Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

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

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 You would come back to Morda with your hair pinned in place with a Mexican silver barrette, or in an elegant, outdated silk shift and trousers, or with a sachet of pinkish amphetamine that you would tap tentatively into a soda water after dinner with a kind of generous sense of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

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

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

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

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

  May 2002

  Just this last week at work I was told a story that I’d like to recount for you. It was Gene who told me. The two of us sat outside in the wind and sun, and he told me that when he was in his early thirties he became involved with a married woman. He wasn’t married himself. When he came home from war aged twenty-eight after three years’ service he didn’t feel he had enough humanity left to marry. Many felt that way, he said, even the ones who were married already. An affair seemed the most and best he could manage—this in a world in which casual relationships between men and women were not the norm, but also in a world in which war had forced years of celibacy on young men.

  A year after the war he met a woman whom he called, mysteriously, M. I will always be left to wonder—Maria? Martha? Madeline? When he told me how he felt the first time he saw her, he started to embark on a theory of attraction. It is Plato’s theory of the missing half—a famous story, but I will summarise it anyway. Once upon a time a single human being was both genders, with eight legs, eight arms, two heads, two sets of genitals, each human both male and female and also a third gender, androgynous, and each parented by the sun, the Earth and the combination of these, the moon. Fearing their power, Zeus cut them in half so that they became distinct, one man, one woman. The combination of both, the third gender, disappeared. He cut them—here Gene quotes Plato—as you would cut hard-boiled eggs with hairs. Ever since this separation, men and women have longed for one another, and the longing has been a desperate one for completion and for the healing of the wound of separation.

  I think Gene referred to this theory because other more earthly explanations completely escaped him when he thought of his attraction to M. He ran out of words when he stopped referring to Plato and he just stared ahead for perhaps as long as a minute. When he started again it was to take up the facts: they met, they went out for dinner and a drink, they met again, they slept together, they slept together again. Though she was married she was childless; nevertheless, she said she couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t want to leave her husband, and he told her he understood. He told himself it would have been disastrous if she had wanted to, since he had nothing left in him to give a woman except his lust, which, despite its tyrannising power, he would always try to be gentle enough in giving. You don’t want to become one of those brutes, he said, and I nodded, though I can only imagine what brutality it was he had seen and was refusing.

  She was a good woman, he said, and he seemed to want to bring this point to the fore. Good as in kind, gentle, compassionate, decent. When he told me this I think he was challenging me to disagree, but I nodded. I expect she was all of those things. And it went on for a few months, he said, seeing one another once in a while, and it seemed a convenient arrangement. For him it was something physical, and although their opportunities were scarce, even in the weeks of no or little contact it was enough that he still had in her a place for his desire to go, somewhere for the thoughts to land. For her it was t
he intake of fresh air in a life that had become otherwise still and—stale. Then he recanted: No, not stale, that’s my word, M never used words like that. If she referred to her marriage at all it was briefly, with tenderness and without judgement. The only impression he ever got of that marriage was that it was still. Not stale, not bitter, not going to pieces, just not going at all.

  But you fall in love, he said. This is the problem. That attraction—and again, when he tried to describe the attraction, it fell to his hands to do the talking; they came tensely towards one another as magnetically loaded things do, and he pulled them apart and they came together—that attraction doesn’t come from nowhere and is not accidental. When you feel that the other person is your missing half, you will fall in love. And then . . .

  He let his hands drop to his knees and he let his gaze drop to his hands. They were not charged any more, they were a pair of old man’s hands, which were used, but not used up. The fact is that the affair went on for years, he said, and was full of love. It became, almost, a marriage in itself, one that rode out circumstance and evolved in massive, unnoticeable shifts, and passed with quietly celebrated anniversaries. Where it was most unlike a marriage was in its physicality, which never waned and which changed only in order to intensify. No doubt this was partly down to its ongoing novelty; they once went for over two years without sleeping together. M would enforce laws of celibacy on them once in a while in despair and guilt, and they would see one another every fortnight for a walk, for tea, as if friends. It was like trying to push the rain back up into the clouds. How could it ever do anything but fail? Their bodies were very insistent on one another, and it never waned, never. These were his exact words. Never waned, never. No amount of abstinence or self-control ever did anything but increase the insistence.

  He asked me if it was normal to feel like you had died while making love. I told him I didn’t know. He said: To feel like you had died and passed beyond your body into the mind of God. Then he retreated from this line of enquiry, as though speaking these clumsy words had got him only further from the phenomenon they described and which he was trying, somewhere in his old body, to hold onto.

  As for M, there were any number of theories about her that might shed light on why she didn’t leave her husband, and how somebody so otherwise loyal and fair had managed to construct a life of deceit. He had his theories, she had hers; they exchanged them. But people are not reducible to theories, isn’t that true? This was more true for M than for any other human being he had met, M who was so curious and oblique and held together by her inconsistencies. M who was very witty and loved a joke, but whose face became almost laughably serious at the smallest thing. She told him once that she had always wanted to be one of those women who threw their heads back in laughter, but that she always forgot, and when something funny happened she instead wrinkled her nose and smiled soundlessly into her lap. It’s very hard to escape who you are, he said, and in saying so he implied that M could not have done or been anything other than what she did and was, and, loving what she did and was, he could never have wanted her to try.

  Yet when we slept together, he said, then she threw her head back, then she became fierce and free. Once again he approached the depths of this thought and retreated, and only said—by way of shorthand perhaps for this baffling carnal force that so evaded words—that he had never much wanted to be a father, but that he wanted to be the father of her children. Furthermore, that it made no sense for him not to be and for them to create nothing together. These were things he didn’t tell her, or if he did he told her in diluted and un-urgent ways that were easily dismissed as abstract talk. Which they did, repeatedly, dismiss as abstract talk.

  After six years the affair ended; why? Why then? No particular thing happened to force its end and neither did it peter out or drift away. It seemed that it simply buckled to inevitability. The love became too big, the time for it insufficient, and he believed that she felt the same. It sounded so perverse and pitiable a reason. If their love was so big, why didn’t it forge for itself a relationship it deserved? Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t he insist she leave? Why didn’t he tell her husband? Why didn’t he fall out of love with her for her cowardice? Again he looked at me as if he wanted me to judge them. When I didn’t, he seemed galvanised. It just doesn’t work like that, he said.

  Gene is not a weak man. In his room he has a photograph of himself in his thirties or forties and he is strong and sturdy and his skin glows, and he has a smile that shows a mixture of childish pleasure and adult forbearance. In that mix I can see perfectly how he might be the kind of man to hunt treasure with unfading optimism, and at the same time to be able to keep his hands off that treasure with unfading patience. Both characteristics come from the same place, an absolute belief that, one day, the treasure would be his reward, at whatever cost to himself along the way. When he told me he slept with no other women during those six years, and that he waited for her without regret, and that in some way he went on to wait for her until the day she died, he told me as though simply to convey, without sorrow, that this was the structure his life took. He could more easily live with the knowledge that he never quite had her than he could have with the knowledge that he lost her through greed and snatching, which pushed her out of reach.

  As it turned out, he did not ever marry. You don’t, he said, it wouldn’t ever feel right. I think I can understand what he means. It is not that you can’t settle for anything less, because you do, several times. I know he has a son because his notes from the hospital say the son had been to visit him there, though only once—and I suppose he must come from a later relationship. Yes, you do settle for less, it’s just that the things you settle for never make sense. Somewhere deeply felt, you can never understand why you couldn’t have that simple thing you wanted so much, and your whole life is pervaded by this incomprehension. You come to look like somebody who is blinking into bright light.

  Butterfly, for the first time it occurred to me that you might have felt some of the things Gene felt, that the years you spent on the periphery of Nicolas’ life might have been spent waiting for something that never happened. I have always been so convinced by the notion that in some way both Nicolas and I were victims of you that I have never stopped to consider the possibility that you might have been the victim. Suddenly I wonder if you loved him, and if you ever asked him to leave me, and whether, by the time he did, it was too late. Perhaps you wanted a child. I entertain this thought just for a moment; I try to squint the wrong way down the lens and see you small and consumed, a half person looking for her other half, and there, momentarily, you are. And I feel a compassion for you I cannot describe. And then you throw your head back in laughter in the way M never could and I think: No, this is not how it was. Gene’s story is Gene’s, not ours.

  Yes, our story is quite different; our story is splattered with the blood of bulls. Gene’s was the quiet emotional aftermath of war, ours is the war, the war itself, one soul grinding repeatedly against another.

  You are exaggerating, you say. But I contend that no exaggeration is equal to the task of summing up the battle between us. We are in southern Spain, in Almería’s Plaza de Toros, a Friday evening in July. We watch six bulls die; the rule is that if the bull shows special courage he might be saved and put out to stud, but this is rare and it does not happen for any of our bulls. Each of them is dragged out of the arena and the blood trail is covered with sand.

  At the time I thought it was like watching an Argentine tango. You remember the videos my mother had of European dance-hall competitions when she was learning (briefly, before she bored of it) to tango; you remember, specifically, the reproachful magnetism between the two dancers as they flicked their heels up around one another’s legs. I thought—though I need to make it clear I no longer see it this way—that the bull and matador were tentative like this; the matador flicks the cape, the bull advances, the matador toe-steps away, the bull quivers.

  But
then, who would not quiver? The picadors come out on horses that have their eyes covered and their ears stuffed. They gather in on the bull and lance its shoulders and neck, and that is when it becomes tentative, demure, as if wooed into an unplanned engagement. It lowers its head. In one of the fights the picador is too enthusiastic and lances it to its knees so that by the time the matador enters the ring it is barely able to stand, let alone fight. The crowd jeers and throws cushions; they wanted to see a fair contest. You waft your polka-dot fan restlessly around Teddy’s sleeping head. But this is only one of the six fights, and in the others the bull is lanced into a kind of taut energy. The banderilleros run into the ring and towards the bull with their spikes. These sticks, like the feathered arrows in Teddy’s archery set, festoon its shoulders. It looks like a morris dancer, Nicolas says, with his chin drawn back in concern.

  By the time the matador enters with his cape and sword, the bull is already swaying sideways and forwards as if at sea, with punctured and twitching muscles—surprised, I think, and offended, but here is the thing—seeing itself for the first time in true relation to something else, no longer alone and dominant, but suddenly half of a two-way exchange. You can see this in the way it makes and keeps eye contact with the matador and maintains both closeness and space. They circle one another; the matador swishes his cape, the bull scrapes at the ground. The blood on its flank thickens in the heat, everybody is hot inside the bullring.