Chapter 18
The Tram Stop
On the following Wednesday, at ten past six in the evening, in front of nineteen witnesses and two telephones, he did the thing he had been told not to do.
It was an ordinary evening. That was what he would find hardest to explain afterward, to the policewoman, to the director of the Museum, to the man from the Halvern Courier who rang him at home in a voice full of regret: there had been no warning, no sign, no hum in the air. The day had been fine. A thin pale sun had come out at four, the first in a fortnight, and washed the stone fronts of the Candlewick the color of weak lemonade. He had been in the studio since eight. With a cotton swab and a mix of acetone and white spirit he had cleaned four square inches of the Mackenzie sky, and it had come up under his hand exactly as it should. Priya had brought him a sandwich. He had eaten it. Around three he had thought, with mild surprise, that he wasn't unhappy.
He left at six. He went down the museum steps into the long gold light and turned toward Corder Street, where the tram ran. He walked along it among the home-going crowd with his bag over his shoulder and his hands in his pockets. The shop windows blazed. A boy was selling the evening paper. In the middle of the road, on the island under the green iron shelter of the tram stop, a small crowd had gathered, in the loose, dull, tired shape of people waiting for something that's late.
And among them, with her back to him, stood a woman in a yellow coat.
He didn't decide to stop. His body did it for him, in the middle of the pavement, so suddenly that a man behind walked into his shoulder and said something sharp.
It was a short yellow coat, belted, of thin waterproof stuff, the sort people buy in the first week of spring and never take off. The woman wore it open. Under it he could see the dark line of a skirt. Her hair was up in a clip, brown, with a few loose strands on her neck. She stood on her left foot with her weight on the hip, her right knee a little bent, in the careless, balanced, listening stance of a person who has waited in the same place so long she's begun to enjoy it.
Isabel had a yellow coat.
He knew that. He had known it all week. It was in the photograph on the sill: a woman at a harbor wall in a pale lemon raincoat, laughing, one hand held up. She'd bought it in the sales in Dunmere Bay, in a shop with a bell on the door, and worn it for six summers. In the end she had left it on a hook in the hall on Lantern Row, where it still hung, collar up, as if someone were about to put it on.
This is my grief, he told himself. It is trying to help.
You do not cross the street.
It's a coat, said the careful voice. Half the women in Halvern own a coat. You haven't seen the face. It is a back. It is the line of a back.
He heard it. He heard it very clearly and with complete respect, the way you hear a nurse speaking in another room. And he found that he was walking, quite steadily, across the road.
The tram bell clanged in the distance. A cyclist swerved. A taxi hooted, long and loud. He went between them like a sleepwalker, eyes on the yellow coat, and reached the island and stepped up onto the curb. The people at the stop moved aside for him without looking, the way you step around a puddle.
He stopped behind her.
He could smell her. He never could explain it: not perfume, not soap, but the faint warm clean smell of a stranger's hair in the sun, with something in it of cut grass and wool. He saw the back of her neck, white, with a small brown mole at the nape. He saw the loose strand of hair. He saw her left hand, bare, hanging at her side, the fingers a little curled.
"Isa," said Callum.
It was only a whisper.
She turned.
He saw her face for perhaps one second. It was a woman of fifty, perhaps fifty-five, with a broad, pleasant, slightly worn face and small blue eyes behind rimless glasses, and a mouth slightly open at the start of a polite question. She had a bag of oranges in one hand. She wasn't Isabel. She wasn't anyone. She was a woman waiting for a tram.
And she saw his face.
He hadn't known what it looked like. He'd never been shown. But he saw it reflected in hers, in the widening eyes, in the sudden drop of the jaw, in the way her whole body arched back from him, the oranges spilling from the torn bag and bouncing across the wet curb. He saw what she saw. A tall gaunt man with a gray unshaven jaw and eyes like holes. A face reaching for her out of the crowd.
She screamed.
It wasn't a long scream. It was short and high and startled, a single note, and it cut through the street like a knife through silk. Heads turned. A child began to cry. Someone said, "Oi!" and someone else, "Leave her alone," and a young man in a cycling jersey, who'd been leaning on the rail, stepped forward and shoved him in the chest with both hands, hard, so that he staggered back off the curb into the road.
"I'm sorry," said Callum. "I'm sorry. I thought—"
"Back off!"
"I thought she was someone—"
"I don't care who you thought!" The cyclist's face was red and young and shaking. He had his phone up in one hand, the lens a small black eye. "You're a bloody menace. Look at her! She's shaking!"
It was true. She was. The woman in the yellow coat stood against the shelter with her hands over her mouth, crying in short silent gasps, while two women in office clothes held her by the elbows and glared at him with a bright, angry, almost happy anger. Her glasses had slipped. Oranges lay all over the pavement. One rolled in a slow curve down the camber of the road and fetched up against the wheel of the tram, which had arrived without a sound and stood with its doors open and its passengers pressed to the windows in a long row of hungry faces.
He stood in the road with his hands open at his sides.
Nobody touched him. Nobody needed to. He was surrounded by a ring of silence, a clear space on the tarmac that people didn't enter, and he saw them all in the lamp-lit evening, each one distinct. An old man leaning on a stick. A girl with a violin case. A mother with a pram. The cyclist with his phone. And all their faces were turned toward him with the same look, which wasn't hatred, or disgust, or even fear.
It was pity.
He hadn't expected that. It was far worse.
The policewoman who took his statement was young, with a high clear forehead and a stiff plait, and she was very gentle. She sat across from him in a box of an interview room at Corder Street station with a cup of tea she'd made herself, writing down what he said in a flat round hand without once looking up. When he finished, she tapped her pen on the notebook.
"You said you thought she was your wife."
"I said I thought she was someone."
"You said 'Isa.' Four witnesses heard you." She turned a page. "And you said it was a hallucination. Earlier. In the car."
"I said it was a mistake."
"It's the same thing, sir, in a report." She wasn't unkind. "I'm going to ask you something, and you can answer or not. Are you under the care of a doctor?"
"I see a psychologist. A Dr. Sorel."
"For?"
"Grief."
"Right." She wrote it down. "I'm going to ring her, if that's all right. I'm not going to charge you, sir. The lady doesn't want that. She just wants it on record. But I'd say," and the pen stopped, and she looked up for the first time with clear, brown, honest eyes, "I'd say you want somebody to know."
He nodded. He couldn't trust himself to speak.
"There's a video," she said quietly. "Of the, of the incident. It was on Facebook by seven. I'm so sorry. I thought you ought to hear it from me."
Dr. Sorel saw him at eight the next morning in her consulting room on Pellam Street, in her chair, with the gas fire hissing and the morning sun full on the window.
She didn't speak at once. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her glasses on their chain, looking at him with the long, kind patience he'd come to dread. In that silence he saw her take in his collar, his chin, the hollows under his eyes, the shake in his fingers when he lifted the glass of water. He saw her write nothing down.
"I went to Carrow," he said.
"Yes."
"I saw a woman."
"Yes."
"I don't think it was a delusion."
"I know you don't." She said it simply. "Tell me what you do think."
He told her. He'd meant to be brief and found he couldn't be, and the whole of it came out in order: the dinner, the note, the t's, the shoelace, the Conservatoire page, the voice reel, the typed letter and the paper stained with tea. He told her about the sergeant and the telephone line. He didn't tell her about the reflection in the train. He kept that back, he supposed, the way you keep a coin in your shoe. At the end she was quiet for a long time, her eyes on the window.
"Callum," she said at last. "I'm going to say something and I want you to hear all of it."
"All right."
"I think that every single thing you've told me may be true."
He stared at her.
"I think there may be a woman in Carrow who looks very like your wife. I think she may have known her. I think the letter may be a forgery, and the paper may have been treated, and your sergeant may be a careless man. I can't tell. I wasn't there. I'm not a detective." Her voice was low and level. "But I also think that none of it explains yesterday."
"Yesterday was—"
"Yesterday was a woman of fifty-four in a yellow coat, buying oranges. And you walked across a road through traffic and put your hand out to her, in front of a hundred people, and said your wife's name." She leaned forward. "That wasn't a clue. That wasn't a detective's instinct. It was the thing we talked about in this room three weeks ago. The mind offers a face and you accept it."
"The first one was real."
"Perhaps. And if it was, then the second was the price." She took off her glasses. Without them her eyes were smaller and older and very tired. "That's what I fear. That if you're right about Carrow, you've also taught yourself, this past week, to see her everywhere. You've taught your mind that the dead can be found. And now it will find them at every tram stop."
He said nothing.
"I want to ask you again about the night." She said it very gently. "The fourteenth. The gap. I think you're circling it. I think every time you see a face you're trying to bring something back. Not her face. Another. Something you saw, perhaps, between half past six and ten past two, that you can't hold."
"I was at home."
"Are you sure?"
"I have said—"
"I know what you've said. I'm asking if you are sure." She laid the glasses on her knee. "Because I'll tell you what I think, and then you may throw me out. I think a man who sees his dead wife's face on a stranger, again and again, and can't explain it, and can't stop, is a man with something missing. Not at the edges. At the center. And the mind, which can't bear a hole, keeps filling it with faces."
The gas fire popped.
He sat still in the green chair.
Between half past six and ten past two.
He had told it to himself so many times that it had become a wall. A white wall. He had gone up to it and put his hand flat against it and felt it, smooth, cool, without a seam. At home. A drink. Bed. And behind it, as he sat there with the sun in his eyes, he had a sudden, brief, strange feeling of something moving on the other side: not a memory, not an image, but a pressure, like a hand pushing out from behind a curtain.
Rain. A long wet railing. A sound he couldn't name.
It was gone in an instant.
"I can't," he said.
"I know."
"I tried."
"I know you did." Dr. Sorel put out her hand, which she didn't usually do, and laid it for a moment on his sleeve. "Callum. There's a place called the Hollin Wing. At the Infirmary. It's quite a gentle one. People go for a week, two weeks, to rest. To be watched over." She drew back her hand. "I'm not saying you must go. I'm saying that if you cross another street, I'll ask you to."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Good." She put her glasses back on. "Then go to work. Eat something. And when you feel the next face coming, do exactly what I said. Stop where you are. And call me."
He nodded.
He went down the steps into Pellam Street, into the thin morning, and stood at the curb with his coat collar up while the buses went by. As he stood there, with the cold air on his face and the sun on the wet road, it came to him that Dr. Sorel had said one thing she hadn't meant to say.
Not her face. Another.
He turned it over. It had a strange, clear, ringing weight in his mind, like a struck wineglass. Something you saw. Something you can't hold.
And he thought, with a slow dismay, standing in the street among the passing faces, each one flowing by him in the sun with its own life and its own troubles: What if I'm not looking for her at all?