Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  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.

  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, b
ut 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.

  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.