Why had Blackaton kept the note? Could it be that he had actually been jealous of their friendship – their closeness – back then, in the beginning?
‘I think I am free now,’ Gabriel said to Mrs Bradley. ‘I mean, really free. We can start living, for real.’ Was there a movement in one of the dry hands? A twitch? A lizard blinking once on a hot stone. At once, he regretted the absurdity of his remark. ‘In our hearts, I mean.’ Mrs Bradley’s eyes stayed level on the horizon.
‘Anyway, I’ve got to go now. I’m invited for Christmas dinner … at a friend’s house. In fact, it’s Mother’s old house. She lives there – this friend, I mean. You’d like her. She’s a bit like us. Quite a coincidence, eh?’
He stood up, but hesitated for a moment. Then, without knowing quite why, he bent down and put his cheek to Mrs Bradley’s, breathing in the smell of her neck, of her hair, just behind the ears. She smelt of very little, he was surprised to find, except for a faint, old woman’s muskiness and woody iris and a hint of something familiar, but very distant … like butter frying in another part of the house. But perhaps that was just his imagination. He straightened himself up, his face quite flushed.
‘I’ll be coming to see you more often from now on. To speak to you, like this. And there’s this note I’d like to read to you, if you’d care to hear it … You know I have been here every week, don’t you? It’s just that I couldn’t face staying for very long; I find it terribly upsetting, seeing you like this. And the shame of it … I promised Michael, you see, to look after you when he died. But, as usual, I was too late.’ He stopped talking for a moment and the sealed room was so quiet that he could hear his own heart – or was it hers?
‘Oh, dear – I expect you don’t wish to hear that all that much – I’m sorry.’ He wanted to escape, but felt compelled to linger. Why? Was it guilt? ‘Perhaps you’d be able to come back to Oakstone one day. Yes, why not? I’ll speak to Ms Turpin about it. She can come, too. Quite a girl, ain’t she? Stand and deliver, eh?’ He chuckled and looked, for a moment, into Amélie’s brown eyes. He looked right into the black pupils and saw, in all that dark, an amber glow – a faint flash of a coded message. Then he pulled back. What was that? He was sure he heard Amélie say something. ‘What did you say?’ He laughed briefly at his own folly, shaking his head. ‘All right then, my dear; see you next week.’ As he left the room, the door seemed to close on a vacuum.
*
Ms Turpin was still at the reception desk, reading a paperback novel. She looked up as he approached. ‘Well?’
‘Have you ever heard her speak?’
She looked at him sharply through her reading glasses.
‘Well, have you?’
She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose so, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s aware of things. You mustn’t—’
‘Ms Turpin, for the love of Christ, I’m asking you straight: do you think she’s in there? Might she actually have understood what I said to her?’
She took off her reading glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose while looking past him out of the glass doors. Then she turned her eyes back to him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’m quite certain of it.’
*
It was not until he was on the road, driving back towards the moor, that he realised what he had heard Amélie say: ‘Gabe’ – and then another word – was it ‘life’? Or ‘live’? Or could it have been ‘love’? Or was it all just a fantasy, brewed amongst this new lightness he felt inside his head?
As the road left the sea behind and started climbing towards the moor, he passed a rambler who stopped at the roadside and raised his hand in greeting. It was an oddly familiar gesture. And that head of hair … Those copper curls … Did he really see the man wink? He glanced in the rear-view mirror but, to his surprise, the rambler was already gone.
He slowed down when he reached the edge of the village. He drove in second gear past the old school and the willow by the river, where he used to hide as a child. He crept past Rowden’s and the church, passing the lane with the cottage where he grew up. He drove even more slowly up the drive to Oakstone and parked to the left of the front steps. After killing the engine, he sat for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel, staring up at the big house – the house that had started to become his, not because of its history or because he tried so hard to acquire it, but simply by him coming back here after a visit to a loved one, by him parking the car in its usual spot. Because this was the kind of comfort one could dare to draw dreams from.
He stepped out of the car, his legs a bit stiff from the cold and the drive. The gravel underfoot could be anywhere but it gave him consolation to think that it was here. Here, outside Oak stone: his home.
16
An hour later, Mr Askew set out again, this time on foot, wearing his best suit under the tweed coat. He had decided, against his own better judgement, on the shoes with the leather soles. He carried a bottle of Amarone in a canvas bag and two gifts wrapped in brown paper. It was still very cold – colder now, as the sun was setting – and the grass was spiked, each blade pared and ready. There was something solid about the way they stood to attention. He stepped off the gravel drive, on to the lawn, enjoying the way his feet crushed and sank, leaving behind a march of ghostly footprints. Dusk was gathering over the short day, a blue shadow tumbling silently from the moor, descending like the seventh wave, its force softened by its own advance. This was the same darkness that he used to hug against his chest at night as a child. Still a friend, it touched his hands now, and his face, pressing softly, coyly against its hollows, finding its way into the hole that had been mended. What was he ever, in his own life? A memory – a ghost – always at the periphery of his own story, stroking the shadows. Being stroked by the shadows. But now the tautening imprints on the frosted grass gave him a sense of being there. Yes, he was here.
As he passed through the gates into the road, his hand reached, out of habit, for his upper lip – checking, making sure. But tonight the skin was smooth under his fingers, and unnaturally white, apart from the scar pinking in the sharp air, an arrow ready on his cupid’s bow. He did not know what had made him do it but, coming back from visiting Amélie at Edencombe, he had gone straight to the bathroom and shaved off his moustache. As he had searched for his reflection in the steamed-up mirror, he could not be sure what he was looking at. He had stood there for a long time, staring, as the steam dissolved slowly without bringing him closer to himself, until, at last, when the heat had gone out of the bathroom and the skin on his naked torso was goose-pimpled, he had looked into his own eyes. He had leant forward, resting his hands on the sink, and looked deep into himself. He had been surprised at what he found and he had kept staring in amazement, until he retrieved himself from the corridor of mirrors. He must not forget.
Few cars passed along this road on Christmas Day and the frost had spread like white fur over the tarmac. It was slippery and he walked, instead, on the gravel edge of the road, avoiding stepping into the puddles that wore only a gloss of thin ice. A few stars had come out overhead and the frost glimmered in the blue light. He listened to his footsteps as they pinged in the tight air. He walked with the hedges high on either side until the road climbed into the village, joining the high street, past the pub, which was lit up like a cruise liner, past Rowden’s, which was quiet and dark now, for once, past the post office and the rows of chocolate-box cottages, past the looming church, where the Christmas service was over. A forgotten candle was still flickering behind one of the stained glass windows. He stopped for a moment to watch its single beauty. It would burn down eventually and no one would ever know that the health and safety regulations had been breached; no harm would have been done.
He set out again through the landscape of his mind, and walked a hundred yards to the mouth of the lane, which had swallowed him up on so many nights in the past. Here, he hesitated and a shiver went through his body as a cold gust sneaked its way up from the valley and stroked its tail
against him. He took a deep breath, stretched his back and walked on, negotiating the slippery cobbles with the emphasised carelessness of a lover approaching a tryst.
The nicer cottages at the top of the lane stood empty – they were only used as holiday homes in the summer, these days. But further down the dark lane he could see the light from behind the drawn curtains in the front room and knew that somehow it would be all right. In this light, the harsh façade of the cottage looked less uninviting. He could smell the peat smoke on the air, familiar and comforting. Out of habit, he reached for the brass handle, but stopped himself at the last minute, remembering this was no longer his home, that somehow the many twists and turns of life had stood him here once more outside the house where it all began. Second comings were like second glances: risky, unpredictable, thin as ice. As he knocked on the door, he was aware of his knees weakening, possibly bending. He could hear gay voices from inside.
*
‘Ah, there you are! We were beginning to wonder …’ Mrs Sarobi smiles at him with her warm eyes. Her hand is on his arm, pulling him in by the sleeve – ‘Come on inside; don’t let the cold in –’ closing the door behind him. Her hands are lifting his coat off his shoulders, releasing him from his pelt. He pulls out the bottle and the gifts and drops the empty canvas bag on the floor by the door.
Mrs Ludgate is sitting by the fire with a glass in her hand. The peat is burning high. ‘All right, Professor? I poured you a drink from the posh bottle.’ She nods towards a second glass on the table beside her. ‘Reckoned you would need warming up after your walk, knowing the way you’re likely to stray and walk off in your mind.’
Mrs Sarobi’s hands are again holding both of his, lifting them up towards her lips, blowing. Her hair is free, falling on either side of her face as she bends it towards his hands. He wants to hold her face, cup its fine bones, kiss her.
‘You’re freezing! Come, sit by the fire.’
Would it be wrong to love Mrs Sarobi’s hands? Her lips? Would they laugh at him, if they knew?
‘Move over, you; give him the best chair.’ The hostess’s cheeks are flushed.
‘Okay, okay; you’re the mistress of the house.’ Mrs Ludgate smiles, pushing herself out of the chair.
But Gabriel Askew stands by the door, his newly released hands still suspended in front of him. He’s distracted, for a moment, by the confusion of a childhood memory – of Uncle Gerry sitting by the fire, looking into his glass, the world no longer in his sight. And of Mother standing nearby, looking straight at Gabriel, for once, frowning at everything that’s wrong and ugly in her damaged child. Or is she wondering in perplexity how she will be able to protect her beloved child from the rest of the world? Ah, but it’s time to leave it behind. Memory is the safest place to store such images. He shrugs and looks up at Mrs Sarobi. ‘What was that?’ he asks. ‘I was reminded of something from long ago.’
‘I said, you look great without the moustache.’
‘Oh, thanks.’ Reddening.
‘How was your Christmas so far? Did you talk to Amélie?’
‘Mm-hmm; I’ll tell you all about it later,’ he says, looking into her eyes. Braver than ever before, he’s strengthened by the knowledge that there’s somebody, at last, who will listen.
*
Mrs Sarobi – Nahal – sees all this and at once she feels better about the gift that she has wrapped for him. He will understand, she is certain; he will somehow understand why it is beautiful and significant, although it’s only a silly old vase, pieced together from a thousand shards of blue glass, revealing the tiny flowers, a cluster of forget-me-nots. She will give it to him later, when they are alone.
‘What are you two on about, skulking by the door?’ Mrs Ludgate has moved to the chair further from the fire. ‘Are you going to sit down, or what?’
Laughing, rubbing his hands together, Gabriel moves into the room. ‘Now, where is that drink you promised me, Doris? We have a lot to celebrate, haven’t we?’
‘Drink’s still here – come and get it, before it goes off.’
*
Later on, the three of them sit there around the table, playing out their fête galante. The oilcloth has been replaced by a beautifully embroidered tablecloth. The Rayburn’s heat is picked out by the tiny blue flames of many candles, flickering in the draught like leaf shadows on a summer’s day: shy, tender, delicate.
This is our world, he thinks. Together and alone, just the way we prefer it; three outsiders, each of us finished, each of us at our beginning. This is the tightrope we walk, a void opening on either side as we simply place one foot in front of the other, never looking down. Never looking back. No need to look back. Life stretches in front of us and yet it’s contained in this moment. He looks at his watch. It’s nearly six o’clock. The hands – the heart – balanced, slotted into place. I have caught up with myself.
There is still time, he thinks to himself, smiling at Nahal across the table, realising now he has never known this happiness.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My warm and special thanks to Susannah Clapp, Gill Coleridge, Lars Hagander, Cara Jones, Adrian Pinder, Jon Riley, Robin Robertson, Rose Tomaszewska and Klas Östergren who, through their dedication, kindness and carefully considered comments helped to give this book a heart.
To Mr Edward Kiely of Great Ormond Street Hospital for answering my questions about gemination.
To Beatrice Monti della Corte for her generosity and for the time spent at the Santa Maddalena Foundation.
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