by Tom Rachman
“I guess he gave it up after I left.” She had further questions about the old man’s life, and Venn answered them all, reveling in the comical biography of Humphrey Ostropoler. She smiled at the account—Venn expected that response, and she obliged. But to do so stung; she felt protective of the absent Humphrey, his private life bared despite decades of secrecy.
Abruptly, Venn pulled up at the edge of a field. “This is where you get out.” He sent her squelching back to the house and reversed away to complete his farmerly chores.
When Tooly stepped inside, Harriet was in the kitchen, watching tennis on her iPad. “Can I get you anything? Glass of wine?”
“Please. Thanks.”
Tooly took a large sip, and considered Harriet, who seemed kindly disposed toward her, not because she was Tooly per se but because Harriet was favorable to all human beings (and ferrets), and Tooly fit one of these categories. People had to be demonstrably evil to constitute rotters for Harriet—until then, they were jolly nice. Whenever Tooly encountered that mind-set, she was baffled. Surely experience eroded faith in human beings. Then again, some people trusted and thrived because of it. She watched Harriet with the baby in her arms, a scene of contentment that Tooly couldn’t conceive of inhabiting, and it was hard to insist that she was the wiser.
Venn cooked goose for dinner, a bird taken from their own stock. As they ate, Tooly found her mind drifting. “I keep thinking about what you told me before. That stuff about Humph.”
“Let’s not bore Harriet with talk of old friends,” he interrupted—evidently, she wasn’t supposed to introduce their past into his present.
Chastened, Tooly sipped her wine. “You two have lived here a while?” she asked, since Venn had evaded the question earlier.
“Do we even live here?” Harriet asked Venn. “Technically, I suppose. But we seem always to be elsewhere, don’t we, darling. Disgraceful to say, but we’re here largely because of taxes. The Irish, mysteriously, charge hardly any of them.”
“That’ll change,” he said.
“Yes, with the market things and so on. Turns out it’s frighteningly easy to become an Irish resident, or to claim you’re one. My husband is an absolute master at that sort of wheeze, aren’t you. We still spend a fair bit of time in London. And I love Tokyo. My parents have a place in Scotland, where the whole Beenblossom clan descends like some sort of pestilence this time of year. Which is why we’re hiding out here. All right,” she said, rising and handing the baby to Venn. “You cooked, darling, so I clean up. Those are the rules. Begone, both of you. Reminisce boringly—I insist.”
Venn and Tooly retired to the library. He placed his daughter on the carpet, where the infant practiced crawling, flopping intermittently onto her belly, gaze fixed on her father. The four dogs slept, each in a different corner of the room. From an antique-globe bar, he extracted a Cognac decanter and two snifters. Books lined the walls, each volume identically bound in Bordeaux leather, silver letters imprinted on the spine, gold paint on the page edges. Classics, poetry, essays. They didn’t have the smell of reading books; they were furniture. She knelt beside the baby, who looked glassily around. “I’d like a one-piece outfit like yours. Most convenient,” she told the child, then turned to Venn. “Shouldn’t she be sleeping now?”
“Lots of life left for that. Everything is too interesting to sleep if you’ve not been alive a year.”
The child goggled open-mouthed at her father, oblivious of anything else in the room.
“You’re surprisingly credible as the family man, Venn,” she remarked. “I’d be a disaster as a mother—I couldn’t trust myself to look after a brood. Don’t even know how to hold one of these properly.” She leaned over to try, then thought better of it, took another sip of Cognac, finding herself more uncomfortable with each remark. “Mind if I help myself to another drop?”
“You drink fast these days.”
She poured, but refrained from sipping for a minute. She sat on the oxblood sofa, he on its twin opposite, a glass coffee table between them, stacked with Country Life magazines. “I saw my parents recently,” she said. (How peculiar to use that phrase, “my parents,” in reference to Paul and Sarah.) She recounted what Paul had said about sending money to Sarah for years, and that Humphrey had remembered this, too. But what had Sarah spent it on?
“Well,” he answered. “On me.”
“What?”
“The woman, you may recall, was a bit stuck on me. The only way she figured to keep her hooks in was monthly funding,” he said. “Your father made those payments directly into Sarah’s account, but she refused to just wire it nicely along. Insisted on handing it over in person—her way of clinging on. Meant I had to tell her every place I moved. And when she turned up I put on a good show—just enough rejection to keep her interested.”
Tooly paused, trying to absorb this. But something didn’t fit. “You took me everywhere you went. Why didn’t you guys just plant me somewhere, then? The checks were coming in anyway.”
“Plant you where? If you started sobbing in a corner somewhere, then sooner or later someone telephones Daddy. Better to make you merry and compliant. And there was Humph to keep you busy.”
“Was he earning off me, too?”
“No, no. Humph was an unpaid volunteer. I told you, a sad and lonely man. And everything was fine until you went and turned twenty-one, at which point your father rudely stopped paying. Though the whole thing was a bit tired by then. Humph was terrified,” he recalled, laughing, “that I might take you with me once the money stopped, that I’d do something awful with you. You remember how I tied your shoelaces that day?”
“Of course.”
“Couldn’t have you running after me and making a scene on the Upper West Side, could I.”
“I know you’re trying to get a reaction from me.”
“Well, of course. What else do people talk for?”
“You weren’t just keeping me sweet. I was your friend.”
“You were my salary. And, since you had to be around, I put you to use. Now and then, you came in handy. Though never nearly as handy as you thought.”
“But you weren’t living off me,” she insisted. “You had all that other work.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Like in Barcelona, you were helping that guy with his factory. Those Romanian gangsters were hassling him, and you fixed it. Right?”
“What an imagination!”
“You told me that.”
“Like I said, what an imagination. My Barcelona businessman was just another citizen, a little excitable, a little greedy. If he wanted to believe I was a one-man Mafia, who was I to disappoint him?”
“But I saw you dealing with tons of scary guys.”
“I met a few over the years. That’s not to say I was mixed up with them. Thugs are not famously strong in the forward-planning department—why would I tie my fate to sediment like them? Maybe certain souls have mistaken me for a magician, the man who’ll get around the rules, fix the competition, grant them all the power they never deserved. And maybe some gave me funds in the fantasy. All that ever produced, little duck, was a timely reason for me to find my next town.”
“But I thought … Venn, I waited years to do something with you.”
“What were we going to do together? Your dot-com with those hapless college kids?”
“You’re the one who encouraged me to figure out something with them. Wasn’t that the point, for me to find us opportunities?”
“I sent you into people’s houses, Tooly, like one sends a child to collect pretty shells on the beach: to get the kid out of your hair. You weren’t about to come back with anything useful. Actually, you probably should’ve stuck with the lawyer. You’d be comfortable now.”
“I needed to hook up with someone to get anywhere in life? I’m that useless, you think?”
“Well, how would you say you’re faring now?”
“I know you’re just giving me a h
ard time, Venn. But I want you to know that I paid attention to what you said. All that stuff. About managing without other people. I’m that way now. We really are similar.”
“Couldn’t be more different. I only said that because it kept you in love with me.”
“Come on—this coldhearted thing isn’t convincing me.”
“Really? What am I doing wrong?” he asked, winking.
“What you’re doing wrong is that I remember. I remember how you spent your own money to fly me and Humph along whenever you moved. How you paid for whatever apartment we were in. You weren’t living off me. You completely took care of me. For years.”
“That was Humph. I never paid for one of your flights, your food, your rent. You only assumed it was me, and I saw no need to say otherwise.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To make himself necessary. Otherwise, babysitting was a job anyone could’ve done.”
“But after New York,” she protested, “you kept supporting me.”
“How? I haven’t seen you in years.”
“My passport,” she answered, meaning the bank card he’d secreted there, and the account that had served as her safety net for years, and with which she’d bought World’s End.
“Never touched your passport—Humph thought I’d spirit you away from him if I had it. Which was crazy. I could’ve sold you, I guess. But how much was I seriously going to get?”
“I know it was you who set up that card, Venn.”
“Just tell me what I did,” he said, “and I’ll be happy to take credit.”
Harriet entered the library. “Oh, darling, you are useless!” she told her husband, picking the infant off the carpet. “You just left her asleep on the floor—I should call social services.”
“She was so adorable. I couldn’t move her.”
“Actually,” Tooly said, standing, “you know what? We were just calculating that I won’t make it back in time if I leave tomorrow morning. I’m sorry, Harriet, but I should get going.”
“Sure,” she said indifferently, and carried the baby upstairs.
Tooly collected her shoulder bag from the guesthouse and walked around Beenblossom Lodge. Venn stood in wait, leaned against his black Range Rover.
“You really affected my life,” she said. “Everything I chose to do, how I am now. I think you changed me more than anyone I ever met.”
“Did I?”
“Why do you think I was in love with you?”
“You obviously were.”
“How come you never tried anything?”
“I’m not an animal,” he said. “I’m not someone who just launches himself at any girl on the premises. Anyway, you’re ugly, aren’t you.”
“You’re just being cruel now.”
“If you don’t want to know, don’t ask the question. Think of it this way: if you’d been attractive, I’d have had you and got bored (fast in your case, I’m guessing), and you’d never have lasted.”
“I won’t hassle you again.”
“Thank goodness for that. Wouldn’t want you going the same way as the ferrets.” He embraced her, locking his arms around her lower back, inhaling to expand his chest and compress hers, his knuckles cracking as he squeezed the air out of her. “An absolute pleasure,” he said, kissing her forehead. “Don’t ever fucking do this again.”
Her high beams swept across dark tree trunks, burst out into the roadway. She drove toward Cork, gripping the wheel, then turned into a closed Morris Oil to calm down. But she had to escape this place, so drove onward, tire treads kicking up pebbles.
In a hotel room outside the airport, she sat naked on the bed, running her fingers over her ribs, his grip there, that kiss on her brow. It was as if she had brushed aside a lock of hair and found an eye, a throbbing eye, a hideous growth blinking at her, repulsive yet her own, fed by her own blood. This is how he seemed, incorporated into her yet monstrous. The shower wouldn’t cleanse her. She left her muddy clothing in the hotel bathroom, abandoning her entire outfit there, and arrived for her flight hours early, just to be among strangers at the terminal.
SATELLITE IMAGES SHOWED the swirling eye of Hurricane Irene inching up the Eastern Seaboard. The authorities warned of flooding, a shutdown of mass transit servicing New York City, a state of emergency across the region. “It’s going to be up to individuals to get out of their own areas,” Mayor Bloomberg announced on television, ordering the evacuation of high-risk zones, including where Humphrey lived in Sheepshead Bay.
He was asleep when she opened the door to his room. Someone—Humphrey couldn’t recall who—had run tape in X’s across each windowpane to stop the glass from shattering during the storm. The rest of the room seemed to have been visited by a hurricane already: books everywhere, dirty clothing strewn about, used cups and plates on the floor. Yelena had left town, stuffing Humphrey’s bar fridge with ready-to-eat meals before departing. He had helped himself to a few, but thrown out none of the refuse, nor washed himself or shaved in a few days. Tooly spent two hours restoring order, helped him to the bathroom, cleaned him, returned him to his armchair. Mentioning Venn hardly stirred Humphrey, while references to the coming hurricane puzzled him.
As he slept that afternoon, she went through his documents. She discarded junk mail, then organized his bills by date. It didn’t take long to find the bank statements. As she put them in order, she found payments in each of the cities she had passed through during the preceding decade, including one final transaction from a few years earlier, the transfer of the remaining balance to the Mintons in Caergenog. “You,” she said when he awoke, “were the one helping me. My magic bank account.”
He frowned—waking was always hard for him. Forty minutes later, the statements still lay in his lap.
“Why did you give me all that?” she asked. “It was all you had left, wasn’t it. And I was so stupid with it. As far as I’m concerned, the shop belongs to you. It’s not worth much. But I’ll sell it, or try to. Whatever I get is yours. And we can move you somewhere decent. Okay?”
“You went lots of places,” he said, gazing down at the bank statements.
“Did you read those to know where I was?”
“I thought of you doing things.”
“And I thought of you, Humph. Often, I did.”
“I wasn’t doing anything worth thinking about.”
She took his hand.
“You have a bookshop!” he declared. “You really are my dream girl! I imagine you there, ringing up all the sales.”
“We don’t make many, I’m afraid.”
“You,” he said, “are the favorite thing I did in my life. Even if I didn’t make you.”
“Don’t say things like that.” She blinked. “Look, you have to come see the shop. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let me describe it for you.” She gave her best portrait of the village, the former pub that contained World’s End, the first editions, the snug at the back, and her lone employee. “You’d enjoy Fogg; you two would get on so well. I can imagine you having debates for hours on end.”
Humphrey gave a short nod, by which he communicated that this trip would remain only a fancy. “I’m in the same place as my favorite person I knew. For nearly all of existence, before and after now—nearly all of it—I don’t get to be with you. But now I am. I even helped you a bit in your life.”
“You helped me so much.”
“I don’t remember everything that happened in my life,” he said, frowning. “Parts, I do.”
Ever since her first visit to Sheepshead Bay, he’d been beset by these fragments—his past flickering, repetitive but incomplete. She’d been able to help only by replaying anecdotes he had previously recounted. But now she did know his story. “Venn explained all about your life,” she said. “Shall I tell you?”
“All right,” he said, looking blindly past her. As Humphrey listened, he squinted at the X’s on the window. Tooly had seen him exert himself before—when Mac visited, for example. “Do you
r best,” she urged him. “Tell me if this sounds right.”
She went on, watching him, his eyes closed tightly with concentration. At times, he specified that he just couldn’t recall this bit, or interrupted with small corrections. At other points, he added details she’d never known. Mostly, he paid attention.
His mother, Tooly began, was born at the turn of the century into a middle-class Jewish family from Pressburg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family spoke many languages, but their first tongue was German. As a young girl, she had aspired to a creative life, to act and paint. And by her late teens she frequented artistic circles, where she fell for an aspiring actor, a Russian Jew who had left Leningrad to make a name for himself in the West. But his career was hampered by stage fright, worsened by his thick accent. He decided to write and direct instead, but the fragile confidence that had undermined his performances foiled his offstage career, too. He was an endearing nebbish, though, so she married him, telling her parents only after the union was legal.
Her husband proved inept at earning and, increasingly dispirited, he drifted into radical leftist politics. To support them, she took work as a seamstress, producing costumes for local productions, while auditioning for parts herself. When she became pregnant with their first child, her father—a doctor—exhorted them to cease these theatrical pursuits; her husband must start contributing. He took work at a jewelry shop, whose customers he privately referred to as “bourgeois stone collectors.” The workers of the world would rise against capitalist modes of production, he informed his wife, since history was inevitable. Exploitation and greed could not be the fate of the species.
Their first child, a daughter, was born with a kidney ailment. Three years later, they bore a boy whom they did not call Humphrey Ostropoler, but who decades later adopted that name. The family, in the grip of revolutionary ardor, became communal farmers. Doing so at the start of the Depression was not an inspired plan. Scenes from those years remained with Humphrey: the milk cow at the bottom of the garden; the orchard where he and his sister had stolen apricots when starving; how he threw a pit that struck her in the eye.
