Chapter 15
The Aubergine
Dev's flat was over his studio on the first floor of the Candlewick Mill. It was the only home Callum had ever been in that smelled of both turpentine and cardamom.
He climbed the stairs at seven on Thursday with a bottle of red wine in one hand and a canvas bag in the other. It was an old mill stair, wide and stone-flagged, worn into shallow dishes in the middle of each tread by two centuries of boots. As he went up, the noise of the building closed round him: the thrum of a pump, a radio playing something from Mumbai, the drip of a tap in some empty loft. On the landing a hundred ship models hung from the ceiling on nylon threads, galleons and brigs and cutters, fully rigged and bright, turning slowly in the draft from the open door like the contents of a large, old-fashioned dream.
"You came!" cried Dev.
He stood in the doorway in a flour-stained apron with a wooden spoon in his fist and a smear of tomato on his forehead. His beard had been trimmed since Friday, and his eyes had a sharper brightness, a cheerful, feverish, over-lit look, as if someone had turned up the volume on him. "I didn't think you would. I had a whole speech. I was going to say, 'It's only an aubergine, you coward.' Come in. Come in. Don't touch the Doyle, I've just re-rigged the mizzen."
The flat was one long room under the rafters, full of books and bottles and brass. A kitchen at one end, a table laid for two with a candle in a saucer, a squashy settee heaped with cushions and the clear dent of a cat that had died four years before and was somehow still in residence. In the window stood the Doyle models in their glass cases, with their tiny faces of bone and their sails like folded wings.
"You look like death," said Dev warmly, taking the wine.
"I've been told."
"Good. I'd hate to be the only one." He went to the kitchen end and began banging pans. "Sit down. Do you want a drink? Of course you want a drink. There's gin, there's the whisky your Isabel gave me, there's something in a bottle shaped like a woman that a client brought from Poland."
"Wine's fine."
"It's always wine with you. You have no vice." He glanced round with the spoon in the air. "Is this a night when we talk, or a night when we don't?"
"I don't know yet."
"Then we'll wait. Food first." He gave a small, quick, ghostly grin. "It's the Malhotra rule. Nobody can be unfair with their mouth full."
They ate at the little table with the candle between them.
It was good. It had always been good. Dev had learned to cook from his mother, in a house in Leicester where the kitchen was the one room never closed to anyone, and he cooked with the abandon of a man who's been taught that love is something you add by hand. There was the aubergine, soft and smoky, in a sauce that tasted of burnt onions and tamarind, and a dal like thick gold, and rice, and flat bread blistered black on the gas. Callum ate all of it. He hadn't realized how hungry he was. He ate hunched over, head down, and Dev watched him from across the table with an expression he didn't look up to see.
"That's better," said Dev.
"It's very good."
"I know it's good. I mean you." He tore a piece of bread. "You've got some color. For the first time since the funeral you look like you might live."
"I'm sorry about Monday."
"Don't be."
"I woke you. I said things."
"You said you'd seen your wife. It's not the end of the world." He put the bread down. "Callum. Look. I want to say something, and I want you to hear it before you tell me what you've been doing, because I think you've been doing something. I can see it. You've got the look of a man who's been up all night with a pen."
"I've been working."
"On what?"
He hesitated. The candle flame leaned and straightened. Then, because it was Dev, and the food was warm in him, and because for a week he had been shut up with his own mind like a man in a room with one chair, he reached into the canvas bag, took out the folder and laid it on the table between the plates.
"Look," he said.
He explained it. He did it slowly, in order, the way he'd explain a doubtful attribution to a committee. The dinner. The note. The platform. The stage manager's remark, the search through the records, the page on the Conservatoire's website with its two names twenty-three apart. He showed him the printout of the voice reel's credits. He told him, with the careful flatness of a man reading from a report, about the phrase in the fourth clip.
Dev listened in silence.
He didn't interrupt. He sat with his elbows on the table and his fingers pressed to his mouth, looking at the papers one by one. As the account went on, Callum saw something happen in his face that he couldn't quite name. The warmth drained out of it slowly, like color out of cloth left in the sun. It didn't turn hard. It turned blank, and under the blankness something else moved, a sort of terrified kindness, like a man watching someone he loves walk toward the edge of a roof.
"The Scottish nurse is quite good, isn't she," said Dev.
Callum looked at him.
"In the reel. The nurse." Dev's eyes didn't lift from the page. "It's the best one. She's got the 'r' just right."
"You've listened to it."
"I looked her up." He said it flatly, without defending himself. "After you rang. On Monday. I couldn't sleep either. I wanted to see for myself." A short, ashamed laugh. "I thought, if there's a woman who looks like Isa, I want to know what the fuss is about."
"And?"
"And she looks like a woman." He lifted his head at last, and his dark eyes were wet. "Cal. I'm so sorry. I looked at her photograph for an hour. She's a nice-looking woman of thirty-six with dark hair. There's a type. Isa was the type. Half the women in Halvern are the type. It's the cheekbones. It's the, I don't know. The line of them."
"It's not the type."
"How do you know?"
"Because she tied her shoe."
"She what?"
"She tied her shoe. Twice. The left one." He said it very quietly. "And she taps the table. Three times. And she says it. Well, there's a thing. In the voice reel. In exactly the same place, on exactly the same breath."
"Everyone says it."
"Nobody says it. Nobody I ever met, except her."
Dev pushed back his chair.
He stood. He walked to the window among the cases of sailing ships and stood with his back to the room and his hands on the sill, looking out at the dark mill yard where the rain was falling in long silver lines through the light of a single lamp. His shoulders rose and fell. From behind he looked like a smaller and older man than the one who had opened the door.
"I rang Verity," he said.
"I know."
"You know?"
"You told me on the phone. On Friday."
"No. I mean, I rang her again." His voice was low and muffled. "On Monday. After you'd rung me. I told her where you were. What you'd said. I told her you'd gone up there." A breath. "She said she'd speak to Helen. She said they'd do what they could. I thought, they'll know what to do. I thought it was the right thing." His head dropped. "Cal. I'm a coward. I've always been a coward. Somebody's got to be sensible, and I wasn't going to be able to be, so I rang them."
"It's all right."
"It isn't."
"Dev, it is."
"It isn't." He turned round, and his face was streaming. "Because I don't know what I'd have said if you'd asked me. I don't know what I'd say now. Because I'm frightened, Cal. I'm frightened for you, and I'm frightened of something, and I can't say what it is, and I keep thinking if I could just get you to stop, to sit still, to have a quiet winter, it'd all go away."
"What would go away?"
"I don't know." Dev wiped his face with his apron. His voice cracked. "I don't know. I don't know. That's the worst of it."
Afterward they sat on the settee with the candle burned low and the second bottle half drunk, the rain going on at the window and the models turning in their cases.
It was nearly midnight. Dev had stopped crying and begun, in his unfair, generous, soothing way, to talk about nothing: his mother, who had phoned that afternoon to ask whether he was eating; a Spanish galleon he'd been asked to restore for a hotel; a boy he'd taught as an apprentice who'd gone off to Melbourne and started breeding alpacas. His speech had thickened. His eyes were red. He sat with his feet drawn up and a cushion against his chest, and now and again he looked sideways at Callum as if checking he was still there.
"Can I ask you something?" said Callum.
"Anything."
"Would you want to know? If it were you. If there was something about Isabel that I didn't know. A thing she'd hidden."
Dev went still.
It was only for an instant. The cushion tightened in his arms. He looked at the dark window, at the long wet reflection of the room, where two men sat on a settee with a candle, side by side, under the sails.
"Would you want to?" he said.
"Yes."
"You're sure."
"I'd rather know."
"Would you?" He gave a small crooked smile. His eyes were enormously tender and enormously tired. "I don't think so. I think you'd like to think you would. Most people do. They say, tell me, I can take it. And then you tell them and what they really mean is, put it back." He stopped. "You had her for eleven years. You had her the way she was with you. That's a real thing. That's the realest thing in the world. If there was something, anything, in a box somewhere, it wouldn't change that. But it would change how you looked at it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's what I've got."
"Dev."
"What?"
"Did she tell you something?"
The candle spluttered.
Dev didn't look at him. He looked at his own hands, lying open on the cushion, short and broad and stained to the knuckles with fifteen years of varnish and shellac. Callum, watching, saw the right one begin, slowly, to tremble.
"No," said Dev. "She never told me anything. I just, I loved her. You know that. She was the first person in this city who ever made me feel I was allowed in the room." He took a breath. "I'd have done anything for her. I'd have done anything for either of you. I want you to know that. Whatever you find. Whatever you think of me. I'd have done anything."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Of course."
"Good." He nodded, and nodded again, looking at his hands. He drew a long uneven breath. "Good. Because I'm going to need you to remember it."
Callum waited for him to go on.
He didn't. He sat there with the cushion in his arms and the tears running down into his beard and said no more. In the end Callum put an arm across his shoulders, and the two of them sat together in the dim long room for a time, listening to the rain, like two men on a bench after a funeral.
When he left at one, Dev stood in the lit doorway at the top of the stone stairs with his apron over his arm and his hand raised, a small broad figure against the glow, with the ships turning behind him.
"Ring me," he called. "Not for any reason."
"I will."
"I mean it. Promise."
"I promise."
He went down the worn stairs into the wet mill yard. At the bottom, under the lamp, he turned to look back, as he always did, and the door at the top was already shut.
But in the window of the flat, between two of the glass cases, a figure stood quite still in the lamplight with a hand pressed flat against the pane. He couldn't see the face. It was only the shape of a man at a window, watching a friend walk away across a courtyard in the rain, the way you watch someone you haven't quite told the truth.