, it didn’t need to be right, it only needed to be an answer. Of course he used the drug; he sat there on the end of the bed, leant forward, elbow on knee, and cast you nervous, accusatory glances as he smoked. At some point it started raining and I got up to close the window when the rain began clattering down in poles. From the room opposite mine sounds came through the rain, that violent gratification that is incapable of censoring itself, the woman finally shrieking, which was so subtly but profoundly unlike a shriek of pain, and carried a kind of song.

One day I suppose I will be able to laugh at the unfortunate twist of that soundtrack; without it maybe I would have imagined a cooler, more indifferent night in the lavendery chintz of Mrs Ellis’ room, maybe I would have decided you had not offered him anything to smoke or that the night had been sullen, resentful and regrettable and only briefly pleasurable. I might not have imagined the blood slowly warming and the immense light and euphoria you described, Nicolas taking off your one remaining item of clothing, the green headscarf that had made you look so defiant and inappropriately proud at the station earlier that day. His hands on your waist, your breasts, your face, your hair.

In the night I got up to make a drink and had to settle for black coffee from one of the sachets — this is how I know there was no tea, or milk. Do you know, when Nicolas grabbed your wrist in the garden and pushed you into the car and drove you to the station, I had no idea if he was going to hurt you and I was worried. I was good enough to be worried. I wondered if I should have protected you, but then protecting you from Nicolas seemed preposterous as things go, so then I worried about myself. I waited something like three hours before going to the station to see what had happened to him, and I expected to see you both in the car, as you and I had been only a few hours before, or to see Nicolas holding the steering wheel quietly, trying to rid himself of you finally before turning round and coming home. What I found was the car with the keys in the ignition, and both of you gone. I drove home. It was two days before I saw him again and even then he came only to apologise and to tell me you had disappeared once more, and to pack.

There was something about you that made Nicolas animated and angry. Do you remember that same day how he stormed indoors when you said all that about Laurence Olivier. ‘I’ve been in an elevator, looking for love,’ you said when we asked you once again where you had been for almost two years. ‘Did you find it?’ ‘No.’ ‘You look unwell, what do you need?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘There must be something, you don’t look well.’ ‘I wanted to find Laurence Olivier, it turns out he doesn’t exist. Now that the one thing I needed is gone, I don’t need anything.’ And he stood from the wrought-iron table in the garden, and he must have been making a windbreak of sorts because the leaves on the table flew upwards when he went; I remember this so distinctly because it looked like they were fleeing his anger, and you winced. It was a theatrical wince and I was glad he had not seen it.

The wind blew, the leaves flew, the sky was as big and grey as a road to nowhere with no one on it, your hair wafted smoke and evergreen, the pipistrelles came out in the dusk, rain stirred, flakes of enamel paint from the table stuck to our thumb pads, Nicolas came outside again and clutched your wrist and yanked you to your feet and took your bag and pushed you into the car. ‘I am getting out,’ you said to me as you left, with flat reassurance. ‘I just want you to know that I am getting out.’ This is what I kept thinking of as I sat in the dark, drinking watery coffee; did you get out? Here, in this room, did you begin to? Did you and Nicolas pass through each other’s flesh into something else, did you find something, were you rewarded, was it happiness?

What is the injury? What is the extra injury, Butterfly? The two of you had done this before, after all. What takes the thorn from the side to the heart, what decides if the heart is punctured? I know the answer, and yet it is never quite a complete one. Spain — Spain is lustful and heady, full of grand but futile gestures, Spain hosts the bullfight and the things that seem glorious but are not, and these things come to nothing, to no good. These things begin to sicken us when the music and colour are gone. What happens there happens in a degenerative heat that we have to forgive or else simply accept, just as we would the beautiful vulgar flowers and the moths as big as bats.

But England is cool-headed and premeditated. Mrs Ellis has put out a little vase of first snowdrops that are greener than they are white, she has put pouches of lavender under the pillows and the cotton is clean and cold. The radiators struggle against the draughts through the old windows. She has left a hot-water bottle in the bed in its own little island of warmth. Passion has a thousand places to leak from, but still it comes, and it comes so heavily that it crushes a marriage, which I picture, despite myself, as a train crushing a deer.

Nicolas gathers your hair in his fist and cuts, or — and this is something I have not ever been able to decide — he gathers it and asks you to cut, so that it is you who makes the offering. He always had a certain prescience, or at least a long range in his thoughts, and I am sure that when he went to get scissors he knew he was unlikely to wake up in the morning and find you there. He was a gracious man fundamentally, and I say this without irony. He is the kind of man who would hear you get up and leave before dawn and pretend to be asleep. Then get up a couple of hours later and go down to a breakfast with the lock of hair wound around his fist, to a solitary breakfast of perfect eggs and tea brewed amber and Mrs Ellis’ motherly hands fussy over warm pots.

He gave the lock of hair to me out of solidarity. This is the only reason I can think of. It was years later, at my father’s funeral in 1993, and he turned up unexpectedly having learnt about the death from Teddy, sat at the back of the church in a strange woollen brown suit, on his own, and appeared to have been crying when he came up to me afterwards to offer sympathy. I understand about tears, they fall clear but they come from a murky collection of emotions all at once — he was not crying only for my father (whom he did like) but for everything that had caught up with him at the back of the church. I think the gift of the hair — if I can call it a gift — was not a form of apology but a sharing of a loss, for which a funeral seemed to him the right occasion.

I contemplated fury. To be truthful, I was too limp with grief on that particular day. I suppose going to stay in Mrs Ellis’ back room was a form of fury, which I justified as curiosity; it was only a month after my father’s death when I went there and, when I think back to it, I probably wasn’t in a good state for such things. After a night of no sleep, of listening to the animal moans from the couple opposite, it was the breakfast that finally did make me furious. Bread as thin and cheap as the blankets, and a toaster. Some margarine, no jam, certainly no eggs. I had never in my life been further away from buttery comfort, from solace. I think Mr Ellis did not inherit his mother’s care for the human soul through a soft honeyed yolk. I took, with chilly shaking hands, a piece of bread from the mean array on the dresser and said aloud to the empty room, Is this it? And then louder, screwing the bread up in my palm like an old love letter: Can this really be it?

55

Lara came to The Willows yesterday evening, but I was on a late shift so there was no point in her waiting. Instead I invited her in for a cup of tea. It was a quiet time anyway, dinner, and most people were eating, so we went into the kitchen and made a drink.

She commented on the other nursing home up the road; she meant The Lodge, a thing of magnificence and luxury with en-suite rooms in the eaves, and with crescent-shaped grounds and working fountain and joyful cherub. ‘We don’t speak of it,’ I told her. ‘They have afternoon calligraphy classes and a spa bath. You must never speak of it again.’

She smiled and pinched her lips closed with her fingers. I saw she was looking at me with something new, which might have been pity, but perhaps not as strong as pity. Sympathy? In any case, a greater interest than before, one that made me think she was sorry that I worked in this care home and not that one, and that also made me think she might ask me about myself. So I said quickly, ‘That’s a beautiful necklace, where did you get it?’ It was a piece of light-blue topaz laid into silver, and looked like it might have been naturally blue and, if so, relatively rare.

‘Eighteenth-birthday present from my parents,’ she said. I got a Bechstein for my eighteenth, I was going to tell her, because I like to point out how spoilt I’d been, how smeared with love like a basted bird, in case it forgave me something. I don’t know what: a selfishness or blindness. But this seemed an unnecessary aside, so I said, ‘It suits you well’ and she held the topaz away from her neck, peered down at it and thanked me. We sat at the tiny table in the kitchen, me moving my chair back a little so I had some view of the dining area in case my colleague, Peter, needed me for anything, and I waited for her to speak. (I haven’t said anything about Peter and I won’t, he isn’t the kind of person you would be interested in.) She seemed to waver between possible starting points, and then she rested her hands loosely on the table.

‘I seemed really childish when I spoke to you last time, about giving up God.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I did mean it though. I’ve done what you said, which is to walk away, and see if God calls me back. He hasn’t, you know.’

She broke this as news; I wanted to say, Of course he hasn’t, he was never going to. God is not like this, he is an egotist, he fires himself all over the skies, he rocks the seas, he shakes the earth. It will be years before he notices your defection. In any case she sat with her shoulders tilted forward and her neck long and everything pale and soft, like a Roman bust. ‘Is life different without him?’ I said.

‘Without him?’ She pouted in thought and her dimple became deep enough to house a raisin; this is exactly what I thought, and I imagined a raisin there, and wondered if it would stay, or fall out when she smiled. ‘Paul in Corinthians: Let all your things be done with charity. I embroidered this onto a piece of cloth when I was about twelve and I have it on my bedroom wall.’

‘My grandmother had that on her wall too,’ I said, suddenly remembering it.

‘And I thought that was the whole point of being religious. But actually you don’t have to believe in God to do all things with charity, so what is the point? Why would life be any different without him?’

I swilled what was left of my tea around the bottom of the cup and told her, ‘Come with me.’ We went out of the kitchen. Peter was in the dining room seeing after everyone at dinner; when Lara and I walked through there was a chorus of greetings. You drop youth amidst old age and it is like showing food to the starved; we used to eat, you can hear them thinking, we used to know the taste of that! I took her into the corridor that led to the bedrooms, and I went into one of the rooms and asked Lara to wait outside. There was Gene on the bed, like that bull dropped on sand. He goes off to sleep in the way you used to, abruptly and completely. I covered his nudity with a sheet and whispered into his ear, ‘We have to get you ready for the nurses. I have a friend with me, do you mind if she helps?’

There was no response for a few moments, and then he murmured from somewhere near sleep, ‘I don’t mind.’ He was lying naked on top of the covers, as I said he tends to, with the window wide. I couldn’t blame him, it’s filthily hot in those rooms. Still, we have to go in, put his pyjamas on, cover him, pull the window to. We’re told we have a duty of care to do these things, and that to leave him naked with a window flung wide amounts to neglect.

There are six permanent care staff here and we are all unanimous in agreement that this is nonsense; we do it only when the nurses come in for their morning and evening rounds, as they were about to do. So I called Lara in and asked her to put cushions behind his back while I lifted him, and we propped him up. If we disturbed his sleep further it wasn’t enough for him to open his eyes. I filled a bowl of warm water and sponged the sweat off him, and went through the drawers to find a clean T-shirt, since he has made his hatred of pyjamas clear.

Lara perched on the edge of the chair by the bed, looking quite openly at the eighty-five-year-old in front of her. You would like Lara, there is something of the warrior in her — she is not one of those ‘all flower and no fruit’ girls that you used to scorn, but somehow brave and direct, a thing I noticed as she sat there with her eyes on Gene. ‘Here,’ I said, and handed her the T-shirt. ‘I’ll lift him forward and you put it on.’

She did this skilfully; let her commit her acts of charity against Gene and not me, I thought. I had the distinct impression that Ruth had said something about me to her since we last met and that she was commiserating silently over my reported losses. How, oh how (she would be thinking, because Ruth would have said) did this woman come to be working in a care home? She lives alone in that flat, she plays cards with strangers. She hardly sees her only son, then there is her breakdown and the loss of her marriage. She used to be beautiful once, before — before it all. I wanted to comfort Lara by telling her that I did not lose my so-called beauty but squandered it, and that there can be no pity for somebody who squanders what they never deserved anyway. I was left with my due, I wanted to say, and tried to say it by organising Gene’s covers and pillows in that efficient, matronly way women do when they have become their role completely, forgotten all they were once as a girl, when somebody used to do it for them.

From late spring the evening light comes straight into Gene’s room, and now that it is mid-June the light is beginning to flood the bed. I want to tell you something about this: seeing his old, brightly lit body, I had a small revelation, because he appeared almost completely abstract and not a body at all. He was a collection of shapes and colours, and surfaces that were reflective to differing degrees, and angles that went all the way through the compass, from the steep pyramid of his ankle bone, which looked like it had been broken at some point, to the flat plane of his earlobe, to the cratered bullet wound in his left shoulder.

I will surprise you with the fact that I remember exactly what the exhibition was at the Serpentine when Nicolas and I went twenty-six years ago — it was a retrospective of a painter called Jeremy Moon, who made abstract canvases of blocks of colour that were supposed to represent nothing. He wanted us to see a canvas painted yellow and not think of the sun or of cornfields in childhood or of golden beaches or of happiness and optimism, but to see only yellow paint. I did not like his paintings much, but I have always held onto their noble cause — to keep working away from the seduction of memory and metaphors, towards the honest, simple truth. This is green, this is blue, this is yellow, this is a slope, this is a curve, this is bright or dark. I have failed abysmally in this. And yet at work, seeing Gene, at last! Twenty-six years too late, but suddenly I have looked at the body of an old man and managed, with some success, that most difficult of things.

I told Lara that charity isn’t about being kind and humane. It is about seeing without interpretation, as a lens sees. What Teddy called ‘the neutral lens’. I’d completely forgotten about that phrase of his until just then. The neutral lens. Possibly a phrase you gave him. The eye looks on others and itself with motives, games and tricks, and makes things what they are not, but the neutral lens leaves a thing to be what it is.

Lara nodded and turned her pale face on Gene with the kind of cool attention the moon gives the Earth. I admit, though I have never been the meddling type, that I hoped against hope suddenly, watching her, that she and Teddy would meet and fall in love. I married them off with one thought, and with the next there were grandchildren. Four or five, actually. So easy is life! And death too — the way it slinks in. Gene died this morning in the T-shirt Lara and I put him in, a few minutes before I arrived for work at seven a.m. It was just a breath in and no breath out, as simple as that. Like that bit in the tenth Upanishad that you used to enjoy, when Yādnyawalkya says to his wife: ‘Dear! I am going to renounce the world.’ And so renounced, the world — this world, much slaved after and cried over and so full of vulgar triumphs and impressive defeats — is gone.

56

Part drunk after a few glasses of wine with Yannis, I have been hurriedly preparing for Nicolas’ arrival by taking clothes up from the bedroom floor and vacuuming down the side of the sofa and throwing away the turning milk and hiding the cigarettes and bundling our letter into order. The wine has reduced me to a teenagery sense of misbehaviour. When I was gathering the letter together I reread what I wrote at the beginning, about the gauze and so on — which I hadn’t read since — and I found it childish and defensive, that I should have felt the need to insist like that on having had the kind of experience that could be called ‘metaphysical’ or ‘transcendental’. I am not at all sure it really was, when I come to think of it. It was just the coming together of unusual things: the collecting of the bones, my grandmother sitting dead downstairs, meeting Nicolas on the flood wall and knowing in some acute way that it was a significant meeting. And then you appeared to be hovering by my bed on Boxing Day as the first flake of snow fell (I wrote then that you were hovering expectantly, but I was just being kind, because I was trying then to be kind. In fact you were not hovering expectantly, but accusingly) and I felt put upon to account for myself, so I stammered something out, and so we began.

Once, it must have been 1979 because I was pregnant with Teddy, I went with Nicolas to the Kent marshes where he had grown up, to his old clapboard bungalow, which was unlived in by that point, and while there I at once understood and accepted who he was — a searcher. Who could be born there and not be, when every point of anchorage slips away into an odd unending blend of water, shingle, scrub and sky. There was nothing else around the bungalow, it was empty as far as the eye went. And yet there was a low brick wall marking off a garden, which seemed such an arbitrary boundary that I could see their lives as one continual striving for perspective, or perhaps just for the comfort of scale. A wall, a raised bed, a wheelbarrow of heathers, a rockery piled with driftwood, a rusted metal stake holding a wind chime made of stones and anything small that clanked or tinkled. Everything owned had been searched for. And I saw him in this setting, a giant against the bungalow’s front door, but a dwarf against the confusing run-in of land and sky. He was tapping the chimes with his fingers, and I thought with victory and tenderness that I had him all worked out. But as soon as we decide someone is a searcher we dismiss the idea of what it is they want to find; they search, that is what they do, so it will always be.

Then you see something in that person’s eyes that is yearning and you dismiss it. They are always yearning! This is one of the things you fell in love with and also, over time, one of the things that is irritating; when they pull a pearl from acres of rushing water you are full of perplexed love at their tenacity, and when they speak again of going back to the Thames to find the lost cow shin or the tail of a peacock you feel compelled to pick a fight with them: You’re grasping and obsessive. Well, you’re impetuous. Why can’t you let things go? Why are you always telling me what to do? Because you’re like a mole-rat, ridiculous, that’s what I think you are, ridiculous. At least I’m not like the Stasi.

A door slams, a book drops, dust flies, a head falls into hands. It is nothing new between couples. But either way, love or hate, the one thing you do not do when you see that yearning is wonder how you can fill it. This never strikes us as possible. Sometimes those closest to us are the most neglectful, I believe this to be true. Another person comes along who sees that yearning and knows instantly what to do with it; it is not a fact to be accepted but a call to arms: Let me take this burden of longing from you. Yes, this is what they say: Let me take this burden from you! And they do, even if only for a few moments and even if replacing it with a longing that is greater still: the longing to have the longing taken again. They do take it. Then streams break out in the desert, as it says in Isaiah. Is it Isaiah, or is it Psalms? Or Jeremiah. My Bible knowledge is terrible these days. But streams and rivers spring up and surge in the desert.

I sometimes put pen to paper and wonder what more I can say, and then I find myself saying what I had never intended. There is always more. And yet now perhaps there is not. Nicolas arrives back in London tonight, or in fact in the small hours of the morning, and is coming straight here from the airport. He should arrive at about five a.m., which happens to be just before I leave for work, though I haven’t told him that. He won’t mind, since it means he can spend the day here sleeping it off. (This plan to arrive at five a.m. was conveyed to me by postcard a week or two ago, in a message that said nothing more than that — a garish postcard with a picture of Fifth Avenue mostly obliterated by the slogan Howdy from New York! He is not the kind of man to invite himself; I read this move — of course I might be wrong — as his final advance, his last act of courtship, to see if I retreat.)

I won’t write any more, Butterfly, once he is back. The pen seems to fall dead at the idea of going on. The nib has split further and it has developed a creak; every time I pick it up nowadays I feel like I am sending an old man back to war.

But then there is always one more thing.

Do you remember the game we used to play, called Chair? It’s strange how I thought of it only tonight, and not back when I wrote about the chair in the Pinter play; it hadn’t occurred to me then at all, perhaps because I had been thinking more of your absence than your presence back then. In any case, we would put a chair in the middle of the room, the big red room at my parents’ house, and one of us would stand five paces in front of it with our eyes closed, then wait silently for a minute. The room was often very dark. The object of the game was to judge whether the other was sitting in the chair at the end of the minute. It was a question of honour that the one with her eyes closed should be able to sense the movement of the other, should be able to know when the chair was available to sit in. We did not make it easy for the other, we learnt to move silently and misleadingly.

I don’t know how you remember this game, but for me it is always with some excitement and apprehension, and also fear. To know there is another person in the room and to not know where they are, but to try to sense them, as subterranean animals must. If we felt that the other person was not in the chair we would take five paces and sit in it ourselves, but to get it wrong, to sit when the other was already there, was a kind of transgression — we would not screech or collapse in laughter, but would flinch as if burgled. It was a betrayal to share space, to blunder into the other’s space; if we really knew one another, loved and understood one another, we would not. It is only when I think of it now that I can see the peculiar premise of that game, that intimacy is a form of distance, that you become sharply aware of the other’s existence only in order to avoid it.

Maybe it has given me a kind of paranoia to not know, for so many years, where you are. That and a sense of failure, yes — paranoia and failure. If I don’t know where you are, perhaps I will never see you again, or perhaps I will turn round and you will be there, and I am never quite sure which is worse. Sometimes I have felt you near, or have mistakenly thought you were there, as I did that day clearing the snow. Other times you leave me so clueless and empty of instinct that I have to resort to random imaginings that I know are wild and far-fetched. And then for a moment or two they do not feel even remotely far-fetched enough.

Teddy did send me a photograph from Lithuania, in case it interests you. It was back in February, in fact I think a few days before the Pinter play, a few days or a week, but I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want to share Teddy with you, if I am giving you the truth. It was not a photograph he had taken himself but one found in a shop of old Lithuanian ephemera — a black-and-white aerial picture of men, women and children standing in a line of joined hands along an empty road flanked by woods. The 1989 Baltic Chain, as you will know. It made me cry with some old reserve of hope. I counted them. They were twenty-one of two million people joined hand-to-hand through three countries to protest against their occupation, twenty-one of two million; four million hands, joined. I became overwhelmed by the thought for a little while. We are joined. ‘Naima’ sounds to my ears like ‘Ruby, My Dear’, then (in the way a silver fish jumps out of the water and flashes purple) I hear something of ‘Sinnerman’, then the voices of worried praise, then of gospel. There is no way the things of this world can isolate themselves or be isolated. We encroach on one another, be it painfully or pleasurably, we encroach and run into each other, and this is what we know fondly or otherwise as life. It is not life to think that to love somebody is never to be where they are and never to intrude upon them.

I am really not sure now which of us invented the game of Chair, I always assumed you, but I have been led to wonder. In any event it was you who proved later in life its complete unworkability as a strategy. I took five paces and found you in my seat, and I could not dislodge you, you would not go. But maybe I have learnt, or I am learning through writing this, to be glad of your many trespasses. Even theft is a form of connection after all, and I do not mean this flippantly; to be encroached upon is in itself to be reminded of your own position amongst things. To be touched by the hand that stole from you or pushed you aside. I have tried lately not to isolate myself, to strike up friendships however loose, random or mismatched, odd little bonds formed over sardines or religion or cards or regret, and these bonds for the most part, to my own amazement, have outlived their starting points.

It is half past three in the morning now and Nicolas will be here soon, and I have to be at work in two hours. A woman is not born to toil, I have been thinking, somewhat repetitively. While making tea and worrying about lack of sleep I suddenly remembered this absurd notion of Kierkegaard’s, passed on to me once by my grandmother: A woman is not born to toil; if she wants to move towards infinity, she has to travel along the gentle path of the heart and imagination.

I really do not know what kind of blessed lives my grandmother and Kierkegaard had, to make them think the path of the heart and imagination is gentle. It is like walking on nails. It is like walking on nails having first been set on fire. With your hands tied up your back in forced prayer. And a stake through your throat. A dagger in your back. What I mean to say is that this path we are trying to chart is not an easy one and I forgive you simply because I hope to be forgiven; I know it is not your way, but if I were you I would take forgiveness, even if it is only mine, and even if it belittles you.

57

The fact being — though I was not going to write it — that I think I saw you. I don’t know if it was you, but until I can verify it I will have to assume it was. I saw the back of you walk down the street past Jimmie’s and up towards Guilford Street, the way I would go if I were dropping in on Yannis, walking quickly in the rain with your head down, in a long raincoat and high heels, your feet not so much touching down on the pavement as piercing it and pushing it back behind you. Your familiar purposeful, long-legged walk.

But let me go back a moment so you know why I thought it was you, as opposed to any number of other women in this enormous town. It was lateish last night, around eleven, and I was in the living room, sorting through the pile of mail that had accumulated downstairs in the hall; post is one of the problems with living communally, there is so much of it and most of it is junk. But if you throw the lot away you might throw out something important, that was missed, something from Teddy, for example. This was part of my tidying frenzy before Nicolas coming back, and a strange and irrelevant one because it isn’t even the kind of thing he would notice. I had the post in a pile on the floor and was sifting through, trying I suppose to wind myself down to sleep so that I could get up at five-thirty a.m. for an early shift.

So I was sifting through. I was tired. I’d had a few glasses of wine at Yannis’ just before that, as you know. The window was open and it was raining, but not much. Then I heard voices on the street below my window, voices of a man and woman standing there, not walking past — nothing unusual in this, at night there is always the routine emptying-out of bars and the talk and the singing, which I go to sleep to — ever the lover of people, I sleep badly when they are not there. I think you never did understand that. People were to you a kind of beautiful problem. You needed their approval, and you disapproved of yourself when you did not get it, and disapproved of yourself even more when you did, as if you had done nothing to earn it.

The man said, somewhat desperately, ‘You are love of my life.’ This might have been the first thing said between them while standing outside or it might just have been the first thing I noticed them say. His voice was deep, not English, maybe Hispanic, I don’t know. And the woman replied, in an exaggeratedly deep, soft voice that might have been done to mimic his, ‘You are the love of my life. You must use the in front of love, it’s the rules.’

Maybe the poor man was embarrassed; I could imagine him stooping his shoulders and almost curtseying away from the mistake. ‘However you say it. I am sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry, I just wanted you to know, for when you need to use it in the future.’

He must have missed the playful insinuation there because he just said, ‘I don’t understand. All this the and a, you think it will be simple, it is never simple.’

‘Yes, it’s simple, amigo, it’s just a little word. Don’t be a child, come on.’

And she laughed, and maybe she ruffled his hair or tugged lightly at his collar.

I think I had stopped breathing at this point; I had certainly stopped moving. It was not only that her voice was just like yours, but that I remembered you having almost exactly the same conversation once with a man in Embankment Gardens. Do you remember? A stranger came up and declared his love for you, and you kindly corrected his grammar. You saw his embarrassment and you took his hand so that you could draw him down to the grass, with the care of someone handling an animal that is dependent on them — and you gave him an impromptu lesson on the definite article and abstract nouns.

I don’t know if this memory can possibly be true; it seems too much of a coincidence. I thought perhaps it was just that the woman’s voice reminded me so much of you that I had suffered déjà vu. And yet the memory feels to exist independently of that moment last night, so much so that I can remember what you said to the stranger on the grass: ‘The narrows down big things, there is ocean and there is the Pacific Ocean, air and the air in one’s lungs, love and the love of one’s life. Beware of the, it has a tacit manifesto to bound and restrain.’

Your words: tacit manifesto to bound and restrain. You said this and then you both stood from the crouch and he went on his way. Whereas the couple outside said nothing of this sort. I thought — but I could be wrong — that the woman said something about being too old to start being the love of someone’s life; at her age it was too long a race to start running. She had come here to see old friends, that was all. Am I right about this? That she said she had come to see friends, whom she believed lived here. And the man muttered or swore in a foreign language, or at least in an accent I couldn’t recognise. But this was murmured and a floor below, and though I was by then right by the open window I hadn’t wanted to stand in front of it or lean through; perhaps I am mad or deluded and overheard wrongly — and yet. After this they either didn’t speak at all or what they said was now more whispered than murmured. It made me wonder if they were holding one another, or whether he had hunched his shoulders in pain or anger and was jabbing his foot at the pavement, or was staring past her at the wall.

I only looked out of the window when I heard the click of the woman’s heels along the street, left towards Jimmie’s. I put my head out and I saw the man on the other side of the road, standing with his hands in his pockets as if trying to decide which way to go. He looked up at me, then he walked away to the right. Mine is a long street, which you will know if the woman was you, and so when I turned I could see you partway along it, going, like I said, towards the main road with your head down and hands in the pockets of your raincoat. It was one of those elegant raincoats that are belted at the waist. You would be in your early fifties now, but you looked no older than when I last saw you, in any case from behind and at a distance and in the dark. It was your walk and yours alone, the long, loose stride that is nonetheless not flowing but forging. People tend to either flow or forge when they walk, and if they forge they are never loose. They map out their destination, set their stride, and brace and aim. But you — never content, I suppose, to practise convention — you forge loosely. Which is not to say you have a great inbuilt sense of purpose, more that you proceed like a sailing boat pushed forward by a tailwind. The boat is a meanderer, it is the force at its back that makes it look purposeful. The thing chasing it.

I ran downstairs in jeans and T-shirt and whatever shoes were to hand. No, let me pause one more time to tell you what happened before I ran. I took my keys from the chest of drawers in the bedroom and I looked at the pillow and projected a day forward, when Nicolas’ face might be half buried there, swampy with jetlag — and a thought occurred to me that seemed to be the first truly religious thought I have ever had. It went: If she is here and he wants her still. It was not, as you see, much of a thought, not even complete. This is how I recognised it as religious — one of those enormous broken offerings we make, someone stammering in front of the Lord. It was a thought that was braver than the person who had it, which is why cowardice stopped the sentence halfway through. If she is here and he wants her still. The rest of the thought had to be had unconsciously, and directed at me as if it had come from a better mind than my own. If she is here and he wants her still — it told me — then you will stand aside and be good enough to let them both go.

Then I picked up the keys and thought, as I went back through the living room, past the escritoire where this letter is kept, that this must be grace, to be defeated by one’s better nature. I thought there must be nothing beyond this left to say on the subject, that defeat had come in one passing moment of imagining Nicolas’ head so conspiratorial on my pillow — and how sweet it was, and uneventful, and how it shocked me.

I ran downstairs in jeans and T-shirt and whatever shoes. By the time I was out on the pavement there was no sign of you; I ran all the way along until my street met Guilford Street, but by that point you could have gone in any direction — left towards Russell Square, north towards Euston, right towards Gray’s Inn Road, which led on to a hundred streets I didn’t know at all, and so I stood in the rain for what I suppose was much less than a minute, but felt like ten, peering almost aggressively into the darkness before I gave up. I called out: Nina? Your name rushed to my lips like that, and left them warm. And just for a moment the years slipped back to times when it was only us, and you were in that chair in the dark. I thought I would go back and find that man you had left in the rain. I went back, and not only was he not there, but the whole street was empty. I think I have never seen it empty before; it was as if I had imagined not just you, but humankind as a whole, as if I were the last person on Earth.