Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  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. Mr
s 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?

  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.