Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, as though I’d confirmed a point that he himself had been making. ‘She filled it in. For me. Look.’ And now he took from the envelope a small sheet of paper, on which was written a poem. I didn’t read any of it closely except the last line, which was her name and the words: ‘for Sam’. His smile offered sympathy; he understood that I must now be feeling rather foolish. ‘See? Her writing here, her writing there,’ he said, retrieving the page and the certificate. ‘She filled it in, so I could have it complete.’

  The poem looked as though it was in her handwriting – the long tail on the letter y was familiar, as were the general size and shape of the words. And my name on the certificate was formed like the words of the poem – that much was undeniable. But it was almost inconceivable that Sarah would have rendered the certificate invalid by writing on it. Sam had forged her handwriting: this was the obvious conclusion, the only conclusion.

  Perched on the table, Sam was watching me with his knees drawn up to his chin, like a child enthralled by a show. I couldn’t look at him. The behaviour of a man stupid enough to think he could get away with so transparent a trick could not be predicted. Eventually I spoke: I said that I was surprised by the word ‘Musician’. Sarah could play the guitar a little; she wrote songs in her spare time; but when I knew Sarah she’d been working in a stables, for pocket money. As far as I knew, she’d never performed for an audience. He shrugged, to signify that this was neither here nor there. ‘But Sam,’ I said, trying to sound like a man softening the blow of disappointing news, ‘this doesn’t prove anything.’

  He sighed and rolled his eyes, and at this point I saw clearly a resemblance between him and Sarah, in the fold of the eyelids and the slight protrusion of the bone below the eyebrows. ‘Something else for you,’ he said, fishing a photograph from the envelope. He slotted it gently but firmly between my fingers, like an uncle giving a banknote to a favourite nephew who was reluctant to accept the gift. ‘You took it, I believe,’ he said. The picture showed Sarah leaning on an old wooden gate, with tall bushes, brilliantly sunlit, behind her; she was wearing a big red shirt over white jeans. The colours in the photo had gone milky with age, but I could recall the original crimson of that shirt; I had no memory of taking the picture, however, and no idea as to where it had been taken.

  ‘Those were the days, eh?’ said Sam. ‘The clothes, I mean. And that’s not the worst,’ he said, delving into the envelope again.

  I raised a hand to stop him, and accidentally came into contact with his fingers. He regarded my hand, then glanced at me, loading the moment with a meaning it did not rightly have. ‘Some other time,’ I told him.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘That’s fine. A lot to think about. I understand.’

  I handed the picture back to him, but he told me I could keep this one. ‘It’s a copy, for you,’ he said.

  Still holding the mug of coffee, I peered at my reflection in the tepid black liquid, unable to meet his gaze.

  ‘Here,’ he said, easing the mug from my grip, ‘give me that.’ His voice was low and solicitous, like an undertaker’s.

  I asked him if he had any idea why Sarah had never said anything to me about her being pregnant. He had an answer at once: ‘You were a bad mistake. You and me – we were her two biggest mistakes,’ he said. ‘And maybe it was a way of getting her own back,’ he suggested. ‘If she’d been short of money, it might have been different, but she wasn’t, at the time, so she could do what she liked. She wanted shot of you.’

  ‘Own back for what?’ I was on the point of asking him, but I kept the thought to myself.

  Sam yawned and stretched, as if ready for bed, and said: ‘We’d better get going – don’t want to make Aileen suspicious. I’ll drop you back at the Tube.’

  The use of my wife’s name was another shock. ‘How did you know her name?’ I asked him sharply.

  ‘Get a grip, old chap,’ he answered, grinning. ‘I’ve read about you. Done a bit of research as well. The internet. Handy thing, I tell you. Amazing, the things you can find out.’

  I rose from the sofa-bed. I felt as groggy as a man who’d been interviewed for hours.

  ‘It’s going to be difficult to tell her,’ he said. ‘Take your time. There’s no rush. I’m a patient bloke. When you’ve had to spend days watching the Irish grass grow, you learn to be patient. Give me a call when you’re ready. In your own time.’ We were at the door when he said: ‘You want me to show you where she is?’ I couldn’t think what he meant. ‘Sarah,’ he said. ‘Where she’s buried. Take us about an hour to get there. Hour and a bit. Think you can you swing it? Come up with a story for the wife?’

  I said I’d call him.

  6

  The following week, Otis Mizrahi came to film the interview. Short and chubby, he had a face that made me think of a slightly less bug-eyed version of the young Peter Lorre, and remarkably long-fingered hands, with which he drew elegant shapes in the air as he talked. Much care and money had gone into his self-presentation: his hair – perfectly black – had been cut into a complicated facsimile of unkemptness; the suit – black, with wacky lapels – was from Yohji Yamamoto and had cost him a good four-figure sum, as Aileen learned within minutes; the radiantly white shirt was likewise from Yohji; the spectacles were Danish, titanium-framed. His voice was pleasant on the ear; he was impressively articulate, and his loquacity – in combination with the creaseless brow and the brightly confident gaze – was suggestive of an expensive education.

  His questions were well-considered and precise, and if the nodding and chin-stroking and intensely receptive eye contact with which he received my replies – as if he were hearing the pronouncements of Le Corbusier rather than merely the remarks of a man who sold furniture for a living – struck me as being a little too much, there was no doubt that his enthusiasm was genuine. He was knowledgeable. Off-camera we talked for another hour or so, and he showed me, online, the work of a team of young Swedish designers of whom I’d never heard. I showed him the dining chair that my father had made, and he recognised it as a replica of a George Nakashima piece. He was intelligent and ambitious – he had other TV projects in the pipeline, and a book too, and was preparing a catalogue for a museum in Finland. I liked him, as did Aileen.

  While the cameraman was loading his equipment into the car, she and Otis were chatting in the hall. Standing outside the front door, I overheard them: they were talking about how the business had developed. Aileen told him that we’d had some lean years; that at one point it had looked as if we might go bankrupt. ‘It was pretty awful,’ she said cheerfully. ‘There were days when I thought we wouldn’t come through it.’ At which Otis remarked: ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me strong.’ Aileen laughed at this, and together they came out. The interview had been great, Otis assured me, and he’d loved the house. He gave Aileen a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Lovely boy,’ she commented as the car turned onto the road, and I agreed. He was easy to talk to, she said, and he wasn’t one of those people who, on learning that she’s an accountant, assume that she’s a drone whose interests in life are limited to money and tax law. She’d been concerned that, being a TV person, he’d turn out to be glib and slick, but he wasn’t glib at all.

  I agreed again: Otis was a serious-minded and very personable chap, I said, and nicely turned out, as well.

  ‘Very nicely,’ Aileen concurred.

  ‘“What doesn’t kill me,” eh?’ I quoted.

  ‘It’s a good line,’ said Aileen.

  I followed her into the kitchen. For a few minutes I helped her to clear up, then asked: ‘When you said you thought we wouldn’t come through it, what did you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t I say “might not”?’ she answered, loading the dishwasher. ‘That’s what I meant to say.’

  ‘Sorry, yes. You did.’

  Aileen carried on with what she was doing.

  ‘You were talking about us as a business, yes?’ I suggested.

  ‘Ye
s,’ she said.

  ‘But not only as a business?’

  ‘Not only, no,’ she answered, still with her back to me.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said, glancing at me over her shoulder as she crouched at the machine. ‘We had a very bad patch. You know that. We came close to splitting up.’

  ‘We did?’

  ‘We did,’ she said. ‘Another month or two and I’d have been packing my bags.’ She smiled at me as she said this, and it was said lightly, as if she were talking about a holiday that, in the end, she hadn’t taken.

  I knew she wasn’t joking: this wasn’t Aileen’s kind of joke. ‘Did you say that at the time?’

  ‘Perhaps not in as many words.’

  ‘I don’t remember you saying anything.’

  ‘Maybe I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But it was obvious. There was no need to say anything. Hardly matters now, does it?’

  Aileen would have left it at that, but I wanted to hear more. I had been impossible to live with, she duly told me: irascible, unreasonable, unaffectionate. I couldn’t take issue with this, but I was a little surprised to be told that I’d been almost as unpleasant, occasionally, in the year or two before we’d left Canterbury. There had been days, she said, when she’d wondered if we had a future. ‘And you felt the same. I know you did,’ she said. If I had felt the same, I no longer had any recollection of having felt that way. Neither did I recall the weeks during which I’d stayed in the workshop till late and would barely speak to her when I came back to the flat.

  ‘Really? Weeks?’ I said.

  ‘Weeks, yes,’ she repeated, giving me a quick amused frown, as though I’d forgotten what day of the week it was. ‘You were miserable in Canterbury,’ she said. I thought that ‘discontented’ would have been a more accurate word.

  There had been a lot of friction between me and my father, she reminded me. One evening she and I had been due to go to my parents for a meal and I’d cancelled at the last moment because I just couldn’t face him. This too I had forgotten. Some tension, certainly, had come into my relationship with my father since I had decided to work on my own. He would have been happier had I stayed with him; he didn’t greatly care for the pieces I was producing; at times, being fully aware that my skills were not and would never be the equal of his, that my work was assembled rather than crafted, I didn’t much care for what I was making, either; I had far fewer customers than he did; in short, I was failing. These factors all complicated the situation with my father, but I had no memory of being unable to face him.

  On the one hand I didn’t recognise myself in Aileen’s words; on the other hand I was sure that her version of that period of our lives was more faithful to the facts than was mine. It was troubling to be corrected in this way, and it was even more troubling to learn – or to be reminded – that Aileen had almost left me. The exposure of my complacency was unsettling, and I knew that I was ridiculous as well: it was ridiculous to feel – as I did feel – in some way slighted by a rejection that hadn’t actually happened, and it was doubly ridiculous to react in such a way when I was the one who had been duplicitous, in addition to being so difficult to live with. And of course what was going through my mind while Aileen answered my questions was that the affair with Sarah would almost certainly have had something to do with my having been irascible, unreasonable and unaffectionate, though it wasn’t clear to me what was cause and what was effect. Nothing was clear to me. Indeed it crossed my mind – when Aileen looked me in the eye and said, ‘You weren’t yourself’ – that she had suspected what was going on and was now about to tell me that she’d suspected, but this panic lasted only a second or two. If she had suspected anything, I told myself, she would have confronted me at once, when it was happening. Aileen was always direct, and never dissembled. I repeated this to myself many times, throughout the rest of the day.

  I was appalled by my duplicity, yet when Aileen went out the next morning I was up in the loft within minutes to retrieve the picture of Sarah, which I had hidden with pointless thoroughness, in a box of old paperwork at the bottom of a trunk. Since hiding it I’d been congratulating myself for managing to leave it alone; now there was an excitement, a brief and guilty excitement, in finally ceasing to resist. I sat on the trunk, under the bare lightbulb, and looked at the photograph as you might look at a memento and await the arrival of a memory – the image and sounds of a beach from a stone you’d gathered there, for example; the atmosphere of a town from a postcard; the events of a particular day from a ticket for a concert. I looked at Sarah, at the gate, at the high bushes behind her, willing a meaning to emerge from this square of washed-out colours. The shadows in the foreground were crisp and the foliage of the upper branches was bright in the higher reaches; her clothes suggested a day that was warm; on the margin of the picture, a rhododendron was in full blossom. The belt that Sarah was wearing – I remembered that: she had bought it in Cordoba, and the leather still bore a smell, ten years later, that hinted at the reek of the tannery. After a while I had the notion that, had the camera been aimed a little higher, the spire of a church might have come into view; I seemed to recall a church that was reached by a path that ran under bushes, and that the path was closed by a gate, but I didn’t know if that path was the path in the photograph, nor where that church was located, for that matter. It was not in Canterbury, I knew that for sure, which meant that we must have driven to wherever it was, and it must have been on a weekend when Aileen was away somewhere, because I wouldn’t have closed the shop in order to have time with Sarah – or had business been so dire that a couple of hours here or there didn’t seem to make any difference? Or had I been so infatuated with her that I hadn’t cared about the possibility of missing a customer? I must have been infatuated, because otherwise why would I have become involved with her? Unless, that is, things with Aileen had been bad enough to make the temptation of Sarah irresistible. That was a possibility, although I tended to regard the dissatisfactions of that episode of my life as dissatisfactions with myself and with my livelihood rather than with Aileen. Yes, there had been disagreements, but the affair with Sarah had not, I believed, been indicative of any crisis in my relationship with Aileen. It was indicative, rather, of my selfishness and weakness. I hadn’t given so much as a passing thought to the possibility of my being unfaithful before Sarah had appeared – or that’s how I remembered it.

  I stared at the face in the photograph, as if to ask it why I should have been so entranced by her. If you were to happen upon this picture in a sheaf of old photos in a jumble sale, it’s unlikely that you would give it a second look. Bringing the photo as close to my face as I could without making it blur, I focused on the eyes, and soon I saw again the boldness of them, the gaze that was more challenging than flirtatious, and sardonic too, as if hinting that you may not be adequate to that challenge. Looking at her as she leaned on the gate, I remembered the quality of her stillness, which had something of the latent energy of a dancer or gymnast. And the precision and suddenness with which she would gesture, as though seizing an invisible object in mid-air – I remembered that too, and the way she raked her hair back with her fingers. She was exciting. Aileen, on the other hand, was good company, a good person, warm, kind, generous – but ‘exciting’ has never been an adjective that would spring to mind were I to be asked to describe her.

  She would say the same about me, I’m sure. We weren’t lovers who had found each other in a flash of recognition: rather, it had been a sort of gentle, protracted confluence, as acquaintance deepened into easy friendship, which in turn, over the course of several years, had deepened further. ‘You were made for each other,’ my mother would often say; ‘She’s sound, very sound,’ said my father, for whom there could be no higher praise. Her soundness, her genuineness, her decency, impressed people immediately.

  There’s an incident that I recall in unusual detail, perhaps because it had taken on the character of an anecdote as it was happening. We we
re in a pub one evening, not long after we’d moved into Chatham Street, and a red-faced man was sitting at the bar, sinking pint after pint. Every few minutes he gave us several seconds of his close attention. Eventually he stood up and came over to our table. He was in his mid-fifties and around six feet two, well in excess of twenty stone, with no more than five visible teeth and hands that resembled rubber gloves that had been filled with thick grease. ‘You take good care of this girl,’ he told me, putting a hand on Aileen’s shoulder. ‘You take good care of her, or I’ll do it for you,’ he said. His face was directed at me but his eyes were swivelling like a blind man’s; he was alarming, but Aileen smiled and assured him that I did take care of her. ‘You better do,’ he said to me. And then, to Aileen: ‘If I was younger, he’d have to watch out, and that’s no lie.’ Aileen managed to appear charmed by this gallantry; as a result it took a good ten minutes to get rid of him. Placing a big soft hand on Aileen’s bare forearm, he offered, in a whisper, to buy her a drink. She patted the hand and answered: ‘Thank you, but I think we’ve all had enough.’ The reaction was unnerving: he closed his eyes; he pursed his lips like a kid who’s told a fib and has been caught out; the hands closed on his knees and gave them each a few small thumps. Trouble seemed to be inevitable. The eyes opened; he squinted at Aileen, lowering his head down an inch or two, as if looking through a keyhole; the mouth widened in an expression of what seemed to be pain, which suddenly became a grin. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Enough’s enough. Enough is enough. You’re right.’ Now, having more or less ignored me since inviting himself to sit down, he looked at me. ‘She’s a good ’un,’ he said. ‘No side to her. I like that. I do.f He lurched upright from his chair, then brought his mouth to within an inch of my ear. ‘You watch your step, pal, OK?’ he whispered, with a glance that was momentarily sober and distinctly unfriendly. Before leaving us, he lifted Aileen’s hand from the tabletop and planted a kiss on it; it was, she said later, like having a gigantic snail stuck onto her hand.