Chapter 1
The Empty Side
On the morning of the fourteenth of May, six months to the day, Callum Wray woke up on his own side of the bed. He lay there for a long time without looking at the other side.
It had become a habit. He did things in a set order. First he looked at the window, where the gray light of Halvern came through the blind in thin bars. He listened to the gutter drip. Then he looked at the ceiling. Then the clock. It said six-forty. That meant he had slept three hours and twenty minutes, which was better than last week. Only after all that, when the day was in the room and nothing bad had happened yet, did he let himself look at the place where she wasn't.
The pillow still had a dent in it. He had stopped pretending he didn't know why. At first he told himself it was cheap foam that kept its shape. But he was a man who earned his living by telling what a surface had been given from what it had been left with, and this was not foam. It was the print of a head that had not been there for six months. He had been sleeping around it.
You could change the pillow, Dev had said in February, carefully, over a pint he didn't drink. Just the pillow. Nobody's saying the bed.
It's a pillow, Callum had said. It isn't a shrine.
Then change it.
He hadn't.
The flat was on the third floor of an old warehouse on Lantern Row, in the Candlewick, the old part of Halvern where the lanes ran downhill to the river. They had bought it eight years ago, in a hurry. Isabel had walked up the iron stairs on a wet March afternoon, stood in the empty living room with her coat dripping, and said, Oh. It echoes properly. She had wanted an echo. She said a house that couldn't answer you back wasn't a house. It was a cupboard.
It still answered back. That was the trouble. In the mornings he made coffee and ran the tap, and every sound came back to him a moment later from the high ceiling, a little changed, like someone in the next room doing an impression of him.
He took his coffee to the window. Down in Lantern Row a van was reversing. A woman in a green apron was chaining a bicycle outside the baker's. The river was a pale stripe at the bottom of the street. It had been a wet spring, and a wet winter before it, and the Dunmere ran brown and fast between its stone walls, carrying branches. He didn't look at it for long. He had an arrangement with the river, the same as with the pillow.
On the windowsill stood the jar.
It was an old pickling jar with a zinc lid, and it was three-quarters full of buttons. Hundreds of them. Brass ones, bone ones, pearl ones, some no bigger than a lentil, one the size of a coin with a little laughing face carved on it. She had started it before she knew him. One for every place I've been somebody, she had told him on their second date, holding a green glass button up to the café window so the light came through it. This is from a coat I wore in a play. I died in the second act. It was a good coat.
She added to it all the time. A button from the cardigan she wore the day they got the keys. A button from his old gray overcoat, which she cut off with the kitchen scissors while he was in the shower. She gave it to him afterward on a saucer and said, Now it's a place. He was angry with her for nearly an hour.
He lifted the lid. The jar smelled of metal and something faintly sweet. He put in two fingers and turned over the top layer, and the buttons slid with a small dry sound, like someone shuffling cards. I should stop doing this, he thought.
He put the lid back exactly as it had been, with the zinc screw lined up with the window latch. She had always lined it up with the latch.
He was forty-three years old, and his job was looking at paintings that were pretending to be something else.
That wasn't a figure of speech. Callum was the senior paintings conservator at the Halvern Museum of Art. When a landscape came up from the vault with a brown fog across its sky, or an old master was thought to be a copy, or someone's great-aunt was hiding under three layers of varnish and one of bad repainting, the picture came up to his studio on the top floor. He put it under a low light and looked. He had a trained eye, a steady hand, and a left ear that didn't work. The deafness came from an infection in childhood that never cleared. He had built habits around it without noticing. He turned his right side toward anyone speaking. He watched mouths. He read faces all day, the faces in portraits and the faces of the people who brought them in. He had come to believe that what a person said was the least important thing they were doing.
A copy is always more careful than the original, he told his students, in the second lecture of every course. That's how you know. The forger is frightened. He goes over every line twice. The real painter isn't afraid, so he gets something wrong, here and here, and leaves it. Look for the carelessness. That's where the person is.
Isabel had loved that line. Once, at a dinner party, she had used it on a man who was boasting about his Cezanne. Callum says you can always tell the real thing by its mistakes, she said, with her wide, mild smile. The man went pink. She tapped the table three times and laughed.
He rinsed the cup and stood at the sink with his hands on the edge.
Three taps. Always three, on whatever was nearest, before she let herself laugh: the table, the arm of a chair, once the roof of a taxi. Tap, tap, tap, and then the laugh, which came up out of her like something being unwrapped. He had asked her once where she got it. I don't know, she'd said, surprised. I've always done it. Haven't I?
Well, he had said, there's a thing.
That set her off at once, because it was her phrase. Well, there's a thing was her own dry little way of answering anything: bad news, good news, a parking ticket, a rainbow, a proposal. He had borrowed it, and she knew he was borrowing it, and she loved him for how clumsy he was at it.
The telephone rang.
It was the old landline on the hall table. They had kept it because her mother didn't trust mobile phones. It rang six times. He let it. He stood in the kitchen with the tap running over his hands until the machine clicked on, and a voice, warm and brisk and a bit out of breath, said, "Cal. It's me. Pick up, I know you're in. I can hear you not picking up."
He turned off the tap.
"You sound terrible," said Dev.
"Thank you."
"I mean it kindly. You sound like furniture being moved in another house." Dev Malhotra's voice came down the line with a clatter behind it: brushes, a radio, the squeak of a stool. He was in his workshop on the first floor of the Candlewick Mill, restoring a set of Victorian ship models for a woman in Rookhill who wanted them to look "used but not unloved." "Have you eaten?"
"I've had coffee."
"That's what I said." A pause. "Do you know what day it is?"
"Yes."
"Good. If you hadn't, I was going to be very tactful." The stool squeaked. "Come round tonight. I'll make that awful thing with the aubergine. You can sit in the corner and not talk."
"I can't. I've got to pack."
"Pack?"
"I'm going to Carrow."
There was a silence. He heard Dev put something down.
"You are not," said Dev. Then, in a different voice, "No. Sorry. That's great. When did that happen?"
"Helen rang on Monday."
He had expected it to sound like nothing when he said it out loud. It didn't, and that annoyed him a little. Helen Marlow had phoned on Monday evening at seven exactly, the way she did everything. In her calm, pleasant voice she told him she'd had a letter from the Carrow Fine Art Society. They held a dinner every spring. They had read about the Gerard restoration, and the paper had been very kind. They wanted the man who had cleaned the Gerard to give a talk, just ten minutes, dear boy, and sit at the top table, and they would pay for everything. I've said yes for you, Helen had said. I hope that wasn't bold of me. I thought it might do you good to get out of that flat.
He had said he'd think about it. He thought about it for two days. On Wednesday he found himself at the window with the invitation in his hand, a thick cream card with a crest on it, and a strange feeling in his chest, like a numb arm waking up. It wasn't excitement. It was more like a part of him that had gone on working quietly all winter while the rest of him sat in the flat. That part wanted to go.
"Do you want company?" said Dev.
"No."
"I could carry a bag."
"You couldn't. You'd talk to the porter for an hour."
"That's my gift." The brush started up again. "Callum."
"Yes."
"It's a dinner in a hotel. It's a lot of people who've never lost anyone being polite to you over fish." Dev's voice dropped. He only did that when he meant something. "Leave after your speech. You don't owe them the pudding."
"Thank you."
"And ring me. Not for any reason. Just ring."
Callum put the phone down.
He packed in the evening.
There wasn't much. One dark suit, one gray, a shirt for each day, the speech in a folder. He had written it on Wednesday night in forty minutes, quite easily, and read it back and found it competent and dead. At the bottom of the wardrobe, where it had been since November, stood the small brown suitcase he always took to work trips. Beside it, tied with black tape, was her good overnight bag with the scuffed corner, the one she took to her sister's every August.
He didn't touch the bag. He went to the hall instead and took his gray coat off its hook. He checked the pockets, as he did every time, for tickets, for a pen. A rolled-up receipt. A ball of tissue. A lens cloth. The usual small leftovers of a life.
Nothing else. He hung it up again.
At nine he sat on the sofa with the speech on his knee and didn't read it. The flat settled around him, doubling every sound. Out on the river a barge sounded its horn, and the window glass shook a little in its frame. On the bookshelf, next to the jar, was a framed photograph: a woman at a harbor wall in a yellow coat, laughing at someone out of the picture, one hand up against the wind. He had taken it himself, in Dunmere Bay, three summers ago. It was out of focus. He had never been able to explain why he kept it on show when there were sharper ones. In the study there was one of the two of them at the wedding, serious and perfect and a bit stiff, like two people who had been cleaned up for the day.
But in the blurred one she looked like herself.
Well, he said to the room, quietly. There's a thing.
The flat did what it always did. It gave the words back, a moment late, from the high ceiling, in a voice that was almost hers.
He sat still. And he had the thought he'd had every night for six months, and every night had pushed away: I would give anything to be wrong about what happened.
Then he turned off the lamp and went to bed, on his own side, around the dent.