Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  With this final denouncement of course he turns to you the hard side of his heart, but in the fumbled manoeuvre we see it—the soft part, the part that is still in such need of his protection.

  I have been thinking increasingly about your sudden reappearance. Today I was shovelling snow from the front door and I looked up from the ground with a notion that you were there. It was just somebody passing on the street, though I note with interest that this someone was a tall person, far taller than you, and a man at that, which suggests that my memory of you has become overly monumental these long years.

  We’ve had a winter of fluctuations, first mild and dreary, and then there was a fortnight of light snow after Christmas and into the new year, followed by a thaw that seemed to swill water around the whole city and flush out its spirit. I’ve never known the streets to be as quiet as they were at the beginning of this month. Now, at the end of February, we have a foot of snow in the parks and some verve has returned, perhaps an exasperated energy from all those who thought spring was coming.

  At work we’ve lost three residents over the winter. I don’t know what curious biological programming makes a human who never steps outside more likely to die when the outside is cold. We’re such simple life forms, Butterfly, when it comes down to it. We see the days grow short and the branches bare and our enthusiasm for our own lives fades a little. Frances, under whose breast I found no judgement, is only just now recovering from five weeks of pleurisy and looked for a brief time as though she might make the sad tally four, which would be more losses than we’ve had during the last eighteen months put together. I was surprised by how much the thought of her death affected me. But slowly she’s improving. While Bing Crosby and Frankie Laine drone in the background we’re all given to turning our heads towards the big picture window that looks out over the garden and the summer house and waiting expectantly for a sighting of spring.

  As you’ll remember, then, you arrived at our back door quite literally out of the blue. A lucid, blue evening in April when the light is so glassy that it is almost a thing in itself, a surface, onto which you seemed to condense. Such was your reappearance: a manifestation. You knocked on the open door and I came into the kitchen with Teddy on my hip to see who was there. You raised your arms outwards in apparent joy at seeing us. The sun, which was low behind you and bursting from cloud, spun through the wings of your crochet shawl, and Teddy jabbed his forefinger into the space between us and you and called—almost sang—your new name in an eruption of happy recognition as if he’d known you for years. ‘Butterfly!’ he said, and for a moment I think you hesitated on the doorstep quite humbled, or otherwise cautioned, at having been so instantly assigned a label in this way.

  You stooped under the low door and filled the kitchen with a perfume that was more tree than flower.

  ‘Teddy, Nicolas, meet Butterfly,’ I joked. In truth I imagined you would hate the name, but it was strange how it so instantly became you. You had always been Nina, and suddenly you were something other, reinvented by the light as if it had dematerialised you and rebuilt you into a new existence. Nicolas had come into the room at some point in this and taken Teddy from me. You reached out your right arm to its full extent and I was surprised, almost perplexed, to see that you still wore the silver cobra. You shook their hands, Nicolas’ with a firm, haughty clasp that made something in his expression stand back as if challenged, and Teddy’s with lightness. His one-year-old hand had never known such formality.

  Once you had kissed my cheeks and hugged me, you leant back against the kitchen table and folded your arms.

  ‘You’re still wearing blue,’ you said. ‘You always wore blue.’

  I did often wear blue, dark blue, which you once said made me look like an impending storm, like the rainclouds that come in before the monsoon.

  ‘And you look like a tree that’s gone green for spring.’

  You were wearing a peculiar long green tunic, which you had tied around the waist with a piece of twine, and your hair was unkempt but lustrous even so. Once it would have been long enough to become caught under the twine, but now it was slightly shorter, and thicker, and though you were never the kind of woman one could call ripe, there was something in your thinness that passed for slender, something that, in another less self-denying person, might have been described as energetic or radiant.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m seeing you.’

  ‘Nor I you.’

  ‘After all these years.’

  It had been nine years in fact since you had left Morda; you left in ’73 when your parents moved to America, where your father had got a job as a botanist, or botany researcher—I never did quite know what it was he did—at the Smithsonian Institution. Off you went with them to Washington, but when I telephoned you a month later your mother said you had disliked Washington and had left to travel around America; one of your many typically abrupt departures. I can only think they were in temporary accommodation at that time, because by the next time I telephoned, a few months later, their number no longer worked. And neither did you call or write, but then, as we know, that wasn’t exactly your way.

  We had been twenty-one the last time we saw one another. And in my mind this was just after you gave me the photograph, although perhaps I have collapsed time a little to fit my memories—but it must have been something like this. You came forward from the table with a bright smile and held your hands out in front of Nicolas. ‘May I?’

  He gave Teddy to you. You held him as though you were weighing him for lovability, to see if there really was something in this fleshy little form that could sustain one’s adoration for a lifetime. Teddy was afraid of you. He didn’t often come across strangers. But you were never a person who asked for concessions and you tucked him on your hip in such a way that suggested you were providing a seat that he was very free to leave. He began to play with the great length of hair that fell over your chest and his expression changed from fear to resolve: after all, I will stay here. I will stay right here.

  What a thing is this dispassion of yours, Butterfly, that causes everybody to make the same decision?

  That evening we sat down for dinner. It was you, Nicolas and I.

  You looked out of place in the cottage, which I thought was just the awkwardness of the situation. But actually, when I think of it now, you looked out of place almost anywhere substantial. You pulled out a chair and perched on it in a way that seemed to say you weren’t really for chairs, for old oak tables and ranges. I don’t mean to say you were contemptuous or ungrateful, you were just in transit. You looked trapped and as though you wished you could feel differently. Across the table you looked at me as if I were at once beloved and unknown.

  ‘Is the food okay?’ I asked.

  You shook your hair, gestured abundance with your arms, and said to nobody in particular, ‘You were always going to be the most able cook. The most splendid wife and mother.’

  I admit to being almost embarrassed as we looked at one another along the table, with a shoulder of beef between us, and Nicolas quietly eating.

  ‘As for you, Butterfly?’ Nicolas asked, because Butterfly had become, in the space of an evening, what you were called. ‘Do you have a husband or family?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You were never interested in men,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what you thought?’

  ‘You always ignored them.’

  ‘I’m waiting, that’s all.’

  ‘You might wait for ever,’ Nicolas said.

  You put your fork down. ‘Do you mind?’ You pointed at a piece of beef on your plate. When I shook my head you picked up the meat and used your teeth, then licked your fingers. ‘I’m sorry, I was born without manners.’

  Your unused knife felt like a betrayal of sorts on my part; I’d forgotten that you ate only with a fork and that if food needed cutting you’d use your teeth. We have these canines for ripping, you used to argue. These are better by half than knives, which req
uire two hands to operate. Man’s overuse of tools is a mark of his stupidity, you’d said.

  Nicolas had come to the end of his meal and brought out a pack of cigarettes that he laid on the table. Together we smoked, you whilst still eating. He leant back in his chair and put a hand in his pocket, or at least he probably did, since he always sat like that at the table after dinner, smoking, his face content in an interlude of quiet before he became restless. It seemed possible to me then that he did not see your tremendous beauty. At the most I thought he might see it in the abstract, but find it mistimed with his reality. It was an androgynous beauty of thick brows and strong nose and narrow hips, one that had lateral appeal, but which wasn’t fond or nurturing in the way our lives had become since Teddy’s birth. I’d had something of your androgyny too once, of course, and I’d had it still when Nicolas and I first met. But androgyny is a difficult thing to hold onto when a child has passed through your body, and not a desired thing, either. I worked on the premise—I’m sure very flawed—that people are wrong to believe that we desire what we cannot have. Instead we desire what we aren’t, but can conceivably be. And neither Nicolas nor I could any longer conceivably be what you still were in your absolute lack of ties. If he saw your beauty at all, he saw it as a person sees something at the far side of a field, and then, after a moment of curiousness, carries on with his walk.

  Nicolas went to bed soon after dinner; he said he would get up for Teddy in the night if he needed to. You opened a second bottle of wine and took it out into the cold garden, wrapped your shawl around you, thin as you were, and smoked and drank in the darkness. When I realised you weren’t about to come back in I took a coat out and joined you. I spread the coat on the grass where you sat and gestured for you to move off the damp grass. We took half each.

  ‘I like Nicolas.’

  ‘He’s tired today, quieter than normal.’

  ‘You met him in Morda?’

  ‘No, in London. We lived there for four years after we got married and while he trained. Then Teddy came and we moved back.’

  ‘Trained for what?’

  ‘He’s a lighting man, for the stage. It means he goes off here and there to work on productions. Nothing major, we’re always broke.’

  ‘I thought you’d be in Borneo, Guatemala, America at least—not still here.’

  ‘I don’t even know where Guatemala is.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, you get on a plane and the pilot finds the way.’

  ‘Where have you been, Butterfly?’

  You put your hand on my knee and squeezed, then let the hand drop back into your lap. I liked the irony of your new name, that of the most fragile and temporary of creatures, and I called you by it as a joke as if to suggest that we’d had no past together to speak of. Teddy had invented you hours before. Did you hate that? If you did you took it with a certain amount of goodwill and collusion, because you responded earnestly enough to the name. ‘It doesn’t matter where I’ve been,’ you said. ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘In America?’

  ‘No, no, not America, not there.’ You exhaled headily. ‘I was there for a few months but got swept out for working without a visa. They’re very literal, you know, the Americans. Very pedantic.’

  ‘But your parents are still there?’

  You nodded, but had squinted off as if distracted, so I looked up, around us, at the night. ‘It’s beautiful here—better than Guatemala, wherever that is. I know the woods inch by inch, I know the shape of the river and how the sun moves, where the birds nest. We camp out a lot in the summer, even last year when Teddy was a baby. It’s just us, me, Nicolas and Teddy, in the way it was just me and you. I wouldn’t want you to pity my life.’

  You tucked my hair behind my ear with resoluteness. ‘Did I say I did?’

  A new direction of thought seemed to strike you. ‘My brother is trying to join the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences,’ you said. ‘Just like my father before him. Still trying to protect the place from the Soviets.’ You gathered the surplus of your shawl and wrapped it around me. ‘This time it’s a colossal nuclear-power station in the far east of the country, it’ll have three reactors when it’s finished. The Soviets have cut down all the trees; they’re trying to turn Lithuania into a factory, according to Petras.’

  ‘Has he gone back there to live, then?’

  ‘Yes, for a time.’

  ‘Is he safe?’

  You shrugged. Because you had looked away and seemed suddenly restless with the subject, I took the tassels of the shawl in my hand.

  ‘I remember this.’

  You rubbed the wool between your fingers for a moment, then nodded. ‘I haven’t taken it off for nine years.’

  ‘Nine hot years.’

  ‘Nine difficult-to-play-tennis years.’

  ‘It’s clean, for something that’s been worn ceaselessly for a decade.’

  ‘I bathe in liquid wool wash.’

  ‘Pass me a cigarette, Butterfly. Do you mind, if I call you that?’

  You gave a generous shrug. ‘Let’s consider Nina dead.’

  ‘Surely not dead.’ I took the corner of the shawl idly between my own fingers. ‘Just retreating from view.’ And then dropped it. ‘Are you going to stay for a while—a couple of weeks?’

  ‘May I stay a longish while?’

  ‘How long is longish?’

  ‘A decade or two, I’m clean out of money.’

  ‘I’d have to ask Nicolas. If I say two decades and he objects, perhaps we could haggle it down to one.’

  ‘Well, a month or so would do. Put my case forward, would you? Tell him I can darn and iron and cook.’

  ‘But you can’t.’

  ‘But tell him.’

  You kissed me on the temple and gathered yourself up to standing like you had always done, a cross-legged handless transition that was the only vaguely athletic thing your drawn-out body ever did. You passed the cigarette from your lips to mine and said you were cold and were going to bed. I extinguished the cigarette and came too.

  That night you shouted out from your sleep, as you did the next night, and the next. For three days you stalked about the tiny house in your tunic, talking about politics and death and the Four Conditions of the Self. Seriousness was your way, but I don’t think it ever signalled unhappiness as such. Apart from the shouting out at night, my memory of you on that visit was one of a human being at ease with herself, languidly exuberant. It was true that the shawl didn’t ever seem to leave your body, which gave you a curious swaddled, limbless look; only once did I see your arms, when they shot outwards to beckon Teddy to you and the shawl fell back. I saw in the crook of your arm some holes from needle use and some bruising, which I never asked you about. Teddy loved you. You crouched earnestly on the floor of the living room teaching him letters of the alphabet and names of animals with a focus and patience I had never had.

  In the evenings you sat outside in the cold and it was me who sat with you, Nicolas only managed it for one evening. He was subdued by you, that was the truth. After you left I thought often of how you had arrived—there at the back of the house, knocking on the open door and raising your arms in unmistakable joy—though I wondered even then on whose behalf you were joyful: your own or ours. You had the grin of somebody who knows their arrival is in some way triumphant, a triumph of surprise, a momentous thing.

  Increasingly I am aware of life as a kind of dream. I will be thinking or feeling something and the thing appears or happens, and it’s as if the world, like my dreams, is a projection of my own mind. Today while walking I was thinking about what it will be like to be a grandmother, assuming Teddy goes on to have children. He is old enough; I could be a grandmother in a matter of months biologically speaking, and there I will be, not much over fifty, elevated into that final stage of being. As I was thinking it a toddler and her father walked past, and the child pointed at me and said, Nana. That’s not Nana, the father said. Definitely not, I smiled. Afterwards I t
hought: Did this happen or did I imagine it? The truth is that it makes little difference either way to the experience itself.

  That example makes it sound like I’m talking about coincidences, which wouldn’t be true. Not coincidences but manifestations, ideas that resolve into form. I write down our old conversations, fanciful and ill-remembered though they are, as if to pretend that’s exactly how they were, almost as a joke to myself, to take a sketchy memory and write it as if fact. But then, somehow, that sketchy memory takes form in the world. Not long after I wrote that last conversation I heard two men by the banks of the Thames, peeling themselves out of wetsuits, discussing diving in Guatemala. One of them raved about diving down to the extinct crater of a supervolcano, the other said he didn’t even know where Guatemala was. This is what I mean, you see, when I talk about the sense of the world projecting my mind.

  And now this week a man called Gene has moved into The Willows, and I saw on his notes that he is Lithuanian, or of Lithuanian descent; so he appears, like the residue of a thought I’d had. Yesterday I saw what I thought was a piece of jewellery on the pavement and it was two green bugs back-to-back, beautiful beyond description, like a piece of gold-inlaid polished jadeite. There was no trenchant message here, only the sense that they had been set in my path as a reminder of the remarkable. The sense that I get, to put it another way, is that far from drifting through a world of arbitrary objects and happenings, I am tuning in through static to a collection of sensory things that have been put there to reveal my mind to me.